 Looks like everybody's here. We are ready to start. Good afternoon. Welcome to the 439 session of the September 21st, 2021 meeting of the city council. I have a few announcements and then we'll move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on television, community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsanacruz.com. If you wish to comment on an item today and at the beginning of the item, you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for public comment, press star in on your phone to raise your hand. And when it is time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented on your item of interest. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call roll. Thank you, vice mayor. Council member is Watkins. Here. Calentary Johnson. Here. Brown. Here. Cummings. Boulder. Vice mayor Brunner. Present. And Mayor Meyers is currently absent. Okay. I'd like to call on the city attorney to provide a report on closed session, please. Yes, thank you, vice mayor Brunner and members of the city council. Council Matt briefly in closed session this afternoon to consider one item involving potential initiation of litigation reportable action. All right, moving on. First up is the consent agenda. These are items number two and three on the agenda. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, now is the time to comment on items two or three. Instructions are on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the cue saying you've been unmuted. Items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to comment on or pull any items? I see council member Brown. I just have a question and there may be different specific answers because they're different emergency conditions, but I just have a kind of a general question about the process for this when time is appropriate. Okay, and council member Cummings. Questions about items two and three related to the declaration of states of emergency. And so I don't know if they're the same as council member Brown's, but I do have questions that have come to my attention about declarations of states of emergency. Happy to. Any questions council members have responded to? I will ask Mary Haley to enter. The meeting and. Good afternoon. Yes. Yes, this is the Mary Haley Owensley. She's an associate in our office and she assisted or prepared the agenda report and the resolutions and can respond to any questions council member. Thank you. I'll just be real quick if I could. So I guess I'm just wondering we've been in a seemingly perpetual state of emergency for a while now. Really, I don't mean just legally. And but we are kind of seem to be in this somewhat of a longer, the longer term phase of what's happening here. And so I guess I'm just wondering are there some set of criteria that are used to determine you know, an emergency, not an emergency. I mean, you know, you kind of like this, you know, when you feel it, you know, when you see it, but how do we know, you know, and what what will determine when bringing, you know, extension of the of the emergency declarations? If nothing else happens for another emergency to occur. So just like what, how you'd make those decisions it would be helpful to know a little bit more about that. Thank you, council member Brown. To my understanding, there's no set terms when an emergency ends. A lot of it is up to the council's discussion as well. So there isn't a set especially for something like COVID where this is a probably a hundred year pandemic. So it's really when the council decides there's no longer an emergency. I would just add to that at this point in time, the primary reason for continuing to renew the emergency declaration well, there are two really both because the governor has not lifted the state declaration of emergency. And the second is really the primary if it is at this point is to maximize the city's potential recovery of FEMA or other state emergency funds. And so, so that's the real impetus for continuing the state of emergency declaration. Yeah, which, which I appreciate that that was included in the report. If there's just kind of a, well, we've been doing this and we're gonna keep and we're doing it again. So I appreciate the a little bit more clarity. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Cummings, did you have additional questions? That answered most of my questions and I'd also, but I also wanted to ask, as it relates to the CZU fire, it makes total sense to me for the pandemic why we'd wanna continue that declaration because it's still like unforeseen what kind of impacts are gonna hit the city and just to help recuperate some of those funds. I'm just curious because now it seems like the fire happened about a year ago and the fires never really made it to the city, although we were part of that response effort and really helped with evacuations of victims. So I'm just kind of curious, as it relates to the fires and the rationale behind the extension of the state of emergency. Thank you, Council Member. I think for the CZU complex fire, quite a bit of it is, is that now we're in a historic drought and so we have historically dry vegetation in addition to, I think that, sorry. All right, let me jump in, Mary Haley. Mary Haley is correct with historic drought conditions following the fire. We wanna be careful, but the bigger issue, I think, is impact to the watershed from the fire and not knowing what's coming this winter in terms of rainfall or not. The burnout areas will cause problems with the watershed. So that's really the major potential impact that the Water Department in particular is concerned about. Thank you for that. That helps because I was, it wasn't clear, but now that makes total sense, given the fact that we have the potential for debris flow since we didn't have major rain last year. Some of those areas are still pretty sensitive to that. So thanks. Okay, thank you. Let's see, now we can move on to public comment. If there are any members of the public that would like to speak on any item of the consent agenda, now is the time to do so. For nine, to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you'll hear an announcement that you've been unmuted. The timer will then be set for two minutes. And I don't see any members of the public with their hands raised. Oh wait, we have one phone number ending in 0711. Number six, to unmute yourself. My name is Sophia Alicon. I'm a citizen of Santa Cruz. I live in my boat. I'm calling to, sorry, I'm kind of nervous. I'm calling to voice my opposition for the oversized vehicle ordinance. We will be having comments on that a little later in the agenda. Right now we're taking public comment on items two and three, resolutions extending emergency declarations, and connection with the EU, August lightning complex fire by 60 days, and in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic by 60 days. So if you can stay on the line and we'll hopefully get back to you when we come to that point in the agenda. I will move on to Reggie. Go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself. Hi, I really liked the question that council member Brown asked about the extension of the city manager's emergency powers. And I'm just wondering why this isn't kind of being questioned more. I mean, this is kind of a big gift of power to the city manager. And it's not as though the city manager controls health and human services as we're constantly reminded, right? So what is exactly he doing for the pandemic? Why does he need to have this power right now? He doesn't seem to, with houseless folks, doesn't seem to be housing anyone, doesn't seem to take this responsibility in any positive way. So I'm just wondering if we can get an explanation about why the city manager has this power right now. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else who would like to call in, comment on items two and three on the agenda? Okay, I see that Mayor Myers is present. And are you ready to take over? Yeah, so are we ready? I assume we are ready to look for a motion on item number three. I've got, thank you Vice Mayor for covering for me. I see Council Member Watkins and then followed by Council Member Cummings. I'm happy to move item Q and three on our consensus agenda. Second. Okay, great. We have a motion to approve the resolution extending by 60 days the declaration of emergency in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. Motion by Council Member Watkins and seconded by Council Member Cummings. And could we have a roll call, please? Council Member Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Cummings. Boulder. Vice Mayor Brunner. And Mayor Myers. That motion passes unanimously. We'll now move into our general business agenda for the evening. Next up on the agenda is item number four, the 2021 Water Department Long Range Financial Plan and Water Rate Schedule for fiscal year 2023 to 2027. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order for this item tonight will be a presentation of the item by our staff, followed by questions from the council. Then we will take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. I'll go ahead and turn this over. I believe to Rosemary Menard who's our acting city manager as well as our water director. And so we'll go ahead and turn this over to you Rosemary. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you, Mayor Myers, Vice Mayor Brunner and members of the council. I really appreciate this opportunity to bring forward. I think this is my sort of blast for a little while specifically to water. I'm keeping my hand in a few things and this is one of them. And I do want to acknowledge as I'm starting the presentation that we have a number of members of the Water Commission as panels tonight. So I hope they'll be an opportunity if they have things that they would like to contribute. They've been our partners in a fairly long journey that started about a year and a half ago to look at our long range planning and to update our financial plan, our capital program, our revenue requirements and our rate study. So for the next several years. Also tonight as the presentation tonight we'll be talking to, we'll be hearing from the ARAC Teles consulting team and with their presentation about the rates specifically. So tonight we're asking the council to do three things. Adapt the department's 2021 Long Range Financial Plan. This is an update of the plan that the council adapted on June 14th of 2016. And I think it's a really important document for us because it lays out in a fairly detailed way that, you know, what our needs are and what the issues are we're trying to manage and what the plan is for how we're going to get from where we are to where we want to go. Approve the proposed water rate schedule for 2023 to 2027 for use in a proposition to 18 public notice process. And in your packet materials have been a copy of the proposed notice that would be distributed to all of our customers here relatively shortly and start the 45 day public review and formal protest period. And then to set the public hearing for November 23rd where you would actually receive the protest that might be filed and also take action on the rates based on feedback that you've received, et cetera. So that's the overview of what we're asking the council to do. Presentation is basically in two parts. I'm going to do a presentation of the Long Range Financial Plan and talk to you about various aspects of the department's finances and what our needs assessments are and how that looks going forward. And then Rascal Sanjay Gar from Rascal Consulting is going to present in some detail the details of the water rate proposed that are being proposed including something that I think we talked about a little bit at the April 6th meeting which is infrastructure re-investment fees and how we should collect those and also drought cost recovery fees which are important to us because we are proposing to continue a very high volume based rate which is important to our community but has some consequences that mitigate and manage for. So with that I'm going to launch into the conversation about the presentation about the Long Range Financial Plan and at the end of that maybe we'll take a pause and see if there are questions from the council also maybe here if there are any comments from the water commissions and then we'll move to the second part. So I want to, this presentation really talks about something that's really important and as I've taken on this new role as an interim city manager and seeing the opportunity to use today's presentation to talk about financial planning and the conceptual model we're using for the water department in the context of larger financial planning and decision making for the city as a whole. So this I may be pointing out opportunities where you'll be hearing some things as we go forward in looking at our fiscal 23 budget for the whole city that would build on some of the concepts and principles that we're laying out here. I'm going to describe a little bit about some of the key inputs and outputs the operating and capital that we have as major inputs our financial policies that we're using that are also the drivers of our financial planning effort but also have impacts on our revenue requirements and then revenue forecast revenue forecast for the next five years beginning with fiscal 23 are really the key to the process that draft health consulting has taken which is in the Office of Service Analysis and then using revenue forecast for the future years to develop actual rates that would be necessary to recover the forecasted revenues. I do want to mention as I go here go down into this process that this work is very aligned with the interim recovery plan the re-envision Santa Cruz and specific areas one is fiscal sustainability that happens to be fiscal sustainability of a large enterprise fund that is operated by the by the city and that fully funds all the water department expenses and also infrastructure investment. There's a very significant driver of God here in front of you that is related to investments and reinvestments in water system infrastructure that is designed to give us a reliable resilient and climate adapted water system for the future. So these are things that I think are very aligned with the interim recovery plan effort that you've undertaken. Here's the financial planning conceptual model and I really want to talk about this in terms of this box up here which is the financial plan input. This is the what and why questions. What are we going to do? What do we need to do? Why do we need to do those things? And to some degree, what are some of the goals associated with why we need to do financial reserves or pay as you go capital versus capital and those kinds of decisions. Why are we doing those kinds of things? Then the second part of it is the long-term financial plan that you've seen as part of your packet. This is the big picture. How much do we need to raise? How much are revenue requirements going forward? And that, as I mentioned, is the input into the rate setting inputs where we make key assumptions about the volume of water sales, about the result of the cost of service analysis that allocates to different customer classes. How much each customer class needs to contribute to the total rate revenue. And then look at rate structure design and redesign as appropriate. And then we get proposed rates and these are the how and the customer class specifics, how much. So these are the elements of the plan that we want to talk about and I want to share with you some of the major inputs. I want to also suggest that there's two places where values, community values are really important. One of them is in the financial policies and goals area. It's like, what are important things? In another setting, you might be talking about what level of contributions we want the county to make to support things like recreation programs and how do we want to balance those values in terms of being, maintaining accessibility for our customers who want to use those recreation programs. So in thinking about how this kind of model applies to other situations, you can think about financial policies and goals as things related to those kind of decisions that the council would make that are value-latent. Similarly, over here in the rate setting input, the council members participated a few months ago in a process of prioritizing what are pricing objectives. That's a value-latent discussion and your answers were basically integrated into the choices made by the water commission and the recommendations that came from the water commission to you on this topic and were incorporated into the rate design process. And RAP-HELS will be talking about that a little bit more as we get down into their part of the presentation. So just as a summary of the level of input, this is the operating forecast for the next five years. We do this based on the typical breakdowns you would see as part of anybody's budget. And a lot of what we do is based on a set of inflation factors that are different for different parts of the cost. So we have salaries and wages and we have a certain inflation factor built in, benefits, operating supplies and chemical energy and then all other categories. So those revenue forecasts and terms for the operating side of the house are driven by existing experience as well as the forecast needs that we have that are influenced by these inflation factors. And then we have the capital program and this is really the driver so much of what we're doing these days. You can see that this is almost $271 million over the next five years. Money, there's no doubt about it. As you can see in some of the line items here, there are some very large projects, similar in size and scale to the current project that's going on up at the Mill Creek Dam where we're putting in a new inlet outlet structure to the dam that has a $103 million price tag. And there are other projects that are more sort of in a scale that sort of seems more doable in a raw water diversion at some of our structures that's out on the coast structures or at the paid intake and also groundwater. But together they add up into a pretty darn robust and expensive commitment that we're trying to fund for improving our capital projects. We talked a little bit about these projects and these programs with the council members at the April 6th meeting where we talked to you about the process we went through with the water commission and the subcommittee of the water commission to look at different alternatives for how we might phase out these projects to sort of address a number of both practical limitations. You can't build everything at once because the water system has to keep operating during the entire time that you're building all these things and you also have to sort of try to spread them out to minimize and manage the rate impacts that are associated with them. But these are the capital programs and the sort of total amount from the council's direction task to use these figures in that came out of the April 6th meeting we had to see. A number of things we use here are financial reserve goals. These are incredibly important to us in both adaptive management, the rate stabilization reserve, for example, has been a source for us to make up for lower sales than anticipated as a result of the pandemic. So this process that we put in place in 2015 to create a more robust rate stabilization reserve has really paid off and given us some capability to adapt to things as we've gone forward. We do have operating a reserve that is sort of two different spots involving about 180 days of cash. These are really important to indicating to our credit rating agencies and to people who might be looking at loaning us money, whether it's the State Revolving Loan Fund or it's a federal WIFIA program with a water infrastructure innovation and finance infrastructure agency that has been created over the last number of years or whether it's the debt market, the capital markets that we do go and approach for loans and use of that loan money to invest in the capital system. In addition, the American Key Reserve is a really important thing for us to have. Three million when you have a billion dollars worth of infrastructure is not terribly robust, but it did help us to get through a number of issues partly related to the fire and also related to a couple of, we had a disaster in our water quality lab that resulted in a requirement to do some rehabilitation and replacement of some facilities there that was paid for out of the DMR Tency Reserve. These revenue requirements went with together, produced annual revenue requirements that you can see here laid out. There is a kind of a lumpy process here that's based on the idea that we've got a lot of capital projects that are coming due in FY24 and FY25. Normally you would like to sort of level these out if you did level it out, it would be about 10.8% a year. But unfortunately the cash flow doesn't really allow it that of the way these projects are laid out, doesn't really allow us to level this out. So this is the proposal of how we would go forward with the revenue requirements and with the sort of ratings reaches year over year for revenue requirements. I'm gonna sort of talk, there's a big section of the middle here, but while I have the floor, I'm gonna talk a little bit about risk management, mitigating the risk of a heavily volume-based rate structure. And I mentioned this before when we talked a little bit about the COVID impacts to our lower than normal water sales. So we're recommending a continuation of the dollar per CCF starts as associated with the increase in the rate stabilization reserve. It helps us mitigate the effects of changes in water use patterns from any number of variety things that aren't drought related. And then we are recognizing that it's really important for us to establish that charge and maintain it. There's some provisions in the financial plan that talks about what we will do with money that's raised over the $10 million goal in the event that we get there. And you'll see that there's been thought through in terms of how we can best utilize those resources to help mitigate some of the impacts that we're facing throughout the, through our whole sort of financial situation in the water department. And then the second part is the drought cost recovery fee is this is our current plan for reducing or curtailing demand during drought is basically can have a significant effect on our ability to raise revenue. And unfortunately, if we had a more sort of fixed cost based revenue structure, rate structure, we wouldn't be mitigating some of this automatically but we'd also not be maintaining the ability to make water affordable for essential use. And that, you know, having the current structure we have where there is a relatively low fixed charge monthly and then the associated use based charges is really makes it for someone who's not using very much water more accessible and more affordable. And so those are these, the cost recovery fee is something that we have designed and have in place since 2014 actually that allows us when the council declared the shortage to implement this fixed fee and to collect it over a 12 month period to help us be maintained sort of revenue neutral. It's not a very popular fee as you can imagine and we don't like to use it but given the financial commitments we have it's really a tool that we need to have in our toolbox. And I mentioned this basically already about using about $3.8 million from the rate stabilization reserve for COVID and that we did use the drought cost recovery fees from July 2014 through June of 2016 and as I said, it's spread out over 12 months to mitigate the monthly impact on customers. And coming back, I want to just sort of summarize again we've been through a fairly detailed process of looking at what our operating capital budgets are and sort of assessing the adequacy of our financial policies and goals, creating a revenue requirements and now we're going to talk about moving into the next step which is the rate-said setting process. So this is what I have in my presentation and maybe we can pause here and see if there are questions or we move on or additional comments from water commissioners. Yeah, thank you, Rosemary. And I also want to welcome our water commissioners this evening. They've done a really, really amazing amount of work over the last two years. So I want to recognize you for all your work, especially as well as a pretty historic drought. So appreciate all the work in the work of your department, Rosemary. I see that Sierra Ryan has her hand up. Go ahead, Sierra. There you go, you're on. Hi, Sierra. Hi, thank you for having us today. I just wanted to, speaking for the commission, thank Rosemary for that great, and just reiterate her statements that this is something that we've been working on for a really long time. I know this was presented to you in April and at the time we didn't have the full understanding of what the rate increases would look like, which we do today and which you've already seen. And I want to acknowledge that these are going to be painful, but I also want to acknowledge that they should be necessary. The capital improvement program is really well thought out. A lot of work has gone into it for many years. These are all projects and programs that are essential to our water supply security and really represent a generational investment in our resiliency. So I don't have anything concrete to add other that answer any questions if you have anything directed towards the commission. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope that does infer, is in the town's agenda. Thank you, Mayor Myers, and thank you Rosemary for that presentation. I wanted to comment briefly on an aspect of the process that was relatively novel, but I think useful, and that was the establishment of the ad hoc sub-commit that was referenced in the materials that were shared with you, along with Vice Chair Wadlow and fellow Commissioner Alejandro Padamo. I served on that ad hoc committee. We basically did sensitivity analysis around what is a massive CAPEX budget, looking at various alternative ways to really structure that in order to maintain our focus on resilience and reliability while trying to balance that with affordability and generational equities. I would just salute staff for coming up with the idea of establishing the subcommittee and working creatively and responsibly with the members of the commission who served on that. The rate structure that you see coming out of this does reflect, I think, good work by that subcommittee. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner. Are there any other questions from council or commissioners at this time? I had a question about the drought recovery to see if it was the right time, Rosemary, but I was just curious, I was thinking about federal and state declarations of drought and I would imagine we would be able to recoup some of our losses from the system or accommodate people somehow. How does that play? So if you have an emergency declaration, oftentimes you can get sources to replace loss. And I'm not curious about how that relates to the drought recovery fee. You know, that's a really great question. I am not aware that there's been FEMA designations for drought in the sort of classical way, but it certainly is something that you might be getting more into moving in that kind of direction, just because of the extreme weather conditions that we've seen. And then as you all know from the work that we did when we talked with you about the Water Church Contingency Plan, that increases water use is already tremendously efficient. And I think that one of the big challenges we have in sort of moving into drought restrictions is not a very effective way for us is you can spend a lot of money to try to cut people's use. But the real solution that we have to get into is some kind of investment in water supply augmentation because it's not really feasible for us to curtail demand by 50% as described in some of those tables, the 50% per month, the monthly numbers are like really eye-copping. And I can't imagine us ever actually implementing those in part because I think that they're not feasible, we're putting them in because they're sort of required to be a match up to the five stages that requires us to have in our plan. But really anything beyond maybe stage two is not a plan that it seems to me is viable for our community. And we need to be finding a way to make sure that we're not there and also looking at ways to mitigate the cost of those investments in water supply, which seems to me that proactive water supply investment is a better way for us to focus on solving that problem. There are some good resources coming out of the state this year and also the feds and we're watching them very carefully and I'm very heavily engaged in looking at how we can get the water supply reliability we need without necessarily having to deal with droughts in the future and this kind of curtailment and also getting ourselves a more reliable supply for our community. Thank you for that answer. Just looking to see if there's any questions for from council at this time. Okay, we'll keep moving then Rosemary. Okay, so I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm going to invite Sanjay Garg all of us to present the information. Sanjay is a slug. So he's a local guy who drove metro buses to put himself through, was that your PhD program Sanjay? Masters, yeah. Masters, yes. So he's very familiar and well-known in Santa Cruz has been with us for the last couple of cycles of rate studies so we've been very lucky to have someone who understands our community and this works so well. So with that Sanjay, go right ahead. Thank you Rosemary. I assume you can hear me well and you can see the screen and I'm impressed Rosemary you remembered that I was at UC Santa Cruz for a few years so thank you for more than that. Also I was, I also worked at Natural Bridges too so I did that for our summer too. I think I saw someone has a background in Natural Bridges. So we'll get started with the presentation and agenda, talk about the rate process, talk about the rate setting framework developed, rose rate structure. As Rosemary mentioned we layered in the financial plan and the proposed rates and the drought rates next step. There's a lot of information here that we are covering today. This has been a very extensive study and we actually, the city started in October with a request for qualification. We got selected on January 14th. We had our kickoff meeting January 10th, pretty COVID and then we adapted with COVID. We've had several meetings and a lot of meetings with the Water Commission, with customer panels. I feel like we were pretty successful given the challenges that we faced by doing everything virtually as of today. We met with you also on April 6th, we discussed the framework of the rate setting and then here we are today. So it has been a long journey, a lot of touch points with a lot of different individuals just to make sure we're on the right track in the study. And that's important because this is an important aspect of the community. This is a big study where we did at what we call comprehensive cost of service where we looked at your cost structure, look at your customer profile and try to marry those two together. We want to do that because that is a foundation to develop a defensible rate structure that's equitable. There are legal constraints with Prop 218. Unfortunately, there are people who are also suing water agencies over this. So we want to have a very strong logic and rationality. We want to have a lot of touch points with customers. And we also want to develop what we call administrative record, which is the next step of the study. We did drought rates. We developed system development charges, which were adopted, as Rosemary mentioned. We did a lot of public outreach. I have Matt Wittner on the call too if there's any questions about our public outreach strategy. She can talk quite a bit about that. And then the next step is administrative record, which will be a very lengthy document that basically justifies shows the logic with the rate structures. We suspect some active citizens who would want to read that report, which we definitely recommend and encourage. We'll be available to answer any of their questions, normal in the process. But it just really shows the map behind all the rate structures and then the five years of rates. Through these, the steps that we conducted, we did a policy objective. We asked ourselves, what do we want to achieve in the rate structure, what are the goals, which we did. We looked at inside outside surcharge and make sure whether that makes sense still or not. And we'll be talking about that in a second. We talked about, we did a wholesale transfer charge. We looked at elevation surcharge rate options, infrastructure reinvestment fee options. We also helped looking at the data. We got new data, so it's really nice. So we can do a little bit more refined analysis this time. As I mentioned, system development charge. I'll be presenting two options where those both ag with the sense of reliability. We also updated private buyer capacity, drought rates, and as I mentioned, we did this extensive customer panel to get their input on what makes sense. Community. So from a process perspective, so those are the things we touched on, people we, the touch point, the promo process perspective, there's really four steps. There's a rate setting, there's a cost of service, where we look at allocation of costs, we work with staff and make sure that makes sense. And then we design rates and look at the impact. And with the water commission and what makes sense and what are the values in our community. Then we layer in the financial plan, take that into account, fund the CIP project, which is reliability is the key word there. And then we're basically now at this point where we're looking for your input in another touch point with you to make sure we're good. And if that makes sense, then we would proceed with administrative record up to 18 noticing and then set the public hearing. So the rate setting framework is basically a threefold process where we ask our sub-literate goals and objectives, what do we want to achieve? And we also start talking about business case in the sense of administrative costs and equity and what makes sense. And there might be rate structures out there that are really precise and equitable, but just the business model to do that might do a bit too much, given the limited resources that we have. And then customer impact, we really want to understand what is the impact of customers and which customers are affected mostly by. And so we did that analysis and we're going to be presenting you that information. We went through a policy exercise with you and with the water commission. We presented these results on April 6th where we asked what are the objectives that we care about? These are the laundry lists. Based on that exercise, we got these three priorities, for water for essential uses, affordable and accessible, provide sufficient stable revenue to meet operating capital and customer service level needs, and to maintain transparency equitable for water and capital and water reliability needs. And so there is a balancing act here. Sometimes there's a little bit of a conflict, but by achieving one thing, such as affordability, essential use, that's by having a low, six star tie volume metric, then we accomplish that by, for instance, having, still maintaining the rate stabilization time or a similar amount of lower water sales to balance out those needs. And of course, staff is conscious about administrative needs. So based on that information, we go to rate structure. Just to remind ourselves, our current rate structure is you have a fixed and variable component. The fixed is this rating is to serve based on meter size, larger meter, more capacity, more cost to maintain the meters. You also have a fire line, those are private fires for fire sprinklers. You have a consumption charge, basically residential sport tiers. Everyone else except irrigation is uniform on at least the same rate like gasoline. Irrigation is a three tier based on water budget. We're taking into account a lot of size and weather. We have an elevation, third chart conversion stabilization, and currently you do have an inside outside differentiation of rates. So based on our analysis, based on a lot of workshops, these are our proposals. First is that the elimination of the inside outside rate based on an analysis, it doesn't make sense to do this. It also helps with simplification. Residential tiers, we're recommending that that move from four tiers to three tiers. Again, it's simplified, but there's a little bit more simpler story there. Elevation surcharge, now when we are at suggestions to open that up, by now there's only one zone we're suggesting that three zones because it makes sense for the app and there are additional costs in the higher zones. And then we also wanted to make sure we have a really good logic and rationality for the private fire life. That's there's some controversy over that. And so we wanted to just really make sure we are on some strong ground with our logic and rationality for that. I'm moving relatively quickly here. So if you're saying please interrupt me. I know there's a lot of information here and I know you've all had a long day or go ahead and even have a longer day. So the infrastructure charge has been currently collecting $9 million. We really examined that. I would say this was the meat and potatoes or maybe I shouldn't, I don't, most of us, maybe the word means not right word, potatoes where we looked at the different rate structures, whether it's uniform, related to serve, property. How should we fund this? And we went through a lot of exercise, a lot of discussion about this. And based on the pricing objective, based on the values, we really feel comfortable with this tier to come out of the current approach. And that's what we're moving forward with. Tom Jay, I just, I'll interrupt just briefly. I see Councilman Rekolder raised her hand. Maybe she had a question on those, most recent slides. I did have a question, but did you, but do you really want us to interrupt or should we save the questions for the end? I have no problem. So I just was confused when you were talking about the private fire lines, are those the residential like fires that people get in their homes? No, it's the private fire lines are the ones that are commercial like hospitals, hotels, the mall, those establishments. And so those, you were saying an increased fee for those? Some of them may increase, yes. Okay, that's all I was curious to understand. Thank you. Thank you. So the other thing we looked at is North Coast Ag. We wanted to understand their needs and concerns. And based on our experience from the last drought, what we wanted to do is really make sure we address reliability. That's a key concern as especially as we enter this new drought. So what we've done is that we developed two rate structures for them. One is maintain the reliability like anyone else. So they will have pro-tailment when anyone else has a pro-tailment. And so they'll just be like a typical customer. Another one is a decreased reliability where it's a seasonal interruption. By having a decreased reliability, you would have a lower rate. So these are two options that North Coast Ag can choose on. They decide, excuse me, it's in the Prop 2018 notice or the draft that's been developed. And they can decide whether they want to maintain the reliability or have a lower rate and decrease the reliability, that's up to them. Based on that, we have these four rate structure components where we have a fixed charge. What we have right now, customer service, meter maintenance cost. We have a consumption charge that takes into account the different costs of peaking, supply, conservation. We have the infrastructure renewal charge. Again, a variable. And then we have the rate stabilization, which is not changing. Based on that information, then we layer in the financial plan mentioned. We have the operating, we have the infrastructure charge, we have the revenue needs and the percent increase. As you can see, it's quite clear that we're really funding the infrastructure charge. And that's what this is all about, some reliability. So with that, we go into the proposed rate. The first one is that the tiers are changing. As I mentioned earlier, you currently have a four tier rate structure. As you note, these are in units. The units we use is called HCF or STCF. It's sort of a secure unit that we use in the water industry, 748 gallons. Here's one, STCF. What we're suggesting is that, if you notice that some of these are pretty tight here, there's not much of a difference in the unit. So what we're suggesting is for them zero to five and then to nine, then above that, or above nine. And this is based on average water use and average summer use. So there's a logic and rationality for that. Next, we have a series of tables that shows you the rate schedule for the radius to serve charge and commodity and et cetera. And the thought is that this would be the city council, then could at the public hearing consider adopting them. And then you may want to revisit these as you move along, whether you need to implement them or not. So that's a policy decision that you can decide later on. But these are the ratings to serve charge. So there's a lot of numbers here. A lot of information here. Here's the fire charge as mentioned. So they do go up a little bit more for customers. Again, for larger, the mall or the hospital or the hotels are typical. Here's the consumption charges over here. As I mentioned, here's North Coast Ag where they do have a difference in rate maintaining on the reliability. They get to choose that if they want that or not. Infrastructure charge, we have the zones and the rate stabilization. So there's a lot of information here, right? And so as you mentioned, as you might even get caught in the beginning, I said, well, we want to know one of the things we want to understand is what this means to my customer, what's the impact. So that's why I want to show you down. And then this is really the most important slide or the first important slide. And the next one might be considered the second most important where we're showing different usages for a residential inside customer. We have two, four, eight and 12 units. Most customers fall around the eight, around the eight. We have the bill right now. We have the proposed bill. We have the dollar and the percent change. As you can see, those who use not that much water will see less than a $2 increase. Some customers will see a little bit more, around $7. And if you use a lot more, then you'll see a much more substantial increase in your water bill. This takes into account the inside outside. This takes account all the changes that I just mentioned. So there's a lot of moving parts here, but this consolidates it all. The second potentially most important slide is, what does this mean compared to our other communities that were on us? So this is a survey. We're looking at six units. That's the average usage. What we have here is Watsonville, Marin, of course, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, Coastside, Soquel Creek, San Lorenzo, and Monterra Water. Scotts Valley, we're working with right now. They have a public hearing. So they will see an increase shortly. Coastside will also be, we're working with them and they'll see an increase in January. So all these agencies are doing some kind of rates that are increased, especially with the drought. They're all facing the same challenges that you're facing. So as you can see from a pecking order, you're still on the lower side compared to neighboring communities. I'm gonna stop here before I go into drought rates. It's almost like a, it is important as another aspect, but I don't wanna mix the concepts here. Is there any questions before I go into drought rates? Yeah, Sanjay, I've got two council members, council member Golder and then council member Watkins. Thank you, Sanjay. You don't happen to have the previous side projected out to 27. To the rates to 2027. I don't for the survey or for the customer impact. The previous slide, I don't remember the title one. Yeah, the impact. No, I don't have that. We could provide that to you. Thank you. Council member Watkins and then council member Conn Tari Johnson. Council member Cummings. Thank you for this presentation and for all your work on this, this looks really great. I guess my question sort of is on a bigger picture perspective, if there is an infrastructure bill passed, how is that assumption or potential additional, particularly capital infrastructure dollars being infused? Is that not assumed in this model and we would make adjustments in when that occurs or hopefully that occurs? Sorry, I answered that one. Yeah, that's a great question. And so here's the deal. So we have made certain kinds of assumptions in the financial modeling work, looking at particularly the infrastructure with respect to how much we would likely pay for a debt service. And there's a table I believe in the long range financial plan that sort of lays out what the current assumptions are in the model for SRF money for market rate debt. And so we've used those assumptions kind of selectively in the analysis we've done. The best outcome that we could get from some of the infrastructure bills is grant money. And one of the really good things that we are right now with our project development is we have a lot of things that are in the category of more shovel ready than not shovel ready. So that puts us in a position to compete very effectively. The other thing I will say is that the current SRF state revolving loan fund debt that we have is at 1.4%. So we have about $150 million in debt that is at 1.4%. And if you had a mortgage for your house which would be 150 million, but at 1.4% you would feel extremely lucky that you had that for a 30 year cost of borrowing money. And I think that the challenges we're facing is that we have a lot of work to do. We're in a historically sort of low interest rate environment so it's really opportunity for us to leverage that kind of situation even if we have to borrow all of this money. It's way less expensive to do it at 1.4% than at 4% or 5%. Which is in the original work that we did in the 2016 Long Range Financial Plan, I think the debt, a service assumption was more like 4% or 5% which makes a huge difference in what you can afford to do. Thank you. I have one follow up question that is in terms of being grant ready, I know we've talked about having the city be grant ready in a lot of different ways. Assuming that the water department is poised and has the resources or access to the resources that when the time comes that we have kind of ready to go grant writers and access sites. Yes, we do and we're obviously following the work that just has come out of the state budget recently. There's about $650 million that has come out for drinking water projects in just one category. There's a $400 million in a climate resilient category and we are working very hard with our local folks to our representatives in Sacramento to get us the information we need to know when things are coming in terms of notices, funding availability and also what projects we might have with line up best for certain kinds of pots of money. Great, great. Thank you. Also we're calling Tari Johnson. Great, yes. Thank you for the presentation. I wonder if we can go to the slide that says 24 on the autumn. Yes, yes, this one. So my question is, do we have this broken down in terms of the percentage increase proposed between customer classes, resident commercial landscape? It just, as we look at it, it looks like residents the increase in residents in the various tiers look significantly higher than some of the other classes. So I wonder if we have the percentages and if you could just speak to that. So I have a, say if I don't have it with me at this moment we do have a table that shows that your observation is correct that it does look a bit high here especially if you look at tier three. Now one thing to note is that there's not that many customers in these higher tiers. So it doesn't affect residential as much where there are the biggest shift though is actually a landscape account. And that's that we wrestled with throughout the study is how do we deal with that? Cause one of the challenges is that when we do our allocation of costs we look at peaking, how much people use water relative to the summer relative to the winter. And landscape account use a lot more water in the summer relative to the winter so they are peaking more. And so more of the cost is shifted over to that. And so landscape accounts do seem more of an increase than other customers. I think I would add a couple of comments to this. The cost allocation is not a, you know take 27,000, 27,000 customers and divide equally. It's based on how various customer classes use the system. About two total consumption is in the residential class. And residential class alone they don't peak as much as the landscape irrigation they do peak. And commercial class generally the commercial properties that we have in our service area that use landscape use water for irrigation have a separate irrigation meter. So their consumption for that is in the irrigation category. They're much more sort of flat in a sort of a general way. They're not peaking off the system in that in that sort of same way that, you know somebody who's using, you know free CCF in the wintertime might be using 60 CF in the summertime based on irrigation practices. So partly what you're seeing here is the effect of allocating costs from the based on how different customer classes use the system. And Prop 218 requires that customers be charged only the amount that is reflected in, you know meeting that actually providing service to them. But you do see these kinds of differentials. Thank you for explaining that. Donna you're muted. I have council member Cummings and then council member Brown. I had one of my questions was answered because members of the public were kind of asking those questions of why now to try to, you know get these loans and it makes a lot of sense that, you know if there's an opportunity to get this funding at a very low interest rate that we want to try to really do that, you know rather than wait and then, you know have a higher rate at a later point in time. One of the questions I had if we could go back or maybe forward to the slide just for clarification when it was showing the HCF rates for the different that one that was graph. Yes. So based on this graph and for clarification this fiscal year 2022 bill that reflects the bill for those types of residencies for the entire year. So based on this graph those people would pay $32.46 at that resident for their water for that year. And then it would go up to 33, 80, 60. These are monthly charges. Okay. And the, it's an example of somebody's using CCF that's what their monthly bill would be. And you can see that it goes again the price one of your priority water pricing objectives was the sort of maintaining access for essential use which wintertime consumption and these lower numbers that definitely represents. And so the structure of the rate structure of maintaining so much of the revenue from the volume based rate is the way that that is accomplished very specifically. Got it. Okay. That was thanks for the clarification because I wasn't sure if that was annual monthly bills. Some other lifetime that might have been annual but not this lifetime. Absolutely. I know I was going to say that's pretty low but great. And then the other question I had was none of the public had asked why in terms of the timeline for paying back this loan like it seems like this is a five year structure and people were wondering why can it be stretched out to like a seven year structure or longer to kind of ease that increase in those bills over time. Yeah, you will recognize from the document that there's a appendix in the long range financial plan that has a 15 capital program and this one has a pretty good sized chunk of money in it. And I think that next 10 years is sort of a little bit more sort of stretched out spending but it doesn't go to zero. So there's more money to be spent after this and you'll recall from the, maybe you'll recall from the April 6th conversation that we, there were several scenarios that were done high, medium and low. They were originally laid out over a 10 year period. And where we got from the sort of highest one to the one that's in here is we spread it out over 15 years. But we've done that to the degree that we can. There is a challenge with the kind of some of these big projects and spending associated with these big projects. You stretch it out too much longer than we've sort of done in our plan. You end up with a higher cost because you're not getting the project done. And I think that we are looking at an ongoing inflation of construction costs which is a challenge. So trying to figure out how to get this work done in this environment. And this is a, the stuff that's in this five years is pretty, you know, there's a few really big things and then there's some smaller things but the big things don't, they don't lend themselves to being stretched out really, really long time. Thanks. And then so for the independent residents that are paying their rates back the reason why it's that five year kind of increase is because we really need to make sure that we're able to pay back in a timely manner so that we're not falling behind. Yeah, yeah. And I guess the other thing is that the maximum number of years that's up to 18 will let you do a rate increase a sort of a year over year is five. So we couldn't do seven if we wanted to. And I think that that's a, you know, that's a challenge obviously. You can do less than five and but you can't do more than five. That's what I was trying to get to. So that's really helpful. Those are all my questions. Thank you, council member. I've got council member Brown and then council member Golder. Thank you, mayor. And thank you to our interim city manager flash water director wearing your water director hat. I really appreciate again, I mean, I can't say it enough how much work goes into this and, you know, how well clearly it is. And yet I still find myself with questions. So one of the questions that came up for me in conversation was related to the commercial class and why no tearing in that category. Given that there are significant differences beyond seasonal among, you know, commercial users. So like hotels, for example, may use a lot more water than, you know, another business function that, you know, clothing stores or, you know, whatever's left of those other businesses in our community. So I'm just wondering is there, that's just based on the research. I think some of the answer is kind of implicit I'm starting to feel like I understand it maybe, but I'd love to just hear a little more of the thinking on that in your model. Yeah, so that's a great question. A lot of agencies that would love to be able to hear commercial accounts. The challenge is that you actually hit it on the nails that there's so many different types of commercial account, you know, hotels, even within the, there's so many different types of health in your service area. You have some larger ones and then you have some smaller boutique ones. And then what makes sense? How would you tailor it? Anything we do to do a tiered rate for commercial would have quite a bit of administrative burden. And you'd want to make sure that it's really designed to create incentives to reduce water, not necessarily to overcharge customers just because they have a large establishment and they're very successful. And so that's sort of the hard part. So we did look at some ideas behind that, but again, based on the pricing objectives, based on administrative ease, it didn't really make sense to do that. So I think one of the things that needs to be commented on there that tiers has to be justified based on the cost of service. So that's a really sort of, that sounds like a bunch of words that's obvious, but the details of how you justify that it costs you more to provide 100 gallons to this person versus 300 gallons to that person, especially when it's the pattern of this. It's different from the residential class where you see that, that sort of breaking into those kind of tiers. But tiers are historically a vulnerability. And so when you set them, you really have to be able to justify based on the cost of service analysis that you can, that they're justifiable based on actual analysis of cost of service. We have Prop 218 to thank for. Yes, we do. That as well. Okay, thank you. That's really helpful. Thank you, council member. I've got council member Golder next. Thank you. I have two quick questions. Has there ever been any discussion about creating like a similar structure, like PG NEHA, customers can choose to have your bill kind of balanced out. Like they average out your last year's bill and then you can take like a flat rate kind of for that year so you can budget. We haven't done that. And I think that part of the problem is that we haven't had the sort of bill into some infrastructure to do it. So that's a bit of a challenge. It is among the various things that we can, that we undoubtedly will be looking at over time as we go forward just because, you know, more customers need that kind of assistance or it's a simpler way to make sure people can continue to, you know, get their bills paid and be able to afford them. It is one of the things along with, you know, continuing to advocate for state and federal funding for low income rate payer assistance and different kinds of ways that we're working on to help mitigate some of the impacts of, you know, the rate increases to those who are able to pay. And then my only other question was regarding the talk we had several months ago about the possibility of adding the cost of the capital improvement property tax bills. Was there a reason why that was? So it turned out that when the customer panels that we did, that wasn't a very desired. There was a kind of sense of, you know, hiding the ball and the confusion associated with that. I think it is a feasible thing, but it turned out that it really wasn't a desired approach. Well, thank you. I think that is all of our current questions right now. Okay, so now I'll go to the next part, which is drought rates. And so drought rates are a surcharge tied to a specific drought defined by the water storage contingency plan. It's designed to recover the loss revenue usage. And it is proposed right now. And if you currently have one, but the proposal is to maintain that to do it based on a fixed charge, based on meter size. This is a surcharge, it's temporary. So in the ideal world, we're not in a drought condition. So we wouldn't even be talking about this. But when a drought occurs, you would have this. Where our recommendation is to use the same methodology that was developed in 2016. When a drought declared city council and the water farm will implement corresponding rates, these drought surcharges, and they'll be collected over a 12 month period. So what we did is we looked at your plan for a drought. And these are different stages associated with them. It gets scary very quickly, I'll be the first to admit that. Especially we get into these higher stages. I know Rosemary has been very, her goal is never to get that stage two. And just to stay at stage two at the most. But you know, the reason why you have these are these are additional tools. In case hopefully we never go there. But if something happens, I don't know what needs to happen for us to be in stage four or five, but hopefully it never happened. But if it happens, we're really rationing water because of our earthquake or significant fire or whatever that scenario is. We have this tool in our tool belt. It's also important to note when I show you the rates is that these are the maximum that you can implement. You don't have to necessarily implement the full amount. So that's something that a city council again can consider as you go through this process. If you want to have them adopted, so you have the flexibility to go up to 18. So as mentioned, it would be based on meter size. One of the challenges that we face is this reduction in loss revenue as the stages occur and the unit rate increases based on meter size. And that's just the nature of your system because people don't use that much waters, but sort of a blessing. You don't use much water. So you're very good at that water stewardship. And making sure water is available for the future. But because you use a little bit of water when we ask you to cut back, it has even more of a financial challenge to the agency. These are the rates by stages. And this is a fixed charge, monthly charge. As I mentioned, again, the process here is that if city council adopts them, then when a stage occurs, you could consider whether you want to implement that corresponding stage or implement something lower. It creates flexibility. You could ask, there are other options such as potentially shifting CIP projects out, which is not favorable, but it could be done or using reserves. Again, all these are not necessarily great, but it creates another tool in the tool belt in this dire situation. The drought rates would be subject to the revenue adjustments that be clear. So it is a little bit of a complex table. It's going to be five stages for each year. So it is a lot of information I will be showing you. I'm just going to show you the five-year schedule for only stage two, which is the top of that. We only stay at stage two or lower. We never go about that. So here's the associated drought stages with the revenue increases that's needed about years to find the CIP. So again, just the most important thing is what does this mean to my customers? How does this affect my customers? So we have a five-eighths-inch meter here. We have someone who uses six units based on the proposed rate structure in the company, $75.31, with a stage two 20% reduction. That person does that. They follow that reduction. There is now a drought surcharge here of $21.05. The bill goes up to $80.15. So they do see a slight increase in their bill, less than $5, but we still have water reliable for them. If that individual does not cut back and continue using the six units, as you'll note that what will happen is that they will also have a penalty rate at the top of that too. That'll be charged on top of their normal rate. That'll be on top of that. Is there any question about the drought surcharges? I just have a comment more than anything else. I mean, I think this is what kind of, as a water customer, this is the most counterintuitive part which is most people would want to assume their chart, their bill goes down because they're saving water, right? And it's really hard to explain that the unit of water still costs the same. And even though you're losing yet less, it's still costing the same to get that water to you. So I'm just curious, Rosemary, how do you, is there also communications kind of planning around this and other things? Because I mean, I'm sure these are the calls you got in 2014 through 2016. And again, it's sort of, why do it if we don't get some kind of financial reward? So I think this is a big hill. This to me is one of the biggest hills to climb in terms of the rate stuff. Just curious about how you handle the communication. The main thing that we talk to people about is the fact that we have a really big mismatch for reasons that we've talked about of how we collect revenue versus the like. And about 92% of the water department's costs are fixed as opposed to variable, but about 90% of our rate revenue is variable as opposed to fixed. So when people use less water, we don't save very much money on chemicals and power, which is a main two variable cost in the production. We still have to deliver the water that they are using. So it really is the unfortunate reality of taking fewer units and trying to collect the same amount of money, which means the price per unit has to go up. And it is terribly counterintuitive. And this is not this drought cost recovery fee, a strategy that I think is totally wonderful and we should use it all the time. And in fact, the times between we did declare a drought in a stage one drought in 2018 and also obviously this year, we didn't impose the drought cost recovery fee and fees as those cases that are kind of using the rate stabilization reserve to sort of more strategically deal with that. But if we got into a situation further down the scale, some of the revenue impacts of a 30% cut and not very much water use, there's not a way for us to make up some of those gaps without doing something here. That's why this is in the market basket. And it's also why, in my perspective, the goal isn't to ever do this again, get water supply reliability such that, our customers have an adequate supply. They're not excessive users. I wouldn't expect those these patterns to change, but that's where I think we need to put our money and put our customer's money in producing that outcome. I have any other council member hands up. So I'll go ahead. Oh, sorry. And one quick question. So I guess under what scenario would we see this going to effect given that you just mentioned that we declared a drought and it hasn't gone into effect this year because I know I've been approached about this issue already earlier this summer when we first declared the drought. So I guess for us, it'd be really helpful to kind of be able to share with community members, cure the circumstances that occur. So that they know just because we declare a drought that this is going to happen. So the water shortage contingency plan contains language and we're pretty sure it's in the Munich code that basically authorizes the city to impose the drought cost recovery fee linked to a specific stage when the council takes action to establish a stage of emergency. So stage one and stage two. It doesn't require that we do it. It authorizes that to happen. And when we've been in stage one either this year or in 2018, it just felt to me like wasn't something that was more the headache so to speak associated with it so we didn't do it. But if we have another dry winter and we go into next year in a similar kind of situation that we are this year, we are in the process of looking about, you know, and I shared some stuff with you in, I don't know, a few weeks ago when you came back from break about, you know kind of what the, some of the forecast looks like for next winter if we have another dry winter. We are looking at the week two and one of the things we would have to look at if that were the case is what is the fiscal impact on the revenue side of doing that. And we would bring you a very specific, you know recommendation related to implementing this in that event. Right, and then the council would have to decide on that. We'd have to provide authorization and approve. Yes, it's part of the resolution that we ask you to approve when we go into a particular stage of the work shortage contingency plan. Okay, thank you. Okay, Sanjay. Alrighty. I'm not seeing any other council members or missioners. So please. Okay, so next step is to receive direction from city council, prepare the administrative report that I mentioned, which is a lengthy document. Important dates are of course today, the virtual public meetings that will be happening on November 10th. We would like to set the public for November 23rd. If city council adopted, then it would be affected July 1st, we would need to start sending out the pop to 18 notice, then we send out at least 45 days for the public hearing. Basically, the way it works is that if someone wants a protest that they can do a written protest that's one for fraud. So it must be received before the end of the public hearing. Great, we're ready to either have you take public comment or take your further questions or the council can entertain an action. Okay, thank you Rosemary and Sanjay. A lot of work, a lot of work and thing which is our water system. I had one question, one last question was the value, valuation of our system was pretty, was a big number, about $900 million. So we were thinking about what this means kind of in the realm of things. That valuation, how do you come about that? And is that having that asset and those assets sort of described in a sense for our borrowing and other needs? So the valuation has to do with the replacement, this was calculated based on replacement costs. And so we took the assets that we have, we understand kind of, we made an estimate about what their replacement costs were. We know how long they've been in the system. And so what the depreciation rate is, the way that the valuation is mainly used is the setting system development charges. But it's the valuation minus the capital program because the ideas that the people are buying into the existing system infrastructure. And then for current and future rate payers will pay for the capital program. So Sanjay, I don't want to add anything else to that number, but it is a big number. It's nearly a billion dollars. It's a very valuable asset for our community and really underpins so much economic and vitality and viability and sustainability for our community. And it obviously didn't cost that in bills. Grand Mill Water Treatment Plant, which has this really horrific refigure in the hundreds of millions kind of number associated with some work that needs to be done there was complete for 1.6 million, but it was 1960. Sanjay, do you want to add anything on valuation? I mean, the main thing to me is in this process, it's all about maintaining that value. In some sense, your job is to maintain this asset for future generation, for current generation and future generation. And that's what we're doing through this process. It's just to make sure that we maintain this value because if we diminish the value, then we call it mining assets. We're not making sure that it's viable for the future. So it is an expensive project, expensive system and that's no low and you're doing a great job in having a plan to maintain it. Thank you, Sanjay. Are there any other questions from council members before I take this out to the public? I've not seen any hands. So, well, thank you Sanjay for joining us this evening. Hopefully we have further questions as we go into deliberation. Excuse me. I'll go ahead and take this out to the public and I see that we are on item number... We are on item number four for those who may be joining us right now. And this is our water rates, Water Department Long Range Financial Plan and Water Rate Schedule. And I see one person has their hand up in the audience. It shows as MP. If you would press star six to unmute yourself, please go ahead. R6, you should be able to get... Yeah, hi. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Go ahead, please. Yes, I'm just curious. With interest rates so low and the jump on market what it is and just that market is what it is, have we ever considered just borrowing at 50% more than what we need right now? Because we probably won't get this opportunity to get such cheap money in the future. Usually we won't have comments with questions with answers, but our staff will definitely take note of that. And we will look to them if they do want to answer that before we take any... I will actually say something about that. If you borrow money in the sort of just the sort of standard debt market, typically it's a three year, spend what you're going to borrow in within a three year period. So it is, it's not, you cannot from a financial management and securities management perspective, you can't do what is being suggested here. Although I'm sure a lot of people have thought it would be a good idea. Thank you for clarifying that. Are there any other folks in the audience tonight who wish to speak to this item? And that's their hands. So I'll bring this back to council for further deliberation. And look for either a motion tonight or further deliberation on this item. Council member Brown and then council member commentary Jones. Thank you. Well, I just wanted to say thank you again to our water department team and Sunday for you for being here. Really helping us move through this. I just wanted to say, I think that chair, the water commission chair Ryan comment that these are painful rate increases, but necessary really sums it up. And I hope that we can really invest some energy and time. And I know the water department is doing this into finding ways to on low income residents and fixed income residents. And especially I've heard from people just talking like with my neighbors and others about the seemingly small increases for low water users is a significant hit for some much more than others. And we can't do anything about that with our B structure because of prop 218. Another reason to thank prop 218. We do take that seriously and that we just continue to do everything in our power to find resources to perhaps mitigate some of those cost increases for people with the least ability to pay. Separate conversation for another time. But with that, I would be happy to move the staff recommendation. Thank you council member. Council member calm. Thank you. Yes, I was also going to thank Rosemary and the team and Sanjay and the water commission for all your work. And I was going to also move the motion to all second. Thank you. And I'll second the thank you to the water commission as well. A lot of work has been put in and I really appreciate everything you all do. Okay. We have a motion on the floor to move the staff recommendation with a second. And I look like we don't have any other additional comments or deliberation from council members. So I think we are ready for a roll call vote. Council member is Watkins. Hi, and I'll third state the water commission for water department as well. How about Tariah Johnson? Hi. Brown. Hi. Coming. Thank you for the record. I just want to express my appreciation for all the work that's gone into this and also just for our community to understand that we really need to invest in our infrastructure now because it's going to cost a lot more if we delay and we really need to make sure that of all the resources we provide our citizens that water is one of those that we're able to make sure everybody has. Holder, vice mayor Brunner and Mayor Myers. I'm I and I'll also just briefly comment that I think Sunday really wrapped us up that we read some often about communities who haven't taken care of their most important resource which is their water. And we've hear stories, you know all over the country and the world. And so this is an investment in the future. And, you know, we're we're paying it forward and I certainly echo councilmember Brown's concerns and I know we were able to provide a lot of relief and so I want to, you know make sure that our department really continues that value of really working with people who are struggling and may not be able to make those bills at any given time. So I think having our forgiveness program and, you know, helping to leverage those drought, you know, those other funds that help pay ourselves back is really wise. And so I appreciate the structure that you put together for the long range financial plan. So thank you. And with that, I'm and I as well. Okay. So we are finished with that item. I will then open up item number five tonight. And this will be the ordinance amending title 10 vehicles in traffic at chapter 10.04 definitions and chapter 10.40 stopping, standing and parking and chapter 10.41 citywide parking permit pertaining to the parking of oversized vehicles and chapter 16.19 stormwater and urban water runoff pollution troll at section 16.19.070 discharge of sewage prohibitive. And I just want to note a couple of limitations tonight and I will open this up for my colleagues to introduce. Tonight we will have extra speaking time that was granted to three groups. Those will be asked to use that use two minutes for their extra. And Bonnie, I believe you've got the list that I want to confirm. And we'll go in this order. Westside cares, correct Bonnie? Right. So Westside cares, you'll go first. Westside neighbors is second. And then remind me the last one, Bonnie. It's stepping up Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, exactly. So we'll go in that order when we do take the extra time folks and that will be the start of public comment. And then we will allow for 90 minutes of comments and we were asking each speaker to have to keep their comments to a minute. And of course we'll have several hearings on this item. So those, we're just requesting those things for this evening. I will go ahead and from what I understand I believe my colleagues, either council member or the council members who sponsored this are gonna open this up. And I'm not sure who's gonna go first. So I'll look to you guys to wave your hand and open this item up. Is that you, Vice Mayor? Thanks, Mayor. Yeah, I'm happy to open this up. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor. So this item is stemming from previous council direction in June related to safe sleeping sites and the direction of safe parking. Identifying safe parking locations and to look at the previous 2015 ordinance. So this item has been built upon that and the three council members that we've worked on this with staff we'd like to introduce it tonight for public comments and bring it back for our first reading at our next in October at a regular meeting. And I believe we can look at the agenda calendar to set that first reading in October. So tonight it's really an opportunity to get full public outreach for this item to introduce it. We've already received a lot of very specific comments on the ordinance amendments and some suggested changes and edits to the amended content of the ordinance. And so we really want to make sure that we develop a good balance of all of that feedback and allow that time before we bring it back for the first reading. So I'll pass it on to Council Member Golder and Council Member Tarenkari Johnson. Thank you, I think I'm next. So for me, this is something that I've been looking at since 2013 when I was appointed by the city council at the time to participate in a public safety task force and there was 14 residents from diverse and varied backgrounds and we spent the better part of the year being tasked with exploring like deep rooted issues affecting public safety, including but not limited to drug abuse and treatment, drug related crimes, homelessness, mental health, gang activity and the increase in calls for service and what that does to our criminal justice system and just the complexity around both issues. And because we were such a diverse group of residents, it really required a lot of thought and analysis and most importantly, open minds and there was tons of discussion and disagreements and collaboration. And at the end of it, after hearing from judges, lawyers, police, outreach workers, service workers, addicts, people in recovery, we brought forward 56 recommendations and number 35 was for the city to review and implement strict parking and overnight camping ordinance related to RVs on city streets, increment of new decode violations related to RV parking in the city of Santa Cruz. And then having lived on the lower west side for the last 16 years, I see a lot of the impacts on a daily basis and my sister and her kids just live on Delaware. And so, which is, you'll see in the presentation why that's significant. And so through this ordinance, we're attempting to address some of the behaviors associated with RVs camping on city's knowledge, like it's not perfect. We think that through modifications, we'll be able to address some of the issues such as fires, oil and black water spills that directly leak into our watershed into the Monterey Bay. There's litter, violence, drug use, the best. In addition, and most importantly, also it gives people living in RVs more opportunity to increase services with the implementation of safe sleeping sites that haven't been there in the past and hopefully, more stability and help improve their lives as well. So we're really trying to make this a win-win for everybody in the community but we acknowledge that we're, we want more input at this point. And so that's where we are tonight. I'm gonna turn it over to my colleague, Cary Johnson. Thank you. Vice Mayor Brunner and Council Member Golder provided a pretty good description. I think what I would add is, I'll pick up where Council Member Golder kind of just left off is that we want to use this as an opportunity to expand the pet program that we have in place with the city-sponsored safe parking program. We have been in conversation with service providers in the faith community to look at cost sharing and supporting the programs that are in place to expand those. We've also been talking to county partners on identifying sites in unincorporated areas. So we're using this opportunity to address as Council Member Golder just outlined some of the impacts of oversized vehicles parked on city streets. And there'll be some more details in the presentation that Chief Mills will provide momentarily. So we're using this opportunity to revise the ordinance and address these very egregious impacts, impacts on how those individuals were using their vehicles as a place to live. They are also living in conditions of trash and human waste around them. So looking at the successes that we've had already with the safe parking program, expanding that and addressing the negative impacts of these on our city streets. I think the other really important piece that Council Member Golder touched on is every opportunity that we get, we should use to connect folks to a pathway to housing. Housing is ultimately the goal that we wanna be reaching for and housing can be attainable. So that is something that we're looking at. And what we've proposed tonight is that we form an ad hoc committee appointed by the mayor that will dive deeper into this. We've been working on it for several months. Council Member Golder for several years, but we really take the time to dive deeper into this to form a response in a program that is responsive to the needs of everyone in our community. So I think with that, I urge to Vice Mayor Brunner who will get us to that for the presentation. Thank you, Member Calentari-Johnson. I will hand it over to Chief Mills if you, yes, there you are, thank you. Welcome. Well, good evening Mayor Meyerson, City Council. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to present this information to you, to make sure that we're all on the same page. And that we, as said by several of our council members, give the opportunity for the community to have a robust opportunity to weigh in. And so I think what you're going to find in this presentation is that opportunity for people to adjust what is already there will be present. And in that way, we can move forward with the assurance that everybody's had that opportunity. So I'm going to try to share my screen right now. Not there yet, Andy? Yeah, I'm not finding it. I might have three dots up top, hang on. Okay, no worries. You want me to share it too? I was just looking in the wrong spot, not surprised. Can you see it now? Yes, thank you. Great. So to begin with, we really wanted to make sure that give you an idea of what's going to take place in the next few minutes. This is an introduction to the oversized parking ordinance, vehicle ordinance. So that is not, we're not asking for the first reading, it's just to give the information. We want to examine also the scope of the problem and the past efforts that have taken place in the city as Council Member Golder had discussed a few seconds ago. And then present the proposed ordinance and amendments. And Director Butler will take care of that portion since he has really invested a great deal of time, effort and energy into language along with the city attorney. And then we'll also discuss the formulation of an ad hoc subcommittee on the safe parking program. Again, the purpose of the presentation is to define the problems associated with oversized vehicle parking. And I think that there's a great deal of frustration in our city amongst many in some of the community looking at the problem. We wanted to introduce you to the ordinance language, provide time to examine and think about, think through the ordinance and show the opportunity to give council and staff feedback that we can make the adjustments if appropriate. But also I think very important to build the most fair, consistent and sound ordinance possible. And I really want to give a lot of credit to our city attorney, Tony Condati. And we're really putting a lot of time, effort and energy in this to make sure that looking at case law and making sure that we are as constitutionally sound as possible. One of our lieutenants just retired early, Arnold Vazquez. It's his picture on the screen there. Arnold's an interesting guy. He was a fabulous leader in our department. But something he said to me the last day of employment struck me pretty profoundly. Arnold joined the police department in the late 90s. And his very first call, the very first day, the very first hour of policing in our city was to handle oversized parking on Delaware and Natural Ridge. And he told us, literally nothing has changed in 20 years. And that is why I think this makes a lot of sense to me, that we shouldn't have a generation of police officers retire from the city and not having had a substantial impact on the problem. In fact, there are probably those who would say it's gotten worse. We can look at data around that. But it's still something that has gone a long period of time. We have received thousands of emails over even just my time, short time here, a little over four years from community members regarding the problems out there, 400 plus from just the West Side residents regarding not allowing people to park out there in a structured industry. So this is acutely an acute problem for many people. We've also had multiple meetings, both small and large, both council and staff. I've been with many of these meetings with some of our council members. Mayor Myers and I also went out there a couple different times. And many people were just frustrated over the parking and some of the there's been decades of input from the community. So this is not new to virtually anybody in the city. And then, and we also want to recognize that some council members and some community members have been actively involved in drafting and promulgating this coordinates. And so we really want to recognize the efforts of many community members to have an input on this and to help lead us to a possible solution for partial, so what's the goal? To me, and this is just me speaking, the goal of the ordinance is balance. And I think that whatever we do in the city, Santa Cruz has a reputation of trying to be as balanced as possible and how we promulgate policy as well as how we lead and enforce the law. We are mixing service options with enforcement capability. We can't have just one or the other. And I think that we all know that. So this ordinance seeks to balance compassion and accountability by referring people to services, giving them the opportunity to park in a safe place with structured environment, but at the same time recognize that if they continue to, there's a consequence for that. And that the police department as well as the parking department should be and are fully prepared to hold people accountable and leverage the law as best we can to hold people accountable. Oh, how big is the problem with the scope? There were 15 9-11 calls so far this year, not including 9-11 wireless calls. Relayed to oversized vehicles, seven were for fires, three were oversized vehicle fires. That's not just on the west side, that's city-wide and may or may not result directly to illegally parked vehicles. I responded to 38 vehicle fires in 2020 and 2021. Of those, three were oversized vehicles. Public Works responds quite often. They responded to 12 oversized vehicles, service calls, 14 public right away calls, and scores of other cleanups and trash pickups that are referred to them by police and fire. I just really want to give recognition to Public Works because we literally in parks as well, we literally call them almost every week while we're cleaning our encampments. And they respond and they do a fabulous job as part of the team to help clean up some of these problems in the city. So I really want to give some credit. So unmanaged parking and camping can lead to significant environmental concerns. This is our recent photo of trashed on the sidewalks as well as you can see buckets that are often contain urine and feces. They get dumped into our grains, which leads into our bay. And it can be a significant problem, not only here, but in some of the other unmanaged camps as well. It also is a significant lack of access to postal parking. People will park for long periods of time in some of these places. Now go into that in a little bit. We also do see criminal activity. In the last five years, there were 96 part one crimes place at Delaware Natural Bridges, Swanton and Shaper Road. So that's a pretty high concentration. A lot of those were assaults between people who've been there as well as auto theft recoveries. So this is data that was gathered by the West Side Community Neighbors who put in a Verizon 6 camera on a light pole over by Cowles Beach. And I just want to go through some of the data that isn't highlighted for you. 95% of all people park for two hours or less. However, 6% consume parking at a much higher rate than everybody else. So 6% of all parking events consume 31% of parking out on Cowles Beach. That denies access to a whole lot of people. And so when you take a look at the bigger picture, and this is typical of both employees as well as crime, a small amount of people really consume the efforts of the majority of our services. And you're looking at total minutes is over a million minutes of parking spaces that were blocked. Oversight vehicle parking issue some more context in 20 and 21, five streets. Delaware Natural Grid, your safer admission in Alomar was 33% of the problem. And if you look at it, about 80 vehicles out of all the vehicles that were ticketed and tagged, and a ticketed and tagged and trying to move this around, I apologize. It had three or more 72 hour violation. So it's again, it's a small number of people who are creating the biggest part of the problem. And that's what we seek to deal with here. I found this interesting. This is what's called the Trouble Index. So the Trouble Index looks at 911 calls per 1,000 parking events. Even at the time of day, and this is military time on the bottom of the chart here. So from nine o'clock at night, till four in the morning, you can see the spike in 911 calls of parking spaces that are consumed. So theoretically, if we can control that, obviously you could affect the amount of calls to 911 which were crimes that are taking place. From the police perspective in 2020, the SCPD did 2,200 abatement calls for service and want to give a lot of credit to Joe Habie and some of our volunteers who go out there on a regular basis and handle those abatement calls by tagging vehicles. And of the 197 were oversized vehicles that were tagged, we towed 20 of those vehicles. In 2021, so far we've done 2,400 calls for abatement services, 2,294 were oversized vehicles and 12 so far have been tagged. They might be a little bit higher after the operation a couple. That's the amount of work that our folks are doing out there on a regular basis. So where's the problem? 33% of all of our activity is on the far west side. If you look at the concentrations to the heat map, it's mostly centered on Delaware natural bridges and in Shaper Road. And so that's where most of the abatement activity takes place. Now that might be a little skewed from the standpoint that we base that on calls for service from community members when we go out there to do those abatements. So what are the barriers to effective management of this problem? The cost of precious metals has dropped significantly in the recent years. So therefore it's no longer as profitable for some of the dismantlers because most of these wind up being dismantled and turned into precious metal scrap. The tow yards literally have no room for these vehicles. Each of these bigger vehicles can take up to two hours to load and tow. So it's an incredible amount of effort on the part of the tow truck drivers as well as the police. As you can see, this is an industrial tow truck. This is a pretty good sized tow truck that takes us a great deal of specialization to be able to do this in an effective way. The last time we did it, public works came out and immediately sucked out all of the black water out of the things that we weren't leaking it on the way up to the tow yard. The tow yards have no more room for the motor homes and buses because they've just run out of room. So last year we created our own tow yard. That's why you saw it dip in the numbers because there was no place to have these vehicles towed too. So we got creative as a team and create our own tow yard and have had the vehicles towed stored up there until these scrap metalers can get in there and after proper notifications and dismantle those. The problem is it proves disruptive to public works operations. And so we've literally run out of space. We are over capacity and there's no more room to tow these vehicles. And so this becomes a difficult problem to manage. The cost of towing these vehicles is not budgeted. As you can see, just the towing itself there's about $1,200 between $9 and $1,200 per vehicle and that does not include the scrapping of the metal in having those things torn apart nor the emptying of the ant-freeze, the ration, the black water and all the other things that come with it. And each of those sometimes take different people to get up there and do that. So it can be pretty expensive per vehicle. Again, we just don't, that has not been figured into our budget at this point. So what are the resources? The resources available are 15 operational spaces in the city and 21 outside the city and the county. 13 of those are on religious sites and two on city property. The police department front lot has been used radically by the AFC to house individuals. We had a father and two daughters living on our front lot for a considerable period of time. And we were proud to be able to use, utilize a lot. And here's the process we used. We informed neighbors that this was going to take place. We defined the duration of the pilot project for them. We talked to those in the program to make sure that they were ready and willing to behave as good neighbors. And then we monitored the progress and to make sure it's taking place. And then we assessed the appropriateness of continuing this program. So the result was we had zero calls for service, problems, issues with those parking. And we also know that they can also park on private business property as well as private. This has been addressed before as it was stated earlier, public citizens task force in 2013 that led to the recommendations of parking ordinance 2015 went to council adopted 2016. The zoning minister approved coastal development permit to implement the ordinance. Coastal commission filed appeal on the ordinance in 2016 and it's there today. So this fit into health and all policy. That's important to us as council has adopted this health and all policies approached and oversight vehicle ordinance will help control the flow of untreated urine, theses and other chemicals into public space. And it could also help us reduce crash and litter as well as some crime issues. Equity is important to each of us and the ordinance will be challenging for some of our community members. We're pretty direct about that. Although we know that council will hopefully direct us to work with council and the ad hoc committee to establish safe sleeping sites which will actually those who comply with the rules and the regulations of sleeping in a safe controlled environment. And then stability for our environment. Environmental integrity is the core value in Santa Cruz. We get that the oversized vehicle ordinance will help improve the environmental conditions, improve access to our coastal community for all residents and visitors and we believe that could be something that could really be beneficial. And I'll turn it over to director Butler. Thank you chief Mills and good evening mayor and council members. I'm Lee Butler deputy city manager and I've got a handful of slides here and we'll aim to quickly go through the ordinance provisions. So the ordinance has a series of definitions and as chief Mills mentioned the council adopted an ordinance 15 and this ordinance has a number of changes associated with that. These changes are incorporated into the presentation here but all of the overall ordinances attempted to be captured in these handful of slides here. So there's unloading and loading is defined and there are some exceptions for parking allowances when unloading and loading is occurring. There is a definition for out of town visitor that allows for a permit to be issued for a person that is visiting a city resident and oversized vehicles are defined in the ordinance as being over 20 feet long or greater than seven feet tall or sorry, greater than seven feet tall and greater than seven feet wide. So the definition has changed and then the definition of resident is provided and you can see that here. We can go back to it if you've got questions. Go ahead. Next slide. The base of the ordinance specifies that there is no oversized vehicle parking between midnight and five AM and there are permit allowances that would allow parking during those times and we'll get to those in a few minutes here. The ordinance speaks to prohibiting utility connections on streets and sidewalks. It prohibits open fires. It requires that the oversized vehicles, the surrounding areas maintained in a safe and hygienic manner and there are limitations on where oversized vehicles can park, imitate a certain transportation features that had like intersections that might where they could cause a challenge with line of sight. And then no unattached trailers can be parked unless they're actively being loaded and unloaded. And then as I mentioned before, residents may obtain a permit. The park can be adjacent to their residents or if that spot is not available within close proximity to the residents. There are also some changes to chapter 16.19 of the municipal code. That code already speaks to the prohibition on the dumping of material into our storm drains and this modification would make it explicit that that includes but it's not limited to disposal of sewage or gray water into the storm drain system. The overnight parking permit does allow residents to have a valid permit for one year and to park for periods of up to 72 consecutive hours per month. So a resident that's owning their RV could park it on the street in proximity to their house for those links of time. And then out of town visitor permits would be valid for 72 hours and a resident may receive no more than six out of town visitor permits in a year. The recommendation that the council members brought forward also includes the creation of an ad hoc subcommittee that would be appointed by the mayor that would be supported by staff. And that subcommittee would develop policy direction on the expansion of city operated or city sponsored safe parking permit programs for unhoused residents or registered oversized vehicles in the city of Santa Cruz. And the recommendation that is included as part of the ordinance is that this would be implemented the program would be implemented prior to enforcement of the overnight parking restrictions included in the ordinance. And that is the last slide. As you heard from a number of the others the council members are suggesting that we take public input this evening and bring the ordinance back for a first reading at a subsequent hearing. And I think we are all available for any questions that the council may have. Thank you, director Butler. I appreciate that. I do have one quick on the first proposed changes slide just to avoid any confusion. Are you able to pull that up again with the timeframe? I believe it's midnight to 5 a.m. As I think it said 12 p.m. to 5 a.m. And I just didn't want to have any confusion around that. Thank you. I caught that immediately before the meeting and changed it to midnight. But I think that you just have to go back. It's this one right here. Yes. Yeah, you're correct. It is midnight to 5 a.m. And I think Chief Mills must have already had the present because I saved it ahead of time. And it's so that it didn't make it in. So thank you for pointing that out and being clear for the public. Thank you. Okay. Mayor Meyers had to sign off. So I will continue to move us forward. With that. And so I'd like to bring it up to any questions from council members. And I see a couple of hands. So council member Colin Terry Johnson and then council member Brown. Thank you. I just wanted to also clarify that the last slide set the policy direction for ad hoc community to work on city sponsored safe parking. But that will also include working with county partners and faith community to do safe parking in an unincorporated area. I just wanted to clarify that as well. Thank you. Council member Brown and then council member Cummings. I have several questions. Is it okay if I just go ahead and they're sort of different overlapping? But okay. So first I'll just say thank you. I'll say comments for later but thank you for your work on this. And I recognize that it is a serious issue and it's a serious challenge to figure out how to address it. I am wondering, it's a one question given the history with the coastal commission. What kinds of conversations have taken place? Has that been an engagement with the coastal commission or has this been mostly around looking at legal framework in which those and interpreting that in order to develop this proposal? So that's one question. And then probably because they're sort of different questions I'll just start there and then go with the next one after. Yeah. What's the coastal commission say, if anything? Maybe I'll start that off and see if anyone else wants to join in. I have had a conversation our parking program manager, Brian Borgino and myself. Had a Zoom meeting with the coastal commission regarding the ordinance shortly after the council direction in June to get their take on it and to understand the process. And they basically highlighted the outcomes of the 2016 coastal commission discussion and noted that the coastal commission in particular at the time was looking for a better understanding of where RVs and oversized vehicles would be able to park. And so they were looking for more information on the affirmative side. They were also looking for some additional statistics related to the issues that sometimes arise around this. So trash collection and dumping of sewage and so forth. So those were the key items that we talked about. And I'm not sure if others wanted to chime in, Tony or Brian. Okay, I'll just fire off the next question then. So the concerns, the specific problems associated with RV camping around illegal dumping and some of the other issues that are quality of life. I think they may fit in that category that you have, nuisance. It seems to me, don't we have love on the books about illegal dumping? I mean, there's environmental health regulations. Where are these hovered elsewhere and why can't we enforce using those? I imagine that it's a question of, there's logistical challenges and all kinds of challenges, but what about this is specifically going to enhance the city's ability to do enforcement on those activities. And has there been any conversation about other efforts that the city could undertake in order to help mitigate those problems, regardless of the activity, how much we can change behaviors or what can the city do to help mitigate that? So where's that conversation at? And I guess that's for anybody who wants to take it on. I see Vice Mayor Brunner shaking her eyes. So the conversations are happening. I'd love to hear more. Andy, do you want to take it correct or do you want me? We can both do a little bit of it. Tony, you want to go ahead and go first and I'll back clean up. Yeah, so there are a lot of ordinances on the books that prohibit the kinds of nuisance conduct that are often associated with overnight parking or really parking of an RV for an extended period of time in one location. It's not just the overnight aspect of it. It's the fact that it stays there and there's littering and there's other nuisance conduct that sort of builds up over time. An infraction citation for littering can be written can be written if there's a witness to the conduct and can verify that it occurred and identify the person who engaged in it. However, what happens in these situations is that the problems tend to accumulate and get worse as the conduct continues and just writing a citation even if it's a misdemeanor even if you could arrest someone and take them into custody. The way the court process works these days is they would be right back out on the street within an hour and go back to the parked RV and continue to engage in the kind of conduct that we're trying to address. So moving these vehicles along seems to be the only effective way to address some of the nuisance conditions that become associated with them. Andy? Yeah, I think that's right. Part of the issue with crimes such as litter and illegal dumping is you have to have a witness or else you have to be able to articulate why this specific person did this, not necessarily that it's just there. So this will give us the opportunity to cite infractions at the infraction level or the misdemeanor level depending on the circumstances and then have our own city attorney prosecute these cases. Part of the issue is the courts are so overwhelmed with other cases, virtually nothing is getting prosecuted. So, and we have COVID because of the much more serious crime and so the city attorney for us has had a better crack record of getting these things prosecuted. To send that message that, look, this is not okay in our neighborhood and we've written, I mean, hundreds of tickets, both parking and as other municipal code violations out there on the West side and it can help for a little while but it comes right back. And so this I believe can help us with the leverage to make sure that people are not doing parking and creating those problems. And I just want to add two things. One is not necessarily just unhoused individuals or those living in motor homes. We get a lot of people coming to town from out of state who think it's just okay to park on somebody's street for a while while they're on a surf trip or while they're vacation. This would address all of that and not just those who are in house, although it does address that. And then the second part of your question comes from member Brown was, are there other things that we're doing to mitigate that? And yes, we are consistently warning people and providing them with contact information to AFC if communities to be part of the parking program. There are other options available to people should they desire to do that. As well as public works, we put dumpsters at different locations. There's a dumpster out there right now at the corner of Shaffer and you know, those get filled up and dump regularly. I think city staff is really doing what we can to try to keep that fairly orderly and give people the opportunity to police them, police their locations themselves. And that's effective at certain levels with different people. Thanks. Just a quick follow up on those. And thank you for that. I appreciate the response some of which is in terms of the, in the act kind of questions. So I guess I'm thinking that when I talk about, you know, annealerating or mitigating, I was also thinking about, and I don't need a specific answer on these, but I'll just say, you know, is there any chance of a dump station on the West side? I mean, even if we do all of this, there's still gonna be an issue. Can we, is there some way to provide a little bit of a carrot like a place you can do this? And, you know, at a reasonable rate, along with the stick, things like, you know, I'm just thinking about as I hear you say that the cost of, you know, towing, storing, you know, the cost, the logistics, and that kind of the material impossibility of continuing to do it this way. Are there other, I mean, you know, and I don't know the level of repair of some of these RVs, you know, that's probably a significant cost to get them moving, but I mean, can we think about ways to get people moving so that they can move on their own, you know, move away, right? So out of that particular offsite. So rather than towing and then having to figure out what to do with the junk, if it's something that is on its way, it could be mobile, you know, is there something the city could do? And then I had one more, but I forgot. So I'll just leave that for a moment. So I think I'll have Director Butler just deal with the dumping portion, but if I can just talk about the other half of it. Yeah, our preference, our full preference would be that people would come in compliance with the law, so we would not have to tow their vehicles. None of us want to tow vehicles, especially for a person who, this is the last thing to happen in life. Nobody wants to do that. But we do need, for the sake of the other half of our community, the majority of our community, you do need to have the ability to say, this is not gonna be okay. Some of these vehicles are on repair, that there is not even a working restroom in the motor home. And so it goes into a bucket to get to put outside of the motor home. And people run by that or walk by that, and that becomes difficult for those folks. So yes, we would love for people to comply. In fact, the sheriff's office learned today that complained that some of the people that we've been doing enforced, but not have now gone out in the county's jurisdiction. And so we don't wanna push the putty somewhere else. We want to help people if we can, but at the same time, we do have responsibility for our community to do what we can. Lee, did you want to address the other? Sure, thanks, Chief Mills, and thank you, Council Member Brown, for circling back to that, because Chief Mills was talking about something right now. And one of the things that I heard in your question, your prior question was some of the things that we're thinking about doing, and they're kind of on the horizon. And so I appreciate the opportunity to speak to that a little bit. One of them, of course, is what the council members included as part of their ordinance language to have an expanded safe parking program and looking into that in and of itself. But I wanna talk about two other things. One, the dump station. And the first thing that I'd say related to that is that we have been looking at the potential for a dump station at 1220 River. That does, that will work a not insignificant cost of infrastructure. There's also, we've also been looking at how that site may be utilized for other homeless services. And so how those interact with each other, if there are large vehicles driving onto the site, while we also have individuals who are potentially utilizing that site for other things, that we haven't figured out exactly how that might coordinate yet, but that is a consideration. And that's a location where we have the property and it could feasibly be installed. So that's one option with river dump station, which the council members know, but I'll mention for the sake of the community the nearest dump station is at the northeast corner of Soquel and Highway One at the 76 station. So it's not super far, but it is a decent little ways away. And second, you asked specifically about a dump station on the west side. I don't know that we have the property, I mean, maybe in the public right away. We don't own a specific property, but there may be some option out there in the right away. And that's certainly something that we could talk with Public Works about. I know Public Works has also been looking at updating the roadway design out there such that there's a protected bike lane on one side of the road. And so we'd have to look and see how all of that would fit in if I don't think a dump station was contemplated at the time, but I appreciate that suggestion that we can look into. The last thing that I'd wanna mention in terms of some of the things that are proactive is actually just something that we were working on today. And it was in response to an email that went to the city council and Council Member Brown, you were asking how we help people to really move on to a better situation. And one of the things that we have as well as the county is a program called Homework Bound. And if someone has a connection in another location, but they don't have the means by which to get there, we can support that. And we verify that there is actually that connection on the other end. But the council received an email or at least I received it yesterday. I'm not exactly sure when the council received it, but, and it was someone asking, hey, I'm located somewhere else, but I don't have the gas money to get there. Can you help? And this person had also been coordinating with the county. We reached out to the county today, connected with folks and they had already offered the Homework Bound program and connected them with the Homework Bound program to assist them. So there are programs that we have in place to try and help people take that step up and that step forward. Thank you. I have just another follow up on that. And then I have one last question that I'm sure I'll have more, but for the moment. So, and I'm familiar with the Homework Bound program. Is that a program that, but I'm not familiar with all the details. Where for, so you met us, but for example, registration, I know vehicle registration becomes, you know, the longer that you're not registered, the harder it is to kind of figure out how to address it. So is that something that can be, that people can get help with through Homework Bound or do you know of any other resource? I guess, I'm just trying to think about ways to provide safety net that is also, you know, facilitating improvement, I guess. So just those kinds of things are, I'd love to just keep talking about them, I guess. I can, if I may jump in, that's all right. Thank you for those questions, Council Member Brown. That is something that we've been talking to some of the neighbor groups are very interested in supporting, is doing fundraising and providing some funds for vehicle repairs, vehicle registration, support with dumping vouchers, dumpster vouchers. So those have been discussed, nothing's been set in stone, but those are some ideas that the neighborhood groups of the faith community that we've been, faith members of the faith community that we've been talking to are very interested in pursuing. Great, and I hope the city can help coordinate in whatever role and help support that. Then I have a question and I just wanna make sure I'm getting this correctly. The program recognizing that this is a first shot and there's much conversation to be had before, and then the first reading and second reading, does that mean that somebody who has an RV who wants to get a permit can only get that permit if they have a residence that they have access to that they can park it in front. So you have to say you have a residence in order to have the RV parking, which seems a little, the attempt to address a challenge, but it seems like it's not really gonna, I guess I'm just trying to figure out how that fits in and who could take it, who could actually use that kind of program if it were to be established, does that make sense? Am I right that you need to have a physical address that has street parking in front of it and that's the place you can park in order to get the permit, is that correct? Okay, all right, thank you. Looking forward to further conversation. Okay, thank you. Council member Cummings and then council member Watkins. Thank you, Vice Mayor Brunner. I just wanna express my appreciation to my colleagues in the community for bringing this item to our attention. I know that many people on the West side have been concerned about impacts of RVs that are problematic. And I think it's important that we hear the concerns being raised and work together to find a constructive solution to specific problems. I've worked at the Long Marine Lab at the end of Delaware since 2015. And so I see what's happening down there on a regular basis. And it's a very complicated and complex situation because while there are problematic individuals they're down there in problematic circumstances. There's also people down there who have been responsible who pick up trash after themselves that are not in this behavior. And so my hope is that as we move forward we try to mitigate the negative, we try to mitigate the negative impacts while not penalizing people who are causing problems in our community because as it becomes increasingly more expensive in Santa Cruz I know a lot of people who are business owners and who contribute to our community who are shipping to living in vehicles because they just can't afford rents and they would prefer to save money so they can eventually buy a home. So I guess the first question I have is that I do wanna follow up on that question regarding the coastal commission because one of the things I noticed and for those members of the public who aren't aware there was an article in the Good Times this morning where it was brought to the attention that the appeal was rejecting the ban on the previous ordinance that was submitted was rejected 11 to one by the Coastal Commission. And one of the things that's quoted in this article by one of the members of the Coastal Commission is that in the time since this vote was made they told the city that if they wanna come back the commission to come back with evidence concerning two issues. One, what is the need for this restriction? And two, what is the plan on where people displaced are supposed to go? And so this has been with the Coastal Commission since 2016. And I'm just curious, what we're doing right now is introducing an amended version of that same ordinance. And what I'm concerned with is just what is the likelihood that this isn't gonna get appealed and we're gonna be in the same process because I would imagine that if it passes then it's gonna have to go to the Coastal Commission then it gets voted on by the Coastal Commission at some future meetings. If we haven't done anything since 2016 then we're just gonna find ourselves in the same situation. So I'm just kinda curious what's been done to mitigate the impacts or the issues that were raised in 2016 and how is this any different from what we submitted previously? I mean- Can the city attorney respond to that? Yeah, I can respond to it. I think, first of all, I think the article while I didn't read that is an accurate summary of what occurred at the Coastal Commission in August of 2016. I think the effort that has been made by the group that's been working on this ordinance is to be prepared to get appealed to the Coastal Commission and to be prepared to answer that question. The language of the ordinance specifically contemplates a safe parking program being implemented and other measures so that when the question is asked there's a good answer. And there really wasn't a good answer when the matter was presented to the Coastal Commission in 2016. I might add that the issue before the Coastal Commission was whether to find that there was significant enough issue that the Coastal Commission wanted to hear the appeal on its merits. So the Coastal Commission made a substantial issue finding that it didn't necessarily reject the ordinance, but it did signal that it was going to take a very careful look at it and probably would have not ultimately certified it. So we need to have a better answer when we talk to the Coastal Commission, just go around. Okay, I guess one concern I do have along those lines is I've met with some of the AFC members a few weeks back and one of the individuals was operating the safe parking program. And one of the comments that was made was that when our conversation was that, they asked the issues in terms of having people who can staff some of these sites. And I know that the safe parking program that was located in the lot over by wheel works and by the arena that was taken offline because they were just having so many issues with that lot. So one thing for me that's kind of concerning is just, are we going to be able to find enough people in the community on a help like monitor and run these programs? And Chief, I'm not sure if you can maybe comment. Is the program at the PD still up and running in terms of the safe parking program? They have not been here for a while. I have not seen them in our front line. Okay, that's just one concern is how we can increase that. I did want to ask about enforcement. And I know that this is, there's two aspects of this. There's a criminal issue if people are committing crimes who are living in these vehicles, similar to if somebody's committing a crime, who lives in the house and police responding to those calls. But then in terms of enforcement of this particular ordinance and since this is kind of a parking issue, is this something we would expect police to be responding to or would there be traffic similar to other permit programs that we have in town? Is this kind of a traffic enforcement issue? And I know that I tried reaching out to Mark Dettel, Public Works Director before this, but he's out of town. And so I got in the way of that stuff. I just figured I'd ask at this point, Dan. Council member coming. I think it traditionally falls on our shoulders to do this. However, there are other entities in the city who are capable of writing parking citations as well as code enforcement stuff. So parking could, if they so choose to go out and do these kinds of enforcement where there's parking involved, the misdemeanor portions of the ordinance would need to be done by the police. But just straight parking enforcement can be done by parking enforcement is completely different division of the city. Great. And then a large part of this ordinance speaks to people who are home owners who have RVs, so residents in town who have RVs. And I'm just curious if that's been a problem, like to what extent has that been a problem to where we're needing to include that in this ordinance? Because one of the things that I'm concerned with is that this isn't specific to RVs. It's oversized. It's any vehicle that's over 20 feet, right? And so that also includes work vehicles. That also includes fans. And the one issue for me in particular is that, and it's an issue on equity, not everybody in the city of Santa Cruz has a driveway. And so there are neighborhoods where the only street is on street parking. And if somebody has a vehicle that falls outside that's greater than 20 feet, they can't necessarily park their vehicle on their street for more than four days, right? So I'm wondering, has that, I guess the question is, as the issue of people who are residents owning large vehicles been an issue to the point where we need to create a law to enforce against them having these vehicles. I can tell you that from just getting complaints from community members that, yes, it can be a problem. It's not uncommon for us to remember one, not too long ago in a Grant Street neighborhood where a person had a large bus and kept it in front of their house for an extended period of time. I think they've been ready to go on vacation but had there for a great deal of time. And so several neighbors were upset about it. And then we wound up tagging the bus and they moved it and so it became a move the bus game. And so yeah, that is just one incidental story but it's not uncommon for us to get those kinds of issues. We also, this says that park semi-trucks, both attached and unattached trailers on the street as well. And so it can be a problem. Right, I've only got three more questions and hopefully they're quick. So I was unnoticed when the West Side Story operation happened and we did see vehicles that I guess were problematic were towed, some were left that I guess weren't problematic. And in part that seems like it could be an approach we're taking where we're not penalizing those people who are complying. And ideally we would be trying to give it people every opportunity possible to fix their vehicle or bring the vehicle up to code and if they're not in violation of any other law. But my question is when those people are approached what kind of resources are being offered to them because I think the thing that we don't wanna see happening is that people have shelter that shelter's now taken away and then now they put on the street in Santa Cruz versus also if they have an opportunity to leave that they could have that as an option. So I'm just wondering if you can speak to that. Yeah, I sure can. Thank you for bringing that up because I really feel like our officers use a great deal of discretion when they're towing these vehicles and give you a couple of examples to families that were living out there in their motor home with small children and we did not tow those vehicles. We asked them to get their parking tickets taken care of. We asked them to move to a different location but we did not tow those vehicles. It made no sense for us to put a child on the street and so our officers do approach this with a great deal of compassion. I saw a social media story that a person in these was displaced and put on the street who was handicapped and I asked the officers about that and their response was no, he had someone to go home with because a local person who had a place to go to when they towed that car. The reality is some of these vehicles have had dozens of citations. They know that they're far out of compliance. This wasn't a five citations and on the 22nd day when we can lawfully tow it, we towed it. This has been an ongoing thing and I can tell you that also that our officers are pretty diligent about making sure that people understand that there are other options available whether it's handing out an AFC flyer or asking them to move. I have been out there, talked to people, asked them to move, asked them to go somewhere else and because this doesn't make sense to inundate a neighborhood like that. So I think our officers do a pretty darn good job with that second piece and I want to comment is I think the county has also been out there talking to people as well. And so I don't know that this, we do it because we believe this is a humane and correct thing to do, but I don't see this as a sole police responsibility to help people get into homes. There's been some research that showed that people aren't really willing to listen to the police about those kinds of things. And so much rather have other people do that, when you're the only game in town, sometimes you do things just because of the necessity. So I think that we want to make sure that people have that option to get it fixed, to leave, to do something else rather than stay there in a broken down state. And then I just have one more question. And this is for public work, but I know that public work directors aren't around so I hope someone might be available or maybe this can go to anyone of staff who's been kind of involved in this, but we've discussed different types of parking permit programs before. And I'm just curious and understanding what resources it will take to stand up this kind of a program in terms of, because we're gonna need access applications for a variety of different types of permits, obviously, because you have the residential, you have visitor, and so I'm just wondering, what types of resources is it gonna take to create this program, stand it up in the timeline around that? We have Nathan Nguyen who is filling in for Director Gettle from Public Works and Brian Borg here. So if either of you would be able to answer that question. Yeah, Justin, I think it's a very good question. I think there's still some implementation cost modeling that we need to do, but in part, we're already kind of established to be able to handle permit programs based on all of our other permit programs that we have. We have a pretty significant residential parking permit program already outside of the Coastal Commission and on the east side, we have another pretty big one that's been growing. So under those programs, we already handle a lot of process applications, residential verifications. I don't think that this is gonna add or grow to the point where it's causing too much more burden than what we've already created with those existing programs. And we already have those staffed. And as you know, like September right now, we're going through the West Side programs for September 15th and we have a number of people inundating that office and that office is busy. The nice thing about this annual program is I think it'll trickle into demand. It won't be all at once. And so I think it'll kind of just roll into our normal processes. Renewals will happen as people need it as opposed to a start date for a program to start. But we probably will have to make sure that all the costing related to issuing the permits, printing permits if we have to print them or get stickers or hang tags or if we need any additional staff to help with processing, there will be added cost to rolling this into that. But we already process a significant amount. Thank you. That concludes my questions for now. And I have a few comments after we hear from the public. Thank you. Council Member Watkins. Thank you Vice Mayor. And I will keep my questions short. And I know we haven't gone to the public yet. I think a lot of my questions have been answered. I guess I'll just make a couple short comments and then I have one question in regards to process. So as I read it that this, since the first ordinance was passed or attempted, a number of other jurisdictions have adopted ordinances that have moved forward. And so I think we are definitely in a different place. So I just sort of want to highlight that in regards to sort of some of the areas where we did have challenges in the past. There's a lot to have been learned in between now and then. I did understand that the AFC is one service provider but also just really working with the county and others as we move forward. And I guess what I'll just sort of, I guess what I'll say is one, I just really appreciate my colleagues for bringing this forward and for the work that you did on this. I think that as difficult as it is to balance all of the considerations that are before us environmental and residential and visitors and neighbors and income brackets and areas and all the impacts, right? I think we have something that's not working right now and we want to move forward with something that's better and it will be, but we continue to move forward in a way that's trying to move us in a way that's balancing all of those needs. And I know Chief, you brought that up in terms of balance. So I just sort of want to highlight that because I know there are elements that I think we can really get into the weeds tonight or forthcoming, but having that kind of approach around continuous improvement, but ultimately recognizing that what we have right now and in action and working. And frankly, I will just say just being participating in the coastal cleanup events that took place over the weekend. On Saturday, I had Delaware Natural Bridges and Shaffer and it is not okay to see the amount of trash and litter and environmental impacts nor the living conditions and the impacts that has on the individuals who are residing in those vehicles as well as the neighbors and visitors. So I recognize the challenges before us and I also am committed to action and moving forward. So in regards to my question, I think since the majority have been asked and I know a lot of community members are waiting to also ask questions, I guess mine is in regards to process. So what's different from what was presented was that this is not a first reading but this is an introduction of a concept ultimately to have a first reading come back. So I guess if I can, are my colleagues hoping that we as council members as well as community members really kind of take the moment to absorb what was being proposed and then to use the time between now and the first reading to ask those questions for clarity to then be informed for how the first reading will go forward. Is that sort of the process tonight that we're proposing or that you're all at this point? Yes, correct. Okay. Okay, great. So in that way, so I appreciate that. That gives me more time to kind of think and also to incorporate some of the questions that have been brought up by community members and we can move forward in terms of how we want to hear input this evening. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Council Member Watkins. You actually touched on the point I was going to bring up so I'll keep it short but this is not the same ordinance. It looks different. We have the red line version in the packet that you can see where those changes are and it's working simultaneously with the community on alternative options and there's quantitative data now that isn't just anecdotal. So I just wanted to reiterate those points. Thank you. Thank you. As there are no further questions from council, we will take it out for public comment and then return to council. Let's see. My understanding is we will do the groups first and there is a specific order. So if anybody has their hands raised right now if you could put them down unless you are a group and we will start with the groups in the following order. Westside Cares, Westside Neighbors and then Stepping Up Santa Cruz. Is that correct, Bonnie? Yeah, that's right. Okay, thank you. All right, so Westside Cares, I see you there. If you could press star six on your phone and your time will start. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. So I'm calling on behalf of Santa Cruz Cares, which is formerly known as Westside Cares just for clarification, to ask that you give some ordinance that is specifically designed to push the poor into unsheltered homelessness. We've been watching it horror as the Santa Cruz Police Department gleefully tickets and tows vehicles as part of their Operation Westside story. These operations have left at least one elderly disabled person without any shelter at all. You had to rely on people to share his story on social media, just to know Andy Mills, you actually did not have a place to go. We did not see the city stepping in to help this neighbor. You have chosen to tow, take it and hand out misdemeanors to people who are financially unable to comply with this policy, directly creating more unsheltered homelessness. At the same time, the shelters around the city have been closing and agreement camps have been swept. The largest camp at the Benchlands is under threat by the city and also by the flood risk of the San Lorenzo. The city is failing our unhoused neighbors on just about every level, even without this new ordinance, which will surely make matters worse. We asked the city council to sponsor programs such as refuse pickup, graywater disposal and vehicle registration clinic. Ask that you create true low barrier safe parking programs. This is sorely needed now, a moral failing and we need to stop punishing people for it. We also believe that parts of this ordinance are violations of civil liberties both the sheltered and unsheltered. Restricting households to one oversized vehicle parked 400 feet from the registered property is absurd. This also directly violates recommendations from the coastal commission on previous iterations of this ordinance. These policies are directly going to create more unsheltered homeless. We've already seen the results of policies like this one in our own community in California at large. We don't believe that anyone calling in tonight or anyone on the city council actually wants that. Please do the right thing and think about these unsheltered people. They're living for quality and these fines and fees are not helping them. They're muted or vice-n-nambra, they're muted. Thank you. Thank you. Santa Cruz Cares, thank you. And now next up, we have Westside Neighbors. Is that Rafa? Are you representing Westside Neighbors? And that, no. Right now, is there anyone from Westside Neighbors? Is that MP, press star six? Hello? Can you hear me? Hi there, are you with Santa Cruz, Westside Neighbors? Yes, I am, my name is Manuel. I'm a local resident. I live on the West side. I'm a property owner. I own a business, my father and husband and I gotta say that this problem, as previous city council member mentioned, it is really getting out of control. We have a very small number of residents in this town and their RVs are making lives very difficult. As a father, it's difficult to hear my children say that they're afraid of walking down the street. The environment is obviously being impacted. We've got rats all across natural British State Park, which certainly has an impact on the monarch butterflies there. And I applaud the city council for trying to do something about this, but it's really late. As Chief Mills mentioned, 20 years have gone by and nothing has happened here. It's not fair that the people, that the ones that really cannot vote, the children or the animals are being so disproportionately affected by this. I encourage you all to do something about this. I think ordinance is a step in the right direction. I'll also state that we absolutely need enforcement. There are laws in the books today. We need those to be enforced so that it's safe for everyone. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay, the next is stepping up Santa Cruz. Go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself. Hi, this is Serge. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. Hi, Serge. Good evening. Nothing in what I'm about to say, okay is littering or sewage dumping. Those things are already illegal. There are more effective and more common sense ways to solve these assortments. Sewage is stated as the biggest problem. As Lee referred to, the cats recommended a free sewage dump site at 1220 River Street. But why is that not being instituted before we're criminalizing poverty? It's clearly not constitutional to cite a vehicle dweller for litter that is near them without proof that they are the cause, yet that is specifically included in the ordinance. If car registration is the issue, why are people not being addicted to the churches like Holy Cross, which helped pay for that before their home is taken? This proposed ordinance will not stand a legal challenge with the Coastal Commission because it's blocking access to the coastal zone, making some people not welcome to live in or move to Santa Cruz. The ordinance says the city may, but does not require it to have, say, parking programs. Shelters and safe spaces do not need people forced into their programs. They're already full most of the time. It's not true, it's not helpful to recommend that somebody calls AFC when they're always full. We'll never have enough space in our programs. So we'll have the same problems without any new solutions. This ordinance accedes to the demands of only one constituency. The health in all policy section doesn't even refer to the health of those people who are gonna be forced into a sheltered home. Multiple studies show that minorities are inordinately affected by these type of ordinances, making obtaining housing and employment more difficult or impossible. Studies show that criminalization of those living in vehicles causes those people to be moved onto the streets, experiencing more trauma, worse health conditions, and a lower life expectancy. It's stated in the last agenda item that water is our most important resource. I'd say that people should be considered our most important resource. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay, that concludes the group. And so now we will move on to further public comment. To raise your hand, press star nine. When it's your time to speak, you will be called on and you'll press star six to unmute yourself. So now I will go out to public comment, attendees. Rafa, please press star six to unmute yourself. Thank you very much. I'm calling on behalf of Santa Cruz EMB this evening to express some concerns with the approach that the ordinance, for the ordinance of the city seems to be moving towards. First, I'll appreciate the city for committing to expanding options for unhoused folks who live in their vehicles to have a legal safe space to park the vehicle. We're not necessarily against the permit program, but we are concerned that as proposed, the program could leave the most vulnerable members of our community without a legal option to park their vehicle. The requirements have had a vehicle registered in the city for six months in order to establish residency seems particularly problematic and is likely unconstitutional since that same element does not apply to house residents who would want to permit for their oversized vehicles. Our existing safe spaces program requires vehicles to have current registration. And there were recently a significant number of vehicles towed for having expired registration. Under the proposed scheme, those vehicles would not be allowed either in the safe spaces program or on public streets. But those people exist and their needs need to be taken into account too. We sight and tow will be taking away the meager shelter that they have exacerbating our shortage of shelter beds. We should be focusing on problems that with people on solutions that lift people up. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, father Joseph Jacobs, press star six to unmute yourself. Thank you vice mayor. I appreciate that. So I am the program manager for the association of faith community safe spaces parking program. I want to be clear about one thing to begin with that safe spaces is not a city sponsored program. The city has never sponsored safe spaces and has never given any funding for it. So I'm gonna plead with people to stop referring to it in that manner. We had plans to submit a request for qualifications to the city for an expanded safe parking program to address this problem. And we were told that there is quote, not one cent end quote available for funding such a program and that the city will use its $14 billion to purchase the land or matters to create a day center. So I'm really unclear where the funding for expanding the safe parking program is coming from. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next, I have Reggie Meiser, press star six to unmute yourself, please. Hi. So I've heard a lot about expansion of safe parking programs and connecting people to housing, but looking over your proposal, all I really see fleshed out is the criminalization piece. And now that we've heard from AFC that funding around this proposal for the safe parking doesn't really seem there and has never really been there. I mean, I really feel like I have to question the authenticity of this proposal. Your presenter is not a member of Health and Human Services. It's not a social worker. It's not a service provider. I mean, it's the chief of law enforcement. So we can talk a lot about services and housing support, but I mean, the focus that you're having speaks louder than the sort of flowery words thrown here and there. And then in Chief Mills' presentation, he's telling us that he has so much extra money and land it's unaccounted for. And he's just spending it on towing people and keeping their shelter away. Thank you. I don't wanna see. Okay. The next number is ending in 4931, a star six to unmute yourself. Hey, can you hear me? Yes. Hey, so you all talk a lot about health and policies, yet you continue to write and pass policies that are both terrible for public health and not based on any sort of public health policy. As a result of SCPD's Operation West Side Story, multiple people lost their only shelter and their only belongings were towed away to include in medications and disability aids. They're unable to retrieve them because they cannot afford to. We'll codify this behavior into law and because of the nature of policing, we know that this will disproportionately affect people of color, gender non-conforming people, disabled people and other marginalized groups. And before you all pontificate about how you believe doing nothing isn't compassionate and we must do something, criminalizing poverty, what you're suggesting. Let me reify that no one is asking you to do nothing. We are demanding solutions that actually address the issues community has. Refugees pick up great wealth, fixing and registering RVs. Your ordinance finds people for not having enough money to access resources. It does not help people get access to resources invested. It's not public health. Public health is helping those who need the most help to live the best lives that they can. That passes ordinance in the name of public health or compassion is a farce. So at least be honest and admit that the ordinance, nothing more than punishment and the banishment of poor people from our streets. Nice, Mary, you're muted. Next up, I have Graham. Press star six to unmute yourself, please. Thank you for your chance. Okay. Yes. Great. Thank you for the chance to speak today. My name is Dr. Graham Pruss. I work for the UCSF standing off homelessness and housing initiative at the Center for Vulnerable Populations and have conducted research for the past decade with vehicle residents in public parking and state parking programs in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland. I'll speak quickly today to keep my comments under one minute, but I'm happy to speak with you further in assist over possible. As chief knows, council members Browns Cummings and previous public comments have explained the primary concerns regarding oversized vehicle, lack of accessible off street space for vehicle residents to inhabit their home, drain sewage and dispose household waste. However, this ordinance cannot balance compassion with accountability because the approximately 30 off street space is currently available is not adequate space for around 300 vehicle residents in Santa Cruz County. Instead, this proposal exposes the city of Santa Cruz and its most vulnerable citizens to undo harm by uniquely mandating the residents of oversized vehicles applied for permits to hours for only four times per month with no clear process to provide adequate off street space to these constituents. It's accepted by the California Coastal Commission this proposal promotes ordinance contradicts the ninth district Martin versus Boise decision and it like other cities similar policies will likely trigger a lawsuit. Thank you. Next up, we have phone number ending in 4844 press star six to unmute yourself, please. Oh, we just heard you try again, press star six to unmute yourself. There you go. Are you there? We can, I can hear you unmuting. Try one more time. If not, we can come back to you. Press star six on your device to unmute yourself. Phone number ending in 4844. Right until emergency survival housing so-called oversized vehicles. Who cares about their welfare, not this council but it would have enacted your disposal systems as mentioned by others assistance for disabled vehicles and other obvious measures. Instead, new displacements and restrictions designed to tease out a group of satisfaction from the well-fed bellies of Westside property owners. The state eviction moratorium ends at the end of this month. The city moves on the homeless encampments like the Benchlands. What can we do? See someone being harassed by mills ticket squad. Stop, witness and- Thank you. Next up, I have phone number ending in 8346, press star six to unmute. As a mother and former teacher of underserved youth, I am convinced that the best way to teach empathy and the importance of building a just and equitable society is to model it. What are we teaching our youth when we criminalize people living in abject poverty? When we continue to make un-informed judgments and sweeping fear-based generalizations about people who may suffer from mental illness, drug addiction, cycles of oppression or just the lack of city-supported resources. What are we teaching our kids when the SCPD makes an aggressive and boastful public display of destroying a person due to out-of-reach, unpaid parking and registration fees that they were never offered to help pay for in the first place? What then do we tell our children and students when they ask where these human beings left with no shelter and no possessions will go now? Do we lie and say there are beds and housing available when we know full well there aren't nearly enough? But the cops are heroes and the poor are criminals simply for trying to find the confines of their given condition. This is a decades-long failure of empathy, a failure to see past comfort and privilege, a failure to get educated on the complexities of poverty and survival behaviors, defund the police, invest in a community of care and oppose the oversized vehicle ordinance. Thank you. Next up, I have number ending in 0249. Press star six please to unmute yourself. Hi there. City council. Oops, hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. This is Carol, thank you. First of all, I wanna say thank you for all your hard work on the long time coming and I know it's a very difficult issue to tackle with a lot of moving parts. Robert North said it best, allowing people to live on the street in squalor and wretched conditions is horrible. It's not compassionate. People who are living on our streets, especially on the lower west side, receive no services. They get the disdain of the local residents who are tired of the multiple impacts that they've experienced from having people live on the street without services. We need to provide help for people. It's not the end game to allow people to live like this forever. We have to provide places for people to go where there are services available to them to help them to get out of their situations and to improve their lot in life. I applaud the city council for looking into the resources available to help us make more housing available for people who need it and to help clean up the situation and assist in our neighborhoods. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, next I have phone number ending in 2174. Press star six, so unmute yourself. First of all, a big appreciation to the vice mayor for saying press star six. I can't tell you what a difference that makes when you're on this end. My name is Julianne Greensight and I wasn't going to call in and speak. I haven't read the ordinance. I'm well aware of the issues, but I heard a couple of comments that I felt I'd like to respond to. One is that this has been going on for 20 years. Well, since COVID, myself and a few friends, we walk before we swim at cows. So instead of west cliffs, we've been doing the distancing and everything at the marine lab. And so Delaware is where we park or bicycle. And I can assure you that for the past year, this has not been a big problem, but it has escalated in the past, I'd say two to three months, escalated to week. It is obviously getting worse. I wish the opponents who talk in generalities, and I understand their sympathies, but I wish that they could get involved in, oh, that went quickly. Okay, I heard quite a bit more, but thank you for your time. Thank you. Next up, I have Joy. Please press star six to unmute. This is Joy Shendelbecker. I am a parent and homeowner on the west side. I'm also an organizer with some local groups, including sanitation for the people. And I think it's really interesting presentation was paired with the water presentation just before it, which I imagine a lot of people didn't listen carefully to. It talks a lot about Prop 218 from 1996, which has basically taken water, sewer, and refuse services out of the public common good and made them private enterprise funds that are only available to ratepayers or people who have property to live in. So if you don't have property, you don't get services. We can, as a community, decide to, instead of having a complete driven approach, have an ethical community approach, and we can figure out how to pay for more of services instead of criminalizing people. Thank you. Thank you. Next, I have J.B. Please press star six to unmute. I'm a Santa Cruz resident. I'm strongly in favor of amending title 10. Santa Cruz's homeless problem is, as it currently stands, unacceptable. It is a humanitarian problem. It is an environmental problem, and it is getting worse over time. One of the big drivers of this problem is a collective refusal to enact and enforce reasonable traffic and parking laws, especially when it comes to RVs. The lack of political will to prohibit and enforce overnight RV parking is not compassionate towards mentally ill and drug addicted that inhabit these, quote unquote, dwellings. It is certainly not compassionate towards Santa Cruz taxpayers and residents. It is destroying our community. It is destroying our environment. It is disincentivizing the most vulnerable among us to change their lives for the better and get help. Energy to amend title 10. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have phone number ending in 0135. Please press star six to unmute yourself. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Hi, my name is Mike Pojemas. I'm a lifelong Santa Cruz resident and high school teacher. I've heard a lot tonight about the ethics and the one solution or another. The main issue here, as I see it, is the ability to pay for services for people who cannot pay for themselves. And the opportunity to place a sales tax at the ballot could have been used for this purpose. However, obviously that's not an option anymore, but the bottom line is that if you don't have money to pay for services such as acquiring property and being able to provide said services, none of this is ever going to change. I encourage the city council to revisit the sales tax issue, put it on the ballot and let the people vote on it so that at least at some point in time in the future, we could have the funds with a city that is essentially insolvent to buy property and to create safe parking programs and other types of services for people who cannot help themselves. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, I have Alicia Kool, star six to unmute yourself. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Go ahead. So I just wanted to kind of echo that many of these things that are being discussed like dumping of sewage and things like that are crimes. The homeless union has never supported crimes and we've always thought that those things can be mitigated on with proper use of the police department rather criminalizing people in general. When you take away people's RVs or excessively find them to try to take away their RVs, what you're doing is you're putting more people in San Lorenzo Park. And unfortunately, that's a problem for our entire community. So I would really urge you to focus on safe parking programs and safe parking programs that include everyone, not ones with limited capacity ran by just one person because that's really high barrier for most people. And I just want to be very clear that if this does pass litigation will follow. I'm the one that works on that. So I want to just clear that up for the entire community but that's not in question here. Thank you. Thank you. Next I have, let's see. Jasmine, press star six to unmute. Hello. My name is Jasmine and I rent in the West side. But I've been hearing a lot of, talk about disrupting the monarchs or something. And a lot of like words with D disrupts the monarchs. What are fellow humans? Or it's difficult for people to walk by people in RVs. What about the fact that they're in desperate conditions often or don't have any other options? And how people are more often victims of crime than perpetrators. I haven't heard of how people hurting children for the person who said they're worried about their children. I think it's more uncomfortable and that's what people don't want to face. Also this idea of leaning on the ASC for safe parking when it's funded doesn't make any sense and stop passing the buck to county. We need a final alternative and safe sleeping solutions first. Don't just place or criminalize desperate people. And I agree with the other caller. We should just defund the police and reallocate these funds to programs like this that can actually support health and human services. What this is right now is not compassionate and it is not humane. Thank you. Thank you. Next is phone number ending in 9248. Press star six to unmute yourself. Yeah, I wanna thank everybody involved for the attempt. The attempt is with honor and it's time that we as Americans and Santa Cruzans recognize this. And I think in particular, Chief Mills and Mr. Condati and Lee Butler and I think probably previously Mr. Bernal for pushing this to the point where it becomes an issue that can be litigated and legislated and there's deep honor in that and it's what needs to be done. I wanna say thank you to all and pass this. It's an attempt that has honor and is dignified and it's something that we need to do. It'll help us to push the issue into the consciousness of people that we can deal with poverty in the way that we haven't maybe since the 1930s. Thank you and thank you city council for this issue. Thank you very much. Thank you. Looks like that concludes our public comment. We have a couple more hands that went up. So go ahead, Abby, press star six to unmute yourself. I live on the lower west side within a mile of Delaware. I visited often and speak to the residents who live in the vehicles there. I was there when the police did west side story in which you towed many vehicles. I was there when they were going to tow the oversized vehicle that had 12 year old child. Their mother and the grandmother who resided it. You had all the intentions to tow that vehicle that haven't been bagged and pleaded with the officer in charge at the time to not tow them that they had a 12 year old inside. That officer said it was too late and there was nothing they could do once they called the tow company. I put up a protest and luckily Sergeant Burrell decided to override the choice of the officer in charge of towing vehicles. Believe me, if I wasn't there, that vehicle would have been towed. So please don't stop using that as an example of you having compassion. So many lies you have mentioned such as a disabled person had a place to go that they had no intention of towing the RV with a 12 year old and that AFC sponsored program. Thanks to Father Joseph who called in. Most of you know that many people are turned away from AFC. You're just pushing out people out into the street. I know you know that this is not a matter of compassion. Stop criminalizing the houseless. Thank you, Abby. Next, I see phone number ending in 0711. Press star six to unmute yourself. Yes, welcome. Hi, thank you. My name is Sophia Alarcon. I am a resident Santa Cruz and I currently reside in Live Oak. I am also formerly houseless and I was formerly houseless in Santa Cruz County in my vehicle. So I have some experience in that area. And the main thing I want to say because I don't have that much time is that treating the houseless like everybody else should be the priority and that means funding for these programs that we're talking about, these safe parking programs but mostly it also means providing actual housing units and services for dignity of the humans talking about. And it sounds like the staffing isn't really an issue for some of these programs. So I'm kind of curious what were the other issues with some of the previous things. Anyways, I think one of the other things that stood out to me about a lot of things that you said was low barrier. So right here we're creating barriers. So you don't want to tow people but you want to keep it from. There's just a lot to say, but anyways, thank you. Vice mayor, you're muted. Thank you, Bonnie. It looks like that concludes our public comment. No more hands are up. So I will pull it back to council and it looks like council member Golder and council member Cal and Terry Johnson. Holder, you go ahead. Okay. Thank you. Thank you to the public who called in. I'm prepared to make a motion and I've emailed it to Bonnie and there's two parts of the motion is to continue the item to the meeting of October 26th to allow for the consideration of public comments on the draft ordinance and allow time to prepare associated updates with ordinance language and to direct staff in cooperation with an ad hoc subcommittee to be appointed by the mayor to establish a subcommittee now and they can begin exploring what a safe parking program can or should include should one be established as part or outside of any future ordinance. Okay, we have a motion. Is there a second council member Cal and Terry Johnson? Your hands up. Yeah, thank you. I'll second that and I just want to add with a couple comments. This is part of number two. I don't know if we need a friendly amendment, but that's just to clarify that there have been a group of us working on this. So it's really a continuation of this work and just to formalize a continuation of this work. Some comments. I also want to thank the community members who took the time to call in this evening. Some of the lessons learned with our work with the camping ordinance was that we really take the time and space, even though this has been in the work for a long time for years by members to take the time and space to hear from community members, receive input and bring forward an ordinance that is a compromise space. Not everybody will be happy and that's the case when we come to complex and challenging issues like this. You know, somebody said that we move forward with law enforcement and not health and human services. I just want to remind the public and remind us that the city does not have a health and human services. We don't have a department. We don't have a team. It's out of the scope of the city to provide those types of services. And we know this can't be done in a vacuum. So our approach is, as Chief Mills said, to find that balance of accountability and compassion. And I know people are defining it different ways. But I do believe that action is compassion because we can get sucked into a loop of finding the flaw. We can get sucked into a loop of not good enough. And those narratives have doomed our community and made us polarized and divided. Or we can put one foot in front of the other and launch and formalize a response that will continue to evolve. So that's what I'm interested in doing here. There are groups out there who are interested in partnering, expanding with now. And yeah, so I'll just pause there. Thank you. Thank you. I have council member Cummings and then council member Brown. First, can we keep the ordinance language up? I'm wondering how we can, that can go back up. I mean, I have comments to make. And then I can make comments on this and then we can take it down or I can make my comments. But either way, one, before I have my comments to make on the general discussion that we've been having, I do want to point out that if we want to, if the council or the subcommittee wants to put an item back on the agenda for October 26th, like two weeks for public count for community input. And then I would imagine that staff would need time to write the agenda report, which technically we need to be submitted by October 14th, although there is some flexibility around when those get submitted. So that that is one concern I have is that, you know, when we deal with issues on homelessness, like these are very complicated issues and very sensitive topics. And, you know, when it comes to laws that are going to impact members of our community, I think it's really important that we give ourselves time to really get the level of community input necessary to know that when we're putting this forward, that we're putting something forward that has had the broadest amount of input and that, you know, the broad majority of the community feels comfortable moving forward with. We, you know, we get something about this issue. But what I've found being on the council is that people really want to be included in these conversations. We saw that with the tolo. And this for many people is the first time they're seeing this item come before. So I would encourage that that be extended. And that friendly amendment can be that this item is continued for the subcommittee, you know, themes that's okay for it to come back or that there is, you know, no date with, you know, when this can come back. I mean, it's clear that this is something that the current vice mayor is working on and is supporting. And if this needs to go into next year when the vice mayor is in the mayor, we know that there's an opportunity for her to put this on the agenda. But I think what we really need to do is to ensure that there is a diverse and inclusive community process that really provides enough time for people to weigh in. And we're all really busy people. I mean, I don't see, you know, regardless of who's on this council, that'd be a lot of, you know, put setting aside our time to, you know, if we really want to have an inclusive process. So what is that we extend that timeline out further so that people aren't just really rushing to get everything in that we're giving the community enough time to digest this ordinance and get their feedback to the members of the subcommittee and to the council. And then I do, I just want item number two because this is mentioning, you know, explore the establishment of safe parking programs. It should one be established as part of, as part of or outside any future ordinance. The one issue I really want to bring up, and this is, I'll just kind of get into my comments right now. I have a really big issue with the discharge of sewage because as it's currently written and to see if somebody from staff could comment on this before I get into my comment, what is the current law on discharge of sewage because my understanding is that a law is already on the books and this isn't something we need to rewrite because I'm really concerned with what's before us today in terms of the language. And so somebody could comment on what that specific law is right now. I can do that. I've got the current section open here. Bonnie, are you sharing your screen? I can share mine and all that out. So this is the current section here. Would you like me to read it out loud or? Sure. Can you remember? I might be listening. Sure. So it's 16.19.070 discharge of sewage prohibited. No person shall cause the discharge of sewage to the storm drain system. In addition, if the government that a building drain or a building sewer is not operating properly and causes the discharge of sewage into the, sorry, to the street sidewalk or storm drain, the director may declare this condition to constitute a public nuisance and proceed to abate that nuisance in accordance with section 16.19.180. Okay. Like that kind of covers no person period shall discharge sewage into the storm drain. And I will say it was actually I'm looking back at the red line version. It was really confusing to see this kind of inserted in the middle of chapter 10 because when I read section six, effective data ordinance shall take effect and be enforced 30 days after final adoption provided. However, that the enforcement of section 10.40.020 shall not commence until the council passes the resolution confirming that either A, city has implemented an enhanced state parking permit program for in-house residents with vehicles. She was that because this came after chapter 16, the way I read this was that we weren't going to enforce the discharge of sewage until these safe parking programs were implemented. Now obviously reading, seeing this again, section six deals directly with chapter 10. But I don't know if somebody can clarify because this is a little confusing for me. There might be a type of graphical error there. The intent was to defer enforcement of the overnight parking component until a safe sleeping program had been established. And I think that section six is one of the provisions that the committee intends to continue to work on. So that I would say out of today is still a work in progress. Okay. It was really confusing because the way I read it, it seemed like we weren't going to enforce the discharge of sewage until these safe parking programs were up and that to me makes absolutely no sense. Yeah, and I'll just add to the planning director's comments that it is a little bit redundant, but it is clear that the language of the section that was just quoted is primarily intended to deal with sewage discharge from buildings. And so the public works directors, nuisance abatement authority does not neatly apply to someone who empties their Blackwater tank into a storm drain. So having somewhat redundant language in the code. Yeah, if I may add also it was the adding of no person shall cause a discharge of sewage or gray water to the storm drain system, including but not limited to discharges of recreational vehicle holding tanks. So that was the added language. Okay. I think the order that looks like the section 16 was kind of embedded within chapter 10. So anyway, it was confusing and thank you for the clarification. I'll just make my final comments. The homeless issue is that this is a national issue. And when we live in a community where homes that were once able to be purchased by working families are now only accessible by very affluent people because you have two bedroom houses going for a million dollars and rents continue to go up while wages stay stagnant, we're only going to see this situation get worse and we're not going to be able to currently build our way out of it. With regards to the first recommended act apprentice agenda, I want to say for the record that I'm glad we're not introducing this as an ordinance for publication this evening because I would not be supporting the recommendation as it currently stands. And in the future, I just think it would be good if we use different language when bringing items forward for community input because when the community sees introduce for publication, that's the first reading and that can really stir up the community and many people's emotions, the intention of what we're hearing before us today. I very much appreciate the work that's been done on this, but based on public comment and the presentation, it's very clear that it still needs work. Just a few examples. It doesn't seem like there's a fee schedule that's been worked out for the permits. Things like there may be a lot of unintended consequences that will negatively impact. We're not a nuisance that live in their vehicles and also put more people on the streets if their vehicles are towed and they have nowhere else to go. And I'm also really concerned with whether it's going to get appealed or whether this will be upheld by the Coastal Commission. Regardless of who's on the subcommittee, I just really encourage my colleagues to create an inclusive process that engages with a diverse set of stakeholders and that the subcommittee takes its time so that we can have an ordinance to get a broad acceptance and support about the community. It sounds like there are three council members who brought this forward who want to be on that subcommittee, but I'll also state that I'm happy to be on that ad hoc committee. As I mentioned before, I've worked at Long Rain Lab and have worked there since 2015. So I encounter the issues that are before us on a daily basis when I go to work. A couple of recommendations. Consider providing longer-term permits for people who are not causing nuisance. That way we're clearly trying to address people who are problems and we're not trying to criminalize everyone who's homeless. I very much think the county needs to be involved and it sounds like that's the case. I also think the AFC needs to be involved because I was a little shocked to hear that the person who runs the AFC program was saying that that is not a program that has received city funding and is not been sponsored by the city. And it sounded like going into this conversation, they've been called, but if that's not the case, I would highly encourage that the AFC is at the forefront of this conversation at a minimum since they provide these services. As with what the community members said, the six-month residency program seems like a little problem, especially for someone, like a student who might be moving in or people who may be moving to Santa Cruz in general. And it sounds like it might be unconstitutional as well. And it would be good when this comes back for there to be a note in the report of who from the public has been met with to discuss this ordinance in order to provide transparency around who's being included in these conversations. I know that we've done this before with the Loudon Nelson Center. We've done it with the removal of the mission bells where we've clearly stated who has been involved in this process and the groups that they represent. And that is really critical so that we are making sure people are, you know, it's transparent of who's involved in these conversations and that we can see, you know, the diversity of people who are going to be involved in these conversations. That's all the comments I have. And I'd be, you know, I'd like to look to see what that motion looks like again if those amendments made, you know, that I mentioned earlier around extending the time can be considered. And regardless, I think I'll support the most it's just to continue this item and to create the subcommittee. We're not taking action on whether or not we support or reject the ordinance before us. So I'll leave my comments there. Thank you. Thank you. Can you clarify, did you make a friendly amendment or are you just commenting? I expressed early on that rather than leaving that October 26th, that we leave it open-ended. We leave it open-ended and it's clear that this is an issue that I know the mayor has expressed she's, you know, is concerned with. Sounds like the vice mayor is also concerned with this. And so, you know, leaving it up to you all to determine what best date to bring it back is completely fine. And I think it provides flexibility allows the subcommittee to determine, you know, this has had enough attention to where it should be brought back to the council. So if you have a date, it usually ties your hands. And I'm just trying to provide flexibility for whoever works on this. Thank you. It sounds like you're a comment versus a friendly amendment. Wait, you're muted. Council member Cummings. I'll make that an official that we leave the date open-ended. So continue this item to allow for consideration of public comment on the draft ordinance and to allow time to prepare associated updates to the ordinance on language. Okay. Let's see. Does the maker of the motion accept the friendly amendment? Whoever I'm not interested in accepting the friendly amendment, we've had conversations today with the city attorney with Lee. We made the decision that we wanted to continue this item and we feel prepared and ready that we would be able to go forward by that date. And does the seconder of the motion? Yeah, I agree with council member Golder. Okay, so I'm moving on. Let's see. I see several hands. Council member Brown and then council member Watkins. Thank you, vice mayor. So I was, I had made some comments that were a little more positive than what I'm about just made to hear. There's not any interest in taking a little more time on this because I think that the, you know, as council member commentary Johnson said, you know, where, you know, this polarization, this challenging situation we're in, the polarization is from doing nothing. I believe the polarization is from, you know, being hasty, not having that inclusive and diverse community input process that council member Cumming suggested is really essential to moving forward in a way that does not kind of continue to gin up the emotions and the polarization. Having that process, I mean, I have no idea who you've all met with. I have no idea who you meet with in the next two weeks. How will people, I mean, we heard from a lot of community members who are very concerned and how will they access providing input? Who are the stakeholders? There's no, I'm not hearing any response to that, that concern and I'd like to and if I'll change my mind. But I also, you know, I mean, also now I'll go back to the pop what I was trying to hoping to be positive here. You know, I'm, I'm pleased that there are council members who are interested in working on this. I'm pleased that at least ostensibly you're interested in engaging with the community. I found this and I'm also happy to see that there's a minimum and attempt to begin to talk about non-enforcement possibilities here, which I think had they been implemented sooner, we wouldn't be quite where we're at today. So I'm glad that this is happening and I want to be supportive of it, but I want to see, you know, the community members sure stepping up and saying, no, this, you know, this feels like, you know, we're really criminalizing vulnerable people. I want them to have a voice in the conversation and not just a one minute at a city council meeting. I'm also, you know, a little dismayed to be hearing kind of pretty different characterizations of what happened with in a couple of cases here with vulnerable people and it doesn't seem to just be a difference of perspective on what's happened here with a, you know, a 70 year old man and, you know, a family with children. And I'm not here to, you know, get to the bottom of that, but the point I want to make is that there seem to be very, very different ideas about what's going on and it's very hard to make a decision based upon, you know, hearing conflicting kind of information, not perspective, but information about what actually is happening on the ground. I want to thank the ASC for doing, you know, I mean, we do, we lean on them. We cite, you know, we refer to them as like, you know, and we kind of put it in a box like, oh, it's okay in there, you know, we'll just get that going and, you know, maybe we can expand upon it. We don't even support it now. So, and they've been told there's no money for you. So the idea that that is something that we can just kind of lean on and feel good about is, you know, it just rings a little hollow, I'm sorry to say, and I'd like to see that taken very in the subcommittee's conversations. I think it's critical. I mean, if we want to actually achieve the goals, the stated goals, creating another an ordinance and then saying, well, we're going to talk about all this stuff and, you know, but we have to do this first as with the CSSO, I don't believe it's a productive way to move forward. This is not about whether or not I agree, you know, I approve of, you know, vehicles that, you know, I believe there's a nuisance. I believe it is a challenge for people. I believe that people have reason to be concerned and want change. I agree with that, but this is not going to create the kind of change that I think people are, you know, there's a rosy picture being painted here. Sorry, my positivity kind of faded when I heard, no, we're done, we're not, you know, we want community input, but we're not going to talk about this. We need to do it now. It just doesn't give me a lot of confidence that something that really takes those concerns into account is going to come back to us. I hope I'm wrong. And then I guess the last thing I'll just say is when I think about the experience that people have when they have nothing, I mean, Chief Mills said that, you know, we don't want to take away their, you know, people's last, you know, resource, but that is what's happening and that will continue to happen and it will happen in greater numbers. If we go in this direction without taking seriously what the city can do to support people getting a car register or a vehicle registered costs a lot less money than apparently it costs to tow one. So why aren't we, you know, I mean, that is just to say, to just swipe out and say, oh yeah, that's true. We're going to talk about that, but not really actually see a foundation for that conversation to happen or a space where that conversation might happen after we leave worries me. And so I'm going to, you know, I'll support moving forward with this, but it's very hard to imagine that what comes back three weeks from now is going to, or a month from now that needs to be completed in two weeks time is going to address all of those kind of outstanding questions. Thank you, Council Member Brown. Council Member Watkins and then Council Member Calentari Johnson and then Council Member Golder. I think I'll keep my comments brief, but in general, I guess I'll say is obviously this is a very complex issue and not only is it a complex issue in regards to the human lives and our environment and all that we're trying to balance earlier, but it's a complex issue in terms of process and action and the role of a council in terms of policy direction and proposals and how we move forward. I think that having been on the council now for over four years, we've spent a significant amount of time trying to think about and talk about how to move forward with some solutions. And I feel my observation, I don't feel clear from some of my colleagues what that looks like. And so I think for me, I struggle with how do we balance being in process but also being in action and what does that look like in terms of balancing the people's business and it's brought before us in terms of our jobs here. We're waiting to have gone on for hours and we've had endless discussion and sort of broad definition of what we think is adequate process. So I don't think I need an answer tonight and I see that some of my colleagues hands have gone up and that's fine if there is a response but I think clearly that means to people will be helpful moving forward and defining how to move forward because taking the can down the road into next year or sort of being okay with status quo essentially is a choice and we can make that choice or we can incrementally try to move forward with solutions as best we can or we can aggressively which we've seen proposed and supported by some of my colleagues as well over the past. So I just really feel like there is it's okay to say that there's a both and here and that's not anything to shy away from because I think we're all seeking solutions and I don't intend to point fingers or I just think naming is important and moving forward with solutions is also important and balancing process and action is our job and as policymakers we have the role to do that in a way that allows us to continue to do the people in all capacities and roles we have big issues that come with water etc. So I think I hear the concerns I understand the nuances I think moving forward in a way that allows more time for consideration and not have this being a first reading I really appreciate that I appreciate my colleagues recognizing that I can do that and so I'm supportive of this direction sure if there isn't enough time between now and then you know it's up to the mayor's discretion ultimately to agendize the item so if there is a the need on the 26th for the mayor to have this continued due to incompleteness then we'll accept that and and we'll continue to move on with our job the business so at this point the motion and recognize the nuances associated with all of it and the challenges associated I understand all the feedback we've heard in regards to those I recognize all of the comments that have been brought up by my colleagues and I too want to work towards solutions because I think inaction is also a choice that frankly I'm just not okay with at this point and I think we can actually get to a place where we can try to make people's lives better as well as protect our environment so I appreciate the discussion this evening and I'm happy to take the vote and call the question at this time in regards to the proposal that's been brought before us in terms of the motion so I'll go ahead and call that question okay the question has been called that would be a motion to call the question it requires a second thank you Tony I'll make a motion to call the question I'll second that yeah since the motion's been made in the second yes so now we will go to a vote thank you councilmember Cummings so we'll call vote please so just to clarify this is a vote to accept the motion it is it is a vote to call the question after which if it passes the motion will be taken up immediately without further debate I mean yeah I'm I and I will just say because I've heard from my colleagues that they are pretty comfortable with or recognize the nuances of this motion and had stated previously that they be supportive so I sorry Johnson and then I have a question for clarity Tony should we get the question before we do the vote because it would halt further discussion right yeah I think that's probably appropriate I just will comment and my question was do I hold those comments now that we've taken the vote but I am also ready to take the vote yeah so the motion to call the question would end the debate okay all right okay uh brown no because I have one more comment and I'm not sure how that's gonna people's comments are gonna fit in if we do this so no coming no and I'll just say we already limited the public's comment one minute we didn't have a whole lot of public comments I think and this is a very important topic so I think we provide people with opportunity to speak that would be best holder hi nice Mayor Brunner and Mayor Meyers is absent so you may now proceed directly to vote on the motion that's on the floor okay so we will move forward with a vote on the motion on the floor a council member Golder seconded by council member Calentari Johnson to continue the item of the meeting to continue this item to the meeting of October 26th 2021 to allow for consideration of public comments on this draft ordinance and to allow time to prepare associated updates to the ordinance language and two to direct to work with an ad subcommittee to be appointed by the mayor to establish a subcommittee and begin exploring what a safe parking program can or should include should one be established as part of or outside any future ordinance may we have a roll call vote council member Watkins aye Calentari Johnson aye and for the record I think that we need to extend the time for when this needs to come back Golder vice mayor Brunner and mayor Meyers is absent okay motion passes I would just like to say that we have taken all the comments tonight from the public as well as from all the council members and we will be um whatever the subcommittee is appointed all of these notes will be taken into consideration for the first reading and in the meantime for anybody who did not was not able to call in for public comment you can always email the full council at city of Santa Cruz dot com so that's council at city of Santa Cruz dot com we can also take handwritten letters or mail mail mail to the city council offices at eight zero nine center street room 10 is that correct Bonnie Bush and sorry I couldn't find my unmute yes that's correct thank you and other ways to um reach out you can email the council members individually and we hope to get this all of the comments have noted and incorporated in before the first draft is brought back for a reading and with that is there anything I am forgetting otherwise this meeting would be adjourned this meeting is adjourned yes thank you thanks vice mayor for stepping in thank you so much thank you everybody have a good night everyone thank you thank you good night good bye