 to the 12, 30 public portion of the closed session of the July 2nd, 2020 special meeting in the council. If you'd like to comment on the closed session item, now the time is called. Numbers are on the screen. In this part of the meeting, the council receives public testimony, share after the public's vote line with the closed and inaccessible. Please mute your televisions or streaming devices once you call in and listen through your phone. Please note that there is a delay in your streaming so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. 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. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been un-muted. The time will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you've finished commenting out of interest. With that, I'd like to ask the public to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Member Byers? Here. Matthews? Here. Here. Boulder? Vice Mayor Meyers? And Mayor Cummings? Like to comment on our closed session item. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hands. And when you're un-muted, you'll be given two minutes to speak. Anyone on who shouldn't be? The person by the name of Susan Landry listed in the attendees. And I don't know who that is. Are they currently in this room? They're just the last. OK, so they just left off or got off? Actually, play it. OK, mics are on. Here you can hear the banging. Yeah, I'm going to see maybe if Bonnie, if you can just un-mute yourself when you're after the roll. We may have to wait then. The item you want to comment on, using the instructions on your screen or that are on the agenda packet, saving devices or television once you fall in and just listen through your phone. Please note that this is a lay-in streaming. So if you continue to listen through your television through your device, you may miss your opportunity to speak now and on your phone to raise your hands. But if you're trying to speak there and call a comment, you'll hear an announcement and you've been un-muted. The time will then be set to two minutes. And you may hang up once you are done commenting on your item of interest. I should acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the un-seeded territory of the Oaxaca-speaking Ubi tribe. The Amamutin tribal band comprised of the descendants of indigenous people, taking the mission Santa Cruz and San Juan Bacita and Spanish colonization of the Federal Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historic trauma. First item of business today is a presentation of Open Gum, Lupita Alemos, finance director and traditional criminal management panel. Mayor Cummings, I'm sorry. I think somebody has their microphone on mute and it's like we can hear. I'm excited. Do you have an honest, are you streaming the video at all? I'm not. I shouldn't be. Somebody who was on the phone also had it on there. I don't know. I said I don't know. Okay. Thank you. Sorry. He's on the line. I'm not sure last four digits. He does have our presentation speed up. Maybe what we can do is we can move on to Delia's Parks and Recreation and Rachel Coughman's Recreation Superintendent. Delia's Parks and Recreation and Rachel Coughman's Recreation Superintendent. Thank you, Mayor and City Council. Can you guys hear me? I'm sorry. Okay. I'm sorry. Mr. Coughman. And if he needs to take over for here. All right. Well, good afternoon City Council. Yeah. For the record, Tony Elliott. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For the record, Tony Elliott, Director of Parks and Recreation. My pleasure to officially kick off National Parks and Recreation Month or as we say in Antiquers and across California. July is Parks Make Lights Better Month. Selmer, as you know, is the traditional season for many of the most well-known and beloved Parks and Recreation programs and events. Unfortunately, this year we've been forced to cancel many of our iconic events and programs like Woody's on the Wharf and Junior Guard. Nevertheless, Parks and Rec staff have really stepped up to innovate and serve in new ways this year. Our virtual recreation programs have served thousands of Santa Cruz residents. Our beach host program has worked closely with the police department and fire department to ensure for the safety of beachgoers. We've worked very closely with economic development and public works to reimagine spaces like the Wharf and create opportunities for restaurants and businesses to thrive in those spaces. In addition, Parks, Trails, and just have served as critical spaces for exercise, socially distanced recreation, and an outlet for both physical and mental health of our community. Use of Westcliffe, in fact, has been greater over the last few months than comparable time periods in past years. La Viega Golf Course actually had its best month of June in 20 years, so the demand has been there. We've seen it over the past few months. Parks and Public Spaces have also served as venues for our community to protest and to gather and to march and exercise First Amendment rights as we try to find out. Parks and Recreation is at the heart of providing Santa Cruz with parks, public spaces, and community services. With that, please join us in celebrating Parks Make Life Better Month in the city of Santa Cruz. And with that, I would just like to thank the mayor and city council for your support and your time. And at this point, I'd like to introduce our Recreation Superintendent, Rachel Kaufman. Video, but I don't see her probably though. You try to find Rachel here. Meanwhile, we're waiting, I have a question for you. I know in one of the previous presentations when you discussed the park. Yeah, so Santa Cruz, the city of Santa Cruz is, yeah, very, very fortunate in terms of the amount of park land that we have, and that includes our beaches, our open spaces in all of our parks. And so in total, we have about 1,700 acres of land that we steward and maintain. And based on our population from a per capita standpoint, we have about three times the number of parks per capita and three times the acreage per capita of the average US city. So we have a lot of parks. We have a lot of amenities and diversity across that park system. As you know, Santa Cruz Wharf, our Riverwalk, West Fifth beaches, open spaces, the golf course. I mean, it's really a dynamic system. Within that, some of the highest ranked facilities in the country and in the world, our disc golf course is ranked highly ranked and highly regarded facilities. Our fond bowling pitch at San Lorenzo, very well regarded, so on and so forth. I could go on and on, but yeah, that's a pretty robust and first-person thing on Rachel. And Rachel texted me and said she's trying to talk, but hopefully she can tune in. I think Bonnie was gonna tee up a video as well. So Bonnie, if you're there and wanna tee up that video. Hi, can you guys hear me? Tony, I had to have Rachel do it because we can't, we don't have audio. I need to keep my audio muted because of outside, so you guys are gonna have to share it, if possible. Can you guys hear me okay, or can you still hear outside? Well, okay. Can you hear me now? Through my phone, but I'm through the computer audio now, so hopefully you can hear me okay. And happy, it's life, parks make life better month. We did, to kick things off, we wanted to share this fun video created by staff. I am unable to access that, unfortunately. We had to send that to Bonnie, so Bonnie, if you're listening, if you're able to play it without sound, I think it's still worthwhile since we still have, we have the text below, but if not, I can move on. I'll continue just to highlight our activities. We can go ahead and play it, if you wanna go that way. And hopefully share that at another time. Tony, did you get that? If you can play the video, even without the sound, it might be beneficial. Bonnie, let's look at the screen share. Oh, here we go, okay. The screen is sharing the screen with us and it's trying to upload the video now. Perfect, it won't be as exciting without the music and our sound, but at least you can get a taste of it. And we did also post on our social media, and it's on our July at this time to make life better page. So you could watch it from on your own time. Bonnie, we don't see the video, I don't know if you're able to open it. If you're listening, I think you need to change the screen to share with the video. Hey, I may be able to share this from my computer, and how are you feeling here? Oh, building up, most of your screen as well, if you might be able to get it up. Yeah, let's try to do that. If you mind, and I think I can get the audio here. Bonnie, if you can stop sharing, then we can just tell you it's been a screen, but we can get audio as well. Thank you. I mean, is that new sharing screen? Is it, but it's working fine, so. I know. Continue to carry out our mission of providing environments, experiences, and programs that enrich lives and build a healthy community. We provide safe spaces for outdoor needed childcare for working families, vital connection for our senior population, environmental education to promote sustainability and so much more. After the month of July, we've pivoted from our planned activities and put together a lineup that still encourages exorcivity and education, but in a safe and socially distanced format. But for a complete list of our activities, you can go to anacrutheparksandrec.com and click on the July is Parks Make Life Better event. And you can also find the activities on the virtual recreation page. And I just wanted to quickly highlight some of the new activities. Weekend for July 4th, we have virtual fireworks. You can experience fireworks virtually and safely, which is really important. Wherever you are with a total AR app and the virtual 4th of July fireworks display can be viewed starting on July 4th at 9 p.m. at midnight and the app is free to download and use and no login required. The next activity, it's an agents of discovery, Scavenger Hunt, and this was actually inspired by a suggestion from Mayor Cummings to organize a community Scavenger Hunt Challenge and using the agents of discovery app staff and set up missions at different parks, highlighting local flora and fauna, environmental steward information and local history. As Agent Monarch Butterfly wearing a stylish Parks Make Life Better t-shirt and the app is free to download and use and no login required. The starting up this month will feature Arana Goltz and Harvey West, and you can check back to the Parks and Recreation website as the parks will change about the month. I know this is one that staff is really excited about and it's pretty neat. Wacky Water Day to Go! Loud & Nelson staff have converted their popular Wacky Water Day event in Laurel Park to Wacky Water Day to Go! You can pick up your Wacky Water Funday Kit and take home or to your favorite park or beach to celebrate Wacky Water Day on July 18th. Loud & Nelson staff will distribute the kit from the center on July 16th and 17th between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and people can call ahead and request it beginning Monday, July 13th by calling the center at 420-6177. And other activities include civics throughout the decades starting July 18th, a historical retrospective of civic events. The teen center is doing a design your own swag activity July 13th through the 19th. We'll have historical park tours with local historian Ross Gibson, our virtual tree walk with urban forester Leslie Keady and a pollinator tour with Spencer Klinefalter from the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. So those presentations can be viewed on Parks and Recreation's YouTube channel. And again, go to Santa Cruz Parks and Recreation for a complete list of detailed activities. And of course, it would not be Parks Make Life Better Month without our exciting Parks and Recreation swag bags. So you each have, should have received a swag bag to properly outfit you in Parks and Recreation gear for the month of July, including what I call is the Too Cool for School Parks and Recreation tattoo. So you can post yourself, oh I see Cynthia Matthews has got her school member Matthews, Parks Make Life Better, and we are Parks and Recreation. So I really thank you for your time and support and here's to another Fantastic Parks Make Life Better Month. It was a super exciting, thank you so much for the presentation of all the amazing events and scavenger condoms. And everything can be taken place in July. I'm really grateful that there's so many opportunities even during COVID-19 to get out and enjoy our parks. But thanks for that presentation, thanks for all the work that you all have been doing in Parks and Rec and me and Greg for telling me about it. I agree, thank you. Thank you. As soon as the comments and council members change on, we're gonna take a break because the activity outside of Chambers is to the extent to which we can't have a meeting on phone television, it's very loud, so we're gonna take a break. But before we go, I'd like to follow up around with your handle. Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you to the Parks and Rec Department, all of your staff for being innovative, creative and flexible in how it is that we deliver programming to the community during this time. I just think it's really awesome that you guys are around so creative and I love checking out the YouTube and checking out the website and kind of trying to play along with a lot of the activities that you've come up with. So I just wanted to say thank you for all that work and looking forward to getting back out into the, I'm not gonna say normal, but post COVID Parks programs in the future. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're just gonna take a short break and then I think we can, if anything, we can move through the presentations and then turning out sides and more, I need to address it so that folks can hear what we're actually conducting. Council member Byer is a student. Yeah, it was a wonderful presentation, but I wanna cheer out for the best, June was the best golf, what do I say, the best month of the golf course. And there are a lot of golfers and a lot of my friends, seniors who are so glad to be back on that beautiful golf course, but it's really a very special place. Thank you, Tony. Man, it's coming over. Okay. Okay, Tony, so while we break until 2.25, and then hopefully we come back and then we, and then we will try to resume our business. You have to go out there tomorrow. Go for some, huh? It's not that complicated. Some of them may have stopped making noise actually, but making noise. Yeah, they, they've only talked because, or they've only stopped because one person, like making a speech. They're still out there. Okay, making noise again. I think what we'll do is we'll have to adjourn the meeting since this disruption, we'll adjourn the meeting, and we will have to ask for this. That's my question. I mean, we do have the adoption of the budget, some time-tentative stuff. We will, in some form, meet today, is that? And council chambers haven't, we want to go ahead and go. We're going to do one more thing, and then probably adjourn two. The presentation. So it will be the Alamos and Tracy Cole. Well, I think I see Tracy. She came back on presentation. Good afternoon, mayor Cummings and council members, the Pita Alamos budget manager in the finance department. And today, we're very excited to present the launch of our financial transparency tool through OpenGov. This has been some time in the making, and before we start our presentation, I really would like to acknowledge and recognize Tracy Cole, our principal management analyst, and budget superstar who's presenting with me today for her hard work in making this launch ready. She's really dedicated a lot of her time into this project to ensure accuracy and a smooth implementation. And I'd also like to acknowledge Jillian Morales, our other budget team member, and also budget superstar who also contributed a lot of hard work into the transparency portal as well. So with that, we'll go ahead into the next slide. It's an online tool widely used by cities across the US. It provides users with an interactive experience with municipal finances. Making the budget and other financial reports easy to access and navigate. It creates a strong communication link between local government and its residents by creating this very easy access. Users can use a tool to filter and drill down on our budget information in a very interactive way. You can drill down by funds, departments, look at revenues, expenditures. Really, the world is your oyster when it comes to OpenGav. And users can also create reports that are downloadable and shareable via our social media platforms. So financial information comes directly from our financial system, which is updated daily. The community can see up-to-date information. Next slide. And what's great is that OpenGav is an online platform. It's, you can access it, your desktop, your laptop, your phone, you can access the budget anywhere. And stories through OpenGav is a module, part of OpenGav that we can use to link our data and stories through interactive charts and understandable data. So let's walk through the stories, the landing page. So this is our stories landing page for our financial transparency portal. You can access it through our budget webpage, which Tracy will show us how to access that a little later. But the landing page allows us to expand and add narrative to our interactive financial information. Next slide. For example, if you scroll down if you were on the website and scroll down, you could see the council priorities that were adopted in 2015, as well as looking at the budget process. So the community understands how these priorities and decisions are made and how the budget process comes to be. Next slide. We also included information such as frequently asked questions like our revenue sources. We're often asked how the city breaches its revenue and here we've expanded on our property tax. We provided a breakdown through this, very easy to read graph. So in this graph, for example, we received 1% of property tax rates by the state of California. And of that, the city receives about 13, excuse me, 16.3%. So in this example, we said that if your home is assessed at a million dollars, the 1% share is 10,000. The city gets about 15.3% of that, which is 1,630. Very awesome information. We also have other sales tax breakdown on the site, including TOT and sales tax. And what's also great about this is story allows us to add interactive graphs that link our financial data. We're able to explain this to the budget in this graph. It's made up of funds from general fund enterprise funds, including water, refuse, place, water, parking, et cetera. And when you click on any of these pie charts, you start to drill down and look at all of the revenues and expenditures of your wanting to filter. And rather than having a static presentation, Tracy will now go ahead and show us a live model of what OpenGov can do for us in our community. Okay, thanks, Lupita. Can everybody hear me okay? Thumbs up, yes. Okay, I'm gonna stop sharing the screen and go straight to our website. There's our website. Let me share my screen. And there we go. So the OpenGov Financial Transparency Portal is located on our finance finance page. So it's right here when you go to the finance page. This is the page that Lupita talked about and how we can get into OpenGov through here. We also have a link down here that you can get into OpenGov. So you can get into OpenGov either way. So I'm just gonna click onto this one and get us right into OpenGov. So OpenGov really is very simple to use. So I'm gonna go over the three major kind of navigation areas. So we've got our left-hand navigation over here. So it's got this middle kind of navigation area and then we've got some stuff going on over here on the right-hand side. So I'm gonna go ahead and start with our reports that we have out there. So we've got three reports sitting out here. The first one is our annual budget. That's the one that pops up on the screen first thing. And this report shows budget only. And it's got some views here that are pre-populated for easy searching. So if somebody wanted to see the finance department budget, you would just simply click on that. And there we are. You know, back to here. And then we also have an annual expenditure versus revenues report that's easy to get to. And then also a monthly budget to actual report that shows all the months here. And then the budget over here in the very last column, budget one. They said before we've got these really great views that are already pre-populated. And these are kind of based on common inquiries that we get from some people asking about different budgets. But if you wanted to drill in a little bit more, we have a filter feature. And so right now you can see that we're looking at a report that's showing expenses, broken down by department. And then you can filter it even more using any of these done here. If you wanted to change the funds, you could do that. Back over into the views. One cool thing that Open Dev also has is once you're in a report, you can scroll down and we'll get the data down below in a nice, fabulous format so that you can download that into Excel if you wanted to later. And so this middle section here, it kind of shows you what you're looking at. So you can see here that this report is shown by department and it's broken down in the primary general fund and expenses. You can click on any of these and we're gonna reset that one. And go through this one. So what's really fun about this is you can click into these when there's more to drill down on into. So you can really get down to those numbers. Lastly, we've got this left-hand area over here where you can share the information that we have on Open Dev. You can put it on Facebook, Twitter, email it to a friend, whichever you want. You can also download the image and that information that's down here, you can actually get it into ExpressG if you want to. That's basic navigation for Open Dev and pretty much concludes our demo. Thank you for letting us show this to you and we hope you guys check it out. This will allow, especially with COVID and it's a good way of hiring on, look like we'll get how it changes over time, seem really accessible so. Thank you. Yeah, I'd echo that. Big thank you for getting this set up. I was on the committee when you first brought it to the budget committee and got really excited and I know everybody was and Tracy, you definitely were excited to do this work. Thank you for giving us a presentation on it and I do hope that people out there who are watching this and listening will check it out. It's a really, really manageable way to kind of understand the city's budget and you can look at kind of where we're at from projected, adopted, actual spending and you can look at it months and months and all these cool things. So I'm really excited to use this tool and I hope others are as well and thank you for all your work. Thank you. Couple more items. I just had to echo the comments as well. Thank you so much for your hard work and congratulations and it's really nice to see that this is up and running so that members of our community can use it to better understand the budget. So thank you very much. Tracy, I had one question before you go. Is there a way to see revenues by the month or quarterly or is there any possibility for that through this portal or is it just kind of expenditures? No, you can actually see revenues as well. When you go into the filters, you can filter on revenues and switch it up from expenditures to revenues. Yeah. Everybody should say though that, okay. Go ahead, Tracy. I was just gonna say the PowerPoint, I have lots of screenshots in it so hopefully Bonnie can get that to everybody speaking of that kind of a reference. Great. And I was just gonna add that, yes, you can track revenues, but as an asterisk to that, some of our revenues we don't receive right away. So if you wanted to trend some of these sales tax are important in our fiscal year 21 story, some of those we won't be receiving until way after July. And so you won't see the impact of those revenues through this tool, unfortunately. And several of our other revenues come in at different times of the year. So I do wanna put that out there to caution that while it is a very clear and accurate picture of our day-to-day finances, when we receive these revenues will impact them and we'll be able to pull them. Great. Thanks. All right, we'll see no further questions. Thank you all for that presentation and we look forward to you doing this. Okay, thank you. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you, Mayor Cummings, and thank you to the whole council. It feels pretty good to be standing here and not bringing you guys a big load of additional bad news, but to bring a load of positive news. And I think everyone saw the press that came out but the Cal Working Group is really happy to report. I'm in 10 years, Cal, it's just not on the Keele the Bay Beach bummer list after topping the number of years. And so with that said, I'm gonna play a little video and just talk about what that means and then ask any, answer any questions you may have. Not me. Is it okay if I share my screen to share the video? Oh, no. What? Screen, is that okay? Yeah. I think hopefully this works. You have the next permission. But yeah, I think you should be able to. Okay, looks like it's going good. So can you see my screen there? Yes. So this is a snapshot from the Sentinel from 2015 just to remind us sort of where we came from. It's just this kind of repeated ad nauseam throughout the years of Cal Beach, number one dirtiest beach on the West Coast. And that always really felt bad to us, I think. So, but we were really thrilled and delighted to receive the news. But as a snapshot, we have two videos that we've produced. Actually, the city of Santa Cruz produced to just get the news out and show that stuff I'm sharing here in the background. And I think what's really cool about this, that's the difficulties, what's really cool about this collaboration is that it took everyone from different organizations and really the community coming together to get us to this place. But it wasn't a surprise the news because we've been monitoring it very carefully with a Ken Balatola's lab and the County of Santa Cruz. I think this is really emblematic of a huge public recognition for the work that we've done and the progress that we've seen at Cal Working Group. And so for us, I think it's really positive story of how will we all come together as a community? We can actually solve problems that our community is facing. So I think the community for this work and the amount of investment that has put in there, whether it's Parks and Rec, whether it's Department of Public Works, whether it's the work group, everybody did their best to make progress on this. So it wasn't, I think that was the magic of it. It was glue, bringing everyone together so that the city and county are collaborating, the different nonprofits are collaborating and we're all pushing towards the same goal. And really the goal that we've been pushing for for six years was the goal that came out this week. And so to me, I'm just really proud of everyone who is behind the Cal Working Group, especially for Mayor Taras for formally convening the group, but also for just the support that we've had from the council along the way, but also every single person that is a city staff person that's put in extra hours to get us here, both past and present people like Scott Collins from a long time ago all the way to now to folks like John Bambachi who continues to think about this day in, day out. And so for us, I think it was just a really positive experience working with the city. And I always feel really good about going out to the community and saying, but the city is putting its money where its mouth is and they are investing in this resource. And so I think everyone on this call deserves a giant high five as does our whole community and the Cal Working Group for having this victory and small bit of good news and sort of otherwise trying times. So I think the last thing I would say on this is that it's a great presentation by Arx and Tony and that crew to remind us how important these open spaces are to both the physical and mental wellbeing of our community and people that come to visit this community. And so having a note from a place like Heel to Bay to say actually Cal has made a lot of progress, you don't have to worry about your kids going the water or your family going in the water means a lot because the avenues of tourism are gonna stay open are frankly our open spaces. And so to be able to stand up and independently say that we're making progress on our open spaces is really important. And without that, I also think we should rest on our laurels and this is a rating that's based on all different reporting from around California so it can fluctuate. But I think as long as we keep focused on the data and continuing to make progress and continue to convene this group, I think we'll continue to see progress or at least maintain what we have now. So with that said, I'm open up for questions in this again. I'd like to thank the whole council, Mayor Cummings, thank you for your kind words of the press event and we just really appreciate all the support over these last six years and hopefully we can continue on as solid partners. Thanks for that presentation and for all the hard work and dedication to this. And I think this is a true testament to when science and community come together with this to make meaningful change for their open spaces. And I think it's such a community that cares about the environment and protecting the environment because this is a big win for us. I mean, so thanks for all your hard work on this. Also wanted to echo what Mayor Cummings said and thank you and the whole group for everything you did for this. And it was a lot of work and took a long time and I just wanna know how grateful I am and my family is and the rest of the community that uses Cal Beach and the rest of the world that's welcome to use it as well. And I just wanna know, moving forward, what things can we do as a council and a community to keep ourselves off that list because it's not a list we wanna be on again? Yeah, I think maintaining the science so just support for environmental health is really important. Support for convening the group is really important because we do kind of share data between city counties and nonprofit monitoring. We're gonna try to probably convene the group if it's, I believe it's approved to continue on and but we have all intents and purposes of continuing on a quarterly basis to at least have the full plenary meetings and then smaller meetings to just address certain issues. But I think the monitoring is really important. There's been also mentioned of an epidemiological study just so we can also sort of say independently from a public health standpoint, we're also not seeing people get sick, which is sort of right now is anecdotal. We don't think people are getting sick. We're not seeing reports of it. The county has their line to answer illnesses that are related and we don't see a major outpouring but I think we wanna continue just to keep monitoring it and there's things that there's maintenance that needs to happen. I think the public works crew has been really good on. So thank you public works for the routine cleaning of like the ball down there is good. And then just letting the public know, I think we still have a little bit of ways to go on just telling the story and having them understand the issue of dust. It was a lot of learning because we thought, when I started working on this, I was like, Calysis has talked to dump and if you go in there, you're gonna get sick. And now we know it's relatively confined to a kind of a certain area and it's relatively seasonal when it does happen. And then the back to your levels have been going down. So I think maintaining the group is important. Maintaining sort of collaborative autonomy as a group is really important. And then making sure that we ongoing have resources for science is important. Thank you. Matthews and Vice Mayor Myers and then Councilman Wild. Okay, for your leadership on this. And I think some of the touches point you touched on that it was actually a non-governmental group that the leadership gave it a good feel of kind of external credibility of what's in just the city trying to cover up or whatever. As the genuine collaboration going into this, identifying a problem. And then as you described following the science, what are the contributing factors? Some of them were dead and some of them were hiked to kind of, who knows, it was the bird. A great result of many years and the city did put in the investment to identify the crisis and for them. And it will be ongoing, but Tiffany has just been modeled and so satisfying to see that not on the list anymore. The working group recognize our city staff programs in San Cruz County back in 1995, water quality and any laboratory in the city laboratory is truly immense and it is very helpful when you bring together a citizen based non-profit that's interested in solving the problem as a partner. And so now we have citizen monitoring really everywhere in California and it's a real testament where local government, which doesn't have a lot of resource can partner with citizen groups who really are interested in improving the environment for the community. And I think the health working group and the work that saved the waves and other partners, the ER Club and others did, Sir Frider is just a testament to really 20 years of really focusing on keeping our bay as clean as possible, our marine sanctuary as clean as possible. So thank you Nick and thank you everyone and all the organizations on the cows working group for everything you've done. And let's keep at it and make sure the beach water quality stays as good as it can into the future. So thank you. I just wanted to say thank you and give you a virtual high five for your great work and this wonderful success and milestone. And I think you said it perfectly that it takes a community coming together. It takes non-profits and interested stakeholders and government as staying focused, using science and having a goal in mind. And we've reached that and we can't also, as you mentioned, let up at this time as well. We have to maintain a focus on wanting to ensure that we have clean beaches. And just as a parent of two young girls who've been out there serving at cows probably almost every day, at least days, it's nice to know that the water is clean for our residents and also for our visitors. So congrats and thanks. Awesome. Yeah, thank you guys so much. I know you gotta move on. So I'll relent the mic, the virtual mic here. But I didn't want to just say, as we're facing this challenging time, economically, it's important to look at the resources that we have around as a community. And I think protecting cows as a resource is amazing. Don and I had about to serve just right after the press conference. And there was 200 people out there enjoying it. And these places become so much more important now when there's a lot of places you can't go. And so having people feel safe to go there is important. And Santa Cruz is really a treasure when it comes to serving resources. And that's why it's one of 10 World Serping Reserves recognized around the world. And so that type of tourism is going to continue. I think other types of tourism are going to unfortunately decline in some ways. So I think the more we can focus on making sure that people that are coming for those resources really feel safe from the public health standpoint, but also from the environmental health standpoint. I think we're one of our economic resources right now that we need to save part. So I know everyone's thinking about that a lot. And I just really appreciate all of your work as our public servants because I know you guys have a really hard job right now. So just know that I appreciate it. And everyone at Say The Wedge appreciates everything you're doing for our community. And tell some of the problems and things you left. I'll just act on what has already been said and add that I think members of the community are really, really excited about this. And I've heard from a lot of people and if somebody who grew up surfing cows and kind of shaving off the sinus infections, I know that a lot of people are gonna be, have that experience, that improved experience. And just thank you for all your work. Thanks Nick and keep up the good work and let us know how we can continue to help our efforts over time. Members of the public who are watching and who are not aware there's a large group, well there's a group of people outside that are disrupting the current digital health meeting and it is inhibiting our ability to have a meeting broadcasted on community television. And so I'm gonna have to read the following statement to the members of the community outside and preventing our ability to conduct city business. They're here by advice and conduct is in violation of the meeting guidelines of the city council in California. I feel those sections 403 and your directives is just continuing your conduct. I'm not going to state to any person without authority of law, locally to serve the lawfully convened meeting of the city council is guilty of a misdemeanor. Continued disruption of the city council meeting will result in the removal from the meeting by the sergeant at arms and you will not be permitted to return to council chambers in this case the city hall campus and you will not be permitted to, you will not be able to return to city hall campus for the duration of this meeting. In addition any continued disruption of this meeting is ground for you being arrested and charged with a misdemeanor. And I would like to ask if those people understand this morning the college will be outside of campus and we're gonna take a quick, we're gonna turn the meeting until the city hall campus can be cleared of this disruption. Let's do the city quick. You hear me or no? I doubt they heard you out there. I don't know if you say required to be able to hear you or. The attorney is on the line. I'm here for whatever reason, my video is not working but the sergeant at arms will also be issuing a warning and informing people who are disrupting the meeting that they will have an opportunity to just continue to disrupt the meeting. They will be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for disrupting a public meeting as indicated by the mayor, a prohibition of people code section 403. Is it possible that Martin Bernal? This is Donna Myers, Martin. You have the number that I'm at. If you could call me on that phone number to let me know when we can be convene that would be helpful. Thank you. Sure, I can do that. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand. I'm looking for the Q saying that you've been needed. All items will be acted upon in one motion, unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion over any council members who'd like to pull any items. Is there any other items that council members wish to pull? Any members of the public, Vice Mayor Meyers? No, I'm sorry, I'll be ready to make a motion to move it when after public comment. For those of the public who would like to speak to items number six through nine, if so, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. To comment on items numbers seven and eight you've gone on some trends agenda. If you do not wish to comment on those items and your hand is raised, please press star nine to lower your hand as well. For those of the public who would like to comment on the consent items number seven or eight, please press star nine on your phone, council member Vice Mayor Meyers. Vice Mayor Meyers, Council Member Watkins. I'll go ahead and second that motion. In case there's a motion by Vice Mayor Meyers, seconded by Council Member Watkins to move item seven and eight on our agenda, I'll turn it over to the clerk to please call the roll vote. Council Member Meyers? Yeah, your name? Council Member Meyers? Council Member Meyers. You're not muted, but it's a yes or no. Yes or no. Oh, yes. Matthews, Vice Mayor Meyers and Mayor Cummings. Six on our credit agenda has two parts. One has to do with entering into a purchase and sale agreement and the other has to do with entering into a lease for a certain property for affordable housing. And after discussion in closed session, I think the item that is appropriate for action at this time is the second item, the resolution authorizing the city manager to enter into leases and amendments and documents as printed in the agenda report for between the city of Santa Cruz and for the future housing for future mixed use affordable housing on the side. So I will go ahead and make that motion the second part of the agenda item. Right, and maybe you need a little staff background on that as well. Sure, I'll come up with directorate on this item. Thank you, Mayor and members of the council. I'm happy to give a brief presentation similar to my presentation in closed session if that would be helpful. Okay, let me go ahead and share my screen. You did take action and direction regarding the purchase sale agreement for 325 and 329 Front Street. So we're focusing on this afternoon session on the proposed leases. And that includes 325 and 329 Front Street currently owned by the Seaside Company and 818, 820 and 822 Pacific Avenue which is currently owned by the city. And this is for the purpose of an affordable housing development project. And I'll give you a little more background on that dotted area. And this is the proposed project. We're calling it a Pacific station phase one which includes 80 to 85 affordable housing units and a new home for, or expanded home for Santa Cruz Community Health Center and the Intas in our downtown. And it's part of our larger downtown revitalization efforts on lower Pacific Avenue. The second phase will be moving forward with the Metro District on another mixed-juice affordable housing project and a new transit center downtown. So this is the first phase on property south of the Metro and south of Maple Alley on property that we largely control. And today we're talking about assembling the rest of the parcel and gaining site control so that we can move forward and apply for grant funding for affordable housing development and move the project forward into the next phase. Just to recap earlier today you gave us direction on acquiring with specific terms for purchase sale agreement and approval on acquiring two parcels from the seaside company. It's approximately a quarter acre and the developer for the future housing has been selected by the city through a competitive RFP process for this project. And they have experience in Santa Cruz recently on two projects including the Water Street project and the Riverwalk apartment. So you can see this has been presented to council before but this is just a schematic on the right-hand side of the proposed project which highlights the as required on our downtown plan and downtown plan who amendments approved the previous year by council a frontage that has commercial retail. It has a Paseo, a pedestrian oriented Paseo which currently is Maple Alley and you can drive down that now. So this is a pedestrian oriented Paseo that connects as part of the downtown plan the Pacific Avenue with a pedestrian corridor landscape corridor all the way to the Riverwalk. So across Front Street and to the Riverwalk where the levy is. So it's a real enhanced amenity that we're pretty excited about. This project includes a new home as I mentioned earlier for the Santa Cruz Community Health Center and the dentist providing low cost medical and dental care for the greater community as well as 80 to 85 of very affordable low units and the affordability ultimately will vary based on our tax low income housing tax credits but we will be applying for very low units and our desire for this project specifically leveraging with city ownership and funding is to provide very low income affordable housing units in this project. Specifically just to recap the terms it's an as is sale. There are no inclusionary housing credits associated with this sale. There is going to be a three month due diligence period where we'll do existing additional environmental characterization of the site and then after the three month period we'll close escrow two weeks after the due diligence period in. In order to apply for grant funding we need to have absolute site control and the developer that we're partnering with even though the city is retaining ownership of the site the developer for the future housing needs to be the primary applicant for the low income housing tax credits as a developer of the affordable housing. Therefore we need to enter into either one lease or potentially more than one lease because we're going to maintain overall site control and also be working on the commercial aspects. The commercial retail you see on the ground floor and working with Santa Cruz Community Health Center in the interest. So we'll be working through those leases but we do need approval and the developer needs approval in order to be eligible to apply for the affordable housing grant funding for the project through housing and community development. So to recap, that's the ask in front of you today is to authorize the city manager to enter into a lease or more than one lease and ground lease potentially for the project at 325 and 329 Front Street the two parcels outlined in yellow on the left to enable for the future housing the affordable housing developer that's been selected by the city to secure grant funding and move forward with an 80 to 85 unit affordable housing excuse project. And that concludes my brief presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Any questions from members of the council? Seeing none, the public, if there are any members of the public who'd like to speak on the item, want to raise your hand. And once you've been unmuted, you'll be given two minutes. All right, you're on on. Question about this meeting in general, is it legal because the agenda wasn't posted 72 hours ahead of time. It was even less than 48 hours from this time right now. Secondly, the site in question was an auto repair shop for many years. And I think there needs to be a real lot of scrutiny on to whether or not there's toxic soil underneath the parking lot for that place and also under the building itself. I mean, if there was cracks in the cement, there's probably seepage into the ground. And there needs to be an exploration as to how toxic the soil is underneath that building and underneath the parking lot for that building. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any other members of the public who'd like to speak to us on this item? If so, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. And once you've been unmuted, you'll be given two minutes. Good afternoon. This is Jim Runler, vice president for the future housing. Just wanted to appreciation for the consideration today and we're very excited about this potential opportunity and want to thank Bonnie and her staff in all their efforts and just wanted to let you know I'm available if there was any questions. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much. Great, thank you. All right, are there any further questions or comments from the public? Seeing none, I'll turn it back forward to the council for action deliberation. Council member Byers. Yeah, I want to talk a little or hear a little bit more about the environmental cleanup that's going to happen. Do we have an estimate on that? Are we paying for it? Just wondering what the research has showed us on that site. Yes, thank you, council member Byers. So the site, the person individual called in is correct. There is contamination on the site. However, the owner has received a no further action letter related to the site has been cast for commercial standards. There have been stricter environmental regulations that have been approved in the last year. And so we're contemplating incorporating the additional cleanup that will be needed in the construction because we'll have to excavate anyway. We are going to put in a vapor barrier and that will be part of the cost of the overall project. And so Jim Rindler may still be on can talk a little bit about that but we are anticipating that have been looking at that as well. We will have an additional, during the 90 days, three months due diligence period. We will be doing some additional site characterization around the contamination and we'll confer with a regulatory body about to confirm what the cleanup actual needs are for the site to make sure that we're costing that appropriately and including that in the project performer. Yeah, thanks, Bonnie. A question probably for the city manager. I think Scott from the public raise, how many hours did we need? I know it's a special meeting so there are different rules. So how many, are we okay or are we? Yeah, this is Tony, I can answer that. Yeah, thanks, Tony. For a special meeting, by the way, my video is blocked for somebody here. For a special meeting, you are required to provide at least 24 hours notices. So this meeting was appropriately noticed under the browning. Yeah, I couldn't remember that rule for a while. Thank you. Thanks. That's all mayor. So you should be able to turn your video on now. Council Member Matthews, I want to read it. If there are no other comments, I'm prepared to go ahead and move the recommendation before us. I think this is an incredibly valuable project for the long-term revitalization of downtown, of the part of downtown, providing affordable housing and a downtown home for two really important safety net clinics in our community. I'm happy to Council Member Brown, your hand was up next. Well, I was gonna say thank you to Bonnie but I can second the motion. Looks like others were lining up as well. But I just wanted to thank you so much for all of the work you've done to get this moving. And I just think it's really exciting to think about kind of expanding that footprint and being able to do some more affordable housing as a result of this purchase. And I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. Thank you. I just want to also acknowledge Jessica Dewitt, who is our Housing Program Manager and has been doing quite a bit of work on this project as well. Absolutely, thank you. Bye, Mayor Morris. Just thank you, Bonnie, for the presentation. I just want to recognize you and Jessica and your whole team, especially all the folks focused on providing affordable housing for our community. This project is one of those puzzle piece projects and I feel like with the acceptance of some of the lots associated with the Pacific and Laurel project and then combining with our own purchases of these properties and in eventual phase, we hope with the Metro, we really are on to creating a wonderful opportunity for downtown and partnering with the ENTIS in Santa Cruz. Health Center is just a very exciting part of the project. So I just want to recognize that affordable housing and these kinds of projects really require the assembling of a lot of complicated puzzle pieces that are come together. And so I think we need to recognize that these are not things that just sort of are created easily. And so I'm very thankful for all the work you've done, at least during my period of time on the council. I know you've been laser focused on this work. So I appreciate that. Bonnie, my one question, I am prepared to support the motion. My one question maybe or one comment maybe. If you could clarify a little bit about the levels of affordability. I think we refer to things like RENA goals and things like that, but I'm just curious if you could talk to a little bit more about whether these are very low and low income units that we'd be targeting just to kind of give a little bit broader sense of sort of what our goals are with regards to the project. Thank you. Vice Mayor Meyers. We would be focusing on very low, low and very low units. And the reason why that is you mentioned our RENA goals is that the typically some of the hardest projects to finance for developers are those at the very low level. The subsidy is needed as higher. And from a city standpoint, we do have the ability with providing the land and really closing that financial gap and making those units actually financially feasible. And it's where our greatest need is. So we'll be focusing on this project and providing those deepest levels of affordability. So I would say 60% is below. So anywhere between 30% of area median income and 60% of area median income is where we'll be focusing for the majority if not all of these units. And thanks for all your work and your Jessica and everyone else on your team. Thank you. As a council, do a roll call with some items. Clarify the motion because originally Council Member Matthews said just the second paragraph, but then you said as proposed. I think the language to use is what's shown on the screen resolution to authorize the city manager to enter the leases for the project 325-329 Front Street, 818-820-822 Pacific Avenue to enable for the future housing to secure grant funding and move forward on an 80 to 85 unit affordable housing mixed use project. And that motion was made by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Brown. There's no further questions or comments. I think we can move forward with the vote. Council Member Byers. Thank you for your muted. Aye. As unanimously. Thank you. Thank you for all your work on this. And thanks for your work. And number nine, general business measure D fund measure D expenditure plan fiscal year 2021. For the meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your stream. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff or the council members who brought the item followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and return to council for deliberation and action. Then with that, I'll pass this over to Chris Snyder, assistant director, public works and city engineer. Good afternoon, Mayor, council members, Chris Snyder. The item before you is a five year measure D expenditure plan for fiscal year 2021 to 25. The regional, the measure D program requires that every agency approve a five year plan every year. And that's before you today. The council has approved the previous five year plans, three of them since the measure was approved in 2016. Bonnie, if you could put up the spreadsheet of the program on the screen, that would be great. The current plan is really a status quo budget. And it was developed prior to the recent, very recent as of yesterday, new estimates for the funding. The RTC sent us approved, revised and adopted the new fund balances as of yesterday. And what they're showing essentially, which is the bottom portion where it's a city measure D portion and estimate fiscal year 21 has already been reduced by approximately 300,000. But what's not reflected is fiscal year 20, which we just finished, has been, revenue has been reduced by 200,000. And the remainder of the five year program, or the five year program has been reduced by 1.2 million. So the projects and the funding that are on the list here don't reflect those new numbers that were just received. What's important to note, obviously the reductions due to COVID, this is based on sales tax, but also all our other funds have lower reductions, including gas tax and enterprise funds. Public hearing was held at Transportation Public Works Commission to consider the five year program. The TPWC recommended shifting $200,000 from the street reconstruction projects to a slow streets program or other COVID related transportation improvement projects, assuming that with a caveated council approved them. Background projects are shown in the last three fiscal years and actually moving out in the future. Currently we've funded the Trestle Trail Widening Project. So you all know that's a very successful project. But to fully fund that project, we had already transferred $670,000 from the street reconstruction projects back in 2018. And the new funding that we're proposing in the program for the street reconstruction really is to catch up for the money that was transferred already to this other bike pedestrian project. It's been funding the rail trail segment seven phase one, which is currently under construction. Funded portions of the water and river street paving, including the bike enhancements on water street primarily and also river street, downtown bike locker program, some active transportation projects, cedar street reconstruction and the last residential paving program in 2019. The current five year list are all familiar projects. They carry forward funding for the rail trail projects, segment seven phase two, segments eight and nine, rail trail maintenance, educational programs, Pacific Avenue sidewalk and the beach area of the Swanton Boulevard multi-use trail and the street reconstruction rehabilitation projects. What also we're recognizing on this list is funding from the Regional Transportation Commission from their share of measure D, which they've committed to the rail trail projects and funding for the rail trail maintenance. And it has been significant funding and is absolutely necessary to ours and theirs to acquire grants for these projects. Almost in all cases, these are just partial funding of projects. We're getting grants, we're using other funds like gas tax or measure H or other sources as they come up to circle back to the Transportation Public Works Commission recommendation. So staff's given a lot of thought to the flow of street process. Unfortunately, it's one that will impact staff no matter how it's developed. So we've been looking at developing an efficient and simplified programs similar to what some of the other agencies have done in California. Claire and Jim Burr have been developing some guidelines and they've got a draft program. I'm going to turn it over to Claire to explain where they are at with that process. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council members. I'm Claire Globley, Transportation Planner for the City. And in the last six to eight weeks as we've been going through this, I've had hours and hours and hours of conversation with council members, partners internally, partners externally, our advocacy community, our education community and by and large what we've heard over and over again is that there's a heavy interest in implementing flow streets. And the primary goals of that are to quickly, efficiently and cheaply open up ways for people to have more space to walk and bike outside. Thinking through how we could do that, there is no scenario no matter how we do it, that's not going to involve a significant staff list. And what we heard in speaking with many partners was this program is a priority and this program is a priority in advance of some of the other things that we're doing and that this type of program is worth slowing down, delaying or putting off some of the other programs that are on our place. So what we've looked at is a review of what other communities in California and around the country are doing to implement a flow streets program quickly, efficiently and cheaply. And we believe that we can roll out a program internally in the coming weeks with a much smaller budget than what was identified. Really it takes staff time and barricades and signs in order to implement this. But I wanna make sure that the program that we modeled was based upon significant community input led by neighborhoods nominating their streets which would then be bedded on a series of criteria which could include checking in with police and fire to make sure these were not emergency response routes, looking at the street care characteristics to see if it is a good fit in street care characteristics because as we close one street to through traffic, we know that that traffic doesn't disappear. It goes on to neighboring streets and we don't wanna create an impact while solving a problem. Additionally, we could look at our active transportation plan. I wouldn't use that as the only tool in vetting or approving these streets but we did go through an almost two year public process to adopt the plan at the council level. So there was a significant amount of community outreach there. And finally, it's something that we could sign off on internally and get this program up and running very quickly. So hearing that this is a community priority, it's something that we can do and I would say the caveat there is that there are things that we won't be able to do at the same time. And I'm available for any questions you have on that and I'll pass it back to Chris. I think that concludes our report. Just recall that city staff currently on a 10% furlough now and we do already have a full play. We've been assisting the businesses with opening out in the public right away. We've been and so it's not that our workload has gotten smaller, it's actually gotten larger. And so this is another project or program. If it's a priority, then we'll work on it. And some of the things we might not be doing might not be as effective in getting grants, other projects might get delayed, but we will fit it into the current program. So I mean, council approves it, concludes my report. Mayor, you're muted. You know, to council members, but I do have some questions to go like that on the side. So we'll start up there. Yeah, thank you for the update and presentation. Claire, I just was wondering if you could clarify what projects you think would fall off your plate if we pursue the closed streets at this time. Absolutely. So what we looked at when we were getting that, we, as Chris mentioned, we have a ton of grant funded projects going on right now. We've been very successful in securing grants. The back end of that means that we have scope scheduled and budget that we have to adhere to. We looked at what projects do we have on deck that are not grant funded and underway? And mostly what that looks like is that I will be able to write fewer grants for existing funding programs. We have two funding programs that we typically apply to, both of which have grants that are due in September. So likely we would complete three to four fewer grants than we would have otherwise in order to deliver staff time to roll this program out. And those are, I should add, those are a bit of an industry and programs grant. I wanna thank Claire and the rest of you that have been working on this. I know it's been a kind of a grassroots effort from the community and I appreciate the flexibility and willing to divert the funds, perhaps one time to do this. And also, I wanna also, that being said, make sure that we don't lose too much grants and other focus towards long-term projects like the one that's on, is it Water Street now that just got completed? And other ones like that around town so that we can ensure long-term safe places for people to ride bikes and walk. I'm prepared to make a motion. I just need to bring it back. Well, I need to open up the public before we have a motion to be made. Council member, fires. Yeah. I have a question on the sidewalk, front street to second. I cannot figure out what that is. I think that's what's... Yeah, that's the Pacific Avenue sidewalk and that's the area across from the Sanctuary Scenic Center where sidewalk drops in this diagonal parking in the BDR room. Yeah, so the idea is to remove the diagonal parking on the Pacific Avenue side and create a sidewalk that extends so people don't have to walk in the street behind parked cars. And the project that's funded by Measure D and a transportation grant. And it's currently about 80% design. We're hoping we can build it this winter. Oh, that sounds such an improvement. I'm very familiar with it. Well, literally then we're losing partying but we're gonna have a good sidewalk. Yeah, so we anticipate losing about four spaces. So it's not a big number. No, it's not. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. You're welcome. I'll run around. Now, thank you for the presentation and acknowledging the community interest, widespread interest in developing a solo streets program. I appreciate your willingness to be nimble in this regard and I understand that there are serious funding challenges coming our way. And so I don't wanna be making decisions that cause us to not be able to do those critical repairs and other work. That said, I'm wondering, I mean, the people that I've been talking to in the community who are interested in this, really it sounds like there's a lot of interest in kind of participation, citizen participation in kind of maintaining the program and doing some of the work. And so I'm just wondering if you see that as a way to kind of mitigate some of the staff time that required and how would that, have you thought about that or talked about that and then kind of moving forward, what do you think would be most helpful? Yeah, absolutely. So I have called around to other entities that have rolled out these programs and how they've done it, what's worked and what hasn't, some of them have had community participation. And in no scenario was it in less time intensive. So many of these programs is because there's someone internal organization who is bringing it through the council process, updating the website, making the maps, publicizing it, putting out the information, making sure the barricades are available, delivering the barricades, making the signs, delivering the signs, monitoring the program, reporting back, doing all those steps. So there definitely is a function and a role for neighbors, community groups, advocacy organizations to play, but it's not one that would alleviate the time requirements of many aspects of the city team, not just my time or Chris's time or Jim's time, but our operational team that would be, we're looking to see how many barricades do we have. That's one of the things that's precluding San Francisco from continuing with their program right now is they're out of barricades. One way that I do see community groups being able to help is that I can guarantee you that there are neighborhoods that I will hear from because they are the neighborhoods that we hear from every single time that something comes up and they have neighborhoods that are organized, that have time, that have resources and understand how to engage with city hall. And I can also guarantee you that there are neighborhoods that I will not hear from because they are neighborhoods that don't have those same resources. And that is how we could use our community groups and our advocacy organizations would be to engage in those neighborhoods that do not traditionally participate at City Hall or in local government. And that is the way that I could see them really making a difference. And creating a program that would have a higher level of advocacy for our entire community, which I think should be a goal of whatever program we roll out. Commissioners asking for $200,000, but what, I guess if the city wanted to take on this effort, what would the program cost and what could that program look like? Because I also, I went back and looked at the recommendations. I know that there is a lot of what this might look like, but we clearly don't have a proposal. So I'm just trying to understand from the city, what would this program look like? The city, what would the cost be? Yeah, thank you. Two parts to that question. The first I'll answer is what would it look like? So we have a lovely intern in the planning department right now named Ethan, who I had to essentially a literature review of what other cities are doing and how they're implementing their programs, what sort of application processes they have. And really what it would look like is we would put up one page application that they would have to be a neighborhood champion that would put it forward. They would say the limits of the proposed list in any neighbors they had that they also had on board from those blocks and a couple other pieces of information, really simple pieces of information there. We would take it in, we would vet it if it was on a street that we could sign off on our own. We would do that and be able to deliver the sign mentioned barricades as we had them available. If it was a street that was a collector, we would review it in a higher level of detail because collective streets carry higher volumes of traffic and therefore shutting down portions of those streets to through traffic could have a higher impact on these surrounding streets, which is not something that we wanna create. And we could also potentially vet with police and fire depending on location. In terms of budget that we would need, I would estimate that we would need up to $30,000 to implement this type of program. We currently are checking to see how many signs and barricades we have in stock. We're also getting pricing on how much it would be to purchase additional barricades and signs and what the lead time would be on that. As I mentioned, many cities are implementing this right now and they are finding that limits on their existing supplies in stock are one of the things that's prohibiting them from moving forward quickly. The other thing that I would think we should do would be to move forward in phases. Many cities have implemented in this way a preliminary phase and then secondary tertiary phases. In the preliminary phase, I would recommend looking at up to 10 streets that would be geographically distributed throughout the community. My preliminary thought would be two on the upper west side, two on the lower west side, two on the upper east side, two on the lower west, two on the lower east side and two in the central zone. So that we would have some distribution throughout the community rather than clustered in maybe one neighborhood that we hear from more than we hear from other neighborhoods. Council member Byers, you're muted. Thank you. Are there, I know the community's been very active on this. I'm sure all of us, I mean, I certainly got phone calls, letters, citing stuff from the, I know you have a mute and hours and hours talking with them that I know and they've reported that and they're really pleased. You know, there's been no criticism whatsoever that I've received of public works in particular. Is there anything that they've really put forward that you really, you and your staff, all the staff, find you're gonna say no door or impossible or well just no do, no, we're not gonna do that. Yeah, absolutely. I will absolutely say no to closing arterial streets and what that means is so kettle, water, those main streets arterial, they're a definite no. Anything that is a primary emergency response route for the police or fire department, that I think would probably be a no as well because public safety that just probably wouldn't be the appropriate location to do these and wouldn't be a location that we would prioritize having so many other streets that aren't that. Collector streets, I would say are not a no, but would be on a case by case basis that would require a higher level of review and really I can't reiterate this enough. It's because closing those streets to through traffic will then create potential issues on neighboring streets and we don't want to solve a problem in one place to create one in another. And so that would require a higher level of review but wouldn't be an absolutely not. So really it would be not closing arterials and not closing emergency response routes. So much of the material I looked at or read or maybe talked to, it didn't seem so much closing streets. In fact, I thought I saw something saying we're not intending to close streets. This is correct, Catherine. And just like to add one more piece to that, we're not actually closing streets. And the one thing I found that we couldn't do as well in the material last night was we can't close lanes. We're actually just posting for road closed to through traffic and hoping to get voluntary compliance from driver. That's consistent from what I understand from that. Okay, okay. Yeah, the word closing a street like closing, you know, clean street or something. Okay, thanks. This has been very helpful. Thank you. Yeah, one more question that occurred to me with and I appreciate that you talked about wanting to really, really carefully consider the geographic distribution and the equity question in relation to doing this. So, and I think that the, you know, obviously the beach flaps came up in the proposal that we got or the discussion around it. And I think that it's particularly important that we make an effort to have a conversation with residents of the beach flaps neighborhoods, neighborhood, especially because they will, they're so impacted by tourist traffic and there's so many kids in the neighborhood as well. So I'm just wanting to see if you've talked about that yet or if, yeah. Okay. I absolutely agree with this scenario that we should spend a lot of effort in making sure that they are equally represented in slow streets. That would be neighborhood that I would say isn't going to come knocking at your door at City Hall and we're gonna have to go to them and help to create or ask if they're interested in having a slow street in the Beach Flats neighborhood. And just to qualify that for the Beach Flats, we've done at least two traffic calming programs in Beach Flats and, you know, the organization of the streets, the directions, the one ways, et cetera. They're all predicated on reducing cut-through traffic from the tour for the tourists. And I think over the years it's helped a lot but obviously more can be done. Here's one question. Have you all from the public courts, have you all been receiving calls given that, you know, many of the students of last and a lot of people have sheltered in place in times during the early stages of COVID-19, what kind of, have you all been hearing complaints about, you know, more traffic and people driving faster just because there's no one on the roads and all the other people taking a match back. But I'm just wondering, you know, again, sometimes there's six that are, you know, really going out and just want me to send some of your and have you all been hearing so on and kind of stories. I answer, I answer the phone for most of the traffic complaints in town and I have not seen any sort of uptick in complaints about speed, which surprises me because oftentimes during summer vacations, I'll get more calls as people are home and, you know, out in the front yards and experienced more traffic. I have heard anecdotally that there are a few fast drivers out there, but in general, I think traffic volumes are down. Go ahead. I would add to that is that Highway Patrol is reported that there have been higher speeds clocked on our highways and that's the fact that's been talked a lot about in our advocacy community. But that is not, that is not local streets. That they've seen it on Highway 1, Highway 17, et cetera. And then I see that learning has a lot to do with PDs on the line. I was just wondering then having the pedestrian tip or bike riders hit and I was just curious what were the priorities on the line. Maybe you can comment on whether we've seen an uptick in that as well. Yeah, Mayor Cummins, I'm here, can you hear me? Yeah, I'm not aware of any uptick on traffic collisions related to vehicle accidents or bicycle accidents, especially within the last, you know, two or three months with the COVID-19 situation. And, you know, this is Chris again. You know, I know the insurance industry has been giving us all rebates on our insurance mostly because there are fewer accidents that are occurring. And I think we all have experienced that there is less traffic on our streets. It's starting to pick up Mission Street in particular, Highway 1, a little bit. So Cal and Water Street are seeing more people on Ocean Street as the summer moves along and people seem to be getting a little more antsy about getting out, but generally our traffic volumes are way down from what we've been, you know, we typically experience. Yeah, and the last question is, I know you mentioned, you know, this reduction in fines that we've seen overall, seem like an overall reduction of 1.2 million, I think was the number. Would this be extra $200,000 on top of that? I mean, it wouldn't be an extra $200,000, you know, we'd be diverting $200,000 away from other critical infrastructure projects. Yes, so I just wanted to kind of add to that projection. Yeah, it would be diverting 200 more to a different program, and so yes, it would be. And, you know, as I said, where gas tax is down about 20% as well, because of approval of FB1, we're getting more than we did in previously, but it's still down quite a bit, and we still don't know what's coming next. And so that's hard to tell if these estimates are gonna be real, they're gonna get worse, they're gonna get better, so we're just being cautious, and we're being cautious about our expenditures to make sure that we're not spending everything we have in the bank at once. Questions from council members? I'm gonna turn it over to Phil Boutel, our commission to get a presentation, to move by if we can set the time for four minutes for Phil to give a presentation on the sweatshirt campaign. Welcome, Phil. Great, thank you, mayor, and members of council. My name is Phil Boutel, and I'm serving on my sixth year of the Transportation and Public Works Commission, including two years as chair. I made the request for the $200,000 allocation from Measure D to go towards the flow street program, and just as a side note, in the past, I made at least one similar request as I've heard Measure D fund from paving to go towards high priority ATP projects, and that was approved without any comment. I know it was situated a little differently now. Now, to clarify this allocation, from my viewpoint, although Chris spoke to this earlier, would maintain Public Works Street's overlay program and Measure D funding at the same level as the last fiscal year. Public Works had asked for $200,000 budget increase from the Measure D allocation for this fiscal year. Now, Chris just told us that this is essentially catch-up funding to backfill what had been spent previously on projects such as the Trestle or the Rail Trail, but my question for councilors, is this the right time to be backing up funding to go to the paving program? I'm not sure that is considered necessarily critical. Other staff also stated that the public supports a trade-off of other popular programs to make flow streets happen, but this was not the commission's intent, nor does it match the feedback that higher other commissioners have received from the public. The only program trade-off that people are interested in with the paving program, not writing new grants for the Rail Trail. I acknowledge that the $200,000 amount is a bit arbitrary, as we don't yet know how much this will cost exactly, but we wanna make sure that it is enough funding to quote, do it right. I wrote the motion so that any unused funds are returned right back to the paving program. The commission discussed with staff how, during the meeting how $200,000 was not necessarily a large sum as it relates to paving in overlay and would result in kind of only a small reduction. It was around like a few blocks to like a quarter mile less of total paving. And I just, I say that to illustrate kind of the total magnitude of funds in question, how they would have a lesser effect on the total paving, but a greater effect on creating and starting a small program such as this. And of course, as Claire outlined, it will be cost beyond just the cost of signage or barriers. We definitely wanna include surveys, outreach to underserved communities and neighborhoods, neighborhood review, educational materials, plus maintenance coordination with key public service sectors, especially garbage fire and police departments. But again, I'd hate to get approval and support for this, but then somehow underfund the program. I've heard about requests to limit the possible flow streets to neighborhood greenways that will increase identified in the transportation plan, or that flow streets should not be include collectors. I know Claire addressed this a little bit. I will just say that the ATP lists neighborhood greenways that are collectors and some that aren't. So I think it's a great starting point, but shouldn't be used as a single guidance document. And so my recommendation is that Council keep flow streets as an equitable city by program, by not excluding neighborhoods or streets in advance. And the program as Claire alluded to will be prepared to work through these on a case-by-case basis. I will note too that at the last commission meeting, staff primary concern was that the ready resources flow streets will result in directing back to other projects such as the rail trailer, region zero. The commission recognizes the department does an excellent job with the limited resources that they have. To that end, our city has several nonprofit advocacy groups who are ready to take on the bulk of this work. I understand that someone council might have seen a draft proposal from like Santa Cruz County. And likewise, I've heard rumors or discussion about the city hiring a part-time consultant as a program manager. Between these two, maybe a lot of what Claire described as far as the burden trade-off could be alleviated. I also want to acknowledge that both police and fire attended our last commission meeting and expressed legitimate concerns about response time and other public safety issues. I'm certain that these concerns can be addressed. And please note that flow streets have very much type of traffic calming program and traffic calming is the main component of vision zero, which was in 2008 endorsed emphatically by both the chiefs of both departments. And I'll close by saying that I'm just a little confused by why the commission's recommendation isn't before you verbatim as far as, you know, what the allocation is, the line item. The commission is a advisor to city council and not just staff. And we would think that our recommendations would go to council to then to judge on that. So I'm here if you have any questions. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. And up to the rest of the public for public comment. So there's numbers of the public throughout the speaker on this item. Now it's your time to call in. You've called in on the number that's on your screen. You'll want to press star nine if I'm going to raise your hand. Once you've been on mute, did you have two minutes to speak? I'm going to turn over to the caller. Oh yeah, hi, this is Garrett Phillips. Hey, in general, I would say I would not want flow streets to impact all the known high accident street fixes that need fixing because I believe they should be a priority. I wouldn't want it to impact the general maintenance of streets that much. I have an issue with advocacy in general and that some people want something that those opposed or seldom ask and tell it is too far along like putting up money right now. A polar survey might be useful even before budgeting money. I prefer pervasive approval. A 50% plus one type approval isn't really good enough in my opinion for anything. Especially when no one knows exactly what the final result would be and finances are tight. The idea a neighborhood can design citywide traffic control through suggestions isn't likely to be better than professionals. But change my mind. I can see every neighborhood liking their street to be slower but every slow street is not in our interest. 25 miles an hour is around a long time. 15 miles an hour might not be that efficient and actually make for more traffic at once on the roads. It seems like this is being put forward by an anti-car bike, pet and viral advocates to see using COVID hysteria to further their anti-car agenda. I don't really ride my bike that much. Anyway, lastly, what exactly is the proven public benefit of this temporary proposal? Thanks. Good afternoon, this is Scott Graham. I'm calling mostly about sidewalks. I don't actually see this on the list but I'm calling about the curb cuts that the city's been going around town and actually redoing old curb cuts for wheelchairs and putting in these yellow dot matrix things. I have never spoken to a person in a wheelchair, a person with a walker, a cane, a visually impaired person that likes those things. Everybody hates them. I don't know if this is some of the mandate from the feds or from the state government but it's gotta stop. These things are not liked. They are an impediment to people being able to use the sidewalks and use these curb cuts. Wheelchairs are out in the streets because they don't wanna go through that stuff. Whoever the company is that developed this has some really great lobbyists in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., is all I can say. Thank you. And that's all I have for you on the line. Good afternoon, my name is Gina Cole and I'm the executive director at Bike Santa Cruz County. I super appreciate all of the time and work that staff has put into their report today. If possible, I would like to address some of the concerns. Our biggest, I guess, for Bike Santa Cruz County, one of the things that we look at was the fact that we do hear from folks that and we do see people that are out walking in their streets. I live in Watsonville that I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz with work and I've ridden around and seen a lot of people outside trying to get their exercise in. In fact, it's recommended by the health officer from the county that we should be outside getting outside exercise. However, it is still a recommendation that we stay as close to home as we can. And this was also the case in a lot of other counties and cities across the state and across the country and across the world. And that is the intent for folks to be able to have a certain level of protection in the fact that people are noticing that the streets are slower. We're marking them down, asking folks to pay more attention to the kids in the street, to the older folks in the street, to the strollers and the dogs in the streets. I have a parent on my street that sits in the middle of the road so that his kids can ride their bike because their yard isn't conducive to them riding. So they are out and he is putting himself in the road so that he can monitor where his kids are riding. We're also going to be seeing, you know, as you said, slow streets aren't closed streets. We are just asking motorists to slow down. We're not trying to close off lanes. We are just trying to increase awareness of motorists for the increase of folks in the streets. Schools, we don't know what's going to happen. I know what's going to happen in Pajaro Valley Unified as the older kids aren't going to go back to school but the littles are. So you are going to have kids that need to get outside, that need to ride their bikes, that need to walk and run and play. And a lot of the streets, especially in... Thank you. A lot of our streets do not have a place. They don't, folks don't have yards. They don't have driveways. Where kids can get that exercise. They also have a lot of the... Sorry, I got you off, but we have to get through them. Thank you for calling in. Hey, this is Kyle Kelly. I just want to thank you for piloting the Safe Streets program. I of course know that we're not yet doing enough to even make our streets more safe and reduce VMT. I just want to point out, for a lot of the transportation planning, the way that it's done in the past, right, for a level of service, has elevated the car always above the pedestrian. And that somebody walking or biking is merely an impediment to the car. That's the only way in which it counts. Just in the way that if you look at a bus, somebody riding a bus is regarded as 1 20th of a person because it's just one vehicle getting through. I'm hoping that this is a start to fundamental change within Santa Cruz to start really bringing in those mixed modes and making it a safer place for people to ride bikes, walk, be in wheelchairs, and that we keep it up and keep going. So thank you. Thank you. Yes, this is Candice Brown. I'm one of the transportation public works commissioners and on the subcommittee for pedestrians and bicyclists, which is a new committee. I just wanted to say that we did talk extensively with city staff and it was very clear that this is a critical time for them for grants, which is why we had suggested a totally different alternative than what the city staff is presenting today, which is to basically outsource much of the outreach and to use existing guidelines, which has been explained previously. This model has been done in places like Berkeley and Alameda, many of the towns in California and throughout the West Coast, you've been now called a healthy street initiative. It's also an acknowledgement that patterns of behavior have changed during the pandemic. There is data that shows on West Cliff area that there's an increase of 200% of pedestrians and at least 400% of bicyclists. And so that's why Palo Alto is calling this the shared street program. We are allowing up to 25 miles per hour on any streets and yet throughout our city, we are finding that people are sharing the street as pedestrians and I think it's important for us to consider a slow street program with massive outreach and it's very important that we do that through an outreach approach because otherwise we will be tying up city staff and they have indicated that they would sacrifice up to 25 million in grants. And so I think this would be important to consider and this is really a new model to deal with the restrictions of budgets and we suggest that you take a look at that and thank you so much. Thank you. Because I don't think it's a star nine on the phone. I'll bring it back to council for action and deliberation. I have, I do have one question. So I've heard some of the people call in suggest that it might be more efficient to have non-profits run the program. And I'm just wondering if it would be easier for non-staff or if it would still require the same amount of staff work to share the load with the non-profits that we have in the community. You know, I'm sure Claire has probably comments on this too but what that does is it inserts a middle demand in the process and staff and so there's gonna be more back and forth and it's not gonna be quite as direct. If there's an area that we can use them that we think sufficient, we'll give that some more thought but for the time being, our belief is that it's actually gonna be detrimental to getting the program started and getting out. So if I could get it started quicker, it will cost less money and be more efficient to do it all in-house. Yes. I'm prepared to make a motion if nobody else has any other questions or comments. If that's a view, we'll have to make a motion. And if there are other comments who'd like to make a comment, maybe we could go ahead with that. So the council member Baird and then Vice Mayor Myers if you all have questions, and then Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. In our packet, we had the minutes of the transportation meeting, which was in May and a letter, only one letter, seems I'm surprised we only had one letter except one from Phil. Are you still with us, Tilbotel? Maybe he is. Yeah. The letter that you wrote, would you, I don't know, is that coming from the commission, like the report? Because there's no detail about this, so I just wonder if your letter covered that, proved by the commission, are you just speaking for the commission, or is there something we didn't get? Maybe that's the best. No, to be clear, the commission essentially did not choose to write a program or go down that path, we were doing this under funding something, we were looking for council direction, in part because staff expressed resistance and we didn't wanna spin our wheels if it wasn't gonna happen, and we respect that, and we've gone through this before. So part of requesting the budget allocation was the commission's way of asking council to give us direction and or staff direction to then move on this item. Oh, thank you, Bill. That really clarifies it for me, thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Myers. I mean, more and more stories around the country about how, you know, neighborhood streets really became people's immediate relief to be able to get outside and get exercise and just have some space, which I think is a great trend. And I appreciate our staff's wholeness about how they're looking at this. Obviously we have gotten a lot of correspondence about supporting this program, and I'm definitely very supportive of it. I wanna be aware, though, as well about the current financial situation that we find ourselves in, and I also wanna recognize that, you know, our staff has accepted across pretty much all of our units a 10% furlough, and so, you know, we do need to be cognizant about really looking at how we can be efficient and put programs on the street in a way that is meaningful, but also is within proper prudency in terms of our fiscal decision-making at this point. So I'm very supportive of trying to keep this at a staff level, at least initially, because I do think we will be discussing the budget as things go on pretty regularly, and I am confident our staff will be able to put this out very quickly, hopefully within the next few weeks, and we can start these programs. I like the idea of the 10 sites and really doing that outreach, and I hope our nonprofit partners, as we sort of develop this, they stay involved, and we can reassess as we move forward about various needs that we may need, but I think starting soon, starting quick, and trying to get this up and running is a really important thing for our community right now. So again, thank you for all the communications from everyone that reached out to us, and I'm really curious to see how we can get the program up and going. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to comment that I'm receiving communications from members of the public that they could not get it. They were on the call and pressed our nine, but have not been called on, so can we reopen public comment to allow for folks to try to get their comments in? Yeah, I'll just say the quickie moments, but if you can press the members of the public, they're still on the line and would like to comment. Raise your hands, give them a few minutes for posting the person to start on your hand, and we'll unmute you in the last two minutes. You are just muted, and if you know the last four digits of the number, maybe I can just unmute them myself. Yeah, well, I have one here. The last four numbers, 1-3-2-6, calling in again. There are 1-3-2-6 here. This is the refund number, 1-3-2-6. You are on the line and you're unmuted. I'm actually writing, this is Greg Larson. I'm a 20-year resident of Santa Cruz and a member of the Escalona Bikeway Organizing Committee, but I'm commenting today as a member who helped organize the petition. We're at nearly 1,600 signatures from throughout the city, and we just wanted to commend the Transportation and Public Works Commission for their leadership bringing this forward as well as the staff for being willing to support the program and also the non-profit partners who have and will continue to do excellent work for bike and pedestrian safety in our community. Because of the challenges with technology earlier with the city, I did miss the staff presentation based on a council comment. I heard that there was some discussion of limiting the program to 10 sites, given what we've seen with the petition and dozens of neighborhoods potentially interested in participating. We think this should be an open program where neighborhoods can apply without there being any arbitrary limits to just neighborhoods previously designated five years ago and neighborhood greenways by staff or prohibitions on collectors. Escalona would like to help neighborhoods and staff make this pilot program a success, but to do so, we'd like to be included and not be limited from potential participation. We'd like the opportunity to apply with other neighborhoods. I believe this should be a citywide program given the need that's out there. We have provided previous communications to the council with the signatures, 100 comments, and much more. And we remain ready and willing to help other neighborhoods. In particular, what we'd like to call on the city to look at is to authorize the funding that was recommended by the commission to authorize staff to proceed and pull on outsourced partners if need be to get the work done and to ensure that it's a citywide program pulling in both previously identified neighborhoods as well as well organized neighborhoods who would like to participate without arbitrary restrictions. So that concludes our comments. Thank you. There's one more member of the public who'd like to speak. Okay, you're on the line. Hi, this is Ron Goodman. I'm a member of the pedestrian and bike subcommittee of the Transportation Commission. I just wanted to echo Phil's comment that the motion that we passed at our June meeting, I don't believe, is in front of the council. That's a little frustration. But we want to emphasize that the purpose of this program is to help people not have to travel long distances so that they can recreate outside. City of Alameda has a very similar program and they've worked with Bike Alameda and Pedestrian Organization in Alameda. Berkeley is doing a similar thing and so I encourage the council to approve that as well. And our primary motion was to ask the bike and pedestrian subcommittee to develop a program if there was funding available for it. Thanks, that's my comment. Okay, thank you. All right, seeing no further questions from members of the public, I'll bring it back to council. Thank you, mayor. And I guess I'll just echo a few comments that I heard from my colleagues that I really appreciate hearing from the community and the work that our commission and our staff have paid attention to this. I heard from community members on the west side, also neighbors that I've seen out and about and my kind of neck of the woods in Santa Cruz in midtown and the east side. And just want to kind of also put an exclamation mark around what Claire mentioned earlier around how we can outreach for equity to the areas in our city that aren't necessarily comfortable coming to government and specifically the beach flats area. So I know councilor Golder had indicated she has a motion but I look forward to working with you all to see how we can move forward with this in some fashion. I just recognize the city manager at the hand up. Yes, thank you. Just wanted to follow up on the comments that were made regarding the fiscal implications and just to clarify that the funding for measure D obviously it's not a general fund. And as you'll hear about later today, the general fund but the deficit is pretty significant. However, it will have indirect impacts as in the past when we've had to make budget adjustments and try to figure ways to get through, we have been able to shift funding around in a way that impacts paving. So to the extent, of course, that you can limit the budget impact, the better it will be for us to get through the budget deficit moving forward. So I just wanted to point out that because while there's not a direct funding impact here, there could be an indirect way to be able to shift funds around in a way that would preserve the general fund allocation moving forward. Just want to point that out. I was just wondering what the motion is. Well, the motion hasn't made it because the council member was allowing. Oh, she just said she's going to make a motion. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Sorry about that. To see what the directions is going on. And I'd also like to thank the members of the public for bringing this forward and bringing it to our attention and so we can, COVID-19, I actually do have a question that's still on the line. So here. I have a temporary program, but I'm just kind of wanting to understand a little bit more about how what this would look like. The one time I asked, I'm just not seeing how, you know, if we have a slower traffic now, we're moving forward, there's going to be more cars, we don't have anything to speak. Sure. I think we all hope that this is temporary. I don't think any of us can predict where the pandemic is going. So, you know, I think early on in May, when our commission addressed this, we thought this was maybe because it wasn't even addressed in time, by the time it got to council, it wouldn't be an issue. And here we are in July and it's still a big issue and things are getting worse again. So, you know, I'm not going to predict anything like that. I would think that should this last for years and people need to recreate with six fit of physical distancing between them for years, then certainly we need to look at making space for people to do it. You know, our own staff, I lived earlier, the parks director said that the switch traffic and bike traffic was up on West Cliff and from the climate team, the staff they presented to us was 200% increase in foot traffic and 400% in bike traffic. You know, if that continues over time, certainly we're going to need to respond to it somehow, whether it's slow streets continuing or something different, it evolves into something that's, you know, some more dedicated spaces, I can't predict, but I know we need something sooner based on the number of people that are using it. So, hard to predict feature. I think it's a great question. Thank you. I'm a big walker and I like walking in the streets also. So I was really excited to hear about this. And so this is what I'm gonna propose is that motion to direct public works transportation staff to initiate a slow streets program for Santa Cruz, utilizing one time use of up to 30,000 measure D funds, the program should be created and operational by the end of the month of July and should include an application process, supplies and educational materials for slow streets events and online map and create a website for the community to access where and when the slow streets events are occurring. The slow streets program should be in place during the period that COVID-19 shelter in place, orders are in place for up to six months. We on report back to council at that time. So if it needs to be extended like Phil suggested, like if it's years, then we'll have to think longer term and maybe allocate more money at that time. But if staff thinks they can have this up and running for 30,000, I think it's really important for us to be physically responsible given the current circumstances and the sacrifice that all of our city staff has done in giving up 10% across the board. So there's my motion. Thanks for the motion by council member Goulder, C. Vice Mayor Myers-Hansley. You're muted all on mute. That motion, thank you. Thanks for the motion by council member Goulder, second by vice mayor Myers. Yes, I'm done. Thank you for moving us in this direction. I'm wondering if the maker of the motion and the second would be willing to include a friendly amendment that directing staff to work with the bike pedestrian subcommittee of the transportation and public works commission and nonprofit and neighborhood groups in kind of further developing operationalizing and further developing the program. And I'll tell you why, but that's my, it's my friendly amendment, hopefully. I just think it's really important for the folks who, the community members who have been working on this and have really worked to bring this to us as well as our nonprofit experts in this arena have a chance to be involved in the conversation. I think it, while public input can take additional time, I think it's really important. And I think it will be more effective with people who are really interested in this, have an opportunity to work with staff moving forward. So I'm wondering if that could be a friendly amendment. I'm wondering how feasible that would be. I mean, just given the circumstances where we're trying to get it up and running as quickly as possible, I just wonder if too many cooks in the kitchen would make it more complicated than it needs to be. Can I ask Claire her thoughts on that? Yeah, I'm happy to jump in on that, thanks. What I would say is that there's no scenario that we're not engaging with all of those parties, but in terms of getting a program up and running by the end of July, it would not be feasible to re-engage and get something moving that quickly with that many cooks in the kitchen. This is a program that I could probably release an application for in the next two weeks and get the first batch of program, first batch of application processed by the end of July and get some barricades on the street. As we move forward, I would really appreciate engaging and refining what we've first rolled out with the groups that Council Member Brown listed, but I think for our preliminary rollout if it's running quickly, then we should just do it if it's a priority. Can I just jump back in and say, I'm sorry if that wasn't clear, that was my intention. I mean, to get something up and running as per this motion, but then to work with these groups over time as to see kind of what the next steps are and how things are going. Yeah, absolutely. And to reiterate, I definitely see that our advocacy and nonprofit partners in the community can play a key role in their established relationship with some of our underserved communities and making sure that everyone equally shares in the benefits of this program. Thanks. I'll go on to Matthews. Thank you. I'm happy to support the motion as it's presented here. I have just a few comments. Close Streets is not a new concept. I think we all realize that this concept has been around quite a long time and it's universally loved as a concept. I think really independent of COVID, although that has brought additional attention to the need to get out and around in the fresh air, but certainly even the city of Santa Cruz has long, long history in moving in this direction. Some of the programs we already have in line, the safety school, the active transportation plan, smart streets, I mean, so many of these, so many of our bike programs are really a continuous trajectory. And this is one aspect. My own experience in some of the neighborhood street safety programs that have been instituted throughout the city is that they do take time and they do take staff background. So I think it's entirely appropriate that we have staff organization support with the outreach and promotion by the advocacy group, whether that's an organization or a neighborhood group. That's the kind of division of labor. I think it makes sense. We talked about wanting programs that are quick, efficient, and cost effective. Another thing I take very much to heart is the cost and given all the demands on the city and our staff this year with exceptionally high resources, I can approve this project because it is modest. And what I am not interested in doing is seeing our major commitment to street improvements over time seriously diminish those who follow infrastructure issues over time know that street conditions just need constant care and safety in the city that passed measure. H, the county has passed measure D, the state passed, SB, whatever it was. And we need all of that to keep our transportation network going and street maintenance relates directly not only to cars but also to bike safety. And so having worked on a lot of these ballot measures over time, I know that you look at our street condition reports, if streets are not maintained, the condition plummets quickly and gets only more expensive. So that's, and I do think that's related to bike safety. I also wanna put in my two cents for pedestrian safety. I feel so strongly about that. A lot of that's just the condition of the sidewalk and the vegetation hanging all over the place. So yeah, yes, all of this make it safe and convenient and appealing to be out and about. So having said all that, I think it is appropriate that we have modest short-term projects that are distributed throughout the city that will involve neighborhood involvement and hopefully have some longer term possibilities for it. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Well, I'm just trying to get my thought. But one thing, and thank you Cynthia for reviewing some of the many projects you and I worked on in years, like a lot of them. A lot of them. It was called Liveable Streets. And my long drug store, you know, realigning the streets and closing them. So yeah, it's constant and going on. And, you know, we shall be proud of that and I'm proud of Public Works to step at that. But it seems this money, 200,000, I know I'll never get anywhere up from 30,200. But even the Public Works staff said all it would do, the 200, was probably two blocks of paving. It's not gonna make, I don't know what, it's measured D money that we all voted on. It's not the general fund. It's not even the Public Works budget. We give them this so much millions every year to do all these projects. And this seems such a little, little box of money when you look at the Public Works budget. If they can do it for 30,000, from what I read on a couple of the communities, but big cost is barriers and signage. You need a lot of signage and a lot of barriers. I can't even imagine what 30,000 is gonna buy. But obviously that's where the votes are. And I would hope that maybe staff would come back to us at some point and say, in order to do this particular neighborhood the way it really should be done, we've got to buy more barriers or whatever the need is. Because I'm so preaching that Public Works is in on this and looking forward to it and wanting to do it. But I just want to be sure out of measure D, not out of anything else, that they have some money to do it right. And I think even Claire said that we want to do it right because there's tax. Anyway, of course I will support the motion. I'm disappointed in 30,000, but we all vote for measure D and it does get distributed quite freely. And this would be just such a tiny piece for the 1600 people who've done the petition and all the neighborhoods who are looking forward to working on something. The one thing I left to add, even the livable streets and around long strokes or all the things and the speed bumps, that was dealing with automobiles. This one to me and all the bike work we've done, this one is the first one that really talks as pedestrian as the first priority. And the COVID has changed. I cannot tell you what life of street is like. It's a very wide street. People are promenading up and down. You'd think they were the Champs-Elysees. It's just every day, it's just a light to see them. It's wide enough for cars go around and everything. So I'm so appreciated and thanks to the community because this is about pedestrians and pedestrian safety. And it's putting that just a little bit higher than the cars and even the bicycle that first time. So thank you public works transportation commission for bringing it forward. And it's an exciting concept. Let's hope we can pull it off. Council member Brown. Yeah, I'll just want to totally agree with council member Byers comments and recognition that $30,000 is probably not gonna be enough to cover what some of the major costs are if we can get this thing up and running and it's successful. So I, but I understand that under the circumstances, this is where we're at. Just hoping that as we move forward, we can get one of those reports back and kind of get a better understanding of what it would take financially to really build this out if it works. And I do have an interest in kind of maintaining some attention to this issue, even beyond the kind of shelter in place order because I think it really will benefit a lot of the neighborhoods in our community. So I think I will actually, I have one quick question for the motion maker a council member Golder, where it says a slow streets events. I'm just wondering, I mean, we haven't been talking about it being like a one time, like a day event kind of thing. So I'm just gonna assume, like I didn't even catch that, but until just now, so what you mean though is not an event like a day long or a weekend event. You mean kind of ongoing, right? So events is, I'm just, just wondering how, just kind of defining that broadly, I guess. Yeah, and we can change the semantics. I'm not married to that at all. And, you know, I appreciate what both you and council member Byer said, and I'm not trying to be a cheapo here. I just would rather see the money go into long term solutions. And if staff is saying they can complete it for 30,000, great. Like let's take the lowest bidder. Like I, that's where I'm coming from. And so it's not that I'm trying to stifle anything here in that 30,000. I just want to be realistic and prugal with the city's money. And so that's I saw you could handle all of you. I was just going to say, using the term event is totally fine here. I think what it, what it indicates is that this will likely be iterative and there's a high likelihood that the first way that we set these up, we will have to tinker and retool with and respond to what we see and what we hear from the community. So these are kind of an ever-evolving type of facility. And I think events is an appropriate way to characterize them. And I was kind of thinking that it would look different in different neighborhoods. And so that's where Council Member Mathews and Vice Mayor Meyers and then I have some talents to share as well. It just occurred to me that this could be flexible events or projects. Certainly there'll be different in different places. Events to me sounds like, you know, when Westwood Drive is closed off for one morning, sounds like a one-day thing. And if you say events or projects, gives it more flexibility. And maybe it could just be flow-streamed. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thumbs up we get. Vice Mayor Meyers. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. We called this a program in the motion. I think event or project sounds a little more, like it has a little more finality to it. And I think what this is, the intent of the, as I'm understanding the motion is, that we start this program and that we have some check-in points along the way, has feedback from our commission and our subcommittee. And that this really though is a commitment to starting a program. So I would say I would prefer that maybe we refer to to what the mayor said in terms of the flow-streamed program. I guess I would also add to some of the comments we received, you know, I don't know that we're intentionally limiting it. I think that the geographic focus is really important and reaching out to communities and neighborhoods that may be able to communicate to City Hall in the ways that some others is really important. You know, if we get a lot of interest, I'm not sure that, and I'll rely on the staff to respond to this. You know, I don't know that we're intending to cut things off. So I just want the community to know that the intent is really to be as productive as possible, get it up and running as quick as possible and then, you know, evaluate. But I guess I'd ask Claire if she has an opinion about whether that restriction on 10 or just a little bit more maybe on that one, that one point, if you would please. Thank you mayor. Yeah, absolutely. So I say this being as a multi-phase project of getting those first 10 up and running, let them sit for a week, two, three weeks, get some feedback from the community. I'm sure you all will hear feedback from the community as well. So take that, see if we need to make any changes and then look through the next batch of applications and roll out the next set. And probably do them in, you know, 10 at a time or so and see when we hit a good saturation. There will be an end point here, like not every single street in Santa Cruz is going to be calm, a slow street that's eligible. So making sure that we go step by step and make sure that we're constantly assessing and evaluating how it's working, is it working well, not only on the streets that have this program implemented but on the surrounding streets as well. So under no scenario, I think that 10 is going to be where we end. I think it's the starting point and it's geographically distributed throughout the city so we can hear feedback from all parts of our community. Thank you. Well, I just had a few comments because I'm supportive of the direction we're moving in. I just to, you know, one of the things that always concerns me is the impact that we're having on the amount of money that we're trying to apply to apply for millions of dollars worth of grants during the time when our revenue is tanking and our budget is plummeting. And so for me, that's a really concern for me but we're not going to lose any of those grants. And at the same time, I do recognize that when, you know, there's one period of time during COVID when we had all the parks were shut down and all the beaches were shut down. And, you know, had we extended that, I could have definitely seen putting more money into sports streets because these streets would be the only areas we would be able to access for open space. But, you know, our parks, all of our parks are open, our beaches are open. And, you know, one of the things that our personal records are mentioned is that there's three times the number of parks would cap it at infantatures and even in other cities throughout the United States. They're suggesting that there are a lot of places where people can go to socially distance and get exercise to be in open space. And because I think about that as someone who's grown up in a big city where you lack a lot of neighborhood lack that access to open space. So I think about that much a lot living in infantures about how much open space there is to let re and how accessible it is. But, you know, there's a desire from the community to bring this forward. I think that what's being proposed right now is the quickest, the most efficient and cost effective way to move this forward. I would just say as a recommendation that someone who writes crap about those personally, when the mom is to go and ask for money, I think that it might take some time but two put together some kind of $1,000 is going and what would be spent on it and how we got that number is much more, it helps me to make a decision because I can understand what the money's being spent on. But, you know, I'm concerned with the $200,000 because I don't know what that'll be spent on. If that's spent on salaries, I think that'll be really bad for us to say that we're gonna have our city staff cut their salaries and then take $200,000 and give it to the program to pay for salaries of non-union employees potentially if they're part of our union. So I just have a lot of questions around the $200,000 and what do we go for? What do we be used for? When would this program be rolled out? And this seems like this is the quicker way for us to move forward and hand me the demands for the concern and ask for the public citizens. So I'm happy with this. I would just ask that we prioritize streets that demonstrate the highest amount of need in terms of traffic because if we're trying to slow streets, it would make no sense that we're putting in a slow streets program on a street, you know, potentially one of the more quiet areas with scanners. And then also that we can kind of measure the impact. So if we're putting this in on streets, it would be great for us to understand whether or not this is having an impact on the streets where it's implemented and then the surrounding streets. So we can better understand are we decreasing traffic on one street just to increase it on another or if it's better to treat it similarly so that, you know, we're not creating higher traffic areas throughout the city. So with that, if there's no further questions or comments, we can go ahead and take the roll call vote. So I'll turn it over to the city clerk to take the roll call vote on this item. Thank you, mayor. Can I just confirm that council member Brown's friendly amendment was accepted? Yeah, I think she withdrew it because it was. Yeah, I just, since that's already happening, it's no need to include it. Council member Byers. Aye. Matthews. Aye. Brown. Aye. Boulder. Aye. Watkins. Aye. Vice mayor Meyers. I'll go on this program. Nine, four, six pertain to sidewalk members. As a manager, we're going to actually continue as I want. So yeah. Yes, it's this item, it's been requested that it be deferred to a future meeting and that is the recommendation. So that would be helpful. In conversations with city manager and city attorney and members of the community, I support deferring this to our next meeting so that there is time for the key stakeholders on this to be involved, to learn about it and be involved in the language. So I know you may want to get public comment, but I'm prepared to move that we defer this to our next meeting. Could I ask a question? Excuse me, if Chris Snyder did measure D actually get approved the table in the last motion? Oh, good call. Well, somebody else, someone texted me, she reminded me, so it wasn't my call. That's why I asked to hear the motion. I didn't think it did. Yeah. Tony, what would be the appropriate course of action to deal with that? No, I think you just re-open that discussion and the council can take that after. So I'm not here to ask for this after this item. I don't know, Matthews, is your hand up for approval? Well, only when that happens, I'll be prepared to move the measure D table or so. Yeah. No, I've done. No further questions or comments on this item, I'm sorry, the members of the public, if they'd like to speak to item number 10, Senate Bill 946, if you'd like to comment on this item, please press start on the phone to raise your hand. Once you have been asked to speak, you'll be given two minutes. If I could just interject, council's certainly free to accept public comment if you desire, however, since the item will be continued, it's not required at this time. I suspect that many members of the public would like to have the same opportunity as some in the business community to mull over the ordinance before they weigh in on it. But again, it's up to the pleasure of the council. Well, I don't see any members of the public wanting to speak on this item anyway. So I think what we'll do is we'll bring it back to you after we've prepared on the Matthews. Yeah, so I will go ahead and move that we continue this to our next meeting. Welcome to Councilman Matthews, Vice Mayor Myers to see your hands raised. Yes, I was going to second the motion. I'm looking to continue made by Councilman Matthews, seconded by Vice Mayor Myers, I will call for it. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Byers. Aye. Council Member Matthews? Aye. Brown? Holder? Aye. Vice Mayor Myers? We open item number 10, given that we still need to take action on part of that item. So I'm Council Member Matthews. Yeah, I'll move that we approve the proposed Measure D five-year expenditure plan for FY21 to 25 as amended by our previous action. Okay, so the motion by Council Member Matthews, Council Member Goulda. I'll second, sorry guys, I dropped that off. So the motion by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Goulda to approve the proposed Measure D five-year expenditure plan for FY21 to 2025 with the addition of previous pre-made amendments. So if there's no further questions, I'll turn that to our city clerk. Council Member Byers? Council Member Byers? Aye. Matthews? Aye. Brown? Holder? Aye. Watkins? Budget is option. I'm wondering who might be able to take a 15-minute break since we've been on for a few hours now. Yeah. So if we could come back at 5.30, we'll set that up. So again, Council Members or other computers, if you can unmute yourself and turn on your video, once you're ready, then go ahead and get started. We're missing Catherine and Donna. Item on our agenda, which is item number 11, fiscal year 2020-21, proposed budget adoption. Remember that the public who were streaming that this is an item you would like to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation by staff, all the questions from the Council. We will then take public comment and return to the Council with deliberation and action. So with that, I'll turn it over to Cheryl Pfeife, acting finance director, Tracy Cole, principal management analyst, and Lupita Alamos, finance manager. Mayor Cummings, for some reason, my video is not turning on, but I'm sure that will be okay as long as I can share my screen. You don't have to do my face. Oh, there it is, start my face, share my video. So good evening Mayor Cummings and Council Member, Lupita Alamos, budget manager and finance department presentation. Our budget adoption presentation will be covering the following topics. We'll be looking at economic indicators and the impacts into our revenue sources. We'll be covering preliminary forecasts and budget saving measures. We'll also be looking at fiscal year 2021 budget changes as well as reviewing our CIP summary of that as well as budget next up. Saying that we are in unprecedented times and the way that we live and do business has been turned on its head. Clearly, we're not alone as a whole world struggles with the pandemic. However, we have, there have been some cities that have been hit harder than others, like those neighbors over the hill or those in Southern California. But there, however, there, excuse me, there are several economic indicators that will determine the severity of our financial situation. Clearly the one major player being COVID-19 activity in Santa Cruz, but on a local level, we'll also be looking at trends from unemployment, housing, tourism and local business health as well as other significant economic contributors such as UCS's plan to reopen in the fall and its impact on employment and sales tax and information came from the County of Santa Cruz COVID-19 information webpage, which tracks number of cases in our county. It tracks hospitalizations, testing, origin, source and demographics. County is faring better, like I said, than some of our neighbors and those south of us, but we're still following the same trends and seeing and uptick in cases. We currently have about 153 active known cases of the virus in Santa Cruz County and about 19% of that total is actually in Santa Cruz. In Santa Cruz, we've moved into phase three of reopening our businesses, including lifting restrictions to beach access. And while our business community is promoting and practicing safety guidelines such as safe covering, social distancing, sanitation, the increase in the virus activity could force additional shelter in place mandates and restrictions as we just saw the governor implement for 19 counties in our state. So we're not out of the woods with this virus by any means. This chart shows unemployment trends since January 2020 for the state, the county and for city. And we see in January, the unemployment rate was 6.1 for the county. It was 3.9 for the state and Santa Cruz at the lowest point here in the gray at 3.1. And you can see that by April, that spikes up to 17 for the county, 6.4% for the state and staying at the lower level of 13.3. And we do see some improvement and possibly due to us reopening our businesses. And we see that in general, the county sees the largest dip going from 17 to 14, 4%. And the state going from 16.4 to 16.3. And then Santa Cruz down here in the gray goes from 13.3 to 12.7. So some good news, but unemployment is still very high. So in addition to having an impact on consumer spending, the unemployment rate could also result in homeowner mortgage defaults and foreclosures. And therefore weakening our real estate market and possibly leading to a broad reassessment of property tax values like we saw in the 0809 recession. Speaking about real estate, here are some of the trends that we wanna show for housing. Here's a snapshot for real estate and permitting activities for since January to May of 2020. Starting with our real estate trends on the graph to the right. The graph is charting single family sales in Santa Cruz County. Total sales are captured in the blue bars. And then Santa Cruz specific is the orange bars and that's the makeup of the total. So we started January 2020 with strong sale numbers exceeding 2019 sales by 13%. And you don't see the numbers, but that's from, it went from 74 to 96 County wide. But only a modest increase for Santa Cruz. We saw an 18% increase in Santa Cruz in January from 22, sales to 26. So leading into the spring and summer months when we typically start to see more active real estate market, we start to see those numbers decline and impacted by COVID. So compared to May of 2019 single family home sales are down 38% from 146 to 90 sales and a drop of a medium price of about 10% County wide from 947,000 to about the 150,000. In Santa Cruz, the slowdown is more like 49% from 51 sales in May to 26. And we also see a 7% drop in our sales price from 1,007 to 932,000. There is some cautious optimism that prospective buyers not impacted by the downturn take advantage of the record low interest rates, which are currently set at 3.13 for a 30 year fixed loan. But in general property taxes are one of our most stable sources of revenue and we're hoping that stays a constant for us. Our permitting activity to the left here shows similar trends in the chart. Here you see residential permits in orange and the commercial permits in blue. So we started off again with strong numbers in January and February combined with a total of 320. So in this year we were exceeding our 2019 numbers by 30%. And then we see a sharp drop in May, excuse me, in March and then most significantly in April. That's only about 21 applications in total. And so we do see an increase back in May of this year, but we're still below permitting activity from May of 2019 by about 26%. So that's going from 114 permits issued to about 105. And that unfortunately is also a loss that we will feel in our fees permitting and to see revenues. Next, if we look at our hotel occupancy rate. So we know that previous and current travel restrictions now have definitely impact our tourism industry. So current survey of our hotels with the shelter in place was instituted in March. We see that occupancy rates significantly impacted. So we see a 48% decline of occupancy in March, 71% in April and 62% occupancy in May. We can absolutely expect to see impacts to our TOT revenues, but we won't know those amounts because the city has deferred their payments until after July. But for now we can see through that survey that we definitely are below those numbers. When we look at our local business indicators, we know that our downtown is absolutely the heart of our community and the major activity center for the city and for the county. The economic development has been very active in providing support to our downtown businesses as well as businesses citywide through micro loans and offering reopening starter kits. And that's all been very positive. But unfortunately downtown has also experienced the impacts on the shelter in place. According to the downtown association, about 66% for about 100 of the 150 businesses downtown remain open and operational in some capacity either through internet sales, curbside pickup or actually opening their doors to customers. But we are also sad to see that about 8% of our businesses downtown for about 12 of them are closing their doors or have been closing their doors since June. So indicating that our sales tax is of course one of our major revenue sources with the true impact of those sales. Again, we won't know until after July due to the governor deferring that sales tax. But we do have our April sales tax in and those indicate a 20% decrease from our April 2019 numbers. So that kind of falls in line with our preliminary projections. So our preliminary forecast and action. So in April of this year, our finance director presented to council a preliminary forecast of a COVID-19 impact on our budget and predicted a $6 million shortfall for fiscal year 21. So in response to that, our council approved several budget-saving measures to be implemented in this fiscal year 21. Some of those measures included hiring freeze, a 10% reduction in personnel costs, which the city has already achieved, and saving approximately $5.7 million to the general fund. We also are deferring any general fund support CIP projects. And we've also offered early retirement incentives to our employees and promoting our VTO policy. And of course, we will be seeking female reimbursements and federal and state aid. And actually very soon we'll be receding about 750,000 through the CARES Act distribution to cities to address some of the public and public health and public safety impacts of COVID-19, including those to our homeless population. Council also established a budget committee to review fiscal year 21 budget strategies and scenarios and make recommendations on budget solutions. The city's also invested in a financial forecasting tool through management partners. They'll help develop our budget scenarios and provide better financial situation given all the variables at stake. So I'd like to, at this point, turn the presentation over to our city manager, Mastin Bedma, for an update on the forecasting tool progress at this time. Thank you, Lupita. Also wanted to just provide a little bit more information on the budget reduction measures that we are implementing now. As Lupita mentioned, the 10% reduction in personnel costs was something that we've been working on with our bargaining units just to implement that, particularly in the form of referral, which we prefer in order to avoid layoffs, requires working with the bargaining units and reaching agreement with them. And I'm happy to report that most of our bargaining units have agreed to do that and want to thank our employees for the support there. However, I also want to report that we have not been able to reach an agreement, or we're not able to reach an agreement with our money publishers association. And therefore, as a result of that, we're left with no option, but to issue layoff notices because with an agreement in place, we either have to negotiate changes or implement layoffs. And so we're at a point where we have issued layoff notices. There's a period of discussions that occurs. And so we're hopeful that those discussions will continue and that we'll be able to avert some of the layoffs for several sergeants are effective in July for some of the trainees that are affected. Those won't come into play until September. But I want to let the council know that while we have achieved agreements with most of our bargaining units, we have one more and again, we're hoping that we can have those implemented and that we won't have to move forward with layoffs. But with respect to the projections, I wanted to provide an update on the projected shortfall. As I noted at our last update, the projected deficit was based on limited information about revenue projections as well as the impact of the pandemic. And then several things have occurred. As Lupita mentioned, we've hired management partners to develop a specific COVID-19 forecast that they have developed in 33 cities, mostly in California. And the city council budget committee received a presentation and demonstration of the model using sample data. And they may want to comment on that later. And then secondly, just yesterday, what happened is I had the opportunity to review the model with our city specific data that they've been able to put into the model. And the budget committee will also receive a presentation on that in the council when we come back in August. This version that was presented represents the initial look given the latest point in time six data. And while there is some refinement that needs to occur with the model, I wanted to provide you with a preview because the model is showing a significant increase in our projected deficits over the next three fiscal years. The order of magnitude is at least double what we originally projected and will require cutting between $13 and $18 million over the next two fiscal years. And this is with the use of reserves to cushion the blow. We're fortunate that we have reserves otherwise we'd have to make even more deeper cuts. The primary reason for the increased deficit is decreased revenues along a longer time frame of the prolonged pandemic. And you saw some of that data that would be to share with respect to KOT and sales tax. Now that the pandemic is longer, obviously having a major impact. I wanted to bring this to your attention. I really assume it's possible because it is important to be transparent and to set realistic expectations that we consider the budget. The reality is that the city council will have to make some very difficult decisions in the coming months. And Lupita will cover in the course of the presentation the next steps in the role of the budget committee as we move forward. So thank you. I'll turn it over to Lupita and then we can go on to questions once we're done with the presentation. Thank you, Rostine. I'll be covering that a little bit later in the presentation for the budget process, the fiscal year 21 budget. So what you have before you today is a status quo working budget based on fiscal year 20 levels. With no significant increases or reductions to programs. So it's basically a baseline. It's a baseline budget that does not reflect COVID-19 impacts in the revenues or expenditures. It does not reflect the 10% personnel cost reduction that were recently achieved through labor concessions. Instead, the council budget committee will start that process this month to develop our budget scenarios and review budget targets and recommend solutions. And with the help of our financial forecasting tool and as the revenue picture continues to emerge we'll be able to make data driven decisions at various checkpoints throughout the year. So an attachment to of your packet is a list of budget changes and corrections from the proposed posted budget in May. These changes are largely administratively, administrative in nature and they don't reflect council action from budget hearings. Some items in there also reflect a receipt of grants or award of grants approved by the council or change in contractual obligations. Another example of what changes are reflected in the fiscal year 21 are recent actions by the council. For instance, the June 23rd council meeting directing appropriations for the river street shelter lease, the get virtual program and state, permanent and local housing allocation application for affordable housing development. And this last minute inclusion was emailed to you prior to this meeting and it all will also be made part of a public record. So included in the list of changes are those made to our personnel profile. Some of these positions are clean up items from recommendations from fiscal year 20. Positions can't be deleted until the position has been vacated. And so that's why you're seeing this before you again. So starting with the water department in fiscal year 21 is a new classification and water addition of one water chief financial officer to be paid by water fund at the net increase of $43,000. Next we have delete one FTE water conservation manager. This was action from fiscal year 20, but recently, but only most recently vacated. So now we're able to delete that position. And we're also deleting one FTE finance manager and that's a new deletion recommended this year. In the police department, we're deleting two administrative assistants, two positions and deleting one FTE prop and evidence specialist. These are both actions for fiscal year 20 that weren't able to materialize until now. And then in public works, we also have one FTE senior professional engineer paid for by special funds, such as measure D and traffic impact fees. And then we also have a deletion in the human resources department of one FTE administrative assistant. And this is also action from fiscal year 20. So that brings our total allocation of positions to 895.03 FTE. And this is down four positions from the fiscal year 20 amended FTE count of 899.03. Let's move on to CIP. So as I mentioned previously to address the preliminary projection of six million, no new general fund CIP projects were recommended. The 87 million moving forward in capital projects includes those funded through grants, special and enterprise funds. But as we heard earlier from our assistant public works director, revenue available for some of these projects may change given the COVID impacts on all funds. The majority of the new fiscal year 21 projects are in water with a budget of 62.3 million, followed by public works with a budget of 20.4 million. And just to highlight some of the projects in the public works of CIP includes FEMA certification, Levy project, the Isbell Drive pump station replacement. There are four sewer improvement projects in there as well as a recycling center storm. Just to name a few and department heads are on the line to answer any questions that you may have on the makeup of the proposed CIP for this year. And then the graph on the right is the the total unfunded CIP projects and the total 329 million. And the list of projects that make up this total are listed in included in your CIP folder for your review. But I would like to clarify that although these projects, these unfunded projects are labeled as non priority, that I would like to say that that is not an indication of really the status. Some are in very critical state of repair. We do have an, we have been deferring investment in our capital for quite some time, but due to our financial crisis, we're deferring projects again until we can stabilize our budget. So for our next steps, as I mentioned, this is just the formation of the council budget committee. They have met two times to start preparing them for their upcoming work in July. And in July, what you'll see is them continue to meet to review those budget scenarios and start making budget proposals and to form that strategy. In August, we'll be coming back to the city council for a study session to review some of those preliminary proposals to prepare for then for our round one of check-in of budget solutions followed by around two and three in December and in February. Before you is the recommendation that we're making for to adopt the budget. This is the same language that you'll find in your packet. The only difference is what's in underlying, which is including those amendments directed by council from the June 23rd council meeting. So with that, I'll go ahead and open it up to any questions. And I'd like to note that the directors are online to also help answer any questions you may have about their budget. Great, thanks for that presentation. Are there any council members who have questions? Council member Matthews. I remembered that time. I learned last week that Candice Elliott is leaving our economic development department, which is an important career move for her, but a loss for us. And it raised for me the thought of our budget for this year is predicated going forward. Our budget changes on not filling vacancies. I've mentioned this to the manager. It also occurred to me how much we are expecting from our economic development department, which already has another vacancy. We're expecting them to deliver the goods on economic recovery and affordable housing and so much. So my concern with the director to increase any vacancies and not require is, and I know they're not alone in this, placing just probably unrealistic expectations for a small staff to be so much. So I just, I want to raise that issue, just seeing me given the expectations and stakes there. How do you, city manager, finance department, see us approaching that? Yeah, I'll start and then maybe Bonnie can also comment. In general, that is going to be a challenge also because we just also implemented furloughs that in itself provides 10% reduction in capacity, citywide. So there's an overall, not a challenge there, too. And however, the other part of it, too, that's going to be important is for the council to really also, as we move forward with strategic planning and priorities that need to provide that direction because while we do have a hiring freeze in place, we do use it in a way that, you know, it's prioritized. So if there's a priority and we need to hire somebody because it's a crucial or important function, we'll do that. But really the approach is that we can do without it and it's not absolutely necessary. We're keeping it unfilled. However, if there's a need and it's essential and critical, we are filling those positions. So again, I think recognizing that there are limitations and setting no reasonable expectations and reasonable workload will be really critical and important and as well as setting priorities so that we can appropriately allocate and direct the work program and we'll be obviously working on those things in the coming months. The other thing I should point out, too, is that with the pandemic, it really has created a response that has been really tremendous and ongoing and we're also seeing the effect of the employees, many employees just really working a lot more than they have ever really. It seems like it's been ongoing for months now and so I think the organization is also tired emotionally and physically and so we do need a little bit of respect and so I think we'll try to do that as well just to be able to take some of our sanity and our ability to work together. So I just wanted to highlight that because that is a sensitivity and I think all of us do that way actually, not just the staff, I'm sure you've counseled us with the number of issues that we had and how quickly they changed and how they keep coming up, but this whole idea or issue of capacity and how we manage it and how we balance that is absolutely critical that we make good decisions and we're thoughtful about how we do those things. So with that, I'm going to Bonnie, let's come if you want to add anything more specifically to your position. Not really, I just want to acknowledge across all the departments just sort of echoing what the city manager is saying, I recognize from a capacity standpoint how challenging it is across every department right now and everyone is giving everything that they can. So with that said, it was a surprise, we didn't know this was coming but you were definitely supportive of Candace and the work that she's doing, helping businesses with her HR needs during this time. She worked for us part-time until last Friday and we wish her all the best. It does leave us in a difficult position at a really trying time, but I recognize that we're in a really a difficult position at the city right now. I'll come from a revised. And you're, Captain, you're muted. For the parks, Tony Elliot, is he handy? Yes. Thank you. I think just this morning, a note, a little text from Humber from the, I can't think of his name, but obviously very active in the Grant Street area and the Grant Street park. And he was talking about getting the bathrooms fixed or upgraded. So maybe you could tell me about that. Yeah, thank you. We've actually got our park superintendent Travis Beck on the line too. Oh, okay. In regards to a plumbing fix at the Grant Park restrooms. Travis, if you're there, would you mind speaking to some of those details? Certainly, can you hear me okay? Yeah, good. So we've had a long-standing plumbing issue in the sewer lateral from the Grant Park restrooms out to Grant Street and identified this year that it really was gonna require investments to fix that. So we have a CIP project on the books for the upcoming year to install a grinder unit that will be able to top up any waste that's coming down from the toilets and make it easier to make it so that it's relatively down the line in order to keep us from having to unclog that line regularly as we've done in recent months and years. Great, so that's in the budget. That's gonna happen. That's one of the CIP projects included in the proposed budget. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Nice to meet you, Travis. Likewise. Well, thank you for the presentation. I know that pre-COVID, we anticipated actually a different budget scenario that was looking really positive. So I know it's definitely taken a toll on our city as well as these just across this nation. I guess I just have one, I have a couple of comments which I'll, I could save for later. But one question in terms of grants and allocating resources to supporting our various departments with grants. And I don't know if this is a question for the city manager or who would like to respond to that. But I think we heard from Claire today, knowing her time will be now stretched and thinner. How can we find capacity or support to help the city seek funding outside of what we already have? Or do we have that already as a priority for grant support, grant writing support? Maybe also generally in departments who want to chime in. It does vary somewhat by departments. I think certainly public parks in particular do quite a bit of grant applications and also driven by the opportunity that are out there. So we do try really hard to take advantage of opportunities that come up through state propositions or other resources. The other area that we're gonna have to really look towards and focus on is really to try to advocate for stimulus funding and how can we leverage trying to get through the impacts of the pandemic. And of course the enterprise do as well. Now they're not in a difficult situation as the general fund is. So water for example is in a position to want to take advantage of some major grant opportunities given the infrastructure program that they have in place. So I think we do make it a priority particularly when there are opportunities and we take out that capacity because it is important and we can leverage and take that opportunity. It will be harder but I think actually we will work to not lose any major opportunities if we can avoid that. And I'll defer to any other department and you might want to comment on that as well. I'm maybe just a follow up question. Does that mean that various folks who are involved in grant writing are able to get additional support in addition because often having kind of a position where you have your job and then you also do grant writing, how can that be reconciled or how does that work? It could be a combination of just their priorities and what they're working on shifting within the department. And in some cases it could be getting some assistance. Sometimes there are grant writers that have the appropriate background and skill set that they could quickly help an assistant in doing that. Although I think a lot of our grant writing is done in-house just because we do have that capacity. For example, in parks we have a planner in our various departments. Public works, I think a lot of the staff is very well attuned to what's going on and we tend to do a lot of it in-house. But I think historically we take advantage of our staff and then if we need to we can also obtain some temporary assistance that we need to. Okay, great. I think I guess I want to say what I'm getting at is if there's a way for us to have some capacity to track what potential funding could come through grants, we'd be able to do that given our circumstances. Tim, I know that there's some mention about not being able to come to an agreement with the People with the Police Officers Association. I was just, and I know maybe the public isn't aware that now positions were currently filled going into this but it's like on there may be layoffs. So I'm wondering if you can maybe just speak to where we were and now that there was an agreement of what that means in terms of the positions over at Public Safety and the Police Department in particular. Right, so yes, we do have some vacancies and however in terms of the way we structured the budget and the way we structure the reduction is that in the budget, for example, in the budget before you, we already allocate a certain number of vacancies in our projections. So our projected deficit already included a number of vacancies that we would have. And so when we look at what each of the bargaining units has to contribute in terms of what the reductions would be their share of it, we have to take into account vacant positions to do that. So we did account for some vacancies and provided credit for some vacancies but it's not nearly enough to not be able to have to provide a layoffs. You get to understand how that, you know, as we kind of continue to program what those impacts are for the Police Department and Public Safety and I think it's all departments that are gonna be impacted where we see employees essentially leaving and positions unbuilt. So yes, absolutely. There are no further questions or comments from the Council at this time. I'm gonna turn it over to the general public for public comment. So if you are a member of the public who would like to speak on your phone to raise your hand and we're gonna start with two minutes and then we'll see how far we get but we may need if this might have reduced the time. Yeah, hi, my name is Kaitlyn Hannah. I'm calling in mostly to support the national and local black leaders who are requesting that we start de-investing in the police force to reinvest in social services. I was surprised and actually quite happy to hear that there's a couple of positions that are going to be taken away from the police force. And I know that that's due to really unfortunate circumstances but I do think that this is in some ways a good first step for us to start seeing what it's like to defund our police force and I really encourage you to figure out what other social services we can fund. I think it's really important that we create crisis centers but we have mental health liaison officers that the homeless service center is actually really well funded instead of really underfunded because we know that underfunding them doesn't make homeless people go away. They're still here and these quality of life ordinances got put on the internet recently are just so transparent and so despicable and we can't keep criminalizing poor people and having the police enforce this economic disparity in our city so in general supporting sort of reallocating resources starting now I hope since everything's pretty much up in the air to really support citizens in this city who are not economically advantaged. So that's all thanks for taking my call. Yes, next week you're on the line, you're on the line. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Hello, my name is Elena Raymer. I've lived in Santa Cruz my whole life. I am also calling on city council to divest from local police at times to move money away from this racist and classist institution as a step towards abolition. I call on you to stop making excuses about what's the county's role and what's your role and just take the steps that are needed now immediately and we can build something better in this place. Thank you. Hello, my name is Margaret O'Hara and I'm a lifelong resident of Santa Cruz. Like many of my fellow commentators, I have called in today to ask you all to alter the substantive city funding breakdown outlined in this budget in upcoming budget meetings such that you do fund the Santa Cruz police department. I ask that you reallocate the $31 million you originally allocated to the SEPD to the budget within the budget before the council to housing economic development and COVID-19 release. SEPD's recent policing tactics including the department's very high rate of misdemeanor arrests coupled with the allocation per this budget of $16.5 million for patrol costs indicate in the various brand of broken windows policing in our community that criminalizes poverty and disproportionately affects our agents of color. So rather than continuing this harmful pattern, I ask that you reallocate these resources to different city organizations to prioritize housing economic development and COVID-19 relief as you've mentioned throughout the meeting today. And further, I ask that you make these changes that you consider these changes and make beneficial changes in future council budget meetings. Thank you very much for taking my call. Thank you. Okay, this is Karen Phillip. Hey, defunding the police has been tried in Cleveland or Seattle's chop zone with disastrous results. That elected officials cower and fail to back the need for law and order for fear of being called racist or actively promote a Marxist mob hijacked and destabilizing movement like the BLM is a very dangerous state of affairs. The progressive left has been throwing a violent fit associated with Black Lives Matter that is destabilizing America and is a civil war where only one side is now fighting. The grievance of occasional and it is very rare shocking violations of civil rights by some police has been hijacked both from within and without the organization known as Black Lives Matter. The systemic Marxist BLM leadership's agenda goes astray and the leftist politics self admittedly mostly trying to defeat Trump and does not condemn the violence that's committed on its behalf. The agenda of defunding or abolishing the police amid false claims of systemic racism has been adopted by all those who wish to destroy America such as communists, anarchists, looters, arsonists and every other group wishing to further its own agenda by supporting what is now a mostly agenda hijacked con. Systemic racism was dismantled 50 years ago with the end of segregation and a dozen major legislations addressing those civil rights. The issue of the existence of the relatively shocking high percentage of Black violent criminals, almost entirely Black on Black violent criminals hardly gets a mention regarding Black lives. The only systemic racism I see is the progressive mob left. Media and educational institutions constantly condemning white men. The council's blatant racial discrimination against white men in recent cannabis license requirements is also that. New gun registrations are through the roof by people who say my life matters. They fear what will happen if the police don't exist to oppose criminal violence. I quote Martin Luther King. Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in a monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. All right, you're on one. Four digits of your number are the 7069, you're on one. Oh, hi, yeah. Can you hear me? My name is Faz. And I'm joining other folks as well. I'm just calling this call to defund the police. I'm looking at this budget and looking at the update and it doesn't sound like this budget is reflecting that the people in this community who have called for defunding the police. And I think that's kind of disappointing, right? We're seeing a national movement right now to defund the police. And I think it has to be understood that when we say that we're not asking, we're not asking to make this community more unsafe. We're asking that the city, instead of policing all its issues, is putting the money towards social programs, towards alternative forms of public safety that are restorative and are not restorative and are protecting the community and protecting the people and providing the services for the people in our most need as opposed to a punitive system that only serves to destroy people of color. And so again, we're calling on the city council to defund the police. I think there's alternative ways of public safety that the city council is really overlooking here. And I would really encourage the city council to look into that, especially when they're coming up and approving their budget. So we really would urge you again to defund the police, reinvest in community services, and really hope that you will consider those calls. Thank you. Thank you. All right, next caller. Hi, this is Scott Graham. I would like to see an across the board, 10% cut in all of the departments, not including what they're already cutting from the concession by their employees to take a 10% cut. I would also like to see the department heads take a 20% cut and pay because they get paid so much. As far as the police go, to quote the chief, he has said that at various occasions that 80% of their calls are about homeless people and homeless situations. And another time said, if there's somebody else out there willing to take this on, then come and take the funding. So that's what we should do. We should set up a different thing, a different agency, a different way of dealing with homelessness, whether it's social workers, whether it's part of public works, cleaning up areas and leaving trash containers so that areas don't get trashed out, whether it's mental health workers and a mental health team that can go for intervene in mental health crises. We gotta set this stuff up so that we can then take that money that the chief has offered through these other programs. We can't just take the money away from the police until we have something to replace it. And so that's what I'm asking you to do is to look forward and try to find a way to set up these alternatives to policing and let the police deal with real crime instead of going around harassing the poorest members of our society, which is what they're doing right now. Thank you. All right, next caller. Can you hear me? Okay. Hey, good evening. This is Reg E. Collin again. I just wanted to say when I think about the budget, what I usually ask myself is, what do people need from the city budget right now? What do maybe the most vulnerable people need, especially in a global pandemic and sort of an economic depression that's paired with it. And we certainly heard a lot about how this environment affects the profits of real estate, hotels, of sale value of single family homes. That was very front and center with graphs and everything. There was even a brief discussion of how to assist these particular problems and small business owners. But there wasn't a discussion of worker impact. There wasn't a graph of lost jobs despite us approaching 30% unemployment. We didn't see any graphs of eviction notices. We didn't see a graph discussing access to food, water, medicine, or shelter, or even healthcare given that we're in a pandemic. So I just, I know that these are things that maybe the county cares about, but you know, that's like the only department that's not on the city level. We have every other department of the county also reflected on the city except for health and human services. And I honestly, I wonder why that is. And I honestly wonder if it's healthy or sustainable to have the city talk about its budget, like it's some sort of investor board meeting and totally divorced from human value and human cost. So I just wanna end this by making a call to defund police and reinvest in communities like everyone else is saying. We have plenty of money in the police budget and we didn't need to cut all these other departments by 10%. That was a decision you made, not democratically. We could have just cut police as we all have said, police are wasteful. They are spent criminalizing poverty. We spend $30 million on police right now. And I think it's pretty clear that when we have like over 20 police officers just twiddling their thumbs outside during this city hall meeting to protect you all from a dangerous noise protest that maybe you don't need that many police, right? Maybe it's like this amount of money isn't necessary to protect people in this city. So I'll just leave it at that. Thank you. There, my name's Max. I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, but I'm not proud of my hometown. When people ask me why, I often say that we're a community suffering from deep delusion. We have an unearned reputation from my perspective as a progressive city, when in fact we're much more alike the rest of the country than we are unique when it comes to racist policing and an education system that disproportionately funnels black and brown students through special ed and scared straight programs that end them up in college or rather in prison instead of college. If you all commit to work with the community to negotiate defunding the expense of an ineffective police force and reinvest in institutions like every practically everybody before me has called for. Institutions that are cost effective, ways to keep our community safe instead of protecting the value of real estate. There are budget cutbacks that have been made across the board, but this is an opportunity to reprioritize our budget toward a community refund to bolster institutions such as affordable housing, services for houseless people and quality public education. Doing this will be a meaningful step toward making Santa Cruz worthy of that reputation that it has. I think we all want this town to be a model of progressive community of the rest of the state. And even the nation imagines it to be when they see images of our mayor kneeling with the police chief. So, you know, actions to be louder than words and we've all seen today is the police defile when calls from the community to defund the police. So just know that you're sending a clear message and we hear you, but it's never too late to change course. My name is Adam Novak and this is the third time I've called in to a council meeting to ask you all to defund the police. This message has been echoed by many other callers. Some people have been in opposition, but it really does seem to be the top issue among the citizens of Santa Cruz at the moment is police funding. Can we cut it? Should we cut it? How much can we cut it? What should we do with it? Last time a bunch of people called in about this, all the acknowledgement we got as far as I could tell was when Mayor Cummings said that on Thursday there'd be a meeting to talk about the budget. Today's Thursday, this is the meeting. I haven't really heard any discussion about adjusting the police budget. In fact, I've looked at the budget. It appears to add a million dollars of police funding from the general fund. I'm beginning to think that you aren't actually paying attention. You really must reject or amend this budget. And in conclusion, I'd like to devote the remainder of my two minutes to the sound of banging on a pot, which seems to be the only thing that can get the city council the attention as demonstrated today when the sound of banging pots brought the police out to clear the city hall campus. So here is a pot. Hi, can you hear me? I'm gonna hope so, I can't hear you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to comment. My name is Hailey Brown. I'm joining other collars today in the call to defund the police and refund community services. As a lifelong resident of Santa Cruz, I'm calling in to express my concern about the proposed budget adoption for the fiscal year 2020 through 2021 and which 28% of the general funds are here to be going towards the Santa Cruz police department, seeing a significant increase from the previous fiscal year. From my understanding of manager, Martine Bernal's explanation of this increase during the UCSB NWHP panel on June 20th, this is to account for cost of living increases and not necessarily to account for new or expanded program and services from SCPP. I would nonetheless like to join with the UCSB NWHP in urging you to revise this budget and consider their thoughtful policy recommendations for a community refund. Now during the global pandemic and economic crisis and the civil rights revolution, this is the time to really be extremely discerning where we direct our limited resources. Cost of living increases are affecting everyone in this community and our community members most affected by that on most marginalized populations are the ones with the greatest need for support at this time, not our police force. We do not approve this proposed budget adoption and instead vote in favor of revision that redirects these funds to community programming that benefits members of our community most in need of support. Thank you so much for your consideration. If you know given the fact that the rest of your time is going to be used to bang on a pot, but thank you for calling in and thank you for your comments on this item. So we'll go to the next caller. Hi, my name is Cass Meaghan. I'm calling because I'm a community member who does not support this proposed budget specifically the amount of money being allocated to the police. A 2018 SCPD operations analysis shows that 80% of all calls to SCPD were quote unquote homeless related. Only 15% of calls were categorized as crime. The amount of money being allocated to police is entirely disproportionate to the community's needs because it's especially egregious during a time when we are in a budget crisis. Like many other community members have said before me, we need to restructure where we put our resources now. I urge you to reallocate these funds to education, healthcare and affordable housing, our city most desperately needs. We have the ability to treat the ailments of the people most in need and care for our community members who are most at risk. This must be done through a model of public health, not policing. These most of addressing public health must be adequately funded in order to work well. Council members, I hope you are truly listening to what Santa Cruz is advocating for right now. Please make the necessary changes to this budget to ensure our community is taken care of. Thank you. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, get in there. Hi, my name is Maria Solis Kennedy and I'm also calling to urge you to cut the police budget and to defund the Santa Cruz Police Department and instead to invest in programs that actually benefit our community like affordable housing and social services. Especially right now when so many of us are still suffering because of COVID-19, the city should prioritize our public health and safety and fundamentally the police do not keep us safe or make our community safer. A third of our general fund towards policing is the ridiculous public expenditure, especially when 80% of all calls homeless related and because as we've heard in this meeting of this strain already happening to the general fund right now. As someone I've already mentioned on social media and various other channels, the police department has been quoted as saying, if someone could take the homeless issues entirely from us and stop us from responding to mental health calls, please take the money. This is exactly what we need to do. The police department is unequipped to deal with issues that houses individuals faced and criminalizing this population who are disproportionately people of color is a racist and classist solution that any progressive city should reject. More training is not the answer and more diverse hiring practices are also not the answer. Frankly, Santa Cruz is behind other progressive cities and joining the conversation about defunding the police and reinvesting in communities of color. This is not impossible or pie in the sky but is in fact absolutely necessary. Thank you. Thank you. So can you hear me? Yes, good evening. Hello. Hey, my name is Rachel Chavez. I'm a registered nurse. I've grown up in Santa Cruz. I am also asking you today in the face of budget cuts to commit to defunding only the SCPD budget, leaving all other budgets intact. I'm asking you to further cut the police budget in order to reinvest that money into community services that actually improve the safety of our community like housing, hard reduction and COVID-19 relief. To be clear, I don't want police reform, not better policing, not community policing. I wanna see this city prioritize caring for its community instead of criminalizing it. Every police reform this country has tried has failed. Despite chokehold bans, implicit bias trainings and body cams, police have continued to murder black people with impunity. The San Jose police department shot their implicit bias trainer with rubber bullets. Policing is inseparable from white supremacy and thus beyond reform. Beyond that, reforms cost money and the police budget is already the majority of ours at 28%. While we as a city dump money into a system that is fundamentally racist and irreparably violent, I have patients who recover from chemotherapy in their cars. I have patients who have to decide between being short on rent or buying life saving medications. I have patients who have to decide whether to pay Uber surge pricing to get to an appointment on time or risk missing an appointment because our bus system is underfunded and has limited routes. Now's the time to imagine a new vision of what safety and community look like. Please defund SCPD and reinvest in our community. Thank you. My name is Sabina Holver. I'm our resident of Santa Cruz. I'm calling to ask that you use the budget shortfalls to defund the police. I agree with the many previous colors at the last city council meeting with the shameful library vote. I heard derision against those that were calling in that they allowed and well organized as if that was a bad thing. Your job is to actually listen to the people right now when they are overwhelmingly telling you that they do not feel safe with the police in the city. This is the first step to take this where there's considerable power over people of color and the homeless in the city. Please listen to your constituents. We are organized and almost calling because defunding the police is not important to us. If we're organized enough to call up a city council meeting at 6 PM on a Thursday, we're organized enough to vote. Thanks for your time. Hello, my name is David. I'm a member of the sunrise movement here in Santa Cruz if you haven't heard of us for a nationwide movement focused on climate change. But of course, as an environmental organization, we understand the interconnection between climate change and racial injustice in this country that so many are protesting right now. So we are joining for these calls to defund. And we actually put out an online forum that's gotten over 60 responses so far and just figuring out how we could use these funds better for our community and the overwhelming majority of people were talking about supporting the houseless. And so we were planning on just reading a quote here on that so many before me have read and that was about a chief mill called to say, we don't need this additional funding if someone else can take it. But another thing that was left out there was that he was saying the county actually has the resources to do this. He said the county has both the responsibility and state funding to provide the leadership. So the question we have is why haven't you moved forward with making another nonviolent branch of trained professionals that can actually better our community and help the house with human tier. And as an environmental organization, we also encourage you to look into regenerative programs that may serve a way to regenerate this house with community such as things like, for instance, the homeless garden project on the west side here and other ways we could just gain employment or give employment opportunity to the homeless population here. That time and time again, scientific studies have shown that things like gardening, land restoration and just working with the land has a lot of mental health benefits. So using that money to not only create a task force to, of course, instead of police being first responders, we have mental health experts being first responders, but also regenerate the land and our communities here. We could better use those funds with the police. So we will hope that you listen to all the voices on this call and reject the current proposal to increase the police budget and reallocate these funds to better serve the community. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next caller, Yvonne. Bird of homeless United for trip and freedom. And to all those listening, the council isn't listening. They have no intention of decriminalizing basic homeless survival behavior or cutting the police budget. The $30 million budget, obviously ridiculous. And innumerable intelligent and reasonable arguments have been made today. Worker job loss, healthcare, renters, the fate of elders, council acting like a board of directors. I think the community needs to do is decide it's going to get together and take the direct July 4th. I'm not mistaken at the town clock. There's a protest at 1pm and our council members can attend this if they want to be more educated and then actually try to do something. But you see, I don't think it's reasonable for us to give these endlessly reasonable arguments again and again, it makes us look like idiots to do this without taking significant action. The city council meeting today was held without any kind of a good advanced notice. So people couldn't even look at it with any clarity in terms of the budget. It was a shielded from the community. He refused to put speakers outside so people could hear what was going on. And the civic auditorium was not used even though it's been repeatedly asked for. Could be used as a safer indoor venue with people safely distanced. All these things are been asked for for years. The council is interested, must be interested. The community has to take the action. I think the next speaker, 4931. Sorry, I'm trying to put my hand down. Alrighty, folks, thank you. Thank you. All right, next speaker, you're on the line. Hello, this is Carol Paul Hamas. Thank you for taking my call. I'm calling to ask you not to defund the police. I think anybody who's paid attention in the last several weeks with this woman with the shooter there and the carjacking that happened yesterday, among other things, realizes that we do need a police department and we appreciate the services of the Santa Cruz Police Department. The people who are calling to defund the Santa Cruz Police Department don't understand that these calls are misplaced. The services that they want, we used to have, I worked in the juvenile justice system for 35 years at a time when we had, in my opinion, a more functional system that cared better for people. But the state dismantled those programs. And those programs need to be reconfigured and brought back so that we do have what people are calling for, which is more mental health services, more drug and alcohol services, more homelessness services. But the funding for those services, all of you who want to defund Santa Cruz Police, the funding for those services comes from the county, not the city. So I hope that all of you who are so passionate about reconfiguring the system and moving the money will go to the Board of Supervisors needing to express this, where actually it would be probably more appropriate. I really support the police budget. I worry that we lose police officers now to other departments that pay better over the hill. I think we need to try and maintain as much of the budget as we can in this time. I know it's gonna be challenging, but please do not defund the police department. Thank you. Thank you very much. Last four digits of your phone number, zero, nine, five, four, you're online. Again, the last four digits of your number are zero, nine, five, four, you're online. So you know this box, I'm gonna keep moving down with the colors. Hi, my name is Andrew Carlson and I'm a longtime resident and business member. And I think there have been some really excellent points that have been made so far. And I'm not sure I could talk in terms of eloquent, so I'm gonna keep this really simple. I really don't know how to teach y'all to care about people, like it's really fundamental. There's a lot of really hurting people in this county. Like I used to do undergrad research in business school. I looked at social benefit programs. And fundamentally, like you have to fund this stuff. And I don't know where, like with the budget. Were y'all listening? I'm a little confused because like, I feel like we made it pretty clear how we wanted the budget to look and whatnot. And that hasn't been reflected. So I'm not really sure what else you'll respond to. So just remember that like we are paying attention. And if you're not going to enforce the will of people, we are gonna remember this come voting time. So like, even if you are limited in the way that you distribute resources and whatnot, like make a statement, say that you support abolishing qualified immunity and that you're not going to absorb the legal responsibilities of your officers and stuff. Like this is all like locating through. You're on the wrong side of history here. I don't know what to tell you. Like, but please, like just like take a stand even if you can't do it voluntarily, but please either redo the budget. Shane, I'm a local resident for a few years now. I'm calling to echo their calls to use the budget for short calls to defend the police. Let's look at the history of this model of policing in America. Prior to prohibition in the Civil War, the self had slave patrols, whereas the North had a policing system that enforced ethnic hierarchy. This continued after the end of the Civil War with the KKK and police down there continuing to enforce racism and ethnic hierarchies. And basically the police became close to a gang because of when prohibition was instated because of corruption. Prohibition ended, the police were professionalized. And what happened is that there was no focus on anti-racism in the police. So even though the enforcement of ethnic hierarchies among what are now called white people was ended, there was no reform to address racism. And the police are still used today. That model continues today, almost 100 years after the end of prohibition with the police still enforcing hierarchy of class and race. That's why a lot of us believe that it needs to be be funded. You cannot reform a system that's fundamentally broken from the bottom up. And so please listen to it. Show some leadership, stop bootlicking, don't be corrupt. This is the time to show some leadership. Thank you. People have pointed out earlier, but I will belabor the point, because that's what I do best. When people call the police in Santa Cruz, that's in Georgia to find it's because a homeless person is existing in a place that's deemed inconvenient. As we all know telling someone to move along just that. They move like what, a quarter mile, and now someone else is gonna complain about them. Real productive. At a previous city council meeting, our mayor said he did not want this conversation to conflate homelessness with the national conversation on policing. Justin, you and I are in complete agreement, which is why I homely suggest that we address the fact that about 80% of SCPD's time is spent responding to homelessness. I completely welcome the separation of policing from Santa Cruz housing policy with open arms. And mayor, I invite you to make good on your words by defunding SCPD. Throwing money at this police department to move the homeless from one place to the next is not only creating a continuous cost for the city that will never go away and is completely ineffective, but also acts as an opportunity cost. That money could be better spent invested in bold reimagining for the city's housing crisis, which would in turn remove much of the supposed need for policing. Medicine Hat, a city in Canada, has the same population as Santa Cruz. They actually ended homelessness entirely. You can go look it up and we can learn from them. Everything from more safe parking to eviction protection to true public housing instead of this BS affordable housing that just ends up being market rate, removing institutional barriers, stacks of concurrent services. I could go on and on, but none of that means anything if the city is not willing to be bold and to grow its spine facing. When something is not working, putting your head down and trying the same crap over and over, it's not going to cut it. And no, giving SCPD little go-pros or in our sensitivity training one time isn't bold. That's just polishing the same turds. So I would like to suggest let's stop turds polishing and try something very different. Thank you. Thank you. This is Gail McHelty and I'm calling. I live in Bonneville. I have two children who go to school in the city of Santa Cruz. My children do junior garden in the city of Santa Cruz. We spend a lot of money in the city of Santa Cruz. I would like to speak as a mother and I told her, your daughter and my daughter Evee play soccer together to point out the fact that we are in a moment right now, allowing us to stop each of us unfolding. And for my job, I'm a climate actor. Today that's not directly related to policing, but it is because racialized racism, white supremacy is at the core of all problems and they cannot be disentangled. And this moment in time, these decisions you are making are huge. And we as a world are in a moment of learning and rushing right now is not the right. And the decisions you are making may seem small and inconsequential, but they are not. And we need to really slow down the money that has been spent into life-giving solutions. And that really is the only way forward. It's our only hope as a human civilization. We are in a moment of evolution, nothing less. And these are not small choices. So please think carefully, realize that our kids' lives, all children's lives around the world are on the line. We need to recognize that. Thank you. I want a baby at the same time. I may not be able to speak right now. Thanks, though. I'm Elaine Edwards. I'm a resident of Santa Cruz. I've called in several times. I'm not going to belabor all my points over again, especially since they've been dismissed repeatedly in the calls with people's cheatsmails, the numbers that we're putting forward, were waived aside callously, I would say, ignoring that they are in fact from the Campaign Zero database, which is based on the FBI database, that's the Santa Cruz Police Department, perpetrates more than 98% of departments in the county. If he would like to refute that data, then he should make all the arrest data from the Santa Cruz Police Department transparently available to the people. And when off of that, I would just go on to say that a lot of things have been pushed aside, saying we should be speaking to the county, that we should be looking for grants, that we should be making these programs happen before we leave from the police. The police are an active agent of violence in this community. It would go a long way just to reduce the police presence in this community. If we did nothing else, that would improve the community. I'm calling on us to reduce the police budget by 50%. Thank you so much. I am an older female living in the county for Santa Cruz for over 20 years, and in the city for over eight years. I wanna tell you about a recent experience I had the beginning of April. I happened to come upon an unhoused young black man surrounded by nine police officers. The police were called because someone called 911, stating that he was going to jump off a bridge and was suicidal. This occurred in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. There is not one mental health professional present. In most situations, I've watched five to 10 cops surrounding someone who was unarmed with absolutely no mental health professionals, crisis intervention, anything like that. And even with the one social worker who works with the police, who was not there on this occasion, but has been out with the police before, I witnessed her only giving out a piece of paper with phone numbers of places to call, most of which are not functional. We need social workers that don't work alongside the police that have no conflict of interest. Police officers are not social workers, nor should they be. No amount of training will make police equipped to handle the vast majority of calls they get because what is needed is a robust social safety net with an armed, not an armed response. We could afford to vastly expand these services if we stop spending a third of our general fund on an ineffective police response to social and economic problems. Even though the city of Santa Cruz only 2%, or 1.9% of the population is black, the unhoused population is a much higher percentage at 8%, so we should be looking at that. We should be helping them. During COVID-19, there have been more encampment suites and more RV towing than before COVID-19. This is, again, CDC's guidelines. On numerous occasions, city officials claim they would follow city guidelines, but obviously this is not what they are doing. Instead of policing homelessness and property crimes which have been proven not only to be ineffective, but very expensive to address this, we should be investing in services that help those in the greatest need such as affordable housing, mental health, and housing homeless. Our public safety approach needs to be compassionate and restorative, not punitive and destructive. Give that money to crisis counselors, community meditators, mediators, and other systems of care. Please check out Kahoot in Eugene, Oregon, the city where George Floyd was murdered. They've already tried police reforms like body cameras, sensitivity training, and they have proven ineffective. Now they're moving towards completely disbanding the police. We have an opportunity to follow suit and exemplify how progressive we say we are here in Santa Cruz. Thanks. Thank you. Next speaker. So I want to echo all of the calls to defund the police and just add one other thing in there which is that since the murder of George Floyd, the term structural racism has been all over the news. We've been talking about, people have been talking sort of waking up to the fact that racism is more than just ideas in the heads of individuals that exist sedimented in institutions. And so as you're thinking about what to do in this budget situation, I think that you would do well to reflect on what this term actually means. Racist structures are perpetuated by racist budgets. And a budget in which the largest single expenditures on a militarized police force indicates to me that there's no real interest in Santa Cruz in addressing racism at a structural level. You don't get a claim that you're against something called structural racism if you're voting to continue funding that structure. Led by radical black activists around the country, other cities are taking these conversations much more seriously than we are here in Santa Cruz. Minneapolis is disbanding its police department. Los Angeles just voted to cut $150 million from theirs. When we say that we want to defund the police, we do mean that the money that is currently being used to patrol, criminalize and arrest disproportionately black and brown people should be reinvested elsewhere into more effective and less violent forms of public safety. The $30 million a year that we spend on policing, nearly a third of our general funds is being used overwhelmingly to address nonviolent property crimes. We're sending cops in to spend 80% of their time dealing with the household population, meaning that we're deliberately aiming them squarely at the most racially diverse segment of our city. We spend half of the police budget on solving crimes, not on solving crimes, but on patrols that disproportionately stop detain and arrest people of color and bring into every situation of threat of incarceration and for some deportation. Carol Pojimac just made a comment about that the money should be found elsewhere for these programs, but I think it really needs to be stressed that we're not just talking about like where are we gonna find the money to fund social programs. We actually do want less policing in this town. We want no policing in this town ultimately, but less would be a start because it's about the structure itself. Thank you. Can I follow? Donald Trump is the greatest leader America has ever known. His face should be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore. We doubt socialists make America great again. Long live big Donald. Good evening, Mayor, can you hear me? Yeah, good evening, Mayor. My name is Kevin Vogel. I'm a resident of the city of Santa Cruz and I am calling you this evening to urge you to fully fund the Santa Cruz Police Department's fiscal year 2021 proposed budget request in the amount of $31.2 million. The most important core function and the primary responsibility of our local government is to provide adequate public safety resources to keep our community safe. The only way to accomplish this is to fund the police department at the level that they have requested. Any reduction in the police department's operating budget will have disastrous results in a department that is already challenged by an extraordinarily high volume of calls for service while at the same time, they are struggling with recruiting and retaining the staff necessary to keep the city of Santa Cruz safe. Police do not be swayed by political pressure from anti-police armchair activists who have absolutely no idea how a police department needs to be funded to operate effectively. Instead, I urge you to listen to your staff or the experts and appropriate the $31.2 million funding that they have requested. Thank you for taking my call and have a good Fourth of July holiday. I'm just gonna get you on the line. I'm not sure that person was about thank you, unmuted your phone, we're gonna have to go to the next caller. I wanted to just say that I think it's absolutely disgraceful that in a time like that we're in, a time where racist institutions are at the forefront of the media, I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our city government is even considering increasing the police budget right now. Times when it's becoming clear as day that the police institutions, you wanna put it across the nation or defunding their police as a way to mitigate or as a way to try and dismantle some of these racist institutions, really considering giving it more funding will know how to make you care because the information is clear and it's abundant. So just you all go look and you look inside at your own prejudices or mirror, please. And then look at the numbers because they all add up. Thank you. I feel that I just wanna echo what I've heard a lot of people say. I really strongly support defunding the police. I think it's despicable, the idea of giving such an institution more money right now. And I think it's despicable that you sick them on the people trying to make a little noise outside those protesters. I think that was bad to do. So yeah, I would urge you to look inward. I would urge you to listen to some of the people on this call to whom I'm sure you're ideologically opposed. But if you could try to see yourself in a broader context, if you could try to see yourself as making the future, I don't think you wanna be on the side of something that is clearly going out. Thanks a lot. This is a final call. I'd like to comment on this item and have it commented on it already. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you for taking my call, mayor Cummings and all the council members. I'm also calling to ask why you haven't discussed defunding the police. Why you think that defunding the police at the same level you're defunding everything else in the city is equitable or fair or just right now. The police budget has increased 25% since 2016. And crime is going down, but our misdemeanor arrests are going up. You've heard from everyone that we aren't happy that the health lists are being harassed by the police. I watch this every day out my window at work as right now the police are going up and down the street, moving people along, asking people not to be there, but where are they supposed to go? And what is our city gonna do to make sure that they have a place to be in community with us and to be a community? I really just ask you to seriously consider that in your budgeting decision tonight. Thank you. Kate, you're on line. I'm the resident of this county and I want to echo the call to defund the police immediately. We've seen time and time again that the police are not the appropriate means to respond to mental health crisis, houselessness or poverty or other community needs, like health that require extremely qualified and equity and especially with mental health crises, they are not equipped to respond to these such calls. And this is a crisis that we're in. We need to respond accordingly. So I call to support measures that support our communities for health, mental health, housing and equity in our county and in our city. And I also call to defund the police and listen to all the callers that have and all the points that have been made in this manner and really call this into consideration. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, this is Brandon and I am calling because I would love it if you guys could defund the police. Just kind of want to join the chorus of voices trying to make the point that our police are not keeping us safe. They're oftentimes doing real damage to citizens of this city and county. And I would also just like to encourage Mayor Cummings and city council in general to maybe participate and listen a little bit more with the protests that have been continuing, especially before you started calling the cops. Anyway, thanks. Yeah, okay, next caller, you could please unmute your phone. Hi there. Thank you Mayor Cummings and council members today for having this forum and listening to our community. I am a longtime resident of Santa Cruz County. I am black and I've lived in Santa Cruz all of my life. I'm echoing all of the calls that have been received tonight in terms of defunding the police. I really hope and really want for Santa Cruz to be an example within the state and across the country in terms of listening to the needs and asks of our community and that our desire for the police to be defunded will be put into consideration while you make your budgeting decisions. Thank you. Thank you, your honor. My name is Neil Mick. I've been a resident of Santa Cruz for about 20 years now. And I'm also calling to ask you to defund the police. But I'd like to, and I agree with everybody that has spoken earlier, but I would also like to just drill down on another angle. We're in a pandemic and the police, it's clearly obvious, are not enforcing the health codes. It's obviously outside their purview and probably just too much for their manpower. I look on the webcams down by the beaches. No one is wearing masks. No one is social distancing. I look outside my street. No one is wearing masks or social distancing. Causing me personally to lose faith in your ability to enforce the health codes. We're starting to see a rise in the infection rate of COVID-19. And I urge you to divert that money to something a little more effective, like maybe a community patrol that could go out to the beaches and issue citations because the police right now, well, they seem to do the high profile busts of this or that motorcycle group that rolls into town. But aside from that, and aside from penalizing food not bombs, which is trying to actually do something right for more, you know, in this community for the unhoused, it doesn't seem to be working. So once again, I ask you, deep on the police, thank you very much. Seeing no other callers, I'm gonna bring it back to council for action and deliberation and just kind of based on some of the comments that were that were expressed on the line. I will also add that I've been meeting the members of the Black Media and Santa Cruz and other community members in the city. And I just want to respect it. I have been hearing, you know, deep fun on this end. I've been hearing even from members of our Black media that they don't necessarily want to see us deep fun. And I've been hearing also about this, you know, community refund campaign, which really focuses on reinvesting in community programs. And you know, last week, we voted to set up a mayor's working group that's really gonna try to work with the community to understand their needs, especially working with the Black community because although I've heard a lot about deep funding to put money towards homelessness and affordable housing, the whole reason why this whole movement has come about is because of systemic racism. And what I really want to focus on as we're continuing these conversations is how we can end systemic racism because even if we take money away from police and give it to other programs, what does that do to change the lives of the experience of Black people and Brown people and people of color in our community? And what does that do to help end systemic racism? So I will say that I'm listening to the folks out here who are saying be fun, but they'll be spending a lot of time with council members and members of the community to really understand what is the holistic need of everyone in our community because we do have a lot of opinions and I think we do have an opportunity for change. And if we want to do it, we're gonna have to work together. And so as one of the callers said, we can't take funding away from the police until something else is in place and I'm very much encouraged and eager to work with partners in our community with our other state and elected officials to understand what we might be able to do moving forward. But this time I also want to point out to the community that the status quo budget is to kind of meet a mandate that we have to have a budget passed by the first regular current meeting in July, which given that the city council doesn't meet in July, we need to have something passed tonight, but we're gonna be going back because as we continue to see the impact of COVID-19, we're gonna continue to adjust our budget and see what cuts will be made so we can maintain our essential services. So I just wanted to be clear that this is the last conversation we're having about this. It's in order for us to move forward and to start digging into what kind of cuts we're gonna need to make in order to have a budget that's gonna allow us to afford our essential services here in the city of San Francisco. So with that, I'll move, I'll open up to the council for action and deliberation and I see the council member Brown has her hand raised. Thank you. I have a couple of comments and a question and I am prepared to make a motion when the time comes for that, when the time is right. So just a couple of comments I wanna make based on what I'm hearing, what we've heard in the staff report, what we've discussed in our budget committee and what we are hearing from members of the public. So I wanna start with the kind of concern that I heard about our move along approach to how we deal with our unhoused community members. I've pretty consistently said that I think that they're, it's costly, not just financially, but in so many ways encounter productive to continue to use a move along only approach. And so I really, really hear what people are saying about the kind of sense in the community that that's what's going on. And so I just think that that's something that we absolutely need to be acknowledging and attempting to do something about, we are leaders here, we are representatives of the city, a city residents of our community. And I do think that it's really important that we kind of acknowledge it and own it and deal with it. So I also wanna say that I've been concerned for a while now and I continue to be concerned about public access to our meetings. So I'm just gonna say it here because it came up multiple times today. And I do think when we're making decisions of like huge import that's gonna, that will affect our community in the ongoing way that we need to find a better way to allow for public input if we will continue to have virtual meetings. I just think, you know, other communities are looking at other ways to do it, the county does it differently. And so I'm just gonna say it here because I've been saying it and so I'd like to publicly express that this is a concern of mine. And I think we're gonna have a sustained call for reevaluating how we approach funding and programming for law enforcement. And so I think it would really behoove us to take that seriously and, you know, and consider that these are genuine, people who are genuinely concerned about these issues, they are authentic voices, they need to be heard, they need to be considered. And, you know, I feel some concern that those, the concerns expressed may be dismissed. So I'd really like to just say, I just want to say those things up front. And then I also want to echo the mayor's comments about what we're doing here today, being, you know, and staff, you know, explain that as well. But just to really make it clear that we are not adopting a budget that we, that will actually be the final budget numbers and line items for the various departments and, you know, programs, we have a tremendous amount of work and challenge before us to try to figure out how we are gonna make it through this crisis and, you know, how the budget is, you know, how we were, that's reflected in our budget. It is a statement of our values, our budget. And I think that we, you know, we certainly want, or I certainly want to be very serious about that and deliberate about that as we move through these conversations, they will be very difficult. It's just not gonna get any easier for a while. So I just wanted to say those things and ask again, if maybe if staff could just clarify, so people really hear what the next steps are for the council in making decisions about the budget. I know we've said we're coming back in, you know, in September, we have a kind of a modeling tool that we're gonna be using to try to help us understand what's to come. But if it just could say a little bit more about how that's gonna go, because I don't want people to think that by adopting a budget here tonight that we are closing the conversation about, what we spend our money on and what we spend the taxpayers' money on. So it just, if we could kind of maybe, Martín, if you could just kind of walk us through that. So it's really clear because I just don't want people to think that we're like not listening and walking away from the conversation and not gonna have a space for that to happen. And I think what they can also add if I miss something or to clarify. So as you pointed out, what is before you is really a temporary or working budget. And that is the case simply because a couple of things, one, is that there was a lot of uncertainty then known to really create a realistic proposed budget. And then two, the price has diverted our attention to other things. And so we weren't actually able to even prepare a budget process, an internal review budget process that we would normally do. So normally you'd get a budget that was much more vetted and reviewed and better structured. So those are the primary reasons. And now that we know that a little bit more about what might be happening and that we recognize that we need to really essentially be budgeting on an ongoing basis. The council approved a budget subcommittee, council members that have already met several times to look at developing, well, look at the budget picture and get a good sense of that. And we've hired a consultant to develop this COVID specific budget forecast. And that will be a tool that we'll use to develop a variety of budget scenarios. And then based on that develop various alternatives to be able to come back with proposals to council that will amend the budget in such a way to balance the budget, because we have to balance the budget. The outlook is pretty dire in that if we don't make a significant reductions over the next several years, we will complete completely our resources and we'll have to be in position to declare bankruptcy and that sort of thing, which we don't absolutely want to do. The budget committee will, in terms of timing, will be working with staff over the next month to put the model together. And also really to look at what are the strategic items that we need to look at with respect to the budget? Do we want to ensure that we put together a budget, for example, that avoid playoffs? What are the priority items that we want to make sure that we include and that are maintained, that sort of thing? The budget committee will then be able to bring forward, in August, what we hope to do is bring a study session to council, where we present the discussions, the model, and some of those strategic policy questions and issues that the council can consider. And then after that, we'll be in a better position to, in September, to make, to take action, because we can't wait too long, otherwise the deficit will grow, grows by the day in the month. So September is what we think is the time, time enough to be able to make, have time to put forward some recommendations and adjustments and then we'll continue to track how we're doing and if things get worse or better, we will come back in December and make further adjustments and then again continue to track and then it may be making further adjustments in February. Now, with respect to, so that's the budget process and that's one element. With respect to the question of policing policies and recommendations around that, the council did also approve a, another council committee that will be working with the police department to look at policing policies and practices and they'll be making recommendations and if there's any of those that impact the budget, they'll have to correlate those and connect those to the budget process as well. As there are other council initiatives and discussions of policy questions that will come forward that will impact the budget as well. So there's some overlap in the interrelation between the various committees in terms of the work that they're doing. So Lupita, I don't know if you wanna add anything to that. No, I think that summarized it pretty well. Yeah, we'll do several check-in points because as I discussed earlier, depending on what the virus is doing, it might really shift the initial assumptions that we make and I think that the modeling tool is very complex and comprehensive where we have the ability to make adjustments to various impacts that would translate into possible. I would just add actually, also we're also hopeful that maybe there'll be some positive news. We hope that the feds in the state will provide some stimulus assistance. I know we've been working in lobbying the state legislature and federal legislators as well to do that and I think it's gonna become a bigger and bigger issue with municipalities and states across the country. So again, that's one item, for example, that we might have to come back and amend and hopefully that'll happen and it'll be a positive development. But thus far, it's all been at news, unfortunately. I'll go around with it. I guess I'll move on to other council members who wanna make comments. Yeah, I was just gonna say, thank you. That was helpful to kind of just lay it out that way. Thank you. Vice Mayor Myers. Martin, could you answer to how we're looking at forecasting, managing the budget, going through at least the initial for six months? I think it's important for the community to understand a little bit about what our reserve policies are and how our reserves come into play at this point in time. Thank you. Sure, absolutely. The, what we're seeing is really unprecedented in terms of how quickly we have lost revenues and how quickly we've had to adapt. So we do have a reserve policy where we maintain reserves. We have a stabilization reserve and we have some other reserves around personal liability. We carry health liability. And we also have some other discretionary funds that and reserves. Well, they really, we don't really call them reserves. They're really trust funds, funds that the council has decided that they need to be reserved instead of site for particular purposes, like the public trust fund, for example, and economic development trust fund. So we do have, but those are, you know, ultimately discretionary in the part of the council. So we have cash on hand to be able to get through difficult times or to address issues or to meet certain goals of the city council. And in particular case the situation is so bad and so quickly that we already with respect to the even the fiscal year that we're ending now, we're gonna have to draw down those fund balances because we lost so much revenue in just a few months at the end of the fiscal year essentially. So we're gonna be drawing those down. $10 million is the estimate. It could be a little higher, a little bit lower than that, but that's what we're anticipating at this point, which is pretty significant. And then with respect to then looking ahead, the actual deficits are actually, like I said, it's hard to predict exact numbers, but they're so large that there's no way we can make those big of cuts without again continuing to use the reserves to cushion the impact. So what we would recommend is that we look at the next, because the deficits are gonna be ongoing over multiple years, we'll have to look at how we use those reserves so that we can spread the cuts and use a combination of reduction and reserves to cushion the blow because over multiple years we'll be able to recover. The other thing there'll be a challenge moving forward too is that those reserves are there for a purpose and we'll have to try to replenish those. And so if we move forward, we'll have to account in the budget a way to do that. So that makes it that's another sort of challenge in the budgeting process moving forward on top of just trying to get through these difficult times. But the first priority will be to again use those reserves to provide a way to get through these next several years in a way to preserve essential services and that meets the goals of the city council to the extent possible. And so that's the potentially approach. And we'll, when we come back to you, you'll see the reserves, their levels and how they can be used and there is some flexibility in how they're used obviously the longer you retain them the more flexibility you have. And also if we're able to finish the year better, for example, that gives us more flexibility. Also if we get some, even if we get one time cash assistance that will help. We did get a little bit from the feds cares act. We have to submit getting about $800,000. So that's the cost. It's one time in each year. We have to spend the end of the year, but that'll help. So those are the factors that we'll use and how the reserves work to try to get us through this difficult period. Thank you, Markine. Yeah, I mean, I think as a member of the budget committee and council member Brown it's extraordinary situation we're in. And for many of the people who are listening tonight in the community, because of this situation, it's not a natural disaster. It's not some of the things that we've seen ever happened before, frankly. The role of our federal government is crucial right now. And frankly, they're failing our communities. It's important for people who really want to help those folks who are left fortunate in our community to really understand that this is a completely unprecedented situation for a local government to try to make its way through. We certainly will put in the time and the effort and really try to think through the budget and look at some of these issues that our community members have brought to us tonight. But ultimately, please focus your attention on advocating for these, advocating for support for local governments from our federal government. If we don't get relief packages directly pointed towards local cities, local government, things will get a lot worse. So I really appreciate all the comments we received tonight. And as much as I appreciate the focus on our local budget, we're in unprecedented times, and we need your support in lobbying our federal government to really step up and help local government throughout the United States right now. So, Martin, thank you for that clarification on reserves. I think it is important for our community to understand that we have had very good fiscal management up until this point in time. And reserves become part of that calculus as well. So thank you, thank you, Mayor. Council Member Watkins and then Council Member Mathews. Thank you, Mayor. I think, I guess I'll start with building my comments off what Vice Mayor Myers was saying in terms of advocacy at the federal level. And when I remember learning about our priorities as a nation and how much we spend nationally on our discretionary dollars on our military budget, I was shocked. And so I just want to make that correlation because I think as a nation we've had our priorities aligned in different ways that don't necessarily go to supporting or making the investments in the ways that we want to see support the good development of people. And I also recognize this movement and what's happening in terms of really questioning our investment and recognizing the complexity of that. And I say that because I was just talking to my family members up in Oakland and my brother lives up there with, he's raising three young African-Americans boys and hearing how the Oakland Unified School District had their own police department and they voted recently as a school board to defund that and eliminating that school to prison pipeline. And that makes sense. And so I think in terms of where I want to sort of weigh in briefly on the content that we've heard from our callers and just in general of this movement, that absolutely we need to look at some of these funding streams and how we're making investments. And we need to figure out what that looks like here for Santa Cruz. And I appreciate the direction we're moving in in terms of hearing from the community and establishing what that could be for us. I also just want to say an acknowledgement of what I think Vice Mayor Meyers points really highlighted which were an unprecedented fiscal challenging times right now. And so we as a local municipality had a lot of work to do and of course this will be coming and we'll have to remain adaptive and look at how we're engaging the community and also doing the best we can with depleting resources. So I guess those are just sort of my brief comments on that. And then in general, we received some information about just in terms of our overall budget and how we compare especially around our spending in terms of our general funds to others in our region. And I found it interesting that, in terms of how Santa Cruz PD's budget, which is 20, and Martin, I invite you to clarify if I'm mischaracterizing this, but we spend 28% of our general fund on our police. And then regionally in terms of how we compare, my understanding from some of the data we received was that between a capital of Scott Valley in Watsonville, a significant amount of those jurisdictions were more towards the sort of 45, 50% of their general fund. So I thought that was an interesting point to understand where we reside as a city. So I know those complex conversations are underway. And then my last, I guess, point would be or sort of hope would be as we as a budget committee moves forward and as we work with our community on sort of different solutions here, that we be creative and think about how to be innovative. And I hope that we as an organization recognize that with schools likely to have really challenging times ahead in terms of reopening that that then weighs on our workforce and how we can be supportive of parents who are working from home, our city workers who have parents who are working from home and having adaptable schedules for them and supporting them. I know the city was first to create a pop-up childcare and I just want to kind of acknowledge that that's going to be an ongoing challenge because schools will not open the way that they have in providing the childcare that parents and workers need. And I just know this conversation is going to be continuing. So I appreciate the overview, I appreciate the work and I'm also ready to get to work to see how we can continue to be adaptable and do our best to serve our residents. Thank you, Council Member Matthews. Thank you. Do I understand the Budget Committee has met a couple of times already, working with the model, is that correct? And I'm not on the Budget Committee and obviously there's some seriously tough work ahead in the month, the next six weeks. And we know we can discuss this offline but I would really appreciate, I think probably other members who aren't on the Budget Committee would appreciate having good communication probably with the consultant just to avoid brown-acting. But they kept well in the loop going forward. The model, I know nothing about the model. Know what the key takeaway points are. We are going to be facing between using but protecting our reserves and whatever rate reality faces. Some seriously unattractive choices, let's face it. And we can be creative and innovative but as everyone has said, this is a crisis unlike anything we've seen before. So, and the other thing that occurs, whether it's a webinar or some smaller meetings, whatever, the community also, I think, benefits, there's so much need for information and everyone's so overloaded but giving the community access to the information as we move through the budget process rather than just the meeting that the budget is presented to them. I think there has to be a little bit more access to information along the way and also to our commissions. We just turned from public works commission, our previous item. Our commissions have their own priorities, their own lenses, their own wants, needs. And I think it could be helpful for them to understand the city's broad picture as well. So I'm just throwing those out as thoughts. And I personally would like to have a better sense of the model and the process going forward. So when we do come to those recommendations, we have a good grounding for asking. Sure, having to do that, we just got the first draft yesterday morning for the first time I thought. Yeah, but just an introduction to the model, that's it. Yeah. So looks like the comments from council members is dying down. I don't see hands raised. So I'm going to go ahead and try to make a motion here. I did send the text of it to the city clerk. I don't know, Bonnie, if you had, great. Thank you. So this is pretty much intended to move in the direction that the staff has recommended kind of in this interim period while we're working with, and it's going to be an iterative process, I think ongoing for a long time now. That recommendation along with a couple of additions and I'll just kind of go through them here. So the first part is unchange the language is the recommendation that was in our agenda report. And then I've highlighted one addition in our budget committee meeting. I will, with a caveat that Vice Mayor Myers was not present. We discussed including $30,000 allocation for tenant sanctuary. And this was based on request from them to provide continuing services to renters for consideration during future budget discussion. So I will highlight again here that this is just asking that it be put into the mix of the bigger budget picture for consideration. And we know that we are going to be making additional cuts. And so it's hard to know what in the priority is where this will come out, but I just wanted it to be included. And the mayor agreed in our committee meeting yesterday. So I'm just adding that. And then number two is the, from the agenda report on the water commission's recommendations regarding the water department's operating and CIP, pro, the community, sorry, the capital investment program CIP. And I appreciate all the work that the water commission did to review all of this and make those comments for us, give those comments to us in anticipation of this budget adoption. And then the last few are, this is to kind of try to begin to open up the space to have a conversation in response to what we are hearing from the community. I think it's great that the mayor's working group on policing has been established. And so in that spirit of moving ahead with the conversation, I would like to add to the initial recommendation of this number three, four, and five, that's to direct the mayor's working group on policing to consider an evaluation of SCPD programs and budget to determine possible opportunities for reallocating funds to support programs that help end systemic racism in policing for direct, because this is not, so that's a great, that's a location, a site for community engagement and conversation and kind of brainstorming and working through this issue. Another space that I think is important to kind of have this conversation is the homeless two by two committee. And so I've just included here, direct the city representatives to the homeless two by two committee to discuss with the county possible opportunities for non-police responses to 911 calls for service, avenues for expanding, mobile crisis intervention alternatives, which we hear constantly are very critical and we're hearing that kind of in spades right now and then related funding opportunities. I have included number five, I wasn't quite sure how to characterize this, but I think it's important to have some kind of report back timeline, because we often provide directions and then we don't necessarily track them. And so I think it would be nice to just hear a report back. And I've included the mayor and city staff here, given that the mayor's on both of those committees plays a central critical role here in that conversation. And to return to council with a progress report and recommendations, I guess to the extent that's feasible in September of 2020, with respect to efforts described in parts three and four. So there it is, I hope that we can move forward and I'd like to hear what others think. If we, I get a second. So motion by council member Brown, looks like I muted it. Sorry, I was trying to second. Okay, so the motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Golder. I saw the city manager had his hand raised and so I'll just see what he may want to comment on. Yes, just a couple of clarifications. One of them was the fact is also recommending adding in your final motion, the June 23rd changes. So those are the ones that Lupita added in the presentation. And then also I thought I'd just give a quick overview of the budget committee meeting that was held more recently, just a little more clarification on that. And that was, there were a couple of items that were discussed there. Council member Myers was not able to make the meeting. So it was council members Brown and Mayor Cummings who were at that meeting. So the committee discussed a couple of items. One was the Senate. Thank you very much. That was Jim. He'd be on. Senate, Senate sanctuary item that the council member Brown noted. And the other that it was they, the council considered whether to make an adjustment in the council budget to reflect also a reduction as similar to the employees. And so what the council, the committee recommended was to cut an amount that was equivalent to similar to what employees did with respect to the temperature furlough, which would be to cut the travel budget of the city council. So I believe that was in the $8,000 range, as I recall. So that was the other recommendation that came out of the budget committee. So it's wanted to clarify those two items. Yeah, just a couple of comments. On number one, the addition support the budget committee's recommendation to include a 30,000 allocation for tenant sanctuary. That sounds like they mean for that to be included no matter what. I think it would be better to say support budget committee's inclusion of 30,000 allocated consideration of 30,000 for tenant sanctuary. I think there's gonna be nothing sacred in our budget going forward. So I think if the language was just to say support budget committee's recommendation to consider 30,000 allocation for tenant sanctuary. I just to be really clear. Then on number three, the working group. Many people in the community are saying defund the police and take that money and do something else with it. I don't think that's what's intended here, but it's the direction for the mayor's working group to consider evaluation PD programs and budgets determine possible opportunities for reallocating funds to support programs. I think if that intended to be internal, I don't know why it says to say reallocating. It just be possible opportunities for allocating funds. It's not like you're kicking in from PD and putting them somewhere else. So they're minor, but I think it's a clarification. Yeah. And I made my comments about kind of keeping council members and community and commissions in the loop that's kind of covered by number five. I would say that that sounds, I mean, to me, that sounds to be fine. Yeah, clear. I don't know if the second item to make up the motion helps on the ground. Yeah. Thank you. I have my hand up. So yeah, I'm, and I don't know Bonnie if it would be possible to put those wording changes into the document that you have. So that would include, so for opportunities for allocating funds rather than reallocating in number, in the following addition under number one consideration of an allocation. And then in the first, the first item to add, including the revisions approved on June 23rd, 2020. What number is that for? The, for June 23rd, adding June 23rd. Under one. That's in number one. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I do have one more question as well. I could ask it now. I did mention in the very beginning of this discussion if there are positions that are considered urgent in whatever department that that's a judgment call. And in some cases, there may be action to fill those without waiting until September, whenever. So that's just a question for city manager, yeah. Yes. So what you approved today is the budget with everything in it. And of course, there is discretion to like, just like we have with respect to the hiring previous fiscal year budget to the other process of reviewing every single position and then making a decision whether to move forward with it or not as well. Yeah. But yes. And I have a question too. We need to include in this motion, the reallocation of council member funds. So it would be to reduce the council budget by eliminating the travel budget. I think it would suffice. So that could be a number six. Yeah. Can you restate that? It would be to reduce the city council budget by eliminating the travel budget. And I just don't have the number off the top of my head the exact number, but I believe it was the entire amount reflected that 10%. Also recognizing that the- Martin. Oh, here's Laura. This is Laura. It should be reducing the travel and meetings budget. They don't need to eliminate the entire dollar amount that's in there. Reduce the city council budget by eliminating- Reduce the- Laura, can you read that again? By reducing the travel and meetings budget. Do you recall what that amount was, Laura? I think that's the main thing. It's around 9,000 and change. We can put probably 9,500 dollars. So reduce the city council budget by reducing the travel and meeting budget to meet the 10%. Yeah. Yeah. That would be a good qualifier. It would be to meet the 10%. Is there anything else that's missing, Martin, from that meeting? No, I think those are the main items. And I think you've included the June 23rd actions. I think you can scroll up. I don't think we can see number one very well. And I think, Lupita, I think you had recommended including it as part of number, or you did, it's up here, it's part of number one. Mayor, it's up there. If I could, I think that what shows up as number six is actually one of those recommendations from that first budget committee. With the following addition, did I understand, it's a technicality. Reducing the city council travel and meeting budget by 10%, didn't that come out as a recommendation from that first budget committee meeting? That is out of one we just had the other day, but I was just wanting to make sure. Yeah. Yeah. That just defines this works. Just talking about. Yeah, I did want to thank you for working through those additions and changes. I did want to revisit the question regarding, or the wording regarding allocating versus reallocating, because I do feel like it's important to kind of acknowledge that we are not going to be looking at any new funding anytime soon. We're not going to be looking at expanded funding. So it would potentially require a reallocation of resources within our budget if we decide that we're going to fund something. So I feel like it would be clearer and not controlling in any way to say reallocating funds. So that would be my preference to leave that alone. You know, it's probably moved in the reality that we're in because departments are pretty much operating with a zero sum, and if they're going to add some programs, they're going to come out of somewhere. So it's explicit really. I'm not going to fall in my sword about that. It's assumed that this is internal. You know, the one thing I would add after funds is and explore other funding opportunities because I don't know if there was any that exists, but if there are. Yeah. So if I could then maybe just put and or explore other. Council member Wattens. I was just going to say, I think my understanding is that this is exactly what this group is working on. And my understanding is that these were the kind of considerations they were exploring already. Is that feel accurate to you there? Okay. I think it's just a formal direct action that that be a part of this process. So then just so folks know, I mean, we basically we formed the group last Tuesday and then now we're back in the council meeting this Thursday and we're going to be, you know, moving forward with trying to formalize this and pre-instruct so that we can bring back and feedback that we can bring back from council and community. Yeah. If I may just to clarify with respect to the first item regarding the tenant century. So as I read that, that would that consideration would happen to the budget committee. Is that correct? I'll come around once again. I would imagine so or that yeah, come around. Yeah. The idea was just to include that so that it's part of the broader budget deliberation. So those will go through the budget committee. Yeah. Before they come to council. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Vice Mayor Myers. Once as well. The committee would be looking at both things. Thank you. Any further questions from council hearing none. I think we're going to be in a very different world moving forward with this budget and just given all the conversations we've had and the public and so I was hoping as we move forward we can keep an open mind to how we're going to be dealing with everything moving forward and it's going to be a very stressful and difficult process. And I think as my colleagues said earlier, I just encourage the public to please continue pressuring at the federal level because without resources here in the city it really makes a challenging for us to make all these wonderful programs you want to see reality it makes it really difficult for us to run a city and meet the needs of our community. So there's no further comments. I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll call. Thank you Mayor, Council Member Byers. Oh, you're muted. Matthews? Hi. Brown? Hi. Boulder? Vice Mayor Meyers? Hi. Mayor coming. Call for a final meeting. The council will be resettling until the second Tuesday in August and so we look forward to your meeting with you all at that time. To be working. Goodbye.