 I'll now call the November 10th, 2020 regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors to order. Will the clerk please call the roll. Good morning. Good morning. If I could remind people on teams to please mute yourself. Otherwise, we get feedback in the chambers. Thank you. I'll do roll call now. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. And Chair Caput. Here. We'll have a moment of silence and prayer followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. This is Supervisor McPherson. Just quickly, I just wanted to make a point out a special recognition to an outstanding citizen who recently passed away, Hal Hyde. He meant so much to this community, especially in the Cabrillo College, the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a dynamic leader and just a pleasant person to get along with. And we missed a true, true patriot and a great citizen and really someone who contributed to our community time and time again. Hal Hyde was a phenomenal person and we're gonna miss him dearly in this county. He did so much for Santa Cruz County. I just wanted to recognize him. So thank you, Mr. Chair. Absolutely. In World War II, he was at the Battle of the Bulge and in later years, he achieved the rank of Brigadier General and Watsonville residents, Pajaro Valley residents his whole life. Absolutely. What we'll do is do it. Do we have any revisions or late items? Chair Caput, yes. We do have a number of revisions and corrections to the agenda. On the Consent Agenda Number 26, there are additional materials. We have an attachment C, ADM 29 form, packet page 648. On item number 42, there are additional materials. There's a revised attachment A, packet page 919. There are clean and strikeout underlying copies. There's also an attachment C, insert after page 920. On item number 43, staff request this item be deleted. It's packet pages 926 through 932. And then on item 52, we have a correction. The item should read, accept and file update on emergency action with Lewis Tree Service for emergency road debris removal impacting critical roadway facilities and direct public works to return on or before December 8th, 2020 with a contract and report on the status of the emergency work as recommended by the Deputy CAO, Director of Public Works. And that's the end of the corrections. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Do we have any board member members that would wish to pull items from the Consent Agenda or make any comments? We'll usually do the comments after the oral communication. Okay. What I'll do is I'm gonna pull, we'll do them together. Item 21 and 23, 21, 23. And they're related. Number 22 is not, I don't know why, but anyway, and we'll speak on those. I'm only pulling it because I was requested to do it for transparency. It seems like 21 and 23 are well-written, but for transparency purposes, okay. And hopefully we can do that before 9.45 because we do have a scheduled item that we have to begin at 9.45. I have to put it on the regular agenda. Chair. You have to put them on the regular agenda. Would you like to put them as 7.1 and 7.2 then? Would you like them at the beginning? Okay. Yeah. Let's make it 7.1 and 7.2. What number will that be? That would be the first item on the agenda. Well, actually it would be after 7.0. Okay. Yeah. All right. The only comment I'll make is tomorrow is Veterans Day, November 11th at the 11 o'clock is the online ceremony being done virtual this year instead of having a parade in Watsonville. It'll be done virtually at 11 a.m. tomorrow and it'll be online. And the other thing I'd like to say is I wanna thank Supervisor Leopold for helping me out up here. My hearing is okay, but with everybody wearing masks and everything coming out, it's difficult for me to hear everything as clear as I would like to be able to hear everything. I have a slight hearing loss and with the masks and everything else it makes it real difficult but he's been helping me out up here and making me look good at times. So anyway, thanks a lot. Thank you. We have to look at it after each other. I know. Okay, thank you. Okay, public comment. Go ahead, we'll have public comment for members to address the board on topics on today's agenda, consent items, closed session agenda and topics that are not on the agenda but within the jurisdiction of our board. If you cannot stay later to speak on a regular agenda item you may address those items at this time. Today's agenda includes a scheduled item at 9.45 a.m. In order to begin items number on time, public comment is limited to only 30 minutes and any remaining public still wanting to make a comment may do so at the end of the agenda which would might even be in the afternoon. So if it's two minutes, okay, go ahead. Okay, we'll be watching. Good morning everyone. My name is Veronica Velasquez. I'm a senior social worker and the chapter president for SCIU 521 Santa Cruz County. I'm here to address item number 27 on the board's consent agenda. When COVID-19 first hit our community, while everyone was sheltering in place our members continued to show up to work. Despite the fear and uncertainty we all faced in March our members showed up every day, fixing roads, protecting children, caring for the homeless and doing all of the other work that it takes for our County to continue running. We knew that COVID-19 would hit our local economy hard. When management asked us to furlough, we agreed to do so. When management asked us to consider extending the contract, we agreed to do so. When management told us that a cost of living increase would not be possible, we agreed and did not push back. Despite the tremendous sacrifices meant for our members. Now we are asking you as the board of supervisors to honor the sacrifices our members have made by maintaining the County's 95-90-90 contribution to our health insurance premiums. This pandemic has shown us the importance of healthcare. As the stories we will share with you today show, management's proposal means members having to separate from doctors they've had for generations and foregoing needed physical treatment. This is too much and I wanna make it very clear that our membership will do whatever it takes to protect our members and our families. We are calling on you to do the right thing and maintain the County's 95-90-90 contribution to our health insurance premiums. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Claudia Herrera Sandoval. I have been a social worker for Santa Cruz County for 15 years. Part of our work as social workers requires that every six months we report to the court the status of the medical, dental, and emotional needs of the children that we work with. We require that every child in care gets a full physical in the first 30 days they enter care. This demonstrates how serious we take the health and well-being of children. I'm here to respectfully request that you take the health of County workers and our families just as serious and that we don't take another hit to our already reduced paycheck. We already gave back 7.5% of our salary. It may not sound like a lot to you, but my paycheck has a deduction of over $300 per pay period. Increasing insurance costs for the plan that I carry for me, my husband and our three boys will mean that I take an extra $200 hit of my paycheck on top of the foreload deduction. I cannot afford any more deductions to my pay. Please meet with your managers and figure out a way to make our healthcare a priority so that we continue to care for the children and families in the community. Thank you for your time. Good morning. My name is Jennifer Getchman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, senior mental health client specialist for HSA behavioral health and a member of our union's bargaining team as well as a union steward. I'm here to address item number 27 on the board's consent agenda. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on our community and us as union members. For the sake of our community's wellbeing and at the time of this pandemic, we have made many sacrifices from furloughing to foregoing COLA negotiations. We can't forego is what we can't forego is the county's contribution to our healthcare. We're just asking them to meet us a little bit more in the middle. We're asking the board to honor your past commitment to our members by matching the 95-90-90 of employees' premiums. Management's proposal to not cover the 2021 increase in healthcare costs will cost our members hundreds of dollars every month at a time when we are most vulnerable. This is not an abstraction. These are the real people whose lives are at stake. I'm going to share with you some stories from our members. These are just a few of the stories of how employees will be impacted by management's decisions. These go from giving up lifetime therapists for our children to foregoing college tuition to changing providers and overall healthcare from PPO's to HMO's. Please read their stories and do the right thing. Match 95-90-90 of employees' premiums for 2021. Good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board. Jim Heaney, I'm the Chief Steward for our county chapter here, SEIU. Four years ago, we approved a new contract, which took us through September of 2020. Four years ago, 2020 sounded like a really good date, and we've all been very surprised what's happened this year, but part of what we've done as employees in this county is dive in to help contribute. You know all of our members are working hard in this process, and many of them are on the front lines. They knock on doors daily to do home checks. People don't expect them to be there because that's the point, it's a surprise visit to make sure the children are safe. So they're putting themselves in harm's way. And for many years as a county employee, I've heard at various times statements about how much the county staff has valued. But what I really have to say to you today is, we're asking you to show that. We have a real concern with the way that the healthcare is being costed against us. Currently, we're told that it's a $1.5 million increase to the budget. However, during the conversations around negotiation, we found out that over $900,000 has already been budgeted towards that healthcare increase. So we want you to look hard at these numbers. We have other concerns with costing. We are trying to have individual meetings with you to explain that. But really what we're asking today is for you to turn around and authorize your management team to fulfill our negotiation proposal, which is based on the 2021 rates, not an average of the 2020 and the 2021 to cost individuals hundreds of dollars. Finally, Chair Caput, thank you for the acknowledgement of veterans today. My father and many of my siblings are retired military veterans. My father was 20 years in the Navy Chief Petty Officer, and he got to live out his life with dignity because he had quality medical coverage through his service. And so we ask you to do the same. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Kevin Collins. I live about five miles from the CCU fire perimeter. The moment that fire was out, I drove into the fire zone as quickly as I could because I wanted to understand what had happened and how much of the landscape had been damaged and to what extent. And in the process of doing that, I came across this astounding level of demolition of forest that PG&E was executing. They have this notion that they can knock down any tree that might fall someday into their circuits, no matter how out to 200 feet away from the circuit. So I brought in a and Cal Fire is issued a notice of violation to PG&E, asserting that they're conducting timber operations without a permit. PG&E is ignoring Cal Fire's order to stop. So this is a picture from Vic Drive up off Empire grade. These are all living Douglas Furs in a giant pile, dropped on the ground, left for, I don't know who to clean up. This is a home site. Every tree on this home site is demolished in a pile. These people were driven out by the fire. They couldn't protect their properties and that's what's left of them. Here's another such shot. This is the largest madrone specimen I've ever seen. It's right in front of the burned out house where it stood. That tree was probably two or 300 years old. It's a pile of rubble now. This is a picture of a Davey tree truck after Cal Fire told them to cease operations. And I don't have time to show every last image here, but to give you a sense of the scale of this, this is a road strung with piles of destroyed trees. I really would hope that the county could take more action. PG&E is the largest utility in the United States. They're totally arrogant and citizens cannot handle this on our own. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Kristen Sandell and I am a constituent from Ben Lomond. I'm here to comment on PG&E's actions in the wake of the CZU fires. These fires were absolutely devastating for the community. Everyone who lives in the mountains was affected, but possibly even more devastating has been the trauma inflicted on the survivors by the excessive and grossly negligent tree removals conducted by PG&E. What we're seeing is almost clear cutting operations by PG&E contractors and mountain communities, particularly through Bonnie Doon. I and many others have driven through the burn zones. We've seen the wholesale and unnecessary destruction of surviving trees of all species. Both those damaged by fire, but still living which would survive and completely untouched trees now being destroyed for the convenience of PG&E. We're losing redwoods, oaks, medrons, and many other species, which residents were told by Santa Cruz County's Resource Conservation District to leave intact to help retain soil. The soil in these areas has been pulverized by heavy equipment into fine dust many inches deep, which will be liquefied during heavy rains, placing residents in imminent danger of possibly lethal mud and debris flows carrying tons of hazardous material downhill at high speed. As happened in Santa Barbara County in 2018, resulting in 23 deaths, we are asking, as your constituents at the board, do everything in its power to stop this incredibly dangerous and unnecessary behavior from PG&E and protect residents of the Santa Cruz Mountains while we begin to rebuild our homes and communities from one of the worst wildfires in California history. Thank you. Oh, it's two minutes now, Chair Knappens. It should be three minutes, of course. PG&E, poison, gas, and explosions. What it stands for, an immense destruction. Your job should be to stop this destruction. The trees are the lungs of the earth. I'm gonna talk about 5G. The pandemic began with 5G. And I wanna refer you to Arthur Furstenberg, cellularphonetaskforce.org, and go to his newsletters. And there's a question I read somewhere related. Is the bioengineered coronavirus pandemic being purposefully propagated globally in order to further facilitate the military deployment of 5G worldwide in space and on the earth? Satellites are being launched in the thousands into the ionosphere, which provides us with the electrical circuit of the earth upon which all life is dependent. This needs to stop. And I'm gonna quote from 5G Apocalypse, the extinction events, the opening words of the film. It's important to understand what the 5G is doing and what they say it is doing. We're told on the IEB beamforming document, that's what is it, electrical engineer screwed, that this technology cooks your eyes like eggs in World War II. We all need to understand these are military weapons. These are assault frequencies. If you know nothing more than that, that's what you need to know. It's microwave radiation warfare, that's what it is. And that's what's threatening all life on earth. That's what we need to stop. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, Marilyn. Not many people up there probably realize how many people know the information Marilyn knows. And it may all sound like sci-fi, but I invite each and every one of you to actually look into these things. These are real things that Marilyn is talking about. Really frightening things. Humanity, well, we know humanity does awful things. Look what we've done to the environment. Look what we do to our environment even here. I picked up so much trash yesterday on the beach, just as I was just walking to use the restroom. I couldn't believe it. So yes, it's no joke. And for Marilyn to take the time out of her life to come in here time after time after time and tell you guys about this and have you not take any action or show any interest and it is really disappointing. But that wasn't what I came up here to talk about today. Well, it kind of is connected. So I'm thinking about representative government. Does representative government mean that those with medical disabilities, medical things that keep them from wearing masks, things that are allowed for within the writing that is generated by your jurisdiction. Is it right that these people are discriminated against and not allowed to be present and have their voices heard? You say, oh, they can call in or oh, they can send in and have their comments read on emails. So when they send their emails in, their emails are not read. Is that representative government? I don't understand that as being representative government. I had a friend call me last week and said that the emails were not being read. There was no mention of the emails that had come in as comments from the public. That's not representative government. So I would like each and every one of you to look inside yourselves and decide what sort of representative do you want to be? Do you want to be representative of the people? And if not, what are you representing? Thank you. How are you doing? Oh, I'm great. It's nice that we can all stand and talk to each other and see each other. My name is James Ewing Whitman. I would like three minutes, but we'll see what happens. So today Washington DC is passing bill B23-0171, allowing children 11 years and older to be vaccinated without their parental knowledge or consent. That's kind of, that's ugly. It's applied to sort of, I can think of where to begin. Once again, thank you. If I had ever stated in any room that I might have said something that offended somebody like quitting smoking, I've done that a thousand times. WC fields. So I did write some stuff, but you know, there's a lot of information coming out about the CZSU fires. And there was a gentleman in this room who was describing on his own property a whole packet of steel stakes that appear. They didn't melt, but they just bent over. They didn't melt. So what does steel melt at? 3200 degrees. So I do a lot of research. It's a lot of fun. It's kind of daunting. Probably read a thousand articles and seen it several hundred videos on wireless frequencies. There's a very small percentage, less than 10% that are about the healing qualities of these frequencies. There's quite a bit about them being weapons. Recently someone that I respect said the first directed energy weapons that he was aware of was in 1991 with the Oakland fires. But this gentleman in Australia talked about what happened in 1983 in Australia. And one of the scientists that spoke, he said that when you can put the frequencies just below the frequency of these various minerals, I'm talking about glass, aluminum and steel, you can get them to bend and melt at a much lower temperature. So anyway, thank you for your time. Thank you. Good morning. My name's Becky Steinbrenner. I'm a resident of rural Aptos. I'm holding my mask this way because I can't breathe when it's completely over my face. I have tried your alternative methods from home submitting emails and received response saying that the clerk would be available in 24 hours. So your alternative methods do not work for those of us who cannot breathe with these masks on. I've been assured that holding it like this so I can breathe and not pass out is okay. So I'm gonna continue. I wanna support the county workers that came before you this morning. I find it unacceptable that you can throw money at all kinds of things, including a 77,000 voting mobile trailer that has never been needed before. And we all got along quite well without. And it's nice, but in these times, that's a superfluous expenditure of money. And now you're asking the county workers to suffer. It doesn't make sense. I wanna speak to consent agenda item 44 where you're increasing your contract with encompassed by nearly a quarter million dollars when you're already paying them millions of dollars for services. That's very nice. But again, in these times of economic stress, that's superfluous. I wanna tell you that I also support reinstating the full-time position of the county emergency services manager. It's being handed over carte blanche to the director, the CAO. He knows nothing about the relationships that Rosemary Anderson has worked hard to cultivate. In my last remaining time, I wanna say that in November 2nd, Senator County Superior Court ruled that Governor Newsom's executive order regarding the elections was illegal and violated the state constitution. And we have to take him to task and we have to abide by the law. You have taken an oath to protect the constitution. Thank you. My name is Ludmila Boyka and my question is when this county finally will do anything to regular people but not just for their employees? Because it seems like it's very big and very strong, very consolidated team of county that try to cover up every misconduct that any employee committed. And it is allowed constantly and no one get investigated. So I'm requesting the investigation, especially mental health department. I spent two months in front of district attorney door and they refused to schedule an appointment with district attorney. I never saw district attorney. I even wonder if he's alive, if it's real person. So why so difficult for someone who was victimized? Family, entire family was victimized and cannot get an appointment with district attorney. And none of them, of course, you know, willing to start any investigation. I sent email Mr. Kaput to you as a member of the mental health board. So I'm requesting your response, please. Because it's not just unfair practices, it's dangerous practices committed by the behavioral health division that need to take care of and need to look into. Many workers even do not have California certification and they have to take care of people. The part of homelessness that we have here because of that department unfair practices, they just push people out on the streets. And while they don't even take care of them, so please, order the investigation of their practices. And I will wait to answer by email. Thank you. Chair, we have one web comment. Yes, I saw that, go ahead. Thank you. It is from Satya Orion. In a recent sentinel, I'm sorry, let me start over. In a recent sentinel news article, Gail Newell is quoted as saying, there is a growing evidence to support that the person wearing the face covering also benefits with evidence showing that there is lower inoculum with masks so people are getting less sick even if infected, which is shown in the low hospitalization rate, unquote. On what science is this opinion based? No one was, none was given. Has Dr. Newell forgotten the most that most cases have always had mild or no symptoms and that hospitalization rates have always been low with hospitals mostly empty and overflow tents never used. This was confirmed by Dominican hospital nurses. Why has the county stopped sharing information on, I'm sorry, I lost my place for COVID related deaths. The information was provided to me freely for the first 10 persons who died, but suddenly is no longer, is suddenly no longer available. Why? That the county has decided to be less, rather than more transparent is a shame and extremely disrespectful to the community. Why are cases the only metric being considered? Cases based on a PCR test, which has never intended for diagnostic purposes and which has proven to give high levels of false positives. The survival rate continues to be over 99%. Why is this information not being shared? On July 29th, I sent a scientific studies to you and Dr. Newell proving the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and treating COVID-19. Why have you not shared this information with the community? Why did you not share this information with the Watsonville Post-Acute Center with hospitals and other care settings? Instead of being open to treatments that have been proven to work, creating a community forum for information sharing, you have instead promoted masks and social distancing, both with no scientific proof or efficiency, both which have created a climate of hatred and virtue signaling with zero support for those in the community who are medically exempt. This disregards community under the guise of health is shameful and fraudulent. And that is the only public comment we have. Right. Is there anybody in the community room? The community room is closed today. Okay. Well, next we have item number six. We can do that. Well, we have to do the consent agenda. Usually we take comments from board members about the consent agenda. Okay. I don't have any. I was going to comment on items 21 and 23, but we pulled those. So you might want to check with our... That's in your district, right? Yes. Okay. You might want to check with our colleagues. Okay. Yeah. Any other comments from board members? No, Mr. Chair. This is Supervisor McPherson. There, can you hear me all right? Yes. Yes. Okay. There's a couple of questions I have on, I don't want to pull anything, but on item number 19, the coronavirus emergency solutions grant program. I want to thank the CAO for bringing this forward. I'm glad we're eligible for another $9 million going forward to provide services related to COVID-19. I appreciate the ongoing reporting to the board on the CARES Act funding and how it's being allocated. And I look forward to more detailed report before the money is all spent. I do have a question. When do we anticipate having an expenditure plan for this new money, this $9 million? And will it be allocated using the same process as we have been in the past? I could get a quick answer from the CAO. Good morning, Elisa Benson, Assistant CAO, and I have responsibilities for our Homeless Services Coordination Office. We do have a spending plan for the CARES Act ESG-CV dollars that we were allocated from the state. This money is allocated actually to our continuum of care, the HAP program. And we are actually submitting, we submitted our application last week, which we have to do to actually receive the dollars. In that application, we presumed about $5 million of that funding to support our COVID shelters moving into 2021 in January through June. As we all know, that has been both FEMA funded as well as CRF CARES Act funded. And that funding that we were using this year ends in December. The remaining dollars are really gonna be focused on priorities of that grant, which is around housing our homeless folks that are in our COVID shelter and care system right now with the bulk of the dollars being focused on 200 units of rapid rental rehousing program. So that's a program where you use case management, housing navigation, and some tight-rated rental assistance to help people get housed and out of shelter. There'll be a small piece about administration. It's gonna be a big program to run. And the way I think we'll be doing it is predominantly through letters of interest to community providers. Happy to provide any more information on that. We're very excited to get started. The next item that we'll be hearing at 9.45, this investment that we're able to do through this of the CARES Act dollars aligns with our action plan to address homelessness in the community. Happy to have an answer any more questions, Supervisor. That's fine, thank you very much. And I'm encouraged about addressing the housing issue in more depth. I don't know that anybody else has any questions, but I do have a few other comments on a couple items on consent. Number 20, the association of faith communities, the safe spaces. I wanna thank all of the AFC members for their work on this program. We appreciate the faith communities for working together with us to provide this service. We want to expand this program. And I know that we do have some folks or some agencies or faith communities in the fifth district that are interested and joining in on this. So I just wanna say thank you to all who have participated and we welcome anyone who might be interested in participating in this program to provide housing and some care for small numbers from the faith community. So just thank you very much. On the zone haven on number 26, I can't overemphasize the importance of having zone haven when it comes to managing a response to disasters, which we're doing it now and related to the brief load as well. These zone haven where you let people know where they need to go, is very important in evacuation planning. I wanna thank Cal Fire Chief Ian Larkin for working with zone haven to secure a grant funding that was made possible for use here in Santa Cruz County. And in terms of funding for this program, it's obviously worthwhile investment in our pedestrian planning too and our preparedness plan, I should say. I have a question on number 27 that COVID-19 costs. I wanna thank the General Services Department for bringing this item forward. It's really important for us to see what the county has spent to date on serving a residence during this crisis. I think we have spent up to $30 million right now. I know we can't be certain right now how much of this will be reimbursed, but do we have any estimate based on what percentages are allowed in each category at this time? Thank you Supervisor Michael Beaton, Director of General Services for the county. Our current estimates right now of the $30.9 million as reported in the report is a little over 50% will be eligible FEMA reimbursable costs. We are currently estimating at between $12 and $15 million will be reimbursed through FEMA, an additional three to $5 million through the state CDAA. The remaining balance is currently being utilized through different granting agencies, redirection of public health grants, CARES Act, as well as other homeless funds that are available within the current budgeted appropriations. I know it's not the exact numbers that we would like to have, but those are the estimates that we currently have, sir. Thank you, that gives me a better idea. I think it gives us all a better idea. So thank you very much. I do, and the items 45 to 54 on the fire repair progress, I can't say enough about our public works department for the repairs to our infrastructure. This work has been happening at an amazingly fast rate and we all appreciate the restoration of our roads, wastewater systems and other key sectors in our infrastructure. Really, it's been quite amazing to me of how the public works department has and others have been able to do this work under the crisis situations that we have now. And then something that's not on the agenda, I think it's very important though that Supervisor Coonerty and I, we're really concerned about the possibility of mud flows, debris flow, evacuation and so forth. We're going to have town halls this week, Thursday, November 12th from 530 to seven. That's a District 5 town hall. And people can call in to talk about that at 916-318-9542. And the District 3 town hall will be Friday from 1130 a.m. to 1 p.m. for the third district. These are important. And I think anybody who is interested, we really welcome them to join us in those town halls. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You're welcome. Any other comments from Supervisor? Yes, Mr. Chair. This is Supervisor Friend. I just briefly want to comment on item 25, the C Cliff Village Park restroom project and thank Public Works for their, excuse me, at Parks for their commitment on that project. I was out there again recently and it really adds so much to have that permanent restroom along with the skate park and other new facilities that are there. People are out and join it in a safe and distanced way. And I just appreciate Parks commitment to locating the funding over the course of a couple of years with our office for that. So thanks to Parks on this. Yeah, Supervisor Coonerty. No comment. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Okay, thank you. I would move the consent agenda as amended. Okay, we have a motion. Second. Second, could it be? Okay, that concludes public comment on the consent agenda except for item 21 and 23. We have to take the vote. Okay, call for a vote. Thank you, Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend? Aye. Coonerty? Aye. McPherson? Aye. Mayor Caput? Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Should we... We have a 945 scheduled item. We're right at 945 so we could get going with that. Great. Yes. That's item number 10 on the agenda. Item number 10. You want to read it in? Read it in or you want me to read it in? Number 10. Number 10, yeah. Conduct a study session on draft three-year strategic framework to address homelessness, developed through the professional engagement with homelessness, tactical assistance provider, focus strategies and direct staff to undertake a community engagement process and return no later than the first board meeting in February, 2021. With a final draft for adoption as outlined in the memorandum from the County Administrative Officer, there's the housing for healthy Santa Cruz, a strategic framework, Santa Cruz Predictive Modeling Summary Report, Santa Cruz County Housing Market Gap Analysis, the California Continuum of Care 2009 point in time counts and the County and Continuum of Care funding sources scan January 2020, or June 2020. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Elisa Benson, Assistant CAO. As Supervisor Leopold mentioned, our focus for our study today is kind of, it's kind of a big milestone. This is our final deliverable, our housing for a healthy Santa Cruz, a three-year strategic framework to address homelessness in Santa Cruz County. This is our, as I mentioned, our final deliverable from a nearly 18-month engagement with focus strategies to perform an assessment of our response to homelessness in collaboration with a broad set of partners and to design an action, results-focused improvement plan. I'm here today with Randy Morris, our Human Services Department Director. As the new division, Housing for Health, will play a key role in leading and coordination of the implementation of the framework. In addition to Randy, we have our consultants, Kate Bristol and Catherine Gale, waiting in the virtual wings to answer any technical questions that Randy and I aren't able to answer. And also, we've invited today city council members from our city partners to participate in the study session. As the success of this work will rely on all jurisdictions' commitment and efforts. With that, we're gonna move forward to the PowerPoint. So our purpose for the study session today is to really introduce the substantive framework, and I'll call it the framework of the plan, to the Board of Supervisors and to city council members. And this is really our kickoff to our engagement effort, community engagement effort, to support implementation and provide input on our first six month work plan that we will be bringing back to you in January. The debris flow item is later on. Yes, we're with some practice there. So, Elise, if you could give me a second. If you are on teams, especially if you are a guest, please remember you need to mute yourself. Otherwise, we get feedback in chambers. When, if and when you choose to speak, then it would be appropriate to unmute yourself then. Thank you. Thank you. So quickly, a little bit of an overview of the presentation. We're first gonna talk about the context, how we got here. The bulk of the presentation will be a summary of the framework. We'll talk a little bit about our next steps on community input to finalize and get, move forward with our six month plan. We'll have question and answers, and then the Board will take their actions on our recommendations. In terms of housekeeping for the study session today, we have about 40 minutes of substantive material to share with you. There's some natural breaks in the conversation that will allow for questions. And so, for those of you online, raise your electronic hand, please, and Christine will unmute you and call on you. But we will pause throughout, so people have the opportunity to engage in questions or comments about the material. So with that, we're gonna get started. I'm having a little bit of a glitch getting, clicking forward. So context, how did we get here? I think it's safe to say that we all understand that homelessness is a critical national, state, and local issue. We're not alone here in Santa Cruz. You visit nearly any West Coast community and the impact of unaffordable housing, poverty, addiction, mental health crises, healthcare crises is all about round us as we look at folks who are homeless in our communities. Here in Santa Cruz, we have a disproportionate share given our population size. You'll see on the graph here in Santa Cruz County, we have almost 80 people per 10,000 residents that are homeless. And that is nearly double the state average. It's not the highest of all communities, but we have a disproportionately high number of homeless in our community. I also wanted to provide a little bit of a snapshot about what does homelessness look like here in the County of Santa Cruz. So we have, in our last 2019 point in time count, we had just over 2,100 homeless people identified. 403 of those folks were chronically homeless. 151 were veterans, 419 were families and that's about 122 households. 51 were unaccompanied children. And we had 569 who were transition age youth, so a large number. On your slide, it also shows the significance of our unsheltered population. 78% of the homeless folks in our community are unsheltered. Another important statistic, and this will come back as we talk about our focus on our performance measures proposed in the framework, 40% of those folks counted in the 2019 count noted that this was their first experience of being homeless. That's a large number of people who are falling into homelessness on a regular basis. I just wanted to present that frame for everyone because particularly our board has been very involved in this study process over the last 18 months, but I think it's important to go back to recognize what does this look like in our community. So how do we get here and starting on this technical assistance work? In mid 2018, our CAO, Carlos Palacios, asked me to take a look at our county response to homelessness. And in that my own overview, it looked like we did not have a systematic framework for strategically operationalizing the 2015 all-in-home for our county departments. We had no performance metrics. We really didn't have an approach to strategic data collection and use moving forward. And just generally the consent or the conclusion around our governance and decision-making roles was that it was confusing. Roles were confusing, whether it was the county, the city, as well as the COC. And at that time, we said, we need to bring some folks in to help us really get our arms around this. So in early 2019, the board allowed us to enter a contract engagement with focus strategies. They are a nationally recognized firm that works only solely in the issue of homelessness and they help communities look at preventing and ending homelessness through data analytics, systems thinking and stakeholder engagement. So our technical assistance engagement was to support strategic data-informed inclusive system assessment and come up with improvement recommendations on current performance, system level measures, governance and decision structures and a detailed plan for improvement. So I'm gonna give a quick overview of the last 18 months. We started quickly in March of 2019 and went through our baseline assessment and we came up with four interim recommendations which we shared with the board of September 2019. We initiated right on the heels of that our quantitative analysis of both our system overall as our project performance provider by provider and we started implementation work groups to look at those recommendations we had gotten from our consultants. And that went on through March 2020 and at that point we had our quantitative analysis and we presented that to the board on March 4th, 2020. What we all know what happened right after that we were poised to go into our actual plan development and community convening a large convening in the end of March and we had the COVID pandemic. So during that time everything came to a halt in terms of our assessment and our improvement planning and meanwhile we came together to stand up our COVID sheltering system. We supported all of our existing shelter providers to put in place COVID controls and help them be a shelter in place program for people experiencing homelessness. We also expanded our outreach and engagement for folks who were living outside around the pandemic. So while the global pandemic and quite frankly the CZU lightning fire caused considerable delay it also provided us as a community an opportunity for significant learning opportunities which influenced the framework that we're putting before you today. It allowed us to really engage in coordinated decision-making. We learned a lot about low barrier shelters and we expanded and redesigned our outreach. So here we are today with our framework. I just wanna do a quick thank you because this was an incredibly inclusive and collaborative approach. And so while the county really initiated this work through the Homeless Services Coordination Office it quickly became a shared effort with our city partners, our service providers, community members, people experiencing homelessness. This entire village stepped up and took a hard look in the mirror and to see what we are doing and frankly how we can and have to do it better. So I'm gonna give a quick overview of what were the findings of that assessment. Before we get into the framework I wanna spend a moment reminding everyone of what we learned about ourselves, our strengths. We had the pieces. We had coordinated entry, our smart path system. We had outreach. We have shelters that were providing basic services and some with a little bit more supportive services. We have a small supply of specialty housing for those with high needs. But our gaps, we didn't have full implementation of a diversion strategy. A strategy to support people to avoid entering a system of homeless services in the first place through problem solving. The reality is our shelter programs were more focused on basic needs than housing. We had a low success rate in terms of exits to permanent housing. And again, our governance and decision making were not transparent and our use of data to inform operations and get towards results very limited. Basically, focus strategies helped us to understand that we had a loosely coordinated collection of programs. And the assessment stressed that we needed to move to a systematic integrated approach from that first contact with someone living outside to celebrating their success at getting to housing. Again, this loose coordination worked for some, but not all people experiencing homelessness. And so if we were able to go forward with a systematic approach, it's gonna allow us to have a shared vision and objectives at all levels that our resources and funding are aligned to shared measurable outcomes. Our programs are designed to meet those outcomes. And we use data to evaluate and adjust at all times. We'll need a clear structure and process for decisions and have accountability for results. And we wanna ensure that, and most of you know, I hate reading from slides, but I'm gonna read the last bullet. Each person receives timely and consistent response that sets them on a path to housing. So how do we do this? We're gonna do it through the framework. With that, I probably should pause if I hand it to Randy for any questions. Okay, we're gonna keep going. I'm gonna hand it over to Randy. Okay, good morning Chair Caput, Supervisor Leopold and other supervisors virtual and those watching Randy Morris. And as Alyssa introduced me, I'm the director of the Human Services Department. I started three weeks BC. I've been told that's what I should call it before COVID in February and then everything turned upside down. Just for the board and the public to know if you're not aware, those of us in county government work regionally a lot with like colleagues in other counties. And this baton pass from the CAO's office to the Human Services Department is something that's under discussion all over the state. Where is the right place to house and administer this challenging public policy issue in county government throughout California in some counties that's housed in the CAO and some that's housed in planning departments and some that's housed in health and some that's housed in human services. If we do this right, this should be invisible to the public. The county is just very committed to figuring out how to administer this. And I inherited a very healthy agency thanks to my predecessor with lots of infrastructure that Elisa and her team did not have the benefit of. So I want to before starting to say thank you sincerely for all the work that Elisa and her team have done as a mighty team of three as my team gets ready to lift this up next week with a new director and a number of staff. And we hope we can move this forward and usher this forward. I also want to recognize another challenge that exists everywhere throughout California. And that is the issue of what is the role of a county and what is the role of the city? There is no clear guidance from the feds or the state. It's an issue that puts counties and cities at odds because everyone's very frustrated with the issue that you see in front of them. So I want to recognize the work done before I got here and the work we need to do going forward to develop better and better partnerships. And I appreciate the work that's been done to date and that will be a key to our success is having good partnerships with the jurisdictions. I do want to make a moment to say one last point that is also confronting the United States and California and that is this nexus of COVID, those experiencing homelessness and any effort at any point in time in any community to try to do better by the population. Elisa mentioned, I think it was the third part in that sequence of events when COVID hit, I think it's important grounding to just share a little bit of numbers and just name that this is part of what's very confounding for all of us is this dramatic infusion of federal and state money that we did not have that allowed us to do a whole lot of work with an outstanding question of what do we do when and if that state and federal money tied to COVID goes away. And as a reminder, the reason we have that money is because of the worry that COVID would spread in homeless communities and shelters and encampments. And it was good of California to invest money and FEMA to invest money to allow us to do work that we weren't doing prior and great kudos to Santa Cruz County and our city partners and our community-based partners for, with very rare exceptions, stopping the spread of COVID. And I think without the work we did who knows what would have happened. So I just want to recognize that to ground that in a few numbers. We are serving here in Santa Cruz County over a thousand people a month thanks to the system we stood up. And that breaks down is 200 people who are in hotels that previously would not have been that's thanks to a state program called project room key. We have almost 350 people that are in existing shelters. We did a lot of work with the shelters to make sure social distancing was in place and a lot of services were there and they became 24 seven to allow for social distancing. We expanded shelters by opening up the Santa Cruz and Watsonville vets halls, recognition, supervisor Caput that tomorrow's Veterans Day and that are where your offices that we have veteran halls that are now have expanded shelter capacity to allow for social distancing. We have a dedicated transition age youth program. Thank you, Supervisor Leopold for all of your work. It's certainly a little microcosm the challenges in communities. Where do you put these programs and your work with the community around seventh day Adventist? We're able to serve almost 20 people there of the many encampments throughout Santa Cruz County the one right behind this building, the bench lands at peak there was 100 people were down to about 50 as we're about to demobilize that with the flood plain being there that got a whole host of services and an organized encampment was a great success. And then I also want to highlight a lot of work particularly done by our health partners and others which is almost 300 people a month get outreach and encampments throughout this county to get health services, assessments, tents, sleeping bags, hygiene stations and added up over a thousand people a month due to this infusion of money that has helped us stop the spread of COVID at homeless. So the question is how do we take those lessons learned and what do we do as we prepare for the possibility that money being pulled and what does that mean? And there's articles being written throughout California about the worry about what that could mean. So with that background, I'm gonna pick up where Elisa left off and it's somewhat symbolic because literally next week, Elisa literally hands a baton to me and the office stands up that we're calling the housing for health to move this three year framework forward. The highlights of the framework are it is grounded in vision and guiding principles. It's in the framework itself that you have and the public has in the board information online but I just want to highlight and repeat some of what Elisa said. I think some of these homeless plans throughout the state and the country often are ambitious and visionary but lack what do you do about it? This is actually a very actionable plan. It is a county wide plan. It pulls in the best of cities and county, all county departments that are relevant and our partners in the community. It is data driven. This is one of the things I have certainly absorbed the high expectations your board and community has of the department I now manage to be able to produce data to inform us and track and see how we're doing. And then this has to be not just a word but also actionable the issue of equity. There are inequitable outcomes among those who are homeless throughout all of California predominantly people of color are more disproportionately impact and what are we gonna do to track data and pay attention and talk about that throughout this framework. The goals, there are very detailed goals with very specific targets and back to the data systems in place to measure the success. All of this is rooted in very specific strategies and objectives which we'll talk about a little bit later. Six month work plans. A lot of what falls short in these big two, three, five year vision plans is the world changes. The environment's fluid, funding changes, policies changes, issues change. So built into this three year framework is every six months there's gonna be a refresh work plan which we'll bring to your board and have communion put and make public so people can see where we're focusing our effort during every six months stage of this three year plan. And then the last one, there are many variables that are not in our control in county government or city government or in a community. So we are speaking some time to identify with the resources that are needed and identifying and naming in a transparent way with the assumptions and hopes are so that as this plays out we can show if we're doing better why or if we're falling short what changed and we can be really honest and upfront about that. So that's some of the grounding principles. In terms of some of the results this significantly oversimplifies the guts of what this 20 page document is and that is to really make a different that our results based we want to have by the end of this plan in 2024 a 50% reduction in those who are unsheltered. Just to do semantic check cause the word unsheltered people experiencing homeless things like these phrases are used a lot. The word unsheltered is mentioned in the lower left. That is people who are living outdoors and campments vehicles or a place that's basically not home or not an actual shelter itself. And that's distinguished by overall homelessness which basically includes those who are in shelters. So 50% reduction in those who are unsheltered and an overall reduction of homelessness which includes the number of shelters we have by 30% at the end of the three years. So those are the overarching results we're looking for which then moves into what are our goals? I'm not going to read through this. There is lots of dense details in the 20 page plan but the purpose of this is to again not just be conceptual but actually delineate what we're looking at and track it and report on it. So if you look at what the goals are here basically we want to ensure that the system itself is being more effective based on the host of measures which are written below. There's been a lot of discussion about how long people stay in certain programs hauling it takes to get them into specific housing slots, et cetera. And this is a chart that breaks it down that we'll be tracking and reporting on throughout the three years. And then the second goal is perhaps one of the most challenging or we are most in need of other departments than mine and that is how do we expand capacity? How do we expand shelter capacity? How do we expand housing slots? And that's gonna take a lot of work but there's very specific numbers in here which are our targets over the three years. The strategies to achieve our goals. I am going to give a high level overview because this is the guts of the plan and then I'm gonna turn it to at least in part to give her credit because her and her team are the ones that worked on this even before I got her so she can give a little bit of detail because I think this is the guts of the plan but I'm just gonna frame it a little bit. So of the four, number one, of those who are unsheltered or those who are homeless which includes those who are in shelters can we do a better job? You know, what can we do to outreach to them? What can we do to engage them and what we can do to help them not be in that situation is basically goal number one to better connect and serve those who are experiencing homelessness. Goal number two, we need more housing. We need more housing stock. We need to have a host. We need to have a number of pathways to something. So there is a whole set of strategies in here about increasing the various housing options and not all housing options work for all people. There needs to be a different types of them for different type of people who will benefit. Number three in the lower left, simply prevention. We can't just work on those who are homeless and not recognize the moment we are in this recession, the challenges in Santa Cruz County and others who experienced fires, people who lost their home. We can't have people becoming homeless while we're also getting people out of homeless. So we have a whole set of strategies on prevention, diversion, trying to do what we can to stop people from becoming homeless. And then the last one, this is admittedly a little bit boring government talk but you have to have an infrastructure to do this. You need to have people, you need to have systems, you need to have people to track data. And then to both this County Board and to the city elected officials, there is room for us to collaborate more on how we make decisions. There are monies that come into cities, monies that come in counties and monies that come into this thing called the continuum of care that by federal funding comes into that body. And how do people make decisions about what to do with this money is something we call governance. And we have some work to do so that it can be more transparent, more participatory. And we can have a better process so that everyone is knowing how it is we are making decisions and how we are targeting within the framework of this plan. Thank you, Randy. I'm just before I actually go into each of the strategy areas, I just wanna give one more sort of structural comment. So our strategies are ways to achieve these key outcomes. And so we have four and across those four strategies, there's 14 sub-strategies and across those sub-strategies, there are 48 objectives. So these objectives are where the action happens. And while it's not, we have not boiled it down to that level in this presentation, I will be walking through each of the strategies with some of the highlights and what's new and different. But I wanted to focus on that because we have a great all-in strategic plan. Our challenge is making it actionable and accountable. And that's really the bridge we're trying to cross with the framework we're proposing. So we're gonna move to our first strategy. As Randy mentioned, this is really about better connecting and serving people who are experiencing homelessness, whether they're in the shelter system or they're living outside. I also wanna point out, this is where we sharpen our focus on encampments in terms of the people who are living there, but also the community impacts of encampments. That's not an element we focused on in past plans. Randy mentioned that there is a capacity element here as well. This is where we need to retain some portion of that gain that we've done through the COVID shelter system. And the goal is in the next three years to be able to add to our existing stock, we recognize the COVID shelter system will have to be demobilized, but that we need to introduce or increase shelter capacity by 150 beds. And the target there is 130 individual adult beds and 20 family beds. So room for five families or about. As I mentioned, this has four sub-strategies, 14 objectives to accomplish in three years. And I'm gonna address some highlights. The first two strategies, 1.1 and 1.2 are really about our shelter system. And they really came about through our COVID learning. Objective or sub-strategy 1.1 is really around health and safety in the shelter system and maintaining our commitment to disease prevention and health across our system. It has four objectives. Sub-strategy 1.2 also has four objectives and this is another COVID learning moment. This is about focusing on low barrier shelter. What we've learned through our COVID experience is many folks who are part of that system have not been connected with services before. And this really brings us back to that idea of 24 seven of person centered, trauma informed and keeping it low barrier so people don't end up behaving their ways out of shelter and falling back into the street. It's also us continuing to work on our shelter capacity referral system something we introduced as part of our COVID response. The next two strategies, 1.3 and 1.4 are really about our gaps that we identified early in this process. The first 1.3 with three objectives is that are up to now very few of our shelters had the services to really put people on a path to housing. That's care management, housing navigation and the goal is to have those in all shelters and having flexible funding available to help folks solve their housing problems. 1.4 is really focused on people living outside in encampments. This is around outreach and encampments and again in area we have not had such strategic focus in the past. It has seven objectives. This is really around housing focused outreach not just health focused outreach and that we need more of it and it needs to be county wide and then link homeless people to essential services. We need to train our outreach staff to have deeper conversations about housing and we need to collect data on how that's working. And then we need to work across our jurisdictions and departments to develop a shared approach to addressing encampments, particularly on public property and private property. Key partners to make this happen are service providers, our city partners and our county departments. I'm gonna pause and see if there's any questions around that first strategy around better connecting and serving people who are experiencing homelessness. We will keep moving. Our next strategy is really as Randy said it's while strategy one was around the front door, strategy two is around exiting and fundamentally that we need more housing options to reach our three year performance targets. Randy mentioned that we have some goals around increasing our permanent supportive housing that's our most folks who have the most challenges and have the hardest barrier housing barriers that we need to have a goal of increasing that over three years by a hundred units. And that's really strategy 2.1 and working across jurisdictions to generate that additional supply and utilizing all different kinds of state and federal funding sources to go there. 2.2 is our strategy around increasing the effectiveness of our rapid rental rehousing programs. Currently we have about 118 rapid rehousing slots for a not perfect word for families and 86 for adults. The goal in our plan is to increase it over the three years by 350 slots to really move people towards permanent housing. The third sub strategy with three objectives is really working actively in an ongoing way with landlords and property managers. Again, we need to be able to utilize whatever existing capacity we can to house folks. And the fourth strategy is around our sub strategy is around our Coordinantry Smart Path System and continuing to develop and refine that so we can more readily prioritize housing for folks that are in need. Our partners around this are gonna be ourselves, the city, cities, housing providers, developers and financing entities, as well as our communities welcoming affordable and permanent supportive housing units in their neighborhoods. We need a place to cite these very important resources. Any questions on strategy two? I have a question. The efforts around rapid rehousing seem incredibly important. When you look at 40% of the people in the point in time census being homeless for the first time, that's, and we've had something between 40 and 50% in the point in time census over the last, I don't know, six years that I can remember. And so being able to sort of stop homelessness, that's our best chance to eliminate homelessness and stem the flow. And so if we look at these goals for the rapid rehousing, do you think that that really is ambitious enough if we're gonna try to stem the tide? Well, I think we're trying to have both stretch goals, but that are doable. I think all of us would love to increase our rapid rehousing slots beyond 350, but that's a large increase already beyond what we have today. And some of that, as Randy mentioned, will be a function of funding. This is not something we've done incredibly well to date. And it's one of the things within this strategy is how to actually offer that program better. But absolutely, 350 will, well, if we are able to do that, we will be able to achieve the goals that Randy spoke to around a 30% reduction in homelessness overall. If we could do better, we'll absolutely assure ourselves of reaching that, and maybe we'll do better than that. But as you said, John, then some of this is really about prevention, which is the perfect segue to the next slide. So our third strategy is really on prevention and problem solving. And I want to just highlight that this, when we spoke about the point in time count, we mentioned that 40% of those counted in January of 2019 indicated it was their first experience of being homeless. Another fun fact, if you want to call it that, we identified through our quantitative analysis was nearly 60% of folks entering our emergency shelter were entering from a housed situation. So our resource that we would hope to be focusing on folks who are unhoused, living outside, many people are going from housed directly into shelter, which really brings us to this strategy around prevention and problem solving. So in this strategy, there's two sub-strategies, and the first one is really around implementing what we call in the business, diversion. And this is problem solving as a first step of smart path intake. This is, and the commitment here is that any person who comes into contact with the system has access to a trained housing problem solving specialist who will work with them to try and keep them housed. And part of that, and I mentioned actually in Supervisor McPherson's question around our ESG program, is us identifying funding that's available to our providers and to our clients to buy that bed so they can move back in with a friend, to help someone with moving expenses. It may not be rental assistance, it may be helping them get back to a family in another community, that we try and solve the problem as early as possible. We all know that prevention is typically far less expensive than those downstream impacts when someone has become a chronic homeless person living outside. The second part of that is in sub-strategy and it has two different objectives is really doing some analysis and focus on who is the most at risk for being homeless. And to do that, that's gonna be working across our providers, our safety net programs and understanding those conditions, those trigger events that are happening with our community and trying to get ahead of them and really focusing on prevention. So as I mentioned, our key partners in this, our community providers, probably volunteers to help with some of our work and then our safety net programs to really try and stem the tide of homelessness as early as we can. I'm gonna pause and see if there's any questions on strategy three. And during that pause, I wanna do a quick piggyback, this is something that's happening not just in Santa Cruz County, but we are not gonna get out of this through brick and mortar housing slots alone. And we're moving programs like this within the safety net of health and human service systems and our partners that we contract community providers. Sometimes what's needed is to sort of help that person stay connected or reconnect with their family and or natural network and then wrap services around them to help support them in housing they have versus moving them to somewhere else. Easier said than done, it's not gonna solve everything, but I just wanna say in the prevention mix and there are some examples of that where people don't end up becoming homeless so they don't make them to the reports. So there is good work happening, we just need to do more of it as part of the prevention effort. Okay, we are on to our fourth strategy, improving administration. What we've described is a lot of work with a lot of different entities. And one of the early observations of our consulting experts was we did not have sufficient administrative infrastructure to build the kind of system and take it to scale to address the level of the problem in our community. So this fourth area is really around building that administrative backbone to do this work. There are 17 objectives across these four different sub-strategies. The first strategy or sub-strategy 4.1 is really around governance and decision-making. I think there's been numerous starts and stops to this work and it's gonna have to be an early priority in moving forward because as we've described the partners that are required to actually make this happen, we have to have a way to bring them together to make good decisions and to be accountable. The second sub-strategy is really around understanding the view from the ground, understanding our interventions and our programs working from the perspective of our clients and working authentically to find ways to involve the perspectives and experiences of people who are experiencing homelessness. One thing I think it's very important to stress is we have folks who have been homeless for a long time and we have folks who are newly homeless. We have working homeless. We have, there are many, many different experiences of homelessness and to design a system based on just one experience, we will not be successful in getting to outcomes of housing. And there's five objectives within that bucket. The third sub-strategy is really around the new division and making sure that it's adequately staffed, that the six month work plans are developed and worked towards and reported on and that in all, in those work plans that there's the, what's the investment? What's the financial cost for implementing the various programs that we've articulated? So those are all laid out in sub-strategy 4.3. And sub-strategy 4.4 is again, this theme you heard at the beginning, this idea of we've got to use data. We've got to be understanding in a very measurable way what's happening on the ground. And as Randy showed in that first very dense graph, this framework proposes performance metrics for various interventions. Well, that means you have to measure them and you have to be working with your providers on a continual basis to understand what's working, what's not and making adjustments. And the other element, one of the objectives within this is yes, those dashboards, internal dashboards for operations need to be functional. Very, very important. And this is part of why we felt HSD was such a, such the right place to put this work given their business analytics and their strong experiencing experience doing that for other programs. But not only do we want that data to be used internally, we want it to be available to the public. Again, this idea of visibility and accountability. So there's a lot to do. The new division is starting to come together and we have Dr. Robert Ratner joining us next week. And I will say Dr. Ratner did review the framework and was part of this in getting it to you today. But so the partners around this strategy are really cities, county departments, funders, the state, the feds. And again, our clients understanding their perspective and how the system is working for them. So with that, I'm going to pause and see if there's any questions and then pass it to Randy. You might want to share with the public who Dr. Ratner is. I don't think they understand. I'm going to actually let his new boss talk a little bit about him. Okay, we'll have something more formal, but who Elise is referring to, Dr. Ratner, your board approved the creation of a new director position when to report to me as this program moves, there was a community hiring process with city and community organizations and businesses and a whole process and Dr. Ratner was lifted up as the person to join us. He's got over 20 years of experience. He's a medical doctor and has a public health degree. He's been working in this field for 20 years in the guts of it for a very long time in county government, particularly in health and behavioral health. So he will be joining us starting on Monday. And I appreciate the board for doing that because then we have somebody with a lot of subject matter expertise who's worked in the middle of this. And just because I know Santa Cruz is a very intimate place, his wife is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz. His father-in-law is a professor emeritus from UC Santa Cruz and he's spent with his kids much of the last 20 years in Santa Cruz with his family and his in-laws. So this is a sort of second home to him. So that was part of the draw to be able to be here and work in a smaller community where he had wrapped around how to take this on. And as Alisa said, he was a unpaid volunteer helping us between jobs over the last few weeks. So thank you, Robert, if you're listening, I think he is. So I wanna add one other thing about Robert. So not only does he have that focus on behavioral medical health, he's also done housing development. As we know, that's, you know, it's great if we're addressing health needs, but we also need to get people housed. So we're really looking forward to having that expertise. Are you ready for your next slide? I am. Okay, so we're almost gonna close it out and open up to the board questions and public comment. I do wanna start by sharing on assumptions, you know, one thing that really strikes me in my previous position, I sat in many board meetings and hearing board members talk about homelessness and frustration and city councils frustrated in counties and cities pointing fingers and I was on a lot of committees. And so I've come here and some of the energy is very similar. Community is rightly so very, very frustrated. It's, you know, it's unconscionable that there is this many people who do not have a home. And what I find before diving into the specifics of assumptions is it is so hard for a community member to know where to point the finger. In public policy work, sometimes you talk about causes and symptoms and homelessness is a symptom of a complex set of causes that have played out arguably over three decades based on federal policy, state policy, county policy, city policy. So to untangle that puzzle and figure out where you point a finger, what do you do is a very, very complicated task. And my point is as a segue to assumptions, a county can only do so much, a city can only do so much, a county human service department can only do so much. So there are a number of assumptions we have in here because we don't have control over a lot of variables out of our control. And I do want to name even if county and city get along fabulously, we still are going to need federal and state policy mandates and funding to really, really move this needle. So we're going to have to do a lot of lobbying. So some of these assumptions, well, we have this double crisis of, you know, the fires that have led to 1,000 houses being lost, the pandemic, which has led to a recession that has led to lots of financial complications which contribute to this issue. We clearly are in the middle of a complicated federal presidential election. And you add all that up. How will that impact the current housing market is a major variable that we can't really control. But during the three years, how that plays out will have a big impact on these outcomes. As I mentioned, state and federal government are going to have to play a role. Counties and cities can't shoulder this all by themselves. This is a crisis hitting almost every community throughout the United States of America. You can't therefore assume it's created by a local community. It's federal and state policy and funding that have contributed to this. So we need their assistance. I'm not gonna highlight, we need a lot more staff, a lot more infrastructure and resources. Again, triple kudos to Elise and her team for managing it on the shoulders of three. I'm gearing up for this. It's gonna be on the shoulders of seven or eight, including Dr. Robert Ratner. And I'm sure we could do better if we even had more. So we're gonna be paying attention, being very thoughtful about public funds and infrastructure needed so that we put as much money towards services, but we're gonna need some infrastructure as well to kind of do this and track this well. Partners prioritize available funding, code word four. There are other systems that get funding who have choices to make. And sometimes those choices don't go to housing for the most vulnerable with the lowest income. They go to other groups that don't move the needle on homelessness. I do not judge that, but I just recognize that that is not in our control. So, planning offices at city and county who have to confront planning commissions and constituents and citing issues and what to do when money comes into other systems is not in our control, but how those partners prioritize will have an impact. Then extension of that common housing developers and service providers in this community, which is different than the community from where I came, there is not as much system in place. So we have to help support our providers having the capacity and if they don't, we have to work through that. So the last two here, I'm sitting in front of elected officials. This very complicated issue of citing, oh my goodness. So city of Santa Cruz, city of Watsonville, Scotts Valley, Capitola and here to the board with almost 50% unincorporated footprint. I have empathy for the challenge you confront when constituents and planning commissions say not my backyard. And what do we do if we can't work through those issues? And as Alisa mentioned, there is no places that we can cite places to create affordable housing. That is an assumption that we need the support of electeds at city and county to help us work through. Because if we have money, but we don't have a place to cite it, what can you do? So that's going to be something we need to be honest and transparent about as we work it through. And then the last is, I just kind of to close out the book end of my opening comment about how much is out of our control at the risk of oversimplifying an issue and bringing the human element in here. I wanna just name that I've only been here eight, nine months. It's a remarkable place to work. There's a lot of positivity and assumption of positive intent. And there's a lot of tension between cities and counties and even within county departments around how we focus on this vexing issue of homelessness and how we communicate, how we work together, whether we're gonna get in the same boat nor in the right direction is absolutely in our control. And if we finger point and fight and strategize about who, why somebody else in one other group is doing it wrong, that's in our control to stop. It's like president elect speech the other night. Let's kind of let's work together. So that segues to a little bit of a slide with a little boat in the background. Let's all get in this and or together, everybody. You know, what do we need to do on the left is a big summary of sort of what we went through and how to get there and the success that which is in our control is whether or not we work in partnership. That is easier said than done. It's a word, it's a statement, it's a phrase, but we do need to maximize our ability to collaborate. I think there is some room for improvement, but we have a good foundation here. And this just lists all the parties, including electeds here and the city electeds, others, people with lived experience, a lot of community partnership, city and county staff. And business partners as well and investors. So that is our hope. And I think we segue to... I think we probably should pause for questions before we go to the next steps. Okay. And we have a couple... I hear someone. We'll pause for the... Yeah, Ms. Benson and Mr. Morissus is a supervisor friend. I thank you for the presentation. I actually do have a question that I think is relevant to bring up at this point because we were speaking on kind of a broader point of community-based partnerships. I view the four strategies as four individual legs of a chair. And if any one of them weren't to succeed, then I think the whole system that we are presenting here would be ineffectual. But within those strategies, there are things that the county clearly has agency in, ownership of, or really just sets the stage in, but a lot of things that we don't. And while Mr. Morissus, you alluded to that to some degree, and I'm looking at the slide that speaks to this, I think that this point can't be overstated because there tends to be a focus on an individual entity to resolve something as people feel it fits within the purview of X or Y. And I do think that the county is taking an ownership role and leadership role on this as evidenced by the creation of the new office and what we're speaking about today. But what I would be interested in hearing is our more specifics beyond, as you had said, this work in partnership, our words. But within either these six-month breakdown periods that we get these updates, realistically, in order for this to succeed, we're going to need to know how these partners are also playing a direct role in this. Otherwise, I think we are going to end up right where we are now. And so I'd be interested in hearing how, actionably, the community-based partners, both the other cities, which I am very grateful for seeing so many of them participating in this meeting right now virtually, as well as the community-based partners, but to a lesser degree them and to a greater degree the actual other localities, how you anticipate having them play a very active role in this process. I'm going to take a little bit of a stab at responding. Supervisor Friend, as you mentioned, part of it is really how we put together those six-month work plans and articulate roles and responsibilities within that. So I think that has to be one of the cornerstones of the designs of those structures. The other thing is where we prioritize the question, the overall question of governance. This is something, there was a start before I started in 2017 to revamp the broad governance and priority setting around this topic. We started down the path in one of our work groups in this most recent effort as well. It's both straightforward and complex at the same time. And I do think the focusing on that early in this three-year process to really better articulate and understand roles and responsibilities and shared decision-making in a very formal way will be part of that critical immediate work. I'm going to see if Randy wants to add anything. Yeah, I'll be a little more specific. Thank you for the question, Supervisor Friend. And this is a hypothetical example about the process and the bridge we need to build between this plan and when we come back to your board and hopefully all four city councils early in 2021 is then we'll have our first six-month plan. So the process would be if we have funding that could allow us to develop some affordable housing and there's potentially unincorporated, that's in board and city or board county planning and planning commission, process would be we would want to talk to Kathy and the planning commission in your board and get agreement about putting on the six-month plan. We have in this next six months an opportunity. If it's in a city jurisdiction, we would want to work with the city, pull the city in, talk to them, talk to their planning department and do no gotchas, no ambushes, but work together to identify the potential and hopefully when these plans get lifted up we name who those parties are, they agree to being named in there and then we track it and we report it openly and transparently in city council meetings and at the board and then there's more people engaged in the process, not just us. I hope that's responsive to your question, Supervisor Friend, but that's an example because the siting issue is so complex for elected officials in city and for you all in county that that's one where we just want to work with those entities to name it and be willing to participate and have a role in the six-month plan and then we'll work on it and talk about it and report out on it as the plan rolls out. Is that responsive to your question, Supervisor Friend? Yeah, Director Morrissey, it is responsive and I didn't mean to articulate that the sole responsibility falls on the county or that I have a concern with that in the sense that I feel like every jurisdiction will always feel that they are disproportionately burdened by certain processes and that is just natural for when you represent a certain area, certain areas will feel that they take a disproportionate load or responsibility be it one of the two major cities I should say in our county or the unincorporated area. So to broaden that, I think that we can all recognize that that is going to come back to be an obstacle, that any individual jurisdiction is gonna feel that they're shouldering more than the others. But with that said, I think that I did hear what I needed to hear which is that we would break this into a six-month actionable plan process. I just think that we have a borderline Sisyphusian issue in coastal California with the cost of living and overall land use challenges that have led to a massive amount of homelessness within our community that doesn't exist, excuse me, within our state that doesn't exist in a lot of places across the country even though there has been increased rates across the country. And so what I'm saying is that I feel like that I need to be assured that if we're taking the lead on this, that everybody does have a responsibility within these other jurisdictions to really own the fact that none of the, that it's gonna, this responsibility has to be more than just shared, it has to be owned across these jurisdictions. And so I think these six-month check-ins are gonna be very honest and soul-searching about whether or not we're meeting these markers in a way and how we can shift this trajectory because otherwise it's just a plan that goes up on a shelf which nobody wants. And so that's what I'm hoping in these six-month processes to really get those accountability measures for all of us, for me as an unincorporated representative but also representing some cities and for city council members and others that just represent their individual jurisdictions. This is Supervisor Coonerty. I have a question, I'll have comments later and appreciations for our county's leadership's efforts in this, but my initial question is we had, we have some funding coming in right now, we'll hopefully have more funding coming in in the next month or two. And I wanna know how we make sure that we're applying the principles and approaches that are being called for in this focus strategies report to that money, even though we may not have a full, we may not have adopted the first six-month plan or the action plan. We had two items on today's budget on the consent agenda that references and I wanna know how we're gonna start doing the work now as money comes in even though even though we may not have adopted the strategy and the work plan yet so that we can start to make progress. Supervisor Coonerty, we are guilty of being presumptuous that you would support this plan and the money that's coming in is coming in within this frame and we are already queuing up for the first two months of the new office gearing up for coming back to your board and to city councils with a six-month plan that shows how we've purposed that money within this frame and that is actually part of this first six-month plan. So we are already doing it based on the discussions that have come forward both publicly and in meetings with your offices that this is an agreeable approach and framework. So we're already doing it basically is the answer and you can hold us accountable on the public hand when we come back in early 2021 to show how we've done it and how it looks in that first plan. I would wanna add one other thing to this conversation. When we started this work, I'm hearkening back to a conversation I had with HSA director Hall, my dear colleague Mimi who said we need this framework. So it's not just sort of the work of the homeless system, but the other systems of care that they then have something to look at and identify how did they relate to the goals? How did those investments either new or current relate to this framework? So there's another, it's maybe a little bit removed from the directness that Randy just spoke to where it's specific funding that's articulated for homelessness, the other intention of this framework is to provide a basis for us to look at our other systems of care and how they are connecting to this framework. How are our behavioral health dollars being leveraged to support the work here as well? So it's as I mentioned, it's a little bit more of a construct, but it's something that we can now use and start with to evaluate each and every investment moving forward and is it moving towards these goals? So I think that's one other important advantage of what we're the proposed framework today is it allows us to look at these other funding streams and articulate, are these aligned? Are they not? How do we do that? Great, thank you. I'll save my comments for after the community has a chance to comment. Oh, any other questions before? I had a question or two. You mentioned, Mr. Morris, that you've already looked at this framework as we seek these additional dollars. And I wonder if you could just say, under this new framework, 18 months ago, we received 10 and 11 million dollars. How will the next slug of money that we get for that, how will that look different? And the allocation of those resources different than the way it looked last time? Very good question. I would like to think one part of the answer is it's more transparent. It's more clear to use a word you very politely but directly asked us to consider more digestible so that when this money lands, it's in this frame. There's data tracking how we're doing on it. And when we come back to you in January, you'll see it in that frame in a plan. The plan is digestible and people can track better. Cause right now it's a kind of a mystery. Money went into some big amorphous system and it's doing something, but it's hard to track it. So I would like to think it will be more clear how the money came in and to oversimplify the nine million dollars that Supervisor McPherson asked about earlier and Alisa responded to. You know, that really kind of breaks down in terms of helping make sure we have funding to keep this COVID system in place that is serving, as I said, almost a thousand people a month and not pulling the rug out from under them for a very defined chapter while purposing the balance towards a number of these three strategies. So I hope it lands in a way that just fits within this and people can track easier. And I'd like to think, and Alisa's mentioned this and I've certainly felt the pressure and expectations to have better data that we will be able to be very upfront and preemptive about where we are in the process, how the money has landed and are we moving the needle and talk about what more we need. I hope that's what happens. Yeah, I mean, this has a very ambitious goals, right? Which is good. And I know that there will be a sufficient amount of sweat between now and three years from now to make sure that you achieve those goals. But there will be, it seems that the state which has not replaced our source of funding for affordable housing that was lost when redevelopment, the agencies were eliminated is just coming through with this one-time funds. And it's not something that we can count on to know that we're gonna get X number of dollars each year. It varies, it changes. It, there's new foci by the administration. You know, so it's difficult. But it sounds like future funds will also be, those decisions will be made by all the jurisdictions together, these partners that you've listed here. Well, let me answer in two ways. One is for money that comes into the county or the county COC, we would like to have the partnership with city jurisdictions, cities get some money too. We'd like to have them in partnership with us that it's all in this frame. And that, again, it's more transparent, it's more open and it fits within the tracking. But I think the second part is it seems inevitable with the nature of this crisis throughout California and nationally, we can also do a better job parsing out what needs federal and state intervention and concurrently focus on lobbying, looking for philanthropic funds, going after grants as we do now, but more. And I think, I think I don't know about DC, but California is hungry for solutions to this issue. And it's just so complicated to find one. If somebody can move the needle, well, I think people are willing to invest in it, but right now they don't know where the investment goes because it just drops into a big amorphous system. So I just want to underline the importance of being organized and focusing on our state and federal lobbying as well. The last question I'll ask for right now is, you mentioned this in terms of looking at all of our other systems of care funding, and we're going to be doing a new round of core funding sometime next year. And so in the first time we did core funding, we use the all in plan as sort of a guidepost of how we're going to make decisions. Would you assume that we're not going to use that plan, but we're going to use this new housing for a healthy Santa Cruz as our guidepost for those housing decisions? And do you think about all the other investments that we make being linked in through that core funding program and will our partners be at the same way? Ooh, that was a multi-pronged question. Short answer is yes, of course, we have to have this be the frame because this is the replacement frame. The next set of slides, which are the ultimate slides before public comment, you'll see a reference to core. We want to engage our partners. And then how will they see it? I obviously can't speak for them, but I think this is one of the things that's fully in your board's control when you have discretionary general fund money. And I think we'll just again try to be very transparent. We will be back in front of you. We have a deferral item. We'll be back in front of you in early 21 talking about the process building up towards next summer when we put that RFP out under your guidance. So all of that can come together. And as you know, we've been doing a lot of work with our core partners to try to build some consensus towards this movement we're working on. So I hope it will fold together nicely, but I obviously can't speak for them. Their community organizations are struggling quite a bit. So I think I understand their struggles with needing more money because they could do better if they had more money, but that's the challenge. There's not enough. Thank you. I would just want to add one more point to Supervisor Leopold's question around connecting the dots, money dots with this. When we were looking at the original heap dollars, there was all, we went through a local prioritization process because we recognized within sort of the HAP community, the COC community, that we were putting together proposals that just basically chased the funding requirements of the funder. It wasn't based on local priorities. And I think one of the critiques of our heap decisions was we didn't have something like this to drive what we were going to do. And that we had literally just started this process when we had to make those decisions. So I, whether it's core, whether it's state dollars, whether it's federal dollars, this provides us our own local structure. Of course you have to align with funder eligibility and requirements, but it's finding that sweet spot between the two and having a structure as specific and focused as this will just make that, hopefully make that process cleaner as we move forward. Thanks. So Chair Caput, if there's no other questions, we have one last set of slides before we open it up to questions in public comment, if that's okay for now, okay? Okay, so we're just gonna close out with the next steps. What is this all for? If you can go to the next slide. We now are basically sort of unveiling this publicly and we'll say in the next slide to cities as well. And it creates an opportunity for stakeholders to kind of look at this, ask questions, get clarification, but also really what we're hoping for is within this frame to sort of help us together collectively as a community figure out how to focus our first six month plan is going to be drafted and brought forward to your board and the city councils in early 2021. And then this is a little bit of a call to action. Mindful, everyone stretched thin. The more who are able to help support us and be part of the solution, the better. So we also hope that this process identifies partners who are willing to be part of the solution and can kind of invest in the work with us together. And that leads to the last slide, which is just kind of wanna outline the timeline that's in front of us. Here we are today at this study session. We, Elise and I will be co-presenting at the four cities to tonight unless something changes, Santa Cruz and Watsonville. And then we have Scott's Valley and Capitola later in the week and next week. During November and December, we've mentioned these opportunities for community input. We will be sending out and make it public an online survey that anybody can respond to and give information, we'll be collecting that. So that will be put out. We hope by the end of the week, we do have a process in place that we're gonna be connecting with people who are experiencing homeless now to do some in-person social distancing survey. And then this is where I go back to Supervisor Leibold's question. We are still working with focused strategies on having a series of virtual meetings with key stakeholders. And one is this core entity that has been meeting for the last many of years to get their perspective. The HAP, we're also specifically back to equity, really engaging with the South County provider group because the dynamics in Watsonville and Santa Cruz are very different. And then our goal is to come back to your board and to the city councils to sort of finalize this plan, which we hope to put a little bit of nice graphics in and have it be the official plan and the first six month plan to honor you, Supervisor Leopold, digestible, understandable, something that we can track. And then that will be the focus of our work. So that is where we are. And I believe that closes the formal presentation and Elise will come back after public comment and just remind your board of what the actions are today. Yeah, let me, I don't expect an answer for everything. I'm gonna make a comment and then you can answer just a little bit because this is a study session and I know we're going forward. I wanna thank you for all the work you have been doing. We're being proactive and we're trying to solve a problem that is a very difficult one to deal with. It has a lot of moving parts. When I'm kind of concerned, the longer we're going forward and the longer we're expanding or whatever, the more responsibility we have personally. So I'd rather be kind of proactive on some things rather than waiting till something goes wrong and then all of a sudden we have to deal with that. So one would be, I guess, security in the future with the shelters. I know the Watsonville shelter, they're doing a great job. We've been in there, the shelter's been in place for months now, probably about six months, is it close to? I think we're closer to seven. We opened that in April. Yeah, and then they're doing great, but we do have men, women and children, young ages all in one building. So if something does go wrong, one of the children or something gets hurt by somebody or and the showers, we have the men's showers and the women's showers in the same open gymnasium area. So I guess what I'm getting at is as well as it's going, we have to have, we're owning responsibility now as time goes by. So a little worried about staffing, somebody does maybe show up and then you only have one or two at night there because somebody called in sick or whatever. So I guess we need more staffing and more security, but again, and then the high school is right across street. We have some of the homeless that don't want to live in a shelter because there's rules. And so they're camping out across street at the high school. And right now the high school doesn't have any students. So it's not a big deal, but it will become a big deal in the future. The other would be normally with affordable housing, you have to have a minimum amount of income coming in to even qualify like section eight or whatever. And even with section eight, there's government assistance, helping pay the rent and everything like that. But the person has to have some kind of income to add to it. We're talking about people, almost all of them have some kind of income coming in somewhere or they don't. Are there a few that are gonna fall through the cracks here? We're talking about people that are basically homeless, but that's because they can't handle money that they have coming in or. I think we have a variety of experiences in terms of income levels with our homeless residents. Some are working and it's really the cost of housing here. Some are not and are gravely disabled and those are our candidates for things like permanent supportive housing. So as Randy talked about, as the report talks about, we have to have a variety of housing options to address different income realities. And when we talk about something like permanent supportive housing, that's for folks that really are not able to live independently and don't have the economic means. But some of the other things we're talking about is really around just affordability. And again, that question of how do you have, how are rents affordable and how are they subsidized? So as we look at our housing supply, that's gonna be part of the questions we get at. We're gonna have to have a lot of different housing products to address the different levels of income. Okay, and then what about, let's say I show up and I have, I'm from another country. I have no documentation. I only speak a different language. And how am I gonna qualify to get some housing there? That's a very good question. I think we have lots of different experiences with folks coming into our community, immigrating in and how they access services. But as we know, the status of someone's documentation definitely can be a barrier to accessing services. You bet. And the last thing I don't expect, like I said, answers on all of this because this is a study session. But if, let's say I'm, what I'm talking about, we're becoming like the landlord. We're becoming like the owner. We're actually gonna own certain responsibility in the future. And so I have a house, let's say, and I open it up for section eight. But I allow the house to fall into disrepair or I allow garbage to pile up or I don't run it well and I don't fix things quickly. Then I'm responsible. I'm very responsible. So what I'm getting at is, as a board of supervisors that as a county working on these problems, we own it. We own the problems. We own the fact that, hey, how come we have so much garbage piling up because we have more and more coming in? We have health and safety. We've got to look at that real close so we don't become a bad landlord, I guess. So I'll let that go. I'll open it up to the public for comment. Then we'll go ahead and vote on this item. Come on, how you doing, Marilyn? Sitting here so long over an hour, Marilyn Garrett. I have given, we're working in a system of capitalism. And that's the problem. And I've given this to the board report and I want to give this to you two presenters and that was very informative. I learned some new figures there. Feeling sad and depressed, it says. Are you anxious? Worried about the future? Feeling isolated and alone? You might be suffering from capitalism. Symptoms may include homelessness, unemployment, poverty, hunger, feelings of helplessness, fear, apathy, boredom, cultural decay, loss of identity, loss of free speech, incarceration, suicidal or revolutionary thoughts and death. And I don't know what can be solved in the system and it's only gotten worse with this COVID. And there is a quote here from Rocco Galati of the Constitutional Rights Center in Canada. And he quotes the University of Maine's Germany study. 14 countries with little to no COVID measures feared no worse and mostly better than the countries that impose COVID measures. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s website, Children's Health Offense, he comments on statistically when there's more unemployment, there are more deaths. Give her another minute, give her one more minute, go ahead. Yeah, I'm just sitting here an hour and a quarter here. Because of these restrictions, the hunger, the poverty, the starvation, suicide, increase in domestic violence, et cetera. Many more people, he said, will die from this than from any virus. So here we are in this situation. And I don't, it's really what I've been reading. There's no evidence that math and social distancing and all this really helps anything. Chair, could we keep the housing? So may I finish, Mr. Leopold? And you talk about healthy Santa Cruz. We also have, you're just focusing on homelessness, an unhealthy environment with all of the wireless microwave assault on everybody causing mental health issues and ill health. We also have all these disinfectants and poisons and pesticides. When you talk about healthy Santa Cruz, it's important to remove these known sources of harm. So I'm gonna leave you with a copy of this and it's a system problem. Thanks, Marl. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of rural Aptos. Thank you, Ms. Benson, Mr. Morris for the excellent report. And I really applaud the county getting things together so there's an overarching plan that will move forward. And I really like that there will be a six month work plans where everything is evaluated for flexibility. And I really like that you're working together with the cities. I've heard a lot of complaints about that at the Santa Cruz City Council meetings. One thing that I think this board can do is really look at increasing the percentage of required affordable inclusionary housing in new developments. We're still working under measure J with a 15%. Watsonville City has 20%. Why don't we increase that requirement for a higher number of units in inclusionary in new development for inclusionary housing? We need to look at tiny homes being part of the solution. And that's not really been addressed by this county by your board. And that is something that could happen. The problem with the ADUs in the Mid County is the high cost of new water service connections with SoCal Creek Water District. It's from $22,000 to $30,000 for a new hookup. And they require a separate connection for ADUs. So that's a problem. And I think that we need to be talking with our water districts about addressing that issue, that barrier. I want to, boy, there was a lot of material and I only get one chance to ask questions. I wanna confirm that there have been no cases of COVID in our homeless populations in this county. I hope that that is true. But I have a concern about the project room key allowed the county to rent hotel rooms. Project home key would allow this county to buy the hotels. Is that something that this county can really afford to do and maintain going forward as a permanent solution? I want some clarification on that because I worry. I appreciate the good and very frank questions and answers about how the $10 million grant was used. Nothing got built. It all went to non-governmental services and nothing really changed in terms of providing housing. So I appreciate Supervisor McPherson's question. How are we gonna spend the $9 million now coming in to really make a difference? I really applaud your questioning the use of that money, especially when people have come here and complained about encompass lying for contracts to get housing. And that's never been addressed. Mr. Tony Crane has been here many times. Well, I'm out of time. I have a lot more questions. Thank you. Yeah, hello there again. So I complain already about mental health department and asked for investigation because of kidnapping, slavery, brainwashing, and mismanagement is outrageous. And about housing, my daughter was in line for voucher section eight since 2008. She had a diagnosis like learning disability. And as soon as I moved in here after my daughter had traumatic brain injury to help her out with health insurance, with everything, the county was pushing me away and tried to isolate. My daughter away from me. This is what they were doing constantly every day. And my daughter never was able to get voucher section eight. So when the mental health department made my daughter very sick, incredibly sick, because they kidnapped her, they isolated her, and misdiagnosed her, mistreated her. So after that, my name was added on voucher section eight because my daughter lost her ability to be independent because of brainwashing. And anyway, housing authority did not consider my daughter's request in the verbal, written request. Nothing. Never her request was considered anyway. Whatever she asked, they just disregarded it and denied it. So my daughter was homeless until March this year. Nobody can even believe it that it's possible and happened in this county, which stole my daughter from me and even conserved her three times. But still, she was not even considered for any housing. She's still not in line for affordable housing. And now they finally gave her voucher section eight this year on March after my again complaint, after complaint, after complaint. But now they're trying to get that voucher away from her because she cannot handle her independence anymore since she was made sick by the mental health department. So I need help for my daughter housing right now. And the county actually prohibited anybody to help me. I even prohibited to get any legal help. We have senior legal aid. When every time I go there, they just don't let me even to schedule any appointment. They know me in the face. I'm prohibited to get any legal help and to help my daughter as well. So this is my request to get my daughter on some, how on the note and help her do not lose voucher section eight that she was waiting since 2008, 12 years. If I may like get a card. Thank you. Okay. Okay, we'll bring it back to the chair. We actually have one web comment. We do have a comment. This is from Serge Cogno. Good morning. My name is Serge Cogno. I am an organizational consultant for homeless services. I am on the county's mental health advisory board with chairman Caput. I was a member of the city of Santa Cruz community advisory committee on homelessness. I have been on our grand jury. I'm a member of the newly formed neighborhood courts. I created stepping up Santa Cruz homeless service directory. I'm an executive director of the new recovery cafe Santa Cruz that we hope to do a presentation to the board in upcoming meeting. I want to express my great appreciation and respect for the staff that support it, for bringing this framework forward for focused strategies for leading the way and for all ready and focused in doing the hard work in this plan. I appreciate the desire to solve homelessness without judgment to offer safety, compassion and willingness to see the actual people in our streets who are unhoused, those looking for help and those afraid, untrusting and resistant to receiving help. We are, I'm sorry. What we must admit in this is that our community has voices of compassion and following best practices which have been proven outcomes nationally and internationally as well as voices that lack compassion that deny best practices that always go away. You are someone else's problems. As director Morris said, we need to collaborate to collectively move forward with this framework. We must admit that some of our ordinances both city of Santa Cruz, county of Santa Cruz, targeting those experiencing homelessness. The county still has 9.36.080 county ordinance banding overnight car camping on county roads through the coastal commission. Though the coastal commission wrote a letter notifying the county that this was not allowed. We must admit that the county of Santa Cruz ordinances and ticketing of those forced to live outside makes this makes the inclusion, the engagement of the housing of them possible. Forgive me, but what I could not find in this framework though, I saw focusing on the low barrier and our shelters and focusing on training and housing for our outreach staff. What I did not see in this, sorry, what I did not see in this framework is how the city and county ordinance and law enforcement citations and not allowing those forced to camp outside to find a safe place without continually being moved along because we will do, I'm just gonna read it the way it's written, because we will do not have enough shelter for everyone without being offered adequate and consistent bathrooms, shower and trash services. We will also need to move forward to support this amazing framework. It's treating those not in any of our programs with dignity to encourage them to join us on the path towards housing. These are hard conversations and the community voices actually making the achieving of our goals more difficult. I want to thank focus strategies, Elisa Benson, Randy Morris, and all of the many, many staff of the county, of the cities and the nonprofits, of the faith community and those on the streets who are willing to dream and are willing to step together to achieve the goal in this framework. Be safe and have a great day. And that's the last comment. Okay, thank you. That'll conclude the public comment, bring it back to the board either for- I think Ms. Benson was gonna give us one last slide about the recommended actions. Thank you, Supervisor. Yes, so the recommended actions are on the slide. Obviously we've done number one, we've conducted the multi-jurisdictional study session and the second is to move forward as with the engagement process that Randy detailed for all of you. And then coming back no later than the first meeting in February, we're actually aiming for the end of January for the final adoption of the framework and the first work plan. Chair, I would make that motion. Okay, we have a motion. I'll second, could we go through the motion? I just have a comment to make too. You go first, Supervisor Grunty. Sure, so first I just wanna take a moment and appreciate the work of Elisa Benson and Randy Morris on this. This is an issue that for a long, too many years, jurisdictions have pointed the fingers at each other or other entities. And because it's such a hard problem, no one wanna take responsibility. I wanna appreciate the work and the leadership that has been shown by the county to step up and say, let's look at our system, let's look at what's working, what's not working, let's look at what strategies work in other places and what we can employ here. I wanna acknowledge that we're talking about setting a concrete goal to reduce the number of households experiencing unsheltered homelessness by 50% and the number of households experiencing homelessness by 30%. That's a big goal, but we have a series of approaches that I think will be meaningful. And the fact that all this was done during COVID and continues during COVID, I think it's both been a challenge, but also informative. We now have more housing and more shelter than any of us ever thought possible a year or two ago. But we also see that with all that shelter, the problem is still getting worse. There are still more encampments, still more family suffering and still more community impacts. I think recognizing that we will never be able to construct enough shelter for those in need, that putting people on a list in which they will never get the housing, a list to nowhere and instead saying, let's use the resources and relationships that you have as an individual. Let's help you repair them. Let's give you the tools to help rebuild those relationships and find housing, whether it's here or other places, is a much more humane and effective approach to addressing homelessness in our community. And I appreciate the efforts. I don't think it'll be easy. I think there will be times when we set these goals and we come up short, but as long as we are trying and iterating and changing to adapting circumstances, I think our community and especially those experiencing homelessness will be better served. And so I wanna appreciate where we are today and look forward to where it will be tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you. Chair, I appreciate the remarks that my colleague just made. And I also wanna thank the staff for their work in putting this together. It has taken longer than thought because of the unusual nature of this year, but it does represent the latest effort to try to think about how we do homeless services differently so we can have better results. I was on this board and participated with the Smart Solutions for Homelessness in the creation of the All-In Plan, which involved hundreds of people in the community and which had a series of bold goals to eliminate homelessness in Santa Cruz County. And one of the, and that was adopted by our board in every jurisdiction and one of the requests that that report made was that we have a person responsible for homelessness, our homelessness response situated in the CAO's office because at the time, that's where the community felt was the best place to address these issues, to raise its visibility. There were a lot of other requests in there for other jurisdictions and the ambitious goal of I think 6,000 units of housing. You know, it's, I think everybody realized at the time that they were probably overly ambitious, but it started to me a change in the way we thought about doing things here in Santa Cruz County. And the efforts that county staff has made to try to form a governance structure so decisions could be made, but with all the jurisdictions, it's in some ways, it sounds boring work, especially hard for the public to understand, but obviously critical. So everybody's working on the same page that they're investing resources to the same goals. And the focus strategy process to me is a better way, has proven, I think a better way to try to incorporate those voices. So our partners feel a greater stake in the plan that we've identified three or four key goals that while ambitious, what stretching could be accomplished. And there's lots of strategies and goals and the plan makers love those things and that's great. But I think to Mr. Morris's point, I think it's easy to understand how we're gonna eliminate or how we're gonna add to the housing stock, how we're gonna work to reduce the number of people who are experiencing homelessness in our community. Those are things that people can understand. So I really appreciate the hard work that went into getting to that place. I do think that in the future, it's gonna take leadership at every level to help accomplish these goals. Assuring that there's resources and standing up to site new housing projects, to do the hard work of working together and building that coalition to collaborate rather than to point fingers. Those, that's work that in part can be done by staff, but is also a requirement of elected officials. I think we do have elected officials who are committed to these tasks and are willing to put the time in to make it happen because the public demands that we address this problem as successfully as possible. So I appreciate the work that went into this plan and I look forward to seeing how it rolls out over the next couple of years. Thank you. Okay, great. We have a first and second. Bruce has his hand. Bruce. Yeah. Mr. Chairman, Chairman, can you hear me all right? I'm Supervisor McPherson. I wanna thank, as Ed, there's had the County Administrative Office and the Special Assistant CAO, Lisa Benson, and our Human Services Director, Randy Johnson, welcome to the County, Randy. It's nice to have you here at this time. I know that it's gonna be difficult to keep on track, but I do think this having this six month review is vitally important so we know where we've been and where we aim to go in the future. I think the promise and potential of this plan really relies on the roadmap it provides for the County as well as its four cities and our service partners in the nonprofit world to work together to make a meaningful progress toward prevention to begin with and then working diligently to get those who are homeless back on track. I think the true success of this plan is gonna be how we operationalize these strategies and ensure that each of us stays committed to owning our own role and managing the outcomes. We have built some flexibility into the plan as well as frequent reports back, as I mentioned, that to ensure that this happens. I wanna call out two goals that I think are really important that goal one, four, C to deepen the outreach to people experiencing homelessness in a way that includes problem solving areas to get them housed. Even when they're presented with a pathway to housing, not everyone can get there right away and for a variety of reasons. So we need to meet people where they are and problem solve to lift them out of this homelessness. And then goal four F to clarify public property rules regarding encampments. This is a big gap that contributes to the visibility of people living on the streets. And I would go even further with this goal to say that we need to seek the adoption of common practices and protocols within local jurisdictions regarding the outreach and enforcement so they are uniform throughout the county. This would get us on track to a cooperative effort with our four cities. And I think this would be a welcome addition if we had some common practices and protocols to follow. And I think that there are some included here but I'd really like to just highlight them even more. I think this framework is a great start and represents a contract that we are making with the community to do things better together. I want to thank all those who have contributed to this to this point. I think it will help us get any kind of grants from federal or state officials in the future. And that's one of the uncertainties we face as we don't know how much funding we're going to have to carry out some of these ambitious programs. And I think that it is an ambitious goal to reduce those unsheltered by 50% in three years. And to let people know, if we did that, we still will probably have some homelessness out there. But if we accomplish that goal, it will be a tremendous accomplishment and we're going to get there if we work together. So I really look forward to working with our city partners and really do seeing this era of homelessness that we're all experiencing. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other comments from the board? If not, we'll call the roll, call the vote. We're going to call the vote. Thank you. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Should we take a quick break or should we, yeah. Okay, well we'll take a 10 minute break and then we'll come back with item number seven. Well, Chair, I don't know. I know that there are people here for the, well, I don't know whether people are here, what we're going to get to before lunch. I think we should be clear about what we're going to get to and not so people in the audience know. What do you, what's the expectation? Yeah, we're going to have closed session and lunch. So we could, we need to take up the 7.1 and 7.2 that we took off the consent agenda as well as item seven, the stream clearing ordinance. We could take up the other items after we come back from the break. So we'll do the ordinance, the urgency ordinance before lunch and we'll do the rest of it after lunch. We can take up the CAO off presentation and the appointment after lunch, after the public defender item, that's correct. Okay, I just want to be clear for everybody who's here and listening. All right, 10 minutes. So a 10 minute break with everybody back at 11.40 then, Chair, or 11.45? Okay, thank you. 11.40. Item number seven. Might want to check up your microphones on. Yeah, item number seven. Consider adoption of an urgency ordinance adding chapter 7.142 to Santa Cruz County code, allowing the director of emergency services to authorize clearance of stream channels on private property addressing immediate threats to life, health and public safety. Related to debris flows stemming from the CZU August lightning complex fires as outlined in the memorandum of the deputy CAO and the director of public work, Surgency Ordinance Adding SCCC, chapter 7.142. And if we, I want to thank Marilyn for these cookies. Okay, thank you. Thank you. All right, good morning, Chairman, Supervisors, Matt Machado. The item before you as read is the stream clearing urgency ordinance in order to protect the health and safety of the community is necessary for the county to be able to quickly and efficiently remove and clear sediment and debris from creeks and streams. The urgency ordinance before you authorizes actions necessary to enter private property and work within the stream channels in order to clear sediment debris. The recommended action today is to adopt an urgency ordinance adding chapter 7.142 to the Santa Cruz County Code to allow the director of emergency services to authorize clearance of stream channels on private property to address immediate threats to life, health and public safety related to debris flows stemming from the CZU August lightning complex fires. And with that, I can answer any questions you may have. Okay, great. Any questions from the board members on this item? Yes, Mr. Chair, this is Supervisor Friend. I do have a brief question of Director Machado, fully supportive of this item. I have a question about maybe broadening it, coming back, supporting this today, but maybe this is a better question for council, but it seems to me that we should have such an ordinance in place for any declared emergency where we would have this authority. Obviously in the South County, we do have private property interfaces with creek streams in the river, that it strikes me that it would be more efficient if we had an ordinance that during a declared emergency, we could go in and do this work anyways. That's something that would be beneficial to public works to come back with an ordinance moving forward that gave you authority for that, moving forward. This is Jason Heath. We did look at that issue when we were in the midst of putting this together. And what we decided from a legal perspective is that it's recommended to do a much more tailored ordinance to directly address the issue at hand whenever you're going on to private property to address something. And that's one of the reasons why, for instance, that we kept it to this particular topic and why the ordinance is only going to be in place through next June, I believe, unless the board decides to extend it. So I think that perhaps we could talk a little bit more about this after you've considered the options. Thank you, Council. I have no other additional questions, Chair. It looks like Supervisor McPherson is hands up. I just had a comment that I'm fully supportive of this. I know it's related to private property, but I just wanted the general public to know that property owned by the San Lorenzo Valley Water District up in Boulder Creek. We have a big concern up there on debris flow and they have cleared the choke points there. And so that's a good step forward. I just wanted the public to know generally that was just completed this week, I believe, or the end of last week. And we had our public works department and a lot of people engaged in that. So this is something that I'm fully supportive of and I just wanted the public to know about that issue up in Boulder Creek. Thank you. The area is specific to the emergency order. Any other board member? The San Lorenzo Valley. Okay. No other part? Okay. I will now call for public comment. Okay, Bob. Good to see you. Thank you, Chairman Caput, members of the board. I'm Bob Berlage. I'm here on behalf of Big Creek Lumber Company. Our company is completely supportive of the county's concerns regarding the dangers of post-fire stream flow buildup. And we're hoping that there may be ways that we can assist. I lost my home in the fire along with most of my neighbors. So it's too close to home for me. But we have a couple of questions. I'm hoping that council or Mr. Machado can answer these questions before you move forward with this ordinance. The Santa Cruz Sentinel had an accompanying article this morning where they stated that the county can get reimbursed for this work. I read through the ordinance this morning and couldn't find anything about reimbursement. Sentinel may have been mistaken. But if there is reimbursement, it's important to know what that means. Is that reimbursement in the form of grants from state and federal agencies to the county? Or are they talking about reimbursement from private landowners for work that the county does on private property? If it is that, then I'd argue that the specifics of that reimbursement from landowners needs to be in the ordinance with an opportunity for people to look at that and for landowners to provide public comment before you pass the ordinance. That's the first thing. Second thing, our company has personnel and equipment and the ability to deal with debris flows. And I'm just wondering how this ordinance could potentially impact our ability to do that or even if we'd be allowed to do that. And lastly, the ordinance calls for workers, county workers, perhaps state workers, federal workers, or even subcontractors could go on the property to accomplish this work. We have a question about the liability of people that the county has sent on to private property. If someone's injured on those properties conducting that work, is the county solely responsible or does liability lie elsewhere? I'm sure that's a concern that not only Big Creek but other landowners would want to know. And lastly, very curious how the county is going to ascertain where these debris flows occur. Because a lot of that stuff's up in canyons and not very accessible, certainly not visible from roads. So I'm curious how that's going to be, information is going to be developed. So we'd like answers those questions and I'm happy to answer any questions that your board might have. If I may term and answer some of those questions. So I heard four questions in there. The first one is with regard to reimbursement. And so it is not reimbursement from private landowners. We would be pursuing reimbursement from state and federal sources if a disaster declaration does happen. And this ordinance does allow us that ability, which is helpful. The second question was the liability, I believe. And so that liability will fall on the contractor that we hire or on the county of themselves. If it's our own forces. And then what was the, I think I missed the second one actually. Can we turn our company and our equipment personnel? So with regard to that, I think coordination with local forces such as theirs, we'll always entertain that if there's an opportunity. And so maybe we could coordinate on that. Extra resources is a good thing. And then I think the last question was, was your last one? Oh yeah, the location, thank you. So the, what we envision this to be helpful for is if debris flows, especially some of the smaller ones start coming down these channels and creeks and they hold up at roadways, culverts, bridges and such. We want to be able to clear those. Now those, those debris blockages are on private property, but they're up against the roadway. So we'll see them and we want to clear those before they build up into a larger dammed type situation with a larger potential of threat downstream. And so we'll be focused on the ones that are up against roadways and such infrastructure that we maintain. So I think that answers the questions. Thank you. For the questions I have, and I'll check in with Mr. Schauder. Right. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I live in the mountains too. And I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Boulage and for everyone that lost their homes. I appreciate the questions that Mr. Boulage asked. I continue to have concerns that the debris flows are being modeled on what happened after the Thomas fire in 2017 in Southern California. I pointed out to you before that we are in a different habitat. The redwood forests are different. There was already a lot of sprouting going on out there that will help hold the soils. So I urge you to take a cautionary, don't assume that that's gonna happen the same as it did in Santa Barbara. That's what I wanna say. And to that end, I'm concerned that I didn't see anything in the language of this urgency ordinance that private property owners would be consulted with the plans on clearing. I didn't see anything about the Resource Conservation District, which has gone out and told people not to remove trees to let them stay. And that has been my experience too, working with that agency in my rural community that opening up stream channels allows the water to move very fast and can actually cause more damage. So I appreciate the clarification from Mr. Machado that the focus will be on culverts and bridges. And I wanna know that that is the only place really where the state, federal, contractors, county workers would be working and not going on to private property to clear stream beds, because that's how I read the documentation in the packet. I wanna know how the work would be prioritized. And I'm assuming now that you will prioritize monitoring and clearing at culverts and bridges, but will it be more extensive? And if so, how will that be prioritized? Going back to Mr. Borlaja's question is how would these debris flow areas be identified? And I wanna say prioritized. I really appreciate council's respect of private property rights. And I again want to say that we need to include the property owners in any plan to clear because they know the land, they know the drainage, they probably already know where there could be problems and getting the resources to help do work that may be needed would be the best. But I cringe at the thought of federal, state and contractors just coming in on private property and doing what they want to do without the property owners consent or input. Thank you. Hi, Marilyn. Hi. Yeah, as I was listening, I had some of the very same serious questions that are needing to be responded to before something like this has passed. When there are these urgency or emergency measures, how many have we got now going in the county? I think it enables policies that are very questionable. And I'm the conservation group, Becky was mentioning and others who know the ecology of streams and wants to be done. Culvert bridges, blockages on the road, that makes total sense. And that's what the county should do. But where are the property owners on this to give input or even know? I mean, and we in this country, it's like, oh, private property is so sacred. And yet this seems like a violation of those private property rights. So those are very questionable to me. And I have a friend who lives by a stream, I don't, but there are creatures there that come by and I don't know if they're beavers or what they'll block. The river changes course each year where she lives depending on the rain, that the waterfall, how things move and it's just constant. So to think of someone coming in who doesn't know the river or have a sense of the ecology and just go in, they've been like increased flooding when things are just cleared like that. So it seems like this needs to be put on a future agenda after these serious issues are really looked into and resolve, thank you. Yes, thank you. Any other comments? Yes, we have a couple of web comments. First one is from Jessica Peters, Dear Board of Supervisors. I urge you to vote no on this recommended action. What preventive measures are being put into place ahead of the rains? Forcing people out of their homes multiple times is not the answer, nor is tramping on citizens' property rights under the guise of public interest. It is unreasonable to continue to use the events in Santa Barbara County to push this agenda. The conditions and geography do not compare, thank you. And then we have one from Ken Davenport, Dear Supervisors. Why do we need a new ordinance that allows county workers to enter private property and declare a nuisance? Last year, a planning department inspector was caught red-handed on video trespassing on a lady's property. I believe he was fired, but why would you vote to sidestep current citizen protection in the county code? In a bona fide and declared emergency, the government has all the authority it needs to enter the property. I do not support this, and you shouldn't either, thank you. And that's it. Okay. Thank you. Just a quick question, Jason, on an ordinance such as this, does it require four-fifths or does it? Yes, yes, Supervisor, this is a four-fifth vote. I'm assuming it's gonna be unanimous, but I'm just curious. Okay, thank you. Yes. If we have no more discussion, we'll bring it back for a motion and a second. I would move the recommended actions. Okay. Second. And we have a second, if we call the vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Now that'll take us to item number eight, consider a report on the establishment of- Chair Caput, we're gonna do 7.1 and 7.2. Yes, 7.1. We'll do eight after the break. Later on this afternoon. 7.1 is for the consent items. Yes. It's normally item 21. You're right. Okay. 7.1 removal of, we put them together, 21 and 23 for comment on- I think you probably need to read- Affordable housing on Capitol Road. Chair, do you wanna read it in or do you want me to read it in? Yeah, you go ahead. Accept and file the report on the use of property taxes received by the county related to the disposition of the Capitol Road commercial site is recommended by the county administrative officer. And as the board of the supervisors for the Santa Cruz County Redevelopment Successor Agency approve revised affordable housing and property disposition agreement by and between the Santa Cruz County Redevelopment Successor Agency and Midpen Live Oak Associates LP, a partnership between Midpen Housing, authorize the county administrative officer to execute the agreement and take related actions that recommended by the county administrative officer. You're the one who pulled the item. I don't know whether you had questions that you wanted to have addressed. I pulled it for the transparency part, but I like the, I'm gonna probably vote yes because we're gonna clean up a mess that's been there for years. But anyway, go ahead, open it up for any comment. Go ahead, Becky. Yeah, could you please wear your mask over your nose? Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbruner, Supervisor Caput. Thank you for pulling this, these two items. They are in tandem. And I wanted you to bring them to public discussion because this is a serious matter that needs public discussion, not just shoved under the rug on a consent agenda. The problem I have with it is the contamination that was discovered that's put out in the document is an attachment. The contaminant is PCE. It's a carcinogen. The studies have determined that it's in the water the ground water for the area. The studies have determined that it is extremely high levels of the contaminant. It's perchloroethylene that sticks around. It doesn't degrade in the soil. It is taken into the body via breathing, via soil, via showering in the water and via food. This affordable housing would sit right on top of it. I looked on some of the environmental sites and the main cause of people getting affected by it are from buildings sitting on top of contaminated sites. Now, Supervisor Caput, you've said that the county is going to clean it up. That's not what I read. The county would put in a vapor barrier and just seal it off. How do we know that that vapor barrier would be effective? It's not addressing the contamination in the ground water. The problem I also have is the numbers of contamination that were reported. In the initial two borings, the levels were 8,200 micrograms per meter squared. The second boring was 40,000 micrograms per meter squared. The state allowable limit for commercial buildings to be in sites like this is 67 micrograms. For residential, it's 15. Look at the levels we've got here. So that caused some other borings to be done. In the ground water, it was found to be 192 micrograms per meter squared and the maximum contaminant level allowed by the state is five. I don't think we should be forcing poor people to live here. My other concern is that Mid-County, Mid-Penance Housing has not shown in the documents that they will have the funding moving forward to make sure that they continue to monitor this problem. That is the problem stated in the EPA documents that is a persistent failure that there isn't funding to move it forward. It will be permanent funding that they have to have for the vapor management monitoring. But that's not shown in their operational budget. I also have questions that the county is going to loan the developer three and a half million dollars to develop this land, a million and a half more than it was. The county has also agreed to reduce the cost of the land by a million and a half because of this contamination. Who's going to pay for this? The county has to pay, but I don't see that happening. With the county's finances the way they are, I don't see how the county can afford it. By reducing the amount that you get from this land, you're also reducing the taxes that you would get and that's part of 21. I also, in closing, I just want to say an important part of this was the historic preservation there is absolutely no mention at all of requiring that to be in there. I have a lot more questions. Zero tax credits. Thank you. Please put it on hold. Thank you. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. Well, that's a major disclosure of research that Becky has done from the documents in the county that to me seem imperative that you put this on hold. I think when we hear cleanup, when things are toxic forever in the environment, you might move them around or put them in the air, but they're still there. And I've mentioned before to you how it was part of the lawsuit in 1969 to ban a lawsuit of nursing mothers to ban the carcinogenic pesticide DDT, which is long lasting. I was horrified. We all had DDT in our milk. We all have contaminants in us and babies umbilical cords are loaded with something like 200 different chemicals. These productions, this harm should be prevented in the first place. And once it's out there to put it where it's going to contaminate more seems to me just more deadly. So I think this does need to be put on hold. That should not go forward. And I also have a friend who grew up in an area where the housing was over contaminated soil and she suffers all kinds of ill health effects. So this is plus the county or taxpayer money incurring more costs for a project that seems like it should not proceed at all. So I, you know, I see Becky come here. She reads through the documents and what I would like to see is the board like previous boards. I remember when Marty Warmhouse was chair of the board of supervisors because I've been coming here 20 years and she really examined the issues, the facts, listened to the public, put things on hold, didn't proceed with projects that were detrimental to the people and the well-being of this county. And I would urge you to follow in her footsteps. This should not proceed in my opinion. Thank you. Thank you. Could staff come forward and just address the issues about the environmental monitoring and the plan for cleanup? Good afternoon, Board of Supervisors. I'm Peter Deltliffe and I'm representing the Office for Economic Development. And I'm joined with Joanna Carpin from Mid-Pen Housing and Suzanne Issa from County Housing. And so in January of early this year, Mid-Pen as part of their development completed a phase two environmental analysis on the site and discovered the dry cleaning solvents through the course of working with Weber Hayes and the Regional Water Quality Control Board from the state. We have gone through a process of identifying, characterizing the extent of the contamination as well as developing a method to mitigate and the contamination for the project as well as ongoing monitoring and management. And so as part of that, we are discounting the price of the land for Mid-Pen to assume the cost of the mitigation and the ongoing monitoring and management. And that plan has the approval of the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Correct. And our Environmental Health Center. Correct. Was the contamination in the past caused by, was it a dry cleaning facility or something? So the source of the contamination was a dry cleaner located on the, excuse me, on the adjacent parcel. And it's our understanding that since the discovery that the water control board is in communication with the owner of the neighboring parcel and working on a cleanup plan with them. How long ago was that, that it's not been used? Oh, yeah, the dry cleaner closed sometime in the 70s. Yeah. Okay. It's been operating as a laundromat since then. Will we be seeking any remuneration from the neighboring property owner, which is the source of the contamination for the contamination of our property? So not at this point. I mean, at this point, the Regional Water Quality Control Board is working with the property owners to find grant resources for them to do the cleanup on their site because they don't have the resources in order to do the cleanup. Well, I think that we should do, you know, that we had hoped to actually develop that property as well. And maybe if they were willing to do a good development, that would be an opportunity to clean up the site as well. Right. To benefit to the entire neighborhood. Correct. In the Water Quality Control Board analysis, do they feel as though the people who are living at this site are in danger? So this kind of contamination is very common. It's one of the most common in the state. And most, you know, urban developments at this point are often dealing with cleanups from gas stations and dry cleaners. And in fact, mid-pen is working on other projects right now. Do you want to speak about that? Sure. Yeah, so thank you guys so much for taking this before. And thank you for all of your leadership and support in affordable housing in general and also here at 1500 Capitola Road. To reiterate, you know, the purchase price reduction does include, it does include not just the cost for the foundation, which is this vapor mitigation system is actually the preferred form of mitigation for contaminants of this type by the Water Board and by DTSC, the state agency as well at this time. Since that's been for the last handful of years, this is their preferred measure. We're even going a little bit above that. And we are going with the more active foundation system. This foundation system will trap, this is for all of the buildings on the site, not just the affordable housing, so for the clinics as well. The foundation system will trap any source of off gassing of this, of the soil. And it will also have monitoring. So to that question, there is the purchase price reduction includes the construction cost to create this foundational system that would trap and make sure it does not go into the buildings, as well as reserves to account for a 30 year monitoring plan associated with this. So we have gone through great lengths and we really appreciate the county has worked, staff has worked with us so closely and making sure that we are working closely with the Water Board in hand. And so we've gone through this every step of the way with all partners on board, making sure we are doing everything up to the levels and standards that we would require at this site. So thank you again. Yes, given our earlier discussion today about the difficulty in securing housing and having a variety of housing opportunities in our community, this site becomes as important as any site that we have here in Santa Cruz County. This is not trying to put something under the rug as has been claimed. This was all the information that was shared with us today was available in publicly available documents in which the midpen housing and two health clinics who serve their clients fairly well and care about their clients have reviewed this information with their own environmental health experts and the Regional Water Quality Board has approved a plan of mitigation. It's not taking it unseriously, reducing the price by over $2 million to ensure that the agency has enough money for a long-term maintenance and mitigation of this is incredibly important. And that will mean loss of revenue to the county, which would have received 18% of that money. It means loss of revenue for the school district and the fire district and the library who would have received a portion of this money. But it's important that midpen housing and their LP would have the resources necessary to create this foundation and mitigate this problem. This is gonna be a great resource for our community. And to that point, I would like to highlight some of the community benefits associated with this project. The partnership is a really innovative partnership between midpen housing and also Santa Cruz Community Health and Dientes Community Dental. The new site will be providing services, health and dental services to 10,000 county residents, as well as 57 homes for low-income families, of which, and to the point from the study session earlier, 15 of those units will be for supportive housing. And so it is a really valuable resource and I just want to reiterate that there is a lot of benefit to this for the community as well. Yes, this project went through extensive public discussion. It involved hundreds of people. We approved this in November of 2019 and it would be under construction, if not for the discovery of this contamination and the planning necessary to protect people from this contamination. To believe that somehow we're trying to pull the rug over people, you'd have to believe that midpen housing doesn't care about the people that they serve. The Santa Cruz Community Health Center doesn't care about the people that they serve. The Dientes Dental Clinic doesn't care about they serves and the county of Santa Cruz doesn't care about they serve. It's not realistic. It's the kind of conspiracy thinking that blocks projects and as we mentioned earlier, in the sighting of projects, people always look for something to stop projects. This is a good project at a great location and will be a welcome addition to our community. I move approval of both these items. Anyway, thank you for showing up and sharing the information here on this item. I appreciate you coming. Thank you. Thank you. Chair, we have some web comments. We do have a motion. We have some web comments first. Okay, yes. This one is from Laura Marcus. I'm writing on behalf of Dientes Community Dental Clinic and Dientes Community Dental Care, a partner of Santa Cruz Community Health and Midpen in the development of the property at 1500 Capitola Road to establish a health and housing hub in the heart of Live Oak. I am writing in support of Consent Item Number 23 and approval of the AHPDA. We have been working together since 2017 to establish plans for this property, holding community meetings to gather neighborhood input, working with the county of Santa Cruz to establish appropriate use of this site and with our boards and donors to ensure funding is in place for a successful implementation. I am confident that we are the right partners for this property and this project to serve the community. I cannot stress the importance of approving this item today as it will impact our ability to move forward with the purchase permitting, lending and start of construction on a timeline that will impact many funding milestones. Thank you for your partnership and your consideration. Thank you to the CEO, Diantha's Community Dental Care. We have another one from Leslie Connor, a CEO of the Santa Cruz Community Health. I am writing in support of Consent Item Number 23. This has been pulled for further discussion today. It is fitting that your board's approval of the AHPDA follows such a lengthy discussion on preventing and reducing homelessness in Santa Cruz County. Three partners at the 1500 Capitola Road Project Santa Cruz Community Health, Diantha's Community Dental and Mid-Pin Housing are all committed to promoting the health, safety and prosperity of the low income members of our community. Our project plan includes increasing access to high quality integrated healthcare for 10,000 people a year plus 57 units of affordable housing that are sorely needed and play a part of the county's strategic strategy to increase housing stock. Santa Cruz Community Health serves homeless individuals plus families, children, seniors and all people without regard to age, income, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity or any other circumstances due to critical funding, benchmarks and significant planning and expense that are currently underway. We are working hard to secure site ownership and permit approval so we can break ground in April 2021. We cannot afford additional delays at this time because such delays may cause us to the forfeit funding that is eminent. We respectfully ask the county to continue to support it, continue its support of the 1500 Capitola Road Development by approving the AHPDA. This effort will have lasting impact for generations to come. We sincerely appreciate the collaboration and support of the county's supervisors and staff have shown us to date. Thank you Leslie Connor. And that is it. Thank you. Chair, we actually need to take this as two when we go to a call for a vote on this, we need to take this as two separate motions. We cannot combine both of them. So if we can take it at 7.1 and then the next one is 7.2. A motion on 21 and a motion on 25. Correct. I think Supervisor McPherson wanted to weigh in. Yep, by Bruce. I don't know if the supervisor Leopold had made the motion on 23. I was just going to second it. If that's proper or do you want to go to 21 first? Well, let's do 21 first. I'll make the motion on item, the recommended action to accept and file the report on, on item 21. I'll second that. Okay, we'll call for. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Crapit. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. Motion 21, 23. I would just say recently I had Betsy Wilson on my town hall and I likened her to Indiana Jones. And you remember that scene in Indiana Jones in the first movie Raiders of the Lost Ark where he's in a cave and he's going to grab the statue. And then all of a sudden the arrows are flying and the ball is rolling and the earth is opening up. That's like affordable, building an affordable housing complex. There is just hurdle after hurdle after hurdle that is presented to you in order to get it done. Sometimes they're not very dramatic. They, they involve funding hurdles. Sometimes they involve neighborhood backlash. Sometimes they're environmental. But there is never an easy path and there's never affordable housing developer that goes in and says, yes, I'd like to do this. And everybody goes, yes. And they throw money at it and it gets built. It takes a lot of work. We should be proud of the work that we did to engage the community, find a project that's going to actually contribute to the health and welfare and address our housing shortage here in Santa Cruz County. And I'm confident that the, this environmental issue has been addressed seriously and safely for the people who will live there. I move approval of what was formerly item 23 and the recommended actions. Second. Okay. We'll call for the vote. The Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Caput. Aye. Motion passes unanimously. We'll now go to item number. Chair Caput, I think we're going to take a break for closed session and lunch. We are scheduled to return at 130 for item 11 and then we'll take up item eight and nine. Okay. That'll be fine. And there's nothing reportable out of closed session. Pardon. Is there anything reportable? There's no reportable item out of closed session. Thank you. We'll come back at 130. I need your help again, John. I'm ready to back you up. It's item number 11. You want me to read it in? We're going to go to eight. No, we're going to do the 130 scheduled item. We're going to go to 11 first. 11. Okay. Item number 11. Consider approval and concept of ordinance adding chapter 2.13 to the Santa Cruz County Code to establish a public defender's office in a position of public defender. Schedule the ordinance for second reading and final adoption on November 17, 2020. And direct the county administrative office to continue to work with key stakeholders and return in February 2021 with the detailed transition plan as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer ordinance adding SCCC chapter 2.13 public defender. Any questions from board members on this item? Chair Caput, I have a presentation and then we'll go to the public comment and your questions. So good afternoon. I'm Nicole Cover, an assistant CAO. I'm joined here today by principal administrative analyst, Sven Stafford, and together we're going to walk you through a very brief presentation. This is our agenda for this afternoon. We're going to provide an update on board direction from the October 6th meeting and information that we were asked to provide. Then we'll go over the ordinance that's being proposed today and discuss recommendations and next steps. So just as a reminder on October 6th, the Board of Supervisors heard a presentation from our office on transitioning towards a public model and during that meeting the Board provided some additional direction and requests of us. We were asked to meet with the criminal justice partners. We were also asked to work on creating a clear hiring policy for the existing staff within the public defense firms and we were asked to report on what California counties are meeting national standards and the cost of meeting those standards and we were also asked to return in November with an update and that's what we're here to do today. So since we last met with you we have arranged weekly meetings with our criminal justice partners. We've so far met four times since October 6th. This includes the Bigham law firm, the conflicts law firms, the Superior Court, the criminal defense program and personnel, our personnel director and our county administrative office. Everyone who's been participating in these meetings I believe have really appreciated the improved communication and the outreach to everyone. Everyone we've walked through and been very transparent about our plans so far and asked to get some feedback from them on those plans. We're trying to address any concerns that they have before we come back to the board with a final transition plan. All of the partners in these meetings have read or in support of the ordinance being proposed today so that we could start to move towards a public model. The work underway has been to work out a detailed transition plan. We're trying to work through addressing the concerns raised with the process for hiring and retaining staff within the firms and addressing what that might look like for the Bigham firm as well as the conflicts firms. Discussions are well underway on staffing and we're also trying to figure out the best timing of the public defender recruitment. Like I mentioned, we presented our plans as we had proposed them and the partners have responded with their concerns and we're trying to find consensus by the end of this calendar year and work on an item to bring back a more detailed plan next calendar year in February. So I'm going to turn it over to Sven who's going to discuss our research on the national standards. Alright, thanks Nicole. Good afternoon board. So to address a couple of the other directions from the October 6th meeting, we did do research on 11 other counties with public systems that we thought were similar and represented in close comparisons to Santa Cruz County. None of those 11 publicly report caseload standards of the handful that we were able to talk or email directly with. There was a general fear of those data being misunderstood by the public or potentially misused by other law firms and attempts to potentially get their boards to favor a contract model away from a publicly funded model. There was one county similar in population that does have a public model that did say they took national standards and used those to guide their local standards. In doing so, they have a standard of attorneys closing out no more than 400 misdemeanors per year and attorneys closing out no more than 100 felonies per year which tracks fairly closely to what the national standards are. And finally in Fresno County which is a historically underfunded county and doesn't compare to Santa Cruz County in that sense they did settle with the American Civil Liberties Union a couple years ago and in their settlement they are required to meet those national standards and report quarterly on those. In terms of funding a public office we were asked to come back with the cost of fully funding the 6AC recommendation. A couple of caveats first is that we still believe that we don't have good enough local caseload data to make the staffing determination. We do believe that we need to bring the attorneys over to get a caseload management system and build those local standards. There's additional uncertainty created right now by the diminishing caseloads that are able to happen in the court due to COVID-19 some changes in the state law. Additionally a lot of the caseload impact cited in the 6AC report was in the misdemeanor filings. Currently the district attorney is embarking on a neighborhood court program to help reduce the amount of cases that even get to the misdemeanor court so that could have hopefully would have an impact on the number of cases and the caseloads going forward. On the other side there is just continuing complexity created by the extensive digital profiles that people are creating through emails and phones and other devices that makes trying cases more complex. There's also the continued use of specialty courts such as the behavioral health court where those cases take more time and on the other hand they do provide for potentially more sustainable justice for those clients that enter them. So there are factors on both sides that drive caseload numbers locally. In terms of the budget you can see in the table here that the current contracts we have provide about 13 million dollars of funding that provides for about 35 attorneys who actually carry a caseload. We don't know the exact number of support staff in those current contracts. To fully fund the 6AC recommendation would be about 16.6 million. It would have 44 attorneys carrying a caseload and 54 support staff which would include in this case the public defender, supervising attorneys, paralegals, investigators, social workers and other administrative staff. In the CAO recommendation we said that we could fit a reasonable office within our current budget envelope of 13 million dollars that provides for about 38 attorneys to carry a caseload and about 39 support staff. We also want to note that in comparing Santa Cruz County's funding of indigent defense to other counties we compare pretty favorably with the other 11 counties that we looked at both in terms of per capita or the second highest funded indigent defense system among those 11 counties and in terms of looking at the public defender budget as a percentage of the district attorney budget it's actually the best funded of those 11 counties. So the ordinance that we're bringing before your board today is the same ordinance that we brought on October 6th. It's supported by all the partners including the Superior Court and the Bigham law firm. It creates authority for the board to establish a public defender's office and establish the position of the public defender and it's simply the first step towards that office. The ordinance doesn't in and of itself implement a transition plan or begin a public defender recruitment or in any way supersede the process that we're undertaking with our partners in the court and the public defender law firms. And with that I'll give it back to Nicole to talk about the recommendations and next steps. So today we're asking the board to approve the recommended action shown here. One is to approve in concept the ordinance establishing a public defender's office and the position of public defender. The ordinance would be brought back for a second reading and final adoption on November 17th if approved by the board today in concept. And then of course our office would like to continue to collaborate with the justice partners and return with a detailed transition plan no later than next February. We feel like we've had really productive conversations so far. We've been able to hear their concerns and I believe we have ways to address them and come back with consensus. And so we appreciate all of the guidance of Larry Bingham our public defender and the conflicts firms in the superior court and we would ask that the board approve these actions today. And we're happy to answer any of your questions. Okay. Thank you. We'll open it up to the board for questions. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, okay. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And I'm glad that the parties were able to get together and our goal here is really to serve the community the best of our ability. So I think we're on the road to doing that. I believe creating this office as an accessory agency to the great work that's been done by our public defender is the right way to go. I want to thank you again to our CAO and their leadership in bringing this item to the board and spending some additional time. As I mentioned, to that end, I'd like to know what additional information has been gleaned. I think you probably mentioned some of this, but from those conversations since early October and just the shape, you pretty much explained that, but are you pretty confident you can do this under the same spending envelope that we have existing today? Provisor McPherson, to answer your first question on the additional information we've gleaned, we spent each meeting with the partners to hear all of their concerns, and I think we've learned about their concerns related to not wanting to disrupt operations and limit the impact on current operations. So we've heard that loud and clear and we're trying to figure out how's forward to try to limit those disruptions. A lot of the concerns relate to how we're going to hire and retain the staff at the firms, and so we're trying to address those concerns. And then the timing of the public defender recruitment, there's concern about when that's going to take place and whether it might impact, whether attorneys stay or go. So we're trying to address that as well. And so all in all, it really has to do with trying to keep things moving forward and limiting disruptions to the greatest extent possible. And so hopefully that answers your question. And then in regards to the second question regarding the budget, we do believe we can establish a public office within our current budget envelope, and it will be something, you know, as we get a case management system and get a better handle on our local data and standards that we want to implement, we can build out the office from there. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't have any questions. I appreciate the outreach that's been done and the collaboration to get us to a good end point. So I want to appreciate all the meetings that have happened since our last meeting and look forward to moving this forward. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you also for your continued collaboration with our justice partners. I think that we need to have a smooth of the transition as possible. I also appreciate the work you did reaching out to other counties and get a deeper dive into the Sixth Amendment Center's findings. I do think that the report probably had some findings that really weren't practical for our community to implement and aren't realistic. And so I think it's important that we do do a local review as Mr. Seford had mentioned, which is to once we finish this transition, really do a case analysis internally to determine a best practice model for us. Because I think some of these nationalized standards of which it, I mean, I think one of the reasons that other communities weren't willing to communicate them was because it's because they're not meeting them. I mean, I think if they were, if they were meeting some of these standards that the Sixth Amendment Center had outlined, I think people, and I respect what they were trying to do about being concerned about releasing the information, but realistically, I just don't think that many communities across the country are meeting these expectations that were outlined in that report. And I don't think that our community would be necessarily any different. So I do think it's important for us to outline ways to improve within our own metrics that are actionable and doable. And so I appreciate that. I actually look forward to hearing it also for members of the community about this continued process and ways that we can ensure that this transition be as seamless as possible. But thank you to Ms. Koberin and thank you, Sven, for your work on this. Okay. Thank you, Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thanks for this update. I take it as a good sign that the judiciary is not here challenging us about what we're doing. That's probably, we're probably moving in the right direction with that. I do think it would be worthwhile to include some of this information about what other counties are doing as an addendum to the report. So when people, that report is going to come back to haunt the County of Santa Cruz. That's Sixth Amendment Center report because it may mischaracterize something in the judiciary. I don't have the information to know that, but we heard very clearly from the judges that that was misrepresented and getting this comparison information from the other counties also is helpful to contextualize what that information is because I think that the idea that we would be held to a standard that no one else is meeting, it's just going to be a problem down the line. And so I think it's important to have that as an addendum to make sure that any electronic copies that go out, that it has that information, so it better reflects what the actual situation is. You know, it's nice that if we spend the money that we can actually have more attorneys and support staff or possibly more support staff, we don't know. But we're actually putting less money in instead of more money in even with that. And my hope when we started this process is that we were actually going to invest more money in. You pointed out in this that we're spending relatively to the DA's office more than anybody else. But we got a 200 page report that told us about all the failings of our system. So the fact that we're spending more doesn't give me any feelings of contentment that we're actually meeting the needs of the community and when it comes to their public defense. And so while we can feel good that we might be spending more comparatively, if we're trying to meet the needs of the report that we paid for, we should actually be investing more money into the system. And so, you know, that'll be for our future board to make a decision about. But it's going to, you know, it's, you can find these measures, right? You know, it's always, you can present something and without the context, it makes it seem like you're doing a lot. But if you look at the whole package, you would say, well, we're not. I mean, here's a report that told us all the problems we had and either we're doing better than most or we're not using our money well. So you can't have it always. So you have to consider that and that should have been thought about in the context of the report. I'm looking forward to hearing the comments in the public and I may have more questions after that. Yeah, I'll thank you. I'll make a few comments and questions, but we'll have the public defenders and the, you know, have their say also. But timing is a key thing with everything. Ever since I've been chairman of the board, everything has fallen apart as far as county government we know. Now that might be my fault, right? Yeah. I don't know, but I'll tell you. That's the way the rest of us are all considering it. I don't know. But I'd like to, you know, cancel the year and start it over, but we can't do that. And I think we're doing the best we can. I don't like the timing of this. Okay. Nicole, you've been doing a wonderful job stepping in for Carlos Palacios. Well, he's recovering from an operation, but we not only don't have a regular CAO, but we have an interim CAO and that's putting a lot of responsibility on you and a lot of blame on you actually from people that disagree with the decision. We had fires, COVID-19, everything breaking out. We have a full plate. We're dealing with all kinds of different things that are coming at us from different directions. And if it's working, everybody's saying it's working. Nobody wants to say a bad thing about the public defender's office. If it's working, what's the rush? Why are we rushing? We can take our time and look at this one year from now and then everything hopefully will be more calm. We're going to make the same decision and time, especially, I don't know, when you're raising kids, one day they're like five years old and a week later they're 10 years old. Time goes by quick. All of a sudden things you go, God, it couldn't have been just, it seems like it was a year ago and it was five years ago. So I'd like to put it off until like a year from now and I might agree then that it's time for a changer and have everybody agree. I like also the idea of public defenders being independent. Somehow the legality, I'm sure it's legal probably, but the legality of having your district attorney on county payroll, same entity as paying for them and then also having the public defender's office under the same entity getting paid by the same payroll. You have both sides, the prosecutor and the defendant. There's a lack of independence that seems to be glaring in my opinion and national standards. I saw that in there in the report. National standards, the current public defenders are meeting national standards? Our current firms, based on the current staffing ratios and case loads, they do not meet national standards. They are not? They do not. No, based on the current case loads and staffing levels, they do not. But staff was unable to find any county that is meeting those standards? They might disagree with that. Is that our determination? That was a calculation that was made. Well, we'll let them answer that. You know, I went along with district attorney's neighborhood court that will take some of the case load off of smaller cases that might come before us. So that'll, we'll be able to look at bigger cases a little bit closer. But anyway, I'm going to either, I don't agree with it. The timing is very bad. And if we waited a little longer a year, that's, they're going to go by real quick. Then I could, we can all look at it and we can make a decision then. It would also allow the current public defenders, they have families, they have problems, the same problems we do. And this is a big change. This is not like, you know, some little nudge changing a little bit here and there. This is the total transition, total change and everything. And it would give them time and us time to look at it closer. So anyway, I'll open it up to, I guess what's the next step? I'll let the public defender speak. Public comment would be next. First them and then we'll open it up to the public. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. I'm Larry Bigum, your contract public defender. And I want to thank the CIO staff for reaching out and making this process more collaborative. The communication and the cooperation has clearly improved. And I'm grateful. I have no issue with today's ordinance giving the County the ability or the eventual option to create a public public defender's office, but do not change our defense delivery system. Simply because you believe the current contractual model is somehow broken or defective or even unethical as that Boston report suggested or inferred. In fact, today's CIO's report on page two repeats a portion of that report when it says at least four states have also banned flat fee contracts for indigent defense akin to those currently administered by the County of Santa Cruz. We have no kinship with those flat fee contracts. We are not a flat fee contract in Santa Cruz County. We are a flexible fee contract and we always have been. Let me explain. In a flat fee contract, all the cost come out of the contracted amount including investigators and experts. So the firm's profit margin is reduced by the expenditures on experts and investigators. That would de-incentivize the hiring of experts and investigators. That would de-incentivize vigorous, thorough and effective advocacy. Those flat fee contracts should be banned in all states. But that's not what we are in Santa Cruz. I am contractually obligated to provide seven full-time investigators. It's a fixed cost in my contract whether I use them or not, and we use them. If I want an expert, I have to go to Tamara Rice and explain why it's relevant and required and if she grants that request or if a court grants that request it comes out of a separate budget bucket separate from my firm. Using investigators and experts in Santa Cruz County does not reduce our bottom line. We also have a clause and escape clause for extraordinary fee cases such as capital cases that could really bankrupt a firm. On extraordinary fee cases, which are rare but we have one now, they are billed outside of the contract. The fact that four states have banned flat fee contracts is frankly irrelevant to Santa Cruz County and misleading. We shouldn't confuse or conflate these two and I just want to make that very clear today. Our system of providing an indigent defense is ethical, it's performance effective and it's cost effective. On page four of the CAO's report today it talks about spending for a hundred thousands of residents and we're toward the top with Napa and Marin but there's a big asterisk that should be behind that fact. Our crime rate is very hyper capita. Our population can double on the weekends just ask the sheriff. They know far better than I. We are the playground for the Bay Area and on Tuesday and Monday morning we have a lot of orange jumpsuits in our criminal courts that hide too hard. We have more crime per capita than Napa and Marin. Our cost per case in defense spending is much less than the Bay Area Public Defender Offices including Napa and Marin. With respect to a percentage of the DA's budget Santa Cruz is the highest in the state I heard or I read we need to be careful with this data and yes we could use more but it's apples to oranges we're a private firm in our budget that includes janitorial and lighting and equipment and parking and IT and personnel a lot of those costs are not in the DA's budget they're in the county budget you gotta be careful here but of the 13 million spent on indigent defense our firm which does 89% of the cases cost 7.5 million which is about 60% of the dollars plus whatever it is for experts and frankly I don't have that so you're getting a very good bang for the buck right now with the bigam firm which does the vast majority of this work my concern look there are good and bad aspects to any delivery system the public model or the private model and I've said this before my concern is really not the delivery system the quality of defense services depends less on the delivery system and more on the leadership and the staff and the resources and the political support that Fresno office which just got sued recently by the ACLU was a public model I hire people out of that office I still don't think they need the national standards anecdotally I'm informed they don't but I don't have the data in front of me my concern today is less about moving to a public model eventually my concern is the timing of such a transition or a move which can affect the ecosystem of the criminal justice system I've been told there's never a good time to make a change like this but there is a bad time and that time is now we're in a pandemic the courts are dealing with an avalanche of unresolved cases that keeps building every day and we have no exit ramps or jury trials we just started jury trials and we're going to do one a week that won't cut it that won't cut it so we've got this we're running from this avalanche of unresolved cases that keeps building and it's a pandemic which is triggered it changes and delays and stress in both the courthouse and in the jail to the extent that we've survived as we have it's due to the relationships and the trust and the stability in the system right now I think changing your public defenders in the middle of this crisis is risky and unnecessary I don't speak for the judges and the DAs obviously but I think they would agree with me I believe we'll be prudent to delay the transition for at least a year perhaps two so we can catch up and hopefully get back to some sense of normalcy as you noted earlier Chair Cabot this is a big move which affects a lot of justice partners besides my office and my staff and my clients including the jail and the DA's office and the judges and probation but regardless of when this move is made I intend to keep working with Fen and Nicole and your board and the judges to make this transition as smooth and successful as humanly possible under all these circumstances thank you Mr. Bingham could you just say a little bit more about why you think a year or two from now things will be different enough one could argue that right now when there's fewer trials going on that that might provide an opportunity to work out some of these details so I'm just I wonder if you could say more about that I think there's a lot of chaos right now in the system and a lot of moving parts and I'm concerned that the clients are getting lost in the shuffle today John and if you start changing lawyers and in this context I'm afraid that the clients are going to be lost and lose that relationship with their lawyer and obviously their lives and liberty or mostly their liberty are at risk that's a concern it's hard to keep a track keep a track on what's going on right now and I just think if I lose lawyers in the transition when I lose a lawyer I don't lose just an employee I lose they lose their lawyer 100 clients who lose their lawyer so if I lose a lawyer I've got 100 clients who've lost their lawyer and how do I backfill if I've got 6 months or 8 months go it's hard to go hire a lawyer no one's going to move to Santa Cruz for that kind of job assurance I just think we need to move slowly here well I know our direction at the last meeting was to come up with a maturity about the hiring of the existing public defenders into our new system and it seemed at least from the report here was that there was positive movement on that that we don't obviously have anything here in front of us but the idea that we're going to try to have as good of a transition with those folks so it does not impact your firm in the meantime was the goal I think I'm not sure if anybody wants to weigh in on that I think you've stated it correctly and we are working we laid out a plan that would involve some orientations starting in the new year and ending in job offers by next summer so that's what we would like to work on we're still talking about that and I think Nicole and Sven understand the need to keep my lawyers down on the farm so they can do their job and get us to a lawyer during these tumultuous times if I lose staff it's very, it's going to be traumatic not only for the clients but for the courts because that triggers delays further than what we already have and we already have the shelf life for these cases now is doubled what it was two years ago and they understand the issue I just want to make sure that I can keep the staff down and I'm just saying every week we get new changes the court process we're all trying to surf these tumultuous waves right now alright thank you I really appreciate it thank you for all you've done for us I have a question too as far as independence goes any of you can answer I don't have the term in my mind when somebody doesn't think they had good representation sometimes they go after their attorney what's that called it's called a Marsden hearing if you feel you need you're not getting along with the lawyer and the relationship is broken down you can ask the court to appoint a new lawyer under a case called Marsden they blame like the result on the attorney well we get blamed a lot sometimes yeah I know with the independence if that were to happen hypothetically you would have to deal with it if it was a county employee then county council would be involved also is that correct I don't know I think that would be taken up by the public defender's office we'd have to defend somebody that's our employee right in county council would probably have an attorney assigned to the public defender's office a lot of times in closed session or whatever there's a deal so what I'm getting at is the cost is more if we have to deal with it we have the liability then if we don't it depends what the situation is and yeah it's solely hypothetical the issue though is critical and you did bring it up and one part of the Sixth Amendment project that I actually agree with is when they said the public defender needs to have a good cause only for him or her termination and I really think independence is critical because we speak truth to power we try to keep the cops the judges and the DA's on the rails so they don't take constitutional shortcuts so sometimes we're not very popular and if I'm the public defender with an at will to you guys or to the CIO it could neuter my advocacy that's my concern independence is critical to a good public defender office that's one thing that we have and if we're going to change it I would hope you give your public public defender a contract with a good cause only termination so that the sheriff or the judges can't call you some night and say get rid of these guys there are pain in the back so I'm just saying we need to work carefully and then we are I'm working now and talking with Nicole and Sven and we're trying to work out some of these issues yeah I guess the last thing too is I remember I got called for jury duty about two years ago and I showed up I knew I would probably end up being I could have got out of it I could have said I'm a supervisor or whatever but anyway I went through the process and I almost expected they go well you know what's your relationship with the sheriff's department what's your relationship with the district attorney's office and I told them we're familiar I mean I say hi I consider all good you know guys and whatever and anyway they excuse me they said thank you that was the right thing to do because of the familiarity of myself and the DA's office just saying hello it's not like we're going out for dinner or going to a movie together or something and also with the sheriff's department so what I'm getting at is the independence is hard to break when you're looking next door to fellow employees of the county of Santa Cruz anyway that's just a little inside of my own I wouldn't qualify to be on that jury because of my familiarity and so if I was independent of the county I was a supervisor or somewhere else then it would be okay I wouldn't be familiar with anybody so anyway that's the important thing to me about independence if I wouldn't qualify to be on the jury I wouldn't qualify to you know have to deal with the district attorney's office and the public defender's office all under the same umbrella county of Santa Cruz anyway we'll open it up to the public for public questions or comments we have any we have no public comment and anyway I'd like to just put this off there's really no reason to rush and no reason to have hard feelings on anybody's part I'll make an amendment or a motion that we look at this one year from now after the COVID-19 is over and also after people have somewhat recovered from having the huge fires that we've had in the county of Santa Cruz everything is finally somewhat getting back to normal this is not a little change this is a big change and it's something that needs to be looked at under a calm atmosphere without all kinds of pressure coming from all sides and a year will go by like and we'll be looking at it so I don't know Chair Caput the motions need to come from one of the other members but I did want to reiterate that you know we've been looking at this and thinking about this for quite some time now and this ordinance would allow us to you know think about how we're going to make this transition so this is not something you know that we've taken lightly this is something we've been seriously considering for quite some time and you know I would urge the board to push forward with this ordinance so that we can move forward and make this the first step toward implementing the transition now how that transition looks and the timing of it we're going to come back to the board in February with that plan back in what? February no I saw that I'm saying that we actually look at it put it off for a year and then come back and look at the whole thing and hopefully everybody be totally at ease with the whole thing the CAO's office and the public defenders and the judges for that matter I don't know but I can't make a motion right no but if somebody makes that I can second it I can ask if any board member would consider putting the transition from going from private to public employees on this for one year you don't all have to rush it at the same time Mr. Chair Supervisor I hear what you're saying and I do understand it although I still think that what's before us today is the creation of a process something that I heard Mr. Bigum say that he supports in concept the creation of the process the concern is with the details over the transition and the timeline of the transition and how the transition will look which are concerns that I share so but what's before us today is the initiation of a process that allows the work behind the scenes to ensure that this can actually happen at all so I'm going to move the recommended actions and this is an additional direction this is just additional commentary and just say that the board still wants to ensure that these voices are at the table and that they're taken seriously as it sounds like those discussions have been occurring for the last four weeks because the issues around the staffing and issues around the timing are very important issues I know to the entire judiciary not just the public defender directly so anyway I'll move the recommended actions the recommended action with comments also comments are not additional direction there's just I think that Ms. Coburn I think that Nicole and Sven are understanding that the board that what the board asked for a few weeks ago has not changed in our concerns regarding how this transition will take place this is just a support in the initiation of the creation of a public defender's office but it's the very initial stages in the February what really will be of interest again is what comes back in February with the outlines of the transition so I'm supportive of the initiation today which is what's before us which is why I'm moving the recommended actions I'll second that okay I guess that concludes public comment and we're ready for a vote call for a vote Leopold aye friend aye McPherson aye no here we go to item number 8 is it 8? consider the report on the establishment of the office of response recovery and resiliency of approved transfer of funds from contingencies in the amount of $600,000 for the OR-3 in fiscal year 2020 and 2021 approved addition of two full-time equivalent positions to staff OR-3 programs and operations and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative office or CSU fire recovery framework AUD-74 transfer of funds for OR-3 we have a report and then we'll have questions from the board okay good afternoon board members I'm Melody Serino this is Matt Machado and we're both deputy CAOs we're here to follow up on the intrusion that the board members are needed I'll say it yes okay we'll start over again good afternoon I'm Melody Serino this is Matt Machado we're both deputy CAOs and we're here to follow up on your direction from October 6 to establish an office of recovery and resilience in order to chart our roads recovery following the CCU lightning complex fire this is our agenda recovery encompasses many complex and interdependent activities some of which are technical in nature are known as adaptive challenges we're going to go through our recommendations regarding the proposed new division of the county administrative office based on the agenda right here thank you Melody so a framework was established in the fire aftermath to address the immediate needs of human care such as connecting fire victims to services and financial support and working with our state and federal partners to begin the cleanup process also incorporated the critical community needs of emergency preparedness and community resilience as a means to assist in stabilizing our community now and in the future the framework was designed to utilize current staff with these assignments added to their current duties the framework was created based upon FEMA guiding principles of disaster recovery I'll direct your attention to the segment of human care very critical to human life also to the segment of rebuilding recovery which is very visible which includes the physical elements of public and private infrastructure and the segment of emergency preparedness and community resilience which is very essential to our future this effort will be important for years to come we must be able to sustain this level of effort leading to an adjusted framework you're the runner of the machine thank you given the board's direction on October 6 to establish the new division with dedicated full-time staff as well as the addition of the ad hoc committee staff recommends keeping the current framework as a way as a way as a way to operationalize the work at the department level and overlaying the new division on top of this framework for maximum effectiveness all work will flow through the assistant CAO to ensure appropriate coordination of efforts this effort includes core capabilities of recovery and preparedness this adjusted and recommended framework addresses the county needs of emergency response rebuild and resiliency the budget hearings in August place the office of emergency services under the CAO and restructured this division while the board's direction on October 6 identified a number of duties for the office of resilience and recovery staff believes there is critical interdependencies between the work of emergency services and this new office for example the coordination of information during an emergency across federal state and local agencies is also critical during the post emergency recovery stage as well OR3 as we're calling it also incorporates aspects of the climate change responsibilities particularly as they relate to the development of community resilience activities recognizing these interdependencies and in order to ensure successful coordinated efforts staff recommends combining the duties of the emergency services and the office of resiliency and recovery into one division in the CAO office pre and post disaster operational coordination crosses all mission areas and is critical to the efficient and effective recovery activities as noted by the board the work ahead cannot be done by adding part-time duties to current staff while the board requested that staff seek to staff the ORR with current employees the analysis of the work to be done indicates that removing staff from departments already reduced to retirements furloughs and layoffs is not advisable instead staff recommends the addition of two additional staff a director and an additional analyst with the restructuring of the office of emergency services at budget hearings an analyst position and the current administrative aid were already budgeted for OES work the additional staff will take on the work of recovery and resilience including some aspects identified previously for the climate action manager such as seeking out grant opportunities to fund resilience projects in relation to climate change activities all of the duties outlined by the board in October 6th direction are included as duties in the proposed new structure under this structure duties previously the responsibility of the director of emergency services such as grants grants writing and management FEMA and Cal OES coordination and disaster preparedness training and staffing will be transferred to an analyst position leaving the director time to concentrate on managing efforts to prepare for and respond during and post-emergency to community needs while specific job classifications and descriptions need to be created it is anticipated that each position will also be assigned a specific role in the emergency operations center in operations center incident command structure to ensure continuity of operations pre, during and post disaster as we recruit a new director and incident commander Mr. Benson will be our recovery coordinator working closely with our framework managers so we can speak as a single coordinated voice the budget information here reflects anticipated cost from December 1 through the end of the current fiscal year funding of $600,959 would be allocated from contingencies for the purposes of establishing this division of course this budget does not reflect the responsibility of costs that will be devoted to the recovery efforts additional costs such as our local match for response repairs to infrastructure and debris removal as well as costs for consultants to assist with permitting and you'll be hearing about that next week and FEMA reimbursements must also be covered through contingencies we will be actively and continually pursuing grants to support the functions of this office and their projects this will help sustainability of the office studies have indicated that the single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges as technical problems preparing for responding to and recovering from a disaster involves both technical and adaptive challenges however vastly different skills timelines and actions are necessary for technical versus adaptive challenges a simple example is responding to high blood pressure a technical solution would be to take medication to lower your blood pressure while an adaptive solution would be to change your lifestyle to incorporate more exercise different eating habits or reducing your level of stress these are some examples of the differences between technical and adaptive work in charting our efforts over the course of recovery and particularly for resiliency both technical and adaptive work will be required much of the adaptive work will be difficult involving numerous conversations with lots of stakeholders require the weighing of competing values and sometimes may take longer than we like yet it is the adaptive work that will define our future resiliency and influence the work of those who come after us it will take courageous conversations listening with the open minds and the practice of adaptive leadership not just from you our elected officials but from our community members as well we believe Santa Cruz County is up to the challenge and the Office of Response Recovery and Resiliency is the first step in building that foundation of work OR3 will lead, coordinate and drive the recovery process it will coordinate and leverage recovery core capability resources it will integrate the interest of the whole community into ongoing recovery efforts and future initiatives it will ensure cross mission and cross capability integration through information sharing and coordination it will establish mechanisms to more effectively engage whole community partners it will improve future operational coordination through continual process improvement this is not status quo positive impacts to our community the item before you includes three recommendations I'll read those and then we can conclude in open questions first accept and file report on the establishment of the Office of Response Recovery and Resiliency second approve transfer of funds from contingencies in the amount of $600,959 for establishment of the OR3 in fiscal year 2021 and approve addition of two full-time equivalent positions to the county administrative office budget to staff OR3 programs and operations one director and one analyst and direct the CAO to refer the positions to the personnel department for classification recruitment and hiring this concludes our presentation and we look forward to your comments on this proposal additional colleagues are available to help answer your questions well maybe I'll start off with some questions if that's okay chair okay just a couple different things one is I think this is a really good move that we're making I think it will help us in the short term with those folks who are trying to move back into their homes that were destroyed and I think it helps us in the long term when we look at the issues of emergency preparedness and resiliency one of the things I didn't see in that long-term plan was looking at our climate action strategy and adaptation plan which I think is going to be critical to that long-term planning it will not only be critical for us to start thinking about how extreme weather events like the lightning storms that we saw this year or sea level rise will affect us but having a document prepared with those adaptation strategies will make it more attractive to acquire that grant money that will hopefully be coming from the state and federal government so I just think it needs to be included as part of the work here I also think that it's going to be really important to do everything we can and I know we're going to hear an item next week at our board meeting about what we're doing about the permitting process staffing in order to expedite that process and I think that this office is going to have to work hand in glove with the contractors that we're bringing in with our planning department staff to make sure that we meet the needs of the community as quickly as possible and there are people who are ready to move in yesterday and there's obviously a process that has to be followed some of it is not determined by us but by state and federal authorities but I'm looking forward to seeing this office be staffed and meet the needs of the community and I appreciate the work you put into thinking about it and I like the three elements of this plan and the way in which you've conceived it so thank you Mr. Chair Supervisor McPherson I want to you can hear me alright okay we can hear you okay I want to thank the CAO and the departments of planning and environmental health building out the structure for this new office it's critical to be established in a way that meets the urgent needs that we have for our fire survivors right now will also mean the challenges of the future emergency management and climate preparedness and I really take to heart the comments made by Supervisor Leopold I think it's very important that we be very inclusive and before we're looking at what we might be experiencing in the future when Supervisor Coonerty and I brought the creation of this office to the board we did so with the intent of ensuring that our residents experienced an efficient and predictable affordable rebuilding process in addition to the other goals that we had set out to achieve for strengthening resilience and to that end I think it is important to point out that the sizable investment we will be making in hiring a site firm to manage the permitting process is very very important and I'd like to reiterate how important it will be for the public to have a single point of contact to ask questions and resolve conflicts as they move through this process as we know we've had 940 plus people lose their homes families and so forth so it's really important that we get them the answer as straightforward and as efficiently and politely as we can with that said I'd like to be better understand how rebuilding will be prioritized within this structure in the near term considering that phase 2 starts in a matter of weeks now and we're not likely to have this office staffed right away Thank you Supervisor McPherson this is Matt Machado to answer your question we've structured this such that there is a standalone segment for the rebuild effort the physical environment the public and private infrastructure rebuild and that single segment will have a single voice and that's how we've structured it with a single management style and I think that will respond to not only your question and concerns but the public's questions and concerns and so we've structured it to have that point of contact there is other coordination but when you're speaking to just that one segment that one segment is quite clear okay very well that gives me a little more comfort I feel comfortable anyway but that's great to hear thank you Mr. Chair Mr. Chair and this Ryan Coonerty I guess I don't have any questions I want to thank the staff for their collaborative effort to build this office I appreciate what Mr. Sereno is talking about in terms of adaptive versus technical challenges or meeting those challenges I guess my only comment because I think as Supervisor Leopold mentioned this is going to be an excellent resource in both the short term but also in the long term as we move into a new reality of stronger storms, more disaster events more need for recovery in partnering with our federal and state partners is to really emphasize that while our current staff has done an absolutely amazing job and been very responsive I am worried if this takes too long to staff up as we go into winter and we have debris flows and increase in COVID impacts, property issues the rebuilding process and God forbid any other natural disasters occurring in our region that the current point people will be already are working with full plates and we're adding this and a growing list to those concerns and so the sooner we get somebody in there to build those relationships because one of the best ways to address both technical and adaptive challenges is to have relationships to be able to quickly solve problems we need to get staff in there who can focus and build a relationship so that we aren't balancing around with a lot of different calls in already challenging times so anything we can do to expedite the hiring and staffing up I appreciate the current staff I just know that they have a lot on their plates and more to come Supervisor Coonerty this is Melody Serino we appreciate the urgency of this we already have meeting scheduled with personnel for this week if you approve this going forward to go over job descriptions and prepare for the recruitments and of course all staff that have been working this continue to remain committed to working through these issues with the needs of the community until appropriate staff is hired thank you the only thing we're adding two full-time positions is that correct? that is correct let's say everything is going well there would be under the county administrative officers that's correct so let's say we have many disasters there's good years and bad years and let's say we have like three or four years where nothing much is going on once they've established their responses and things where they have everything organized what do they do? so I'll chime in on that and so there's always a need to be constantly prepared and trained for climate change and the need for resiliency that will be a continual effort that will be needed forever and so that will fall upon the shoulders of this new group these two new employees and so they'll be doing emergency preparedness and they'll be doing pursuit of grants which will be for climate action and resiliency together and so there's a lot to do in that area those are full-time jobs by themselves you're probably right every three years or so we seem to have an emergency and so that's nearly a full-time job because just as in the situation of the fires we're going to be three to five years for a full rebuild that's a full-time job for quite a few years to come I'm all for being prepared I'm all for everything but I just I can't see them spending a lot of time working when maybe a few years go by and everything's going well it's kind of like the National Guard I was in that we only really got together after training and stuff one weekend a month but we were supposedly ready for a disaster so I'm wondering about the down time of the job we're still rebuilding from 2017 you can tell you don't have roads affected by the 2017 storms we're still trying to get them we just put a bridge on Redwood Lodge from the 2017 storms because of the amount of paperwork it takes to get that done and then the pursuit of reimbursement and the continual paperwork that follows the chains of disaster so it's ongoing I would also I'm only asking this because we've just got through laying off or terminating 39 positions out of our county staff and then here we're adding two full time it's kind of like saying well these two full time positions are much more important than the other 39 that we eliminated but anyway I'm okay I just had one more quick question that just came up as part of this is if we have another incident like the 2017 storm incident which primarily affected public infrastructure is that going to be a DPW only or is this office of resource recovery and resilience going to be involved with that I mean what are you envisioning? I think that's one of the advantages of the OR3 we're creating coordination and we're creating cross training and a team and so future disasters there may be a primary lead like you say if it's a road centric it would be led by DPW but this team that we're creating is going to have the reinforcements and the knowledge and kind of the reinforcements to be more successful in the future and even in those situations the most you know in the moment of the disaster the team is going to be absolutely critical to address those needs and be more prepared for the response that follows after the disaster is over so that's where the value of this team comes in great, great yeah and I would just point out to my colleague that we're a county that sees fires, floods earthquakes sea level rise and tsunamis I mean all of that is it's not just history it's the last 10-12 years almost all of those I would only add in response to Supervisor Caput's earlier question the work to do within the community is a lot of work as you know dealing with constituents as part of the main part of your job and so downtime it really is about making sure we're connecting with the community making sure that we understand their needs whether we're in a disaster or not or recovering from a disaster or preparing for a disaster making sure we can maintain those connections and that we have that infrastructure in place so that when a disaster occurs it isn't just the county government that's responding, it's this network that we've created that enables the response to be successful I'm not sure whether Supervisor McPherson had something his hands up I'm not sure if he's thank you for seeing that from afar I appreciate Mr. Caput it was a nightmare going through this budget this year I understand but I was going to mention the 2017 storms and Sonoma which had gone through a disaster six years ago and they're still on the road to recovery so this takes a long time if this could get done in a year or two boy I'd love it it's going to be a long haul and I think another important part of that is the resiliency factor just everything from informing people about vegetation management and the importance of that around their homes and so forth that could all be part of this message that we're doing while we're building we can let people know what they can do to avoid a disaster that might take their house down maybe they could take some action or parts to this and it's absolutely necessary as beautiful as Santa Cruz County is to live in and I've been here in my life somehow we're at the eye of the tiger sometimes they want to come by with a storm or a flood or a fire or whatever so I am really I know we're all set that we need this to happen and I wish it could be done and said and done and we could feel comfortable in a year or two but that's just not it's going to take a long time and God knows what's ahead so I do appreciate the work that's been done and to bring this forward it's absolutely necessary and I don't know if we've gone through the public comment yet but I would be ready to move the recommended actions public comment yes ok if there's no other comments I'll open it up to the public for public comment and that's your opportunity and we have no web comments ok so let's see the bring it back to the board we do have a motion I'll second it and we have a second and if we can have a vote Supervisor Leopold I Friend Supervisor Friend Supervisor Coonerty I Supervisor McPherson Friend I think he accidentally he dropped off his connection wasn't so great ok yeah and Chair Caput aye thank you motion passes yeah ok that'll take us to item number nine consider final appointment of Stephen Allen to the assessment appeals board as an at-launch representative for a term to expire September 6 2021 I move approval ok we have a motion let's see any public comment ok we have a motion and a second I'll call for the vote Supervisor Leopold I Friend Coonerty McPherson I Chair Caput I ok we've done a closed session and we also now the next regular meeting will be 9 a.m. Tuesday one week from today November 17th 2020 I want to wish everybody a happy and proud Veteran's Day tomorrow November 11th ok thank you