 Good afternoon. Welcome to our 4 30 p.m. session of the August 31st 2021 special meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council announcements and then when we move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website cityofsantaacruz.com. All council members are participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home to view today's city council meeting. If you wish to comment today's agenda item call in using the instructions on your screen. If you wish to comment on today's agenda item call in using excuse me. If you're calling into comment, please mute your television or streaming device and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for public comment, press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have been you have commented on your item of interest. And now I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you mayor council member Watkins here. Calentary Johnson here here council member Golder is absent vice mayor Brunner. Good afternoon. I'm present. And Mayor Myers I'm present. We had this evening this afternoon. We have translation services available. I'd like to call on the city clerk again to introduce our translator and provide the instructions to utilize the translation services. Thank you, Mayor. Today we have Peter to help assist with interpretation needs. So if anybody needs to utilize them, if we could just have presenters and council speak slowly so that he can accurately interpret. In addition, the PowerPoint that are going to be shown will also be made available post meeting to the public. The instructions on how to use the function are on the screen right now. One key thing to note is if you do need interpretation. Oh wait, let me back up. I needed Peter to translate the stuff I was just saying. Yeah, I'm going to say. So I'm not sure what you just read off, but one thing that people would need to in order for it to work, they need to be using their audio. Thank you. So I'm not sure what you just read off, but one thing that people would need to in order for it to work, they need to be using their audio from a device and not a telephone. Okay, and then if we could call for a raise of hands if there's anybody in the meeting right now that needs interpretation. So we do have one hand raise, and I can only assume that for interpretation needs, so I'm going to go ahead and add Peter as an interpreter, which has been going to put him in the interpretation room. Muy bien, entonces para la persona que efectivamente anunció que quería asistencia en español, usted tendrá que en ese momento cuando sale, usted tendrá que presionar esa parte y presionar después español para que funcione. So the person with their hand raised is Steven Bossworth. Do you want me to check? Confirm, yeah, that would be a good idea. Yeah, do you require translation, Steven? A star six and we'll be able to hear you. Sorry, I hovered over the hand right and didn't push it, but I'm sorry I got through to you. Okay, do you do you require translation? No, I don't. Okay, thank you. Okay, so it doesn't look like we need anyone currently, but maybe every 20 minutes or so we could stop and have Peter check. And as far as recording, do you want me to still translate in the recording interpreter? Not really, we're going to only one we're going to need it. Someone comes in and uses assistance. I don't think you need to translate and Ralph can join at some point. I know they're meeting that's going to be covered covering a lot of what's going over tonight. Okay. But thank you. So, Peter, I'll just, I'll just I'll be watching the attendees and I'll, I'll try to, you know, try to stop and have you will check in to see if people have joined. Perfect agenda items today is a public hearing to receive input from the community regarding the creation of a district based election system. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff, followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. So I will go ahead and open up this hearing. We will start. I'll introduce our staff person who is the lead on this project and that's Ralph Demerica. And he will start us off this evening. Welcome Ralph. I'm here and a good evening members of the council Ralph Demerica principal management analyst with the city manager's office. And joining us tonight is Dr. Doug Johnson from MDC and he'll be doing most of the presentation tonight. My role is really to kind of give some context as to how we got here and to really set the stage for his presentation. I have a very quick PowerPoint to share with you all and then I'll hand the mic over to Doug. So today we do have a recommendation and to the council and that's to receive this report that we're presenting to you. We're conducting a public hearing to receive and put on district boundaries and to approve the revised timeline. Public hearing one and two were pushed back a week which is a little different from the original timeline that we presented back in May. And so for those watching and I'm council already knows this information but for those at home watching I did want to give a summary of past actions just to give a little bit of context as to how we arrived. So the in back in February of 2020 the city received a claim of violation of the CBR a and it threatens suit unless the city transition to a district based electoral system. And while the city denies that it's at large election system violates the CBR a to avoid the cost and uncertain uncertainty with litigation. So we're trying to settle an agreement back in May and whereby the city agreed to consider a resolution of intention to transition to district elections for the November 2022 election. And also in May, May 26 2020 council passed the resolution number NS 29,657. And that was attached as back of material to this item today. And in that resolution, the council determined that the public interest would be better served by transitioning to a district based electoral system, because of one extraordinary cost to defend against the CBR a lawsuit to the risk of losing such a lawsuit which would require the state of prevailing plaintiffs, attorneys fees and three, the reimbursement would be capped at a maximum of $30,000 by following the procedures set forth. And also before the November 2022 regular election, the city council will consider adoption of an ordinance to institute a district based election system. We then after that resolution was passed in November of 2020, this into a professional services agreement with demographer expert National Demographics Corporation or NDC and we'll just we'll talk about them a little bit more in the next upcoming slides. But their scope of work includes developing and refining the city's election districts, including working with city staff to district and database, preparing draft maps and election schedule, assisting with the public meetings and the plan adoption and including working with the county registered voter. And in May 11 2021 we approved council approved the initial schedule and staff also published the website and the link to the website is on the screen and I'm I encourage members of the public to visit it on there's a lot of very useful information on there and we'll continue to update it throughout this whole process. And we try and answer as many of the frequently asked questions on there as well. Not a good contact information is on there too in case anyone has any questions. And lastly, a few weeks ago in mid August, staff held a virtual community information session with members of the public where we went over what I just went over with you guys. But in further detail and we talked about how the city got to where it was and really what the next steps were. And so today's public hearing. The purpose of this public hearing is to inform the public about the district and process and to hear from the community on what factors should be taken into consideration while creating district boundaries. The next step. I'll go over these very briefly I believe Doug is going to go over them as well. But then we have our second public hearing. Scheduled for September 18 at 10am and more info will be coming out on that. And then initial maps published on or prior to December 31. And then public hearings three and four will be in January and February. And then in March of 2022. In my apologies, I'm a public hearing will be held to adopt a preferred district map and to introduce an ordinance to transition to a district based system. 2020 and 2021 just flew by and I keep forgetting we're looking at March of 2022 now. Let me get back on here so NDC the National Demographics Corporation. They've served hundreds of local governments in California, Arizona and Nevada since their founding in 1979. And he sees performed work in all regions of the country serving clients as varied as community service districts, water districts, healthcare districts, airport districts, school districts, cities, counties and states. They have successfully completed 375 projects. And the website says NDC can easily say no company has been responsible for successfully districting and redistricting more local governments. And I added a slide here Doug that I didn't share with you. I added right before the meeting. So tonight, joining us from NDC is NDC president Dr. Johnson or Doug and initial. He started out as a senior analyst with NDC. He is now the president over there. And what's really important is really, really impressive resume is that he's worked on over 250 district and redistricting projects across California and Nevada and Arizona between 2001 and today. And if members of the public are interested in learning more about him, please visit NDC's website. I didn't want to put your whole bio on there Doug, but I thought that that was the most important part that members of the council and public would be interested in tonight. So with that, I'll have the microphone over to Doug to take over the presentation. Thank you Ralph. And it is a pleasure to be with you. Ralph noted that most important part may be the experience. I would also add, perhaps the most important part is actually I'm class of 88. I spent most of my high school years working at the United R's movie theaters, the Del Mar and sadly the now defunct river theater. So I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz know the area well. And we did, I and my firm just finished helping the city school district through its transition to district elections. I guess about 18 months ago, maybe two years ago now. And we're working with them on their update their lines now. So it is a pleasure to meet all of you. And we'll know before I launch this night, you have one logistical issue of I have planned out my day very carefully and I'm somewhere to do this presentation but I do not have power. So if my laptop dies after my presentation, I have a tablet here. So if I disappear, I'll be back in. So I will get through the I have plenty of power to get to the presentation. So let me launch the presentation here and I'll share my screen. Let's share my screen. There we go. This is our looking forward and talking all about the different parts of the city. And first of all, as the council is aware with the public may not entirely grasp what's going on here is there are three main election systems in California that the city has employed with called an at large system historically where you have city wide elections. And everybody runs from wherever they live. And they read any cities are up that year. That's what the overwhelming majority of California jurisdictions were until about 20 years ago. There's also a few cities that are what are called from district or residents districts were where you have to live in a given district but the election still city wide. There were only about five of those until 20 years ago and now I think we're down to two. They still use that system. And then there's the system that the city is moving to, which is called by district. So in this system now residents will only vote for the council member from their district. And the council members have to live in and run for the specific district and and the city is certainly not alone in making this transition work. Well over 150 cities have now made this transition in just the last 20 years to buy district elections all driven by the California Voting Rights Act and its goals. Ralph covered most of the timeline the only piece I wanted to add in here just because it's a little confusing is that the census data the official 2020 census data as you likely heard were released on August 12. So we have the federal census data. The catch is that for the first time ever California is going to adjust that data. And so the state is going to take the state prison population and count all those prisoners at their last known home address. So while the federal census data is out our official California redistricting data is not yet released. That's going to come out sometime in mid to late September. So that is one reason why we don't have the official demographics yet and we don't have the tools launched yet because we're waiting for that official database. And as you heard then we'll be looking at additional hearings and draft map discussions in January and February looking to adopt a map in March prior to the April 17 deadline for plan to be adopted for next November's election. So. Key slide here that what are the rules for how these districts get drawn. They're really three baskets of rules. The first on the far left are the federal laws. The number one we have to have an equal number of people in each council district. There's a little bit. Edge plus or minus allowed there. But it really is a very strict requirement. Then we have to comply with the Federal Voting Rights Act which really means that if there's a neighborhood that is particularly concentrated of one with a law called a protected class. But it really means Latinos African Americans Asian Americans or Native Americans. If there's a neighborhood that's heavily made up of one of those protected classes. We have to be sure not buy that neighborhood in a way that dilutes their voting strength in any way. And at the same time federal law for bars racial gerrymandering. So race can be one consideration. You know when I talked about the Federal Voting Rights Act I talked about neighborhoods that are heavily a protected class. You'll see we can estimate the ethnicity of every city block. And when race becomes predominant factor. For example if you start drawing lines just based purely on the colors that will show you in the map. Then that is too far. So those are federal laws. Obviously the maps we bring to you will be sure comply with all those. Now we have a new state law called the Fair Maps Act that just kicked in in January 1st of 2020. So if you've talked to folks from cities that went through this process before January 1st. They did not have these rules in place. So the new Fair Maps Act. It says that the following in this priority order are state requirements. So first of all geographically contiguous. Each part of each district must touch each other part of the district. Number two is we must strive to avoid dividing neighborhoods or communities of interest. And I'll come back to both of those topics in a minute. Number three we want to follow easily identifiable boundaries. So the river, the freeway, major roads, things that are easy for voters to understand. So when they go out and want to knock on doors for a candidate. It's easier for them to know which doors to knock on. And we want to avoid kind of cutting through neighborhoods and things like that and try to follow easily identifiable boundaries. And then the fourth state requirement is to try to be compact. And they define not bypassing one group of people to get to a more distant group of people. The state also includes a prohibition. So in addition to those four requirements, you also prohibit that you cannot favor or discriminate against a political party. So straightforward enough, we just don't look at political party related data in this process. So those are the statutes and all the requirements, things you must and must not do. In this third basket is other traditional redistricting principles. So these are not things that you're required to consider, but they're also not prohibited. And there are things that the courts have previously said are okay and redistricting processes. So number one, this doesn't apply in districting, but it comes up when you redistrict is minimizing the number of voters shifted for option years. So if you were already in districts and someone's expecting to vote in 2022, we try not to bump them into 2024. That obviously doesn't apply here when you're moving to districts, but it is a common consideration in this third bucket. You can, after you meet all the requirements, you can consider what we would describe as respecting voters choices and continuity office. Essentially, you can try to keep the council members in separate seats. We view this and describe this really as letting the voters decide which council members have earned reelection rather than the lines dictating the voters that you may want to reelect these two or three, but you can't. That is something that's in this third bucket that you can consider. Again, only after you've met all the other statutes, statutory requirements, if you wish to consider it. Then future population growth. I mentioned there's a couple of percent flexibility in that equal population requirement. If you know what district is going to grow faster than the others, you can underpopulate it a little bit now knowing it's going to grow faster than the others over the course of the decade. And then again, if we were redistricting the other traditional principles, trying to preserve the core of existing districts. This is so folks that have organized and passed elections in a district can continue to work together and continue to use that network. Again, it's something that'll come up when you redistrict in 10 years, not really a factor this time around. So, of course, data play a big part in this. I'm not going to go through all this data. But to provide a lot of socioeconomic data in every project we do, because often that is helpful in trying to identify communities of interest. I won't go through it all, but you can see on the right there's things like immigration percentage of the population's immigrants versus. And how many of them are naturalized, language spoken at home. And then in the middle right, you can see one that comes up a lot is housing stats, looking at where the single family versus multifamily homes, renters versus owner occupied homes. All this data I'll show you we can provide on maps. But the big numbers are in the top left, the 2020 census population. And again, this is the census population. It's not the official redistricting data yet, but it's going to be pretty close. It's just under 63,000. If that number six is noted in blue on the left, you're looking at just under 9,000 each of the seven districts, assuming you keep seven districts. I did note as well, I did a quick check and the census count for the university population was 8800. So it is just under the same population as the district. The big thing I was really checking is we're seeing places where the universities might have been missed because of COVID and everything. And they can confirm that all of the census data from the university area is slightly higher than it was in 2010. So they did get the university population, thankfully. I mentioned we can map the data. I'll quickly show you a couple of maps related to the Voting Rights Act. On these maps, it's called a heat map. The purple and blues are low percentages. Getting up to the screens are where you get, in this case Latinos to be a majority of CVAP. It's citizen voting age population. It's what the courts look at as a measure of eligible voters. So you do get really down in the beach flats area where you really get Latinos are a majority of the eligible voters in that area. You get a couple of the red census blocks popping up other places, but those are generally very small population census. The one in the far right looks fairly big. That's just geographically big. It's not a lot of people. For Asian Americans, really the only area where they show up is more concentrated than anywhere else is the university and the university housing. Again, we get one to see the arrow in the top right. There's one census block that's over 75% Asian American among eligible voters, but it only has 14 residents. It's a small area and that's not going to influence the demographics of a district as we're drawing it. And then the third group that plays into account here is African Americans. And you can see no concentrations like we get with Latinos, but you do get slightly higher percentages still less than half slightly higher percentages down again in the beach flats area a little bit. Americans are such a low number they they're the whole city's purple essentially so they don't show up. So those are protected classes for that voting rights act consideration and really the area we're looking at primarily is the beach flats. All those other socioeconomics can be mapped. They're not as precise. We don't we get them by census block group or by track, not by individuals. But you can see general trends. So for example, I just pulled one up to use as a demonstration here. This is showing the percentage of residents or percentage of households that are occupied by renters. So the purple areas is less than 25%. The shades of blue is 25 to 50. And then the greens and yellows it's just over. And the reds are 75% or more. So mapping kind of data that can help be useful as you look at and the community tries to testify about communities of interest. I mentioned the communities of interest in neighborhoods. When we're defining those, there are really two questions. The neighborhoods in question. So asking people, where do you live? How do you define your neighborhood? In particular, what are its geographic boundaries? Obviously, if we want to keep a neighborhood together in a map, we need to know what the boundaries of that neighborhood are. And really, the definitions can be whatever people consider area between major roads area around the park area around the school, whatever residents testify about. And if we don't get testimony from an area, then we can look at zoning records, you know, specific plans, housing developments, things like that that may assist in defining neighborhoods. And so there are two things in the law. One is neighborhoods, the other is communities of interest. They're roughly the same idea. But communities of interest might be a little bit broader and there could be a shared social or economic interest. It could be an area that there's an impact of a county or city policy. Really, we're looking to tell, hear the community's stories. And then the key thing in deciding if something is a community of interest is would it benefit for me included within a single district for purposes of its council representation? Some areas, you know, we get like senior senior housing developments that actually think they're better off in multiple council that multiple areas. Same thing tends to happen in school districts where school attendance areas want multiple trustees that are answerable to them. So sometimes they don't what you might think of as a community might not want to be in a single district. And so it might make sense. And so then it wouldn't technically be a community of interest. We just being there could talk about this comes up a lot. One area that might be relevant when we did Claremont, California, the Claremont colleges are a big population chunk similar to the university here. But because the students turn over so fast and so many of them registered vote back home, they actually didn't want Claremont made the decision that it didn't want one district in the covering the colleges because they were afraid they wouldn't give it. So they actually divided that they decided was not a community of interest. They divided that area amongst seats to ensure that there wasn't the seat that no one ran for essentially. One thing of note here at the bottom it does highlight by law that the definition of community of interest may not be defined by a relationship with a party or what comes up more often locally and incumbent or candidate. If there's an area that says we all really like person X who want them to represent us, well that cannot be the definition of a community of interest. There needs to be some other story about what ties that area together. And I covered this largely. Again, this is the big new piece of the Fair Maps Act is this requirement that a community of interest be defined and that really becomes after contiguity the top state consideration once you meet the federal contiguous districts. But we do need to note, as people talk about their community, it has to be geographic. It has to be something we can identify on a map in order to keep it together. So as it goes through this process, we really want to encourage a public to get engaged. So we do have a variety of tools that we're looking at to include in this process. I do want to emphasize that these are empowerment tools. If folks are not, no requirement to use any of these. These are simply options for those that are comfortable with them. And they range from all levels of technical skill from a really simple way to look at maps without drawing them. So all the way up to options for power users to draw lines. Let me just quickly flip through these. Obviously we'll get into the more detail as the project goes along. And once we have that data and we want these tools. First of all, there's what we call the interactive review map. This is just a map where we'll put data and we'll put the draft maps. It's essentially easy to use as Google Maps. You just zoom in and out. You can enter an address and it'll jump to that address. But over on the right, you see the layers options. People can click on the different draft maps and they'll be able to see the differences between different plans. And you can actually, you can switch it to a satellite view and go in and see an individual house if you want to see how plans treated an individual house. So it's very handy as a review tool, but it's not a mapping tool. Well, of course, anytime that we're doing anything online, we also want to offer offline options for those that aren't comfortable online or that do not have internet access or don't have good internet access. So we'll always have a whatever we have an online mapping tool. So we do what we call a public participation kit. It's just a simple map where we divide the city up into small geographic units and we give people the population numbers for each of those units. So they can add them up until they get to the right number and then send in that map. So it's very simple, easy to use and obviously an offline app. For those that are a little more adventurous and that are comfortable with Microsoft Excel, we also throw in a version that instead of population numbers, it just says ID numbers. And then you enter those numbers into Excel and Excel will do the math for you and we'll tell you the demographics. Again, it's not worth learning Excel to use this, but as we find more and more people are used to Excel, this is a very popular way for a simple line. It does require a computer obviously, but it doesn't require good internet access. Could I possibly ask you to just briefly stop for one moment? I'm going to just have Peter. Peter, could you announce maybe if people need Spanish translation just briefly so we can see if I don't believe there's anyone out there, but maybe you can make a quick announcement, Peter. Tardis, queremos tomar esta oportunidad para si alguien necesita traducción, por favor, con la computadora, usted levante la mano. Ahí en la parte baja, el computador puede decir raise hands para que usted tenga la oportunidad de tener esto traducido en español. I'm not seeing any raised hands. Okay, thank you, Peter. Go ahead, Doug. Sorry to interrupt. No problem, thank you. And I'm going to close the end here. One tool that is brand new this year and is proving incredibly popular is actually from Tufts University Star or Districtor. This is a really simple tool to use. We've worked with Tufts and so we have a partnership where they will take all that socioeconomic data that we have on renters and language spoken at home and things like that. And they will put it in this tool so people can use it. And then if you look at the top right of the screen, there's simply the hand that pans the moves the screen around brush and an eraser. And literally that's it. So it's really easy to use people can zoom in and draw just their neighborhood, just their community, or they can draw a whole district map of the whole city. So this is a very popular tool that we're finding to be definitely the dominant tool people are using this time around. And then there's a power user tool called the Mapstitude online redistricting. This provides it. It has a learning curve. Take some time to watch some videos and figure out how it works because it is the power user tool. But it does provide us all the data that we have on as your professional demographers on our computers and all of the tools that we have available to us to draw and submit maps. It does come with six built in languages too. There's just a town you can see in the top here where it says English, just a little pull down for all those languages. So this is the only one that has built in language translation. District R actually works with your internet browsers translation, as does the interactive review map. So that's a quick introduction to this top. The tools that will be coming once the data is released. Really the big factor in all of this is understanding what are the neighborhoods and communities of interest that we need to use and that we need to identify and use as building blocks. Once it's time to build draft map options and ultimately for the council to adopt its chosen plan. So that's my presentation. Switch back here to the regular view. And happy to answer any questions that the council or the public have and look forward to hearing from me. Thanks Doug. So we'll go ahead and spend a little bit of time with questions and then I would like to take it out to the public for questions as well if that's okay with you Doug. And for those who are interested in commenting you want to press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when we get done with council questions. So why don't we go ahead. I don't see Peter any additional folks that have shown still the same amount. I do see one hand up so there's a couple of hands that have come up we'll get to you after some council questions. And I will go ahead and have council member Cummings. Thank you Doug for that presentation. I'm kind of curious kind of just based on this map and you know your extensive experience with doing demographic mapping imagine as well that you've probably done some maps for cities that may have been sued under these types of conditions and one thing I'm curious about is our map compared to some other cities I'd imagine that there are some cities where these types of demographic studies have been done where it's pretty clear that you have concentrated populations that aren't represented. But in fact based on the map we showed it's really unclear, you know how we would be how protected groups will be benefited by rejoining these maps, just based on the fact that for the past 10 years. We've had people from from protected classes, elected in every single election, and oftentimes the dominant group that's been elected in these elections. So that's it. Now I think it's great that we have this new map that we didn't have before, but I'm just concerned because it doesn't seem like by going to district elections that's actually going to improve. We're seeing more representation when for example that now we have a council that is 100% validated by people from protected classes. So I'm just wondering if you can provide some context on this map you've seen in the past and how we compare to some of those areas. Some of the cities where they might have actually had problems with representation on the councils. Sorry, sure. We have seen, you know, across the spectrum. Jurisdictions were moving to district elections. Yeah, took them from zero to three Latinos on the council and a thing. Jurisdictions where it made no change in actually jurisdictions where they went backwards after they went to this. It's hard to do, you know, to make any specific comments. You know, the number of jurisdictions have been threatened lawsuits. Some of them. It's very clear there's a problem. You know, they probably weren't violation of the federal white voter intact. There's, you know, the one Merced, they immediately switched when they got the letter because they had not had a Latino on the council. They actually couldn't vote on a zoning issue because for the five council members lived within 500 feet of the parcel in question. So that, you know, there are some clear cut cases of where there was a problem and they fixed it. There are, of course, at the other end, you know, Poway, the city as a whole with 13% Latino, the most Latino district you could draw with 16%. And, you know, that's within the margin of error. So we've seen it all across the spectrum without a doubt. Thanks. And I don't know. Maybe this can go, maybe you can answer the, or maybe our legal team could answer, but I'm wondering if there's any cities out there that switched to district elections and then got sued. They actually went backwards and had less representation on their councils after making that move. Yeah, no, there's no grounds for that. The laws, the California laws requirement is simply that you have district elections. There's no requirement that it actually achieves a goal of increasing representation. It simply matter you go to districts and you're in a safe harbor from the California law. If you draw the law legal, then you're going to violate the Federal Voter Rights Act. But that's only because you're Gary Mander against, you know, to dilute the voting strength. There's no requirement that any going to districts increases or even keeps the same representation on the council. Thank you. Other questions from council members at this time. Seeing any, Doug, in our recent, in our recent, well in our current status as council in the 2022 election would be the one that we would have, I believe three seats open for a district election because those would be normally run in 2022. How do we sort through that type of initial kind of run for those particular council members is that kind of negotiated with the public basically and the candidates or how, how has that been done in the cities that have that has come up with. Sure. Well, the requirement is that you have to have the same number of seats up in 2022 as there are seats that would normally come up if you weren't switching. Okay. And so if you have three seats that come up in 2022, then you have to have three districts that just keeps the same number of people on the dais. And the remaining seats would be up in 2024, obviously. Which of those seats end up as the ones being up. That is decided by the council at the time that you adopt the map. Okay. And so, you know, if it just happens to work out that each council member is a separate seat, well then you just assign the three seats where the three council members are whose terms in 2022. That's, it's pretty rare that the pieces fall into place like that. So then it can be a tough, tough decision. Ideally, council members who end up in the same seat are both on the same cycle, so that both men run and the voters would then choose which one got elected to represent that seat. If two council members who are in different election cycles end up in the same seat or more than two, then if there's someone who's term ends in 2022 and they end up in 2024 seat, then their current term will be their last. And they won't be able to run again in 20, 20 friends in 2022. They'll have to sit out for two years and then they could run as a non incumbent in 2024. It gets even more complicated if it goes the other way. But hopefully we won't run into that situation. Okay. So that's something that you, we work through with you. And then that's part of that discussion with the, when we do adopt the map. So that's all he done through these public hearings and other discussions. Exactly. Exactly. And it can be kind of, it's hard to put your mind around it purely theoretical because there's so many scenarios, but once you're down to a map or a couple of final maps, then it's a much more concrete needs you to address. Okay, thank you. So we had another question that came to mind. I know in communities that adopt district elections, they also, especially for those who don't have a direct elect mayor. They also need to establish a process for how they determine that mayor. So for example, Watsonville rotates amongst the different districts. Is that something that we'd need to discuss in terms of how to incorporate that process because it was currently, you know, we use the criteria that a person gets first or second in the election and traditionally they've rotated into that seat. But we have a new council that's been voted in by districts and somebody who should become mayor who voted under the at-large system. I'm just kind of wondering how the establishment of the mayor would work under those circumstances. And if that's something we need to detect before, or is that something that would be newly established when we establish the district and process? And you would have to look at your process and probably reconsider how you do it, just because, as I mentioned, districts are drawn based on total population. So you'll end up with certain districts that have much higher voter turnout than others. And so simply who gets the most vote, it would always be the same district. And likely the same votes. You probably do want to revisit that. But that could be something you could do after the map is adopted or at any point in the process. Along those lines, Doug, do cities typically, in that situation, do they typically, like, rotate the mayor by districts? Typically, all forms or does it just take all forms? It takes all forms, definitely. Yeah, I mean, some do two years, some do one year. There is a huge range of options, definitely. Okay, great. Vice mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Doug, for showing that presentation. I've learned a little bit more. And my question also centered around the districts and the mayor in that process. And I know that since the purpose of public hearing is to hear input from the community as to what factors would be taken into consideration with these boundaries, these districts and creating district boundaries in these maps. Progress. And one of the things that had come up was also the idea of six districts and an elected mayor and the difference with seven districts versus that and versus when the city charter would need to get changed in that process. I think if someone could touch on that briefly and how that ties into this, before we go into input, that might be helpful. Yeah, and I will defer to the legal counsel on that one. Thank you. I'm going to ask Kathy to weigh in here just briefly. So currently the remedy that's provided under the CDRA for an alleged is to establish district boundaries and so that sort of defines the actions that are available to the city. So, however, constrained by the charter which specifies that the city council shall elect one of its members to have the title of mayor. So, when you talk about a, a, an at large elected mayor, we're really talking about a charter amendment versus the relatively more simple process that we're on track for right now, which is an ordinance that would establish just a collection. And that would not require an amendment. Now, based on the case, but that many cities that have charter provision specifying at large collections have transitions to district elections by ordinance and the reason and legal basis for it is that it's in compliance with the CDRA as opposed to under the charter. Yeah, and to change the city charter that, that process is. In order to amend the city charter, you need to go to the voters with a proposed charter amendment that we've done fairly recently. In fact, we have one that right now with regard to the children. I don't have anything to add beyond what I said he's got it. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Council member Watkins, did you want to, did you have questions? I saw your hand go up. Yeah, no, my question was asked by ex mayor in regards to what I think our community has really asked in terms of kind of what the scope of potential could be, particularly as it relates to a directly elected mayor, but it appears that we have that answer at this point. So thank you, Tony, for that explanation. But while I have the floor really quick, I'll just say that I'm a, I'm a mariner too. And I know you kind of answered this, but so maybe it's more, you know, if you want to elaborate on it, but although there has been minority representation elected at large, there has not been the majority minority representation of our Hispanic and Latino and Latinx population on the council. I heard from your presentation is as the maps are drawn, there could potentially be more likelihood for a Latino to be elected to council in the spirit of what I think the intention of this law is trying to do based on the potential for that district to have opportunity for that demographic. Is that accurate? And to a degree, yes. So, whatever district the beach flats, it ends up in as a presuming we obviously keep it together that they were together that district will certainly have a higher Latino percentage in the city of the whole does currently. Okay, so that's kind of the goal of the C various to maximize their voting strength in that one district. Okay, great. Thank you for clarifying. Great. Council member coming to do you have another question and I'll go to Council member commentary Johnson public comment after this. I'll keep it brief. I did. I kind of wanted to follow up on the question asked earlier because I'm just wondering, you know, if we do see a reduction representation on the council as a result of this going through. Could a similar argument be made that the system that we have is creates a bias in our local system that prevents certain people from other protected classes getting elected. I will, Tony, jump in and crack me. I was going to target. I was going to have that. So the same. Yeah, I think. I think that sort of answer that question previously in regard to PDA provides for is a transition to district election. But it doesn't provide a mechanism for doing the research. So, if we found that there is actually less representation of protected groups on the council as a result of district election. I suppose the potential remedy would be to return to some form of at large based election. But we would then be facing the same liability exposure that we are right now in terms of, you know, a claim of a PDA violation. Yeah, yeah, there's certainly no no provision of the California border attack where they could bring that challenge. It would that's creative federal challenge to come up with that approach. I guess, ultimately, we could see it and it sounds like it's happening in other communities where they've switched to districts when they've actually had less diversity on the church. Yeah, I just wanted that to be clear because I think that that's really probably mean it's. It's a concern. I think that many people in the community have and and I just want to make sure that that's the top there. So thank you. Thank you, council member council member contrary Johnson. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation Doug. Do you have the information around the citizens population for the beach flat and I know it's a small area. Yes, we have it census block by census block. That's the data that we're showing kind of city block by city block. I haven't like drawn any draft maps or like put that area into a district to find out what that expected percentage would be part of the trick of the fair maps act is it actually encourages just give the public time to win first because it's the drawing of any council member city staff or consultant draft maps and tell a certain amount of time after the data are released. So we can start drafting districts at all yet. Yeah, no, I understand that you just you had a population for UCSC. So I was wondering if you had that same number for the boat area. Yeah, it's a good that we actually could tell me and I have not done that but but I can do that provide that certainly. Thank you. Any other questions from council members. Okay. Okay, we'll go ahead and open it up for public comment. This is a public hearing but Ralph, I'm assuming it is okay for questions regarding this so I'm hoping that we can have this be sort of a question to answer format but I just want to double check with Tony if that's okay. And also Ralph that that's an expected versus just people having just doing public comment I'm just kind of wondering format wise whether or not we can have we can have at least questions answered. Yeah, so I will call on Scott first and if you could press star six Scott Scott before you start up I'm going to have our Spanish translator announced one more time in Spanish how people can queue up if they do need translation services so Peter can you do that announcement one more time please. Yes, if you're just kidding in this moment to have a lot of participation. I'll be just a bit of a session and public. Okay. I will go ahead and start with Scott. Scott, if you press star six, you're available to speak. I'm getting a note that Scott is using an older version of Zoom so I have to promote him to a panelist. Okay. I'll do that right now. Okay. Okay. I'm wondering the original lawsuit that the city decided to settle instead of fight was all based on race. Much of the discussion about protected class is all based on race. But then there's a federal law, an actual Supreme Court decision that says you cannot gerrymander districts according to race. So how is the city going to walk this tightrope and not fall into something where they can be sued in federal court? Me or Doug, do you want to take that? I'm not sure. Doug, maybe Doug and Cassie can provide an answer to that. Thank you, Scott. Yeah, I'll think of first pass and then Cassie can correct me or add to it, of course. So it is a fine line we have to walk. As I mentioned, the primary TVRA driver is race and determining whether or not you're moving to district elections. Yes, no, we're going to districts is primarily race and that's okay because it's not how the districts are drawn. It's simply are you going to drop? Then when we're drawing districts, race is one factor in the decision. So obviously we have to comply with the Federal Voting Rights Act. Considering race is one is part of that decision and that approach. So we have to consider race. What the federal law bans is race becoming the predominant factor. So usually challenges are based when you end up with these weird shaped districts that are stringing together different, you know, primarily African American or Latino neighborhoods into one district that goes across multiple communities. So as long as we stick to looking in neighborhoods as a key factor and then noting those neighborhoods that are heavily one protected class, then we're in that that safe air between the two where it's a consideration, but it's not the predominant consideration. Cassie, anything to add to that? I think that's a great answer. I would just add that it's very common in multiple cities and other special districts have transitioned to districts on the basis of the California Voting Rights Act challenge, alleging racial issues. And, you know, we haven't seen a ton of or any that I'm aware of alleging the Federal Voting Rights Act violation because we trend because there was a transition to district election based on the California Voting Rights Act. Great. Thank you, Cassie. Okay, next up I have a caller with the phone number ending in 1810. Please press star six to unmute. Mayor, was Scott done? He had a minute and 10 seconds left. Oh, I'm sorry. Scott, did you have any other questions, Scott, or comments? Well, I'm just wondering if the city's ready to fight a lawsuit for going to district elections or is the city ready to actually let the people of the city vote on whether or not we want district elections? That's that's all I want to say. Thank you, Scott. Okay, next I have phone number ending in 1810. Please press star six. Thanks, and you should be unmuted. He's not a Spanish speaker. Garrett, we need to press star six to unmute yourself. You're still muted. Okay, Garrett, I'll come back to you. I'll go ahead and move on to Steve Tedesco. If you could press star six to unmute yourself. You're unmuted, Steve. Okay, my only question is, has the decision been made to stay with seven districts or is there consideration for five or not? Do you want to take that one? Or is Cassie, maybe Cassie, you can talk from the charter perspective? Yeah, our city charter provides four, seven council members, and so changing that would most likely require a charter amendment. Thank you. Steve, is that your only question? That was it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next, I have phone number ending in 1810. Press star six to unmute yourself. Okay, I still can't hear you. Okay, I'll we'll come back to you. I'll move on to Lyra Filipini. Next. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Awesome. Thank you. I have two questions. The first one is just a curiosity based on how that, you know, a citizen. When we move to this districting structure, is it going to change the fact that right now all of our city council represent each of us and we have equal access to all of them? So, for instance, if Justin Cummings is not my representative in my district, but I have a specific environmental question and he's an expert in that field. You know, I would like to directly access him. So how will that change in our city? Do you want to take a stab at that? Sure. It's a very common concern and a very good question. A lot of it ends up depending on the dynamics of the council members. You know, some cities are very differential. If a call comes in from another council member's district, well, you get referred over to that council member. Others keep much more of a big picture view. So it really depends on the dynamics. And it's been interesting as we work with now a couple of hundred jurisdictions going through this process, almost universally. Council members who previously ran at large and have gone through the transition, you know, everyone in the city knows them. Everyone still calls them. They still take all the calls, you know, it's it when the cultural challenge comes up is really once you start getting council members who have never run city-wide. So when you start getting new council members who just run by district, that's where the culture of the council and the culture of the city will will be challenged to see if if they maintain that kind of citywide perspective and openness to everyone or start differing and referring calls over to the others. But there's no official law or ordinance or anything that impacts that. It's simply a kind of accepted practice amongst council members. OK, thank you so much for for that answer. The the next one is I wanted to thank you for your redistricting rules and goals, slide and information and especially for the third column and draw your attention to the future population growth. So as we are beginning this process, I was wondering if you are using our current zoning and land use information that shows that we have certain zoning along certain streets where currently there's just commercial buildings, but where they may be mixed use high density or mixed use medium density that not only would allow a huge jump in population, especially with these new state housing laws very quickly to happen, but also that we have density bonus laws in conjunction with that. So the current zoning for say, you know, 55 units on acre could result with 145 units for that acre due to things like, you know, SROs in our land use element. So how are we going to incorporate that into this formula? And in how much we can accommodate. So we're really just playing within the margins of the equal population balance requires, which is really. Technically, it's a little different, but as a rule of thumb, it's plus or minus five percent at the most. So if we're looking at, you know, about 9000 people in a district, then we're probably. So we get under populated district by 450 and it's rare that the numbers and the neighborhoods work out that that smoothly. So we're only talking about having a little bit of flexibility for a couple hundred people. The other piece is keep in mind that the lines will be redrawn every 10 years. So after every census, the council will go through this process again. So the focus of that expected growth tends to be on approved projects that are under construction. You know, if our 500 units in a development in one particular part of the city, then we'd pay more attention to that. I'm not familiar with any jurisdiction where we've looked at the potential for future growth, either just simply the zoning rules and taking that into consideration, just because we are talking about a relatively short timeframe of just 10 years and you want to be a little more specific in your justifications of knowing there are X number of units and not in other parts of the city. So we're going to underprivilege by a couple hundred people. Great. Any other questions, Lera? Oh, great. I didn't know I had more time. Thank you so much. Yeah, just to kind of further on that, because thank you. I'm sorry. We'll have time. You know, if you want to do up again, we'll see kind of where we're at. But hopefully those got you some questions. I don't know if you have. Well, let me get through everybody else and we'll see where we're at. But thank you for your question. The next person to get queued up is ending in phone number 5542. Please press star six to unmute yourself. Star six to unmute yourself, and you should be able to speak. Bonnie, is there any issues that I'm not right the right instructions tonight? No, because it's working for most people. Oh, here we go. There we go. You're we can hear you now. Good afternoon, Councilor Mayer. Today's meeting is premature regarding creating district based elections. Getting into an ambulance chasing legal threats is not only of warranted and ill timed, but you become complicit in undermining our local sovereignty and state constitution. Rather than moving post haste with establishing district elections, your role now should be to protect our local sovereignty. That protects authority of charter cities. Today, you should center around directing our city attorney to work with other affected cities in a legal strategy to challenge the claims forcing district elections. Without a vote of the people to change the charter city charter and by proceeding, there appears acceptance of creating district elections without a mandatory vote. You cannot establish changes to the city charter by ordinance. This must be challenged. It must be. The city of Santa Monica case pending before the state Supreme Court may provide the necessary clarity, but at least wait for the Supreme Court decision before moving ahead because it's in their docket now. The important issue at hand is the rule and authority of the city charter that must be followed and upheld and not circumvented. A public vote after creating district elections is cynical at best. What happens if it's defeated? If the city charter is to be altered, then there's a clear legal process that must be followed. Your job, your job is to protect local sovereignty and not undermine it. Thank you for your time and thoughtful attention. Thank you. I don't know if Tony or Cassie or Doug want to provide any comment back on some of those points. I mean, whatever you've. I would just add this charter issue is something that's come up in prior cases and, you know, there is pretty firm case law to show that or to hold that, you know, the California Voting Rights Act basically preempts the city's charter. So that issue has been litigated. It does come up in the Santa Monica litigation. I don't expect that case to run upon the charter issue. That's more about what does it take to establish a CVRA violation. That's the main issue in that case. And on this issue of cities sort of coming together, you know, I would add that the CalCities, formerly known as the League of Cities, is very involved in this and submitted an amicus brief in the Santa Monica case and is trying to put that position out there on behalf of cities. And just I know the council knows this, but the public may not realize it. The Santa Monica is fighting this. They won't say exactly how much they spent, but the estimates are they've spent somewhere around $78 million maybe more on their defense. So it's bold and brave of them and we'll go with it. But it does take writing a really big multimillion dollar check to fight even if they end up winning. And of course, the plaintiffs in that case have asked for $22 million in fees just for the trial phase. They haven't asked for their fees yet for the appeals. So it takes writing a really, really big check to take that path. Thank you, Don. Next, I have a skirt. Please press star six to unmute yourself. Hello, City Council. And hello, Doug Johnson. And thank you for coming to give this presentation. And thank you for undertaking the very difficult complicated work of demographies. I have a few questions. I'm not sure if I'll get to all of them, but I want to first just start out and say that, you know, here in Santa Cruz, there's a, okay, so I'm aware that that race is a big part of this legislation and a big part of your presentation. I would like to talk about class. In Santa Cruz, the percentage of households which are owned by the people who live in them is 47 percent. This comes from the American Community Survey in 2020. And then the percentage of households which are renting is 47 percent. So in that, to me, that makes, you know, land owners and land occupants, you know, an important class distinction. And then, of course, we also have a really high density of vacation rental properties here. And of course, the mixed projects which are going up. So I guess I would like to hear about class. You know, is class a protected status? You know, if we have a majority of renters here and a minority of land owners, then, you know, what can we do for district-based elections to help make sure that renters have appropriate representation here in our city, which is, you know, rapidly being taken over by real estate. Thank you. Briefly say no class is not a protected class legally under the Voting Rents Act. But certainly areas that are high rentership, you know, all those other socioeconomic features that can go into class can be used to define a neighborhood or a community of interest or, you know, a couple of neighborhoods that are bordering each other that should go together in a district. So you can consider those factors in terms of communities of interest and drawn lines. They just don't have a legally protected status. Thank you, Doug. Next, I have phone number ending in 0396. Star six, unmute yourself. Okay. I think you can hear me now. We can hear you. Yep. Yes. Just a comment. I would like to thank Mr. Johnson. It was an excellent presentation. And I, for one, am very excited about the prospect of district elections here in Santa Cruz. As a resident, I had some issues over the years where I felt not having a city council representative for my neighborhood was quite a deterrent. And so I think it's an exciting change and one that we can really improve representation in Santa Cruz by going to district elections. So thank you so much. Thank you. Next, I have phone number ending in 1810. Wow. That's hard to get through to you guys, doesn't it? Anyway, first, this is Garrett. Hey, for starters, the entire justification for this sounds good, but in practice, I doubt it. 37% of the population is white male, but none of the current council is good. Good luck bringing that demographic into balance as few white men even bother to run in a town like this. Minority representation is not a problem. A lack of political diversity is. Since the object of this is election fairness, how any of the three district thing begins fairly in 20 by two is a total mystery to me. Sure, it's fair to vote all seven districts every two or four years or to alternate three than the other four districts to vote every four years, but how to fairly begin that from the current system, which districts vote first, which districts are chosen to be in the three or four district groupings. Do we pretend that large elected members represent where they live or where they might move to and voted needed? The deciders that's you have already failed the people approving conceding really that more than half the city could sit out the 2022 elections. Well, is that an as yet undetermined minority of districts could do all the voting or as bad pretend sitting members represent them anywhere they move to? If any of that happens, a shame on you. Better would have been normally at large terms in 2022 that should have been adjusted to serve only two years and then transition to a more fairly to the simultaneous seven districts in 2024 and respect the current council terms. Does the plaintiff understand forcing half the population out of representational opportunity to choose in 2022 defeats their purpose? Not a fairness was their goal. Maybe you've got some bad be worse is occurring. Any amount of a Lucy's plan and of how to do fairness is accomplished other than that in 2022 election. As I explained, it will ring hollow to me. Pricey demographer demographer or not, the indicated direction will come from you and published firmly agreed on districting goals are needed to avoid the usual political tyrannical rigging. Otherwise, Santa Cruz is unusual insofar as it has a large okay. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Next up is Steve boss Stephen boss were a star six. Please press star six Mary. Hello. Hello. We can hear you. Oh, good. Well, I had her through to somebody pulled the plug on me at one point. Sorry about that. Yes, I'm I'm I'm really quite surprised at the the current seeming plans seeming firm plans to go for district elections. This is in spite of the fact that Santa Monica ah ah ahh dispute is still going and the appeal court for that dispute. Ah, just allowed the by election solution that the echo on neighborhood wanted to have in its place. And an argument came in there that ah, if the ah, if the instead of having districts Instead, there was an at-large election continuing but not using the existing plurality system, either of two other available voting systems. Then the 30% of Latinos, Santa Monica, would have a very good chance of electing at least one member of the seven member council in Santa Monica. So there is a, there are other methods. And I'm just wondering, the one thing I'm surprised at because I wonder if before the council, I would like to say, hooked on to the hypothetical solution of destructing. Did you then engage in research as to what the alternatives are? In Santa Monica, they are considering three, and I co-authors and myself are contributing to the dialogue that is going on there. And there's two more systems that I didn't have. And you give a commitment that you will have a commission called of interested parties to argue about and to consider all the options available. What do you do? And I have a response from each one of the council members on that question. Thank you for your comment. We'll come back to see if any council members would like to respond and I'll allow time to that. I just have one more caller that I'd like to get to. And then we can have additional comment and discussion with council members as appropriate. Let's see, 4871 is the next number. Thanks. Which are not perfect. I'll say that. The number ending in 1820, I think you've already gone. Is that Garrett again? Can you hear me? Nope, oh, sorry. Yes, go ahead, please. Great, thanks. Hi, so some of you may have listened to a radio lab podcast called Tweet the Vote that talked about this topic and whether or not this was a successful way to address fairness in elections. And to me, one of the interesting things that it talked about, and I encourage you to listen to it if you haven't, is how geographic diversity is, in some cases, really beneficial to gain. But it's not the only kind of diversity, especially in a small town. There's things like experiential diversity, age diversity, protected class diversity, philosophical diversity. Previous caller mentioned renter owner diversity. And they concluded, hopefully the best way to have diversity in your elections would be to have age diversity because throughout different ages, people do tend to go through all the different things they might, the different value they might have. So I'm just curious, is the decision made here, I mean, is this a guaranteed thing that's going to happen? Can we explore these other ideas? Just a really valuable thing for us to think this through. I'm not actually sure what the right answer is, but that's my comment. Thank you. Okay, I'm not seeing any other hands at this point. So I'll go ahead and take it back to the council. I'm completely fine. Oh, wait, I just saw a hand come up. If you are gonna, Mr. Bossworth, did you, you've spoken already, your hand is still up? Or it came back up? It came back up. Okay, okay. I'll take it back to council now. I'm comfortable with council members if they would like to respond to some of the questions. Just want to be aware of people's time. But yeah, happy to have that discussion as people see some of the answering, some of the questions coming from the public. I have council member Brown, council member Cummings, and then council member Watkins. Thank you. So I do want to say thank you to Mr. Johnson for being here and for doing this work to try to help us make our way through a bit of a complicated and not entirely clear process given all of the variables and the legality and everything this entails. And so I do look forward to seeing more and hearing more from you as we move through this. I also wanna thank the members of the public who are here today. I know it was something that I certainly have been hoping to do to get this issue out into the public. It has been on our open session agenda once previously, but for the folks who are listening out there, I think it's worth saying that we've been talking about this in our closed sessions now for quite some time. And that is in many ways was very much appropriate because of the threat of lawsuit. But we're not in that paradigm anymore. I mean, that still is obviously a factor and we have legal counsel helping us navigate this. But I have been asking for a long time now as have some of my colleagues to get this out on our open agenda and really start to get public input and get some of these questions answered people. I mean, clearly you don't have very much information about the fact that this is even happening in the city of Santa Cruz right now, much less answers to a lot of the questions. I mean, we're still trying to figure out answers. So I just think it's really important that now that we are, you know, daylighting this, that we have a meaningful conversation that we get really clear about, you know, how it is that we respond to, how it is that we make our decisions moving forward. You know, I think we, you know, a public forum gives us an opportunity to let our concerns know. And I mean, I've had questions from many, many people about, you know, with assumptions that I support this because the council has, you know, voted to move through this process. And so I wanna make it really clear that I support this process. Yeah, I just wanna say a couple of things about that. I am not fundamentally opposed to district elections. I think they have been, you know, helpful in some cases. I mean, I think Mr. Johnson, you kind of gave the explanation that it really runs the gamut. And we've also heard that the California voting rights at really, or at least the interpretations of it don't really care whether racially polarized voting or under-representation, systematic under-representation exists, or if district elections could remedy a perceived or actual problem. What we know, I'm just to be really clear about this piece of it is that district elections are written into this state law as a safe harbor provision, which means that the reason to do this is to protect ourselves from legal exposure. And because of that serious concern, we've been working on it mostly behind the scenes. I think that there are still open questions about that. And, you know, so this question of, is this, I mean, you know, from my perspective, I don't know if this is a done deal. It feels that way, but, you know, there's a lot, there are variables that are gonna continue to emerge. We do have, yes, our legal counsel has shared, so you all now know as well that, you know, most jurisdictions have either just gone ahead and done this when faced with this kind of complaint or threat of lawsuit, and the ones who have fought have not won with the possible exception of Santa Monica and they have spent a lot of money to do that. But I wanna just say here that, and remind everybody that the Santa Monica case, and this is Pico, Pico Neighbors Union versus the city of Santa Monica, will be heard by the California Supreme Court. And the question of whether or not evident, there needs to be demonstration or evidence provided about racially polarized voting in order to be, you know, legally susceptible to that, you know, to being forced to move to district elections or forced into some other kind of system. You know, that's still an open question. And we gotta, I think it's very important that we say that and that we, you know, and for me, the reason I'm saying, saying that I don't support this because I don't support being, you know, I don't believe that being strong armed, being kind of extorted, being threatened is a way to responding to that in this way is a good way to make policy. There may be very good reasons to move to district elections. I don't know what they are, but I think that's a broader community conversation. So this kind of question that lingers, is this a done deal? I think is not yet answered. What will happen with renters? This is a question that I actually has come up multiple times and I would like to ask this question right. Tony or Cassie, maybe you can weigh in or if not try to help us get an answer to the question of well, what happens if a renter is elected in a district and for whatever reason, either because of the way power works in a landlord or tenant relationship because of their politics or just for any other reason. I mean, you know, if a tenant is displaced, is it possible to write something in to allow that elected official to finish out their term? So I guess I'll ask that question. I do have some more comments, but that's the one that's just been on my mind. And so I figure now the time, good time as any. I'll ask. I've seen that done in other jurisdictions. Doug, have you seen any renter protections passed in other jurisdictions for council members? You're muted, thanks. Yeah, the residency requirement, you know, is the same for everybody. You have to live just as you clearly have to live in the city. You have to live in the districts and if you move out of the district for anything other than a very temporary situation, you have to resign the seat. So, and that's written in a state law. So, and there's no legal way to address that in a district elections context. I mean, the charter you can do, you know, charters or charters, you know, you can get very creative in charter, but that would be unusual. But it is the same other than the fact that the renter would have a smaller pool to move into, it's the same scenario that could happen currently with the citywide council member too. You just have fewer options as places to move to. Yeah, and many, many fewer for renters out there. We, you know, you know, that's the case. I'm just gonna say this because, you know, there are people paying attention to this who know me and know my politics around renters issues. This is not asking this because of my particular situation. You know, on the way to home ownership, I don't have to move. Nobody's gonna make me move. I'm termed out. You know, this is a question that I am asking on behalf of, as one speaker suggested, the majority of the Santa Cruz population. So, you know, we should think about that. There may not be anything we can do about it, but we should be thinking about and we should be thinking about whether or not there are ways to address this. So I'm just gonna put that in the parking lot for now. I know we're gonna have more conversations about this. So Mr. Bosworth's question, you know, this question about evaluated, evaluative rank choice voting or proportional representation, I guess is the appropriate term. That's a really interesting concept. You know, rank choice voting, you know, kind of the standard kind and the kind that Mr. Bosworth, you've been working on and you've spoken to us about this in the past. I really appreciate it. You know, those are things that we, I think we ought to be talking about as well. Not here today, but you know, if we really want to address issues about representation and access, there's all, we know there are all kinds of other things that ought to be discussed. Just wanted to say that and put that in the parking lot for the moment as well. I could go on and on and I'm not gonna, but I do actually in the interest of moving us forward and trying to clarify a little bit, you know, what's happening here and you know, what I think would be really helpful for this council in order to make, you know, informed decisions motion. And Bonnie, I sent it to you. I saw that you've got it. So I'd like to, I'm gonna make a motion right now. I know it's straight out of the gate, but if I don't do it now, I may miss my chance. So there it is. Can you all see that? Hopefully. Yeah, so my motion is to direct our interim city center to provide the following material the next public meeting scheduled to consider district elections. I think that the California Voting Rights Act ought to be included in our packet. And it should be made available to the public. I know it's public information, but that should be there. Any available updates on the California Supreme Court's timeline for hearing the Pico Neighborhood Association at Al versus the Santa Monica case. I've included here, although Cassie may have already sort of, you know, addressed this one. The opinion of the US Supreme Court case, Shaw versus Reno. This is, this refers back to one of our first speakers mentioning, you know, federal rules around gerrymandering districts. And I guess maybe you've looked at that and, you know, the demographer has. So if it's irrelevant, we could delete it, but also the full 2020 census tract data and map for the city. I think that should all be included in our packet for the next meeting. And to express the intention of the city council to consider rescinding the district elections resolution at the end of this public that's merited or if we feel that that's merited based on evidence received during this process. I say that because I do feel like this is a big open question in our community. And I'd like to, you know, include the possibility of that that, you know we may do that depending on what we find out. There's my motion and look forward to discussion. Thank you, council member. Justin, sorry, council member Cummings. Thank you. I'll go ahead and start by seconding the motion so we can have that discussion. But then one or follow up on some comments. The one about representation, that was a great question. This has come up. I've had a number of members of the community reach out to me asking, you know along with these questions around direct like mayor and bring to a voting. But some people have been asking, you know what do we have to have the seven representatives and could it be five, could it be six with the director like mayor should be in two representatives for each district rather than just one. And so, you know, I got the answer that I have is that these are still questions that are up in the air and that members of the public want to weigh in these community forums and also writing to the city council and letting, you know, providing your comments in the public comment areas. That's the best way to get that information out so that we can kind of track what people are saying in terms of what they want to see the city council look like moving forward because if we go in the direction of district elections this is the time when the members of the public have the opportunity to weigh in on what our composition of our city looks like. I did have a question about, you know what it takes to demonstrate a violation of the C be a health when you go to write back just looking at the language in section 14, 041 subsection B says the current racially or as voting show some examining results of elections in which at least one candidate is a member of a protected class. I think here, what's been argued is that you know, there's the basis of they're not being Latino representation on the city council but we can prove that in fact when Latinos have ran in this town in the community especially within the last 10 years that they have known but we have actually seen one Latino former mayor David Tarazas, you know become the highest vote recipient and become the mayor of Santa Cruz. And so, you know, there's this question of when and then in addition to that there are elections when Latinos have not ran, right? And so if someone doesn't run and then we can't say that there's bias voting on behalf Latinos when in fact some Latino land can't actually be elected but what we do see is that when people from underrepresented groups and when people from protected classes run overwhelmingly they get elected onto the city council. And so it's difficult for me to understand, you know how in our situation, you know we would lose this argument when in fact we had a history of not only electing Latinos but overwhelmingly electing them to the highest vote getters and then also electing other people from protected classes. So, and I think one of the things that I noticed in the maps and what we saw today is that while in the beach flats it might be easier for other Latino to get elected. It seemed like in the rest of the city that would actually be diluted in those areas where we wouldn't see Latinos having a higher chance of getting elected. So, you know, the intention of the law is that we're trying to eliminate bias and reduce bias in terms of who gets elected you know, it seems like passing would actually increase the potential for bias in our elections and in our learning system. So, I'm concerned with that and I know that there's a number of people in the community who think that this might be a frivolous lawsuit and that we should actually, you know counter sue on the basis of it being a frivolous lawsuit. And, you know, maybe that would actually make the people who are trying to sort of think twice if in fact, you know, they're unable to prove we have bias loading in Santa Cruz that they would then have to pay us the equivalent of what they're trying to charge us an attorney's fees. So, you know, and to count the number of rounds point, you know, these, this is obviously problematic when we have a group that's literally going throughout the state of extorting money out of communities and abusing, you know, the California voters right back. And so, you know what direction we're going in but I think that, you know, if it turns out that we have a strong case and that the violation of the California Board and Rights Act, we should keep in mind opportunity to not go in this direction or at a minimum, take it to the community and let them vote on it because, you know, the community wants to go down this route of district election, put them on the ballot and let them vote on it. But, you know, I guess, you know, to that, I'll just repose that question and maybe somebody kind of answer what it takes to demonstrate the violation of the Act and then kind of some of my comments, but it doesn't seem clear that they would have a good case and that we would be able to defend ourselves. I think you want to take a second. Yeah, I was going to say, go ahead. Council, I think, I mean, council members, I mean, did correctly quote the standards that are applicable in the statute, but rather than that the Democrats said, thank you, whether or not, you know, we meet that standard, I would just refer to the track record of cities and special districts throughout California, which is difficult in attempting to defend against these California voting rights act challenges. And so, you know, that argument is being made and as someone who lives here in Santa Cruz and who knows the city pretty well, you know, I think those arguments sound compelling except when you compare the Santa Cruz situation to virtually every other city in California that is attempted to send off this type of a result challenge. And it didn't occur to me at the time, but I just want to, in reference to Council Member Brown's kind of bit, I thought- Tony, can I, can you turn your, I am up a little bit, you're pretty gravely, you're hard to hear. Yeah, I'm sorry. There you go, that's a little bit of a statement. I was saying that, you know, just at the gut level, it seems like a voting rights challenge in Santa Cruz doesn't make sense, except when you consider that in comparison to virtually every other city in California that has to try to defend themselves against these lawsuits. And so, including the city of Santa Monica, which lost its case in the trial court and a mind reader or that there really is not a divergence of opinion in the appellate court in California and the Supreme Court accepted review of the case did not vote well necessarily for the city of Santa Monica in that case. That's not to say that the Supreme Court might not agree with the Court of Appeal, but generally they take up cases when there's a split of authority in the different appellate districts to resolve those types of differences. And then it just occurred to me that I've certainly been familiar with anecdotal evidence of people actually moving into districts in order to run for seats. And so, you know, I think that the roof makes some sense in the sense that you're less likely to have a situation where some carpet bagger moves into what is perceived as a weak distance in order to try to get on the city council, but that doesn't really represent that. That's just a thought on that. I don't know if I covered your other question. Council member coming. I think it was along the lines of what does it take to demonstrate the violation of the California voter right check? Yeah, and I'm just not prepared to go through the data and do that analysis under the standards that are contained in the statute. So I guess I fell back on sort of the track record argument. And many other communities in California are similar demographically to the city of Santa Cruz. And so, none have succeeded on that basis thus far. And I think the likelihood of prevailing on a claim that the lawsuit is frivolous given, again, the dismal track record that other cities have experienced when challenged under the CDRA, you know, not a court is just not going to find that a CDRA lawsuit is frivolous. Thanks, Tony. Bonnie, you have a question for council member council member Brown about the promotion. You want to clarify something? Then I'll move on to the council member walk-ins and then council member commentary Johnson. Thank you. I just wanted to confirm because you did mention that at the next public meeting, you wanted all of those things included in the agenda packet, but the next public meeting as far as I know is not a Brown-acted, it is a public meeting, but it's not a Brown-acted meeting that would have an agenda packet with materials. So are you wanting those for that meeting on the 18th or those for the next council meeting it comes to? For the next Brown-acted meeting, thank you, Bonnie. Got it, okay. Thank you. Council member Watkins. Yeah, no, I appreciate the clarification and the questions. And I think at the end of it all, it's obviously very complicated and I don't think there's really a perfect solution, right? And so I understand the challenges associated with the at-large, associated with the districts for all that have been brought up. And hopefully if we do need to move to districts and that's where we end up, then one of the potentials of benefits having more minority representation is the opportunity for them to be able to campaign in a smaller district which has been proven a barrier for fundraising, et cetera, for some other folks. So I think there will be, you know, pros, cons, you know, trade-offs along the way and we're kind of just trying to factor how to do that to the best of our ability within the constraints that we're under legally and otherwise, as well as also very transparent in terms of how we're engaging our community and hearing their voices in this process. Which gets to my question is in regards to kind of people being able to access or having their voices heard, how are we reaching other populations that might not feel inclined to participate in coming to a virtual meeting like this right now but more so in terms of whether it be translated or in other ways to kind of access their input from the community. I see Ralph you popped in, don't forget. We're translating a lot of the material we're sending out to the community including on our website and social media and all that and we're making sure that there's translators available at these meetings. We have a, both for September 18th on a Saturday morning also make sure that people who are working Monday through Fridays have an opportunity to participate as well and we'll be sure to reach out to do a better job of reaching out for that meeting as well. There's always room to improve when you're doing community outreach and so we'll be sure to really focus in on, especially if it sounds like the beach flats area and any other neighborhoods or community groups, council members would like us to spend a little more time doing outreach too. We can spend more time doing that as well. Great, thanks Ralph. Yeah, I think what I'll do is forward you sort of suggested demographics. I think there's the ELACs at the schools. There's a number of other bridges down at the beach flats, the university, et cetera. But I think we do want to have as much of an inclusive process as possible to ensure that we're hearing all voices of the community and their input as we move forward with this process. So I appreciate your input and I'm happy to hear it on a Saturday morning and hopefully we'll get some other folks there. Okay, thanks. Thank you, council member. Council member Contari-Johnston and then Vice Mayor Bruder. Thank you. I want to thank council members Brown and Cummings and Watkins for your comments. I have more questions and comments. I also share the concern about diluting the diversity on our city council and in our leadership. I was also curious about our outreach and participation efforts and one suggestion is that our committees and commissions and ask them to do outreach to their communities because they're serving as advisories to our city council. So that's another opportunity. So my questions, I'll just say them all at once. So this is something that council member Brown brought up in her motion about the intention of rescinding. And I guess, I don't know who this question goes to. Maybe it's Tony, but would we be able to rescind the resolution at any point? I guess I'm trying to understand the process and to the point of the caller and what council member Brown brought up, is this a done deal? I mean, could we rescind to the council and do we need to have that language and emotion? So that's one of my questions. And then my other clarifying question is, we have to go to the voters for them, for the charter amendments is how I understand it. And so if voters vote that they don't approve the charter amendment to go to district elections, what does that scenario look like? And then council member Cummings asked, can we take it to the voters? So what's that distinction between the voters voting on the charter amendment and then taking it to the voters and have other communities done that? And there's a lot of questions, but I'm just gonna get it all out there. And then we talked to Watsonville. I know they're clearly a very different community. Their makeup is very different, but they went through this not too far in our history. So they went through this as well. So we connected with them to ask about their lessons learned as they went through districting process. So those were a lot of questions. So I sounded like the first one was around when I'm just the voters don't approve the charter amendment is, can we take that one off? Yeah, that's the list of that, yeah. So I understood the first question is, is this a done deal? And I'm gonna defer to Cassiopeia. I would say no, it's not a done deal. At the end of the day, the council needs to pass an ordinance sent to district elections. And so the council could just choose to not pass that ordinance and to not finalize the process. So that's an option that's open to the council, regardless of whatever motions are made today. I think that was your first question. The second question I believe was to the charter potential charter amendment. And just to sort of fill everyone in, I know there have been discussions about a potential charter amendment to convert to district elections. We do not have to amend our charter. We could just leave it requiring at large elections and just have that inconsistency. We could come back later and clean it up just to make it consistent and to what the process we really have is. Or there are a myriad of options for a charter amendment. We could change our charter to convert to a directly elected mayor. I know that's something that's of interest to a lot of community members or they're just a myriad of ways to amend the charter. So if we did, it would be, I think your question is, well, what if we put a charter amendment on going to districts and then that didn't pass? I think that's where the issue of the California Voting Rights Act, where if the charter comes into play and that's why we don't really need to amend our charter at all to be able to convert to district. Yeah, that was my misunderstanding. So thanks for clarifying that. And I think just the last one, it's a general question maybe Ralph can answer. Have we connected with Watsonville to learn about their process? No, yes and no. I know Bonnie, our city clerk has been in touch with them to kind of figure out escalation services and all that stuff and understand that they went through this process as well. So, we could definitely talk to them more about what they experienced and some maybe lessons learned from their process as well. Yeah, and I would just add on that, certainly the lessons learned in kind of management to the earlier point about how the council members relate to residents. Watsonville has tons of lessons learned that they could probably share. Would note in terms of making the transition, they made it as part of a lawsuit in a court ordered district map. So it's just for noting that when they drew districts, it wasn't this kind of community drawn process. It was all in a courtroom. Oh, okay. That makes it different. Yeah. I'm sorry, I did have one other, I'm looking at my list of questions that I wrote up that have other communities voted on district elections here in California, rather than doing it by ordinance through a council of other communities voted on it. This is actually one of the problems is that in, when the California Voting and Attack first kicked in, cities had to take a vote. They didn't have the option to do it by ordinance. And so, Vicilia and a number of other cities put it to voters and the voters turned it down and they were all immediately sued. Well, not all, but almost all of them were immediately sued and then had to agree that, you know, they all quickly settled. The first, back then it was six figure settlements and had a judge order them into districts. So that's what the state legislature at the request of League of Cities created this avenue to say, okay, even if they didn't have polarized voting beforehand, the vote on district elections was turning out to be polarized. And so that vote created the evidence that then forced them into districts, generally with, you know, high six figure set, okay. So that's why the state set up this process to do it by ordinance without having to put it to vote. Because even if you didn't have polarized voting before, that one election could be the proof that the plaintiffs need and then you end up having a judge do it anyways. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Next will be Vice Mayor Brunner. Thank you, Mayor. Let's see, I had a few comments and questions as well. And some of the questions have been answered around community access. Our next meetings in September, I think it's September 18th, January, February and March. But after today and hearing the input and comments that we have received and emails, how will that be incorporated into next steps? That's my first question. Oh, do you wanna take that? I don't know if it's Doug or you. This is the tail end of the question. Vice Mayor, our website will continue to have up-to-date information for the public. And it includes my contact information too. So if there are any questions that come up between now and our next meeting, they can send those over to me. And I'm gonna be sort of the funnel between the community and our staff here and our team here who can help respond to those questions. And of course, we'll get all that feedback to Doug and NBC as well to help draft these initial maps. And the questions that have, that are even questioning the process and questioning, there were a lot of, there would be a Q&A available on that website, the city website, is there a special page for that for district regarding district elections to point people to? Yeah, in fact, yeah, there is a fact section on the website right now, but can we add to those raw? Yes, and it's gonna be a living document, a living website. So as we get new questions, we'll work on answering them and getting them on there. Okay. And one of the callers asked about options that were, so this resolution was last year, prior to myself being on council. And so I'm not sure of the discussion and the information that went in and led up to that point last year. So I think it would also be helpful to have any of the options that were discussed and that are available and were available at the time that include that information if that's possible. And I guess that would be for Ralph as well. And maybe it's already there. I haven't seen the webpage, so I'm sorry if I'm maybe bringing something up that already exists, but it's just clear with this community input, there are a lot of questions around process and even here on the council asking if it's a done deal and what the options are and what options have been explored and how we move forward in a community process that really addresses all the questions. The weeding of diversity, renters, and if voters don't approve, do we stick with seven districts simply because then we don't have to amend a city charter? Do we consider other things? There's so many moving components that would be nice to understand how we gather all that and move forward into those next steps to have all that answered. And all my questions have been pretty much answered. The process, the city charter and outreach participation. And then I think there was one question I had for legal. What is the deadline again we have for this? There was someone who had suggested we wait for Supreme Court decision, but my understanding is there's a timeline on this legal litigation part. And so what? In order to set, well, first of all, the resolution that the council adopted expresses the intention of transitioning to district elections by November of 2022. In order to do that, we really need to have the district under these trauma and transmitted to the county election official by sometime in early April. And that probably has a specific date. April 17th. The day that looms large in my mind. And is there wiggle room to change that? We could negotiate an amendment to the agreement, but in terms of the county election official's deadline, it's really pretty hard to set. And Kathy has more familiarity with the status of the Pico neighborhood association in case Supreme Court. All I can say is I'm watching it closely and the council will be the first to know if when there's a decision on that case. Yeah, and I can say one of the attorneys from Santa Monica actually said at the earliest he expects a ruling at the very earliest in March and much more likely after that. So you really saying with the registrar deadline you don't have time to wait for that ruling and then go through the district process. But as been mentioned, you can go through districts and then you're rescind that ordinance before the election. You have to have them drawn by April but you really have until July to rescind that ordinance if you change your mind. Options written down, if it's a part of that information that would be very helpful. Just for the public, Ralph, just and also for council members, the webpage is available on and I don't know Ralph but there's a way that it's a little bit hard to find. I just am looking at it now. Somehow call it out a little bit more strongly. It does have frequently asked questions and then it also has the timeline of the city and council actions all the way through basically the March 2022. So the timeline I think has brought confusion because the timeline is stated in a way that this is a done deal. This is what's happening, right? And so that's where there's a little uncertainty and so just having all the information spelled out I think is important and even in the gender report it says next steps as if this is the only option word. And so I think just understanding for the public, especially if we're having public hearings to understand the big picture as well as all the paths forward, each path has a consequence, right? And what are each of those paths and what are those consequences? Is there any other? I've got council member Brown and then I'm probably gonna cue myself in here. I am closing, public comment is closed by the way. I see Mr. Boss works has had his hand up but I did close public comment. So I'll go ahead to, I'm just gonna cue myself up real quick here and then I'll hand it over to council member Brown. Yeah, I'm supportive of the motion this evening. I think that again, whether or not this is a done deal is a little bit of an unknown based on a lot of the moving pieces including really important court results in some of these cases. But I think it's also important for the public to understand that we did adopt a resolution and we have in a sense settled the legal, basically we have a legal settlement that is moving us in this direction. Now whether or not we end up there ultimately, I guess can be up for just, it can be potentially changed towards as other things come into play. I was on the council when that resolution was drawn up and one of the primary factors I think with that resolution was the threat was the threat really to, it was very clear that the city, a city of the size of Santa Cruz could not uphold that kind of legal kind of process of trying to appeal this and work through a legal framework of trying to undo this requirement. We actually looked at a number of cities that were doing their lawsuits at that time, some of which have now just folded up and stopped because they were literally out of money to pursue those cases. So that was certainly one of the main, one of the primary reasons that there was a threat that resolution was passed was a recognition that the law is very clear and I agree it's terrible to have a law firm running around California making communities do this. It's obviously the community, any elected official would want is to be forced into something that your community, first of all, really doesn't understand and really also may or may not support. I think what's most important about what we're doing now is we're starting that public discussion and I do think that's the most important thing and I wanna recognize Ralph's ability, his commitment to trying to get the word out as much as possible. I'm hoping maybe some of the press on the listening in tonight will do some good reporting on what we're embarking on. And we do the COVID and other issues we maybe should have started earlier on all of this but the fact of the matter is we're here where we are and I'm very interested in understanding from the public where their thoughts are on this. We have I think three more public hearings. I'm hoping we might be able to squeeze in more if we can. It's awful to do this on Zoom which is really, really frustrating to me that people are not gonna be able to physically come and look at these maps but we've gotta figure out a way to accommodate people to the extent that we can and I do think some direct outreach to Beach 5's neighborhood is really important as well so they understand what's available as well. So some of the speakers had asked for us to give our remarks right now in terms of whether we support this or not and I'm gonna be one of the ones that says let's do our public process and learn as we go. I think this is the process that we're learning from and I wanna allow ourselves the time to do that and provide that as much as possible and I wish we had gotten started in May of last year but we didn't and so we've missed a lot of opportunity with our community to actually have these conversations by not having anything that's brought forward and I'm not quite sure why that happened but it didn't show up and so we're starting and it does feel rushed and it would have been nice to have more time to talk to people certainly about these items but we're certainly embarking on it now and we will be working hard to get the word out and I guess it finally I think this gives folks a chance to also learn about again we only get about a little over 60% of our can vote for the city council so there's still a lot of people out there who are not engaging in our democracy locally so I also think of this as a way to potentially again engage with people more, it could be a way where people are seeing maybe an avenue into having the reverse voice heard or an avenue of not having their heard but I think anytime you talk about your democracy at a local level is of value so I want to keep that in mind as well we still have pretty low voter turnout for our city council and I think it's important for people to really understand what this could shape for the future so those are my comments this evening I just want to make sure people are up to date our meeting will be on September 18th and we'll be sure to put that time I believe Ralph has scheduled for a 7pm or no I'm sorry that's the Saturday meeting are we doing that at 10 Ralph or what time does that meeting start? Yes, I'm at schedule for 10am Saturday Okay and I'll turn it over to council member Brown and then council member Cummings Thank you mayor now I have a random thoughts and responses I'm going to try to keep them organized and short so I want to thank all of my colleagues on the council for your comments I think what folks have heard if you're listening in is that we very much are trying to muddle through this and there's a lot of unknowns and we do want to hear from you and create the space and I appreciate hearing that from everybody and I also neglected to thank Ralph D'America on our staff who has taken on this challenging job of coordinating something that's really nebulous and you know just experimental I guess from you know at our end for all of your I in no way want to suggest that like having not talked about this or community not knowing has anything to do with your effort to your really are committed I just want to shout out and say that for the first time in my time on the council where I've talked about we need more community engagement we need community engagement a staff called me up and said I heard you and I really want to talk to you about what that looks like to you and get your suggestions and Ralph he did that and I really appreciate it and I think he did that with other council members it really is a collaborative effort so two points one just following up on Vice Mayor Brunner's questions around the process to date and kind of what information's been gathered I just wanted to put out there that we did have a charter review committee and the intention was for that group appointed folks from the community to really look at a range of potential reforms all of which with the exception of just district elections with seven council members would require charter amendments that have to go to the voters so there's probably some documents about that information gathering that they did their work was really cut short but if it's possible to find those I guess this is mostly Ralph to you and folks in the city manager's office if that is around it could be cool to get access maybe link it to the web page or something like that because it has some other I looked at it at the time and I forgot exactly what's in there but it's interesting and then Mayor Meyers' year point about kind of lamenting that this is all virtual and it is a total bummer but maybe at a certain point when we get some maps whether permitting we could do depending on what's happening and go outside seeing where people can be distanced and actually be able to go around and look at stuff so there may be ways even in this really constrained realm of possibility that we're in so I think I'll leave it there and I guess I'll just add with respect to the motion that I made just so I don't to make it clear I'm not doing this to ask for busy work from staff if you want to take out the Reno the piece on the federal case around gerrymandering I think that having thought about it Cassie your response is pretty clear there so no need, I mean, so unless others want to just really making it clear that the motion is really just intended to help clarify for the public where we're at not to stop work on anything not to try to introduce a whole bunch of new ideas but really to just carry on with this process with an understanding that things may change or new things may arise. Thanks. Thank you council member, council member coming. I just have one quick question because I know folks want to keep going I think we're pretty close to being done with our conversation this evening but I did want to follow up on the comments that the mayor made and just so the public I think for those thinking about this process and why we were at the point we are and I just remembered that one of the things I think we were hoping to incorporate into this was the new census data and it took so long for that data to come out that in order for us to be able to draw the maps appropriately with that new information we pretty much had to wait and unfortunately it's causes substantial delay in our ability to kind of move this process along so to butt share that with members of the public to give some clarification on this process a little bit more quickly. Thank you council member. Okay, I think this will wrap up our and so we have a motion on the table and we also have council member Brown we had a request a recommendation also if you would be willing to add to this motion that we adopt the new timeline that Ralph described so do you mind if we add that in as the third item on your motion and that way we'll get it all done. That's great. And while you're in there Bonnie if you want to take out the Shaw versus Reno bullet it's the third bullet down. It's fascinating but I think we're beyond that at this point. And Ralph, I'm wondering maybe two if we could post I see we have the resolution and also the contract we have with Doug's consulting firm maybe we can put that copy of the voting rights act up on the website as well right now it's a webpage that way we could that way people who are listening can dig in. Okay we have a motion on by council member Brown seconded by council member Cummings and Bonnie we can go ahead and do a roll call vote. Thank you mayor. Council member is Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Council member Golder is absent vice mayor Brunner and mayor Meyers. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Gotta get to my script here. Thanks everybody in the public look for the information for our meeting on September 18th at 10 a.m. And also we will have two additional public hearings and those will be posted on the website. Just wanna thank everyone from the public for attending this evening and this meeting is now adjourned. Good night everybody. Night. Thank you everyone.