 Thank you. Okay. Are we ready? I think you got about another minute. Oh, Mike. Mine said now. That's all right. You may be accurate. I'm sorry. Just watch. All right. Good morning, everyone. And I'd like to call this. March 26th. Meeting of the board of directors for Metro tour. And ask Gina for a roll call. Okay. Dr. Dutra. Present here. Good morning. Good morning. Dr. Gonzalez. Here. Dr. Collins, Harry Johnson. Here. Dr. Connick. Here. Dr. Lynn. Here. Dr. McPherson. Thank you. Dr. Myers. Here. Dr. Pagler. Here. Dr. Peterson. Here. Dr. Rothwell. Here. Dr. Rotkin. Here. Ex-oPCL director Henderson, let us know that he would not be here today. Ex-oPCL director Northcut. Here. We have quorum. Okay. Thank you. And the next item on our agenda is to recess to the SCCIC meeting. And I think that's a brief matter. And if I'm correct. Let me describe what that organization is. Thank you. When an agency like the Metropolitan transit district floats a bond, apparently under federal law, you can't take the money directly from the bond holders. And so a non-profit organization gets created. It's a non-profit organization. It's a non-profit organization. I don't know why the Fed decided this was useful because it seems a little bit like just an extra step for no good reason, but it's required by the law. And so if they, if we ever wanted to, in the past, we wanted to float a bond. So we created this organization and used it to float a small bond for the transit district. This was in the 80s. And it costs money to set one of these things up. There's legal costs involved in a bunch of other stuff. And so we just kept it in existence. It doesn't cost us anything to do so. And it meets once a year at this point, because we have no plans at this point to float any bonds. So it sits there just to keep it alive and save us a couple, several thousands of dollars to, it would cost us if we were going to sunset it. We, we actually control that agency. That's what's so strange about it. If you had a sort of an agency with independent powers, it'd be different, but it's totally, And the people on the board are totally members of the transit board and that the chair nominates them and we appoint them we've already done that. So this is their annual meeting. And as you'll see it basically includes a, you know, wrecking minutes from the last year's meeting that there's no bond in front of us. I set up the time for the next meeting and then adjourn that's going to that's what's about to happen here. It should be very quick. You know, free lunch when we actually were floating a bond, but and served on that committee but we're not doing any bonds and there's no lunch involved just this quick meeting. We're also going to prove last year's financial statement. Yes. All right. Thank you. So, um, who will I be. We just we just recess and there should be a chair of that committee if not they should quickly point one. All right. Yeah. I'm actually it's president but whatever. Right. So if with the chair's permission, I'll call to order the annual meeting of the Santa Cruz Civic Improvement Corporation. Agenda our annual board of directors meeting of March 26, 2021 members of public are not attending this meeting, but they will have a chance to make a comment if they so please. The members of the board of directors, as was elected by the trend of the Metro board is myself as president vice president of the rail guns all as secretary Manu Koenig treasure Donna Myers and director Larry pay is also on. So I will call to order. That and we do have to consider appointing members that I officially that I just mentioned, if I would entertain a motion. I'd make that motion. I'll second that. Okay, I think we should call the roll. Motion to approve the appointments of directors Gonzales Koenig McPherson and Pegler for a two year term 2021 to 2023 and director Myers for a one year term 2022 to 2023. She is replacing director Kaufman Gomez. That was a motion by Pegler and I'm sorry I didn't see you did the second. Gonzalez. Thank you. Okay, so the roll call is director McPherson. Hi. Dr Gonzalez. Hi. Dr Koenig. Hi. Dr Myers. Hi. Dr. Pegler. Hi. We have quorum. Thank you. We have any oral or written communications. No, sir. Okay, that was item number four. I'm never five additions or deletions to the agenda. No, sir. No, sir. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. I'm never six. Remember six approved the prior year minutes of April 24 2020. It's attached with the entertain emotion. I'll move the item. I'll second. Very good. Just call those. The directors, the five directors to approve this. I believe we don't have to have the whole board. I think correct. Just the five. Yes. I'll take the bill. It's still legal. I just approved the minutes of April 24. 2020 of print as presented. Dr. Good director McPherson. I took a tonic. I'm staying. Dr. Myers. And director Pegler. For eyes and won abstention. Motion passes. Okay. That is attachment C shows that the operating revenues were $250 in 2020, $270 or $270 in 2017. Well, and I say it's 250 and 2,770. Well, I had these comments by members of the board I entertain a motion to accept the financial statements. I'll make that motion. Second. Call the roll, please. Motion to approve the financial statements as presented, motion by Director Pagler. And I believe the second one is Director Koenig. Correct. Okay. And the roll is, come on fingers, Director McPherson. Aye. Director Gonzales. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Director Myers. Aye. And Director Pagler. Motion passes unanimously. Okay. And again, did I ask, are there any public comments? I see no hands, no, nothing. Okay. All right, we'll go to item number eight. We'll adjourn to the next PCIC Board of Directors meeting. Sorry, Mr. Chair, if I could interrupt, I'm sorry. We do have a hand from attendees, Deb Molina. Oh, excuse me. Okay, go ahead. Yes. I was just wondering if this is the time to just express my appreciation for Metro? Oh, maybe wait till the regular meeting. We're gonna adjourn here. It'll come up just in a minute. Okay. Commit, that'll be the right time to do it before the Metro Board. All right, thank you. You're welcome. Okay. And we'll go to item number eight to adjourn the next, to the next time. You have another hand? Yeah, Mr. Chair, there's some confusion. There's some folks that wanna speak under public comment at the regular board meeting. I believe they're a little bit confused thinking that they need to comment under this item. Okay. You know, I'm sorry, I was asking for comments just related to Santa Cruz Civic Improvement Corporation, this five member board of the Metro. So public comment will be taken in just a moment under the regular meeting of Metro. So I think just I'll go ahead and move to have a motion to adjourn the meeting of the... I'll make that motion. A second next. Second. Call the roll please. We don't need a motion to adjourn. We can just adjourn. All right. Okay. We will adjourn back to the regular meeting of Metro of March 20, 2021. President Cruz. Thank you. And so reconvening the board of directors meeting for Metro and starting by thanking the community TV for broadcasting today's Metro meeting for... Anyway, I've got a community TV of Santa Cruz County. We thank you for broadcasting today's meeting and as for any other announcements and are there board of directors comments? Seeing none, we will move to oral and written communications of the board of directors and starting with Buzz Anderson's on his email, I think for bus stop services. That was included in the packet. So it's available for public information already. Okay. Then we can move to labor organization comments. No, you have your general comments for the general public. This is their chance to talk. All right. And I just missed that. Thank you, Mike. So now we see some hands up and this would be the time for the public to comment on any items that are not on the agenda. And you would have three minutes for that comment. So starting with Deb M. Yes, good morning. I'd like to express my appreciation for the Metro bus services. And I believe that Metro is a big part of the solution to our traffic problems in this county. Instead of the RTC wasting more money on trains, studies and surveys, if they invested in an increasing bus services by adding additional times and routes, it would be an equitable and efficient way for people to commute around our county. The bus gets people where they actually need to go using a single source of transportation. The infrastructure for buses is in place as opposed to having to spend millions on tracks and concrete retaining walls. Continuing to improve the bus system would allow the railroad corridor to be used for safe, efficient, active transportation. And finally, I'm concerned that if the RTC continues with their train plan, there will be fewer dollars for the Metro system that actually does work in this county. Thank you very much. Thank you, Deb. Next we have Brian from Trail Now. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, thank you. Hi, Brian from Trail Now. Thank you for taking the time to listen to public comments. Yes, I wanna remind this board that there is an important vote on April next Thursday on how to use the Santa Cruz Coastal Corridor. The facts have been shown now that rail banking is a legal process to preserve the right-of-way. 100% of those railroad tracks have to be removed for any type of future transit. And the current proposal is to essentially destroy and tear down all of our historic train trestles. Can you imagine tearing down the Capitola, hidden beach or seascape train trestles just for essentially 60 trains a day moving what, 2,500 people, if that. So it's really important a vote coming up. And we really, really after a decade of letting that property sit unused, we really need to use the property, the facts show that we can, and we appreciate Metro Board getting on board with our effort. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brian. Next we have Joan Jeffries. I actually wanted to speak on, under the labor organization communications. Sorry, I think I'm on the wrong item. All right, nope. We'll bring you up under labor. Thank you. Next is Buzz Anderson. Okay. Okay, hi. Thank you, Metro Board. I have two items to share. The first one was a video I sent out of Tyler Fox. And I think Gina was able to get that to going. Gina, were you able to put that up, Tyler Fox's video? And Buzz, let me just say, as long as that can be done within your three minutes, including the setup time, we're good. Okay, well, maybe she can work on that. And another item that I'd like to draw the Board's attention to is a guest commentary that appeared in the Register of Pajoronian. It was written by me, and much of what was put forward in that article came from a piece in the Berkeley Planning Journal entitled Public Transit Planning and Social Equity. The main points of the op-ed that I wrote are, one, people like cars, 95% of households own cars. Cars are the main source of traffic congestion in our county. Two, for public transit to be effective, it has to offer many of the advantages of the car. Three, buses come closest to achieving this. Use of surface streets can stop anywhere and have relatively cheap fares. Trains are not a viable public transit option, especially in our county of only 275,000 people. Four, as for social equity concerns, buses are way more effective than a train. Train commuters are typically higher-income professionals, not construction workers, not restaurant employees, not service workers. The average annual salary of a smart train user is $97,000. Trains benefit the privileged few and require huge infrastructure and maintenance costs as well as regressive sales tax increases. I'd like to see our community go all in on Metro, Metro is in place and is poised to deliver the best public transit in our county. New buses are coming online, bus on shoulder and adaptive signal control will be a reality in the not too distant future. Services can be expanded into more neighborhoods. We need the political commitment and the redirection of dollars towards improved bus service. When people from all walks of life ride the bus, social equity is forwarded in powerful ways. The future actions of this board can help to make this happen. Thank you, and if we can run that video, if there's time. I'm not sure there is, Gina. Can we run that? It's a 28-second video, I think you're just gonna make it. Oh, right, perfect, thank you. Walter, can you up the Tyler Fox video that you just had onscreen a minute ago? Here we go, perfect. We're not hearing sound. No, that might be the best we get, sorry, Buzz. We get a rail and a trail they would have to put in. Personally, I love trees. You really want more noise, best form of public transit in central and Greenland. Thanks, Walter. Thanks for everyone. All right, we got it all in. Anyone else wish to speak under this announcement or public comment time? I don't see any other hands. No, I don't either. Okay, thank you, everyone. So we will move to the next item, labor organization comments. Hi, can you guys hear me? This is Joan. Yes. Okay, great, hi. Good morning, board members. Mr. Clifford and all other attendees today. My name is Joan Jeffries. I've been at Metro almost nine years and I'm the SEA chapter president of SEIU. So I'm here today to let you know that our union has serious concerns about the fact that several positions are proposed to be unfunded in the draft preliminary budget that's on your agendas today. Now, of course, we don't want to lose positions or the people that are doing those jobs, but beyond that, we believe that doing this would have a huge negative impact on the ability of Metro to provide the services our community is counting on. To give you further details of why this is so, I would like to introduce you to Kayla Hill, our SEA secretary treasurer. And I think Kayla is here on the call today, ready to speak. Let me just share, Joan, that this is going to be discussed under the budget presentation. And you may want to have those comments after hearing the presentation on specifically on what you're speaking on. Okay, I understand. That would be fine as well. Yeah, I think that might work best since that you'll be able to have that information before us at the same time you speak. Okay, all right, that sounds fine. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Do we have anyone else under labor comments? Okay, I don't see any. So if not, we will go to any, I think we have our written comments, we'll go to additional documentation. No, I think we're good through our opening session and then move to the regular agenda. We're now to the consent agenda. Yes, we do, we need, we do, we need a motion to approve the consent agenda or if there are any alterations to that consent agenda. Start by asking if the public or any items the public might be interested in having us discuss further. Please. Thank you, Michael. So is there any items on the consent agenda that the public wishes to either have moved to our regular agenda or speak on? All right, I don't see any. Does the board have anything from the consent agenda that they want to be moved to a regular agenda? All right. Then I move approval of the consent agenda. This is my third. I'll second it. This is Myers. Have a motion by Rodkin and second by Myers. Can we have a roll call? Go. Motion to accept the consent agenda as presented motion by director Rock, can second by director Myers. Roll call is director Dutra. Yes. Dr. Gonzalez. Yes. Dr. Collins, Harry Johnson. Yes. Dr. Koenig. Yes. Dr. Lin. Yes. Dr. McPherson. Yes. Dr. Myers. Yes. Dr. Paedler. Yes. Dr. Peterson. Yes. Dr. Rothbaugh. Yes. And director Rodkin. All right. Unanimous. Thank you. So next on our regular agenda is a presentation of Employee Longevity Award. And this is gonna be challenging. I'm gonna try to say the name correctly. Jason. Logi. Logi. Digi. Logi Digi? Is that correct? Somewhere close, Jason? Logi Digi. Oh, all right. That was my biggest worry for the meeting is knowing that was not gonna be an easy one. Anyway, we do wanna acknowledge Jason's 20 year service and let me just grab that, his bio. Jason's been with Santa Cruz Metro Transit for 20 years working as a mechanic, started as a mechanic and currently holds classifications of lead mechanic. His dad retired from Santa Cruz Metro after 32 years of being a mechanic. So followed in dad's footsteps. They used to tinker with family vehicles and he knew that one day he wanted to work in that field. Jason was only 20 when he started at Metro in 2001. He had two stroke Detroit diesel engines along with various makes and models of buses. We had just begun to see the CNG buses in the fleet. And as of last week, we have our very first all-electric bus. Jason has seen the new buildings, new faces over the years. Metro has been kind to him, he said, through difficult times, both personal and work related. He has two boys, Jack and Miles and he's proud of what their dad does. They're proud of what their dad does and they are not hesitant to mention it when they see a bus go by. Jason hopes that one day, his sons follow in his footsteps doing something they can enjoy. Working for Metro has been Jason's career. He plans to retire from Metro and hopefully before another 20 years has passed, he said. He has met some really wonderful people, hopes to meet more and he's looking forward to when he can socialize again so that we can have another picnic with great people, great food, AKA Kenny's Ribs, he said. Till next time on the bus, he wants to thank everyone. Wonderful, Jason and congratulations. Thank you for your dedications 20 years, wow. Let's do a little plus, okay. Next, I have retiree resolutions of appreciation and we have three, Rufus Francis, Debbie Kinslow and Gilberto Lemus. Let me move, let me move the resolution that. Yes, thank you. That recognizes and appreciates their service. So that's my motion. I'll second that. Okay, and on and thank you. Give me a roll call. We need, I know, we have a motion. Second, did you catch that, Gina? I have a motion to accept the retiree resolutions of appreciation for Mr. Francis, Ms. Kinslow and Mr. Lemus as presented. The motion was by Dr. Ratkin and I believe the second was by Dr. Dutra. It might have been me. I'm sorry, it was me, yeah. Oh, there you go. Larry Pegler. Got it. Thank you, Larry. Okay, the roll call is Dr. Dutra. Yes. Dr. Gonzalez. Aye. Dr. Calantari Johnson. Yes. Dr. Konig. Aye. Dr. Lin. Aye. Dr. McPherson. Aye. Dr. Myers. Aye. Dr. Pegler. Aye. Dr. Peterson. Aye. Dr. Ralfwell. Yes. And Dr. Ratkin. Aye. Inevitous. All right, thank you. So we have, and so for Donna. Excuse me, I'm sorry, Chair, we do have bios for the retirees. I don't know if you wanted to share this. Okay. Yes, I did, and I was just, sorry. Just for, no, thank you. I've never, never hesitated. So under our first retiring Rufus, Francis, safety and security, risk management director, 21 months of service with Metro, during his short time with Metro Rufus, completed and updated the program, bringing Metro into full compliance with all state and federal regulatory requirements. And that includes the injury and illness prevention program, COVID-19 prevention program, public transportation agency safety plan, emergency operations plan, continuity of operations, system security and emergency preparedness plan, and useful utilization of industry safe programs. So under a short time, he's during COVID, certainly had a lot of challenges to, and the work he's provided, want to thank Rufus for his service. Next we have Debbie Kinzo, finance deputy director, 13 years of service with Metro. Debbie started working at Metro in February of 2007 as the assistant finance manager and oversaw the finance department for nearly 14 years. Debbie's position was retitled to finance deputy director in June, 2018. During her career with Metro, Debbie steered the finance department through challenging transitions in times of financial distress. Debbie oversaw many defining moments and major developments at Metro, such as implementation of an automated timekeeping position, a system, and CalPERS reporting. The streamlining and management of fixed assets, the development and implementation of various strategies to resolve the 2014 and 2015 structural deficit, to name just a few. In addition, she assisted the CFO and directly oversaw the following financial aspects of the agency. General ledger, account payable, accounts receivable, payroll, timekeeping, CalPERS reporting, fixed asset management, audits, as well as financial and regulatory reporting. Above all, Debbie's commitment and dedication to her colleagues and to Metro, was inspiring and contagious to all of us. We appreciate and we greatly value her professionalism, mentorship, and support. We all hope Debbie enjoys every minute of her retirement best wishes. And our third is Gilberto Lemus, a bus operator 35 years of service with Metro. Mr. Lemus was featured in a Santa Cruz Sentinel article June 9th, 2019. And all of us, I think might have seen or we see properties of that, I hope. Gilberto is a fixed route relief operator, doesn't have an assigned route, meaning he covers routes when a regular driver's cannot. He received his 30 year safe driver certificate in 2018. He believes driving a bus is easier than driving his car. Originally from Mexico, he lives in Santa Cruz with his wife. They have three adult children. In his career, there hasn't been anything he can handle, he said. He has dealt with racial issues, but he doesn't let it bother him. If you start to worry about that stuff, it will kill you, he said. Recounting a time he carried his frustration home after a Snapple bottle got stuck in his bus drawer. You either have to like people or you just have to be patient with them. On the bus, we carry everybody and everything this city has. He has found underwear, syringes, beer, whiskey and other things left on the bus. As a tip to new drivers, he says, be patient, learn how to read people, show up on time for your shift and beware of your surroundings. Wow, we can frame that advice for many of us and please applause for all three of our retirees. It's sad, I remember retirement celebrations we've had and hopefully one day we can meet in person to congratulate and cheer on each one of our retirees and all of our longevity award recipients. So sad that we can't be there for all three special people but we thank you for their service. And are there any other comments on this matter from anyone other than we all, I know you're commanding each of them and we will move to the Santa Cruz County Operation Plan Update. This is being offered by Matt Machado who's the deputy county administrative officer for the public works department. He's public works director of the county of Santa Cruz. So Walter will pull up his presentation. Okay. Agenda item number 14. Yes. And I'm not sure we're mad. There he is. There we go. Matt, are you available? Yep, can you hear me? Yes, we do. All right, I just got myself unmuted. So thank you and good morning chair, good morning directors, Mr. Clifford. Thank you for the time today to share a bit about our Santa Cruz County operational plan. This is an update. It was actually two years ago that I gave our first update our little overview of our plan. So let's go to the next slide. Today I will cover a quick overview of the initiative. I'm going to talk a bit about the status of those objectives. We're coming to the end of our two year objective season here. I'm gonna focus on the transportation area because that's your business and our business too. So I'll share a bit of update on that. And then a bit of a view for the future and then finish with some timeline. So next slide please. So with board and staff support the county has staggered the introduction of four initiatives over the last two years we do have a strategic plan that sets the direction. We have a two year operational plan and budget to create and finance our priorities. We have Primo, which is our continuous process improvement effort. And we have performance measurement as a tool to measure and report progress across these initiatives. And you can see on the slide how they all interact. So next slide please. So as I mentioned, we're coming to the end of our first two year operational plan. It does end June of this year. This plan was developed based upon the county's strategic plan that was developed in fiscal year 17-18. And then in fiscal year 18-19 we worked on promotion and the operationalization of that strategic plan. That resulted in 180 objectives over six focus areas. As of right now, we're about 70% complete and we're making great strides forward. Just quickly, we completed 100% 64 objectives, 60 are in progress and on time, 49 were amended. We did withdraw seven, but we are complete. We are on track to complete 70%, which is great. If we had completed 100%, I would say that we didn't stretch enough in our goals. And so we always envisioned that we would stretch ourselves as far as we can go knowing that we may not hit 100%. So we're pretty proud of the 70% mark. Next, I'm gonna focus on what's near and dear to your heart and to mine as the Public Works Director our transportation focus area. This is one of six areas, but I will just stay focused on this one today. And so in the transportation area, we did develop four goals. And I'm gonna focus on three of those. And so let's go to the next slide. We'll start with our reliable transportation. And so the goal within this area was our regional mobility to improve road infrastructure and intra-county connectivity and enhance commuting solutions. With that goal, we developed two strategies, which are you can see there, improve traffic flow and work with our local transportation partners to improve the multimodal transportation network. And as we go forward, I'll share some examples, but let's continue to go through these goals. So let's move to the next slide. So also under reliable transportation as our community mobility, which the goal is to grow alternative transportation networks and lower barriers to mobility. The strategies that we developed for this goal is to support policies and infrastructure that encourage alternative transportation and plan transportation networks that are adaptive to innovative mobility solutions. Go on to the next slide, please. And then the last area that I'll share a bit about today is our goal of public transit, work to enhance functionality and promote use of public transit with the strategies working with local partners to prioritize transit, promoting policies and programs throughout our system. And so next I would like to share a couple examples. And so recall that our strategic plan did develop a vision, mission values. We did cover six focus areas. That included 24 goals. I just covered three of those with you. As part of those 24 goals, we developed 54 strategies. I just covered about six of those with you. And from those strategies, we developed objectives, 180 actually in total of all the six focus areas. Just in public works, which is focused on, partially focused on transportation, we developed 19 objectives. These objectives were specific, they were measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. When I say attainable, they were stretch goals. So you'll see that we're close, but not gonna quite attain all these perfectly, but we've made some great strides. And so the two objectives that I do want to share with your commission today is objective number 134. It's our Soquel congestion project. And what we said a couple of years back was that by June of 21, public works would reduce congestion and key intersections on the Soquel drive from 41st to Main Street. Another critical objective was number 151. This is our bus priority objective. And we stated two years back that in partnership with you all and the bicycle community that we would design and construct and test a signal priority project along Soquel Avenue. And so those are exciting ideas. And fortunately, we were pretty successful in this area. So let's go to the next slide, please. So here's a great project that we're pulling together right now. And it does meet those objectives and we're very excited about it. And so this is located on Soquel Avenue between La Fonda Drive to State Park. It's a total distance of 5.6 miles. The scope of the projects includes local road improvements, transit bus and active transportation improvements. And this project will construct adaptive signals, protected bike lanes, buffered bike lanes, green bike boxes, pedestrian improvements which will include 10 rapid flashing beacons and mid-block crossings to promote pedestrian use. And about a half a mile of new curb gutter, retaining wall sidewalks, 96 crosswalk upgrades, 12 sidewalk curb extensions and 100 rebuilt ADA ramps. And so you can see we're really trying to prioritize pedestrians, bicycles, and along with the adaptive traffic signals, we plan to prioritize buses, your buses. So we're very excited about this. I will share a bit that this project is part of a joint effort with the RTC. The county teamed up with RTC. We pursued a very large state grant. We received over $100 million. 16 million of that grant is going towards this project. This project in total is about a $25 million project. The difference is the local match being provided by the county. So we are committed to this. Design is starting this year. And we hope to be under construction in that 22-23 fiscal year. And so we didn't quite make our ultimate goal here, but we got pretty close and we can see light at the end of the tunnel on this project. Before we move on, I do wanna share a couple other great projects that also meet these objectives. And I think are exciting to hear about. We're in the final stages of our shanticleer pedestrian over-crossing. This project is going out to bid this summer and we'll start construction in the late fall. That project, the shanticleer pedestrian over-crossing, is in coordination with the Highway 1 auxiliary lane and bus on shoulder project, which I know you are very, very familiar with and a key partner and a key lead on that effort. And so all of that together is continuing our mission to promote alternative transportation, safe transportation and reduced congestion. Additionally, the county is leading the charge on two segments of the rail trail effort. We are under preliminary design and environmental consideration for segments 10 and 11. And then finally, we did receive two air resource grants for some signal work, both in the Aptos village and in Soquel village. Both of those signal projects was about synchronization and bringing those together and modernizing the controllers. And as we promote adaptive signals with bus priority, these two areas will be queued up for this effort as well. So we're very excited about how we're improving our technology to reduce congestion and prioritize bus travel. So let's go to the next slide, please. So here we are looking forward. This is our next two-year cycle of our operational plan. We will be considering this last year of trouble with COVID-19 pandemic and the CZU complex fire. And so clearly these posed extraordinary challenges to our community over these past 12 months. And so will we use the opportunity these next two-year operational plan to create a foundation for long-term recovery and transformation. And so that will be a bit of our focus area. And then if we can go to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about the timeline. And a part of this timeline is also a part of the focus of our new operational plan. We will continue to develop, you know, baselines and measurement tools, but a new component to operational plan going forward will include objectives that identify and address specific disparities. Each department will develop at least one objective that addresses a disparity that can lead to more equitable results. And so we are excited about this direction. We're excited about the past and our completion and successes of the past. And I appreciate the time to present this to your board today and I'm available for any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Do we have questions from the board? I have a question. I see a hand up from the public. Okay, we'll start with Director Rodkin. Yeah, signal prioritization. Typically, if I understand it, and I have pretty much a late person's understanding of this, the bus driver has some kind of a button on the bus that when he or she pushes the button, the light changes green in their direction when it maybe had been read before, I understand that's part of it. And another part of it, and it's not always the same, they're all different, but also might involve having an extra lane at the intersection so the bus doesn't have to be the fifth vehicle in line or the 20th vehicle in line, which you might be on Soquel Avenue during the commute. And I'm wondering, in terms of the signal prioritization projects, to what extent do I have it right? Is there something else involved in this? But are those two things what go on? And to what extent are we doing signal prioritization? It's just the button that changes the light direction or are we actually doing projects that give the buses a lane that allow them to move up in the line? And anything else you can tell us? And then my final question, I'll put them all up once. My final question is like, can you give us a ballpark idea of the cost of one of these, take an intersection somewhere on Soquel Avenue, what it might cost to do one of these and make the buses be able to move faster than the rest of the traffic down the corridor? Sure, thank you, Director Rockin. So just to clarification, our space is very limited on Soquel Drive. So unfortunately, we're not gonna be able to add the additional lane. There just isn't real estate out there. And in terms of the details of how we will achieve that bus prioritization, we're still working those details out now. I do know that we will be connecting to the AVL system that your staff and your team have developed over the past couple of years. And at a minimum, we will tie into that AVL system so that our signals can see the bus coming and can give extra time on the signals so that they can catch that green or they can speed up the red and get you to a green. It won't be a button on the bus, most likely. It'll just, it'll be an adaptive signal where we can monitor the bus flow and we can encourage longer leads or shorter leads, whatever it takes to get those buses through those intersections. And in terms of cost, we do have 23 signals that we're upgrading. And I don't know the breakdown per signal, but these are significant investments. So they're definitely to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per application, but I don't have bid numbers yet and we actually don't have a full design. So I can't really speak more to it than that, but I do appreciate those are some good questions and I hope we can see some success with that prioritization as we view it today. Thank you. That does answer it. So like we're talking hundreds of thousands of bucks for an intersection rather than like $3,000 or something, it's an expensive application apparently. It is, it is. Thank you. There he has his hand up. Ana. I wanted to just point out to the group that the scope of work, it looks like the span from La Fonda to what was the end of that Park Avenue. Encompasses are planning for the paratransit facility near the Park and Ride Lot at Dominican, near Dominican. So, Matt, if you had anything to say about that intersection, I just wanted to flag that for the group. Pedestrian improvements there will be appreciated and beneficial to our function in that area. Well, I would say that we're going to upgrade all the pedestrian facilities. That's why there's a hundred ADA ramps that are gonna be rebuilt to meet current standards we're adding. We're filling in the gaps where there's gaps in sidewalks. So, and then we're improving crosswalks for safety, adding about 10 flashing beacons in addition to what we already have out there. So, we're really trying to focus on pedestrian safety so that as people either they're walking in general or they're using the bus and trying to get to their destination, they have a safe route. I don't have specific information on that particular intersection, but I would say that it is included in the grander scope and it will include pedestrian upgrades focused on safety, really, so. Great, thanks, Pat. Director Koenig. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Director Machado for the report. Quick question. So, if I understand correctly in your previous answer, we haven't put out an RFP for the improved and smart signal adapters or whatever we're calling them, right? Well, we actually do have, well, we do have an RFP out. We actually are working with consulting firms right now in an effort to bring a contract to the Board of Supervisors. We hope that happens, excuse me, in the next month or so. And so, we're well into it. We just haven't started the actual design work because we're still working on a contract proposal that we can bring to the Board and award and kick this thing off. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, I've seen pretty cool technology out there that uses AI so that the signal adapters actually get smarter with time and can improve traffic flow even more. So, we'd love to see some of that possible. Sounds good, thank you. And then my other question is actually for our Metro team here with all these really wonderful improvements we're gonna see on Soquel Drive. Are we currently planning any improvement of service, right? And reduction of headways on Soquel? My understanding is that we've got the 71 that's got 30-minute headways and the 69A and W which also have about 30-minute headways. And I'll just point out this is really our, probably one of our biggest opportunities, growth area opportunities as a supervisor who has one of the more populated stretches of Soquel Drive. We've seen a lot of permit applications for new and field development in this area. So, again, the question is, is any improvement in service currently contemplated by the Metro staff? Yes, let me ask John Urgo to comment on that. He's been tracking this very carefully, John. Yeah, I'll jump in there. So, we'll definitely evaluate service as we go through the design process with the county. The transit signal priority application should help with reliability but without the real estate for buses, the Q-jumps, it's not likely to improve running time. So we're not gonna be able to necessarily get savings that we can invest back into service. But with the improvements in reliability, we'll definitely take a look at how to enhance service. It already is one of our most heavily traveled corridors and invested in corridors, but we'll continue to look as we go through the design process with the county. Okay, but we're not currently planning on getting 15-minute headways instead of 30-minute headways. I currently know. Okay, we'll work to do. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Now for attendees. President. I just wanted to make a brief comment. Thank you, Mr. Machado, for your presentation. And speaking for the county, I can't say enough about our public works department having to deal with storm-related matters back to 2016-17, hundreds of projects worth millions of dollars and updating and directing our attention to those high-priority projects. And I wanna thank Metro for working with the RTC so well. It's been noticeable. And I think that's why we got the state grant that we did recently. I think we're moving in the right direction. We're doing a lot with what we have. And I just wanna commend the Santa Cruz County Public Works Department for the job well done and great foresight in moving forward. Thank you, Director McPherson. Well said. And if there are no other comments or questions from our directors, I'll move to attendees. And I see Brian from Trail Now. Is the hand up? Yes, hi, Brian from Trail Now. You know, I wanna first point out recognize Matt for his exceptional communication style and effectiveness. I've been in public policy for transportation for over 20 years. And I'll tell you, Matt has been outstanding in reaching out to the community. People send me questions all the time when I go forward. And Matt is very good at communicating and be a response. The other thing is, is I actually, my day job, I work for Lockheed Market and I help lead the effort for the recovery of our facility up at the end of Graham Hill. And we really appreciate it. Santa Cruz County Public Works support on that. You know, Matt, one promotion all emphasizes roundabouts. Can we get some roundabout strategies going? That would be great. I think that roundabouts work well. The other thing Matt, I'd like you to see if you could address is Murray Bridge retrofitting that's gonna occur next year, I believe. And it's gonna be two and a half years of traffic nightmare. So any way that your agency can support opening up the Santa Cruz Coastal Trail as an access, that would be great. The other thing is Steve, associate your team member. Great presentation to this board, I think last month. He did show a elevated trail. After I followed up with Steve, he said, you know, that was just concepts. We don't support doing major design work, engineering work on an elaborate trail next to the train tracks. That visual that he showed was very expensive and actually very dangerous. And then finally, Matt, one of the things we promote or promoting is the Highway 1 widening when they do it near Apos, rather than replacing both train trestles, we're looking that we only replace one to over the highway. And then have the Southern trestle reconnect into a dedicated protected pipeline between Soquel and Highway 1 that would go all the way up to Apos, Junior High, even up to the high school would be phenomenal that we leverage that. And also it will, and you keep the rails corridor on the ocean side of the highway. That will be exceptional for our community or reduce the heavy congestion within Apos Village. I think it's just a win-win for the community, the protected pipeline. But again, Matt, I really want this board to realize the phenomenal communication style that you have. So thank you. Thank you, Brian. And any other comments from the public? And I don't see any at this point. I'd like to echo everyone else's comments from for Matt and wonderful presentation. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. And we will move to the CEO oral report COVID-19 update. Yes, Madam Chair, directors, thank you so much. And I have 26 brief updates for you. And I'll start that off with an introduction of two executives who joined us on March the 1st. And so I'll just read a little bit about each of them and then have them say a couple of comments. Mr. Farmer, who is our CFO, brings a significant experience in budgeting, forecasting, analysis, reporting, cash management, metrics, such as key performance indicators, system implementations, enterprise resource planning, what we commonly call ERP, just to name a few. He has many years of experience in executive level finance roles, including more than five years with Amtrak. Chuck has relocated to La Salva Beach from Washington, DC area. His background includes a BS and an MBA in finance and has worked with companies that have annual operating budgets ranging from 30 million to four billion. So with that introduction, Chuck, would you mind saying a couple of words? Sure, thanks, Alex. I just wanna say I'm very excited to be here. Love this place. And at the same point, I also wanna say, thank you for this opportunity. And I really look forward to serving as the next CFO of Santa Cruz Metro. Welcome on board. Thanks. Thank you, Chuck. And our next executive is Mr. Curtis Moses. Curtis has worked for Washington, DC transit, or what we sometimes call WMATA, from 2010 to 2017. They're, of course, one of the nation's largest transit agencies. He has over 20 years of transit experience. More recently, he has worked since 2018 as a transit specialist in Charles County Government in Maryland. He possesses numerous safety certifications and has experienced in federally mandated safety programs. And of course, he is our new director of safety, security, and risk and replaces Rufus, who recently retired. And Curtis, would you mind saying a couple of words? Sure. Good morning, directors and the viewing public. I want to say thank you for this opportunity to come over from the East Coast to the West Coast. I was extremely excited on joining the West Coast. It took me two and a half days to come here. So I'm excited to continue to foster the safety culture here with my experience. Thank you. Welcome on board. Welcome, Curtis. Thank you. Wow. I'm excited. They both come with a lot of enthusiasm and what really excites me is they've already identified a number of things that we can do different add to our programs and in that vein of continuous improvement. And East Coast, wow. Their loss are luck. Yes. Okay, moving on to the other 25 items that I'll try to briefly cover. As you may or may not be aware, the American Rescue Plan of 2021 has passed both houses and has been signed by the president. The bill includes 30.5 billion with a B for transit agencies and that is to be used between now and September 30th of 2024. And we anticipate that that bill will result in about $26 million in COVID relief for this agency alone. So as you know, we've received CARES Act money. We've received what we call CARESA money and now the Rescue Act money. So the challenge for us now is to work to reduce expenses and also what we'll talk about a little bit later in our budget process as this inherent fiscal structural deficit. In other words, if COVID had never happened, we were gonna be faced this year with the start of discussions about a fiscal structural deficit, an imbalance between revenues and expenses that we anticipated starting in the FY22 fiscal year and forward. So even though we have these one-time resources that have arrived and we have arrived and we should use them very carefully and judiciously, along this journey between now and when we complete using these funds to help offset the impacts of COVID on our agency, we have to still resolve our structural deficit that is inherent within the budget that we'll talk about a little bit later. So we hope that these funds will help ribs to gap between losses of revenues and our expenses as we try to maintain some level of service that resembles our pre-COVID levels of service. And we hope that these funds will help carry us through about the timeframe of June 30, 2024. But that's only a guess and a lot goes into that depending on what happens with increases or decreases in revenue sources and what the federal government does with reauthorization. On the state level, we're working with the state through CTA, our California Transit Association to seek COVID assistance via the state's budgetary process, which includes regulatory relief from penalties for non-compliance with TDA, which is Transportation Development Act regulations and to support Governor Newsom's proposed 1.5 billion, again with a B, investment in zero emission vehicles and charging infrastructure included in his proposal is 315 million for zero emission trucks, buses and off-road freight, and to dedicate at least 80 million for transit agencies, specifically within what we call the HVIT program or the hybrid and zero emission truck and bus voucher incentive program. And as you may or may not know, in the four buses that we have ordered from Protera, we are offsetting those costs by each of those buses having one of these HVIT vouchers to the tune of three-quarter million dollars per voucher. So these are significant and they help to offset the very high cost of electric buses. Then moving back to Congress, Congress appears to be serious about reintroducing earmarks. As you might be aware, earmarks went away permanently in 2012 and I think 2010 or 2011 was the last time that earmarks were around. But this time around, they're looking at putting some very specific criteria and limitations on those. They might allow, for example, earmarks to be as high as three million dollars. Earmark requests are to be submitted to the senators and the Congress people sometime in early to mid-April and then each of those offices will evaluate the requests that they receive and then decide which, if any, they will forward onto Congress for consideration. At our end, we've come together as a team, we've evaluated our capital program and we have identified preliminarily some projects for the various senators and Congress people. Right now, highest priority is Congressman Panetta. His timeline is a little bit more accelerated and we're proposing to send a request for the federal government to fund 80% of the cost of two 40-foot compressed natural gas buses and one 60-foot compressed natural gas articulated bus. As you may or may not be aware, we have four articulated buses on property that we received from VTA a few years back for $1, but those buses are near the end of their useful life and we need to think about replacing them. And they, of course, are super important to our ability to deliver quality service to the students at UCSC. So we're further evaluating requests that we'll make to the other, to the two senators and to Congresswoman Eshoo. Those will follow shortly after we make our request meeting the timeline for Congressman Panetta's office. All requests must be in by early April or mid-April, depending on what each office sets as their deadline. Then just moving on to some COVID updates, I made the board aware that a couple of weeks ago, we had a COVID positive among our employee ranks. I'm still pleased to report that that is the only COVID positive that we've had going back to February 1st. So our employees are doing really well in managing their life, both at work and off work to avoid the COVID. Following the governor's order, the transit workers qualify for the COVID vaccination effective March 15th. Thanks in part to the help of some of our board members. Jimmy, thank you in particular for helping us out with the city of Watsonville. Within a couple of days, we were offered over what totaled that to be over 550 dedicated vaccination slots for transit workers. 550, we have 300 employees. That was remarkable how many offers that we received for dedicated vaccination slots in Salinas, Watsonville and the Santa Cruz SoCal mass vaccination sites. We wanna thank the county health department for arranging for at least 100 of those slots at the Sutter Health SoCal drive up mass vaccination site. The city of Watsonville for 250 slots at the Watsonville fairground site. And what's really cool about what Watsonville is doing is they're allowing us for any employees that have changed their mind, that didn't get their vaccination for whatever reason last week and changed their mind. Watsonville has arranged for us every Wednesday to have some slots available so that we can continue to get those folks vaccinated if they change their mind. And then Kaiser Permanente stepped up with a number of slots. I believe it was over 100 slots there at their vaccination sites. And then finally, the Monterey Bay Central Council stepped up with slots at the Salinas Natividad Hospital. So just an incredible outpouring of support for transit workers. So here's- That's the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council that did that, right? Yes, thank you for that. Yes, so now here's sort of the downside to all that good news. Out of those 550 slots, and again, we have about 299 employees, about 167 of our employees took advantage of that and obtained the vaccinations. Now, there are some number of employees that obtained the vaccination before March 15th. We're still trying to collect that data. And there's some number of employees that for whatever reason wanna do it a different way, maybe through their doctor's office and we're trying to assess that. But what's a little bit disconcerting at this point, maybe more than a little disconcerting, is the numbers at this point just amount to about 55, as 55, 55% of our employees opting to take advantage of the vaccinations. So there's a lot of work to do there to continue to encourage and educate our employees about the importance of the vaccination. That number is certainly way lower than what may become the interpreted sort of herd immunity once the CDC announces whatever that is. And preliminarily, I think they say that could be anywhere between 70 and 85% across the nation. We were hoping to get 80% within our own employee ranks. So, yes, yes. You have the presentation from Mark Patrick. Did you have a sense of if that helped relieve some concerns? Actually, that's my next bullet point, but we don't know yet. I think there are the folks that listened in on that, I think are still pondering the information they received. And so as we endeavor to continue to encourage and educate employees on the importance of the vaccination this past Monday, thanks to your help, Donna. We really appreciate that. You arranged for UCSC Professor Marm Kilpatrick to provide a webinar to our employees. We put that invitation out far and wide to all of our employees. We allowed them to participate in that webinar on company time. And so Marm went through a number of points that he educated our employees on about the vaccination. He dispelled some of the other notions of things like, yes, you're not getting injected with a microchip, for example. And then he answered questions that came up from employees. So he did a really wonderful job. And then in addition to that, so we recorded that and then we combined that with a link to a Kaiser Permanente COVID informational video on the same subject. And we blasted that out to all the employees so they can click on the link on their own time, anytime they want, watch the Kaiser Permanente presentation about the vaccination and they can watch the video of the webinar at home whenever they want if they happen to have missed those two opportunities. Alex, a question on that. Is there an ethnic breakdown, a cultural breakdown on that within our industry organization? I haven't cut the numbers up that way at this point. So I think maybe once we get all of the data into HR and of course we want to preserve everybody's individual privacy, but I think we can do some high level analysis but I don't have that yet. I think it's a target different groups of people if that way, if we need more work done in Watsonville then we'll do more work and just, so it's good to see where exactly maybe the breakdown is. Sure, well, when you think about the possibility that 45% of our employees have opted for now at least not to get the vaccination, it seems intuitive that a number, a significant number of those are gonna be in the bus operator ranks. And we do know that a pretty high percentage of our bus operators live in the Watsonville area. And likewise we've watched those numbers as you have that the Watsonville areas had a bit higher numbers than the rest of the counties. So I think that's a good point. Well, we're a lot higher, we're over 55% of the cases. So we've been trying to do as much education and we've been getting a lot of vaccines down into Watsonville, but this is good news for us or not good news, but this is important news for us to have so that we know whether or not, I can go back to our city management and say, hey, we need to continue educating our community. So thank you. Yeah, I think this is true and anecdotally, I do hear that these numbers are representative of what some others are experiencing. So we have some work to do. And it's an area we have to navigate carefully, right? We don't wanna badger our employees and we don't wanna violate their privacy, but we do want to work hard to try to get that number up. And we think by educating them, that's one approach, making sure that we offer the opportunity even on company time to go get the vaccination. For example, we're offering one hour of annually for each vaccination. So even if an employee went before March 5th, on their own time, they can get that one hour. If we let them go on our company time, then we let them go on our company time, there is no one hour of annual leave. And then for those that are still considering it, if they wanna go on company time, they just need to talk to their supervisor. Otherwise, if they wanna go on their time, they can take advantage of this one hour of annual leave reimbursement. So we're trying it hard to do what we can do, but when we get more data, we'll try to cut the numbers up a little bit more and let you know the answer to that. Then on other matters, I'm really excited to report that our second of four, Protera, zero emission battery electric buses has arrived on the property this week. So yay, second one's here, two more to go. And then in preparation for the return of UCSC and Cabrillo College students in the fall, we have hired a class of eight bus operators who will begin their three months training right around mid-April. So they'll be ready and graduated by fall. Metro continues to offer free rides to all county residents to their vaccination, right? We have also completed on our website, you can take a look at our vaccination interactive map, Danielle and the IT staff have done a wonderful job and people can go to that interactive map and they can kind of mouse over the different vaccination sites and they can learn which bus routes they should take to get to that vaccination site. So that's a really cool thing that they accomplished. And then of course, as you're probably aware, Effective Monday, the 22nd, this past Monday, our half fares went into effect. So for everybody who rides our system, they can ride for half fare. If they paid $2 cash, they can ride for $1. And then for all of those customers who already have the discounted fares, they qualify for free rides. So that has gone into effect. We don't have any early numbers yet, but hopefully next month I'll be able to report some really positive things in that respect. We're also in discussions with Flix bus, F-L-I-X Flix bus. You might recall that prior to COVID, they had, we had worked on a contract with them, the board had approved that actually. And for whatever reason, they couldn't put that in motion and they sort of went away, they have returned. And so we are in discussions with them. And just so you know what Flix bus is, they are an intercity and interstate bus concept similar to mega bus, if you've heard of mega bus and also similar to Greyhound. You recall that we've talked about our on-demand service that is now scheduled to go into effect on April 19th. Obviously we're communicating a lot of messages to the public, free rides to vaccinations, reduced fares, a lot of information. So we're trying to launch these things in sequence in order to try to avoid confusion about what we're offering today. And then finally, we're getting much closer to the launch of our automatic vehicle location system where Isaac and team are now working through some final problems related to some of the data and GPS accuracy. And once they get through those problems, if no other problems pop up, we hope to accept that program and then move on to launching our smartphone application for the sort of next bus, if you will, concept. Madam Chair, that concludes my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions. And I see a question from Director Rodkin. So the AVI system, does that use satellites? We have problems in the mountain areas and Santa Cruz with various kinds of radio communication, things like that. I'm wondering, and since we wanna know where all of our buses are, and that's the whole purpose of this, one of the major purposes of the system, is does it run off of satellites so it can totally penetrate into mountainous areas or is it more microwave from the ground? How does the AVI actually work? AVI, sorry, AVI, Automatic Vehicle Location, yeah. Director Rodkin, yes. AVI, Auto Vehicle Location does utilize GPS and which is satellite driven, so we don't run into issues with obstruction of that particular system. Great, thank you. Any other questions from our directors? Any questions from the public? I don't see hands for either. Thank you, Alex, there's a lot of information, but some really good work there too, thank you. Next, we will move to the approval of the fiscal year 22 and 23 preliminary operating budgets and fiscal year capital budget and for review on TDA, SDA claims and purposes and one of the things as part of the budget committee that remind everyone that everything is in flux, so this is a very rough draft on many of the areas that we have to anticipate changes that will be coming up as we adapt to COVID and all of the various funding. So I will bring up Chuck Farmer for presentation. Great, hi, thank you, I appreciate this. And I'm gonna basically add on to what Director Lin just talked about. I wanna be clear, this budget right now that I'm gonna present is gonna be at a very high level, primarily because this is our first real roll-up. We are going through as we speak today, scrubbing through and determining where we need to go. As kind of part of this process as we do, please don't look at the numbers per se, it's more directionally the direction we're going. That's the more critical takeaway from the budget that we're presenting. The reason why we're doing this is because we have an April 1st deadline to present at least preliminary budgeted numbers to the RTC and that's why we're presenting it today to get approval so that we can submit for the April 1st deadline. So to move on to the budget presentation. So as I said, I'm gonna talk about this on a high level, less focus on the numbers, more so in kind of like the direction and the driving factors as we see going from 22 and to 23 from where we are today. Couple of the things that we've adjusted in the budget and like I said, this is going forward in the 22 and 23 is really driven more so by a lot of the conditions we're in right now. For example, we have COVID taking place. We also have basically economic conditions around cost of living increases, which we know are gonna take place between 21 and 22. There's people buying information or buying products and generating sales tax. So that has impacts on it. And then there's other areas such as there's experience issues such as benefits. Benefit pricing is gonna go up and that's really healthcare providers going back and looking at their experience and repricing their products and every year we have increased. So really beyond a lot of this kind of external forces, we're really looking to staff the budget going forward at 100% capacity post COVID. So that's really kind of our goal at this point. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm not gonna walk through every slide but I'm gonna hit a couple of key slides just so you have an idea of the direction we're going on the operating side and the capital side. And of course, stop me at any point if you have any questions. So if we wanna flip to the next slide, keep going, keep going, keep going. So actually, let me get to... So on the budget fair, so let me start with the operating budget. So in the operating budget, and I mentioned kind of the external forces, I'll just give you a couple of little snippets. The biggest driver on the revenue side, we are holding most everything to the contracted amounts or for that matter where we've had feedback from different areas to provide numbers. The only real number that's of flux is really our passenger affairs. And when it comes to our passenger affairs, we know that COVID is making an impact. And we're looking to kind of build upon where we are today and of course move that into 2022. I don't know if we're gonna get to 100% by 2022 but there will definitely be an impact. And that's really the only driver that's driving changes year over year of budget over budget into 2022 and 2023. So let's flip to the next page. Let's keep going, keep going. Okay, now getting into the operating expenses. So flip the next page, flip to the next one after that. Okay, so here's a couple of the pieces that I just mentioned about economic conditions, changes. So we know that we're gonna basically have a cost of living adjustment because of course inflation's gonna be there and we've gotta make sure people get hold. So as part of it for 2022, we've added in preliminarily right now some wage increases and we're holding it flat in the 2023. That may change, but right now that's how we're looking at it. Next piece is the Calipers Contribution. So this is our unfunded liability for our pension. So we have a $64 million opening bound, approximately $64 million of pension that is unfunded right now. And as part of it, we actually have a payment and part of that payment is interest that we have to pay on unfunded liabilities. And that's why it's so big. I'm gonna tell you we are going to go into the next audit and finance committee meeting in the month of April and really dig down into this UAL payment and what it means and what we're gonna do to try to address this issue as well as the OPEPS, which you don't see here, which is actually a much larger value that's completely unfunded and we're actually working on a, currently we're right now as you pay as you go customer. And that of course is increasing as well. Medical insurance of 5.6, again, that's another issue with experience in a medical company health insurance coming back saying we have to increase. And then the last one on this page right now, and I don't focus on the numbers here because we don't know where we're gonna stand on FTs. We are going back and we're looking at the broad that the company itself, where we need to stand and what is it that we need at 100% to operate this company efficiently and effectively? So those numbers right now, even though they show up, are subject to change. And then once we have that number, we're gonna come back at the beginning of May and we're gonna talk to the unions and then for the May audit finance committee as well as the board come back and ask for your approval. So right now at this point, this is very preliminary and that number is subject to change and it probably will change between now and the May time frame as we have discussion. Go ahead and flip to the next page. Like I said, I'm not gonna go through each piece, but I can tell you the very first piece, the interest expense, the big increase there was we were preliminarily gonna buy buses and lease them. And that was the interest pavement on the lease. Since we did this presentation, we've decided to push that purchase and it's even then is contemplating as to what the timing is. So that number already has changed than what's in this presentation. So this is why I wanna make sure that you understand this is very preliminary and that numbers will change, some minor, some major. We go ahead and move to the next slide. And then this right here is our transfers. This is the 3 million we're putting aside for basically transfers to the capital budget. This number right here is something you agreed upon. We are gonna go in a full depth discussion at the next audit and finance committee meeting in April. So we'll go further in the details. So I'm not gonna spend much time on this. Go ahead and move to the next one. And then this is our structural deficit. And like I said, as we get the budget more fine-tuned, we'll talk a lot more about this piece as we go forward. And this is where COVID reserves make a big impact on our business going forward. Go ahead, next page. Okay, now I'm gonna go get into the capital and I'm gonna introduce a little bit more of a different concept as well as I wanna kind of focus around adding some more value into the capital side. So right now we actually have 27.5 million dollars in our capital portfolio. I'm gonna start calling this our portfolio because this is all our identified projects that have funding mechanisms that are tied to them. And it's 27.5 million dollars. Now we could spend that money this year, next year, the following year, but each year, as long as these projects are open, the board is coming back and approving these projects, which is the right answer. But we may not have actual spending in that fiscal year because it may be like, for example, a bus purchase that might not take place for another couple more years. And that's when the money actually walks up the door. So what I wanna introduce is the fact that you approve at the beginning of the year, the capital portfolio, which is your 27.5 million. And what I'm gonna come back to in May is actually show you what is our in-year spending? That is our budget. What is it we're gonna spend cashflow-wise in that given year? So for example, if we actually have a project that's gonna kick off in mid FY22, say next January, you're gonna have six months of possible spending and we wanna measure against it. And this is all about not necessarily approving the budget, but it's a way of financing as well as the project managers to be able to measure their progress on projects as well as spending timelines. And also, of course, if there's any changes in scope in the project, we'll be able to address that too as well. And we will report against the full portfolio of the 27.5 million too as well. A lot more detail to come. So like I said, that's coming up, but I wanted to introduce it here in this form just so you have an idea. And I believe that's all I have. If anybody has any questions around operating a capital, we can address it now if you like. Thank you. From the board to start with, is there anyone with questions? And I see Director Rodkin will just start. So you're just new here, Chuck, and welcome on board. So my question, maybe it's one that Alex has a clear answer to, but if not, you can help us with this. You've noted that it's only preliminary, but we looked at basically reducing some of our actually authorized positions. I forget the exact numbers, but it went from something down to 18, it was three, something less than right. But where we're dropping about, so we look at 10 positions or something, these are not layoffs, these are vacant positions right now. Nobody's actually getting laid off or sent off, who's working for us, which is I think an important, speaking for myself, and I think most board members here, who's not all board members, to not lay off people that are working for us because of these problems. But there's also an issue about whether, these positions existed in the past, they were obviously doing something, some jobs could be combined, there's new technology that removes the need for some jobs and so forth. And it'd be helpful to us, even though it's preliminary, to get some idea of why you're assuming at this point that we're gonna be, this is the response to the structural deficit, we need to find places to cut the budget. I assume that has something to do with why we're reducing the number of these authorized positions. But give us some picture of like, what is it you think you need less of? I mean, I would like to get not into every detailed position, but when you reduce these positions, somebody will end up doing some different kinds of work. Jobs will shift around to cover the things that were these other folks were doing earlier, I assume. In fact, that's happening now. These are vacant positions. So somebody's doing that work while these positions remain vacant. So I'm trying to get some idea of what you're looking at in this upcoming in the budget in terms of reducing the number of authorized positions and sort of what kinds of things we're doing less of or why we need these less. I don't know exactly the right questions to even ask, but I can see from your presentation that there's a reduction there and I'm sort of interested in knowing where we're going and what's the impact that that's likely to be. Yeah, Chuck, let me take that one. So first of all, Mike, going back to the positions that you talked about. So you referenced page 16A11, which talks about 21, FY21 being 324 FTEs, FY22, 318. I just pointed to the footnote, which says preliminary estimate. Keep in mind, there's been a little bit of a moving target here. So when the budget was first developed, I even had more positions as a reduction. And then when the Federal Rescue Plan Act was passed, we went in and did some more rework of that FTE reduction. So that's why I say you've already heard preliminarily from the union representatives, they're concerned about position reductions. This is just the wrong time for that discussion. This is, as Chuck pointed out in his introduction, this is a very preliminary budget. It's put together very quickly, although it will be a good, an excellent base document, but it's put together for one reason and one reason only. We have this discussion every year. The March budget is simply to meet the TDA, STA deadline that RTC imposes upon us. As I understand it, we don't even have to present them a balanced budget. We just have to present them a budget. So that's the purpose. There's a lot, a lot of work that has to go into this budget between now and the committee's May meeting, in which among many things included in this budget, we will be looking at the FTE assumptions. Now, just one correction to something I think you said, within the six FTEs, there are two provisional employees. So for those slots are definite vacant slots to have provisional employees under current policy are this, when we bring a provisional employee on, they are like a temp employee, except we think we may need them for a little bit longer than a temp employee to fill a gap for workflow or some kind of project that we might be working on. And so those employees, when they come aboard, they sign an agreement that they understand that we will keep them in that position for a minimum of six months, but no longer than two years, right? So that sets up the boundaries of a provisional employee that you will be here at least six months, but we can't guarantee you one day further than six months. Depends on the need of the company, what we have you working on. And in the case of both those employees, they're well past their minimum threshold of six months. So why are we potentially not keeping them well? In part because of workload and in part because they get integrated into the broader discussion, the broader discussion about expenses that we need to reduce. And when you reduce expenses, you also look at whether you're running your company as efficiently as you can and whether you can do some nipping and tucking even when it comes to the number of FTEs you have. So if we could bring up the slide, 16A14, please. 16A14, it looks like it's your number 61. Next one down there, 61, slide 61, there you go. Okay. We're seeing it. Yeah, so Chuck introduced this slide. So we were gonna be having this discussion even if COVID never hit, even if we didn't have the three different one-time funding sources from the federal government, we were gonna be having this discussion. And we introduced it to you last year that we were projecting that we're gonna have a structural deficit re-entering into the equation again. And a lot of things go into that in increased escalating costs of benefits, factoring in the pay raises that we negotiated back in 2019. And on the revenues side, revenues not going up as aggressively as we would like them, state, federal, sales tax dollars. So all in all, a structural deficit very simply is this, your revenues are not keeping up with the pace of your expenditures. And as we talked about years ago, when I came aboard, when I arrived on this property, we had a structural deficit. Going back to the great recession of 2008, this agency was hit hard. This agency had $26, $28 million sitting in reserves and they were targeted for capital. But the agency hoped and prayed that we would come out of the recession faster than we did. Remember the recession went from 2000, the great recession went from 2008 to 2014. And so over those years, this agency drew down those $26, $28 million in reserves until 2014, when I arrived, we had one year left of reserves and we were gonna have a fiscal cliff of $6.8 million. So think of that as the right side of this graph, FY26. Now it's not $6.3 million, it's $11.4 million. So what you don't wanna do is you don't want to mistakenly fill in all these gaps, 6.3 million, 8.2, 9.3, 10.3. You don't wanna fill in all those gaps using your one-time COVID reserve money, CARES, CARESSA, Rescue Act. And then just all of a sudden in 2026, you have this massive fiscal cliff. What are you gonna do? If your revenues don't keep up with expenses, you've got $11.4 million structural deficit. That's hacking and slashing 25% of all of our service. I don't think we want to be there. So the point I'm trying to make is in contrast to 2008 to 2014, we're looking out over the horizon. We see this coming and I have to start today to begin to address that fiscal deficit in hopes that measures I put in place today will begin to make this gap smaller and smaller. And none of us have a crystal ball we shouldn't be running a budget off of a crystal ball but our hope is that over the same period of time we'll see sales tax dollars come up that we won't have any kind of economic downturn in addition to the COVID downturn that we won't have any recession, right? Hope and a prayer. I don't know what your crystal ball says but I try not to run an agency off of hopes and prayers. We also hope that the federal government will increase their commitment to us through reauthorization and that maybe the state will do the same thing. So we hope and pray for a combination of things to occur but we can't build a budget on that. And what that means is we have to anticipate that this 11.4 million will be real and that we must take measures today. Let's not wait till 2026 to take dramatic measures, hack and slash our budget, lay off a lot of people. Let's start addressing it now and the best way to do that is looking today, next year and the year after at what expenses we can trim, nip and tuck and make changes to we evaluate every vacant position to see if we need to change that position into something else or just not fund it. And then provisionals again are they're great folks but they're like a temp employee they're not intended to be here long-term and in this budget as it's proposed today they are envisioned to no longer be funded after June 30. That may change. I have to tell you just closing on that note that may change. We're looking at a whole bunch of things between now and the May committee that depending on how those things come together these positions may still be recommended for no longer being funded after June 30 or they may be recommended to continue. If they continue those employees would potentially stay in that position until their two-year threshold that two-year threshold actually occurs in the FY22 budget. I think for both employees somewhere around March or April they would have exhausted the two years. So apologize Mike for the long, long answer but this is a really critical point. It's an important juncture in the financial stability of this agency. And I wanted to just reiterate something I believe Chuck said when he was speaking which is that in this process there's gonna be a meeting with the management and the labor unions to talk about these kinds of issues. So they're gonna have an opportunity for pretty direct in someone's got to explain here's the job I'm doing now and we don't know yet what we're talking about in terms of the details but if you don't fill this position here's what's gonna happen to my job if we get to hear that in a direct way that is part of our process I understand correctly. Mike you're exactly right that meeting as I understand it has been scheduled. And again that's why this whole discussion about FTEs up down or any line item in this budget in great detail today is just not placed well it needs to happen later when the budget is more defined. Thanks Chuck and Alex both appreciate the response. And next on our panelists would be Director Koenig. Thank you chair and thank you CEO Clifford for that explanation. And I understand that we are dealing with an $11 million structural deficit over the next five years and that's gonna require some hard choices and long-term thinking. So there's starting to adapt now is definitely gonna be better than pretending like the problem doesn't exist. And I guess I'll say briefly is that one of the challenges organizations like ours have in when we look at cutting positions is a lot of time those cuts can fall or can be based on seniority rather than skill. And one concern I would have is that these provisional positions could also be positions where we're actually trying to recruit new talent for Metro. My understanding is they might be in planning and IT which are essential services or essential positions for being able to adapt our service to increase the ridership to make up this budget. So I guess, again, we'll be having this decision or discussion in greater detail in the future but I just wanna make sure that the cost cutting measures we do take don't also jeopardize our ability to adapt and ultimately close this budget shortfall. Thank you, Director Connick and Director Dutra. Thank you. I see that we operate in a deficit every single year. Is this something that we traditionally do as an organization to operate in millions of dollars of deficit every single year? No, Jimmy, I'm not sure what you're referring to. We always present the budget as a balanced budget always. Yeah, but the last slide. What we're projecting is that we're gonna have a deficit and that deficit starts in FY22, which is the coming year. That's right. So, but I feel like when I was on the board the last time we were also in a fiscal deficit as well. We were headed towards a fiscal deficit. So it seems like we've been in this game. Welcome back. Welcome back, right? Like, I mean, we were in serious problems the last time I was on this board and we had to make major cuts to balance this. So I just feel like is this something that's just usual for this organization to always be in this situation? Yeah, Jimmy, I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, we had some tough decisions to make as you recall and you were a part of making those tough decisions between 2014 and 2016. And a lot of things had to come together. But here's an interesting point to think about. In that timeframe, two really important things helped us to bridge that gap. The final big chunks of that gap. One was SB1 passing, which provided additional state revenues to this agency that were fungible or flexible dollars. And the other was Measure D passing. As I look out over the horizon between now and 2026 I'm not seeing any of those major potential funding sources coming together. And the point I'm trying to make, Jimmy, is that if we did not have SB1 and Measure D our service today would look a lot different because we would have had to have laid off a number of people and slashed our service to the tune of the amount of dollars that we did receive from those sources. Now, as a result of those and efficiency measures just like I'm proposing that we consider in this budget and a number of other things that we did, including the COA, the Comprehensive Operational Analysis which adjusted service to make some efficiency changes. As a combination of all of that, we got into balance and we were able then to stay in balance for several years. So we have been in balance, but here's the thing. Inevitably the structural deficit can present itself again because your expenses, the rate of growth in your expenses don't keep up with the rate of growth in your revenues. And every year that you have that deficiency you would start building towards this structural deficit that presents itself. So even before COVID came, we were saying in 22, we're gonna start having a structural deficit again. So we were already preparing the board for that discussion but here's the good thing. During those better years after we resolved the structural deficit, and I think this is probably after you left the board and you weren't able to enjoy the benefits of your hard work, we were able to sustain ourselves with balanced budgets and to negotiate fairly decent pay increases with our unions in 2019. Well, we had to make some really tough decisions. I remember packed houses and lines out the door and really upset people. And so I was hoping we wouldn't have to be back in this situation. And it seems like we're heading back there. And to me that tells me that there's an issue if the revenues are not being produced, then what can we do as an organization to make Metro a source of transportation that people are gonna wanna use and get on and so that we can keep our revenues higher. And we really should think about what we need to do to build that. Yeah, Jimmy, first and foremost, everything I'm talking about today is an attempt to try to help you not be in that same place when 2025, 2026 comes around, right? And the only reason why you're not having to face that really, really severe consequence today is because we got these three allocations of one-time money that we'll use very carefully to bridge the gap between operating and expenses. And by the time they run out, we need to be in balance. Now, how do we get more people on the bus? Ooh, there's a big challenge. There's a lot of work to do. We know as the students return to the university and to the community college, we hope to come back in the same strength as they were before COVID, right? So that's 60% of our ridership. We hope we think once they come back to 100% in-person classes will be there again for us. But that other 40% of our ridership, they are dominant transit dependent, 34% of them don't even have another way to get around. No other car. Why aren't they here today? We have to understand why they're not here today. Is it because they lost their job and it hasn't come back? Or they lost their job and it hasn't come back yet? In which case they will hopefully be back to ride our system somewhere down the road. Have they relocated? Have they gone out and purchased a car? The great unknown is how much of that 40% we're gonna get back. And then in addition to that, the other point I think that's important to what you're trying to make is we gotta reach out and try to get new riders onto our system. Danielle has a heavy load on her shoulders. She's been tasked in the marketing and communications area with thinking through this and where do we need to make strategic investments in order to get people back on the bus and encourage new riders onto the bus. We must get them back. We need to stay relevant in this community. Well, thank y'all. I really appreciate that. These are important points that you're making and those of us that were on the board in the past during those times, we should make sure we don't wanna go back there. So we should make the decisions now to help prevent that. So thank you. Thank you. We should point out that we hired that marketing director, Danielle. That's one of the results of that situation that we were facing. So we actually for the first time, and we had a marketing director, I'm gonna say 40 years ago, but we haven't had one for a very long time. And it's great to have someone who actually will be dedicated to figuring out how do we get riders back, among other things. Director Minfussis. Yeah, thank you, Chuck Farmer. I just wanna say and remind you that you asked for this. So here we go. But this might be, I'm sure gonna be discussed by the audit committee in all, but for what day, how are you gonna project projected ridership increase or sales tax increase? You're gonna go to the legislative analyst, the state, or just a regional kind of an agency, some sort or how do we project what might come, you know, free, continue a comeback? Are you gonna, what are you gonna look to see what we, or how are you gonna project what our ridership may increase or the sales tax revenue may increase? So I'll go ahead and take that. So when it comes to the sales tax, there's a CPI index as well as the form for economics trending. They'll actually kind of give you their projections that show kind of what they're thinking in the regional areas of people's consumer habits and what they expect to buy from there, just applying what the sales tax is in the certain areas and then equating to what we think it's gonna be our portion of it. I haven't got there yet. It's gonna take a little bit of time, but I'll also kind of leverage Christina too as well because she's been through this process before on how Metro has done it in the past and we haven't sat down and talked about that piece yet. As for the ridership trending, I know I've talked with John Yergo a bunch about it and we've talked about ways of going about doing the projection of ridership and then also translating that into revenue as well as Alex kind of cutting the pricing in half. How long is that gonna be sustained and then do we go back to full price pricing at some point in the future? He said all has impacts on our revenue as well. We're still on discussions on how to do that because as part of it, we don't know the big what if here is COVID and even if everybody gets vaccinated, do people actually change what they've been doing in the last year to start riding on the bus or will they kind of hold off and kind of delay that riding? I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever know because we've never been to a situation like this. So I think it's kind of we're gonna try to formulate what we think is the best answer and then ultimately know that we're gonna have deviations as we go forward, but hopefully they're explainable based off of what our assumptions are and what actually happens. Great, thank you. And also the other factor will be how many people will continue working from home how that workforce may change, which I don't think we'll know for some time either. And under our attendees, we have Brian Peeples, trail now. Yeah, hi, this is Brian from trail now. Thank you. As a reminder, trail now actually was in 2015, we were actually a political action committee that opposed measure D initially when it came out because the language, 24% of the funds was gonna go towards a train, actually $14 million were gonna go towards a train station in Monterey County. And so working with the RTC, they readjusted the allocations and actually reduced that to 8%, eliminated Monterey County train station and diverted it to Metro. And so then we became a active supporting measure D and that our supporters provided the majority of the funds, the most amount. So now what happens is the public gets frustrated when we see this happening where the RTC is going off and doing more spending on a train while Metro has major deficit problems, unfunded pensions, ridership has fallen off a cliff. It's just, it's a terrible thing. Our bus system needs funds, while at the same time, members of the Metro Board who represent Metro on the RTC are voting for the trade. They're voting for the trade and that's really unacceptable. Now, granted, we all know there's really never gonna be a billion dollar train. Honestly, it's not gonna happen, but what we don't realize is the amount of money our counties, our taxpayers are paying, we spent over $40 million over the last decade just managing that property. We spend over 2 million a year managing the property. And then we're spending millions more to build a substandard narrow trail next to those railroad tracks. So that's the frustrating part that we have when we send Metro having a major problem. You guys are gonna have a major problem. It's gonna be hard to bring back your ridership. So when your Metro Board members go over and vote for a billion dollar train, and that is frustrating to us. I mean, the train plan, they're going to tear down the Capitola Trust and replace it. Is that realistic? No. So we all know a train is never gonna happen, but our frustration is, is that we're spending millions to maintain this taxpayer-owned property. And at the same time, you're laying people off that metric. You're cutting the bus service. You cut the La Selva bus service back in 2016 or so. So it doesn't make sense. So we really would appreciate if you're consistent in your policy, and please don't vote for a billion dollar train when you have major deficits. Let's stop wasting money on managing that problem. Thank you very much. Thank you. And now we have Kayla Hill. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Kayla Hill, and I am the secretary treasurer of SEA. I also work in the planning department at Metro. A preliminary FY22 budget was reviewed at today's meeting. Currently, in this draft of the budget, there are six positions that are suggested for elimination. And the union was informed of only three of the personal members who are included in this group. These three positions are Provisional Transportation Planner One, Provisional IT Support Analyst Two, and the Standing Intern Position in the planning department. The Provisional Transportation Planner One has worked with this agency for over three years. He was first hired as an intern, then worked as a provisional employee for two years in his prior role within the planning department, before being promoted to his current role as provisional transportation planner one. I'm here to say that these employees are currently fulfilling important roles for this agency. These employees are directly involved in critical ongoing projects, such as CAD-AVL and the bus replacement plan. And unfunding their positions will make completing ongoing and future projects in a reasonable timeframe nearly impossible. I understand that the agency is projecting an increasing deficit over the next five years. However, these are only projections. Measure D revenue actually increased relative to last year. Writership levels are likely to rebound somewhat after vaccinations are more widely distributed and once UCSC reserves regular in-person sessions. UCSC has already approached Metro about returning to regular levels of school term service in the fall. Additionally, Metro received 20 million in CARES Act revenue and is slated to receive an additional 26 million. These funds are specifically designed to help agencies like ours keep afloat. We're already straining to complete projects that can provide information Metro needs to improve the service. Without adequate staff, we will not be able to implement the service improvements that are needed to grow ridership. The purpose of the CARES Act funding is to maintain personnel levels and Metro should use the funding for its intended purpose to make sure that this agency is able to quickly expand our service to our County as demand returns. Thank you. Thank you, Katelyn. Anyone else? I think we have James Sandoval. Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes, James. James Sandoval here, General Chairman for SMART. And we stand in solidarity with SEIU. We need to figure out a way to retain our staff. Anytime you don't fill a position, it just requires other staff to carry more weight. So if we're able to figure out a way to retain employees at Metro, that's what we need to do. Thank you. Thank you, James. Anyone else? Okay, I don't see any other hands. Any other comments and response? Okay. I don't see any hands. Yeah, I don't either. Okay, well, it brings us to our announcement next meeting, Friday, April 23rd at 9 a.m. Donna. Yeah. Excuse me, I need a motion to approve. Yes, you do. I move Donna to approve. Thank you. I'll second that motion. So a motion by Director Dutron, a second by Director Rodkin. And Gina, thank you. We'll ask for roll call vote. Okay, roll call. Motion to approve the FY22 and FY23 preliminary operating budgets and FY22 capital budget review and TDA slash STA claims purposes as presented. Motion by Director Dutron, second by Director Rodkin. The roll call is Director Dutron. Yes. Director Gonzalez. Aye. Director Kalantara-Johnson. Yes. Director Koenig. Aye. Director Lind. Aye. Director McPherson. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Director Myers. Aye. Director Pegler. Aye. Director Peterson. Aye. Director Rothwell. Aye. Director Rodkin. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Thank you. And thanks for catching that. Okay, now we're to our next meeting for April 23rd at 9 a.m. Thank you, everyone. And a lot of information, but really some good discussion, good information. Thank you all. Thank you, Community TV. And we will adjourn. Everybody stay safe. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye, everyone. Be safe. Bye-bye. Thank you.