 Good afternoon. Welcome to our 130th session of the March 9, 2021 meeting of the City Council. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website cityofsantacruz.com. All council members are participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home to view today's City Council meeting. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in 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 nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be 52 minutes. You may hang up once you have comment on your item of interest. I will note tonight that for item number 26, public comment will be limited to one minute, not the two-minute time period. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Islotkin. Five Today is a presentation by Visit Santa Cruz County. Our presenter today is Maggie Ivey, the CEO of Visit Santa Cruz County. Welcome, Maggie, and thanks for taking time today to come update us on your work. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Myers and Council Members. We pull up my presentation. I hope to be going. So just as a reminder, we are at 1c6. Our mission is to promote the local economy by promoting our community as a visitor destination for leisure visitors, domestic international conference, and film destination. Our priority has always been and continues to be pushing for high-heeled overnight business, particularly in a normal year. We'd be looking at non-summer months, but this year it's any day of the year. The organization I should say was formed in 1988. The district started in 2010, was renewed in 2015. So all of the efforts with Visit Santa Cruz County are funded through this hotel assessment district, which is a countywide district. That's really allowed us to do a number of deep dives over the last few years. We did a rebranding, significantly increased our investment in online marketing, which is so important in the travel industry. And we've been able to also, until this year, work closely with Visit California in developing an international market base. We saw consistent growth again until 1920 when COVID hit. You can see one of the reasons for the growth was new property development, two of the larger properties are in the city of Santa Cruz. Be that as it may, we really had 10 years of consistent growth in tourism for Santa Cruz, the state, and nationally. In 2019-2020, we hit a huge milestone. It was a big year. The state economic county figures told us that consumer spending had reached over a billion dollars. So travel was generating more than a billion dollars in economic impact to our community. Local business as well as the tax base. And again, back in 1819, City of Santa Cruz had collected more than 10 million dollars in TOT. And then we saw a significant decrease because of the fourth quarter with COVID. The occupancy last year, so significant, significant drop in hotel occupancy. And this is a countywide figure, which tracks very closely. City of Santa Cruz would be right here. So as a quick recap, we're talking about what was a billion dollar industry percent decreases. We're waiting on the state of California to give an update on the average tourism losses in California. We should get that in the next week. But suffice to say, this is hundreds of millions of dollars in spending that's been lost to our community, our top industry in the city of Santa Cruz. Lodging is down about 30 percent. And industry predictions are telling us that it'll take two to three years to recover fully. Now in the middle of all of this, we had to pivot as everybody has. And we really invested heavily in working with the local hotels as well as just any of the businesses that needed support. We started the safety pledge. We were working with the Economic Recovery Council. We also engaged with a larger membership with the California Hotel and Lodging Association, which provided the opportunity for all of our hotels to participate in the clean and safe program. So I would say the hotel industry, because it stayed open throughout COVID, has been really a leader in developing safety standards. And our local properties are no exception. The membership with California Hotel and Lodging Association also provided a lot of PPP supplies for our local hotels, which was really welcomed. Another piece of the safety pledge was making sure that that information was available online, that on the website we were talking about travel advisories. And then what's open? What can you actually expect to find if you're in Santa Cruz? And then finally, a commercial for local television. Again, to support the idea of clean and safe, of support your local businesses, but also do it safely. And I wanted to share that with all of you. Investment, which is our primary tool for providing information, inspiring travel and helping visitors to be able to easily book their travel. You can see the increasing year to year, 17. And in 18, 19, we were able to surpass a million visits to the website in a year. And then again, we look at 1920 and severe decreases again, based on that fourth quarter with COVID. Whether we're talking about cuisine, big focus right now, LGBTQ, you know, it really allows us to dig deep into our storytelling. We use a lot of blogs. Oops, excuse me. We use a lot of blogs to help bolster this program the last few years. We have over 100,000. Continues to be presented our email list. We get to talk to our interested households who have opted into this list about their specific interests. And in a normal year, we're communicating with them two to three times a month. In a normal year, we get between $7 and $10 million in tracked coverage, so we're not letting go of this. It's definitely slowed down this year, but we have those relationships and we look forward to rebooting them. We're able to see over a five-year period and increase in our leisure visitation base, starting this program, but it won't be happening in 2021. A lot of people don't know is that in California, there are no, there is no guidance for meetings and events. So even if we were talking about something in the future, there's nothing in place for meeting planners. This is challenging. We're waiting to hear from the governor's office on this, hopefully as we move into the better tiered areas. But suffice to say, we work with the conference hotels like the Dream Inn and Hotel Paradox. We go to trade shows, we host meeting planners, we do site tours, all that good stuff and help to establish our community as a great place for meetings, especially important in the non-summer season. That's great business for us. Sitting on the ERC, that it is quite possible by early April, we may be in the orange tier. So if everything is going to be staged under let's cruise safely and safety protocols and continue to work with the businesses on these concepts, we've got a lot of tried and true digital efforts that we'll be doubling down on when the time is right in our drive market. So looking at really the two to three hour drive market regional, that's where it's going to be and it's going to be about your domestic leisure market. Media will continue to play a big part. Again, we really want to be drilling down on the safety measures. Don't let go of those. Participate in safe and fun things to do in Santa Cruz. And then finally have prepared before meetings and business travel. Regional markets are going to be really important, but we're also going to have some heavy competition because the wine country is looking at the same market we are. So is San Francisco. So we want to be top of mind when it's time and when it's safe. And we want to welcome our visitors back and start to recapture some of those hundreds of millions of dollars that have been lost. And we'll do it. It's resilient Santa Cruz, right? So I will stop my share. I wanted to thank you for her service on our board and also welcome Council members Watkins and Brunner in the coming year. I look forward to working with you. Everything that you guys have done, as you know, we still had people coming to Santa Cruz because the one thing that people really discovered, I think, is that our outdoor spaces are spectacular and during COVID, they were able to access on whether or not that was good or bad. But I think your help with a lot of the messaging and being really present and available to help with guidance was really helpful during that time so that we were able to communicate to people when they come to Santa Cruz, here's how we'd like you to be with your mask and social distancing. So I really appreciate you guys in a time when, you know, revenues were sort of contracting that you guys were still willing to put out the kinds of communications and the kinds of information that we needed to have people who were going to be here. Anyway, it's going to be coming anyway. So maybe they were just day visitors, but I think it was very helpful to have your your ability and your partnership and doing that so that, you know, we weren't just trying to do that at a local government level. So I just want to recognize that because you were very much part and parcel in trying to really get the messaging out there that we needed both during COVID but also during the wildfires as well. So we had a rough year all the way around and your messaging and your ability to access the millions of people who look at your materials is really helpful during those kinds of things as well. And I just also want to recognize your leadership in really helping with finding evacuation abilities for people in hotels and all the work you guys did during the evacuation period as well for our whole community as well. So thank you for everything you did offline that was keeping you busy all summer long. So I'll open it up to Council Member Questions or comments. Council Member Cummings and then Council Member Brown. Thank you for that presentation and all the hard work Santa Cruz does to help drive our economy. I noticed that you had explicitly called out targeting communities that were LGBTQ and I was just wondering if there's any targeted efforts to encourage people of color to come to Santa Cruz and also whether your materials are offered in English and Spanish, especially since you're saying that kind of target them a graphic is, you know, two to three hours away from Santa Cruz and knowing the high Latino population that we have in parts of our area. I'm just wondering, you know, for example, those commercials or other materials that those are also provided in Spanish. Question. You know, we aren't, we haven't started the process of translation of the overall website. We find that the majority of our domestic market is English speaking, but it's certainly something that we should be looking at. Absolutely. We have such deep content on the site. So that would definitely require a particular strategy in terms of investment, you know, heavy investment to do that. But I think it's good to bring it up and we need to continue to look at ways to represent diversity in terms of looking at diversity in Black Lives Matter and other populations in our area. You know, we just really try in all of our creative materials to make sure that we're representative of the communities that want to visit Santa Cruz. So we continue to make that a commitment in our in our video production, in our storytelling, in our photography. And so it's just an ongoing effort. Yeah. Thanks. Councilmember Brown. I just wanted to say thank you, Maggie, for the presentation, and thank you for all of your work. It was, you know, really, it was really wonderful for me to be able to serve on the board. And I learned a lot about all of the work that goes into creating this, you know, this really vibrant and I'd say, pretty welcoming sense of our, you know, our community and inviting people to come here. And so I really appreciate that. I definitely want to give you kudos, major kudos for all of the work that you've done in the face of multiple crises this past year and, you know, just the ability to get creative and be nimble and really roll up your sleeves and kind of figure out how to move forward under those conditions is just really phenomenal. So thank you. I, since Councilmember Cummings brought it up, you know, I, it's, I understand the challenges with the translation and I'm just, you know, hoping that maybe some of the higher level content or something like there might be a place to start where people would have a way into at least kind of be, you know, feel, feel like they could learn a little bit about and then, you know, there's other ways to kind of get more information into Spanish speakers' hands. But so that, I'll just say that it would, that would be great to see. And then finally, just thank you and the board for, you know, allowing me to participate. And so I'm, I'm not leaving the board because I want to, per se, it, I just have a conflict with my new teaching schedule. So I'm really glad that I'm thrilled to pass the torch on to Councilmember Watkins and Vice Mayor Brunner. I think they'll bring a lot to the table as well. Thank you. Any other comments or questions from Councilmembers at this time? I am not seeing any. So Maggie, again, thank you for coming and updating us and hopefully we'll have a much better year ahead. It might be a little slow off the start, but hopefully we're over the hump of COVID and we can welcome people back. So thank you for all your work. Thank you. Thank you for your time. We'll move on to announcements, statements of disqualifications, additions and deletions, and oral communications announcement. I have a few announcements and then we'll move on to our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television, Channel 25, and streaming on the city's website at cityofsandcruise.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items Council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be open for public comment during today's meeting are numbers 8 through 26 on your agenda, on our agenda. I'd like to ask the Councilmembers if there are any statements of disqualification today. Seeing none, we'll move on to, I'd like to ask the City Clerk to announce any additions and deletions to the agenda today. There were no additions or deletions of items, but I do want to point out that there was a last-minute update this morning to the packet to reflect the change in the fiscal impact section of item 20. Okay. Thank you. Announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communication will occur at 6.30 p.m. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in at 6.30 p.m. And then I'd like to call on the City Attorney to provide a report on a closed session. Thank you, Mayor Myers, members of the City Council. Sir, this morning the Council met in closed session at 10.30 a.m. by Zoom to discuss the following items. The first item was public employment involving the city manager recruitment. The second item was a conference with legal counsel regarding liability claims. The first claim was the claim of the anti-police terror project at all. And that is also listed on your consent agenda this afternoon as item number 14. Second claim was the claim of Joshua May. There were no reportable actions taken in the closed session. The third item was significant or anticipated litigation. Two items involving significant exposure to litigation and one item considering initiation of litigation. There was no reportable action on those items. Lastly, there were two items of existing litigation. First item was a matter in the currently pending in the U.S. District Court entitled Santa Cruz homeless union at all versus city of Santa Cruz. The council received a report from the direction of the city attorney's office on that item. Second item, don't morph the work at all versus the city of Santa Cruz was continued to a subsequent meeting. Thank you, Mr. Condati. I'll now turn the, I'll call on the city manager for our next item, item number six, for the city manager to report and provide updates on city events and business items, including COVID-19, the CZU, lightning complex fire, and other events. Welcome, our team. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mayor and council members. Got three items to report on. I'll start by building on the comments from Maggie Ivy from the CBC with respect to the fiscal conditions that we've experienced as a result of the pandemic. And like the tourism industry, the city's really been hard hit. We've lost about an estimated $21 million in revenues as a result of the pandemic. However, there is a bit of good news. So I wanted to share that in that the, at the federal level looks now like the stimulus package will go through and it will include funding for municipalities and local governments. So we anticipate receiving in the order of $14 million over two payments. So we don't know the exact details yet of that, but it is will be enough to be able to make a big difference in terms of addressing our providing stability and giving us time to address our structural budget problem and also to really prevent some essential cuts in essential services. So that's a bit of good news. The next step in that process is for the, now that the Senate's approved that, it goes back to the House and then after the House approves it, it will go to the President and that's expected to happen by this week. They do have a deadline of the leap of March 14th, but it's anticipated that all might happen by the end of this week. So that's good news. The second item relates to COVID-19. And then after that, I'm going to turn it over to our fire chief, Jason Hyde, who receives daily or every weekly two-day morning briefings on COVID situation locally. So he has the latest information on that. But before I turn it over to him, just wanted to also let you know that the governor also signed an executive order extending the authorization for local governments to halt evictions for commercial renters impacted by COVID-19 through June 30th of this year. And so in response to that, we will bring him back to you because that expires at the end of March. So we will be bringing back to you an ordinance to be able to do that, to extend the commercial renters evictions. And so that the protections, and so that'll be on your next agenda on March 23rd. So with that, I'll next turn it over to our fire chief for an update on the COVID-19 situation, which is improved. Go ahead, Jason. Here's to the council. Jason Hyde and Bonnie Bush is going to be walking us through a couple of PowerPoint slides. And I'm going to be referring to the county website because they have the best information for this on a call this morning. The really good news is that you can see from this graph that our number of cases is just dropped significantly. And that's why we're moving into the red tier. And if this trend continues, we could be moving into a less restrictive tier in a few weeks following those guidelines. And this has widespread impacts not just in the city, but across entire county, for businesses, for students, for everyone who lives here. And so this is really good news. And hopefully this trend continues in this direction. Next slide. Having this huge spike, it wasn't just the overall case numbers, it was the impact on our local healthcare system. And our hospitals were full. They were reaching capacity. They were expanding their ICU usage. And we were getting close to 100 people hospitalized. We were in the 60s and 80s. And now we're down into the single digits as far as number of people who are in the ICU who are in the hospital. And that's just because of the impacts of vaccination, but also just the actions individually and what they've done to limit the spread within our community. And that's really good news. The effort that the county health officers have been doing is, you know, to prevent disease and to prevent death. And again, we're heading in the right direction. Next slide. Relative to other places in the state as far as our county. And we started off really below everyone else. And then we slowly crept up. And what I take from this slide is that that curve went up and now it's flattening out. We're starting to drop down, which is really good. From the 58 counties in the state, we are six as far as the number of vaccines distributed per capita. So even though I know that there's people who are frustrated with that process, we are doing much better than a number of our other counties in the state. And I think after this morning listening in with the Johansson or the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which is a single shot vaccine, it doesn't require two. That is beginning to come into the county. And we should see the impacts that accelerate rapidly. But we are doing good. We could be doing better, but everything is heading in the right direction. Next slide. Vaccine appointment. This is from the county. And what this shows here is currently we're in phase one B, which expands the number of people who are eligible to get vaccinated. And this is how they're distributing the vaccine. And this is the number of people that they have within the county. So 70% of the available vaccines are given to individuals 65 and older. They're now moving into emergency services, agricultural, and food service workers 20% and then education and childcare. There's been a really significant push in the last week or two to vaccinate our educators to get them back in school. And I would expect that in the next few weeks, we'll probably get more definitive timelines for what that looks like. If you want to get a vaccine, the two main sources for people to access locally would be to Santa Cruz Health dot org, the coronavirus vaccine, or the state program, which is my turn, where you can register and when you become eligible, they'll contact you. The county is also doing outreach to those portions of our community that may not have the easy access to health care. So that is one of their primary goals, those who are most vulnerable. And they are doing that access. After March 15, they expect to radically expand the criteria for who is eligible to get the vaccine as well as having more vaccine available to give. Right now they're really limited on the supply coming in, but they've been pushing it out as quickly as possible. So I would urge anyone to go to the Santa Cruz health dot org, the Corona coronavirus vaccine or go to my turn for the state vaccination to sign up and see where you fall within that eligibility to make sure that you are aware of where you can get a vaccine when you can get a vaccine. And I would urge everyone to get a vaccine. I know that everyone's probably read about the CDC guidelines that were just released about how people who are vaccinated can intermingle without spreading coronavirus. And as we get further and further into this, I think more guidelines will come out and we can get back to normal quicker, which was kind of the goal here. Next slide. Even though we have more vaccines, even though our case numbers are falling, even though we have less hospitalizations, we still have the risk of transmission of the COVID vaccine and specifically with some of the variants that have come out. And so continue to do the things that work, which is washing your hands, wearing a mask, keeping your distance, don't go, don't go to work, don't go to school, don't go to someone's house if you're sick and keep doing those things will continue to keep the numbers dropping, which will get our entire community back to normal sooner. And that's what I have for you today. And if you have any questions or more, I'm happy to answer them. I really appreciate you providing all those updates today and super excited about all that good news. Councilmember Cummings. Reds here. I think it goes into effect tomorrow, but effectively today we are in the reds here for all the parameters. We missed it last week by one tenth on the adjusted equity score. We had to be at 5.2. We're at 5.3. So all of our numbers are really dropping week to week. And so we will be moving into the reds here and all the associated restrictions for businesses and what not will be lifted. But they do want to keep pushing this because those restrictions are being lifted that we're not out of the woods yet. So to continue, you know, you're distancing and you're masking and that will get us back to normal. You said last time too, do you know where we're at kind of now? Do those numbers substantially drop or? Yeah, I don't have that exact adjusted equity score in front of me, but I do know that the numbers have dropped precipitously over the last week. And here we go. Dropping over a point, so we're, you know, close to four or so. You know, small business owners are people reaching out to us about to tell them that we were moving into that today or should we tell them as of tomorrow? I think I'm going to defer to Bonnie Lipscomb on what the business impacts are for the actual tiers and the restrictions on the business. I believe they give a little bit of notice before they're going to put restrictions in place and also some notice before they lift those restrictions just to give people time to be prepared. And really quickly before Bonnie moves into explaining the red tier for businesses, it's a facility at midnight tonight is when the red tier goes into effect. So go ahead, Bonnie. Great. Thank you. And good afternoon, Mayor and members of the council. What I briefly put up on the screen was our county blueprint for a safer economy weekly report that we prepare on behalf of the ERC. And basically right now over the last week, we've dropped adjusted daily new cases per 100,000 by 1.2. And so we're well into the metrics for the red tier. Also, the positivity test, we've reduced that by another percent over the last week. And Dr. Newell has made, you know, comments that if, you know, if we continue on this downward trend, we potentially could be in tier three, which is an orange moderate tier potentially by the end of March beginning of April, which is a really good sign. So we do have to be in this current red tier for two weeks and meet the metrics for the next lower tier, which is that orange tier before we move into it. But what that means starting basically effectively tomorrow is that restaurants can reopen at 25 percent capacity indoors or 100 people, whichever is fewer, all retail can expand to 50 percent capacity, gyms and fitness centers, 10 percent capacity, museums, aquariums, 25 percent capacity, movie theaters can reopen at 25 percent capacity. So it hotels with lodging and indoor fitness centers. So hotels are already open, but the fitness centers can have a 10 percent capacity. So it does, it means quite a lot for our local business community be in the red tier. And obviously, when we go to the orange tier, even more so. So this is definitely good news for our community. And we'll just continue to support the campaigns that are out there about, you know, safely visiting, you know, all of our businesses, which is really important. Thank you. Thank you, Bonnie. Councilmember Golder, in regards to the vaccination of the Santa Cruz City School teachers and staff, I just wanted to just really applaud the efforts of Dignity Health and partnering with Santa Cruz City Schools and ensuring that everybody gets vaccinated so we can get schools open as soon as possible. So everybody, including, you know, some of the retired teachers and the school board members and everybody that comes on campus. So that I'm just, I was blown away with the effort and how quickly they were able to give those extra doses to school staff. So thank you to everyone who worked on that. Any other comments or questions from Council on this? Anything else, Martine, on your on your list for today? And that's it. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. And thank you, Chief and Bonnie, for providing really good news. So things are, things are moving the way we, places that we would like them to move. Next is the, I'll call on the clerk, City Clerk to provide any updates to the meeting calendar for the Council. There are no updates. Okay. We will now move on to our consent agenda. And these are items 8 through 21 on our agenda. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, now is the time for you to call in if you want to comment on items 8 through 21. Instructions are on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the queue saying you have been unmuted. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a Council member for further discussion. Again, this is for items 8 through 21, which is our consent agenda today. Are there any Council members who wish to comment or pull any item? Council member Cummings and Council member Brown. I had a comment on 10 on the question on 18. Comment on 10 and a question on 18. Council member Brown. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to register a no vote on item number nine, but I'll, I don't have any questions. Any other Council members be requesting to pull any items? No items have been pulled, and we will now go to Bonnie. I'm just going to check in with you. Yeah, go ahead. I think typically you would have Council member Cummings make his comments and the question. Right. Let's do that. Council member Cummings, you had a comment on number 10 and a question on 18. Item number 10 is the minutes of the February 23rd City Council meeting. Item 10, I just wanted to make sure the public was aware on item, on the item that was related to homelessness. I think there was a, I mean, we were trying to work through a lot of information, but I think there was just the hours for camping. And I think it just ended up being associated with the transitional and campus of the detention encampments. And so since we're going to be hearing that again tonight, I'll make some adjustments to that because I don't think it was clearly captured, but I just want to point that out because it did come up. And then industry at talking about refuse trucks, refuse trucks so we can continue moving our fleet more away from fossil fuel vehicles and more towards electrical and cleaner vehicles. And so I just wanted to see if there's any update on where things are moving within that industry. All director of public works. I'm happy to address that question. That's a good one. Electric refuse trucks are evolving and they're starting to be more mainstream. In fact, we have received a grant $400,000 airborne grant and an additional $200,000 VW grant towards an electric refuse truck. And we're working out the specifications right now before we place that order. There's a couple of things that are unique to electric vehicles, especially a refuse truck. A range is obviously one. But the refuse truck also uses the battery to operate the arms. And so it's not just how far you travel, but how many loads that you take or how many containers that you lift and dump. And then how do you charge it? So we're working through all those details. We will learn a lot on our first purchase. We're setting up the charging station and we feel that will be an effective use for us. We'll gather a lot of information. And the industry is still evolving. As batteries get better, we'll see that the range will increase and the costs will come down. So we're happy to take this first step, but we're not ready to convert the entire fleet at this point. As we saw in Texas when they lost power, their electric vehicles shut down and they weren't able to operate. So with the PSP events and those type of things, we'll have to be looking at battery backups to make sure that we can always operate in case of an extended shutdown. And again, all that's around battery technology. So we are continuing to operate and follow that. And we're excited to get our new vehicle, our first vehicle, and try it out and learn how it goes. Where the city is going with regard to electric vehicles. So thanks for that. And we'll stay tuned to see how things go. Great. And that concludes all my questions and comments. Mayor. I'd like to now invite members of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda. Now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement. You have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. And I'll start with Mr. Whether I can use Zoom or whether I have to use my phone, but now I see you're taking me on Zoom. So thank you. And I appreciate Council member Cummings asking about the electric garbage trucks. I'm really happy that the city has one electric garbage truck on the way. I do feel that anything we can do to accelerate the electrification we should do, even with the so-called renewable diesel, diesel truck, I don't think is consistent with the city's climate goals. And I think the diesel trucks will swiftly become stranded assets. We should not purchase more diesel garbage trucks until we get some experience with the electric truck and see how it goes. I want to point out today's item 25 is a legislative agenda which supports municipal fleet electrification. So we've got fleet electrification on the agenda today, which includes electrification of garbage trucks. Electric trucks will last longer and they'll be more efficient with lower maintenance costs. Our residents deserve the experience of a quieter alternative to diesel and CNG garbage trucks. And I believe the costs are declining and there will be likely more funding opportunities to support fleet electrification in the future. I don't see that these diesel trucks are urgently needed right now. It's kind of a strategy that says seven years is the optimum time, but I think things are changing as we realize that buying new diesel trucks now, they will basically be obsolete in seven years when scheduled to be resold. So I strongly recommend to either delay or reduce this purchase or go ahead and buy another electric truck at this time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next up is Beverly Dejeu. You should be unmuted. Yes, thank you. Hi. This is Beverly Dejeu of the Electric Auto Association in the Central Coast. I'm actually the president and I follow with Brett Garrett's comments. We have a deep concern for any new purchase of diesel. So not only is diesel a fossil fuel, but it is the most toxic in terms of health reasons. The particulates in diesel are especially dangerous. And I do appreciate that you are considering it. And I know that you do have the grants for the one garbage truck. I happen to know that Tom Habashi, the CEO of our 3CE, Central Coast Community Energy, has spoken as this about garbage trucks, electric garbage trucks, as being a favorite project of his. So I know there would be funding there and I think there would be funding also, again, from M-Bard. So I also urge you to please wait on this because I think that you have them for, I thought that you had them for longer than seven years. But even so, it just is not the time to be buying another diesel truck, really, with all of our climate goals and with the necessity of addressing climate change. This really is not the time to be buying another diesel vehicle. As far as range, the vehicles have sufficient range because they're mostly used in the neighborhoods. They're not going long distances, so they have sufficient range. And during a PSPS event, gas pumps are also shut down because they're owned by electricity as well. So, and anyway, I urge you to please consider not going ahead and buying these diesel garbage trucks. It's just completely counter to our entire Climate Action Plan. Thank you for considering. Thank you. Thank you very much for speaking today. Okay. I'm not seeing any other members of the public wanting to speak on our consent agenda, so I will go ahead and move on to... Really quick. Sorry. I just want to see if Steve LaBeurge is logged in. He had sent an email saying he intended to speak on Item 13, but I don't see him listed, so if you are here, go ahead and... Please, LaBeurge, available. If you're Steve LaBeurge, please raise your hand by pressing star nine on your phone. I'm not seeing anybody, are you? Bring it back to our next item, which is Item Number 22 on our consent public hearing. We need a vote. Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. Thank you for catching up. Okay. I'm now looking for a motion on the consent agenda. Council Member Brown. Thank you. Yeah, I'll move the consent agenda. I'm wondering though, and I'm sorry that this is now kind of taking it out of order, but given the points that were made by members of the public, I have the same questions that Council Member Cummings had, and I understand the challenges and kind of waiting to see what the technology, but I'm just wondering if... Could we call that item for a separate vote? I'd like to vote on that separately, but otherwise, I move the consent agenda with the exception of Item 18. Bonnie, I'm seeing someone with their hands up now in the attendees. Is that Mr. LaBeurge? I'm not sure. Do you want me to unmute them? Yeah. Mr. LaBeurge, you can speak if you're... Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Oh, thank you very much. Hi, this is Steve LaBeurge. I'm speaking to Item 13. I'm the chair of the board of CFSC, and I'm here with Paolo Bryan, our secretary treasurer, and CFSC would like to thank the city council for its commitment to providing support for statically disabled adults. As the city analysts report notes on the Van S property... Excuse me, Mr. LaBeurge. Excuse me. I believe we have this on another item today on our agenda. Are you speaking concerning the... The Van S one? Oh, that was on consent. I'm sorry. Go ahead, please. Yes, thank you so much. So we... Yeah, CFSC has $165,000 obligation to the state housing and community development and our second obligation of $103,000 for the city of Santa Cruz. And we just wanted to explain that 222 Van S Avenue property is a beautiful seven-bedroom house on the west side of the town, providing housing for eight low-income tenants. The house is 90 years old with extensive and expensive maintenance responsibilities. Providing mental health housing at Van S has been a labor of love for CFSC once we bought the property for that purpose in 1989. However, it is only a break-even project at best as the costs are high and the state mandates a minimum operating reserve. In the past, the city has forgiven interest payments to help support our ability to provide desperately meeting mental health housing. The present city council clearly understands the very pressing immediate need for mental health housing in our community. Forgiving the deferred loan interest to the end of the loan would not have a financial impact on the city today, but would ensure that in 30 years, CFSC would be able to continue to provide low-income mental health housing at Van S Avenue. A future city council may not have the same commitment to mental health housing that is shared by the present council. If 3% interest is attached to our loan extension, $90,000 in interest will be due in 2049. If that interest due was demanded in 2049, this precious housing resource would be lost. Loan interest forgiveness would ensure the continued economic viability of Van S for mental health housing. So we thank you once again for your continued support of our efforts to provide sustainable quality low-income mental health housing in the city of Santa Cruz. We just ask that the city council consider forgiving that the loan interest at the end of this 30-year loan extension in 2049. Thank you, Mr. LaBerge. Okay, I have a motion by, thank you. I have a motion by Council Member Brown and a second by, did I get a second on that? Council Member Watkins. For the consent agenda, and we'll minus item, minus, with the exception for item 18. So I'll go ahead and call for a real call vote, please. Council Member Watkins, I just want to note that you have a no vote on item nine. Thank you. Yeah, I, you know, this is one that I struggle with here. I understand the immediate needs and I understand the limitations of the current technology. And at the same time, I recognize that to make this kind of investment in new depot equipment is really counter to our climate action goals. I would like to make a motion to go to just on this item and detailed report on the feasibility of alternative refuse technology, so electric or hybrid technologies. I'll leave it there. And is there a second to the motion? Okay, not seeing a second. That item will not, I'm sorry, Council Member Cummings. No, I just wanted to make a comment on the item to acknowledge the concerns of the community, to acknowledge the concerns of my colleague. I do think though that, you know, we are, you know, in need of refuse trucks to get garbage from people's houses to our dumps and to sort that garbage accordingly, you know, getting recycling process and things like that. The thing that that has to be taken into account is that we don't learn ourselves into a situation where we're kind of pushing our current vehicles to their limit and then, you know, potentially having breakdowns that then result in higher costs associated with, you know, trying to, whether it's rent vehicles or we're in desperate situations where we need to buy whatever we can so that we can ensure that we're getting our trash moving. So I appreciate the update that we received. I think that that, that we're a lot further along than we were two years ago with this process of trying to get electric vehicles. But I'm not, I'd like to see us, you know, our public works department remain efficient with trying to mitigate impacts of trash. And so for now, I think that we can have updates regularly on progress towards hybrid and electric vehicles. I think that would be very much appreciated by the council and the community. Thank you, councilmember Cummings. Okay. So I will, Bonnie, we need to pass that item, right? I will look for that motion. That motion failed. So now we need another motion. Yeah. A motion to pass item. Yeah. So I'm looking for a motion to approve item number 18 on the consensus agenda. Councilmember Watkins and then councilmember Cummings. I'll move the item. We will go, we have a motion by councilmember Watkins, seconded by councilmember Cummings. For item number 18 on our consent agenda. And can we have a roll call vote, please? Councilmember Watkins. Our consent public hearing, which is item number 22 on today's agenda. This is the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 2021-02, environmentally acceptable food packaging and products. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The members of the public, excuse me, I'll go ahead and open this up. If there are any questions or comments from council on this item. So again, this is the second reading of the environmentally acceptable food packaging and products. When Maggie was giving her presentation, it's not really part of this ordinance, but something that I'd love to see in the future. You know, those itty-bitty hotel shampoos and lotions, there's some places where I've traveled where those are just not allowed, but they've bought bulk products. And for as progressive and green as Santa Cruz is, I'm really surprised we don't have something in place preventing that kind of single-use plastic waste that we have in our tourism industry. And so just throwing it out there. We're finding a description on that. Leslie O'Malley's here, and she's our staff with regard to this. And then I see that council member Cummings has a comment or question as well. Leslie, I don't know if you want to clarify efforts on the single-use hotel, you know, shambos and et cetera. Sure. Leslie O'Malley waits for that some program manager for the first recovery. Higher council did look at this issue before the county has passed the measures banning the single-use single bottles that you're referring to in hotels. And our feeling was when we checked into it is that it wasn't a significant issue then, and there seems to be a real trend industry-wide to move away from the individual bottles into more bulk processing. So it's certainly to be revisited in the future. COVID has certainly changed things, but we haven't looked into it since prior council's insistence. Thank you Leslie. Council member Cummings? I'm hearing you, but my understanding, and I don't know if you mentioned it right now, that the county made an effort towards eliminating these single-use bottles in the hotels. Is that true? And I don't know how I could catch to see if you said that or not. That's what you're muted. No, it's not. You're muted. Better? Yeah, that's better. You are a little bit hard to hear. So sorry. So yeah, so the county has passed their ordinance to ban single-use shampoo and conditioner bottles in hotels. When we looked at the issue, there seemed to be an industry trend in eliminating those and going towards bulk, and there certainly has been a reset during COVID. And we looked at the issue, but prior council decided not to pursue this as an issue of concern. And yeah, I just wanted to ask that to follow up on council member Golder's question. Council members? Seeing any hands raised, invite members of the public to speak to item number 22 on the consent public hearing agenda. Now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. Are there any members of the public that want to speak to this item? If so, you should press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. Seeing none, be looking for a motion on item 22. Hi, but we'll go with Renee. Excuse me, council member Golder. I'll make the motion to accept the ordinance 2021-02 amending the charter. Do I need to read the whole thing or is that okay? No, I think we're good on that. And a second. Seconded by council member Cummings, ordinance number 2021-02 environmentally acceptable food packaging and products. And could I have a roll call vote, please? Council member Golder, did you have a question? Roll call vote, please, Bonnie. Council member Watkins. That was unanimously. Who are general business items for today? Next up is item number 23, which is the Santa Cruz economic development strategy. And today we'll have Rebecca unit. The business liaison for the economic development department presents the report. Welcome, Rebecca. I actually hand it off to Bonnie to introduce the item for us and our team. Thanks. Thanks, mayor, members of the council, and Rebecca is going to be giving a portion of the presentation today as we'll our consultants at strategic economics. So just a very brief background before I turn it over to Derek and making we were wrapping up this that we could more effectively respond to the COVID crisis and immediate needs in our business community, but also so that we could recalibrate the report and specifically have in sort of the longer term COVID recovery elements. So that's what you see before you today. Now that we're going to go over is an economic development strategy, which includes the one to two years sort of COVID recovery period as well as a longer term up to five year sort of strategy, ED strategy for the city. It's important for me to mention that this is an economic development strategy. You know, our department is called economic development. That includes four distinct divisions. This is really focused on our business division within our department. So I want to frame that first before turning it over to our consultants. Our consultant strategic economics, they're going to give a little bit of their background today. They're going to talk about the process, the outreach, some of the data, some of their findings and recommendations. And then Rebecca is going to go specifically over some of our goals and strategies sort of by industry sector. And then I'll finish the presentation by just talking about how this relates to our interim recovery plan and immediate next step. So with that, I'd first like to just introduce and for that strategic economics. And we have here on the panel today, we have Sujata Sharivas-Stava from Strategic Economics and she's available for questions. We have Derek Braun, who will be giving the presentation, the main portion of the presentation today. And then Jesse Brown, who was also engaged with us through the course of our work with Strategic Economics. And on our ED sort of business development team, I want to acknowledge Rebecca and Nathan Q. And I'm not quite sure if Nathan is on today. If he is, if he could pop on his camera. I just want to introduce Nathan because I don't think the council has met him before. And he is our economic development coordinator and he does behind the scenes. He does a lot of work here at ED. And what you will recognize with some of his work is a lot of the social media work, as well as our weekly blueprint reports, which you briefly saw on screen today. So I wanted to welcome Nathan officially through the council. Look forward to working with you guys in the future. Happy to be part of the team. Welcome, Nathan. And with that, I think I will turn it over to Derek Braun at Strategic Economics. Hi, Bonnie. And thank you to the mayor and council members for the opportunity to present this work. So I just want to open with a little overview of Strategic Economics. We are an economic development and language economics consulting firm based out of Berkeley, California. And we've completed a number of economic development and retail strategies throughout the Bay Area, including a number of cities just over the hill in Silicon Valley. And we're currently wrapping up work as well in Alameda, city of Alameda, economic recovery strategy from the COVID pandemic. Next slide. I just want to provide a little overview of our process and approach to the background analysis information that I'm going to share. And we use this information to then develop the goals and strategies in the economic development strategy document. You know, our goal really was to build on, to identify and build on the existing strengths and opportunities in Santa Cruz. One part of this was data analysis, performing economic data analysis, looking at industry performance and business performance in the city. We looked at real estate market data as well and examined some sales, tax revenue information for sales, tax, transient occupancy tax, admission tax, to gauge how some of those industries were performing in the city. We also had a process of outreach to key stakeholders to really get on the ground information. So we conducted a series of focus groups with various businesses and partner organizations with economic development and city department staff as well. As Bonnie mentioned, the COVID-19 pandemic struck during the midst of this process. So we did have a moment of retrenchment and looking at some of the survey results and looking at some of the trends and issues that were arising as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This whole process went through a city staff input and review and our goals include a background report for that analysis and drafts of the economic development strategy. Next slide please. So I just want to take a moment to thank all the stakeholders in Santa Cruz who participated in this process through those focus groups and some follow-up interviews that I mentioned. There's a whole lot on this slide and I just really appreciate all the time and inputs that were shared. Next slide. All right, now we're getting into the sort of the background findings that resulted from the study. I'm going to sprinkle in some COVID impact information throughout, but as far as the impacts on the city and its port for businesses, I think none of this will come as a surprise that you're all well aware of the tax revenue situation resulting from the pandemic and the effect on the city's budget in the near future. This will of course have impacts on the capacity of city staff and from the city's partner organizations of workforce development and business support going forward, but I just want to call it how critical it is that you know there's there's a short-term focus of the strategy on assisting businesses to sustain operations and recover and it's going to be really important to dedicate some support to ensure that businesses can bounce back faster in Santa Cruz. Next slide. The tourism and hotel findings, you just heard some of this from Maggie Ivy, but there was really strong job growth and strong performance of hotels and of visitor destinations in Santa Cruz prior to the pandemic. About 23 percent of the city's jobs are in some way related to tourism and hotels, although this also includes restaurants that are serving local residents. Really the market is heavily driven by Bay Area and California residents. About 37 percent of visitors come from the Bay Area as about 2016 according to Visit Santa Cruz County and there's there is a highly seasonal leisure-based tourism industry in Santa Cruz and so there's this longer-term effort to try to diversify some of the visitor segments and maybe you was speaking to that earlier as well. We can really see in the transient occupancy tax revenues chart on the right how the third quarter of the year 2018 is just an example of this third quarter of the year and some of the second quarter really outperform the off-season quarters very dramatically. We also found that some older hotels in Santa Cruz do require some updates, have undergone some disinvestment. It's a little challenging in the city because there is so much demand in the summer season that sometimes the hotels don't need to reinvest to attract from that demand. Next slide please. Now you just heard a more detailed rundown of hotel and tourism impacts and outlook from maybe but we find that generally Santa Cruz is well positioned for recovery at least on the basis of having those that two-hour drive time visitor market segments and really the chart down below shows the hotel occupancy year-over-year percent changes hotel occupancy from in 2020 through January 2021 and what's interesting to note here is how in September of January 2020 the hotel occupancy which is just one of many indicators but hotel occupancy actually was about the same as September for the prior year and so much of that is because of the emphasis on the drive time market but as Maggie said there's a lot of competition for it now and there will need to be a longer term process to diversify some of these market segments to attract more visitors in the off-peak seasons. We looked at small businesses and commercial districts in Santa Cruz and you know about 70% of Santa Cruz businesses are fewer than 10 employees so small businesses really are the lifeblood of Santa Cruz. We in our conversations with a lot of small business owners we found there are challenges of accessing these services or knowing who to call for maintenance of public spaces or how to learn how to address homelessness issues impacting businesses. There are also challenges raised around traffic congestion and therefore customers not being willing to drive as far or take the time to go to businesses. There's opportunities for transportation and pedestrian bike improvements to improve this access and we also heard about parking challenges in some of the light industrial districts like the west side industrial district where more customer facing uses have grown and there's more parking than them now. Next slide please. First over 19 small businesses have of course been heavily impacted they've had to pivot their business models to e-commerce curbside pick up different mixes of products and services they're the same time they're feeling additional costs for health and safety cleaning and mass compliance measures while experiencing reduced revenues from capacity and operations limits this of course leads to what we're all familiar with at this point with the eviction risks and rent burdens and the risk of temporary and permanent closure so this speaks to the need for ongoing financial and technical assistance support to help these businesses come out of pandemic in good condition or better condition. In terms of the retail and shopping districts specifically downtown and east side midtown areas ESAB there's the this is being shared across the nation the shift towards experiential storefronts that is to say away from selling apparel and hard goods and soft goods and more towards things like restaurants and dining and entertainment and fitness and services you can see this in the red line in the charts showing rapid growth in the restaurant and hotel sales tax revenue category since the great recession. We found as a result of this trend there's a need to kind of expand the definition of anchors in downtown you're not likely to get that big destination store anymore but instead you should the strategy now is to go after some other uses that might attract a lot of foot traffic such as medical offices major entertainment destinations etc there's a lot there's a demand for quite a bit of office space in downtown these days which is at a level previously unseen at least before the pandemic. We also found that the east side and midtown area could function better as a cohesive retail destination potentially if designed for improved shopping between different storefronts and next slide please. The 19 pandemic impacts on retail we've seen this short term we're all familiar with the impacts and personal services and dining and soft goods we have seen that grocery stores convenience stores they've they've done very well during this period with people cooking from home and doing more at home drug stores with one well. Long term we expect essentially a return to several of the longer term trends returning the name for personal services and restaurants while the stores that compete against online shopping will continue to be challenged in that in that way if anything that says accelerated the shift towards e-commerce quite a bit. Education workforce and commutes we found that you know about 75 percent of workforce in Santa Cruz comes from outside the city itself while about 25 percent of the city's residents commute over the hill to jobs in the bay area. We heard from every single employer just about that high housing costs are a top workforce attraction and retention concern in the city I can't emphasize how many times this came out. The city has a robust network of workforce development organizations and this is the core organizations and there are there's a very good relationship between this development and those organizations. Now I'm going to talk about a few specialized industry sectors we identified in Santa Cruz these are sectors that we found are especially concentrated in the city of Santa Cruz they have grown rapidly in most cases they have a lot of growth potential in most cases and they also reflect some of the city's past priorities and plans and policy focus areas all together these five sectors constitute about 18 percent of total jobs and they have all grown faster over this 2009 to 2018 period than the city as a whole and point of growth is about 23 percent over that period and except for biotech and life sciences which had a slower growth rate but I'll walk through this one at a time. For biotech and life sciences this is a very small but very unique and concentrated cluster in Santa Cruz that really is supported by a lot of assets in the city there's of course CC Santa Cruz with its genomics institute and also the startup sandbox incubator the sector is growing a little more slowly and is relatively small compared to the biotech industry you find in the Bay Area but still this is a very unique niche that Santa Cruz has. My innovation jobs experienced rapid growth over the past decade now Santa Cruz in many ways is less competitive job in the Bay Area just because it's further away from the venture capital and the total magnitude just the sheer number of people who work in the sector is relatively small compared to the Bay Area but this is a sector that has a lot of ongoing growth potential in Santa Cruz because there are so many workers in this sector who live locally in Santa Cruz and they seek to start businesses or would prefer to work closer to home in Santa Cruz. Next slide please. This is a good segue into the office impacts from COVID-19 and you know currently most office workers are working remotely but long term we will see this return to workers wanting collaborative work environments and businesses wanting collaborative work environments so we do expect most workers to return in person at least part of the time and this trend could really favor Santa Cruz because there's going to be greater potential for satellite offices for working spaces or even just workers working from home more often who might then keep their dollars in the community itself instead of going elsewhere. The outdoor recreation sector is an incredibly important Santa Cruz with the global brand name for for sports and outdoor recreation and so it's a very highly concentrated and rapidly growing sector that attracts a lot of outside spending and investment. There are some challenges limiting just with the limited availability of light industrial space and really a big thing that we found in Santa Cruz is a very strong demand very low vacancy rates for light industrial space. And another competitor for that space is this artisanal production. This is the other specialty food and beverage companies, coffee roasters, breweries, wineries, any kind of small maker. These these businesses do also require smaller and flexible industrial spaces. Finally last but not least one of the topic areas that we really drill down is city services and processes. We found that a number of business owners did mention that they were I'm sure about how to access city resources or had some frustrations with prior experiences about approvals and permitting development requirements and issues that arise as a result of community opposition being able to throw obstacles. This came up in the context of projects such as tenant improvements, parking modifications, signage, temporary structures, an outdoor seating and lighting. Now staff has been doing and the city has been doing a good job of proactively trying to address some of the obstacles and trying to streamline and clarify and resolve some of these concerns. It's possible to some extent this is perception based on past experiences but it is a perception that is out there. And lastly there was we had some discussions about how the economic development department business development can support other departments. There's some new opportunities for interdepartmental coordination and business outreach as part of some of the teacher sustainability projects that the city is taking on. With that I'll turn it over to Rebecca. Thank you so much Derek. So that was a really good overview of a lot of the study and data that we reviewed in terms of developing our actual economic development strategies. So this document that we have attached in your packet is five year implementation plan guiding the work of the economic development business development division. And so the first two years of this work we're really focused on COVID-19 recovery. We see that taking us through to the end of 2022 and then we'll be shifting over to more of the post recovery effort to beginning in 2022 ideally through the end of 2025. The strategy also includes a lot of work that we do on the day to day. This is sort of our ongoing efforts that we continue to do and it's really important to the basis of our role in the city. And so we see those efforts you know living on beyond the strategy but just want to set the stage for the timing of implementation for this. So the document is divided into seven top criteria categories and I'll talk through each of those categories for you. But they're laid out with specific goals, strategies and actions within those categories and you'll see in the document that there's matrix in terms of the timing of each of those activities who's working on those where they're located and how we intend to track those activities as well. So I'll just give a high level overview of what ended up being 44 strategies that we're excited to take on over the next five years here. So our first category which is the most important and the activity that we're focused the most on right now is COVID-19 pandemic business support and recovery. So the main goals of this is continuing to monitor the existing needs of businesses, looking at ways to provide continued assistance, new tools. You know some examples of this is our temporary outdoor expansion program that's been incredibly successful and we're continuing through October of this year. We're also looking at opportunities to position businesses to recover quickly and so as part of this work you know we've been maintaining our business resources landing page on the chusanacruz.com website our economic development website and businesses can access that at chusanacruz.com slash coronavirus. So maintaining all that information around changing state regulations, health requirements, where to get a vaccine, how to safely reopen your business and the different support tools that we have available. We've also had our existing financial and technical assistance resources that will continue through this strategy. So our chusanacruz resilience microloan program that we launched last year and the get virtual program which we're providing funding to to help businesses get online, get some e-commerce tools to compete on that larger scale and we've heard some really great success from businesses that have participated in that. So continuing to support that and really seeing that as a recovery tool and way for businesses to move out of sort of the crisis response into growing their business even stronger as we recover and then we're looking at some new opportunities under this category of we are participating in a countywide revolving loan program which is calling growth in our county partnering with national development council that was a 2.75 million dollar EDA loan from federal government. So that's going to provide more capital to businesses countywide and we're working with all of the jurisdictions in the county as well as the small business development center. So it's a really good opportunity and really came out of the collaboration that we kicked off in response to the pandemic and some bi-weekly meetings that we're holding with all of our jurisdiction partners and support services that are responding to businesses needs. Another opportunity that we're looking at is potentially a second round of that resilience microloan funding. We've been doing a lot of outreach right now working with the DTA and through our newsletters and through the economic recovery council to gauge the need for businesses. So what are the gaps that still exist in the funding that's available who might not be receiving funding for whatever reason time you know the time that they've been in business or their type of business or things like that. So seeing where we can really have an impact you know where the programs aren't meeting their needs. So our second category is focused around tourism and hospitality. As we know that this is a key part of our local economy and it was one that has you know been really hard hit under the pandemic and so looking at ways to continue to stabilize this industry. Look at ways to work on the shoulder and off-peak seasons diversifying the market similar to what was discussed earlier with Maggie Ivy making sure that we're reaching our drive markets and also reaching different demographics and making sure that how we're marketing our areas attracting new visitors to our space network being inclusive and who we're inviting here. And then expanding resources to promote and enhance tourism and visitation and also looking at revisioning the civic center and some activation of our city own public spaces. So as business development just providing support for some of those larger projects that we have going on in the city in ways that we can involve the business community in those activations. Examples of things that we've already done. We were flexible in our TOT and admissions tax collections in response to the pandemic just recognizing the real impact that those businesses are experiencing and changing the collection timeline for that. We've been supportive of Visit Santa Cruz and the left true safely campaign and the safety pledge. And then we're also something that we're looking to more long term is potential state and federal funding opportunities to help mitigate the impacts of sea level rise and looking at ways to support some of those businesses who might be needing to adapt to the changing climate so keeping that on our horizon. For the third category this is our small businesses and commercial districts. So this is really focused on the day to day work that we do in the business development division. We are sort of the front line, friendly face up city hall for businesses helping them navigate the process, creating a welcoming environment to them. So we're really looking at improving those processes, improving information that we're sharing to businesses, making sure that we have that available on our website that we're creating easy to access standouts and that our colleagues in different departments know that we are an available resource if they get a question from a business that they might not be able to meet. And then it's also looking at how do we support our businesses in the built environment. So improving streetscape, working on pedestrian, bicycle access, making sure that our commercial districts are a welcoming environment. People can get to them easily, can have an enjoyable experience when they're accessing them. We're also looking at a little bit of the wayfinding key. So we've seen our beautiful new wayfinding signs that are out there. So looking at expanding on that and yeah, Amanda Rutela, shout out to her for the excellent work on that project. I'm looking at ways to bring that down to the pedestrian level, so getting more branding into our commercial districts, more place making happening. So similarly I mentioned earlier, just continuing to rely on our partners in the community. So this is a small sampling of some of the business support organizations that we work with. And we've had a great relationship with them, pretty pandemic and it's just gotten stronger through the coordination efforts that we've all been involved in. So just continuing those regular meetings with them and coordination and creating program specific to our business needs going forward. Areas that we've looked at too. We work really closely with the downtown, but also focusing on our midtown business district that's really grown and they've got a nicely organized group of businesses that are doing collective marketing. So supporting their efforts and meeting the needs that they have in the streets where we can play a role at the city. Similarly with the west side, helping to cultivate some organization of those businesses and finding what needs they have to help make that commercial district even stronger. In terms of retail and shopping districts, this is our fourth category. This is more focused on the business attraction and retention side of things. So looking at what is our business mix downtown, what are you missing that maybe you can't find when you're shopping downtown and how can we attract the business to meet that need there. It's also an opportunity for us storefronts that we have. We're working on some programs to create maybe an incubation or some sort of subsidized space program to provide opportunities for women owned and BIPOC businesses to have their storefront downtown and trying to reduce some of those barriers to access and in those cases and finally I'll talk a little bit more about that when we get into the recovery plans tie in. But just really taking the chance to look at the opportunities that we have with the current state of some of our vacancies and ways that we can find those new anchors and create some new attraction into our shopping district. And then on our education and workforce section, this is really focused on relying on our partners. So workforce development at the county level, partnering with UCSC, Cabrillo College, all of those partners who can help us create workforce development, workforce retention programs, looking at ways that we can broaden our employment base and really provide workers with the skills that they need to get into some of these higher wage jobs and to support the industries that we have here who are having trouble retaining their employees for whatever reason. And largely one of those major reasons is the workforce housing piece. So being able to support from the business development side, building more workforce housing, supporting employers who are looking at ways to maybe partner with others and just meeting those needs. That was something that we've heard for a long time and it was really present in our outreach most recently for this. So being able to support those workforce housing elements. And then for the specialist industry sectors topic, this is something that we might not think about too much in terms of Santa Cruz when you think of us as a tourism place, but we also have all these really incredible burgeoning businesses and they have a lot of space needs. So we have some limited industrial space and so we've seen a lot of businesses struggle to grow here in Santa Cruz or we've struggled to retain some of them just because of the lack of industrial space. So looking at how we can support the remodel of existing spaces, more development of it and also just what partnerships we might be able to create between businesses and between the university. So we can really retain those businesses here. And then finally our city services and processes. This is something that Derek touched on towards the end of his presentation. And this is also something we've been working on extensively over the past couple years. And we have really strong partnerships with our colleagues in planning and all of our different departments that touch the poverty process. So just continuing that work, my position was actually created business liaison to meet this need and so being able to track where people are in the process, get an understanding from maybe economic development where we're outside of the current system and weigh in on what that experience is for businesses so we can make sure that our marketing materials and our applications and our processes make sense to the community and that they're able to get into them quickly and efficiently. And also making sure that we're putting out enough information, you know, I don't think that we can over communicate what our processes are and how people can get help. So just continuing to do that work is very, very important. And then in terms of tracking our success, we will be monitoring the seven economic development indicators, new business licenses, fail tax revenue, POT, building permits, employment unemployment rate, real estate market data, and discontinued business licenses. This aligns with some of the tracking that we're doing through the interim recovery plan. And it will just give us a way to track on a quarterly basis how we're performing, how the local economy is performing, where are some areas of needs as we move through this strategy over the next five years. And with that, I will hand it over to Bonnie to talk about some of the overlap between this strategy and the interim recovery plan. Great. Thanks, Rebecca. And before I go into too much detail, I did want to back up just a second and talk about the overall needs that led to what's in the interim recovery plan and what's in our goals and our strategies going forward. And as Derek indicated, for the preparation and the data and the outreach related to the ED strategy, similarly, during COVID, we've had this regular feedback process in which we've been working collaboratively, as Rebecca mentioned, both with our neighboring jurisdictions, but with all of the organizations that Rebecca showed in that slide to make sure that we're getting real-time information about what our business needs are. So we have actually participated our own in the downtown ERC with over four surveys over the last year to our business community that really gave us comprehensive feedback on what the needs are and sort of drilling down on what can actually, as a city institution, economic development provide. So when we go into some of the more near-term specific projects in the downtown and citywide that are reflected in the interim recovery plan and that will come back to you in the next couple months ahead as each program and project is ready to move forward for your consideration, we'll give you more background on how we got to these, how we got to these points. But specifically, some of the top needs that have come out from the survey, you're going to see, as our city manager mentioned earlier this afternoon, sort of that support for commercial evictions. With the governor recently enacted the executive order allowing local jurisdictions to extend at a local level commercial, the moratorium on commercial evictions through the end of June. This is something that repeatedly on outreach we receive feedback on on this need for support to not be evicted and also to have rent support. Similarly, you've seen, we took to council at the last council meeting support for Senate Bill 314, the Restaurant and Bar Recovery Act, and that's something similarly that we receive feedback from a lot of that meeting, that ease of being able to get permitting for outdoor expansion during the pandemic and beyond for recovery and for trying to recoup some of the loss that they've experienced. So you'll see some of these that aren't specific programs but they're real-time needs that we're addressing through coming to council for consideration. We're working on a few things. A lot of the feedback we've received is on outdoor dining, making permanent permit and reduced regulations on how to streamline sort of the permanent parklet program. Low cost, low barrier access to capital is even with the PPP loans that are available will have more coming on that. There's still that need for gap financing and for low cost, low barrier interest financing. So that leads a lot, both to our NDC growth center cruise program that we're expanding countywide through the EDA grant that we've collectively received. So we're pretty excited about that and then contemplating doing the round two of the specifically of our micro loan resilience program based on feedback. Marketing, signage, both signage that were open. A lot of businesses have requested that need as well as signage that says and where your mask can be safe. So these are different things that we're working on with our partnering organizations including the downtown association, visit Santa Cruz and through the ERC and that you'll see some policy changes coming and recommendations coming in the months ahead. As Rebecca mentioned a few minutes ago, you've heard about sort of the need to do a sort of a pop up program or a vacant storefront program. I'll talk about that more in a second, but those are sort of the shortlist of some of the needs that have been expressed to us and that both is reflected in the data that we have available as well as the specific sort of stakeholder group and survey feedback that we've received. So that's sort of with that sort of quick overview. I wanted to talk just very briefly about what's in the interim recovery plan and the focus areas that's responsive to these needs. And specifically as you're aware, the three focus areas in the interim recovery plan are fiscal sustainability, downtown and other business investment and infrastructure. And so the four specific things that we have in this plan that relates to that that are current projects that are underway are ongoing of course is the work master plan, business support and infrastructure. And of course you approve today to grant applications that we'll be submitting to do some pretty serious expansion of public access on the wharf. Our library mixed use affordable housing project is another one of those that touches on several of these categories, both reactivating and reinvesting in public spaces in our downtown as well as providing critical affordable housing. That project in addition to Pack Station South and our Metro Pack Station North, you know collectively has the opportunity to bring up to you know between 250 and 300 affordable housing units in the downtown. So this both gets at addressing some of the critical need we have for affordable housing and the high cost of housing in our community. But it also starts touching on some of the workforce housing and the inclusionary ordinance modifications that we've taken to council within the last few months, specifically the school district employer sponsored housing and more to come on that way finding as Rebecca mentioned with a shout out to Amanda who's been working on that project. You do see now those signs citywide and some of our gateway signs. Next step on that, sex on that is doing some specific banner work across in our commercial areas around the city as well as some of the gateway signage for example on the wharf that we need to go through a public process to really vision what that signage will look like. These are all sort of infrastructure enhancement that you'll see in the coming years. Next slide. About some of the citywide projects and programs that we're proposing as a response to the ED strategy as well as the assessment certain needs assessment that we did. As I mentioned the permanent outdoor expansion parklet program. We have a very successful temporary program and overwhelming feedback we get is can we streamline a permanent program to make it much more accessible? How do you reduce the overall cost of what a permanent parklet and what those costs would be which can be anywhere from you know 40,000 you know in some cases up to 80,000 or more to create a permanent parklet that has you know a substructure you know steel or wood frame base and that's safe to the to the public. That's a high point of entry and it's cost prohibitive for many businesses certainly in this current climate. So we've been doing outreach. We have a very specific survey for restaurants that's out right now and we're getting feedback from them and from designers and actually getting some cost estimates on several template designs to be able to put together sort of a package program that's hopefully user friendly that we sort of pre vetted internally across you know our internal departments both planning building public works and a fire from a safety perspective so that we can hit the ground running with this program but potentially even source some of the materials or provide some small grants to sort of you know offset some of the cost of businesses and restaurants in this time being able to expand. So that's a program we're hoping to bring forward in the next month or two for you as you're aware we currently have the temporary permits go until October of this year but we want to make sure we get this program out so that businesses have time to apply and get that in place before our current temporary program expires. Rebecca already mentioned our grocery Santa Cruz loan program we're pretty excited about that and then the potential second round of our microloan resilience funding so we want to come forward to you and have a little analysis of some of the feedback we've received we've done that briefly before and some of the needs assessment looking at some of the new stimulus funding that's coming out similar to the 28.6 billion that's coming out specifically for restaurant relief we really want to look at what that available funding is and make sure that we're presenting something for your consideration that's not being met in another in another capacity. Additionally we're looking at some of the feedback we have is that need for commercial district marketing you know we have several very successful you know downtown is is one everyone's familiar with but our sort of burgeoning midtown you know some call it east you know eastside midtown shopping area as well as you know a developing shopping area on our west side and the swift street courtyard area and also on Delaware so really trying to support them some of that includes investing in some infrastructure particularly on the west side which is primarily you know an industrial area so if we want to do for example banners we need to make sure the polls are there to accept the brackets for the infrastructure things like that but shop local campaigns that we'll be working on with some of our area partners both on the downtown and the east side as well as through the ERC and visit Santa Cruz and then one program that you may have just started hearing about that will come before you in a just a larger capacity soon is our card program which is sort of that intersection between within economic development with our arts division and this is a city arts recovery design program which is a pilot grant program and we've been working with arts council about helping us with this program and what's really interesting about this program is this both helps and the goal is to help some of our you know our very vibrant artists and Santa Cruz is known as sort of the creativity you know sort of you know of the area cultural center and our artists are no exception we have an amazing artist community in Santa Cruz and the arts and recovery program is basically a call to artists to respond to help us respond to recovery efforts through art and so that could look anything like some activation of our vacant storefronts downtown some really creative murals it could be street performances that help activate spaces there's just a sort of a limitless ideas of how we could use this pilot grant program to help with some of our recovery efforts so we're pretty excited about this and one of the elements that you know a little bit more when we when we bring this forward in more detail is that this has sort of three program themes as part of it it's arts and economic recovery arts and community connectedness and restorative justice and arts and public health safety so those are our themes for this program and when we get proposals there will be a panel selection and then those proposals will be invited to more fully present their their project so hopefully we'll be able to fund a few of those in the in the coming in the coming months and year finally specifically for the downtown in addition to the citywide projects that I mentioned the vacant storefront activations and our master lease program is something that we've been working on you know I'd say over the last month we've been meeting with both our downtown brokers some of the property owners and getting feedback and also talking with event Santa Cruz and a couple other local sort of consultants on how best to partner to make this program successful so we're pretty excited we're hoping to bring this forward to you within the next month month and a half and the concept is that we get you know up to 10 vacant storefronts primarily on Pacific Avenue where we guarantee a certain cost per square foot and then we're responsible and take on some of the liability we're responsible for curating those spaces and getting getting the tenants in there and the activation so the majority of them would be retail pop-ups there may be a few a couple that are really trying to bring in some activity that experiential retail that Derek was mentioning earlier as well so for example we might even have a pop-up a little mini performing you know art sort of art recording studio or something like that or some of the ideas that have been have been popping up so we'll come back to you shortly with that program I will say that a couple of these programs do have a cost to them you know not insubstantial and the reason why we're still proposing that we invest in it some of these programs or that effect that it has on the surrounding businesses so for example in a downtown like ours that is incredibly vibrant when you have a number of vacancies in the downtown it has that effect overall on those you know our incredibly local independent sort of tenants and retailers that are open in our restaurants you know they're they're struggling they need the support they need that vibrancy they need that activity the more our community and visitors see how active our downtown is the better all of our businesses retailers restaurants will do so by filling those vacant spaces filling even just the storefronts if we don't have them all filled with pop-ups on a six month basis just getting them activated getting activities really just bringing activities to downtown is really going to help considerably so we're pretty pretty gung-ho on this and we'll present this to you shortly I already mentioned marketing sort of wayfinding beautification we have some major infrastructure projects in our cip budget that have been bond funded so some of those are funding for some of the larger infrastructure projects um Rebecca mentioned a revisioning of the library civic core project we have kicked that off what that is specifically is a commitment that we made to council over last summer to look at the existing library site and looking sort of in the context of a large sort of civic center of the city hall campus and sort of that civic center to our downtown of what that could look like in the future so that will be a public process that we're kicking off lower pacific avenue improvements downtown beautification and downtown alley improvements are all bond funded projects that we have in the cip and with the current sort of lens on covid recovery it's always been a we will get to these infrastructure projects and now the urgency is really here that we get to these projects within the next year to as part of covid recovery efforts to really reinvest in our downtown and link these with some of the affordable housing and market rate projects that are currently underway so that's a and I know that was a lot um the projects that are in our interim recovery plan and um that are relate to our economic development strategy and we're excited to present this to you today and um all of us are here to hopefully answer any questions that you have thank you obviously you guys don't have enough to do and you're obviously underachievers based on everything we just heard you know um yeah just uh comprehensive and um just really thankful um that we have your team working on this um myself and the other three mayors meet um every every other week and um um they're just you know the the cities in Santa Cruz county the other three cities they're just um very jealous that we actually have an economic development department I mean uh this is a quite an opportunity for us as a small city and um and Bonnie you and your team are doing an amazing job so I will go ahead and open it to council questions and comments and I've got council member Cummings council member Golder and and vice mayor Bruner with a lot uh to take in I just want to get a little bit background I for whatever reason trying to think back you know my early times in council I don't feel like I've ever heard anything about this plan kind of moving forward with you know getting to consult them and kind of where we're at today and so I thought and so I'm just wondering if you could speak a little to kind of how this came about to kind of where we are today and it looks like some of it was through you know there's a 2017 2019 plan so this might come out of that so I'm wondering if you could just provide us with an update on kind of how this all came about sure and that's a great question um yes um we did have a previous plan and we at that time it was a work plan um and as we went through it and we were looking at the next period and it was pre-covid you know we thought that it was really important but such a diverse economy that we have locally to make sure that um we were uh fully addressing the needs and not missing any opportunities um for supporting our businesses and our industries that we have here locally and so um that was the rationale behind going out and partnering um and we put you know we did a public process a request for proposals and went through the process of selecting strategic economics and um it you know as I said it really was to come and would have come uh I think in in early 2020 but for the delay of the pandemic and so um that's why there was a bit of a gap between our work plan and um our new um ED strategy but just recognizing what the needs are locally and wanting to make sure that we're fully addressing those and understand um what both the needs are as well as the opportunities thanks and I do have have a number of questions I'm going to try to hide some of them together so that you know there's it's not a question of going on and on forever um first question you know this is a pretty I feel like the topics that were brought so we're fairly broad so I'm just kind of curious what the prioritization will be or is it going to be a process for kind of prioritizing when certain things will be worked on and kind of how it's going to fit into this it was a little long it took a five-year plan right so that's right and so our prioritization is really focusing for the next one to two years on COVID recovery and for those major initiatives that um intersect you know sort of that are our nexus with an interim recovery plan so if you look at the projects in the interim recovery plan and you'll see you know sort of the downtown recovery that's specific to COVID recovery and some of the projects that I mentioned in the last few slides those are our priority projects for the next two years um some of the infrastructure projects we're trying to time with some of the downtown development to be the least disruptive um for our businesses downtown so we have uh for example we have uh bond funds set aside for beautification so whether it's you know working on sidewalks working on peseos as street trees overall sort of enhancement of street furniture downtown we're trying to time those to be the least impactful with the surrounding development so we'll be coming forward to you you know as these as these projects come forward I will say you know part of our issue and certainly because of the pandemic you know and as as Derek mentioned earlier we do have some capacity issues you know I wish we could take these all forward at once but we are a small team so there may be some opportunities that we present to you to be able to move some of these forward and we'll talk about how how we move those forward and and what's involved in that so those will be some decision points for you I would say over the next six months to a year the some of the larger ones around the industries if they're not time specific and when we have goals in them I mean we meet regularly with both our partners with the university you know ongoing and sort of the tech bioscience you know as those opportunities arrive you know we support both the organizations and are working with you know constantly applying for grants with other organizations so some of those will be if we get grant funded we'll be going full steam ahead on some of these other initiatives as well thank you one of the comments that I heard come up was um around the commercial eviction protection is that something that council will need to take action on or and because I think what I understood from when you were speaking was that the governor is allowed for local jurisdictions to make that extension and the governor didn't make that extension statewide and so is that something that we will need to have come back and to extend yeah so that is our understanding and and um Tony's words were out of an abundance of caution we want to take a city specific um action on this we had a previous action that we took back in June which allowed us to extend um our current protections as long as the state authorized us to do so um but we want to make sure that there's no question that we're supporting it which is why we want to take a specific action I think Tony's on so I'll let him answer that more directly oh I think that's exactly right it's pretty uh there's pretty good argument that the ordinance that was adopted by the council in June was extended by the governor's subsequent order I think it was um 80 20 um but we just don't want there to be any question about that so we're recommending that it be brought back to deal specifically with commercial uh tendencies as opposed to the way it was originally drafted it applied to both residential and commercial and so I guess my follow-up question that are we anticipating and that's going to come back at the next meeting yes development piece and so I'm just curious if you all have been in contact with some of the local unions around kind of what they're doing around workforce development as it relates to the trades um because those are well-paying jobs and I know that they've expressed for a lot of time that they struggle with bringing more young people into those these days so I just wanted that on the yeah and actually rosemary if she's on um just uh sent us an email today that she's been that it looks like we may be moving forward um with uh for workforce development with um let's see I mean we can see if I can pull it up rosemary are you on so we have sort of while I'm waiting to pull this up um we have been engaged um internally as we were talking you know uh you know a number of months ago about sort of project labor agreement the workforce development and a series of meetings um with businesses and with that need both for on you know um apprenticeship and workforce development so that's part of the scope for the year ahead is specifically to look at that and look at what trades and what what technical assistance programs you know whether it's through you know cabrio ucsc uh csu and and b of being able to support that so that is something that we'll be working on in the year ahead um like we're moving up in the process to have a civic spark scope for the next year will be workforce development so we'll all be sort of working on that together but when you refer to light industrial space I'm just kind of curious what that refers to as opposed to like some sort of heavy manufacturing space it's more of a physician development or flexible use space that's still not finished out to a high degree it could be used for another smaller artisan maker food production small scale kind of operation thanks and I'll just follow up with a few comments because I know I have a time and I have so many questions but um I know you know to the point that you that we're being made around um no businesses in other parts outside of the downtown and know there's been some and there's been some community members on the west side interested in creating a west side business district and so it'd be great to kind of get a sense of the kind of how that's moving I know in particular the new owner of mission west was interested in trying to set something up so there's a way to kind of give an update on either that or maybe you know have further outreach to understand you know what can be done to support that effort that'd be great um I've been hearing a lot about people moving out I know there's a there's an issue around kind of workforce retention and I've been hearing a lot about how a lot of people in California because of COVID and the cost of living and so I don't know how that's impacted our community but it might be worth there's a way that we can kind of try to capture some information on whether we're seeing um an out you know an outflow of people out of the community and whether that's kind of matched with influx of new residents coming in that might be interested to understand how that might be impacted our workforce um I know that get virtual was mentioned my understanding from last year was that get virtual was really there to support existing businesses and I wonder if there might be an opportunity to support people who want to kick their businesses off and how that can fit in also with the pop-ups so it'd be great to just get some feedback and get back on that I noticed the cannabis wasn't mentioned in terms of specialized industries and with that industry growing rapidly I'm just you know rather than increasing retail I think there's a lot of different aspects within that market that we could probably you know around manufacturing that might fit well within um you know kind of the growth of the industry and also just you know using the opportunity you know that Santa Cruz has had a long history and a fight for the legalization of cannabis so how we can kind of work to build that in and as I mentioned not so much I think we have plenty of retail but then you know around manufacturing testing all those other kinds of aspects of the industry that are needed for parklets and keep and like really supporting businesses with that because so many businesses have been able to with that and I just imagine that it's only going to help with tourism and everything moving forward to really have that kind of in our community and so with that I will uh yield my time to other Council Member Golder thanks to Bonnie and the team for that comprehensive presentation and I know you have tons on your plate but I just had one thought of something that was maybe left out an area of town that will be emerging as we move forward and that's the corridor along the rail trail I mean I just was thinking like if anyone's walked the High Line in New York where there's public art and there's you know gardens with native plants and there's you know little cafes with food for sale or things like that and so I just think to that end and I don't want to throw one more thing on your plate but if it comes up where the you know there's opportunities to redevelop areas along that corridor to make it more you know green friendly for biking and walking and you know I would I would like to see that too yeah I would be remiss if I didn't mention at this point since another division our apartment worked long and hard on our rail trail arts master plan so that is a plan that we have and that is something that you will see as each segment goes that goes forward thank you vice mayor Brunner council member brown and then council member Watkins I just wanted to say thank you to the economic development team Bonnie Lipscomb Dave McCormick Nathan Q Rebecca unit I mean truly the frontline for small businesses and very responsive I've been working with them through a lot of these initiatives and I thank you to strategic economics for adjusting and working with the department really to align with the COVID-19 goals and strategies and and implementing it with interim recovery plan and focus for small businesses and you know our business support sector so I'm very excited about the city arts recovery design the card pilot grant pro collaboration with the arts and the local artists and in our recovery efforts I think that's very exciting Bonnie is that opening up Friday March 12th with do you know when that opens up or where there's information about that currently is managing our arts and being updated timeline so I'm checking this room right now but I believe it is March 12th so we are looking at you know part of the process will be the call to artists for proposal and that's sort of part of the first step so Wednesday May 12th is it will actually go to the arts commission so that will be the first public meeting will be Wednesday May 12th and then the we'll have an orientation in early April for artists so that they know kind of understand the program the pilot program and then starting in mid-April and by May we should actually have the final list of recommendations for the pilot here I think these all of these I think there's what seven categories here very thorough and very hopeful and promising so I'd be happy to make a motion to accept the Santa Cruz economic development strategy report thank you vice mayor is there a second for that motion council member Brown yeah I'm happy to second and since I'm up next just ask I have a couple of questions I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who's involved in this who knew all this was going on like right right here next door the city hall I've been to over to your offices and I'm just amazed by what you all do what accomplish you know and the planning that goes into this but also all of that kind of action you know on the ground with businesses and so I just I wanted to ask a little bit about the light industry just to follow up on that so we have limited space available I get that but we do have it seems to me there's a lot of land over on the west side in particular in that industrial zone and so I'm just wondering as part of this process I imagine there have been conversations about developing those spaces that that don't aren't built out but are exist right less so in Harvey West and so I'm just wondering if there's like discussions with the property owners or potential developers about what you know what would be needed to kind of make that that kind of development happen over on the west side so that's one question and then with respect to the downtown front I'm so excited to hear about the plans that you have or the work that you're doing in that arena and because it's definitely a concern that I've had and I know others have had you know what's going to happen with the you know the empty storefronts and so my I guess the question I have is in terms of work with commercial landlord how that's going is there you know because it's just a different kind of relationship with businesses being in and out and you know the financial feasibility of that and all of those other things so I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and since I just thought of it I'm also going to ask if there's any conversation about what's going to happen with the Cinema 9 space because that's a pretty big space I'll talk about Cinema 9 first because we we have been engaged since that a sort of announcement first came out and surprised everyone every one of us including the owner although I will say with trends nationally wasn't a complete surprise so surprised that we didn't hear about it in advance so we have been in discussions with Sayuki about Cinema 9 and you know I have mentioned this previously but they do have direct theater experience they used to own Century 21 and so they're contemplating you know looking at long-term theater trends they're contemplating do they try to get another theater operator do they do it themselves or do they you know look at the future and you know come up with the different uses for that space and so they're kind of entertaining and evaluating everything right now we've connected them to a few and sort of working with our downtown association and our very actively engaged you know community have connected them to a few pretty exciting uses and they tour the spaces they're talking through and you know one of the things if it does ultimately go through as a theater is that they will want to serve which you'll see you know in theaters across the country now we're kind of slow in coming forward to this having that ability to serve more regular food service and sort of accompanying wine and beer so that's sort of a requirement for theaters because that's one thing that sets them apart from necessarily Netflix at home it's that sort of concept of you know being able to have that more greater experience for theaters so for theaters to survive they're really going to need that we did take that ordinance Rebecca worked a lot on that right sort of pre-pandemic to the council and actually Marty Ackerman worked on it with our theaters as well so we do have that ability to do that now but they you know individual theaters will still need to get that permit so we have told them we're happy to work on them with that to make that happen I think our priority number one is still to see if there's any viability for a theater for it maintaining a theater that's our number one priority these other uses just because of what that draw still I think has and that impact in a downtown you know that space is 20,000 square feet it's huge so you know we really need to be thoughtful about if it's not a theater what is it then so those are ongoing conversations stay tuned we're also specifically looking at palace and sort of the combined use of the space and what physical changes you know tenant improvements could potentially could be that could be kind of interesting so that's on that on the downtown storefront as I said we have been talking through both what from a perspective from a landlord are they willing to take that risk I mean that's why we're really approaching those that are vacant and we're really looking at a six-month increment so basically you we get it in there we're curating both sort of either new concepts that have great business plans we're reducing the risk for the landlord by guaranteeing a certain dollar per square foot and then the rest of it can be a percent on sales so the there's a potential there for the landlord to get almost full market rent but that reduces both the risk on the landlord side as well as the risk for the new business of trying to start a new business during the current sort of pandemic environment but it's intentionally only six months because you know if they're doing really well you don't really need the city in there anymore and we'll we'll get out and they'll they'll continue on and you know we'll support we'll support the program elsewhere but the idea is to really get that activation in downtown and really try to help jumpstart the recovery and then finally you ask a question about light industrial and you know some of the spaces particularly you know as we see in like the Delaware edition you know some of these things have projects they're you know really well poised you know you see that activity with Venus you know in Delaware and some of the other uses I think they're well poised to be able to move forward in some of those areas for their development on the Swiss Street courtyard I do think though it's a balance because we do want to preserve certain amount of light industrial manufacturing you know the recent announcement of Joby you know aviation I you know I want to you know there's any opportunity to get you know a portion of that five thousand five hundred thousand square foot manufacturing facility you know on the west side you know I want to make you know be able to help make that happen so I think we really are trying to balance sort of the need of emerging areas and recognizing that we still need to balance for some of these other uses that are still viable uses and really contribute a lot to the local economy both you know in jobs as well as revenue and Rebecca you may want to add to that yeah I think you covered that really well I'd also just add that some of the properties on the west side do have some environmental overlays that we have to contend with that you know might not be obvious to the naked eye but there are some some issues there but definitely working with those property owners to see you know what potential projects you could have and also just looking at some of our existing industrial properties and is there redevelopment potential there or ways to sort of reconfigure those spaces for the changing business operations and I think too on the Delaware edition we're always balancing sort of some of the development fees that come with new tenants some of those impacts so working with the property owners and the tenants to see how we can support you know traffic impact fees come to mind and things like that so there's some implications that can slow some of that progress but we're definitely there in those conversations I'm happy to support okay any council members yeah I realized that I'm just trying to thank you for pointing that out um I'm trying to just make sure every council member's got time to ask questions or make comments and then we'll go out the public process out the public comment council member Watkins thank you mayor and I um I appreciate as everybody else has already shared just our you know economic development team the way finding signs are awesome and the report is really thorough and I um just also want to call out that I think it really does follow a lot of the best practices in terms of just this constant feedback loop and um adaptability really as we move forward with these uncertain times I guess my question is um slightly a comment and a question and I know that we could probably spend a lot of time because economic development is so critical but I'll keep it to this one is one thing that we know is women have been disproportionately impacted by the economic recession and primarily women of color and in the tourism and hospitality type industries which we have and I know that that is something that as a nation we need to focus on in terms of big structural change and I'm all for that 100 percent and um sometimes change concerns local you can see what we can do here locally and so I'm wondering how um you know how that has come about in terms of your thoughts or what you've heard back from some of the business sectors and how at some point we can not necessarily change what we have here but maybe um add to it some sort of priority focus area on supporting women and women of color in our economic development strategies child care is an essential component of that and I know we also have a lot of vacant spaces and child care facilities are limited and difficult so just kind of wanting to hear what you guys maybe heard from our business community and some thoughts you might have on this topic yeah I'll start out and then Rebecca may want to add some to that you know we did have um you know as one of the categories for our resilience microloans for women um and and that was and BIPOC and so that was 50 I think it was like 56 57 percent of our loan recipients met one or both of those categories so um that was definitely a focus um that's become a focus as we're sort of moving forward we're having that lens both from the IRP standpoint but all the work that we're doing we're really you know working as a city as a city team to try to integrate sort of these practices and lenses we look at programs and projects going forward so you'll see that in our card program our arts and recovery design pilot project as well at just one of the themes that we're inviting for applicants going forward so that's just something that we're trying to integrate in all the work that we do thank you thank you uh council member counter johnson yes thank you I'd like to echo the sentiments of my colleagues and thank you and your team for this um incredible work and the work forage um a lot of exciting pieces I was really excited to see the workforce development portion and linkages the career pathways so I had a question about that and then a comment um just in terms of career pathways are we looking at um connecting with our university colleges are we going back into the maybe not k through 12 but the 9th through 12th education system and the ctes that are part of our education system so how does that look that's a question and then I'll wait for your answer and then I have another comment I'm actually going to defer first to strategic economics on sort of overall trends and what they're seeing and um and then we'll go kind of go from there okay right so for workforce development strategies um they we are looking at things that go all the way from working with youth in internships and mentoring opportunities and creating those longer term career pathways and certainly adult education is a component of that too so we would see the school district as being a really important partner um as well as Cabeo college and some of the other workforce development organizations that are already in Santa Cruz and the labor organizations as well so I think that the way we have been looking at this is just um you know again this is contingent on capacity and opportunity to implement but really thinking about starting to have those conversations in partnership with these other organizations to develop those projects and initiatives and have more of a convening role in coordinating with all of these different organizations and I would just add to that that if we're successful and it seems like we're on track to give the civic um to receive a civic spark fellow it is a full-time position focused on workforce development so I think we'll have that opportunity to really work on the scope and make sure we're addressing what the needs are of our community thank you um so um my other sort of comment question is um thinking about youth and the needs of youth and how they can contribute as we are re-envisioning our retail in our downtown in our midtown west east side space um something council member Cummings said sort of just brought this this thought process on around our um growing cannabis industry um and and we know that there's revenue that can be generated there as well as our alcohol industry um and I would hope that we can balance um over saturation and and um not go in that direction you know to ensure that that access and availability of substances to our underage youth is not increased through this note you know this new path that we may be taking um I mean I think I think we can balance I think we can do both but just wanted to really call that piece out the numbers show that we have some of the highest rates of binge drinking and um cannabis youth among our underage youth here in our in our county so as we are envisioning what the retail and what the direction can be um one of the needs of the youth how can they contribute to this and um ensuring that we don't increase access availability thank you so much for your work okay thank you um I'm just going to do a time check we're running about 15 minutes late on the item but um we have a cushion um between uh we're just eating into our little bit of a dinner break that we have and I do know we have a pretty big item uh behind us uh behind this item um council member Cummings did you have any more comments or questions okay um I just like so after we get up to the public is there anyone in the public that would like to make comments now is the time for members of the public who are interested in speaking to the council on item number 23 the Santa Cruz economic development strategy for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be I present excuse me if you are uh here I see some hands raising please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes and I see uh caller number with the phone number and you need in five three six two go ahead and welcome there you go we can you are available thank you hi good evening Judy Grunstra and um a lot of uh material has been presented to you this evening um and um this continues to be a top-down process and I'd like to remind council that not everyone's on board with a hundred percent of these plans specifically the wharf the farmer's market move the process that arrived at the necessity and wisdom of demolishing a library that can in fact be renovated so please step into dismiss the positive alternatives that uh many community members are trying to present to you uh different vision of downtown uh don't think of this as being obstructionism but rather real concern for the future livability of Santa Cruz uh downtown and the value of public space uh which contributes a great deal to a community's health physical health mental health and economic health uh so you know many people have different ideas of what uh can be downtown there um and uh Bonnie referred to the disruption of downtown and I thought about what that's going to be like uh in the coming months and years when there's a great you know number of uh large projects going in and that is going to definitely be destructive to downtown businesses so hopefully there'll be some coordination there about you know that won't just keep people out of downtown thanks a lot good evening thank you next up I have a caller with the name of Rosa please go ahead and press star nine and start star nine to unmute excuse me star six to unmute yourself go ahead please um mayor I I tried to unmute her and it says I have to promote her to a panelist so I'm gonna do that for one second okay she's gonna be shopping as a as a panelist Bonnie I'm on the computer okay yes that is mine go ahead I just want to say um you can hear me right yeah I just want to say that um I like that you have an economic development plan I like that um that you have staff to work on that I like that you have all these beautiful pictures in your background that show Santa Cruz the lovely Santa Cruz that it is with the trees and the hills and the ocean and I like the way that you're thinking about housing for families here and I like that you're thinking about the design and addressing the needs of the community I want you to all remember that when I speak on item agenda 24 thank you thank you any other members of the public who want to address the council on item number 23 the Santa Cruz economic development strategy I am not seeing any additional hands so I'll bring it back to council um if you don't mind council member Cummings I might just say a couple things um I had one question um regarding some of the data in the report um one thing struck me uh in the some of the data in the back of the report it looks to me like um you know we have about 63,000 residents um and it looks like we pretty much are right around 29,000 folks are employed and so I'm just curious is that um so you know that in some some ways that would be concerning that half your half your residents um are not employed um so I'm just curious is that a reflection on um sort of the you know the the amount of for example people who maybe are retired living here or is it um the fact that you know in many ways we have some of our population is obviously made up of students that may be you know full-time going school I'm just curious if you could uh just speak to that I'm looking at figure 13 which is on page 48 of the report and it's a little table that says um workers employed it's talking about commute patterns but I was just kind of struck by the um number of workers versus what I know of as our population just curious about that and um if you could speak to that just very very briefly I guess that's for Garrick that's a good question so I don't know the exact breakdown of uh who might not you know might be included in working and not working in Santa Cruz but I think you just hit on a lot of the uh for big ideas I mean so anyone under 16 wouldn't be working most people under really you know 20 early 20s wouldn't be working or would have parts on jobs there's a lot of students in Santa Cruz as you said and then uh anyone uh who's retired obviously wouldn't be included in that number so that doesn't be the typical causes and so your your your analysis of our sort of our economic base you're not showing that we are it doesn't appear that we're underemployed by any means I mean it does seem like our employment basis is fairly strong um just curious about that those who want a job seem to be pretty well able to get a job in other words yes yeah and I haven't seen the latest unemployment numbers for Santa Cruz but my understanding is that it's in pretty well yeah yeah okay good I just wanted to just clarify that um and then um yeah I I'm also just very interested in um really understanding um how we can attract more green jobs um Bonnie to your point really understanding what uh what opportunities might be there and making sure that we retain those that light industrial space I mean so much of it used to be over in Harvey West that's largely um uh you you know using it's been used I know by a lot of cannabis businesses which is great and obviously some schools have moved into those into those buildings as well so it does seem like light industrial is a really important focus area for us as we move move forward and um so I'm really I was really excited to see that kind of come out in in the uh plan and I just want to thank you and all your staff for the thoroughness of the plan um I does it does seem to provide us a really clear roadmap and um so thank you for for that uh councilmember Cummings did you have additional comments that's like I just had one quick question as it relates to the civic if we end up receiving a civic sparks fellow is that work plan also going to come back to the council or would it be better for us you know around workforce development if we're not um make any recommendations that we make those today I you know this is Rosemary uh submitted this and she she is you know really taken that on so I don't want to speak for Rosemary I'm just looking at the communication that came today on it I imagine um you know this part of this was coming out of the work that you know she was really doing with you as when you were mayor and sort of following up on that work and moving forward and sort of recognizing that the real need I think for long term for you know some of the trades that we have in the community and that real need particularly in you know in water and public works etc to have have those trained and apprenticeship so I you know I believe that this is something that you will have you know future opportunities to weigh in for sure I don't think it's just we hit the ground running and you hear about it when it's done I I think that there will be engagement okay that's all I have and thank you all for all your hard work and bringing this forward and and I just wanted to take a second to to you know thank strategic economics again um but also to acknowledge you know the hard work that Rebecca you know put into sort of finalizing this report and bringing it forward and some of the the supporting team that you don't hear about because we are a small team and we were really trying to focus that this was the business aspect and not the whole department but because of the nature of our department being so small it really is almost everyone on our department is helping implement you know these programs and projects as we go forward so I definitely want to have a shout out to our entire department and then from there you know we don't do it alone so it's our partners it's our community it's the internal you know our other departments within the city so we're all we're all doing this together and we're that's what makes it all possible so thank you thank you Bonnie and thank you to your team so I have a motion from council member Brown seconded by council member Watkins and Bonnie we'll go ahead and do a roll call though and the motion is to accept the Santa Cruz economic development strategy report all right thank you um council member Watkins hi Helen Tori Johnson hi that motion passes unanimously and um it is 417 I know we have a number of people who've been waiting on the next item um I'd like to give the council about five minutes we've been sitting for since 10 30 so I'd like to give us about um let's take five let's take 10 minutes um I know we could all use that for just a short break um and we'll reconvene at 4 425 427 actually I mean yeah 427 thanks 10 minutes everybody council members are excuse me when council members return if you wouldn't mind just turn on your camera uh we will go ahead and get started okay uh next up on our agenda is going to be item number 24 which is the objective development standards test fits and general plan slash zoning reconfiliate reconciliation and community engagement for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order of this item will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council we will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action okay and today our presenter is Sarah Noyce she's a senior planner with our planning department and Matt Van Hoyt with is also presenting today uh and he is a principal planner so welcome Sarah and Matt hi good afternoon council members can everyone hear me I'm using a new microphone today okay great um that we have been working on for um a few months now and uh we are coming back at this point in time because when we were at the city council in um january of 2020 they were talking about of this project to develop objective zoning standards and there was there has been and continued to be this sort of question about whether the city should also be engaging in a project to amend the general plan at that point in time we talked about how um that would be a good time to check in and the recommendation of the planning commission based on that analysis and we're also going to be covering the community engagement strategy that we are um is planning to use with doing this project to update our zoning code and create objective zoning standards for multi-family housing so just a little more background so I understand we have um a bunch of new folks who who may not have been following this project from you know back since august or perhaps and we also have two new council members that want to acknowledge that around the city has an adaptive general plan it's the 2030 general plan uh it was adopted in 2012 and that is the general plan that's in effect and um regulates land use development in the city currently the city's zoning code doesn't implement the general plan typically there is a period of time after a general plan is adopted while a city is you know adopting a new zoning ordinance to implement the general plan locally that effort was called corridor plan and um you know it ran into a lot of concerns in the community people were really concerned about the amount of change that was included in the general plan and um really weren't happy with the direction that that plan was going so um there hasn't been much work done on that since 2017 and officially in august of 2019 the city council um canceled that project directed staff to piece work on it and to begin a new effort to reconcile you know the between our general um that coincided with some state law changes um sb 330 the housing crisis act for 2019 and that's a law that really um limits the discretion that local jurisdiction have in approving housing projects over 2019 we got directions from the city council to pursue a grant to create objective development standards so we went ahead and um you know submitted our grant application got our funding resources and then just as we were getting ready to launch our that was in the spring of 2020 and that the way any of us expected it to go so it took us a while to really to get our rp out and get our consultant team on board we did select a great consultant team in the summer of 2020 we're working with urban planning partners as our prime consultant doing the um planning and urban design and overall project management strategic economics is on our team to support the economic analysis components and we're all they're also working with inner ethnica who is a community outreach firm that really focuses on making sure that outreach is both language translated and also culturally appropriate to reach diverse populations so we're really excited about working with this team we use the sb 330 says that an objective standard involves no personal judgment so it's it's not a matter of reducing shame let exceed 30 percent of the neighboring property on you know december 15th of a given year so it's it's delineated very in advance by both the decision maker and the idea behind us that the state is pushing is that the number of for every jurisdiction in the state may actually issue that the state is trying to address is this total number of housing units um that are being built each year in the state ideally that also then increases having these objective standards increases certainty for both the community and for developers so if we all know exactly what the standards are then we all know what we should be expecting on when we were thinking about how we're going to do this project here in santa cruz um we're focusing on zoning standards for multi-family housing um and we are focusing also specifically on we want to make sure these standards work for rental housing they'll apply to both rental and for sale housing um but we are um most concerned with being an equity and social justice lens to this work there is a lot of history in zoning that has created really unjust outcomes and we think this is one tool that can help address that and we're also going to be focusing on equity through our community engagement process and really focusing on reaching populations that haven't been included in past planning work so i'll talk about that more towards the end of my presentation today i also want to mention we are focused on equity and on smoothing the you know smoothing the process for multi-family housing development to help the city meet its housing goals and i do want to acknowledge that this project itself doesn't involve changing any of the maps about where that housing would happen or how much housing might happen on one property versus another that would be another project to make changes to the map so i put this picture on here just to give an example of the specificity that we could get the subjective standards so this is an excerpt from the city's downtown but it talks about you know putting a minimum recess you know that's no more than you know 40 percent from one end of the building to the other it talks about the top floor being 60 percent of the area um of the floor below and not more than 60 percent of the building length so you really you can see how these types of standards can really be written in a very specific way that can really have some control over the urban design that we have kind of lost by not being able to use our design review processes that we have previously relied on we're not making any changes to the map so i just want to to share this map in particular this is the general plan mixed use the land use designation these are the areas that were designated for change in the 2030 general plan and these are the areas that you are that we hear concerns about from the community and primarily we hear concerns about this mixed use high density designation which is the um which are the parcels that are shown in brown you'll see that they're concentrated along soquel avenue and then in two nodes on water street and this land use designation allows um like these these are the maps these are the areas that were designated for change the areas that are shown in white here mostly didn't change i'd also just like to know um i think in the letter it mentioned that the mixed use visitor commercial it mentioned the ocean street was designated for mixed mixed use medium density and i'd also just like to note that ocean suit also has a um that darker orange color is mixed use visitor commercial but the orange and the brown parcels allow this like more intense level of development than we allow elsewhere in the city process in developing new zoning standards um so first of all we just as planners and consultants we want to understand does zoning and the standards that are in the general plan rather you know can we actually reach these maximum capacities that were required to sort of accommodate under sb 330 um because once we understand if what you know what we have then we can kind of understand if we you know might need to be amending the general plan because really 2.75 far um is like bigger than anything we've seen anywhere bigger than what we have downtown like we you know until we put these things together with all of the zoning standards so the step back the parking requirements the you know shading standards that we do have already in our code until we put all those things together we don't really have a sense of how they work together so um we wanted to spend a little time focusing specifically on this mxhd designation we know it's been the concerns from the community so there are two pieces that we look at we look at a physical component so looking at a sort of just a basic building envelope of like how could you set a building on a piece of property with these standards and just sort of a basic layout like could you get cars in and out could you meet parking standards and then there's an economic component so assuming that you can lay out a physical site um what's the cost per unit um and then as you start to you know consider different scenarios how do that how do those different scenarios affect the cost per unit so we looked at all of that just mentioning again we focused on rental housing specifically and the whole other host of complications and um we are really focusing on what's our how can we get those all of those sites in the general plan area zoning of community commercial and doing just some basic you know like I described basic building envelope layouts you can read stories would be required and currently the zoning only allows three you know we noticed that the in on both the large site and the small the residential units were really subsidizing the commercial component in the mixed use and in both cases the only residential developments were less expensive to develop so that's something we want to be thinking about as we're as we're thinking about you know how much in these mixed use districts we do want to keep commercial space you know preserving space for local businesses is important to us and it's one of the goals set by the council um and so what's that right amount to preserve for local businesses for commercial and retail development um on these sites in setbacks maneuver and you know physically fit everything on a smaller site and in this test it kind of turned out that some of those may really not work very well for mixed use they may not support they may not be very likely to develop I guess to redevelop if we're um really committed to keeping mixed use on all of those properties you know those standards are really pretty much in line with best practices in the state and the region and you know seem to work pretty well in these scenarios but those requirements for retail parking are still pretty high and they need some attention through this and this security details you know we have staff and this is that 2.75 FA developing the property I mean the the prices started to shift from 400,000 below 400,000 up to 530,000 dollars per unit just that we complete the zoning first this work on zoning and creating these objective standards before we consider moving into doing a general plan land use amendment that would move some of that intensity around in the city doing this project on objective standards is going to provide more insight and it'll be really which will be really useful if we move into a you know the council does decide to move into a general plan amendment process you know as we were looking at the test this is to be completed in november of this year so that's a design and gaining back some of this control that we've kind of lost at the 330 is was proposed under the current standards for cc zoning so this is not a site you can't figure out the financing so to me this is just so these lower intensity sites are just really challenging right now you know given the current for housing units it's just I don't know if this project is actually going to happen because we'll get into it but figure out how to get this developed urban planning partners one of the reasons we selected them as rp really talked about three priorities we're going to focus our efforts on it's the latinx community low and moderate income households and university students that they're involved well we're going to make targeted smaller meetings to meet with those folks we're also collecting you know demographic info at every one of our engagement events to just see who we're meeting and who we're missing to create a focus group with university students because none of them came to our webinars so we can set that up and do that make that happen and make sure that those voices are included in this process focusing on making sure that meetings are convenient culturally appropriate providing stipends and and stipends and incentives to participate and we're working with several partner organizations in the community excuse me we're working with um far as veneto to reach our latinx community we're working with the ucfc student government and we're also reaching out to um we're working with capital charities and TAB to reach sort of the our lower income community members for the next we also want to make sure we're providing our community with information information about related to housing so ensuring that people are really informed about the top three facts they provide can really be implemented and used in the process and then we also just want to add to the discussion on housing so there are want to bring in this piece about systemic racism and privilege and we're getting ready to have our first community event later this week where we're going to be making this presentation about you know what is the history of zoning how did we get to this place where we are nationwide locally what's the history behind that who was it designed to serve and how how do we step into that history and own it and move forward with it so our community engagement process um first is to inform listen and understand so we're gonna be helping the community learn about what is the state law that we're operating within and then hearing what the community concerns are and um so we can start to um think about how we might be able to address some of those concerns as as we develop the standards and move into defining and measuring community characters so really drilling into like what is it that makes Santa creatures of our area that we want to preserve and reflect in new buildings um you know what are the most important things that we want to see when we see some of these really key opportunity sites we develop you know um we want to make sure that they reflect where Santa Cruz is going um so then our third the third phase is to shape and refine the objective standards so once we've sort of gotten this feedback from folks um that they've been able to give to us in an informed manner and we'll develop these you know preview the work and bring it back to the community and make some further refinement before bringing it through to public hearing and then we have a fourth phase which is our ongoing effort which is maintaining a website and um keeping that content there updated and relevant so that the community engagement outcomes will be the following that the discussion about housing in Santa Cruz connects the project to state housing legislation systemic racism and non aesthetic elements of what makes Santa Cruz um this is a reach goal I have to say like I'm really excited about this this is um something we have not really attempted to do with zoning before to really connect it back to this history and to these other equity features about housing I also think it's really important for the city to be reaching in this way and um where we're going to get with this um number two we want to ensure that voices of underrepresented populations have been included and heard and reflected in the final product we want to um number three we're hopeful that the community understands what an objective standard is and why they're important how they're used and um what they can do and what they can't do and then fourth we want to be sure that the community sees their input reflected in the final objective zoning standards when they're integrated into the municipal code and has made this recommendation that the city council make a motion directing planning and community development staff to complete the objective standards for multi-family mixed use housing project before pursuing any action to amend the land use pattern established by the adopted 2030 general plan and provide comment and feedback on the community engagement strategy staff is available for any questions thank you sarah for the presentation i'll go ahead and open it up for council uh questions at this time council member golder okay so thank you for that presentation i was just wondering when you said provide stipends for community participation what does that mean um so essentially paying people to participate so um that could be in the form of a raffle so we have a meeting on thursday coming up and we're doing two raffles we're raffling up a 25 gift card to the ferv and a hundred dollars to newly um it may also be that certain focus groups we might actually provide people with like 50 gift cards for participating in a focus group okay um and then one thing i know that you know uh people probably from my base would have to say about um your process and i think it all sounds great it's just they're the one component i think that people might have a problem with is uh the the the um the university students and that a lot of them might just be here for two to four years and then having this long term impact on land use um when you know unless it i'm happy to hear that you were going to provide some background and things like that but they might not have the um knowledge that that um somebody that's been in the community for decades would have and so i would appreciate um you know making sure that these focus groups are balanced and um and and um you know i don't know any other way to say that but but you know yeah no that makes sense if i could just respond real briefly um you know yeah i university students these are typically younger folks they've probably not been involved with the city before who knows if they're even going to stay in Santa Cruz and we're going to have a student population here for the foreseeable decades and so we want to understand what are the unique housing needs that students have that maybe families have different needs um sure you know i understand that i just yeah i get what you're saying i get where you're going i just um i'm i'm cautious i'm a little cautious about okay that for the presentation um really really glad to see the equity and social justice approach and lens that we're taking with this process um i have some specific questions around the outreach and engagement um are maybe i should just ask them all first that should be more efficient um our our call cabrio college community college students as part of the university students those are oftentimes our um local youth who have grown up here and will like maybe will stay here um i'm a transplant but um uh so our community college is included in that um i saw in the report that interactive website is part of the outreach and engagement will that also be in Spanish um in social media uh a part of the approach in order to engage the younger youth population um i saw that stipends uh were offered for Latinx community but i'm not sure um that i saw that it was for low-income community members as well might have been in there and i might have just missed it and i'm looking at the questions i wrote them out i think those are my my specific questions around outreach and engagement for now sure um so those are all really good questions thank you thank you are included in university students we were careful not to say usb students and question because it reminds me that so far we have really only connected with usb so um we do need to make an effort to outreach to cabrio as well so thank you for that reminder um the website will be available in Spanish the whole city website actually can be translated into Spanish and so within that um you know it'll be available in Spanish all of our publicity materials and you know anything we it's available in both English and Spanish we've already created one um like housing one-on-one guys it's essentially like a bunch of terminology pieces so folks can start to get the vocabulary that we use in this line of work and that's been translated in English and Spanish so we will continue to work on that i don't think that every single document we produce is going to be available in Spanish to these the big key primary ones will be and um and our outreach events so like i mentioned we're having an event this thursday that's the english language event and then um that event involves some community speaker presentation about history of housing policy and um the Spanish language event is going to be two weeks after that on the 24th of march and that gives us time to dub their portion of the presentation into Spanish ensure that the exactly the same information is presented to both and then social media we are using social media to do publicity for our event and then also thinking about um you know this next phase project when we move into sort of um defining the character of Santa Cruz a lot of that is going to be done online and using social media tools to um either push people to surveys or like bring the survey into um we're exploring what all the various options are and like how we can be sure that we're able to get the data out but that is the that is the goal and the intention is to make sure that we're using those so that we can um reach these new constituencies great just just a quick follow-up question um but do our english event have primal genius interpretation availability right now so this event this first event that we're doing we are not providing that because we're doing a separate both events will be fully recorded and then provided available on our website for anyone who's unable to attend so we are only offering them one time um so we're going to make sure that they're recorded and then when it's posted it's posted in like you know bite site like useful increments of times it's not just like here's a one and a half hour webinar of everything um we have in the past sometimes when we do live meetings we'll provide simultaneous translation and it's and we actually think that what might be more effective is creating meetings that are specifically for that population and then going and working with community organizations that are already plugged in there to provide them and really just make a meeting that's just for them so um member brown council member Cummings and then council member Watkins thank you uh so I also have some questions or I guess there are questions at the moment uh around the outreach process and council member Calentari Johnson got some of those answered so thank you um in terms of just as a follow-up to the outreach process to targeted communities um you mentioned some some organizations that are going to be helping with that and I think that's great you know they're all quite capable and knowledgeable uh I'm wondering if because it seems to me that casting as wide as possible will be important and I know that's your intention so if if we have recommendations on other stakeholders or representative groups that might be able to help with that kind of outreach how would we just send them to you Sarah that you you can incorporate that into the the plan yes read those books okay great um thank you um I also wanted to ask um and this is more this is not so much a process question but um I I have a question around the objective standards uh you know the our ability to how it is that we you know are constrained and at what kind of possibilities we have in that process and so I'm going to have a lot more questions about that later on down the road and comments um but just wondering um in terms of how you are approaching the because I hear webinars and I think that's a one-way transfer of information and um I know that there's other other stuff that's going to happen but um how you're approaching like setting the table for those conversations to give folks who who participate kind of um a wide latitude to to get creative in their input about how to do this um because most of the information we get is kind of says well you kind of can't almost do anything right and so it's hard to think about how to within that framework um you know really come up with uh you know create and have some creative thinking so I'm just wondering if you have like how you're thinking about that element of the outreach process how to set the table for those conversations so there's a couple of things there and so first of all um you know you all have what is intended to do what it actually does you know we want to create an informed population that can provide informed feedback so that's you know one component of it is understanding state laws and and the effect that they have how we have done development up until now you know because it is a change it is different even if something meets the standards today the way it's processed and the outcomes are a little different than they were two or three years ago this is the webinar this is the one way like push out of information we're launching our website is pushing out of information and so we start to define that community character asking people to really think about their neighborhood like what is it that you love about your neighborhood what is it that you love about no way that you don't live but you like wish you could you know tell me about all of those defining characteristics and as we get those um you know we're working with this with a really great team with a really great urban designer and there will be processes sometimes there'll be like small group meetings where we can really like take so you know all of you have been informed you've been part of our process and like we've been hearing these things from you know other members of the public we're trying to address all these things and we've kind of come up with like a couple different ways that we can maybe address it and we'll discuss those and kind of get some feedback because you know partly because it has a different focus partly because it's you know we're life in a pandemic it's not our traditional outreach process you know we're not just having like a bunch of big series of community workshops there are going to be there are going to be some times where you know people will provide feedback and then you know the next time maybe they personally are involved just when we have a draft of the standard and then we're getting feedback about the happening in smaller group conversations and behind the scenes and I want to be really clear that um you know there will be big community outreach about when we have a draft of these standards so that we can take all of that feedback you know you told us what was important to you about Santa Cruz and you know we put that together with these other like kind of what I'm looking for like almost mathematical standards that we have to make them done and we have a lot of work to do so um some of that work is going to have to be done by smaller groups of folks rather than bringing everything that we have every separate process to the whole broad community. Partly requirement and so I'm just curious opportunity where we can address that because I have heard you know for example there's certain types of businesses in the community where you know having that retail requirement may not be if it's a universally applied there's certain businesses that might be in that exempt so for example you know requiring you know bars to maintain a certain number of parking spaces well you know I think we could all agree that we we would like to discourage people from dragging in driving so if you have an establishment like that that's trying to open you know why would you require them to have parking spaces which ultimately could be encouraging for people to drive and so and then also you know and thinking about you know I'm thinking in particular about the east side and you know and even the west side to some extent but you know we have businesses in these districts and there's an opportunity kind of for this shared kind of parking model you know how can we try to you know better refine our retail partner requirements so that you know similar to what we did with residential we got to minimize either the cost or try to get businesses to kind of work together to absorb those costs but they're less for businesses moving forward and so is this process or is this part of the objective standards are we able to get at that yes so when we when we first brought the contract forward to the council for approval we had had two tasks in there related to parking that we had marked as optional because we were like you know we just updated our parking standards like maybe we don't need to do this big parking analysis and then we got to you know this point in the process well you know when this was at the staff stage with the test sets and we were like yeah I think we should go ahead and do those parking standards because you know clearly that it really affects some of these mixed youth projects in like a really substantial way it's like on the large site you had to add a whole level of parking like a whole floor of building got used up for parking I mean and that's like on that large site we analyzed that was like 48 housing units that you couldn't build because you had to park the retail space that we had included we will be looking at that one I think it's really good that your students and young people who are normally not as engaged in these conversations because I think it is really important to understand if we're going to keep a university in our community how are students being impacted and I know that you know there's a lot of people who come from outside of Santa Cruz they go to UCSC they end up staying and really contributing to the economy and to the culture of this community and so I think it's really important that that they're also included in these conversations because you know just because the money comes from somewhere else doesn't mean they're necessarily going to leave and and then the other piece of that is I appreciate the equity social justice lens on zoning and the outreach to kind of marginalized voices I would in current is maybe also reaching out to the NAACP and then the Santa Cruz County Black Coalition for Justice and Racial Equity ensuring that we're including the black voices and and I think also just reaching out to other groups that may fall under the kind of black the black and business people of color categories because I feel oftentimes I think that if you directly reach out to those groups there's a higher likelihood that you'll have more people from those groups actually engaging and so whether that's people from our Muslim community or black community or Latino community or LGBTQ community really targeting those the groups that you work with those members of our community could be a really good way of making sure that their voices are included in these conversations rather than just a broad kind of come-on-come-all approach yeah that's really good feedback thank you and um those are all my comments so thank you great council member Watkins thank you I think a lot of my questions and comments and sort of appreciation of the social justice approach to this as well as the acknowledgement of history and sort of redlining and what that's meant for equity you know in our in our community but beyond that it's so important so thank you for for including that one other suggestion to suggest a group is the ELAC you know the English learner advisory committees at the schools will help some of the families yeah okay and um and certainly the community bridges right down in the beachbox community but I can email you if I have more suggestions I guess I have a question in regards to when um when this strategy is fully implemented and then ultimately adopted in the interim what are some of the tools that we could use or look at to help kind of mitigate some of the concerns that we've heard from the community around certain developments that are under this sort of standards we have now if any or have you thought of any yeah so um I was wondering when this question would come up I know we got a fair amount of correspondence I imagine there are several folks on the line that are waiting to talk about 831 water submitted um it made it clear they're they're planning to apply I want to understand their preliminary application isn't exactly complete yet but isn't far away from being complete um and so what are our options for addressing properties but other properties that might be the planning director to jump in if I misspeak but I'm going to take a shot at this time there is not a lot that we do not have a lot of schools available that the state law is really clear that when a preliminary application is deemed complete that whatever standards are in place at that moment in time are the standards that apply to the project um and then add on to that the additional piece that every show um bonuses in the number of units projects is extremely limited spot rezoning or like spot general plan landings designation amendments these masks that we have is not you know we'd be looking for receiving sites for that development capacity um we'd be then working with those receiving neighborhoods also about what was changing in their neighborhood my review involved maybe nine if we split to the you know if we miss a meeting date in November and split to December but um I can't imagine amending a general plan faster than that typically an amendment to the general plan I would think even if it's like really focused or limited I would expect it to take 12 to 18 months just because of the environmental and review that's involved more than anything else I mean and also that's a really big community conversation to sort of switch that around so um the tools that we have are really the tools that we're going to be working with and you know we do have things like you know tools like development agreements that we can sometimes use as like incentive for developers so adjust things or change things around um under SB 330 they can get their approval without doing that so it's um you know unfortunately that's just the reality of it my regret with this project is that's a pandemic hit and it's you know I wish we were finishing now I feel that was the timeline we're supposed to be on and pandemic life made everything go slower so um it's just where we are I appreciate that thank you for your for your response to that go ahead yeah a couple quick comments too um to the point of um some of your outreach um I would probably add copa to your list of that would be oh I'm not familiar with them any lgbtq group so that would be the yeah those would be the two and then there's there's also the glbtq plus alliance in town as well so just a couple of groups that probably could be some real input from that community what I think I'll save any other comments for after public comments so I just want to make sure uh no other other uh council members at this time have comments or excuse me question looks like we're good to go okay we'll move over to public comment uh now we will take public comment on item number 24 if you are interested in commenting on objective standard test fits and general plan slash zoning reconciliation and community engagement press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes so I have a number of folks with their hands up the first person to speak is Sue Terrence I would like very quickly to ask uh for a clarification do we have any objective standards in place in this interim period before we um get new objective standards this Terrence all what I'll do is um we'll log that question and typically we don't have staff answer questions during um public comment but we'll certainly add that to the list and I'm sure staff would be happy to answer that okay then I would like to ask um you know our current standards say that 55 units is the maximum number of units on uh an acre this site at 831 is 0.9 not even an acre um current standards are 39 feet this project is 59 feet our neighborhood is in favor of development affordable development we would support 100 percent affordable units here but these are units that are 342 square feet we don't really um believe that it's going to serve the workforce that desperately needs how to sing in this community um this Terrence I'm just gonna also we we can't we can't take public comment on the project at Water Street we can only take public public on the on the develop on the um objective standards item we can't take public comment on the item not on the agenda thank you so we also understand that um you know we are in this never never land um before objective standards are in place but the community needs to be assured about the health and safety of the developments before they're okayed if there are serious and valid and justified concerns about hydrology and geology the city would be remiss in abrogating abrogating their responsibilities for protecting the people who are here we want the development that's safe thank you very much so I'll next uh speaker will be uh ending in six four two four and I just want to remind folks that um maybe some folks are here to discuss the watershed project but unfortunately we really need to to lead keep your um what uh comment to the objective standards so go ahead hey there uh this is Ralph Assamind fell first I just wanted to uh thank the staff for a really well thought out uh uh presentation um I I really wanted to echo the importance of the equity lens that's uh being addressed here um I also wanted to comment that I think uh we we really need desperately need to uh start with objective standards uh before we get into any sort of general plan amendments um as the staff mentioned that well here is for uh general plan amendments to be adopted we're already set to be doing a housing element update in a couple years anyway and uh we need objective standards before that I definitely encourage you all to support moving forward with those standards right away I also wanted to um comment that uh in addition to having you know an equity lens in terms of outreach I think it's really important to make sure that the uh with a commitment to equity making sure that renters are accounted for in this process and uh making sure that uh at the end of the day um the voices of people who are underrepresented are actually heard um and and not just reached out to and so um like have some sort of work in your process where you can ensure that the um uh overall perspective um and the the engagement in the community is equitable and not just the effort to engage with community um and along those lines uh the affirmatively affirmatively further housing is really important um and uh the community spectrum can um live in Santa Cruz and um be part of the thank you very much next up I have and thank you Sarah for a um very well thought out presentation I was a little dismayed to hear not sad but disappointed that the uh project wasn't done in nine nine months but maybe I'm missing the whole point I just like to um one thing can I request that the city council please publish how many people are uh participating in this meeting as a matter of public record and then um with regards to what I've kind of come to realize is a huge new wave of high density development in our town I'd like to remind city council respectively that in addition to the challenges you face with addressing new state laws that push to mandate an explosion of high density here you're still hired by voted into and expected to take into account your existing constituents and residents in the words of some of your own charter language something like uh maintain and protect existing neighborhoods so um I think again I'll keep it short the objective standards need to be defined um specifically before any new development is really allowed to go through and I know you're under pressure but um we as a city and we citizens hope that you know we are able to be the masters of our own destiny with regards to new state laws or ordinances being defined and defended so um respectfully I'd like to thank that public input still matters and thank you for your time thank you next up is uh phone number ending in 8480 good afternoon Mayor Myers and members of council this is Doug Engford can you hear me yes we can great there can be no doubt or debate that Santa Santa Cruz needs and wants affordable housing developed respectfully responsibly and well integrated with their neighborhoods and similarly there's no doubt that objective development standards will get us there eventually so we also need some immediate action until we have developed agreed upon and implemented standards the general plan governs development in town and that general plan reflects higher intensities than will the final standards and and time is of the essence we learned just last night that mr nova and the developer of the 60 foot five-story density bonus driven monstrosity proposed at 831 water street will apply for sp35 streamlining for that project circumventing our public processes and sequa without action now we can expect to see more abominations like 831 water on any property currently zone for mixed use or community commercial that's all along mission foquel water and south branch of 40 often immediately adjacent to our one-zone single story homes the resulting a barren and irresponsible pattern does not reflect council's direction to staff to quote preserve and protect residential neighborhood areas and existing city businesses as the city's highest level policy priority now we can hope that development doesn't happen quickly or that other parcels are owned by more responsible developers than mr novan or that this planning process for standards happens more quickly than anything they've ever done before but hope is not a strategy 831 water street can be the unifying threat that the city needs in order to be able to quickly cooperatively and effectively to put into effect both these interim tools and the objective standards as then franklin said failing to prepare is preparing to fail please don't fail us for more about 831 water visit 831 responsible development dot org thank you all so much for your service thank you next up is 28 53 ending phone number and just a reminder just transit to get too far in a 3-1 water thank you we're a filipini here firstly thank you for prioritizing community engagement in this process of establishing the much needed objective standards due to the state housing crisis laws the future landscape of our city depends on how these standards are set and it is imperative that those who live here and are investing in this community have a direct voice in any set framework that will dictate how our city will then grow up for this upcoming community engagement plan and process i'd like to note that your current partner in this process urban planning partners ink explicitly attempts to direct the community to remove subjective aesthetic viewpoints in the process they currently outlined this is in both how they like to us to assess the community character of our city and is also part of how they plan to measure the project's overall success i believe this particular steering by urban planning partners to be problematic community involvement is in its very nature using subjects to give their subjective feedback in this case to engage in a process of setting standards that then become objective in their future application of streamlining development aesthetics are an important part of this process they are an established part of subjective cultural identity and also intricately related to the psychological parameter of place attachment and mental health can we ask sarah's question what makes an accru special without allowing aesthetics as part of that conversation all of this is imperative to keep in mind if an end goal of this process is community support in these objective standards and a lessening of community objection and future development proposals as well as the importance to an adherence to your honorable health in all policies track record overall i am optimistic about this process and i look forward to improvements to it as it progresses thank you for your consideration thank you next up is guy last near unmute yourself can you hear me now sorry yes we can go ahead okay great um i don't know if i'm repeating myself but thank you for the excellent presentation earlier i understand a whole lot more about it my name is gilan yeah and i live on velvet your terrace and i know all you council members are committed to doing what's right for santa Cruz and you care about our community's character that's where you're there right in the face of new state mandates that severely tie your hands it is critical that we have objective standards to harmonize the general plan and zoning but in the interim i urge the city to use every tool in its kit to not let the community's character erode and i draw your attention to the prime example i already mentioned 831 water 151 units taxic stories high on less than an acre immediately adjacent to a modest neighborhood it is a key opportunity site but the proposed project clearly does not reflect the city's planning goals or processes right location wrong project i recognize getting objective standards may take some time until then to protect or to protect your legacy and the community's character there are many possibilities that you can direct staff to create such as spot zoning changes remember we have this existing low density land use locations that connect to zero for total residential capacity change density calculations to avoid 831 water street situations require visual representations such as story below story poles or balloons even if this ultimately delays the objective standards the city will be protected against a proliferation of grandfathered out of scale developments just like 831 water it's just the first of what could be several similar projects over the next four years before you know it we could easily end up with three blocks of 60 foot buildings all immediately adjacent to our one single family homes a lack of action now will establish a development pattern that is inconsistent with council direction in 2019 and with the community's vision a pattern we will then have to live with for generations thanks very much for your service and thanks for the time thank you very much next up we have phone number ending in 3487 hi my name is Justin Bortnick and i'm a resident here in Santa Cruz uh born and raised here and actually attended the branch 40 elementary uh right there in front of the 831 water street project and uh today i just wanted to reflect on you know the uh presentation we saw today from sarah's well detailed and thought through i did wonder just about the easements and how that's reflected in a proposed six story building if that does shade out the entire neighborhood of Belvedere terrace would that uh still receive approval potentially at this point because that's a huge concern with the six story building every resident right next to that we can't respond to any uh comments on the 831 project and staff really can't respond to questions during public comment but you're welcome to continue and and you know again we're talking about the objective standards so i'm sorry to interrupt and those objective standards include the shading process right of the easement and the overhang into other expanding neighborhoods is that correct and i know you're not allowed to respond to comments so from what i understood that was correct that there is supposed to be standards that are being upheld to a three story building has a very different shade covering than a six story building i think we can all agree to that so if the standards proposed uh were already approved this building would then have to fall under those alignments but today they're going to try to circumvent that and unfortunately that puts this neighborhood and Belvedere terrace one of my you know where i was really uh grew up playing in the neighborhood and run around with my friends on that street so i just think that uh having a huge shade covering on all those neighbors just doesn't really serve any purpose and also there just is no place to park for these huge residential uh compounds so like with any of the proposed uh deployments across so captain up water stream i am unaware of where the extra parking is i know that they're planning on building parking into some of these structures but there's really no proposed way of handling the parking in the rest of the neighborhoods and and that's already an issue with all the ucs residents and the different uh people that do frequent these neighborhoods the parking is a struggle along that entire corridor so i'm really curious to see where all this extra parking is going to come from to serve all this high density uh housing uh i appreciate you guys once again and all your service that you guys provide to the community thanks very much next up i have Kathy you are we can hear you okay grill thank you thank you um i just lost my train of thought but i just wanted to say something i am outraged that these objective standards which the staff that planning has known about for several years now and because of covid somehow it hasn't reached the point where they've developed and saw this through and this should have been done been a slaughter a lamb that's what we're going to do i'm looking for i'm looking at you our city council i don't know how you can streamline a general plan amendment i don't know if it means an eir how you can do that uh but i think that there must be some tech neighborhoods leave all the character we have a missile coming towards us and we need to stop that i would like i would be saying that we have no tools i don't believe that i think we have the courage enough we have courage to take courage and go maybe against what the planning commission um suggested and not go for the general plan amendment but i think you can streamline that and give staff action to say okay all you need to do is change that would take care of it and thank you for your time thank you next up we have uh kyle kelly give me a second here a lot of the community this is probably confusing um but i think i'll end up at the end of the day to get to control a little bit more about how things will end up looking and feeling one thing that i want to make sure that we do as we do the upcoming process is that we try to steer away from using uh phrases such as community character uh and never put it in kelly's breaking up for being a dog whistle for perpetuating segregations and exclusionary zoning that piece of we try to break away from using phrases such as community character which has a long and well being used as a dog whistle for perpetuating segregation and exclusionary zoning uh you know a lot of the existing character of many of our community is directly linked to the california planning policy including jim crow air segregation antics will allow people to decide how the how the looking people buildings will go while still allowing for for renters and for people to be able and for including a lot more voices thank you next up we have my cl and then next will be rosa good afternoon thank you for your presentation my name is mike young i do not live in the city but i live in limo i'm having to be a good standard uh that's my only comment and it's very disappointing and i can't believe you guys sat on it for that long covid or not thank you next up i have rosa and then david hi can you hear me yes we can hear you well i go with agenda 23 to talk about the beautiful picture that you show in your backgrounds and the beautiful stuff well that beauty is going to end if we don't have some kind of objective standards before the project in a 31 and listen i'm outraged too that you have not done it and you're responsible so now you get tony your attorney you do whatever you have to do and you find some loophole to get us out of this mess patient earlier i think we can all agree that we need objective standards for housing that tie in the general plan with the zoning code this is to prevent us from being victims to the whims of developers and sacramento they were supposed to be done by late 2020 but that date has come and gone it may take a while before they're developed in reality in the meantime though the city needs to take immediate action to protect its planning goals against mandates by the state perhaps some general plan amendments or other actions in advance of developing the objective development standards for example the spot rezoning's mentioned earlier would be a good first start or perhaps we can change density calculations to avoid over the top development proposals like the development currently planned for 831 water street with over 150 units on less than one acre many of these units less than 400 square feet the use of story polls or balloons to give the public a better idea of just how large these proposed developments may be which is another good idea this becomes increasingly important because the 831 water street developer is pursuing sp35 streamlined approval for his development if we don't act fast we may facilitate a development pattern inconsistent with the direction the city council took in 2019 with help from input from the community and affect santa cruz for generations to come thank you thank you very much okay i'm not seeing any other members of the public so i'm going to turn this back to council i'm going to do a time check um it's 5 45 and we have an item uh sorry at 6 30 this evening so um just want to let council know we're running we're running about 45 minutes late um and then we still have one more item which i understand from staff should be fairly quick so just want to keep keep track of time and um i'm uh happy to open this back up to council's uh comments and deliberation i have a couple of comments that i'd like to make before we go ahead i think that at this point uh moving forward with staff recommendation makes sense but i do have some comments uh related to uh some of the concerns raised by the community around affordable housing and how it is that we um situate and you know try to use the objective standards so they become possible to promote affordable housing rather than just density housing um questions around uh the kind of interim tools you know i think sarah thank you for kind of laying out what those might be and for folks who uh weighed in asking us to think about implementing some of those sooner than later um you know i i agree i think that there are things we could do but in terms of spot zoning and some of these other tools it seems to me that they really you know those decisions need to be made in context um in particular you know in particular context so i it will be hard to you know i i'd like to respond to that today but i i'm just having a hard time thinking of a way to provide that kind of direction without something more concrete um i think that the comment about use of storyfold is really important one i you know this is something that um you know would would measure pretty objectively what you know these buildings are gonna what they're gonna look like and how they'll feel right so i think that that's the kind of thing that we ought to also be considering that's not what's on the table here right now um but i did want to make those comments with respect to develop those those objective standards to to most uh you know to get us towards that goal um you know of you know protecting you know neighborhood or neighborhood compatibility i want you for a character um but um you know compatibility with neighborhood and promoting affordable housing i mean those are really important goals and objectives and i don't want them to get lost in this process of trying to figure out how we um can just jam as many units into you know the most density into the current general plan um and you know for folks who are concerned about this i really encourage you to get involved in the objective standard planning process um and comment on projects when appropriate um i my question about the some of the discussion at the planning commission in the interest to um in an interest that the the planning commission had in um ensuring that while inclusionary zoning is not the topic at hand it is outside the scope of the objective standard it is important and it's an important piece of that um i think initial uh learning the teaching process and trying to provide information for folks who are going to be engaging in this process um i know that they sort of recommended that that was part of the initial education process and i it wasn't a motion but i'm just wondering if um where about that or sarah can maybe speak to encapsulate it in what you what you do or would it be helpful to provide that direction you know our outreach engagement strategy um you know we're making sure that folks understand those terms and and then um as part of the webinar we'll talk about how you know part of what the webinar covers is like you know housing policies like all these things and this project is really doing this part but you know there are other things that the city has done and in the inclusionary entity bonus is part of that you know i think folks will have an understanding of what that tool is and you know we're not going to like deep dive on inclusionary because this project isn't supposed to change it um you know i make sure people understand that word and understand how it fits into the housing policy locally um but we're not going to be doing a deep dive into that we express that to the planning commissioners as well thanks yeah i just i guess i'm what i'm trying to get at is and i i totally understand that and i'm not suggesting trying to unpack inclusionary in a you know really detailed way but i guess i'm just trying to think about ways to kind of going back to my question about setting the table um providing information to folks who are going to engage in this process of a housing unit will be some information on basis on which people can begin to think through you know inclusionary is a tool what are some of the other ways that we can get not just identity and as much as possible but actually where it will help it so i'm just trying to like sure figure out how to kind of make sure that that is part of the conversation and i know that part of that's going to you know depend upon who comes to the table but what i think and um you know i don't want it to be kind of sideline um no that makes sense but planning commissioners as well um you know one from out of this process is sort of like ideas for further work because you know every time you go out and speak to the community their blinders aren't on the way that our blinders are on you know i'm like i'm here to talk about zoning talk to me about height you know far let's talk about setbacks and setbacks and awnings and windows and materials and they're like people stay in housing once they get there and tell me about right control is people have all these questions and are making all these connections right if they don't do this professionally and that's forced you to take your blinders off and so i could see that as one as you know a possible outcome is that we sort of like parking a lot a bunch of items that are out of scope for this project and they are you know sort of good ideas for future work that could be sort of one of the one of the final products that we bring back or like you know other other ideas that we heard from the county from the community i mean this is we did that with housing voices and you know it's been four years so here we are again we're hearing new ideas and new issues and concerns of time so we could come back with the include x y c um and then so i'm i won't make the motion because i know other people might not be safe but i'm prepared to make a motion to thank you i raised my hand i'm not seeing any other council member hands i just have a quick question sarah um i think it's either the bright red or the bright brown um is there any way to break apart so i'm just curious about whether or not um the locations in the city that may be in the the black box period is there any way that you can look at those sites with your objective sense uh so in other words um i think the brown maybe it's the brown zoning um i can't remember the mixed use exact name on that um mixed use identity do you want to look at the map yeah i'm just curious if is there any way and i don't know if this is you know i i we're not here to talk about 831 so i'm going to be respectful of that but i'm just curious about um development pressures and frankly this this unevenness that we're in right now you know um which could mean that based on objective standards outcome you might have you know designs you know objective standards that make development in neighborhoods amenable over time but that we're not there yet and we we're not going to be there for nine more months um and so i'm just curious um about whether or not you could break apart your process and maybe look at the mixed use high density um i just don't know if that would be would work or not but i'm just curious if there's any way to get at some of these concerns i i'm hearing the community um and you're hearing people are they're frustrated um and i'm just curious if there's any work around or way that we could tackle these as separate um zoning districts rather than kind of doing the whole process or whether or not you could potentially tackle them one at a time based on the district based on the zoning long rambling question sorry so yes i'm gonna have a long rambling response if yes okay i know that we're like short on time here so maybe it won't be so rambling okay so let's just recall the general plan was adopted in 2012 there was a process initiated that would have created zoning standards for this site that process ran into trouble and it was halted so it was halted internally in 2017 it was halted officially by the city council in you know q3 of 2019 so we don't have standards for these sites and the general plan land capacity has been established since 2012 when that project was when the general plan was adopted we're in the situation we are now because the state law has changed out from underneath us you know this idea that we should have been a developing objective standards for the last like three or four years is simply inaccurate that law did not take effect until the beginning of 2020 so we knew it was coming as of September 2019 we got on the stick getting a grant proposal put together so that we could do this project and then we had a little slowdown issuing the rsp i'm not going to lie the pandemic hit and i couldn't work full time so things were slow so we finally got our consultant on board in the summer instead of in the spring and we're a couple months behind where we wanted to be the reality of where we are and the firm end date we have to see where of 2022 we have to submit our final billing in February the whole thing so ideally we're shooting for November of 2021 this year so eight months from now um create like all of these zoning standards for all these designations that carry this multi watching this happen too i you know wish to do i mean we have some standards in our code that are objective we have height limits we have floor area ratios um we just typically when it comes to building design and location on a property of the building we have been using this design review process and just are not allowed to know i'm familiar with that and i reconsidered because we would be in worse shape moving ahead if we had not so and i and i recall the discussion okay that i appreciate the clarification um council member walk-ins did you have your hand up or did i miss you no i i'm not appreciate the discussion and the interest in wanting to kind of bifurcate those areas um to kind of come up with a compromise solution given sort of the circumstances we're in today and um understanding that they're complicated and challenging too so um i just wanted to acknowledge that and i think we want to give justice to the process but clearly i think having something in place would be really beneficial to our community as soon as possible too so i guess i'll just echo those those comments and sentiments as well and council member brunner thank you uh thank you sarah for uh all of that information and update and i think the educate and inform portion of the outreach that piece is really valuable and the example of the terminology pamphlet uh for example in english and spanish is great to hear um one of our constituents mentioned subjective feedback is important to inform the objective standards and uh i think there is some value in that piece um and housing developed in these multi-family mixed-use zoning districts over the coming years and creating standards informed by the sanitary citizens will be key you know so for the city to continue to work on developing objective zoning standards and addressing the priorities of the community um will be very very necessary and um you know i'm also happy to make a motion to move forward um i know that uh council member brown threw it out there already maybe what i will do um just to to um what i'll do is go ahead and go back with council member brown i believe she's making a motion to uh to move the staff staff recommendation um vice mayor brunner would you want to second that i'll second okay great okay it looks like we don't have any more um uh comment from the from the council member so bonnie i'll go ahead so we have a motion by council member brown with a second by vice mayor brunner to um to approve the staff recommendation uh which is to continue to direct planning and community development staff to complete the objective standards for multi-family mixed-use housing projects before pursuing any action to amend land use pattern established by the adopted 2030 general plan and provide comment and feedback to the communication strategy which i think we did today um i will go ahead and call for a roll call vote council member what can i talentary johnson would i and that motion passes unanimously uh we will now move on to item thank you for everyone in the public that joined us this evening for that um i'm sure we will be seeing you again on other items uh next up on our agenda is item number 25 and this is the legislate 2021 legislative program manual and platform for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if there is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council we will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action so i would like to introduce susie ohara assistant to the city manager and she will uh go ahead and give us a presentation on the 2021 legislative program manual and platform thank you mayor myers good good evening i guess council um i'm not going to take a bunch of your time because i know you only have 30 minutes until we go to oral communications and the next item but i do want to share a few slides and talk about this year's legislative program which is a program that we are kicking off after several years of really not having a formal program um so i'm really happy to be leading this for the city and happy to be sharing with you all the progress so let me share my screen going over the presentation for this this evening it's just going to be a short presentation that really will orient the council to the attached documents in the staff report those attached documents um really do go into depth as to what the program manual includes as well as the annual platform um so the goals and objectives um we'll i'll cover first and then at the end we'll talk about next steps so the goals and objectives of the legislative program are basically to serve as a basis to proactively engage with policy and legislative initiatives so as i'm sure each and every one of you are aware and maybe even our newest council members sometimes we're kind of behind on engaging on bills that are either in committee or um on the legislative floor at both the state and the federal levels and have to act quickly to ensure that the city's position is really clear um as those bills travel through each of their respective bodies at the state and federal level our legislative platform and policy manual will really hopefully transform that process to ensure that not only are we proactive in engaging with our state and federal legislators but that we understand what is ahead um in each of those calendar sessions and that we are engaging on things that are really mean substantially a lot to the city um that process will be guided by the i'm sorry by the program manual which if you've had a chance to look through in great detail leading up to this meeting i know your packet was huge so um if you just glance through it that's okay too because there'll be plenty of time to to kind of go over it it really does outline um how we move forward with uh lobbying and and advocating on behalf of the city who does that between city staff um the mayor the council as well as our lobbyist firms and how does that process transpire so that's what's included in the policy i'm sorry in the program manual and the platform guides the city council and staff on what are what our priorities are for the year and as i as you can imagine that's really intertwined with our interim recovery plan so just to briefly go over the legislative policy manual or program manual right now each of our departments as you heard bonnie mentioned earlier with the economic development strategy we are individually tracking legislation and moving forward with lobbying at a department level at a city manager level at the council level whenever those opportunities arise and that can lead to some um lack of coordination and also um duplicative duplicative efforts on some of those um that work so what we're hoping to move from is that disjointed process that can sometimes be very intense um with regard to staff capacity to a much more integrated program that is as i mentioned integrated with the interim recovery plan and that would also set forth internal coordination um for legislative advocacy really understanding our lobbying roles at the city council city manager mayor and department head level um how we evaluate legislation to understand how the city fits into its opportunities and challenges and also the guidelines for lobbying as i mentioned the platform um what we be moving from is um somewhat of an unclear position from the city's perspective on upcoming legislative bills um that can as i mentioned be reactive and sometimes hasty in terms of how we lobby to a clear and transparent city platform for both our internal staff council elected officials in our lobby is to use um it would align with the interim recovery plan how our city plans on moving forward in the next 6, 12, 18 months to help our community move out of the pandemic and into sustainable recovery from an economic public health health and all policies perspective and then also allows um this proactive engagement with our state and federal lobbyist i'm sorry lobbyist and legislators um between the mayor's staff and of lobbyist firms so very very high level what is included in the legislative priorities and i wanted to mention that the legislative platform that you saw in draft form in your agenda packet was put together with the support of a few delegate visits from congressman panetta assembly member stone as well as senator laird work with the california league of cities to ensure that the league's platforms are pretty pretty much included in in our draft platform and then looking through what other bay area cities and cities similar to santa cruz with regard to our economic and pandemic recovery plan um and then using all of that information to develop this draft platform it does fit into the priorities of the interim recovery plan so focused on downtown and business revitalization as you heard from bonnie and her team all of the things that they're working on are going to require flexibility and revenue um really working with our state and federal um lobbyist firms to ensure that there's a diversification of funding support and small business support infrastructure um you've heard from uh director public works director deadl as well as water director minard that you know our capital improvements program our need for infrastructure improvements is only going to grow and we really want to ensure that we have redundancy and we're focusing focusing on a green economy and workforce development as we invest in our infrastructure fiscal uh sustainability you know ensuring that we are lobbying especially as we're in recovery for as many state and federal funds to come to the city in a way that's flexible in their application and can also be used for revenue loss and then lastly but not least by any means sustainability and green economy equity and well-being and engaged community and this really does get around um advancing our green economy focusing on climate adaptation um and action and then funding um services for homeless related programs and services but i see next steps um quarterly update to council probably in the form of an fyi or maybe semi-annually coming in front of you to talk about what's happening um at the state and federal level with lobbying outcomes and any city relevant legislation that we have to pay particular attention to a semi-annual meeting with our state and federal legislators um on their priorities and how to integrate our priorities with their work um in their respective bodies and invitation to view and participate in any state and federal committee discussions um one of those was a few weeks ago when i sent out an email on a committee discussion at the state assembly with regard to homelessness that i think many folks were able to participate in and got a little lot of information out of and then of course integration of the legislative program into our interim recovery plan um and ad hoc revenue ad hoc committee planning so we would really want to make sure that as we are thinking um of new revenue uh channels for the for the city that we're thinking about how to um fully leverage our state and federal sources of funding and then also ensuring that those priorities overlap and that we are leaving no stone unturned as we think about how best to engage with our legislative legislative program so that's it from me and i just wanted to thank you for your attention and um happy to take any questions and also want to ensure that you guys get a chance to have dinner before you sit down on the the next topic so thank you very much thank you susie um yeah i'll just make one quick comment um i appreciate the report i think it's really really thorough um i think this is really over the next four years is probably one of the biggest opportunities we're going to have for um a lot of the focuses for the plan especially infrastructure um green economy climate change so i'm really really happy and this is one of my priorities when i came in as mayor was you know making sure we really know what's out there and really have a very focused way to approach it um we've had some really productive really uh conversations with our electives already so i really want to thank you for working on this um i just would add a couple of ideas for you um with regards to the downtown and i so i'm looking at the draft legislative platform the um the uh the very back part of the of the report um uh downtown business and revitalization um i would add potentially the river parkway as an alternative transportation there as a piece of our downtown that oftentimes i think gets missed but that alternative transportation aspect and the tide of the coastal area really kind of cements our downtown and its relationship to the places that are near it and provides frankly ways that people can get around without a car so sometimes um those things show up in weird places sometimes it's in infrastructure other times it could be in downtown so um i would just maybe just make a note of that um there is a statewide river parkway program as you're aware of but maybe just tracking that and then under infrastructure um i always think of um of our green belts our trails and our bikeways and our parks as part of our green infrastructure and um just want to make sure that we don't lose track of um that green infrastructure aspect and also the way that we do and have managed our flood control channel in the past which is really a model of green infrastructure with regards to flood control um work so just want to make sure that we don't lose that and then um finally recognizing uh under infrastructure sort of the coastal pieces that we've been working on through tiffany west west work with the resilient coast and just making sure that that doesn't get lost within that infrastructure category and those are all my comments thank you uh question about council members everybody's hungry not seeing any i'm going to take it out to um the uh attendees for this item so this is going to be item number 25 2021 legislative program manual and platform if you are interested in commenting on this item please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes uh i have caller ending in 1810 go ahead please general this legislative action and platform has inherited similar defects to that of health and all policies and then it reflects some leftist globalist dogma formulations which take directives and foreign authorities half of which aren't democracies other external authorities and also parts are radical partisan dogma crafted to appease a body which is not elected as a partisan body and the authors are unelected city bureaucrats seeking approval for those ideas the city government is a poor imitation of individuals who themselves are always correct in capitalism providing what others need want or willing to pay for even as the government is imperfect and be able to divine such as the people are not of the out of opinion or the ability to pay but in all cases should provide only what the pervasive will of the city public is not simple slim majority not unelected city bureaucrats not derived from external or council partisan politics in all cases it should be things individuals cannot provide for themselves that benefit are accessible to all the city government strays off this path when it allocates resources to benefit special interests not available to benefit the pervasive population the city government also strays off this path when it lobbies other authorities on non-local issues in general these guiding documents seem slanted toward obtaining more discretionary authority and money always bigger government the greater public will is not really prioritized as essential it pre prioritizes is partisan and non-local issues abound i think this action list and platform even the idea of pre defining these goals itself shows a lack of public specific input but sure okay some items are well meaning one example is the equity goal which simplified is the treating of different people unequally to attempt to make their lives more identical which means you don't value individual liberty much and have american values upside down favoring group identity socialist tyranny and has no mandatory prior to place in the land of the free in simple terms i'd rather see your policy be rightfully limited to lobby only for what the people pervasively need want and either are willing or paid for affecting local city matters it could be that simply stated thank you okay no one needs your hands we'll go ahead and bring it back to the council then council member brown thanks so i didn't get my hand up quite in time to ask a question so just two things one i this is great thank you and susie really appreciate you putting this together in such a comprehensive way and i love the idea that we're going to kind of get more coordinated and efficient and productive in our advocacy i am given the conversation of our last agenda item i it seems like including something about supporting local control of around development in particular would be a useful addition unless there's significant opposition to that it's hope that we could include that and um and then i just have a question about um for you know i know that council members uh often bring cases of legislation for support by the council that may fall outside of these three um you know these three priority areas and although one could hopefully find a way to fit them into one of these because they're pretty broad but i'm just wondering is there any um is the intention just to leave that like if three council members want to bring something we would do that outside of this legislative program so just wanting to make sure that doesn't get lost thanks council member brown so that the issue of local control i was looking back through the manual and it's it should be the top basically the top um i value uh in the program manual so i'll make sure that that's clearly stated and universally city jurisdictions with regard to land use very much do not want to interference with state and federal policies so i'll include that in addition to to that with regard to if three members want to bring an item that is not part of our legislative platform that is you know the liberty of the council and that actually is included in the program manual so anything that's not previously adopted can come forward with with council support question good comment could catch uh council member walkins and then council member Cummings and uh yeah we'll try to see when you wrap up i'll be quick i'll just um say i think part of the local control component really is our you know our relationship with the california league of cities and just looking at how sort of their strengths and numbers in terms of our advocacy and legislative advocacy and that as that as a pathway potentially so thank you susie i think this is really great council member cumming yeah and i'll just be brief i just wanted to um be some council member browns comments which that helped because i was curious about that position as well and i know that there are oftentimes legislative issues that come up and we're asked by members of community to take a position so it was good to hear that you know if something like that comes forward we can still bring that to council on a habit agenda as to be able to take you know express our support for other legislative um policies that might be coming thank you council member you know i think the distinction being is if that with this adopted platform if there are items that come up from the community that you've already adopted you don't have to bring it to council we can move forward with the mayor providing that advocacy because it's already been laid out in the in the platform okay thank you so much susie for the report and for the work um i would entertain a motion on this item council member cumming and then council member what yeah i'm happy to move the staff recommendation uh to approve 2021 legislative program manual and platform document i'll go ahead and second that okay we have a motion by council member cumming and a second by council member walkins to uh prove the 2021 legislative program manual and platform documents and body can we do a roll call vote please council member walkins calentary johnson thank you i i thought i missed it okay cumming scholder i vice mayor brunner and mayor meyers hi that motion passes unanimously we're gonna adjourn and um we have not eaten or really moved for about 10 hours um so we will go ahead and restart at 650 we'll just give ourselves about a little under a half an hour to try to get some food and we will re-adjourn at 650 thank you everyone next up on our uh excuse me hang on one second good evening everyone welcome to our 630 session of the march 9th 2021 meeting of the city council today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website cityofsanacruz.com all council members are participating in this meeting remotely i want to thank the public for staying home to view today's city council meetings and i would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll thank you mayor council member walkins here okay great next up on our agenda tonight is oral communications and for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you want to comment during oral communications now is the time to call in instructions are on your screen oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda so if you are wanting to speak on the next item which is item 26 please um put your hand down and as soon as we get this underway we'll uh we'll be able to uh get you back up so this again is for oral communications is for items that is not listed on today's agenda if you are interested in addressing the council press star nine on your phone to raise your hand you have two minutes to speak when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted we request that you clearly and slowly state your name before making your comments so that we can accurately capture in the meeting minutes however stating your name is not required please remember this is a time for the council to hear from the public we are not able to engage in dialogue with each member of the public but when we are able we will address the questions raised after oral communications has been completed i'm going to go ahead and look to my attendees i have and again just make sure this is for oral communications um this is for items not on the agenda so i have a phone number ending in nine five three two is the first speaker for oral communications go ahead please it can terribly sorry i dialed in uh and i'm to lower my hands but i'm not able to do my phone okay and you're you want to speak to the following item or or to oral community yeah that'll be for the following items like that okay uh next up i have laura lee martin are you here to speak for oral communications or on the item on item number 26 the next person oh go ahead laura lee are you here for item 26 or oral communication i'll move on item 26 okay thank you i'll move on to the next uh phone number which ends in nine five three two this is for oral communications not item 26 if you are here for oral communications please go ahead and to eric if you're here for oral communications you are able to speak now if you're here for item 26 uh we'll do that after oral communication go ahead eric new mayor mires this is eric rodberg last week uh chancel lary sent a campus-wide email claiming that the student housing west project was affordable made that claim multiple times and i know i presented to council before documentation on the exorbitant housing cost but i just wanted to review it for the public and also for new council members according to um their own consultant study the proposed rates for camp for student housing west are starting at a one bedroom one bath three thousand five hundred and forty dollars for three students for this is for one bedroom up to ten thousand two hundred twenty dollars per month for a five bedroom two bath now technically student housing west is not part of the uh long-range development plan however um their claims that they're going to house all additional 8500 students under the long-range development plan are completely unattainable because they have no plans to reduce the cost of housing to even the very high community rates so i hope that you the council because this completely gets swept under the rug there that they can't just build the housing they have to offer it out of at affordable or at least that market level rates or they'll never be able to fill it so their their promise is completely vacuets and i i want you as council to um keep that at the forefront when you negotiate with with uh the university and as you may know i was a um i'm a name party to the consprehensive settlement agreement for the 2005 litigation um on on that on the 2005 l rdp thank you very much thank you so being a holber are you here for item 26 or would you like to speak for oral communication hi i'd like to speak for oral communication please go ahead yeah i'd like to speak to how the city council is running these meetings and how they're not accepting enough public comments two weeks ago there were dozens of people that were still on the line that had waited for hours and hours they started at 5 30 that we all got online and at 9 o'clock you cut off public comment i was very happy that i was able to get my comment in that i would really like to hear the rest of what your constituents are saying i'd also like to hear what the pros and cons that you're hearing you pass these things because to me it does not sound like you really care about public comment you care about passing the ordinances that you would like to pass so i would really appreciate it if we could hear why you're cutting off public comment when you have so many people waiting in line and i know councilmember Cummings asked that last time and there was not really a great answer from you mayor mires so i really would appreciate if you would address that and you make sure that you are running these sessions in a more democratic fashion thank you thank you tag no which i believe sir you did contact us directly about public about oral communications if i can speak uh this will not be to item number 26 this will be just oral communications okay please go ahead thanks sir not sure if you guys were able to catch the board of supervisors meeting this morning um the housing for health strategic plan for homelessness the three-year plan was presented and the six month plan they're going to have a different very workable actual um each guideline like what they're going to do every six months and an interesting one that they have for march that's slated and that says complete a draft of recommendations for county and city partnerships related to unsafe encampments um if you look up the board of supervisors packet it's page 34 is the six month plan for january to june uh april has developed proposed action plan for creating and funding financial year 21 22 regional proactive multi-division street outreach teams um i i hear a lot from the city about the county should be doing all this work and we have to take care of ourselves but i don't understand why there's not more of this kind of talk of how the strategic plan is actually working to the city and this is actually in in a section called improving connections between the county and the city so why are we not hearing about if this is a march um action item for them they have they uh approached the city on that and why is that not part of our discussion these days that's all i really wanted to say thanks thank you paul's are you here for item 26 are you here for oral communication oral communications i wanted to echo what sabina said a few minutes ago about the process by which these council meetings are run and i'm on zoom all day every day with a bunch of high school students i know it's not ideal i know we all have to be sort of creative and graceful in this moment but i just feel like the way these zoom meetings are being conducted isn't super democratic you know we come to the meeting we get cut off we don't even have an opportunity to like have a t-shirt have a button you have no idea what any of us at home are thinking and you don't really seem to care thank you next we have abby young are you here for oral communications or i'm 26 i'm here for i item 26 okay we'll um we'll catch you back then uh next i have zinni are you here for oral communications or i am 26 for oral communications okay go ahead please this is about the housing homeless project so my neighbor spoke with chief andy mills and was informed that on any given night there's only four to five police officers on patrol and many of the rangers in iran a gulch have already been laid off and there's no funding to have a police officer stationed permanently to the neighborhood surrounding iran a gulch to provide security at night it's unrealistic the idea of having them pack up every morning is unenforceable putting this kind of a housing the homeless project in such a high density neighborhood without contact security i'm sorry to interrupt you i believe you're here for item 26 that's going to be the discussion about the temporary outdoor living ordinance which includes that kind of discussion okay that'll be right up next okay my apologies thank you no worries at all thank you okay i think i have because people are leaving their hands up i can't really sort through well i'm lowering them as they're acknowledging that they're here for the next item okay i think we got through everybody let me i'm going to lower everyone's hand if if anyone here for oral communication can raise your hand oh lease please go ahead yes we can okay okay i just wanted to say may or mayer if you and the city council would to the public i recently heard that their people are using the civic for testing for kovac so thank you a least one eight one zero and we're just here for oral communication above even the protections of those in the bill of rights and somewhere below that i value efforts to eradicate wrongs such as discrimination but we never get the first two for the latter leftists have that value system upside down evidence the discriminatory reports to law enforcement ordinance that is a two-vague attack on free speech which clearly violates the definitive 51-year-old standing ruling of the supreme court case of brandon burg versus ohio which holds prohibitions of speech must prove speech is likely to incite imminent law of action but the police are unlikely to be incited since they are in forces of the law do you care your silence is the answer you have placed your extremely vaguely described notion of discrimination superior to the right of free speech i see no unity possible between either liberals or conservatives with the intolerant ultra progressive left the leftist almost religious call prioritizes their versions of endless sins of of transgressions elevating those above individual liberty and the constitution to vilify cultural appropriation a lack of statistical diversity a lack of inclusivity a lack of extreme climate change priority having private property relative wealth using unapproved speech having different values and well blaming mostly white people in the most intolerant and currently untrue racist manner citing white supremacy or privilege always with the blaming for bad outcomes whatever occurs which leaves me no choice but to overly oppose that forever because otherwise their totalitarian jackboots will come pounding at my door with a gulag in mind for people like me you will be next to hear that knock but too late by then you'll realize freedom is gone forever the blatant racism of the anti-racist and the marijuana permit ordinance is another local example yes the ever expanding monopolistic control corruption and morality of the government is unsustainable but that is not addressed by making a bigger more authoritarian government trashing liberty or for instance suspending the constitution because of a pandemic without primer okay thanks bye you next up to hilda this is for oral communications not for items 26 yes we can oh perfect uh yeah so i wish just commenting on uh elise about opening city council to the public i think this is kind of important if we're passing ordinances that kind of affect the homeless um since libraries are closed and necessarily folks aren't having this privilege of having funds during a pandemic being able to broadcast this in an easily accessible way would be really important to kind of hear the voices of those 1200 or more that are being affected right now during a pandemic and that's all i wanted to say thank you for listening next up i have phone number indian 5383 this is for oral communications and not item 26 excuse me council members thank you for accepting my comments for oral communications my name is skirt bonagate formerly of the santa cruz derby girls i would just like to comment on the public process here echoing um some of the other folks who have commented you know i was i was in line to i was in the queue to speak at the last meeting and because of mayor meyer's decision i was unable to speak and so thank you so much for taking my comment right now all i would like to say is um i would like to invite mayor meyers and uh and or any other member of the council to um please fill a gap that i am seeing in the discourse of these last few meetings um and i would like to invite um any council mayor council member to speak directly to um the people who will be affected by the temporary outdoor living ordinance speak directly to them um give them at least some consolation if you plan on passing this ordinance um and explain um you know try to you know give them some comfort for what they're going through um you know i left uh the rally tonight at the city council building and as we were leaving it started to rain it got really cold um my my hands were cold and um i was just thinking very compassionately of the folks who are living outside right now i hope you are doing okay folks um you deserve better um you deserve a home you deserve shelter i want to see you safe i invite the city council members to speak directly to the people that they will be impacting by their actions tonight thank you thank you next caller just has the number one and uh this will be for oral communications and not um item 26 yes we can calling to um i'm a little confused on what's happened to public comment here it used to be that we used to be able to speak three minutes then it went down to two minutes then one and a half now you have it set for tonight at one minute cutting us off at 9 p.m you also have it so we cannot speak i was i was on the computer as well as on my phone to speak i did not get um i did not i would did not have the ability to speak i think there were a lot of us who tried to speak last week i know that it's obvious even though i counted there are 32 people who voted who wanted to um i'm sorry who did not support the ordinance and um i think i counted seven people who did want so who did support the ordinance obviously you don't care what the public thinks um and i the last caller stated that maybe you should speak but speak to the people who would affect most you live in your glass houses as well i live in my house and we are fortunate but you don't know what it's like to live out there in the rain um and the reason i'm talking about this now is because obviously you're going to cut people off at 9 p.m and i doubt i'll get a chance to speak even though i'll try to get in line so um mayor karen i mean uh myers um that's what i have to say and i hope that most of you that do not um the people that decide to vote for this ordinance um i i will not be voting for you um and i hope you lose your position thank you next i have chloe hoak for oral communications not for items on the agenda i'm in the next section then okay great thank you okay we will now um begin item number 26 on our agenda this evening that's the ordinance related to regulations for temporary outdoor living for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now it's the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council we then will take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation in action i am going to try to limit public comment um to no later than 9 15 tonight i'm adding additional time because we did start late and i do want to try to get as many people um being able to speak tonight as possible uh i'm going to give you each one minute because um that allows the council to continue to deliberate on the item and um i will again try to accommodate everyone that is um queued up tonight and in keeping with that to try to give as much time for groups i mean excuse me for individuals to speak i have not granted any extra time tonight for groups in an effort to try to achieve as much public comment as we can if you are interested in so right now i'm going to turn this back over to staff we have lee butler director of planning and community development annie mills our police chief and kathy bronson from the city attorney's office this evening and lee i'll go ahead and turn it over to you we'll then return to have council um council comments or excuse me questions and then i will take it out the public comment right after that thank you mayor mires i'm going to share my screen here okay does everyone see the power point here without the note stages yes we do great thank you very much thank you mayor mires vice mayor and council members um i'm lee butler i'm the planning community development and homeless response director for the city and joining me this evening will be andy mills our police chief um i will try to be uh concise yet thorough as it means to provide as much time for community comments as i can hear so i'm going to go over the ordinance um briefly and i'm going to go over potential modifications and um as was the case with the first reading of this ordinance we've heard from hundreds of people i want to thank those individuals for providing comments and providing that valuable feedback for both staff and for the council of deliberations as i noted in the february 23 presentation the ordinance before the council this evening is but one part of many city efforts that include millions of dollars that we spend each year on things like support for nonprofits like housing matters and the downtown streets team the downtown outreach team county mental health liaisons embedded with our police and hygiene and trash trash services rental payment assistance and so forth we also support affordable housing through direct funding as well and as surge cagno mentioned in the oral communications it's important to note that the county is taking some great steps towards addressing homelessness county-wide and just today the board of supervisors adopted a six month and three year strategic plan with four key objectives being building a coalition preventing homelessness increasing connections and expanding permanent housing and also on the county's agenda was a separate item that had a number of components but one of those was a direction to the county staff to find a location for at least a hundred or multiple locations for at least 120 new homeless shelter beds in unincorporated county areas and so wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the progress and the relationship between what we're doing here and larger efforts all right quick overview of the ordinance the prohibited areas include beaches and this i'll say is the ordinance that is before the council this evening as a second reading and it does not include the changes that will be under consideration i'll get to those in just a little bit so the ordinance before the council prohibits camping in beaches parks some of the open spaces downtown residentially zoned areas and enclosed areas the potentially prohibited areas include fire hazard areas that the fire chief can close flood prone areas that the public works can director can close when there's a risk of flooding and then sensitive habitat areas that would be designated following careful review of biological reports and various other related documents include commercial and industrial areas so primarily sidewalks in those areas and then portions of a number of the open spaces those being poganit moore creek iran and gulch and dela viega and areas in proximity to trails in these open spaces would be off limits and of course some of those areas could also be off limits due to other provisions in the ordinance like the habitat protection or the fire risk the ordinance also allows for the council or city manager to designate managed encampments or similar facilities and we've noted in the report that we would come back to the council with some general policy parameters for those in advance of standing up those operations should this ordinance pass and then i'll also note that the ordinance calls for a minimum of 150 safe sleeping sites to be set up by the city that's the current ordinance then the ordinance before you this evening also contains behavioral requirements it cites tent prohibitions between the hours of 7 a.m. and 1 hour before sunset with exceptions for disabled individuals caretakers their caretakers and families with children also related to behavioral requirements fires would be prohibited and their various requirements related to storage size of encampments litter environmental damage and various other limitations with respect to enforcement the ordinance is drafted it would call for a progressive approach with warnings citations and misdemeanors and it spells out criteria related to the confiscation and storage of belongings so you can see here this is the map from the last time the first reading this shows the prohibited areas the one thing that would be added here of course is the residential areas and so that would add a considerable amount of red in terms of the prohibited areas to this map and then this shows the potentially prohibited areas and you can see in the yellow stripe is the those are the habitat sensitive habitat areas the hatch mark is the wildland urban interface and then the blue are potential flood zones and then this map just shows an overlay again you know significantly more areas prohibited in all of the residential areas of the city we've heard a lot of comments about the open spaces that was one of the predominant themes concern about those the four open spaces that are allowed in the current draft or more creek gay la viega or on a cultured pognum everyone knows where those are around the perimeter of the city here and you can see that each of those areas is covered in the wildland urban interface and much of those areas is also covered by sensitive habitat that could either of those could prohibit campaigning and camping in those areas as well as many of those areas due to proximity to trails also have red and at this point i'll jump into the potential changes that the council may want to consider as they were outlined in the agenda report council is free to consider whatever changes you all see fit and the ones that we outlined in the agenda report were just some of the feedback that we have been hearing prior to drafting that report so i'll start out of order here with gay la viega and you can see due to the different designations within the la viega as well as various trail designations so you know the parks themselves are off limits for camping and so some of this area is prohibited and then there were some requests to continue a perimeter around here and then similar to what we heard with all the open spaces there were some requests to eliminate campaigning camping in the open spaces all together and this is just a close up of those maps i won't belabor the point because i think you're familiar with it then we win the council um prohibited camping in residential areas we inadvertently left out the rt the tourist the tourist residential um components and that includes beach hill and beach flats the uh council likely intended to include those but we left off the rt residential designation so that may be something the council would want to consider as well in um potential amendments um we also heard from the community and they said hey what about all of swanton boulevard the way we um the way that we structure the ordinance the area here on swanton boulevard the the west um parking lot sorry the west uh uh it's not actually a sidewalk there but the public right away um in that location um could actually allow for camping under the ordinance because we did not um prohibit camping in zoning districts as this is we prohibited part uh we're prohibited camping in designated parks under the park's master plan and so um the staff report went into that the council can um direct us to clean up that item and um prohibit parking on some or all of swanton where the ordinance currently wouldn't um prohibit it similar situation here on um lighthouse field um state parks all of state parks whether it's um uh sea bright or lighthouse field or natural bridges um all of those the the state parks prohibit camping um that is a state requirement and so we did not address the state parks in the draft ordinance same situation occurs here along pelton you can see the south side of pelton is actually in a pk zoning district and so we reference residential zoning districts being approved the council has an opportunity to direct us to clean that up should they wish to do so um the state parks we've already talked about it's prohibited in each of those and what we recognized is that due to the way that um we um called out parks and referenced the parks master plan the same issue that occurred on um pelton and um uh swanton could uh and would actually occur in other places just adjacent to um uh neighborhood parks um and community parks for example and so the council may want to consider some cleanup language um that prohibits camping on the sidewalks um adjacent to city and state parks when that abuts a residential zoning district so you know in not all instances do park lands abut a residential zoning district and i think um you know if it's abutting an industrial zoning district for example the council may be interested in maintaining a camping allowance is there but this would allow for um prohibitions in residential areas um moving on to um the transportation direction that was included in the ordinance staff had some questions surrounding this um related to um from where and to where um and so we um uh have an alternative that was included with the um agenda report and i won't read the whole thing but essentially it's looking to get some more specifics with relation to on street transportation and to storage facilities and so council may want to provide some additional direction um related to that um transportation requirement and i'm just going to say i'm happy to go back to any of these if you guys have questions i know i'm moving really quickly i just want to um leave as much time for public comment as possible while also getting through all the um items in the agenda report um the third item in the agenda report i'll note that the numbers here are referring to the numbers in the agenda report um all right it's related to um locations where disabled individuals caretakers and families um could camp you know the council will recall the ordinance allows for these individuals to um stay in place for up to 96 hours and um the ordinance itself um does not clearly call out um locations where that could happen it says that it can happen but it doesn't provide any exceptions for where it could happen and so council could say um provide additional allowances on sidewalks um potentially even where they could block sidewalks in some certain manner uh council could say allow that in certain open spaces um in um city designated uh in parking lots um in uh safe sleeping lots um council could even say um that um the city uh workers at those locations should assist individuals if they're packing up every day and so forth um so uh there are a wide range of options in which the council could choose to address this and we're happy to talk with you about this further should you choose to have any questions or want to discuss with us next up we had um some provisions in the ordinance about um covid and uh delay on enforcement and um we heard a lot of comments related to this from the community as well um the top bullet here is um what the the ordinance currently says it says that um certain provisions in the ordinance would not be um enforced until a vaccine is widely available to for free to unhoused individuals um that is one option that the council could consider there are also other options that the council could could consider related to this um changes to the CDC guidance could be a different threshold um it could be when the county or state declaration of local health emergency is lifted or it could be when the county moves to a yellow or orange tier of covid spread per california's multi-tier system and just a note here um the yellow tier is the level where there is less spread um so um moving on this is something that we didn't include in the agenda report but it's related to the prior slide um about enforcement triggers um we we did identify in the um the ordinance that um the daytime restrictions would not be in effect until um storage daytime storage was in place um and the council has the ability to to put other limitations or to modify that they could say don't enforce certain portions or all of the ordinance until safe sleeping sites are in place or until managed camps are in place or other specific uh shelter options or locations are in place so just want to put those options out there for the council to consider and happy to talk about those further if you wish um next up outreach um the draft ordinance has an outreach component and council may want to confirm what the desired outreach is here it could be related to connecting individuals with services or educating regarding how camping is allowed and where it's allowed and where it's not or it could be both of those so there may be a desire for council to clarify that and then second um we wanted to point out that it's um that social service outreach is not a function of most cities um we don't have staff who are dedicated to doing social service outreach work um we help fund various organizations like downtown outreach team and the county hopes team but they're independent organizations and their outreach would generally be out of our control and i'll go back to the county uh approach here for a moment and note that they are striving to expand their outreach as part of the increased connections objectives in their six months and three years strategic plan and while that will certainly be helpful the outreach staff will still be out of our control and the the first line in this text here that shall ensure language could be challenging for the city given the lack of control that the city has for some of those outreach efforts so um as noted in the staff report there is potential alternative for the council to consider i won't read it um folks can reference it in the staff report i won't read it for sake of time here any emails up to talk through some of the enforcement provisions evening uh mayor and council members thank you for uh andy mills your police chief thank you for giving us some time to discuss enforcement uh of this the approach that santa cruz police department has taken is a mixture of compassion and accountability uh we've done a i feel like great job working with people to try to send them to the resources that they need in order to get health in fact our officers have access to cards that can be handed out to uh people are experiencing homelessness so that they can see and call uh some of the uh resources that are available to them in order for us to be effective um i believe that we need to have some level of leverage for the recalcitrant few who determined who are determined not to adhere to the standards of living in this community uh for example uh one individual who camps on main beach on a regular basis has been cited 39 times in the last little over a year and continues to camp there and uh that those are infraction citations and so for us to actually uh move that person along we've tried stay orders we've tried a variety of things uh with this individual and uh and it becomes um a matter of will in terms of is this location main beach going to be one of those areas that we do not want people to camp so the ordinance would allow us to have a few options one is for instance uh and most of this by the way is on a reactive basis we aren't proactively going out looking for people camping uh people are calling us and we respond to those calls for service and start off in a four tier process the first level is to inform uh use of those cards uh educate people and let them know that there are options and alternatives available to them the second is to warn and to document that that uh people uh if you don't move along or if you don't camp if you're camping in a place that is a time place and manner issue that you can be cited uh and then uh it can be moved to a infraction citation if enough of those accumulate then it can go to a uh a a little bit more serious offense where the city attorney's office works with the courts to obtain a stay order so in the upcoming potential ordinance there will be several things one um separate the behavior some status things like fires um build up the bicycle parts or no prompt action by the individual uh could elicit a misdemeanor citation uh after that citation and if it continues multiple violations they could technically be taken into custody because it's a misdemeanor and that is literally the only leverage that we have now there need to be candid with you they're unlikely to stay in in jail they'd probably be taken to the jail and cited and released there but that is the most that we can i believe get out of this i think there's a couple of other things that i think are important to to point out and to note the first one is that we would need to manage the expectations for the community of what is likely to take place here um we've issued a lot of citations over the years and as at the infraction level there's not much motivation to actually appear on those citations so for us to be effective there has to be at least one higher level tier where we can go to if we absolutely need to when it's necessary and that's just the decision that you know uh you can either direct us to do or not do depending on what you on what you see uh the last part of this i think is as a salient point is we also asked for provision uh to have a restorative justice model something that will allow us to divert people from the criminal justice system and allow them the opportunity to not be at infraction or even a misdemeanor citation by doing something to build up this community rather than tear it down and so for those that are having behavioral issues then this would allow us the ability to do that so those are the things i believe are important to note this will take an immense amount of effort on our time when i mentioned that we would put extra people out not for the purpose of proactively citing people but responding to what we believe will be an immense need from the community calling us on people who may be in violation of the section and even so we will still use the processes that we've already had which is to begin by informing then warning then citing and then potentially in the rare circumstance taking somebody to physical custody thank you chief mills the one thing that i would add that's in the agenda report is the potential alternatives of tying specific actions to the misdemeanor and that's detailed in the agenda report and then one additional thing that i would note is a recommended or a potential addition to a section of the code or yeah a section of the code which speaks to the martin verse boy's case where it notes that sleeping cannot be criminalized when adequate spaces to sleep adequate places to sleep are not available so we did draft the ordinance to comply with that case but to make sure that conveyed crystal clearly the council could consider adding the statement that's identified here as part of the enforcement provisions moving on to section seven from the agenda report um the ordinance as drafted would prohibit sleeping or camping i should say between the hours of seven a.m. and one hour before sunset and there are some some exceptions um both um in relation to um the disabled and caretakers and so forth but also um we included some safe sleeping exceptions this was discussed at the last council meeting um where later later start time would be available so that was input in place so that for example if a parking lot was still being occupied at 5 p.m. 6 p.m. you know the safe sleeping could start later there've also been questions that have arisen with respect to the the standard 7 a.m. time that starts uh the prohibited camping period whether there would be sufficient light for individuals to pack up their belongings at 7 a.m. given the uh different sunrise times throughout the year and some questions about you know whether there should be alternative times applied throughout the ordinance rather than just um in relation to the safe sleeping um facilities so that's another option for the council to consider and that covers the changes i'm going to rehash a slide from last time which um notes that the ordinance as presented or even if council modifies it is not going to end homelessness the many items that i talked about at the beginning of the presentation are geared towards that effort this is just one of the tools that would be used to address some of the behavioral environmental and quality of life concerns that can arise particularly with large encampments or camps that remain for an extended period of time um and i'm getting close here um but i do want to call out for you that um we've done some preliminary analysis and have some numbers related to the costs of various facilities and um for a safe sleeping site where we're assuming two staff members present while that safe sleeping site is operational as the primary cost and then um we have restrooms and hand washing and servicing of those facilities plus storage costs roughly about 250 thousand dollars a year for 50 people if we had three separate sites that would be about 750 thousand dollars a year for 150 individuals with a storage program that would assume two staff per location five hours per day plus restroom and hand washing and servicing of those um that would run roughly 75 thousand dollars per year per location um with that kind of staffing level and then um with the managed camps um our cost for 1220 river when we ran a managed camp and actually we we um uh had a nonprofit running that for us for a while um we spent about 80 thousand dollars per month for uh 50 camping spaces and um the county when they had the benchlands managed camp they were spending over a hundred thousand dollars a month um that was serving about 85 people at its peak um that included meal service and various other things so that just gives you an idea um and these are just rough estimates um and we would encourage we very much encourage any organization seeking to run such facilities to express their interests particularly if they have you know a volunteer network for example that could help reduce operational costs obviously these are um very significant costs um but that does need to be an important consideration particularly given the um the deficits that the city is is facing both this year and in long term structural capacity um to bring to ground these a little bit this is a headline from last week in the san francisco chronicle just last week san francisco is paying 16.1 million dollars for homeless tent camps um 262 tents and over 300 people that amounts to 61 thousand and some change per tent site that's for the bathrooms the meals the 24 seven security and so you know these these facilities are very expensive and and they can also offer some um some great benefits in terms of a safe place for people to go in the evening so i want to um convey both sides of that to the council as part of your considerations um last slide here um the mayor went over the process here but i had um written um a uh thank you to so many people last time uh and i was excited to get through my hour long presentation and forgot to say it so i'm going to uh convey that now and i i do want to thank the many people who have worked on the aspects of this ordinance the cash subcommittee and full cash volunteered many hours debating this topic the council members have spent many hours the members of the public that have participated in council and cash meetings as well as 700 plus pages of correspondence just on this meeting plus last meeting hundreds and hundreds of pages and then of course the city team has analyzed and debated and negotiated and compromised on many versions of this ordinance and that's been you know council members the city manager's office the city attorney's office kassie bronson has um put in countless hours fire park police water it public works finance every single department has contributed to this effort and so i wanted to extend a thanks to all of those and with that we are available for any questions that you may have thank you leigh i'll turn this over to council member questions now um and um i yeah just i am going to try to accommodate many people in public comment tonight so if we can um leave our deliberations till after public comment so we can really hear from folks um and so i'll open it up for questions uh council member golder i think you had your hand up first i i have a do you want me to save my comments then or just stick to the question right now i'd like to get your questions if there's clarifying questions for staff if you want to yeah i'll save my comments my question is um and i know everyone's on this meeting but if there's somebody that can let us know how the change at the county level um will help with our situation in the city and like how soon can we expect to see those beds open up thank you to our partners at the county that brought that forward and um this morning i'll take a stab at that i wasn't able to attend the county discussion today um as we were in session here um but um it's it's going to depend on a number of factors um how quickly they can secure land um how what what type of facility they want to set up is it is something that they do on a temporary basis um or something that they want to do as a long-term facility and so there are a lot of factors but suffice to say you know that takes time um so um the 120 i think you're referring to the 120 shelter beds and um that isn't going to be something that's happening um likely and um you know the next few months it's going to be a longer term effort um even if they they've got land it takes time to um mobilize all the resources even for a temporary facility any other questions council member coldis no i'll save my i'll save my group okay uh council member watkins was next and then council member coming yeah i think i'll save a lot of my comments and questions also but i just really want to speak to a comment that i heard during oil communications in which you were referred to as mayor karen and i guess i just want to say a couple things about that one is that it was misused often that's associated with racial um actions and i think we want to be really clear about that with language and i um i also want to say as mayor it's the job of the mayor to facilitate public input and process and it's a tricky job and i have empathy for your position and um and also just recognize that's the role of the job of mayor right facilitate that process um i think after four years of name calling i hope that we can move away from that type of um dialogue and that we as a council welcome of course your policy input and ideas and thoughts and opinions but when you go to personal name calling i think it really is something i'd like to see left in the past as um as we had a lot of that from our former president and so i just really want to say that because i think we all observed it and heard it and i hope my colleagues here on the dais the virtual dais stand with me and wanting to move forward in that kind of direction so i will reserve my comments specific to this item but hope that as we move into oral or into the public comment process that our community members can adhere to that standard thank you councilmember councilmember coming thank you mayor and i agree with my colleague statements that were just made right now regarding some comments that were made during oral communication i had a couple clarifying questions and i'm going to also reserve comments for later i think a lot of those comments will be addressed was i'm wondering if you can just explain with regards to the on-street transportation what that can just clarify what that statement is thank you councilmember Cummings let me um pull this back up um and i apologize for going quickly through that but let me uh get that uh the transportation i believe is number two yes okay um so i'm going to share my screen again here so this is um where we saw um the draft said authorized storage programs shall be required to provide transportation assistance to individuals who request it and a potential alternative would be as any personnel encounter individuals who are camping in prohibited areas or at prohibited times so that's the when it would be offered the city shall have a service available to assist individuals with on-street transportation to storage facilities so that's again it's saying um where they're going to where they're they're starting from um the concern part of the concern was um the um drafted language could be interpreted very broadly like you know well someone would be given assistance to take their belongings out into the far reaches of the Pogonip every day with the with a broad interpretation of the language and so that's where we wanted to have the council consider a a more narrowed um uh directive as part of the ordinance they wouldn't then get so at least i'm just trying to understand you know why the term on-street is used and like how it applies in a certain sense to whether that's you know you have to be in the city um in like a residential area or does this apply to other spaces as well right certainly the council is you know it's it's the council's discretion related to this i think um part of the concern was that this says shall be required so uh the storage program shall be required to provide transportation to individuals so so the concern was where does that go and and obviously you know if if someone's being required to provide transportation to you know far reaches of open space that's going to take really significant um staff time um you know if they're um helping convey materials back and forth and so that's where we wanted to to have the council consider the implications of the policy that um and had been approved and um you know there are there are time and cost implications but it's it's the council's discretion as to how they want to approach the issue we wanted to call it to your attention so that um you can you can make that informed decision and then looking through the ordinance and then even today you know we have all the different zones called out and i'm wondering and you know if we if we express neighborhoods parks and things like that why do we have to call out all the zones and is there an easier way of saying what parts of the community are off limits by just stating you know neighborhoods parks open space etc so i'm just wondering if you can clarify you know why why we're laying out every single zone yeah i think um it it's been an iterative process um and i appreciate that question because um as we go through that iterative process there may be alternative approaches and so um you know depending on how the council wants to um direct us this evening there may be an alternative approach that's preferred in terms of how the ordinance is structured um so you know we started off with um fewer you know we tried to to minimize the number of areas that were prohibited um and certain areas have been more areas have been prohibited um with the addition of residential um for example and so you know certainly if if we're heading in that direction um if it's the will of the council we could restructure the ordinance such that it um it is worded in the affirmative of here the areas that you could go if um if that's the will of the council that would be an alternative approach um because you're you're correct there are uh you know the number of prohibited areas has been growing was mentioned um i think it was mentioned in the presentation around sensitive habitats being on the list but when going through the ordinance i just want to point out that it's sensitive species that are listed and so we actually don't have sensitive habitats as no sleeping areas so just to provide that distinction there's there's a difference between um you know sensitive species and sensitive habitats my question is there for now i have more but i know um we have limited time for comment and i want to ensure that we can hear from as many numbers of the bubbles as possible so and i know my other colleagues have questions as well so i'll stop there thank you and don i think you're muted or maybe right i'm sorry uh vice mayor bruner uh councilmember brown and councilmember condary johnson in that order great thank you uh and thank you councilmember walkins for calling out that caller statement my questions i'll be quick i did have one question and uh councilmember coming sprouted up on the transportation alternative language um that was part of the amendment that councilmember calentari johnson and myself had included and added at the last reading um i'm still unclear of the definition of on street in that usage what what was intended for that alternative language thank you vice mayor bruner um i think what um the thought was as part of that discussion was that it would be vehicular transportation um you know it wouldn't necessarily be going into the open spaces um but it would likely be vehicular transportation so that that was the thought going into it and again you know council discretion but that was how it was considered development okay okay and um my second question was um the hours you brought up a slide uh something about the hours um and again if you could clarify that sure happy to so i will know that the slide itself um is is particularly helpful but um the um the ordinance allows for camping um between one hour before sunset and seven a.m and uh councilmembers will recall it was presented last time as eight um allowed from eight p.m to eight a.m and there was some discussion about well it gets dark early in the uh winter and so maybe we should have one hour before sunset that'll give time that'll give people time to set up their camps um and then seven a.m since that time um since the last meeting the questions have also arisen well it's seven a.m the right time um so some other communities have done things like half an hour before sunset to half an hour after sunrise or it could be an hour before to an hour after and so forth so there are lots of different ways that the council could do it and given those questions that have arisen it is wanted to call that to the council's attention as a potential discussion topic and um we did have um exceptions built in to those um one hour before sunset to seven a.m for our expressly for our safe sleeping zones so we said it's allowed but you know the safe sleeping zones can have different hours um so that you know it wouldn't conflict with other uses you know if it's a parking lot you know starting it at four o'clock on on christmas eve you know an hour before sunset then you know downtown parking lot might be full at that time so um that was that was the thought is um you may want to consider alternatives there okay and um what what parks are not under state parks or parks master plan the open spaces are not considered parks in the parks master plan okay but there's okay yeah so i think we've got seven and i can pull the slide out we've got seven open spaces um and the ordinance before you preclude camping in a number of those um but um almost to the slide um here we go is that you know aronical more creek they love you get a coconut yeah so so um here um neary lagoon is an open space but it's it would be prohibited the um a rail soco canyon would be prohibited um and about others like the more creek hogan ebb um gala and um uh the aronical would uh not fall under those prohibitions in the ordinance that's before you tonight um okay and aronical portions would be due to the trail uh proximity is that correct that's correct you can see in in each of these you know the trails at 75 feet so these are 150 foot wide because it's 75 feet on either side would be expressly prohibited um and then um the um sensitive habitat areas could be prohibited as uh councilmember coming said if they're determined to have potential impacts on sensitive species so if the camping would have uh impact on sensitive species and these would be the first areas that we would look at and evaluate is these habitat areas should the council approve the ordinance as is drafted okay um and uh that's it for now thank you you're welcome uh councilmember brown and then councilmember commentary johnson yeah i i just want to make note here i i do have a comment because i think it's important to note that it is now 803 um we are not even done with councilmember questions and i appreciate that folks are trying to limit them but um we are leaving almost no time for the public to speak and i think that given what we're hearing it um it seems like there are a lot more people who want to speak on this item um i would appreciate extending uh public comment time to allow for that and i you know i i just i just want to say that you know on an issue a set of issues and a major policy change that is going to have major major impacts on our city all of our residents the city budgets um marginalized people in our community that um it's the least we could do to uh let the people speak um my question is it with respect to the cost estimates um we did have you um talked with other actors besides the county to have you talked with any of the nonprofits or community faith based organizations to um try to get a handle on um what costs might be if we looked at alternative administrative models because i think that um certainly that would be significantly reduced will we to do that so i just am wondering if you talk with anybody else to get a sense of what the cost might be otherwise so i'd note that the the managed camp was run um i believe a salvation army that was running that is my recollection and our estimate there was about 80 000 so that that is less than what the county was doing for the 100 000 plus that they were spending for you know roughly the same number of individuals though um i you know they were also providing more meal services um as well um and um what we based that on was just hours and pay so 19 dollars an hour number of hours number of staff um i do have a meeting set up next week um with a provider that you know i hope that we can have some of those conversations um however um you know between two weeks ago and right now um we all we were able to do is is get these rough estimates just based on um you know using those you know back of the envelope here's how many hours we would have people out there if it was um two staff members and and then we used our experience based on the 1220 river street thank you you're welcome and and i would say you know there is that potential and we're hopeful that um some non-profit providers could assist in doing it in a more cost-efficient manner councilmember callantary johnson thank you um i also share um councilmember brown's concern that hoping that we can extend public comment a little bit longer and i also want to thank councilmember Watkins the um name calling is unacceptable we may share or have different perspectives and come from different experiences but there's no reason for that and we can do better than that i do have a clarifying question for lee um or maybe something to confirm that permitted managed camp programs are currently possible um in the ordinance as it's written right now is that correct yes that is correct there seems to be confusion but that's not included and but it is currently possible yes it is and we have said in our draft report that one of the next steps would be to it should this be approved we would come back to the council with a policy um that provides some just high level guidance for those you know we don't necessarily want to get really specific but just high level guidance so we can understand what the council would like to see as part of those should this ordinance be adopted great thank you that was my question thank you councilmember um and i appreciate the councilmember's brevity in their questions um as many people know last couple weeks ago when we um reviewed this we stayed till 1 30 in the morning and um there was a lot of people that left during that process too so i'm trying to balance um a peak period of time where we can get as many people from the public involved in commenting um and give council members enough time for questions and comments and deliberation i'm not intending to eliminate or try to deny anyone public comment but i don't think setting policy at 1 30 in the morning is helpful to our community either so i am very read recognizing that i'm at a major balancing act right now so i'm going to go ahead and extend the um public comment time up to 9 45 so i'm going to add an extra 30 minutes right now there's 98 speakers starting at 808 i'm hoping we can accommodate everyone if all 98 people would like to speak um so if i did my math right i might miss a few here or there and feel free if you're speaking tonight if you don't need your full minute please make your comment as brave as possible and we can get through as many people as we can so i'll go ahead and open this up for public comment um if you are interested in commenting on on the ordinance related to regulations for temporary outdoor living press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to one minute public comment will end at 9 p.m excuse me 9 45 p.m to return to council action and deliberation and we will go ahead and get started i have caller lori martin please go ahead lori martin can you hear me fine yes we can hear you okay 30 year resident of prospect heights neighborhood thank you for taking on this difficult issue i realize the issues homelessness and city ordinances are controversial and complex however the issue of fire safety is not i'm from paradise california the fire storms we're seeing in recent years extend beyond what would normally be expected the csu fire had many of us in the city packed evacuating or prepared to go if camping's allowed in the open spaces of day la viega park around engulf should more creek it will have the potentials of the entire city of santa cruz at risk from devastating fires as well as our neighbors in the county these areas are also constant risk of falling trees and branches they're not safe for camping the fire in day la viega would also put our 911 center our hospital the armory shelter the golf course santa cruz shakesburg and more city assets at risk please amend the ordinance to remove day la viega park and these other open space areas from the loud overnight housing thank you thank you next step is search kagna go ahead search i did i sent bonnie could you put up slide number three is that possible i'll just keep talking i hadn't realized that health in all policies was actually in ordinance it's six point zero three point zero five zero and it states that all agenda reports within a year of adoption which were passed that time will contain a paragraph considering health in all policies so since this doesn't have one i don't know whether uh that lee just broke the law and whether this uh vote can actually go forward without that being included um with slide two i had a map that shows the black is the only places that people are allowed to camp and this is the best i could do trying to figure it out and trying to cross off all the neighborhoods it's a completely confusing it's absolutely unconstitutional homeless people are never going to be able to figure that one out thank you next up is phone number oh search are you still working i don't know i'm do i still have time it hasn't rang yet you do okay well if the if it was possible to show slide number three um that was i emailed all of you guys uh thank you search will if you email us we look at it we appreciate it zero nine five zero the solid in sales speaking for the more creek canyon homeowners association we support your efforts to help the homeless at the same time the lives of we who live at the wildland urban interface have been transformed by the growing thread of wildfires it defies logic to legalize outdoor living in areas of extreme fire danger like more creek canyon aranigal chindalabi aga park disposing of santa cruz is homeless by inviting them to camp in these remote inhospitable locations away from basic services is a disgrace removing unwanted encampments by opening the green belt to so-called overnight camping foolishly sweeps the hot coals of the unsheltered under an open space rug where it's only a matter of time before flames erupt it's been said that all sides unhappy may be the mark of an equitable solution in this case all sides are unhappy because the camping solution is a bad idea that helps no one and endangers many thank you thank you next up is tiffinnie worthington please onnie did i skip one no there we go tiffinnie worthington hi sorry i just came up thank you so much for hearing me and thanks for tackling this i'm with sol and laura lee i'm not with them but i just heard them speak and yes i agree it's um you know being intimately involved with the wildfires myself you know it's profoundly critical to keep camping out of these so-called open spaces you know fire hazards are extreme and i didn't realize i didn't have an intimate um experience with homeless and and drug addicted people until now that i live about 50 feet away from the encampment beach behind royal toge and um there was a massive explosion which turned into an uncontrolled bonfire the other night and luckily it didn't catch the nearby trees which hang over our home um but you know having that fire happen in our in pogan at for instance could easily start a series of mega fires um so i definitely discourage that i think it should be in some big parking lot and managed i think that would be easily managed and then i just have a quick question is what discourages um out of town homeless people and addicts from coming here to enjoy these these services and just increasing the need thank you very much next up i have mary please go ahead yes can you hear me yes we can great um i would propose that arena gulch would be an absolutely horrible place i think that they've tried this before to have camping i was actually part of one of the original people who was part of when original arena gulch was to be put in and that conversation came up believe it or not before they put arena gulch in regarding camping and it was the number one concern of having that just having that go into that area and now here we are saying that we're going to allow camping in arena gulch there's absolutely nowhere to put people there's everywhere you go there's no way that you're not going to be by the sidewalk i go through that i go through there at least three times a day early morning and evening it's very busy there's a lot of children in there there's no room and i don't understand how you have homeless people get there when they're all actually they need to stay exactly where they are right now and also i would propose that you put them at the facilities are for the homeless next is amanda s amanda s go ahead hi can you hear me yes we can my opposition to the inclusion of the arena gulch open space in the list of overnight sleeping areas arena gulch is the heart and soul of the east side it's a heavily utilized space by families dogs cyclists it's handicapped accessible it's the gateway to the beach and i wonder if this council doesn't fully grasp the amount of use it gets this past saturday from 9 30 to 11 30 in two hours we counted 255 separate individuals coming to use the open space a ronald gulch is key it is key to the quality of life of us those of us living on the east side of town this ordinance sacrifices the quality of life and security of the people of the a ronald gulch neighborhood please do not take our park for much thank you very much uh next up is david williams good evening my name is david williams i'm a resident of the city of santa cruz i share the serious concerns that others have already addressed about the wildfire danger of opening the city's greenbelt lands including the pogunap to temporary outdoor living there have been several fires in the existing outdoor living communities including in the pogunap area banning open fires will not be sufficient to prevent a totally tragic wildfire since fires occur even when both camping and fires are banned the city is exposing itself to future liability if it ignores this risk i'm also concerned about the environmental impact of overnight camping in the greenbelt lands the argument in the agenda report that this proposal is sequel exam is not compelling particularly with respects to throwing the greenbelt lands open to new camping in areas where it has not occurred or been allowed before if our greenbelt lands are needed for as temporary housing it must be done in a sustainable way that confines the impact to small regions that can most readily be supervised mitigated and enforced thank you thank you bonnie can you clarify did i i thought amanda just went right before david but i just want to make sure i didn't i didn't mess up amanda asked did you speak before regarding aronago yes okay thank you uh next up is beth princess please yeah i'm trying to unmute is it working it is we can hear you okay great thank you um so i live along the levy and i have an encampment um basically uh right by my house and um i'm calling in support of the ordinance just so that i can start feeling safe again uh you know all day long there is shouting um really obvious drug use and drug sales i've had people hop defense and steal things from my yard i've had someone a man from the encampment tried to enter my home while i was in it there's so many reasons that i feel unsafe because of the encampment um and then also the fires that just happened which i could see from my door they were very close so please um please continue to consider the residential areas and um yeah that's all i have to say thank you thank you very much breath uh best excuse me uh next person is with phone number ending in 1810 population density is directly proportional to homeless services so why thinking adding more services just here is not going to actually increase the homeless council santa cruz is questionable enabling homelessness is a city growth industry or a santa cruz city cause for many the line for free stuff is endless there should be other lines elsewhere i join others thinking an open invitation to legal mass occupation of so much vulnerable open space is a mistake as to tent camps sandwiches go set up six uh safe sleeping villages where each of 262 campsites cost 5 000 a month totaling 16 million a year more than it costs for a market rate apartment coming with three meals a day bathroom security the homeless industrial complex is a very very happy camper helper bunch since tent camps are not reimbursable by the fed one wonders what city services they give up an exchange maybe they and you should say what those are giving the unelected city manager autonomous bureaucratic authority to set up a temporary whatever that is homeless camp anywhere anytime is just one of many concerns thanks if you're pleased and ask your next speaker please um go ahead done mute and we'll ready to go okay thank you so much um my name is and simonton and i'm very curious that you haven't really you're considering this ordinance without as an idea of where to camp and where are you going to put these people camping when we have a very good solution that's used in many places around the country which is called a managed camp and that means there are guidelines that you are not investigating this and that you haven't really put any time or effort into this and i mean i know brent adams doesn't get 75 grand per year for his storage program so that you put forward these numbers to frighten people like the last caller who just was saying how prohibitively expensive all this stuff is there are volunteers in this community please consider faith-based groups nonprofits private groups and a managed camp thank you very much thank you next up is phone number ending in 9532 my name is soren whiting i'm the legislative director of the uc santa cruz now the temporary outdoor living ordinance effectively removes compassion from an area of policy decision-making that is in so desperate need of compassionate decision-making instead of having tolo we should be having discussions around topa copa it really breaks my heart to see the city which i've spent the last four years of my life being the news in the headlines with the title uc or santa cruz trying to regulate homelessness while at the same time my hometown berkeley discussing how make an implement policy like topa copa and other initiatives that can actually help people out and prevent situations leading to house homelessness um furthermore you know uc students are currently receiving around five percent of housing insecurity which you know you know a big part of our population is being dramatically impacted by this so i just want to say that that we are keeping a close eye on this issue uh and we want to make sure that you know going down the line that we have compassion and policy making rather than money guiding uh decision-making uh thank you next up is hilda can you hear me yes we can all right thank you so much so to the santa cruz community listening to me the way that the homeless folks were presented to us as a monolith last week was horrific paying them as drug riddles second-class people who are criminals who dare take out space in our prestigious areas like we're going to ban them from open space and then provide those temporary or even permanent shelter are you praying that they like die because obviously we're not looking at them we're speaking with them even with no access to libraries or even phones how are they even able to have access to this meaning that we're talking about their livelihood i like to remind folks that santa cruz is the fifth most expensive city to live in the world according to business insider every two years santa cruz conducts this county homeless like survey and i read all 60 pages from 2019 and 75 percent of the homeless of santa cruz aren't outsiders they've been here for five to ten years more these are your seasonal workers who are doing your actual construction work and these are your boardwalk people who are actually getting hired on these years you haven't gotten your first or second stimulus because the nation's had a huge influx and so we're not able to handle it really have compassion here and let me know that i voted for a kind and compassionate council member thank you next up is uh phone number ending in 2885 just press start there you go hello this is marv louis long-time resident of santa cruz this ordinance should it pass will likely stand as a challenge to the eighth amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment as well an indictment upon the majority citing a consciousness vacant of compassion this ordinance does not speak to liberty and justice for all rather the ordinance speaks to an abuse of power within a virtual process that refutes the best interest of this community both housed and unhoused thus i urge you to refute this ordinance until which time the community-oriented solution as would be representative of a democracy may be presented to this council that concludes my statement thank you very much uh next up is uh phone number ending in six nine five nine please go ahead and you can press star six and we can hear you number ending in six nine five nine phone number ending in six nine five nine did you want to speak if you unmute yourself we're ready to have you speak we're going to move on to the next speaker elise you're up next looks like you're ready to go is that six nine five nine or never mind bonnie you must have done that next up is elise okay hi can you all hear me yes we can thanks again i really appreciate i just want to say i agree name name calling shouldn't happen however people are very angry and i'm one of them and killing people is also unacceptable very much so in our country i believe it's called murder and that's what this law will be it is a punitive law it's a political law the ultra ultra conservative council that won on a primary date with big big big money and lots of deceptions in the sentinel is the reason behind this punitive law i have deeply investigated services in tana cruise profoundly services actually the city is in the business of lying suzi ohara is one of the zars of empty homeless policies she regularly tells bibs and you all do about your real policy which is mostly about about the police if you if your number ends in zero eight six one you're ready and we're ready to hear from you well i'd like to uh object to this uh criminalization of the homeless um you're picking on the poorest people in town and i realized that there are some of them that are making messes and stuff around town but that's uh that's not everybody that's a small group of people um how would you like it if you had to tear your house down every morning and then when you came home from work you had to build it back up again um it's very unreasonable and i'm sure that all of this is going to end up in the city in another lawsuit which you're probably going to lose so why even bother to do this if you know it seems futile and the fact that you're putting these um things in there to say okay this has to happen first before we start it that's not going to happen the police will enforce this law as soon as it goes on the books they're not going to wait for storage places to open up they're not going to wait for um somebody to come around and hand a piece of paper to every homeless person thank you next caller it ends in uh the last four digits nine zero six eight i can hear me yes we can yes my name is christina kowdland uh i'm an retired environmental consultant i specialized in recreating native plant communities especially in degraded areas uh clients have included municipalities parks departments of transportation airports power companies and many other commercial and industrial entities my particular emphasis has been on preventing erosion and fire as well as on the protection of watersheds and wildlife habitat what you are planning to do in other words allowing camping within parts of moore creek pogo nip dale aviega and orana gulch will quite simply ruin the native habitat it will quite simply destabilize the non-native environment it will also ruin the watershed it will place these natural areas at high risk of wildfire which as you know can jump to residential areas within the city of tana cruise i'd be happy to offer my services pro bono thank you very much next up is eric please thank you for taking my call tonight this is eric rodberg i understand i understand the many concerns people have it both uh the public and council and staff with the issues with it being rushed and um the potential amendments i would urge you to pass it tonight on a second reading so that you um with a few amendments as possible so you can pass it on a second reading you'll have plenty of chance to amend it before it actually can be enforced because of all the triggers and the thresholds before it will be enforced and i think this has been in the making for so long it's extremely important that we get something on the books tonight and um that thank you and uh thanks for all your hard work and staffs all staff's hard work thank you next up is clloe hoax go ahead clloe unmute yourself clloe can hi can you hear me yep we can hear you hi my name is clloe and i strongly oppose this ordinance i'm an environmental scientist with a background in water quality i'm well aware of human impacts on waterways but the city's concern for the environment is completely disingenuous you all admitted this isn't going to help homelessness it's just a first step but aren't there other first steps we could be taking like waste management portable hygiene facilities basic survival resources or how about funding mutual aid groups that are actually keeping the unhoused community fed enclosed why not invest more there first you're more concerned with protecting the environment from the houseless than you are from protecting the houseless from the environment somebody said this last week but you can't compare unhoused folks need to survive with housed wealthy folks need to not to be close to poor people your outreach is a vague afterthought and chief mills with all the respect how dare you say there's any compassion in your criminalization of homelessness this ordinance is a performative attempt to sweep optics of poverty out of the public eye with no genuine attempt to address the underlying issue vote no defund the police thank you next up is caller with the phone number ending in 7409 speaking on behalf of iran a gulch neighborhood and i'm wondering if you guys have consulted with the coastal commission um the city of santa cruz invested an enormous amount of time and money into developing the open space in iran a gulch for the purpose of protecting the tar plant by also creating a space for our entire community um allowing the homeless to camp in iran a gulch would inflict an exorbitant amount of damage to the endangered species habitat and coastal area implementation of the iran a gulch master plan required the city to obtain a coastal development permit from the coastal commission because the planning area lies within the designated coastal zone the coastal development permit includes both standard and special conditions and iran a gulch habitat management plan was developed to satisfy the special conditions of the coastal development permit iran a gulch is an area that's been protected for the endangered habitat in addition the majority of the area lies within the designated coastal zone and per the habitat management plan by allowing homeless to camp in this area would be in violation of those regulations thank you next thank you that's go ahead you're unmuted hi there sorry about that i um i'm a resident of santa cruz of 10 years one thing i'd like to bring to the conversation is why the city hasn't implemented a point in time survey in the houseless community and aren't doing their due diligence before implementing this ordinance and even i'm having an understanding of what the homeless population is currently at in santa cruz county with all of the additional houseless people from the pandemic thank you for your comments next up is caller with the number one you press star six thank you go ahead um i agree with chloe hook and um basically we're having a heart can you move a little closer to your speaker we're having a little hard time hearing you yeah um i very much agree with chloe hook and and listen i'm listening to what's going on in um the administration and the police and talking about homelessness and it seems to me that they're you know they're coming up with these kind of systematic ways to deal with homelessness on an ordinance level and it's very bureaucratic um and they're dealing with the fact that there's large encampments in san lorenzo park and um up in uh harvey west park until they're targeting those areas it's really clear to me that that's what they're doing they're not saying that but that's what they're doing and so my question to you is i i'm trying not to come off this um confront um confrontational or oppositional here but um i feel that you have to adapt to some kind of a mood of tolerance because what it means to cutting me off yeah i'm giving everybody a minute and i didn't even say it give as many people in as possible okay i don't know thank you next up is toby vini you're ready to go you can unmute we're ready been five fires this past year from a legal camp in iran a gulch her chief andy mills is only four to five hours off just a shift there's not enough police funding to secure the iran a gulch neighborhoods after budget cuts there will be no nighttime security and neither packing up every morning nor lee's proposed bedtime for the homeless is enforceable this kind of a housing project is not it's such a high density neighborhood with constant security is irresponsible it shows a complete lack of deterrent for city phantacruz city residents this is a flagrant and it's used to significant funds to only appear to address a growing mental health and economic crisis on our streets we've all seen what happens when the county embarked on these band aid projects in their attempt to only address the symptoms of a bigger problem while ignoring the real issue we've also seen what happens to the scarred environment in neighborhoods after the negative impact of these housing projects are irrevocably left in these areas before being relocated to another area if this measure is allowed to pass we're going to see the same things happen to iran a gulch the lovey aga poghanip and more greek iran a gulch is the most is the most frequented area in the heart of midtown if this is allowed to pass then it cruises the whole will never be the same again next up is davin we oppose this ordinance on the ground that is morally bankrupt logistically untenable likely illegal and altogether antithetical to the health of our community we must be the problems faced by our community in the context of the material conditions which give rise to them the 2019 santa cruz county homeless census found that of the 2000 on-house people in our county a vast majority are previous residents who became homeless due to domestic abuse divorce or separation the loss of a job and eviction or a rent increase and those who are able to work over 90 percent are either doing so or are currently looking the facts tell us this the on-house community is populated largely by the working class of santa cruz our struggling neighbors whose lives will be needlessly more complicated by this ordinance we must address the assertions made by those ordinance holistically claims such as irreparable environmental degradation are unfounded at best though often the result of inadequate city services other cities have demonstrated that robust community organizing paired with sufficient social services is not only more impactful and cost effective at addressing the problems at hand but it's also the responsibility of governance we call upon the council to do the right thing in the santa cruz chapter of science for the people thank you very much next is maria solis kennedy hi can you hear me yes we can hi i just wanted to um encourage the city council to vote against this ordinance i'm super confused after tuning in last week how it managed to get even worse and exclude people from basically every corner of the city i agree with a caller earlier that says this is can amount to trying to kill people um i think that this would do nothing but bring harm if you're looking for more money to um fund actual solutions for ending homelessness then i suggest um taking money out of the police budget which is overblown and there's a lot of public support behind that so please listen to your constituents and vote no against this thank you next up is anastasia hello can you hear me yes we can and go ahead thank you um i'm here today because i value compassion for all and i want to see it reflected in the systems that surround me and the police i live the issue of homelessness is of course an undeniable one in santa cruz those who are in sheltered often have big physical and mental health needs for obvious reasons and our city and county don't have the capacity to meet those needs right now i believe that the funding time and energy needed to effectively support this population and the surrounding community is being wasted to double down on things that have never worked writing citations to the already impoverished forcing those who live on the streets to constantly relocate taking away places of respite and shoving aside those who need help none of these things have thus far made an impact on the problems caused by homelessness in santa cruz i address any change makers on this council please reconsider this ordinance and instead prioritize working with the diverse community and local organizations you represent to create effective spaces of support and compassion for those who need it the most thank you go ahead garret unmute yourself star six um hi can you hear me yes we can all right um what i want to throw is a possible amendment if this is going to pass and that amendment would be rather to stop uh the taking and choosing certain areas and asking yourself sort of where people end up manifesting where they camp anyway instead of spreading them out into the open spaces if you had the camping van just be eight through eight um then basically you'd be outlawing all encampments in the city and that's a pretty huge move and it's really really hard for people to pack up their stuff every day so that's a big move and considering that amendment included that it wouldn't push people out into the brush areas they'd stay virtually where they were but they would give the police officers something to enforce in some way sorry uh so basically that as an amendment i don't think it would leave any encampments it would be a really strong anti-homeless move which the tolo already is and it would outlaw encampments and other that have mutual aid groups have to step up and help people set their stuff up thank you next up is phone number indian 6074 hello my name is grace pastille and i'm an undergraduate uc santa Cruz as well as a legislative advocate at the uc the temporary outdoor living ordinance ordinance effectively removes compassion from an area of policy decision making that is most in need of compassionate decision making while amidst a pandemic and long-lasting housing crisis the city has proposed increasing punitive measures against a large population of our city who have been displaced and disproportionately affected the city has yet to acknowledge the true measures that they need to take to truly combat homelessness and make living affordable we urge the city council to take compassionate action rather than punitive measures to provide relief to those in most desperate situations and urge you to see homeless people as important legitimate members of our community thank you thank you very much next up is kiki on you're welcome to unmute go ahead please hi my name is kiki and i strongly oppose this ordinance i be proposed costs from outline today by we are only three percent of the total of Santa Cruz's police budget which would be much better allocated to a managed camp facility and this would actually provide real resources and solutions to the houseless community instead of continuing to criminalize them and create more harm to one of the most vulnerable communities so i think that i urge council to vote no on this ordinance thank you thank you next up is raffa son in film i was appointed to catch and served on the safe sleeping subcommittee we were from to try to come up with solutions the city could use to improve or mitigate the negative effects of unsheltered homelessness and while i appreciate the city's effort to attempt to tackle this complex issue they approach taken with this ordinance is not helpful and frankly counterproductive not only do i believe this ordinance is unconstitutional and will open the city to further civil liability but it will not be effective in managing camping in a meaningful way people will be forced to break the law to meet their needs there'll be so many violations of this ordinance that'll be impossible to enforce fairly and consistently resulting in more litter more human waste since there'll be no organized trash and toilet service for dispersed camping increased burdens on people sleeping outside through the particularly counterproductive misdemeanor arrests that are included in this ordinance and resulting in making it even harder for folks to access medical and social services harder to obtain housing and harder to keep and result in keeping people on house i think we need to focus on solutions to get people out of homelessness not policies like this one that perpetuate thank you thank you next up it is phone number ending in 0249 for all your work on this challenging issue this is carol fulhamas i was very encouraged this morning to see that the board of supervisors passed their proposal to provide more shelter options in county districts since the county receives the funding for homelessness mental health and substance abuse treatment i believe that the city should begin to shift its focus to reliance on the county for these services and to work closely with the county to locate managed transitional camps with services on county property i um also encourage you to pass this ordinance with modifications thank you thank you next up is abby young hello can you hear me yes we can go ahead yes my name is abby young a 20-year resident of prospect heights and co-founder of fire-wise communities in the city of santa cruz i cannot support this ordinance as written especially because of the provision to prohibit camping and require storage of belongings between the hour seven am and one hour before sunset this will criminalize the unsheltered with an ordinance that's inhumane and punitive unenforceable in old times especially given that the board of supervisors passed their resolution this morning for housing and health division to work immediately with the city to create stable healthy safe places to live and a mission which was endorsed by the mayor and vice mayor in that matter to the board yesterday i strongly urge the city council hold off on passing this ordinance till the county's housing for health divisions first priority of exploring city county partnerships has been explored and their first report has been written also as fire-wise leader the allowance of camping and open spaces of moore creek poganip and orana gulch would greatly endanger the neighborhoods above the gulches i predict this will be described as people who need community and services to survive thank you very much next up is branna mochler wanted to start by saying that i've just been really disappointed about how much so many people have been referring to the house's people they are part of our community they're residents they're our neighbors um and many people call it in support of this measure asking for it to be expanded are talking about them as though they're pets that should be gotten rid of which is just really disgusting um obviously santa cruz has a very high rate of homelessness um of community members experiencing homelessness but this proposal as council members have stated isn't fixing the problem it's just trying to make it less visible to the wealthier and luckier members of this community um it's clear that many people are much more concerned about the small nature spaces within a city that's surrounded by protected nature than they are about the well-being of the most vulnerable members of our community and i'm embarrassed to live in a city that would put forward such a heartless and clearly nimby motivated ordinance that make it harder for those most vulnerable members of our community to sleep and to stay safe during the cold thank you next up is phone number ending in 8002 hi my name is rebecca lundberg i'd just like to say that i think you'll be making a huge mistake if you try to allow homeless camping in aranagoche it is in the coastal zone i believe you would be breaking the law if you allowed that we still have huge pockets of trash garbage chopped bikes um gas cans um mattresses in the creek and in the waterways please please please do not allow this camping to go on it's a fire hazard the vandalism that took place in our neighborhood i live right across the street in the entrance to the park was untenable cars vandalized homes broken into it's not okay we're upset and you're making a big mistake please do not allow camping in this space as well as i'm pretty sure it's illegal talk to the coastal commission thank you thank you next up is phone number ending in 7044 can you hear me yes we can hi my name is melissa free baron and i'm calling right now to advocate for the neighbors surrounding stan lorenzo park um it's very clear what's been happening we have a serious mess and heroin problem in our community that is not being addressed and what happens in these unmanaged encampments is it brings a drug territory issue to our local parks it brings fires it brings trash we have removed along with volunteers and city workers over 11 000 debris pounds of debris just from under the soquel bridge it is unacceptable to think that people can camp in our open spaces moore creek pogo nip irana gulch these are all areas that people the residents locals have been doing cleanup for over the past 10 years you need to amend this ordinance and you need to support managed encampments with services connection to providers thank you thank you very much next up is harm mc can you hear me you're a little bit light um but yeah please go ahead maybe move a little closer to your things sound okay now that sounds great thank you okay i don't think that fires or needles or trash or noise are going to be solved by discernment to the county or more police action i don't think that you can address symptoms only i don't think looking over the fence and listening to talk show radio is also research and transparent measures are not only morally but scientifically and actually bankrupt i don't want to have to keep spinning my wheels because people get spooked by some shallow hard-on-crime 90s puppet show constantly masquerading homeless people in front of them to legitimize the salaries of the council and the cops over half san cruz city's council sorry budget goes towards the police and most of the stuff they deal with is the unhoused population i also want to know why they're actually harassing the volunteer thank you very much thank you is edward astrada hi can you hear me uh you're a little bit light if you could oh hello there you go that's better okay hi everyone my name is edward astrada i'm the president of college dems college democrats at ucsc i don't think more regulations on homeless people and criminalizing homelessness is a solution to our current homelessness and housing crisis i know this issue is very complex but this is a step backwards many of us are only a couple paychecks away from homelessness in this county with its extreme housing costs their residents too and they're part of our community this ordinance does not fix homelessness it only pushes the homeless population out of sight and out of mind while criminalizing their existence and survival we should be moving our homeless population into homes providing them with mental health and drug services and not increasing criminalization housing is a human right thank you thank you stacey falls you're next two weeks ago and my concern has not changed the ordinance is completely untenable because you know you're you're restricting all these different places and the places might change depending on the season tiger beetle is mating or not as people get pushed around ten minutes it's just going to be exacerbated by not providing a place to rebuild their lives if you start in 2554 you press star six you could unmute your phone number ending in 2554 hello can you hear me yes we can go ahead all right hi my name is john mckelby i'd first like to thank the city the council and city staff for trying to balance the interests of our entire community i support approval of the outdoor living ordinance but if managed encampments are necessary for accommodating families who have recently lost their homes they should serve as triage facilities and a starting point for houseless individuals and families to escape homelessness altogether we should not satisfy ourselves with creating favelas as new neighborhoods in the community and accordingly i don't believe we should allow ourselves to see such facilities as permanent or even semi-permanent end states for people experiencing homelessness i think we need to do better for the most vulnerable in our community having said that the inclusion of open spaces like irania gulch television park and more creek within the definition of places where outdoor living will be allowed is problematic the topography combustible vegetation general and accessibility and environmental concerns in these areas make them unsuitable for outdoor living we should instead be focused on limiting managed encampments to underutilized easily accessed safe and easily maintained locations not otherwise accessible to the public whether located on public or private property is sabina over can you hear me yes we can thank you hi my name is sabina i want to give a shout out to my children who are still up at 9 p.m because we're all listening to the city council meeting together they understand that criminalizing houseless people is not going to help any issues that are going on here i would really love the city council to comment on exactly what this ordinance is fixing also this is clearly a huge huge lawsuit that is about to hit the aclu is definitely interested as our other groups so how are you going to pay for this lawsuit you're giving all the money to chief andy mills who is salivating at the thought of ot for all of his officers who are just going to tell people to keep moving along which is what they're doing right now so i'm not sure how this is going to work also these comments are overwhelmingly against the ordinance so i'd really like a comment on that from the city council as well besides that homeless people are just icky or something like that because that's all that i hear from you now anyways i need to put my kids to bed you should really start these meetings earlier so you can get more public comment thank you next up is adam novak i guess we can ordinance is an attempt to make homeless people disappear by moving them around really fast now this is a strategy that i would be disappointed to see employed by a baby let alone elected officials have a strong grasp of object permanence let alone empathy for the people being regulated here it's just a mean policy nobody benefits from making people set up and break down camp every day that's two hours off your day that's a significant reduction in quality of life for what's supposed to be a quality of life ordinance and it would cost every household person in the city something like ten thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars every year in city compelled unpaid labor as a generally accepted minimum medical wage i mean look at this great new program to help the homeless by giving them negative eleven thousand dollars said no one ever like this is not a good idea please reject the ordinance four digits four three four three you press star six we can hear you hear you just a second ago if you press star six on your phone you should come through dollar with the left four digits four three four three we can't hear you okay i'm going to move on uh tiffany worthyton i believe you've spoken already is that correct bonnie are we the second for it to unmute to offer the unmute no i i really i have and i just simply wanted to say i just apologize for all of the um that um the kind of the hate and anger that's coming towards you and i just want to really appreciate you guys for taking on the service of being on our city council that's really all i want us to say it hurts my heart to hear how harsh people are being towards you all so thank you for taking this on just all thank you next up is uh phone number ending in 9820 i oppose the ordinance thank you next up is phone number ending in 5383 yes we can thank you uh next up is phone number ending in 0845 criminalizing poverty does not make it go away we give you our tax money to help the left fortunate not to pay for more police in jails and judges are intelligent and we'll be able to see through the attempt to um circumvent previous rulings the second point i wanted to make is that it was wrong for the mayor to censor the commenter who played her own words back to her it sounded like mayor meyers was embarrassed by her previous outburst it would be appropriate and i encourage her to initiate a reparations reconciliation process if she's embarrassed as she ought to be i i believe that mayor meyers knows that we are all racist and our identities does not exempt us in our behaviors we have to be honorable and we have to be honorable towards those less fortunate to us and those who are poorer than we thank you next caller is ending in numbers 5383 council members um this is skirt bonnigot again i'm calling um to say that i oppose this ordinance um i oppose it mostly as a taxpayer and as someone who looks critically at city budgets um i believe the overtime required for our officers to enforce this ordinance should it pass um given the number of homeless people that we likely have in the city and likely ability for everyone to comply perfectly 100 of the time um i do think this will cost our city a quite a bit of quite a bit of money and um i don't feel comfortable with that on top of a lot of other things that i don't feel comfortable with about this ordinance and i just want to say uh you know i played for you know derby for this community for five years i love Santa Cruz i'm very very proud to be uh thank you thank you thank you next up is pire pire ritchie please star six unmute your well we're ready to go pire ritchie okay go ahead we should be able to hear you we can't hear you um pire ritchie um you look to be unmuted but we cannot hear you we'll we'll try to come back to you can you keep track of that i've got the name written down to next up is baro this ordinance because as we are all aware it was not written to support the basic needs or well-being of the unhoused population and i don't think it was even written for the wealthy residents of Santa Cruz who don't want to have to look at dirty poor people in their neighborhoods because so many of them are calling in to complain about the few areas we're camping would still be allowed this ordinance is only concerned with the aesthetics of the city and its goddamn tourist industry and it's obvious your greed and lack of humanity are disgusting you're not fooling anybody with this you need to be investing in actual services for unhoused people if you want to claim to be addressing the issues stop making excuses by deferring to the county if it's the county's job then you should stay out of it because you clearly don't know what you're doing vote no on the ordinance deep on the police and quit your fucking jobs thank you is friend adam hi i'm here hi brent hi uh you know i just wanted to uh kind of remind us about what has been happening in the previous years for instance the um uh interim shelter um idea where the city had identified five different locations put that up on a map and then there were resistance movements didn't move forward transitional encampments you put a map up there the city manager did and then resistance movement put a kibosh on it parking lot 27 safe parking lot put a map up resistance movements not going to happen all mon starters here we are put a map of course you're never going to put camps in these open space areas this is really just um a dry run fiasco the city manager knows this is a non-starter this is a fool's errand and you're just running us around and we i kind of wonder wonder where we're really headed of course we need transitional cabinets we need a full array of shelters in this community we need an authentic program from the city manager's office and i'm really wondering you know what's behind all this it's just i'd press star six and you should be able to speak i was wondering if any of you have read the letters from the dsa i mean not dsa sorry d rc disability rights of california um they sent a four page letter about how this how they oppose this ordinance um as well as the htlu sent a letter um so i'll just read until i get cut off from the disability rights the a few things that it says in their letter is people with disabilities both of which will result in unlawful discrimination on the basis of disability also acknowledges that people with certain disabilities may be unable to relocate their campsite every day the provision gives them 96 hours to relocate ignoring the reality that moving every four days remains burdensome for anyone particularly people with disabilities additionally in order to receive the extra time to relocate the individual with a disability may be asked to provide therapy for you i just wanted to state that i oppose this ordinance because i believe that it is unlawful and unethical to make people move that much i also think that it isn't actually going to do anything productive for the issue there are not the facilities in place to make this happen making people move their stuff without having places for them to go during the day is just going to create more issues with the police and making giving police more power to enforce this i think it's very violent i think that it's a horrible idea and i heavily oppose this ordinance thank you thank you next up is hector marin you're a little bit muted i we can't quite hear you i don't know if you can move closer to your speaker can you repeat that again that's great oh good yep okay yeah so i just want to quickly say that you know when it comes to the you know temporary outside living ordinance that we should oppose it because there are no alternative solutions that are being offered for houses books and it's imperative for y'all as public uh you know public officials to represent the needs of the community right because like what's going on especially you know during these times we're in the middle of a pandemic there is no support being you know provided for these folks and it's really dehumanizing to impose this ordinance which is which really represents the real estate and the elitist endeavors of the city of Santa Cruz right so i you know i the community the community is coming forward to engage with y'all to um oppose this ordinance because it's morally wrong there are no solutions being posed and above all this y'all can be voted out just as much um if y'all don't represent the community in that same regard um but yeah that's my message and you know follow what the community says and this is what the community is um enforcing y'all to do um oh yeah part of the people Barton do you know what's next council to vote no against this ordinance because i see it as a wasteful step to solve homelessness it makes no sense to me to see the city face the potential for lawsuits and the continual use of police time and money to issue useless citations if this ordinance is passed to imagine at home people have to tear down their houses every day with a cop over their shoulder is on the unacceptable to me and seeing that there have not been comprehensive outreach and nonprofits faith-based groups and mutual aid organizations to work towards a cost-effective and manage open space camp makes me urge the council to do more research towards this option i see this as a much more appealing and cost-effective option compared to the cost of paying the police overtime to enforce this ordinance again i urge council to vote no against this ordinance defund the police fund effective solar services and i'm finished with my time thank you thank you very much next follow-up on 226 this is kandace elliott and i just wanted to thank you all for the work that you're doing tonight on this issue um and after having listened to everyone and everyone's concerns i think this is still an important piece to move forward with in recognition that it is a part of a tapestry of work that is being done locally on the issue from nonprofit organizations and the county and the city with federal and state and all these different funding sources um and so thank you for the work you're doing tonight next up is steve schnarr can you hear me now yeah go ahead yeah so this this policy seems like a foolish attempt to make people to sorry i understand that that like we there's a lot of problems that people have with the camp big camp in the middle of downtown but um people are going to sleep somewhere and pushing them to the remote areas of our open spaces without trash service without bathrooms um it's only going to make the problems worse so if we want to actually reduce these negative impacts that people are worried about we should be investing in designated camps where there are bathrooms where there's trash uh where people can get transit otherwise we're wasting everybody's time and i'm risking future lawsuits next up is phone number ending in 2760 2760 you're up hello my name is isabel salazar and i am one of uc santa cruz's legislative advocates and i strongly object to this ordinance the ordinance is trying to break up in canvass yet does not address the core reasons of why so many people in dead cruise are experiencing houselessness or even offer short-term solutions of shelter it is this heartening and disturbing that the ordinance involving extreme policy changes was corroborated by the police department who is going to be offered overtime pay to enforce this initiative i strongly urge city council members to not pass this ordinance as it will cause more problems and pain people need approaches of care and support not policing as this ordinance very much does i hear a lot of people on the call talk about their safety with encampments nearby but what about the safety of having to live on the street criminalizing houses populations does not fix the surface level problems that people are listing here like fires needles and noise it just moves them away from their view there is strong city opposition for this ordinance and i really hope that the city council will keep that in mind when voting thank you come back up i committed to having you come back up when we see you are online so please go ahead hello can you hear me yes we can thank you so much for your time um my personal experience with the uh outdoor living ordinance issue is my personal experience homelessness in the city of santa cruz in 2008 uh long before you guys uh spent three million dollars on creating tent city i was living in that homeless facility that's located on river street uh going to school every day to mission hill middle school from seventh grade eighth grade and a lot of the stereotypes and a lot of the uh rhetoric that i'm hearing towards homelessness about theft and drugs and of many bad rhetoric that i hear about the homelessness i've heard from students i was plastic swift and many of those rhetoric i knew was from the parents and a lot of the older adults who are in charge of the city and a lot of them carried that rhetoric to their children and it made me more shameful to be homeless and the community that didn't really have careness towards homeless and it made me more introvert and um a lot of these issues uh affected a lot my mental health issues uh dealing with depression of trying to figure out where i'm going to live where my next meal is going to be and i just hope that you guys have the empathy when you vote on the deal thank you very much also want to um bonnie advance uh phone number four three four three they i think couldn't get through last time either you see them four four three four three right below nancy could um the number that couldn't get through initially was five three three but we did get to it three three that we didn't get to and we did we did get to it oh we did get to it okay got it okay okay um sorry uh sabrina lopez you're next i really like to reiterate what so many have said here today that the ordinance is can you hear me yes we can did you hear all of that okay great so uh the ordinance is inhumane as criminalizing poverty is an unintelligent solution to getting people out at the end of the day it's clear that the motivation behind this ordinance is to simply get these people out of your backyard and if i can change your mind on your motivation at least i can encourage you to use a more intelligent and innovative problem solving skills perhaps some that don't perpetuate criminalizing minorities and poor people perhaps my tax dollars and the tax dollars of your constituents could be put to better youth by utilizing actual problem solving skills your staff repeatedly acknowledged that this is not a long-term solution so why would any of you vote yes mind-boggling but the fact of the matter is we know that you are going to vote yes because that's what the city does it aims for short-term solution prioritizing aesthetic and tourist income over human needs thank you next up is number ending in 7149 and then i just want everybody to know the last caller that will take is with the federal level ending in 8877 i believe that will take up to 945 go ahead good evening thank you for your time my name is jace ritchie and i strongly oppose tollo and in this moment honestly my heart breaks when we talk about marginalized people and marginalization this policy is literally what pushes the most vulnerable among us to the farthest most or more corners of the city away from critical resources and into our green belts i hear deep pain in our community though and the city leadership seems eager to brush off our pleas for compassion i want to take a moment to speak to those still fighting for human rights in our community there is still compassion in our community even if we do not see it from this council there is still compassion even as members of this council spends vapid words lamenting hurt feelings or sue the california department of public health as they vote to eradicate poor people but not poverty from our community there is still compassion despite this punitive police heavy ordinance and we will continue to fight for a just safe compassionate Santa Cruz until the day we meet our maker until then i pray for guidance for city leadership and i persist with peers in the name of the next up is phone number ending in 4931 hey can you hear me you can hey i'm rachel chavez lower ocean resident and nurse i live here and walk alone through encampments regularly and without any problems i'm begging you to not pass this ordinance even those that are in favor of camping restrictions can see what a disaster that it would be to push people away from services and further into neighborhoods and open spaces this ordinance is ordinance lacks humanity it lacks logic and it laughs in the face of evidence-based practice it's shameful that so many of the council members who recently ran on platforms of compassion equity and health and all policies support this ordinance that ignores the wealth of research that proves that anti homeless laws are expensive and effective and traumatizing for the in-house the time and effort that went into this hateful and senseless ordinance is disgusting misuse of city funds that could have been spent writing grants and setting up services instead of scheming how to give scpb even more money to terrorize homeless people there's no evidence that having more services brings more homeless people to town it's actually contradicts the point in time count as well as other research done on hopelessness it's disgusting that the city promotes this myth and other dehumanizing anti homeless rhetoric while hiding behind people's first language tells us that you know better but you don't care thank you yes me me yeah i think we okay go ahead nancy caruso i oh no yeah we can hear you okay thanks thank you i think what we've heard tonight shows this ordinance is pairing our city apart and we've also heard there's no right place as you know we have successful encampment models as an alternative to unmanaged camps or over managed costly ones we have models from managed communities that have positive results and they're not managed by police so instead of instituting another punishing policing regime which will ruin lives and risk the health of hundreds of people vote no on this ordinance and bring us ideas that have the potential to succeed not rip us apart to heal not harm us and to save lives thank you next is nadia parolta hi good evening wonderful things have been said i hope that the city council tonight can hear that and let it in through the very human hearts that we know you have despite the inhumanity of the tumbary outdoor living ordinance i think that one of the most things that sticks out to me the most is how this ordinance is just so emblematic of everything that so many people are ready to leave behind and that is while so many people tonight are telling you that there is a desire to embrace actual um compassionate solutions for houseless this um i personally i'm the resident of the antiques and have been for a long time and i talk to my houseless neighbors on a regular basis asking what they need and bring them things as much as i can um i feel like there's so much you get time there and some people just from talking to them and i think that there's so much waxing in here it's so disgusting and i know he seems better and we will vote you out if you do not see my opinion as a mother a taxpayer and i work as a paralegal in this county um i i understand the law i i understand people's concerns i also have been an unhoused person um on two occasions once before i was a mother and and once as i as i had become a parent um neither of those occasions were because i wanted to be an unhoused person would assume that that most unhoused folks in our community didn't make the choice to to live as unhoused people uh no one wants to be unhoused here but as a person and a taxpayer and and and a member of our community i have to say it's absurd that we should expect our unhoused community to to set up camp and then and then take up their lives and move thank you next up is phone number ending in 1158 thanks for thank you for taking my call i want to point out that we're living in a county where the median house even in city where the median listing price is over a million dollars it feels selfish and irresponsible to separate yourself from the rest of the community and i urge you to vote down this ordinance thank you thank you next up is phone number ending in 2033 if your phone number ends in 2033 you can unmute can you hear me if you can um my name is britain fits morris i am the uh the grandson of former mayor kim fits morris so the green party and i strongly oppose this measure i think it's very performative neoliberal bullcrap and it's harsh confusing punitive please vote no the recent fires have added many new houses people it's an immoral class this ordinance during a pandemic against tdc guidelines uses weird uh faulty environmental tactics instead you should build affordable housing not development uh for for you know like whatever weird things that you guys are building in town that we don't want um like resorts and stuff defund the police reallocate services to mental health services um and be um be an ideal city uh instead of one that takes punitive measures towards houses people thank you uh you you will suffer legal suffocation if you pass this ordinance as well so take that into consideration thank you jennifer you're next hello can you hear me hi uh my name is jennifer burnow and i strongly oppose this ordinance i uh i've been living here for 16 years in santa cruz i'm a mama i haven't eaten eight-year-old daughter and she cares so much our family cares so much about people as humans and it breaks my heart when i have to explain to her that we live in a city that wants to pass an ordinance that will move people experiencing houseness around so heartlessly we regularly visit people living on the street sharing basic needs items food forms and i wouldn't have it any other way i want her to grow up seeing people as human and i it just it makes me so sad that we would that you would consider passing this banning people from seeking shelter will not magically disappear houseness i urge you please please please reconsider passing this ordinance and instead find compassionate solutions because they are out there and we have a whole community of people who want to help to find ways and thank you seven seven last four digits your number ends in eight eight seven seven you're ready to ready to go you can press star six you can unmute yourself ability rates of california in order to receive the extra time to relocate the individual with a disability may be asked to provide verification of their disability from a physician this requirement creates an unnecessary barrier as unhoused individuals rarely have regular access to a physician who can provide such a letter this is especially true during the pandemic when most medical providers operate through a telehealth model even when an individual is able to get healthcare services the transitory nature of homelessness including the threat of encampment sweeps often results in the individual losing important documents like id cards and medical records the city should not require anyone particularly a person with a disability to change where they live on a regular basis the other provision addressing people with disabilities is six point three six point oh six oh g which states that a campsite shall be no larger than 12 feet by 12 feet per occupant or 1150 and that'll be it go ahead saxon i create a bike and really crunch off doctor like that on the interconnected nature social categorization such as race class and gender as they apply to a given individual or group regarded as creating overlapping and independent systems of discrimination or disadvantage in the ordinance of discrimination is non-intersection half of this council is promised to bring equity to the city of santa cruz mints on the lives of our neighbors are far more important than quote unsightly tents the city has relentlessly pushed people into corners so that they're out and out of sight and out of mind of tourists and this does nothing but make life harder on the people who already have it hardest and people many people already have to walk miles to go to their night jobs and to get water and to get food and pushing people around and redlining areas and making them pack up their tents every single day just makes living so much harder at san lorenzo park for example which the city has already tried to broke up break up the homeless union and others have proved in federal court that the accusations the city manager and city has made about fallen units garbage needles and human waste are false and that community members at the park have actually worked to resolve any issues that there are despite the negligence of the city which has actually failed to provide proper garbage services at the park this is just one example thank you number one one five zero hi can you hear me yeah hi this is helsey hill um i made comments two weeks ago on the first reading but i want to reiterate some comments that have been made how in the world that this ordinance get even worse and what i've witnessed in these last two meetings is patently bad city policy crafting it's confusing it's messy and it opens the city up to lawsuits in the worst budgetary constraints the city's experienced in decades many of you on this diet know that i was homeless for five years as a youth and if it had been my mom or dad that you were legislating against the tolo i definitely would not have been able to go to school in this town or run for council this last year where i heard the newly elected members on this diet talk about compassion ad nauseam so how dare the majority on this council call themselves leaders when they're unabashedly serving only the interests of people who are already sheltered in our community you need to hear the concerns of your constituents and kill this ordinance thank you have a good night thank you we'll go ahead and uh conclude um i believe the last two folks with their hands up i believe the aspirin you've spoken um and i believe michelle we can hear as well mayor jasmine who is one that didn't get through the first time oh okay so why don't we have her go ahead please uh can you hear me yes we can um i'm jasmine mia and um i lost my faith in the city council in the electoral process a while ago yet somehow i was still surprised surprised you somehow made this ordinance even worse the presentation was basically city staff pointing out all the places you overlooked to suggest ways to make this even more restrictive hey you guys forgot that little patch over there this is essentially saying that houseless people should cease to exist because where should they go what if all cities and counties did this invoke john ralph veil of ignorance what if you were houseless and this was happening to you how would you want to be treated this is a path to genocide it's heartless inhumane and unacceptable connect with your humanity vote no on this ordinance defund the police and use the money to provide actual solutions thank you bonnie was there any other callers that didn't get in when we were working through some of that yeah okay okay i'm gonna allow the last two six nine oh three because i said i'd go till nine forty five so six nine oh three and michelle and that will be it for this evening thank you this is cat and k on speaking on behalf of the sanix group coalition of homelessness we're advocating for transitional managed encampments in the city it's of no cost to the city because the funding comes from organizations or communities managing them people living nearby transitional encampments actually benefit from them last crime and greater cleanliness of the neighborhood people transition into better situations at a higher rate than other models through self-care and communal responsibilities like picking up trash in and around the encampment and maintaining the encampments facilities like cooking cleaning and staffing the welcome desk if the outdoor living ordinance passes we wanted to include a permit process specifically allowing faith-based communities and or nonprofits to operate the transitional managed encampments in all parts of the city our preference is for a permit process to be included in this ordinance but we are also in support of it being its own individual agenda item the city can either continue the never-ending cycle of relocating homeless individuals through police enforcement or they can invest into a true long-term solution of transitional encampments okay go ahead Michelle hey thank you I am just begging you to please vote no on this ordinance as a community member and a previously unhoused person people need a chance to to prove themselves to to have potentially a better life and and most of these people did not choose this path and I just wish that we could give them one more chance and and that may be just to to stay where they are for a few more nights and to be able to pick themselves up to have somewhere that they can can count on sleeping for a few nights and and and began to to make a new life thank you thank you okay um thank you and thank you for everyone that spoke tonight um I hope we got through pretty much everybody um we tried hard um I'll go ahead and turn it back to the council now um uh I believe council member Cummings I I have to admit I was focused on a lot of numbers tonight so I'm not to be honest I'm not sure if it was you or council member Golder that raised your hand first so I'm hoping I wonder what are the other of you would know probably what's one of the community's biggest and most challenging issues I greatly sympathize with the members of our community who are experiencing homelessness and homelessness um and I also greatly sympathize with those who are housed to experience some of the negative um impacts that can be associated with homelessness and my hope is that you know we can work together to find a balance and personally my feelings are that you know rather than to rush to do something that we should really take our time to do something right and you know we make changes this evening I really hope that it can come back as the first reading and that we could have staff do some work to really make some updates and changes that can address the concerns that we're hearing from the community really believe that it's so critical that we get something past this evening because as it's been expressed we do have time to continue working on this given that there's going to be restrictions in our ability to enforce this due to CDC guidelines among other things and you know I think we also need to take into account you know if this is something that can't be enforced then why are we putting laws on the books that can't be enforced so um those are some initial comments I wanted to make I agree with members of the community especially those who have expressed concern around um this around unsanctioned camping in our open spaces um that was one of the biggest reasons we'll have voted against this last time and my feelings toward that have not changed at all I've looked over the parks master plans each of the areas that have been defined have their own master plans some going as far back as the 1990s some in the early 2000s and many of them truly expressed the need to preserve these environmental habitats and minimize to the greatest extent possible human disturbance within these areas as some of the callers have mentioned some of these plans had to go through the coastal commission and so I was concerned around whether or not you know saying that we we would allow for camping in those areas whether or not that we need to have approval by the coastal commission um but you know I do want to recognize that we need to try to start figuring out ways we can address some of the behaviors that we're experiencing um to um one of the the callers made the comments around the cleanup under the Soquel bridge um I know a number of other people who went to help with that effort and while we need to try to do what we can to um you know allow for people experiencing homelessness to have compassionate ways to find sleep and to live within our community we also need to ensure that the actions that are associated with those encampments aren't damaging our natural spaces our water supplies that we're not promoting fires within fire centers and habitats and that we're not you know putting unnecessary impacts on people within our community who may be housed as well um so with that I do have a few questions I do have some recommendations for changes that can be made um and I'm willing I'd like to hear from colleges where I'm not gonna you know jump the gun and make a motion straight out the gate um but I did have a couple questions uh before we kind of get into deliberations for staff first question and and I know I brought this up at the last meeting and I've had community members reach out to me as well um last meeting we had maps showing where camping could not occur but we weren't provided with a map of based on the areas where we designated where camping could occur and I'm wondering still has there been a map created to show based on the current ordinance where camping could occur um and I think that's really important because if this were to pass tonight the way that it's written then the community at least deserves to see what areas would be uh where camping would be able to occur in the city. Thank you councilmember Cummings uh a pictorial representation has not been prepared I can tell you the ordinance in front of you includes the four open spaces which would be um Dela vega pogunov uh orana gulch excuse me yeah orana gulch and um uh pogunov or I know more creek I already said that other one um and then it would include the commercial industrial areas so that includes west side industrial um the uh harvey west area um it includes the uh small area in seabright that is owned industrial and it includes um each of the primary corridors so mission ocean water soquel um that's essentially what it would include as permissible areas. Can you just repeat that one more time please? Sure the four open space areas um and then um are three industrial areas so that's um the far west side um harvey west and there's a small industrial area in seabright and then uh the commercial uh zoning districts so that's mission water ocean and soquel. An example so Dela vega I'm wondering could you bring up one of the maps at least what we can kind of point to where we're discussing? Give me one moment one here can you see this so this is the ordinance but I'll pull up uh find one of the maps here correct yeah so those light drain areas are those the golf course and the disc golf open so the they're all um that are the golf course you can see through here um and other areas are prohibited these this is you know the lower Dela vega park this I believe is the disc golf course back here and then um there's some other facilities that um are also off limits based on their their designation. I just wanted I wanted to point that out too because when we're you know if we move forward tonight with saying that this is a fan open spaces I just want to point out that one of those spaces as well is one of our economic generators which is our golf course and I believe this year for the first time in 20 years we're actually in the black and our golf course and so having that designated as a place where there'd be unmanaged encampments would be extremely problematic I think for many people in the community um and then my next question is for the city manager and I couldn't find it in my most recent emails but we did receive an email from an individual who had reached out last year and had mentioned that they had proposed providing the city with a number of properties on the east side that could be used for homeless encampments and I'm just wondering if you could speak to that because that individual emailed us again um and it reminded me of when this person reached out to us and so I'm just wondering you know if there's been any follow-up with that person or what the potential is to work with them because it sounds like if someone offered his property to use for this purpose and if that's the case then we should probably consider taking them up on it uh I believe you're referring to an individual that owns land uh out on uh it's it's it's in the unincorporated area it's not in the city limits it borders the city I think it's off of 7th avenue um and uh but I think last year because it's not in the city um I think that was referred over to to the county and then last year the county was focused on opening up all the the other facilities the armory we focused on the armory we focused on the hotels and all the other facilities that were bought online so I don't know whether it might be a conversation that the county may have now that they've adopted some some new policies and perhaps that might be something that they consider but it's really not within our control as it's not in the city limits and I'll note that um I did forward that information to um the county so that they couldn't the the letter that came in as part of this packet I forwarded to the county for their consideration they did indicate that they were going to follow up with the individual so it's in their hands at this point okay great thanks and then um I'm happy to kind of go through some language at a later point but I do want to provide opportunities for other council members to ask questions and make comments but I do have some suggestions for um direction moving forward I have the council member golder council member brown council member voluntary Johnson and then council member Watson okay so um you know I feel like it's taken decades to get the city where we are today and it's not all our fault there's state laws that have also contributed this situation and I am completely prepared to make a motion I've emailed it to Bonnie um but I just want an opportunity to share some thoughts and I'm happy to hear from um my colleagues as well but first of all I'm super happy to hear about what happened at the county this morning and I can't thank the supervisors enough for um you know starting the ball rolling with that but I also want to be clear to the callers that I don't think there's a member of this body that wants to live in a police state and thinks that arresting a person um every person for being poor homeless is what we want but that's being said like we do need some basic rules and like I'm my kids have asked me like how many callers that called in have invited homeless people into their home and I'm only making the suggestion because uh my family and I have invited two different homeless individuals into our home and we had one live with us for eight months and another has come in off and on as he pleases for the last five years so um it's really illuminating and I encourage everyone that has a couch or an aerobed to to do that um but when you do that like I really would like to know do you not have basic rules because uh we have rules at our house to guests follow and just some simple ones like not eating on the couch or throwing trash on the floor please pee in the toilet and make your bed in the morning like and guess what they managed to follow it and so when someone's homeless if they're a grown adult I don't see why they can't follow rules like how we're expected to stop and stop signs and things like that like I don't think that the rules that we're trying to throw out there that um I'm also curious if some of the callers even read the ordinance or if they just kind of found a call to action from Instagram or a flyer but I just think that the intention of this council is to address the complex needs of the homeless individuals and make our city safe and clean for everyone and um I'm going to keep ranting for a second but like I'm so sick of everybody um the narrative I shouldn't say everybody the narrative that just because someone's homeless they're the most vulnerable person in our community you'll never convince me that of that the home the most vulnerable people in our community are our children and whether they're housed or not we have to do everything with them in mind and from my perspective I don't think we're doing a very good job of protecting our watershed or making certain places of our town safe for kids I just read during the break that somebody was there's an attempted murder at San Lorenzo Park this week and like over the past two months I've or maybe the last month even I went on two cleanups where we cleaned up over 4 000 pounds of trash left by campers and hundreds of needles that are flowing straight out to the national marine sanctuary like I saw gang graffiti with gang tags I saw swaps because carved into trees and I'm not a detective but I hypothesized this is over you know turf for drug sales and like I just can't believe that living you know in unmanaged unruled camps is the way to go ideally obviously I'd like to see managed encampments transitional encampments and things like this and so to the extent that we can work together to find places where it like councilman coming said where it is acceptable and putting those people kind of together um where you know that's ideal that's what we want I don't want people in open spaces and I don't think anybody here does so you know I have a motion that I think that that we could that addresses some of the things that director Butler said and that I think addresses a lot of the concerns of the council and a lot of the community concerns and so I'm wondering if we could look at it and then try and work from that but I saw Sandy and and Shebra and Martine you guys all had your hands up too so I don't want to be too much of a gas bag so I'll stop talking thank you well in the in the effort to try to get a motion on the table it's 10 o'clock now um I'll go ahead and second your motion and I know that there will be other edits most likely um but we'll just try to manage it going forward um councilmember Brown if you could put that up I'd love to see me in the map I guess well we're waiting to get that I um one of the reasons that I want to take a look at this is one to make a couple of comments but also to ask the city attorney to give us a little bit more of a take on what looking at what moving forward with this iteration of an ordinance mean in terms of our legal vulnerability so actually that was produced by a member of the public um and it is so it may not be exactly uh you know the the boundaries but I think it it's pretty representative so what you see here uh the black areas are camping between sundown and 7 a.m. or you know 8 p.m. whatever the time frame that the end of uh coming to you um where camping would be permitted uh you'll note that most of this area is the four open spaces which have been discussed tonight we've heard a lot of concerns from the community I share that concern um it's you know it's just a little bit confusing to me that um to move forward in this way we are um we have been up until now and I imagine there will be changes tonight um then looking at uh some of the only places that people can be are open space that's much of it not really conducive to um actually that certainly without hygiene and waste management and access so there's all kinds of challenges even if we did leave this in I don't believe we that these are appropriate areas but if you take those out we what I see left is Harvey West Soquel Avenue Mission Street and perhaps a little bit of the west side industrial zone um so that is a fairly limited realm of of possibility for people who are you know legitimately without shelter shelter and have no other place to go so I'm just gonna now ask the question uh Tony if you could um just maybe talk a little bit about that I know we we've acknowledged that there's probably no way to you know move through this without some legal claims without having to move through that process but I'm I'm just wondering if you could help us understand what that might look like should a claim be a constitutional claim an eighth amendment claim um and or sequel claims what that will mean like how long in mind it take before that gets resolved um I know that it's again it's a lot of variables and I kind of tried to ask this last time but I'd love to just get a better understanding of what we're looking at here um as a result I'm sorry I think that's a thanks yeah um so there's there's quite a lot to unpack there so let me try to break it down a little bit first is as we have discussed and I think I was candid um the last time uh that that the council met on this topic uh we are dealing with a very complicated issue with a lot of competing a lot of competing interests and an area and areas of the law that have um no clear guidance and and so the litigation uh risk-free option is not on the table tonight including maintaining the status quo um and we're already under in litigation on this topic and I think there are a number of ways to look at this but whatever whatever ordinance the council ultimately ends up approving I think there's a reasonable likelihood that we'll be defending it in court and I'm not suggesting that that's a reason not to do it it's just the reality and and and one possible outcome of that is that through the court process um further amendments could be made because there is a severability clause in the ordinance and so a court could strike portions of it and leave the basic framework intact um and so so that so that's just the circumstance that we're operating under a separate concern is could the council move forward on an ordinance tonight for final adoption and direct changes be brought back for consideration of future meeting that would address some of the and you know perceived uh flaws that might give rise to litigation and that's a possibility as well that someone might you know you meet you leave the potential for camping in open space intact but direct um the staff to return with an amendment to remove the Oranagalch and Dolaviega and Moor Creek etc from the places where sleep overnight sleeping is available could someone file an environmental challenge based on endangered species act or or um Sequa to challenge that component only even though the council's already given direction to bring back an amendment to fix that and I think the likelihood is is not very high but but there is at least you know a potential likelihood of that um and and one way to mitigate that would be to have an ordinance brought back for introduction um you know before the deadline to file a uh a Sequa lawsuit it has passed and the and the deadline to file a Sequa lawsuit is triggered by by filing a uh notice of exemption with the state office um the state clearinghouse and if the council directs us to bring amendments back I suspect we won't be filing a notice of exemption uh at least until the council's taken up the ordinance at a future meeting so so the risk there is even further mitigated so that's a possibility um and so I think that gets to the heart of your question but I want to make sure that I answered it fully is there is there another um have I missed anything no I think I think I know I think substantively on the the claim what the claims might entail I think that covers that I appreciate you uh going over that um I guess the other question that I do have though is um in terms of and I know this is you know there's a lot of possibilities here too and a lot of variables but should either of those kinds of claims be filed what happens next after that for the council to consider for the for your office to to do what would be the next steps you know would we go into settlement talks or would we try to I mean would part of the ordinance still be you know could we sever then you know I'm just I guess I'm just confused about the potential there's a process timeline yeah I think that no matter what the no matter the direction from which litigation comes we would look to attempt to resolve the litigation through uh discussions and negotiations um and and regardless litigation does not get resolved quickly and so um so there would be plenty of opportunities for us to have further discussions and possibly make changes as a settlement or um maybe make changes um based on guidance that we get from the court if this litigation so so that's that's a fluid process and it really depends on what the nature of the claims uh is and and and what specific issues we're we're trying to we're trying to deal with thanks I appreciate you trying to help me envision the future here with uh you know a whole lot of unknowns but I appreciate in mind you know as an attorney who's accustomed to providing you know advice on litigation in closed session as as attorney client privileged communications I'm trying to you know I'm trying to walk an appropriate balance between having as much of a candid discussion as you can without like totally tipping our hand on on potential uh legal issues that might be used to count this right thank you I do have some comments but I think I'll I'll let others uh weigh in and um hopefully come back around before we vote sure uh councilmember con tarry johnson thank you um um yeah I I just want to start out by saying again I I heard all the callers and appreciate and want to thank the callers um for taking the time to engage and participate um as well as those who wrote letters in the last several weeks um taking the time to express your concerns um compassion was brought up a number of times tonight and and through the letters um and I just you know I I want to say that doing nothing is not compassion and um watching human suffering um among those who are unhoused is not compassion and watching the negative impacts of our community members who are housed is not compassion I understand that there are um challenges with this current ordinance and I'm hoping with our discussion tonight that we can make some significant amendments that address the concerns and challenges um but sitting here and doing nothing is not compassion for anyone I just I really want to make that clear um but that's I feel strongly about that um what the ordinance has done is it's given us an opportunity to engage although a very divisive issue it's given us an opportunity to engage and to have dialogue with community members um and among us the city council colleagues that I have um it's also allowed us to in a meaningful way talk about programming um right now as the ordinance stands a safe sleeping program would be launched um and stood up within 60 days maybe we need to look at that and expedite that um right now as the ordinance stands there are opportunities for managed encampments um I think that that piece of the language in the ordinance is confusing but it's in the ordinance that managed encampments would be permissible in all areas of the city um even the ones that are outlined as prohibited um if we work with city county nonprofits and I think the language of faith communities is missing so I hope that we could have that um again there's work to be done um there are issues to be addressed um I hear the concerns around criminalization I had some really insightful phone calls with some community members that work in the field um some people who I know some people who I've never met um and I think as much as we can really narrowing in on the unacceptable behaviors and the rules that we all have to live by as councilmember golder mentioned um to explicitly name those those are expected of everyone to explicitly name those and not criminalize being unhoused or sleeping um but hold people accountable for the rule that that are here in society um so I'm hoping that we can have some clarity around that um uh yeah I think I'll just I'll just stop there with my comments and I also have um worked with councilmember Watkins to draft some potential amendments and changes and I'll wait to see what's brought forward by my colleagues before sharing those thank you great thank you councilmember uh councilmember Watkins I do want to thank my colleagues for their comments I want to thank the community members who've reached out to us um who were on the phone today but also the many who emailed us their concerns I um I want to reiterate what Lee said and thank just the amount of work that's gone into this from various um department heads and community members who've informed some of those modifications and changes I think what we know is that there really is no single strategy or true simple solution to um the issue of healthlessness in our community I think what we also know to be true is that really cities are not equipped um to handle these complex issues on our own and um anytime that I've observed being on council um a proposal to take action you know like a big action um it's been very you know controversial and polarizing and difficult and um just to the point where it's paralyzed it's really our our ability to move in any way I think you know one of the things that I really when I learned about for example health and all policies which I know has been brought up you know one of the things that really struck me is about how that framework really takes in the whole community um is really balancing the health equity and sustainability of the entire community it also really it focuses on the fact that we have really complex societal issues before us and that no single entity can handle this issue on its own and we have to collaborate and so it was brought up by one of the callers that it's almost like a tapestry of um interventions and um supports and mitigations and ideally continuous improvement but what I also know is that large unmanaged entrenching campments are not healthy living environments um they cause environmental and social concerns and they are simply unsustainable they actually had an opportunity to go down to the San Lorenzo park after the first reading of the ordinance and I actually invited some members of the community who um shared concerns with me about the ordinance to to come with me I didn't hear back from them as interested in wanting to come but I think people um who may want to understand what it could be like um just observing or talking to individuals down there who have it but have opinions you know I suggest they do and I'm sure our law enforcement if they don't feel comfortable going on their own we'd be happy to go with them um but I want to just sort of share what I observe visuals residing there I spoke to a few of them some of them uh said they were local uh from Capitola in Aptos a country um some just went just a woman who looked distressed there our law enforcement who I was with that every time an ambulance comes there's uh a law enforcement officer or companies that EMT to um to to perform their services there there are no children in the playground nor do I think there could actually probably you know would be good for any children to be there in that playground that's actually one of the more lower income areas of our community so it's the low income families who are not able to benefit from their their local playground um I observed our seniors who are there who are actually living in uh seniors who are 62 years older and um or disabled and um and them being impacted from the conditions of park a healthy equitable approach to our entire community university um doesn't make it okay to allow us to ignore them or take any action whatsoever and say that that's what we're willing to accept because that's where that is and those are the areas that are most often impacted I think that really about how do we improve and I know uh Councilmember Callentary Johnson brought up that we have some amendments we'd like to share around um improvements and modifications to really address a lot of the concerns that were brought before us but about also balancing being in action as opposed to deferring to status quo um because that is not what I would consider a healthy equitable or sustainable community decision in my opinion so I know this is always tough and tricky and I have sat on the Council for four years and it is never easy because there are um human beings of all different sectors who are impacted our entire community is impacted and so at point we have to stay unwilling to try things and if it doesn't work we tried and we'll improve and we'll continue to modify and track and we'll improve and we'll continue to modify and track but we're going to continue to try because I'm not willing to throw out my hand to say that that's what I think is acceptable because it's just it's not for anybody and um and I want to echo the comments made about the county I think I appreciate them willing to step up we're uh in this together and we need to work together on these solutions so those are my comments and I know that the amendments in the motion are forthcoming in terms of how we're going to move forward with policy direction thank you council member um council member coming if you don't mind I might stick myself in here just for a very brief comment and then I'll ask I'll I'll be happy to have you continue um yeah I um I you know I echo a lot of what's been said um I've said many things before I'm not going to repeat them um this is um basically a societal failure um it probably 30 years in the making at least in my knowledge growing up here in California um and watching my mom hit the roof when Ronald Reagan you know passed laws that basically decided to not take care of people who needed to be taken care of um and who needed assistance um and I remember I remember those conversations I remember reading the San Francisco Chronicle I remember her as a very staunch liberal democrat who spent a lot of time taking care of people being absolutely curious that that was going to be the destiny for you know the people of california in the future of california I have a dear dear family member a relative he has been homeless for 20 years he's a veteran he's a father um he's been off and on the streets he's lost his home he's lost his job he is disabled um from 20 years of meth addiction um he um so he's the guy I called he's the person I called this week and I said and and he knows this place um he's been here many many times and we've hiked in the woods and we swam in this river and we've done all the things that you do with people you care about and um I said well what should we do should we do nothing or should we try to do something and he said trust me start doing something start stop ignoring us stop accepting that this is acceptable it's not he lives in camps he knows what they're like um and he said please do something stand up and try to do something try to name opportunities try to set behaviors try to tell me that you expect me to do better so I'm going to take his words and I'm going to try to do that tonight because that's my experience and I trust him because he has been living homeless for 20 years but he's a proud veteran he's a proud father and he was a very successful person and unfortunately his substance abuse it's just consumed him but he can't find help for that disease um and that's the problem that is affecting our entire society right now is we're not investing in things that are making people's lives fail and it's not people that don't that build big houses it's not those things it's disinvestment into our society and into our communities and that's why we are where we are today so when you vilify people who may have built a house or owned a house or did any of those things I agree with my colleagues please do not turn this into a divisive community argument we're only going to get there if we work together and nothing is going to be perfect when we push it out the first time but I haven't heard anyone here tonight who's your elected official who has said that they are you know died in the died in the wool around one thing or another I think we're all trying to push something forward trying to make the inertia stop and make something happen so um you know I second I seconded the motion I feel very strongly tonight we've got to we've got to put some on the books and I think we already know we'll come back with an amendment but I think something has to be put on the books tonight and that's that's that's what at least I'll be advocating for I really appreciate all my um colleagues comments um and especially um all your concern for everyone involved and all the people who are unfortunately having to to be in the place that they are tonight with um not having home so councilmember Cummings I will um call on you next and um and then we'll go I think to the motion after that I want to thank everybody for the comments I did want to make um one comment very briefly you know we open this and to the points that will make a councilmember Brown before we um went to public comment I think there was um you know a real desire to try to allow as much time as possible for the community to speak to this item and for that reason I know councilmember Brown kept her her question short I did as well and I know other members of the council like like so probably did because we wanted to make sure we heard from the public and when we opened this portion I was ready to make a motion but wanted to wait to hear from my colleagues and I know a motion has been made and so I'm not going to argue that point I will just ask though that as we move forward when um we are taking action and making motions that those motions are read before a second or what have you because currently we have a motion that was made and seconded and no one in the community knows what that motion was and so I think just for transparency and as a part of our process that you know it's really important that when motions are being made that we read them that it's clear for everyone that we know where this what direction's being moved um you know before we're we have seconds and we're starting to move forward in the process because technically if someone were to call a question we could just move on to a vote I know that's not going to happen but just in terms of process I think it's really important that we try to be as transparent as possible and stay true to the process so all in my comments and I'm looking forward to seeing what is before us and the motion that's been made and then ways that we can try to you know contribute and move something along that will help our current situation I just want to make sure counts yeah counts member commentary johnson you're back in you got kicked out you got booted off yeah something weird happened everything turned off in the house I think it was a win I'm back thanks okay is there do you want to put them is there any other questions I don't want to cut anybody's time short I did I was trying to honor listening to the public so I don't know if counts members have specific questions for staff or if we should just go right into deliberation counts a member golder do you want to walk us through not sure if you gave this Bonnie's got it but I didn't know if you sure I'm happy to um I don't know if she wants to scoot it down and I can read it or people can read it what would be sorry you should read it can you can you put it down a little then because they can't see the top okay so um is up the very top this is the very top right here I don't know what you can see oh okay um oh there yeah I could not see it there okay now I can see it okay so um I'd like to make a motion um to amend um chapter 6.3 of the Santa Cruz Municipal Code related to the temporary outdoor living and direct staff to return by April 9th 2021 with an amended ordinance that would include the following and so the first was MAP amendments an amended map um designating more creek preserve Pogonip open space um Delaviga Park Arana Gulch closed during all for camping during all hours an amended map um designating public property adjacent to the state parks when public property of butts are residential zoning district as closed to camping during all hours and designate um Swanton Boulevard as closed to camping um amendments to 6.36040 at risk areas and daytime encampments so um direct staff to return by April 9th 2021 with the following revised language designated public property adjacent like sorry it was like I was trying to put everything together so I might have duplicated some things here um this is kind of just the same thing but as um language and not the map but um designating public property adjacent to state parks when public property of butts of residential zoning districts such such as closed to camping during daylight or during all hours and designate all of Swanton Boulevard closed to camping as well as public right of ways such as sidewalks adjacent to city and state parks um when said property of butts a residential zoning district direct staff to return by April 9th 2021 with the following revised language to section 6.36040 at risk areas and daytime encampments section 8 to remove but not including open spaces um can you scroll up a little Bonnie I'm wondering too if we could email it to everybody just so that they can read it it might be easier too I mean I can I'm happy to keep that way people can read it on their own too direct staff to return by April 9th 2021 with the following revised language to section 6.36 oh sorry um 040 at risk areas and daytime encampments to include more creek preserved poking up open space or on a gold shula vega and within all parks as defined by the parks master plan and then I took some of Lee's words that's why it seems so duplicative um have to return by April 9th 2021 with the following revised language to section 6.36040 at risk areas and daytime encampments section a 11 to include RT zoning district direct staff to return by April 9 21 with the following revised language to section 3.6.36.040 at risk areas and daytime encampments section D3 as city personnel encounter individuals who are camping in prohibited areas or at prohibited times the city shall um service of available to assist individuals with on-street transportation to storage facilities staff to return by April 9 21 with how individuals will with physical disabilities will be addressed and then for the direction for city staff city staff shall conduct a census of the homeless individuals at least quarterly if funding is available to do so city staff shall return with operating and permitting guidelines for 6.36050 and 6.36050B sorry the city staff shall issue a request for qualifications for non-profit service providers for safe sleeping programs and temporary encampments in order to broaden the city's list of qualified organizations for providing such services allowed under this ordinance the city shall not implement enforcement until amendments are made and cdc covid tier is orange city staff shall provide an amended map with clarifying legend and a statement that camping is not allowed pursuant to state requirements for state parks city staff shall seek opportunities particularly when public safety life safety is not under immediate slash urgent threat through coordination with city county non-governmental organizations or faith faith faith based staff for outreach to proceed or occur simultaneously to enforcement of provident living so that when feasible non-enforcement personnel can contact identified individuals on a complete basis with a structured proactive program city staff shall seek opportunities particularly when public safety life safety not under immediate urgent threat through coordination with city county is this the same paragraph again I think that might be a mistake thank you and then finally no action can take place no no action can take place in it it's supposed to say if safe sleeping spots are not available in the county and that was I was trying to get if there are no safe sleeping spots or so I was trying to capture what Lee was suggesting at the end of his presentation and then I wanted to put something here with the misdemeanor so this is that that that only and I think this is something Lee put on there I was trying to put it but I don't know if I did it right but that that the following could be the following could be misdemeanors and now I can't see it can you scroll up a little bit no I meant down sorry did I put them on there yeah then I can't see him no I don't know I can't read him it just says misdemeanor 6a as all I can see but there was like a list of things that Lee said right there tied to tie him to actions fires bike chump shops needles camping in specific locations and so I know that that's something I feel like that we could work through I don't I don't have it so much and then the and that's the same thing down there is that that you part was the same thing I was trying to capture from so I understand that it's not perfect and I was hoping that through teamwork and friendly amendments we can make it better thank you councilmember boulder um councilmember Cummings and then councilmember commentary Johnson Justin you're muted my hand was up in last time did you not I didn't have my hands in the last time it's not then I'll take my hand down right now okay councilmember commentary Johnson um you know I I was just going through councilmember boulder's motion and and an amendment and looking through councilmember Watkins and I put together and there's there are quite a bit of overlap so I was trying to go through and cross out the overlap but maybe I'll just send this to Bonnie as is I might be a faster way to do it so um sorry just one second I'm going to maybe yeah what's the best way to proceed yeah I was going to say maybe we'll take a five minute maybe a maybe a 10 minute break um which I'm sure I'll use and maybe councilmember commentary Johnson you could would you mind doing a kind of a compare and and yeah break it and then that way we could get to one document does that make sense I hate to not give you the 10 minutes and I know I'm I'm okay with doing that yeah I thought councilmember Cummings was going to speak so I thought I had a unfortunate um so you guys take a break and I'll try to cross out what's already been said question or comment yeah I did I was going to mention that I it's similar to uh councilmember commentary Johnson and councilmember Golder I also had recommendations for language to be incorporated some of which I think overlaps and some of which I believe might be new and so I guess the question is you know what's the best way to try to reconcile three sets of recommendations um why don't we start with councilmember commentary Johnson sounds like she'll go through and compare I don't know councilmember Cummings if maybe you could do that just make sure there's not repetitive and then we can work from councilmember commentary Johnson we'll just have to work line by line through again to see what we can get to if that's amenable I'm not sure how else to do it unless uh martin you have your hand at martin Bernal oh just a good question uh with respect to the date just to clarify that one did you mean April 13th which is the first April is that the next county yeah so the next county meeting is the 23rd March 23rd oh what's the first one in April I didn't want to be so it was like because sounds like a lot it sounds like a lot of work I don't want to be a jerk like it's just giving too much work so I meant the first one in April that's the 13th then yes that was okay all right okay thank you just to clarify that remember Cummings is that will that work where we just we're just going to be pulling out new language um is that is that amenable to you I mean yeah I don't I don't think there's any just trying to see what we can do by going through language and making a comparison mayor it might be beneficial for councilmember calentary johnson to submit um what would be a friendly amendment I assume and then we could work with that and then councilmember Cummings can do a his friendly amendment with anything left member calentary johnson doesn't encompass councilmember Cummings wait yep you can record him as friendly amendments um we'll take that 10 minute break is that okay yeah yeah let's let's take 10 minutes and then we'll come back and we'll go hopefully with friendly amendment okay if councilmembers can um turn on their videos and their excuse me they're uh Michael uh be ready great everybody's here um councilmember calentary johnson did you have enough time to look at your materials and councilmember Cummings did you have enough time kind of okay um I may have missed something but I I sent the um motion language to bonnie if bonnie if he could pull it up and then I'll um also just invite councilmember Watkins if I if I missed something um to to chime in friendly amendments to councilmember golder's um amendments are um the first one is to um provide clarity on where safe sleeping is uh permissible and explicitly identify those areas where the nighttime sleeping is permissible as opposed to listing where nighttime sleeping is prohibited uh in addition to the storage uh program uh that safe sleeping program is up and running primed prior to implementation of prohibition these other areas that I've crossed out I believe were already covered by councilmember golder's amendments um around outreach there was a question by staff about the intention of outreach and it is to connect individuals to available shelter um safe sleeping options but also to provide education on where and when camping is permitted and not permitted the other one is um moving down to number five that families with minor children are not subject to arrest or citations um and I believe councilmember Cummings has some more specific language around that so we might want to consider what he's drafted that daytime restrictions um this was part of councilmember golder's amendment but um the suggestion here is to shift the language a little to um state yellow tier or cdc guidelines change whichever occurs first and um again this the misdemeanor enforcement piece was brought up by councilmember golder the language here is a little different um I think I think it's saying the same thing but I just wasn't sure and then there is policy direction to add to the policy directions that councilmember golder provided and that is to stand up a managed camp at 12 20 river street um and have staff report back to council on stuff taken to stand up the managed camp at 12 20 river street um by june 2021 uh actively develop and pursue restorative justice programs as part of our enforcement efforts um work with the county of Santa Cruz to fully integrate the city's safe sleeping and storage programs into the continuum of care the regional continuum of care that was brought forward by the board of supervisors today and um and ensure that all county managed shelter and housing resources are made available to eligible individuals that con that are contacted by city law enforcement or outreach personnel develop and implement with the assistance of the members of the public safety committee a semi annual review and audit of the outdoor living ordinance um specifically around arrests and citations and work with the uh city police auditor to ensure public transparency of enforcement um of the court and and adherence to its principles um work with the two by two to explore expansion of shelter traditional shelter programs this was the piece this was what the board of supervisors has brought forward so it's really it's just confirming that we are in alignment with the board of supervisors and that we will continue to work with them um and contribute to the to their strategic plan and the ways that make sense for our city sorry really quick councilmember um i think it would be good for you to read it verbatim yeah sure people who have called in i can't see you what you're oh thank you i wasn't sure that that okay thanks for clarifying the city's two by two members to work with their county two by two counterparts to explore expansion of transitional shelter programs into the city jurisdiction in concert with the county's three-year strategic plan on homelessness and new policy counties set forth on march night 2021 to expand the county's shelter programming into the unincorporated urban areas of the county and direct city manager to return to council in low later than june 2021 with an update do i need to go back and read some of the other one bonnie um no i don't think so okay um the next one is to invite county staff to come to the to um a future city council meeting to present to make a presentation of the work plan that was passed today and then ask city staff to serve as a liaison for future updates of how this work plan is moving forward and um finally develop and implement an ordinance effectiveness review program to initiate nine months from ordinance initiation to track um there's a number of items i'll read them to track increased outreach and connection to services including quantity integration into the county system of care including hmys and coordinated entry results decreased high density large outdoor living groups increased access to safe sleeping sites increased access to high-chain resources decreased encampments and high sensitivity zones and open spaces increased access to parks and other city resources by all constituents decreased reports and instances of fires crime ambulance visits environmental degradation of highly sensitive areas and sub-division areas of the city and a cost analysis comparing cost and encampments cleanup first responders and staffing response to encampments versus implementation of programming and the new ordinance council member colder are you um are these uh amendments friendly amendments okay with you absolutely and as the seconder i accept them to and can i just confirm um these yellow or these crossed out we're crossing out right they're not going to be part of the friendly amendment correct okay and then the yellow was the same but slightly different so um number six um if council member golder and mayor mires are um except that then i that i i would like to see this shifted the language shifted to tier yellow tier or cdc guidelines changed um number seven yeah i'm not really sure what to do with that because i i think i think that council member golder's um language and this language is maybe we combine the two i think it's it's saying the same thing but each of us has something a little different maybe we can combine those two i think it's lower this one yeah yes mayor i think i think there's a little bit more of an explanation within the amendments but these are the identifying accompanying um actions that's how i read it yeah i think so this would replace the other language that doesn't have as much explanation yep mine was just a bunch of like thoughts and so i think this one's better as i said i think council member cummings has has more specific and maybe stronger language also member cummings do you have a friendly amendment week we'll work with once in these over to you and maybe go through them and see where they will to identify the appropriate areas and others i think with you on here that i would need um the exact location but um one of the things in particular if you could maybe show uh council member golders language again or the whatever the most recent document we were working on calentara johnson and i actually think that we could probably delete the two map amendments because i think that what's most critical to the ordinance and as we change the ordinance that'll be reflected in the maps so i think if we really put the emphasis on changing the ordinance then we'll see those changes we made in the maps but in particular because we haven't had a map produced showing where people can camp that in particular i think needs to be called out and we need to explicitly have a map where camping can occur and it might be worth the saying where it could um we have said that the city manager will have authorization to designate where um transitional encampments are managing campus may go and so if there's a map they can be produced to show that along with um in that absence where people can camp i think that would be appropriate though i do have some comments around shaking her head yes so i think she's amenable to that um body maybe i'm just taking notes so basically i think we're favoring council member calentara johnson where a map that would show where camping can be allowed would be would replace maps the current maps that um that and then council member coming you also mentioned um uh you had one other adjustment to the map um just then was that was that it that it's really okay yeah that's the main one is having a map where um i'm kind and i'm also kind of going through the ordinance as well because there's some bit of general comments in some i think that um are um specific to the ordinance one was in uh 030 private property under and this is a private property is unlawful for any person to own private property erection figure construct maintain or store an outdoor living encampment or to use a vehicle for outdoor living except add a license and register vehicle in a residential off-street driveway with the right consent of the owner and occupant of the residence where the driver occupant of such vehicle is in possession of a valid driver's license provided that no more than one vehicle shall be permitted any one location no particular location shall be used for camping under this provision for more than three days during any one calendar month and i was going to as a friendly amendment strike that last sentence quick if i can um i think it might be good to have a visual so i'm going to stop sharing my screen and allow detective butler to show the ordinance and kind of make red line changes as he goes okay that might be better this is uh 6.36030 and a hey that you were referencing yeah it was four it was a four thank you last sentence and it might be good to hear some comment from the concern that i have is and i know some of the individuals who spoke tonight at least one individual who i've known who's lived in a camper in someone's backyard in their driveway and you know them being able to live there provided them with safety security allow them to save money put down payment on the house and so long as there's no you know nuisance behavior or complaints it doesn't seem it seems to me that you know even if it was somebody coming into my town staying in somebody's rv for a month you know while they're visiting um the action of somebody staying in an rv in someone's backyard i don't think that that should be you know that should be against but there should be a law that we're creating that um doesn't allow for that unless the people are creating nuisance behaviors and you know under which circumstances they need to be dealt with regardless so that's one of the changes i'd like to see if it would be considered we is this possible that you possibly make your screen a little bit there you go all right perfect that's great no i just want to make sure that public can see it yeah so let me see if i can get the whole section there yeah it's a private property language would be to the to or is there a revision to that last sentence councilman coming sentence and just looking below to see there's um can you scroll up a little bit lee there we go this way yeah i'm sure that they would need to make it somewhere else but it's it's included so this is uh all of private property then it has uh the allowances and then we have struck your suggestion is to strike the three-day limitation and the second part of that is a is not permitted on private property where it's conducted in a manner to create noise and adequate sanitation trafficking illegal drugs etc private private nuisance and to that point too i was also going to suggest striking noise because we have a number of noise ordinances and there's certain times when people can make noise and when they can't and it doesn't seem fair if somebody's in a backyard and they're it's two o'clock in the afternoon and they might be listening to a radio that could be considered creating noise so unless we can explicitly define you know what that is but i think it is captured when we say also living or camping shall not be permitted on private property where it's conducted in such a manner as to create a public or private nuisance so i feel like you know if the noise that's being made is is considered a public or private nuisance then that could capture it so it could be considered redundant certainly the maker of the motion seconders fine with that so we'll strike as to create noise and just keep the remaining language there okay that's where this should be included but one thing in particular environmentally sensitive habitats near critical infrastructure and i'm not sure exactly where that was including open spaces and then two and sensitive habitats in the city limits and i know that there's a number of members of the public who mentioned that sensitive species have been mentioned but since the habitats haven't and so we're showing to add that within all parks as defined in the parks master plan open spaces and sensitive habitats in city limits does that work as i um i think you mentioned earlier that open spaces weren't included in the park's master plan that's why i was trying to keep those two separate yeah they are um they're just separate from parks they're not considered parks in the park's master plan and that's yes on me too um and then number 10 i would just strike that number but number 10 oh no sorry here's nine the 75 linear feet from either side of a designated trail in open space you can't camp in open space in that wouldn't make sense um 25 feet off the trail you know what comes to mind when we saw the maps earlier for example that would mean technically you could camp you somebody could set a time in the middle of the golf course and they would be 75 feet off the trail in open space um and so i think there's a lot of concern around the distance off a trail and the potential negative impacts that can occur when you're um going off trail to camp i think um for things like this um they're going to in response to the council direction at this point they're going to be a bunch of clean up similar to this where we're going to need to go in and um make modifications and in fact what i was hearing is that um this may want to move to an affirmative um rather than a prohibited so you know a lot of this area is going to going to need to change in fact you know it might uh unlawful it might change to lawful and have the areas that are okay but you know we'll we'll cross that bridge in the next couple of weeks before we uh prepare the next report okay and then um before zero which i had around language was the prohibitions in section nine pun uh zero b one unless and until unchallenged persons in the city because of available access to pre-covid vaccines i think was two um one suggestion would be um dispersing individuals experiencing homelessness and homeless encampments and or when the county or state declaration of a local health emergency has been lifted that's i'm going to put that out there for consideration um but then the other part the other thing that i could see going in this section is prohibitions in section six point three six zero four zero b one and two shall not be enforced against homeless families with children and in cases of a homeless family the city staff shall work with the county and state and or non-profit partners to attempt to find the family temporary shelter or housing well i can send that lee if you want so that makes it easier can you repeat it really quick see right is i've got it on c and d just as a note that it needs to be captured here because i don't know that we've got the specific wording at this point okay and so um zero four zero b one and two cdc the guidance around dispersing individuals experiencing homelessness and homeless encampments the county of emergency has been lifted and purpose behind that is that um the concerns that i've been hearing is that the city because currently the guidelines even if people get vaccinated as to where max continues social distance that's all changing and if this is coming back at first meeting april we might have new guidance then but really trying to be um kind of building the safeguards so that um you know if we're saying orange or yellow that um another lawsuit the cdc still maintains that regardless of status um while the health emergency is in effect that we need to not move homeless people homeless encampments so that's just the rationale and the basis for that the next one was um the prohibitions infections six point three six zero four zero b one and two shall not be enforced against homeless families with children in cases of a homeless family that shall work with the county or nonprofit partners to attempt to find the family temporary shelter or house as fast as you can speak sorry yeah no problem i had one thing to that i mean i i totally is that okay if i add something right now kind of or should i wait with that i would also like um just from having dealt with homeless families for the last 20 years in education that child protective services also be involved because they do every attempt in this county to keep the family unit together and they have a vast network of resources that they can provide and um i just want to make sure that uh the children are cared for and in in both circumstances not sure the best place i think it might be good on their penalties for violation but the enforcement of the camping prohibitions will not occur prior to providing storage which i think is included and identified managed sanctioned sleeping sites what section is this i think i'm not sure exactly the best place for but i think it might go under penalties for violations it's really just trying to get at um conditions when this can be enforced and i think we've expressed that um in order for this ordinance to take effect we'd need to have storage and i wanted to add to that question is that different than what we had included last time which was was the state with 150 safe sleeping sites before the ordinance was that is that different than the language that was in before that is different um so you can see here um that um let's see did i did i find the right one here section so you can see here that it says uh provisions above in these sections shall not be enforced until the storage program is operational uh at the last meeting the council added the safe sleeping but they did not tie the enforcement of the ordinance to the safe sleeping they only the the tie to the enforcement remained solely with the uh storage for this section so i believe that council member Cummings is looking to add something right here yeah for the people on the phone the provisions above in section in subsection 6.36040 b1 and b2 shall not be enforced unless and until the above described unsheltered person storage program and a managed sanctioned sleeping site are operational and reasonably available to unsheltered persons in the city of Santa Cruz really trying to get us to have managed sites and to really try to get away from these um sort of unmanaged encampments that have really negative impacts on our community so did you call me yeah do you this is this amendment okay with you um this is okay the only thing i was just thinking i don't know how much back we went but as far as the cdc guidelines i'm just concerned that the emergency declaration is going to go on for i don't know how long and i would just like to stick with the tears if that's possible and i i don't know that was uh council member Cummings like what are your thoughts about that like and i'm not i'm fine with like the yellow orange or yellow or whatever the next lower one is i'm just concerned that we're going to be in a date of emergency for five more years i mean i just feel like i don't know what it's going to end what are your thoughts council member colin tardy johnson i think you had language that tied it to the tears yeah i i tried to um i i asked that it would change to yellow or um cdc guidelines change i added both because i i share the same concerns as council member golder that um we may be in a state of emergency for years to come so just some more flexibility around that i think i think would be best so that's why i added the yellow tear or cdc guidelines yeah it's the second or i'm i'm more comfortable with that i agree i think the state of emergency could could remain for years i would just um i wonder if they're kind of inquiry around that i think the reason why i'm concerned too is because as um as we're aware of the people south solito case that came before us um where it sounded like in that case the judge asked when the city went to um enforce the movement of a camp in that community and the daytime sleeping ban one of the things that the courts asked was that was whether the city had any other you know document or group that they had you know been in consultation with the suggested he was recommending in terms of how to deal with homeless encampments and when the city couldn't provide any just any justification that might have contradicted the cdc the the courts pretty much said well if you can't show us any other documentation that would suggest that what you're doing is okay then then that's not that we can't uphold your request and so that's the concern that i have is that if we were to move forward and we were asked you know what are we using as a basis for um you know taking down encampments in yellow tier i don't think we'd have anything um legally to back us on that and so that's the big concern i have but that's one additional legal hurdle that we'll be faced with if we leave it in so i'm happy to leave it in for now because this is obviously going to come back to us again in between now and um between now and april 13 i'm adding a lot of things are going to change so if we want to keep it with yellow and cdc guideline changes for now um i'm fine with that and we can see how that changes when it comes back to us on the 13th i have a couple of questions i just have to see a couple of hands up i have martin bernal martin walkins and then count from over brown do you have any comments on this section or martin with respect to the discussion earlier about the conditions for enforcement around having the safe sleeping sites i just want to be clear because there's the manage encampments and safe sleeping sites so be clear whether you're referring to the safe sleeping sites or manage encampments or both uh the distinction being that the safe sleeping sites are places where people stay at night uh manage encampment oh and one night at a time where the manage encampment is a place where people stay for a longer period of time and it's also uh much more intensive it was as far as staffing and as far as cost is concerned so there's a big difference there too so i just want to be clear about what the intent there was it just the manage sanctioned sleeping sites so i read this as a sleeping sites the safe sleeping sites yes and i and i guess the question that i have then is would be managed it would be that yes yes so there would be yes they yes they're not right exactly but uh yes that just distinguishes but it's not it's not the manage encampment model no and that's why this was being explicit we have to have a managed encampment site and so other city manager it would need to be staffing and it would be for the purposes of overnight sleeping yes item was um in the lat when when we when this item came to us previously um i don't think that one of the friendly amendments i made was captured appropriately and so um timing for when people can sleep i was wondering if that could be amended so that for all an hour before sunset to pitch a tent and then tents will be taken down by an hour after sunrise and so we're keeping that too but i was just thinking that you know in terms of providing that flexibility that would be amenable so that's an hour only concern is the same concern i had last time was kids biking to school and i know certain areas are off limit but off limits but kids live in all sorts of neighborhoods and there's schools and down by harpy west and i just don't want kids to have to ride into the street because someone's camping on a sidewalk and so i'm not i'm not sure what time the sun rises in the winter but i do know kids bike to school every month that school is open so i don't know if anyone has any other feedback on that i mean i'm fine with whatever the will of the council is i don't want to be the only decider on this one i'm going to ask and actually i can ask maybe martin as well i'm just curious with the warming center i know that's been operating in the city for a while and i'm just curious what their hours are because that's a program that's seen that's been pretty effective and um it seems like it's operated in neighborhoods it hasn't had very major impacts and they have people coming in at certain times when they're leaving in the morning and so i'm just wondering if we can set hours maybe similar to that of the one center um i think he's 8 a.m. to 8 or 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. i think that would be for non so you would i think we're blending two different things here are we trying to set the period of time you can begin to set up your nighttime sleeping site and take down i'm fine with an hour before sunrise i think it's a seasonal issue so martin you had your hand up which martin are you talking here martin walk into them martin bernal and then council member brown i am i had my hand up earlier just because i wanted to speak to the amendments that council member calentary johnson and i proposed and sort of really explained conceptually where they um i think need a lot of the concerns that i had in that members of the community had brought before us um but i i think what i mean i apologize but i think what i'm hearing um it's really duplicative of what we've already sort of prioritized within our amendments in the end within the main emotion so i'm sort of seeing a lot of unless i don't know how many more like i can i can wait on my comments i don't know how many more changes uh council member coming has but i'm seeing a lot of um overlap between some of these very specific things with what was already previously directed which is great because i think we're i think aligned in that way but um i'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to make my comments now in terms of some of those broader themes if we're if we're gonna go on by lines or some of these changes still all um council member brown do you have a comment on this particular item so that's a good comment i agree maybe we can so so go ahead sandy if you have a council member i actually i don't have a comment on this particular element so i'll just wait until uh we've been made it through this i have another item that i'd like to just throw in the next so we're gonna we're debating um right now a change in the um the time change which would would be would reflect and i believe um we i think maybe this was in some of your slides this morning this today earlier right do you have a recommendation for sure well i mean you know the council could do a number of things right now it's one hour before sunset to 7 a.m. is the allowance um what i heard um was maybe a desire to tie this to um the sunrise in the morning and allow some time after sunrise and then i also heard a concern about um individuals um children going to school and biking to school um i wonder if there is uh something along the lines of you know an hour after sunrise but um no later than 7 45 a.m i'm not sure what time the the earliest school starts um but just thinking of how to get to a compromise there um along those lines and it could be a half hour it could be an hour or you know um but i think that that upper limit could be established to address council member golders concerns and some additional time after sunrise could be allowed to address council member Cummings concerns i just looked it up sunrise and december 21st is 7 18 a.m and next year school is not set to start until before like 8 30 i think because of the new state law so i think an hour after sunrise or 8 a.m would be fine it sounds okay with everybody and by the way uh would be uh the storage program the worming center storage program that's open from 8 to 10 and then from 5 to 7 p.m we would still have the allowances for um safe sleeping you know those uh the safe sleeping could operate outside of those hours to address um you know the potentially incompatible use hours i'm assuming that's the intent maybe one or two that haven't been expressed yet and charges like to get those so one was um i believe that it was expressed in council member count our johnson and walkins motion uh or their language to create clear language and criteria for misdemeanor charges um and including but not limited to having an encampment larger than 12 by 12 feet that's true with litter maintain large number of dismembered bikes inside or outside tents have needles left unattended outside the tent and that's the building off of the language that um that was in our agenda report but really trying to not formalize the condition of being homeless but really focusing on the behaviors and so those are three examples i'm sure there's more um but you know really trying to get that if you're going to be sleeping outside you need to really one keep your area clean and our environment clean and the other um we're not supporting bike chop shops and bikes that period council member walkins is that is your language i think your language captures yeah our language captures that along with some of the specific things that you listed or that council member golder had listed in her original motion so that's already covered it was to create a city sponsored diversion process for misdemeanor violation of the outdoor living ordinance which i know it was mentioned that there's opportunities for community that we could create opportunities for community service if people are in counseling etc and for those um by engaging in those kinds of um services and and giving back to the community that these misdemeanors can get wiped off that record and so i think that that would be something that we could look into and i think it was recommended by staff as well and that was also in them and the amendments along with um looking at a restorative justice approach to it so that we're not further harming an individual who may have experienced um houselessness and then occurred a misdemeanor and then supporting them exactly to kind of be able to clear that so that they can find success so that's already covered as well last one um you know is i know that we've laid out like all the different zones where we can't camp and i'm just curious would it be clear to you know have language that's just you know for example prohibition prohibit unsanctioned camping on all public city property and rights of way that are required but a local state or federal law to be free of obstruction and on city property adjacent to state and federal lands when safe sleeping i know that we've laid out all the different zones but would just kind of you know when there's sites perceived available statement of prohibiting camping in all areas um that have not been um identified for safe sleeping looking at lee let me see if i can capture your you said you want to prohibit and all when there when there are spaces available in safe sleeping zones you want to prohibit camping in um all other areas in all areas of the city that are not the safe sleeping sites is that is that what you're saying so if there are spaces in the safe sleeping and managing camp and then there would be no camping elsewhere you know and we're trying to have indoor shelter and now we're trying to have overnight sleeping and we have managed encampments but we really want to encourage people to go into those services where we can connect them to the county services and where we can you know kind of get people out of some of these sensitive habitats and so it would make sense if we have those available our objective should be to get people into those spaces and not have people camping throughout the city and in places where we have identified we would prefer people aren't camping and so i'm just kind of wondering what people's thoughts are around that or and if that's something we can do i think i i'd like to uh hear tony's interpretation on that well from a from a legal perspective the martin versus voisey decision stands for the the principle that um the city cannot enforce a prohibition on camping on public property uh against a person who is homeless if they don't have a realistic alternative to sleeping on public property and so if we could demonstrate that we have um real realistic alternatives to sleeping on public property then yes a city-wide camping ban is enforceable and the key there is that a court would have to look at it and say that it's a realistic alternative so low barrier um shelter um you know ADA accessible no restrictions on admissions based on you know religious affiliation or instruction or that sort of thing so yes those that that's the key to having an enforceable city-wide camping ban is for homeless individuals who have no alternative access to shelter either because they can't pay for it or because it's not actually reasonably available to them for free um that then it's difficult to enforce but if we have those spaces available then yes we can enforce a city-wide camping ban i guess my my question for staff is i mean i don't know that we're going to ever have those number i mean i guess i'm not sure we'll ever have those number of beds so i'm just a little bit confused about so i guess if you have eight whatever it is four hundred and fifty beds i mean i i just worried that you start to get into the number of beds and are we going to be chasing i i'm just wondering about that martin maybe martin burnall you you look i give a comment yes what i was going to say is i think we don't we don't have the data to really know at this point uh because uh you know the census has approximately what is it the 800 to a thousand uh and shelter in in the city of sienna cruise we've got the uh you know the armory facility um and then we've got the hotels although some of those are not necessarily long-term because some of the funding will run out on on the the hotels of the the uh hotel program um in another county after the some of that is pandemic related funding um and then if we add safe sleeping sites the the ordinance what you've directed is 150 so whether that will be sufficient or not is we really don't know for sure it's certainly it's certainly data that we will we will be able to collect uh more of uh as the safe sleeping sites come up and and if we can direct people there that'd be the first thing to do is uh enforcement that's necessary is to direct people there um but if they're full you know we'll we'll we'll know and if they're full we need to be able to uh give them options um so i just think we just we just don't really know whether that would be ideal i think if we could direct somebody to to the site uh always um but i just don't think we have enough information at this point just following up on martin's comment just given that where we are today versus the point at which we could say that there's a reason you know there's a shelter option for every homeless person in the city of Santa Cruz um i think when and if we get close to that point um it would be perfectly appropriate for the council to consider um you know modifying the language to to make that um clear in the ordinance at that time as well okay i'm just i guess i'm just a little confused then with how like enforcement of this is going to work if i guess is the idea that we're going to create these safe sleeping sites and then if we come across individuals who are camping in unpermitted areas we're really going to just try to warn them so that they find alternative places to go um i guess i'm just kind of confused it seems like if someone is if we have beds available my understanding of what we've been trying to work towards is if there aren't beds available we want people to utilize those beds and we want to try to fill that capacity and um if there is capacity and people are refusing to go then potentially they can i mean my understanding is that they can actually be cited for not going but if we so i guess that's what i'm trying to get at with that language and we affirm that but i'm happy to not include it as well um you know but i think that's right right don't need that yeah if there's shelter of capacity and it's made available to them they can be cited uh uh what i was trying to get to is if they're full then then we have to provide an option and i guess that's that's a question we don't know whether the additional capacity is going to be added by the uh because right now that is the challenge that we have is that the current shelters are essentially full at least there's just really no possible way for example to that's the challenge that we have with the current encampments there's not enough space to offer to those individuals and so uh you know whether they i thought your question was if we added these uh additional safety sites per the ordinance and and perhaps added a manish encampment as as suggested would that put us in that position to be able to enforce uh and in the answers we don't know boulder do you have a thought on that last amendment or are you accepting maybe we just we've got one now for the time being if that's okay since we're all is that okay council member brown i think i just wanted to be able to include direction in the case of misdemeanor uh offenses and uh you know i it occurred to me i i didn't have this thought when we were just talking about the ordinance because i don't know that it's it's probably which would be part of an ordinance come up as additional staff directions i'm just wondering if we could also think about a process to uh situations where people have tickets that have been piled up and may may not be missed to be here but um you know the system for clearing those tickets i know that uh other cities have done it well la did it um oakland has done it and um i know that uh you know it's it has been helpful in uh providing you know a little bit of relief for people who are trying to you know move forward uh it's very difficult for example to you know it affects your work your employment qualifications that affects obviously your ability to um get housing and uh you know when those tickets pile up they just end up going to collections as we know and so there are uh systems that have been set up where uh people can opt to you know to try to do this but it requires that they also have you know meet certain criteria and have you know like a case manager who vouchers for them or you know i i just feel like if we're going to think about the misdemeanor uh piece of this that there's there's also this bigger issue um which i know we've it has been kind of raised from time to time but it just feels like that might be worth also thinking about as part of our restorative justice approach mayor if i if i may i'm having done restorative justice i i completely share your interest in wanting to go in this direction i think we should absolutely explore it i do think that there will be additional partnerships that we'll have to um enroll in that regard because they've already been to the court they're kind of already in the system my understanding is that what we can do at the local level is hold it and then have the restorative justice process occur and then not necessarily file on it and so there's that then there's just that's how we can do it as an intervention at the police level and i could be wrong but that's how i interpreted it but i i do follow your interest and i share your your you know your passion around wanting to go in that direction thank you yeah so i i yes i hear you and but i think there's also and i you know chief mills i don't know if you have any um anything to add here but i know we talked about it at one point um that this this would this could also be applied in cases where the tickets have just been on the books and you know and are never cleared and they are just clogging the system so that wouldn't necessarily be holding it but you know um but i i agree that um you know it needs further exploration to to move forward but i just love to see that in the conversation i share that chief did you have something to add yeah just real quickly mayor and thank you for that councilmember brown and watkins we certainly can do some research to find out um what the city attorney's office how many tickets are currently outstanding uh who they are assigned to and develop a process where we could take a look at those tickets and see what can be done to expunge them or to remove them uh from the from the system um that would take a little bit of research and we could report back to you on that you know our thought process was to make sure this process is pre arrest or pre citation diversion uh because that would actually be a cost savings for both us and the city attorney's office not having process an enormous amount of paperwork that virtually um is less than effective so we could certainly take a look at that and report back to you thank you and i think the benefit of having a program like that would also um i mean if if we were able to get people's into services um in exchange for dismissing or expunging uh citations that would still be a good deal for the city i think so that's certainly worth exploring and is that that that that's that's captured for any intent to the restorative justice language that councilmember Watkins and calentary johnson offered correct we have the language right in front of me but so essentially what we have is actively developing pursue restorative justice programs so i think it you know such as homeless court to incentivize positive behavioral change among those subject to the outer living municipal ordinance citation and or arrest so i guess you could you could potentially expand that particularly covers it as long as we have it on our checklist to follow up on okay so bonnie do you have a version that we can look at should try to take a vote on actually i just have a couple of clarifying questions um i did see a difference between the friendly amendment and councilmember golders was the date that it's supposed to be returned one said april 13th and one said march 23rd and i didn't want to be a um a jerk and put like a lot of work on the staff staff or maybe more team can say what would be doable yeah i think uh and i would also uh defer a little bit here to we since uh he and the team will be through the block of the work i think april 13th this is probably reasonable we can certainly uh kind of shoot for sooner if you prefer um but april 13th this is fine i think maybe change has happened by then is that with uh would you come over walk in everybody and then my other clarifying question was the cdc friendly friendly amendment from councilmember coming that was not accepted right councilmember golder i think you were the one who i would be more comfortable sticking with the peers and i think we changed to the language that councilmember calentary johnson provided so it reflects their their their language um and then uh mayor i had also one clarification also um with respect to uh this is to clarify just expectations on the one uh direction from uh councilmember calentary johnson about the managed encampment the not not the site is specific to the ordinance but the additional directions with respect to the i think it said staff shall uh pursue a managed encampment at 12 20 river street i think it's further up uh there it is set stand up a managed camp at 12 20 river street um again just to clarify expectations uh obviously we can pursue this i'm assuming just to be clear that this is obviously contingent on uh soliciting and finding uh both operators uh or and uh funding to be able to to pursue this yes yes we'll give you progress on the in june this is what you're expecting them exactly thank you okay great thank you did you have a question councilmember walked into anything to add i didn't i just had a few i just had a few comments but i you know i'm happy to reserve this to later before i go through the ordinance or some of the final on this yeah i'm not unless when we go through it no are we are we ready yes there was one other thing the map amendments was maybe yeah okay let me delete those yeah because instead i believe we're going to direct that a map basically well a map will will result because we're now going to define people places where people can be correctly those those provisions i think may have been needed could you pop those back up there funny i'm just curious yeah so those provisions might be need they are needed in order to um identify the affirmative places i think they may actually be redundant but um rather than checking for their redundancy because i think um farther down in the motion it also lists those um but we can um we can adjust that accordingly um when we come back and i do have um but i'll mention since we're talking about the map i do have a map that i um threw together a rough map i will say it shows um what i believe to be the affirmative areas that the council is um looking at right now so i can share that with you if you'd like to see it um yeah let's take a look at that okay bonnie can you stop your screen share for a moment but these are just polygons that i threw together you know at a high level showing um the commercial and industrial areas so these white blocks here are areas that would be under consideration that that removes the open space areas um and focuses just on the industrial and commercial areas you can see some interspersed but mostly along the corridors harry west and the far west side but the no daytime camping um component is in effect at least until until a lot of the other things i mean not immediately but according to covet and other those other things right following either yeah the uh community sometimes when okay hell of tear or um tbc guideline changes tony what the most efficient way for us to go through the motion is it line by line or do we can we adopt it as a meant with the um the intent of the i think is that the council has by consensus framed the motion that's in front of you right here unlike um making these changes to the ordinance as part of a first reading you know we still need to go back through the ordinance and translate this into the text of the ordinance so i don't think you need to go line by line through this because we're going to have to work with this to bring back a red line for you when we bring it back okay so are we adopting we there are these amendments to the original ordinance so we are adopting the ordinance tonight and then um and then directing staff to come back with these amendments as the first as the first reading that's that's how i read the language okay i just want to make sure sorry what can you repeat so we're adopting the ordinance that was introduced last time and directing amendments to come forward yeah that's okay do you want me to scroll through these or tony do we need to go to reach in every one or i think bonnie just scrolls down through it okay um and anyone can say stop if you need to catch up saw something that said orange and then something that said yellow for the tears sorry to interrupt and think it says yellow down here and it said orange up higher i don't know if i'm wrong this is a copy and paste so i don't go up a little bit further i think i might have seen the same thing right there here is yeah and then it says yellow down there at number five maybe just erase that thing i think this was from calentary johnson and what kind of friendly amendment so i'm sure what i don't know which one is it orange or the yellow erase the orange right i believe yeah exactly did you say erase the orange erase the orange i make it yellow i think it says here yeah um number five right there so it's a yellow and cdc guidelines whichever occurs first so that's the language yeah the one above um bonnie i think goes away all together this one all of it all of it and i don't know that language comes back later but i know that it was mentioned at the top and so language around the maps was included top so i just wanted to read ours we're going through this what what's the language the language was to oh i did have that somewhere yeah i think it was part of what um counselor walkins and i might have proposed i think it's like number one under what we proposed there's one date that says march night i wonder if we could that was acknowledging that that the county had taken action on march night got it okay okay i forgot did we decide to erase the 25 or 75 feet from the trail yeah we did down below bonnie i think she actually wrote strike above it above it oh yeah the whole thing right yeah sorry bonnie i didn't she didn't said strike last try i read that this is this is my note taking duplicates did you put that other part there about contacting like social workers or and cps if there's kids can see right there now you know yeah maybe we want to i don't know if we need to but just acknowledging that the county had already really set forth priority for families for their sheltering and rapid rehousing so i don't know how that fits i mean maybe it fits into the continuum of care but i just want to acknowledge that that's a priority if i could speak to that i think part of that would stop showing so working with the county and the state and so state agencies i think that includes all the above child protective services you know whatever is necessary to have in those conversations but so just to confirm that would mean i don't need to specify cps is that what you mean by that well the county cps is actually a county function so yeah well the only thing i think is that i have concern that let's say in sheltered and the parents don't want to go to the managed encampment or don't want the shelter but the child through no fault of their arm is now homeless and they're the outreach workers the social workers are offering it and they don't want to take it and let's say these kids are not in school or not if cps isn't involved then there's no one there to specifically advocate for the children and their welfare and so i really i think we can yeah no i follow you i think we can add it and i just i think that also those guys those folks are generally mandated reporters so if they're observing what you're describing then they're required by the law to actually report it to cps to at least open an investigation yeah because it's like as a mandated reporter sometimes i have to report it's not my place to judge it's not my place to just report and they really do an excellent job of educating for what's best for kids absolutely so i'm happy to say and yeah i think we can definitely can i get some language so work with the county including you know child protective services generically covers it can you please email the current language it is the end but um i didn't know what we landed on here but in the winter the sunrise is at 7 19 and since schools aren't coming back till 8 30 that was um that was okay so long as it was i think before 8 a.m is what she mentioned or before 8 a.m but no later than 8 a.m okay thank you bonnie lower my hand can i just make a few brief comments with one suggestion and then i'll lower my hand yeah no go ahead i just wanted to do i wanted to make sure we got through this before i did but um i'll just say it sort of in general i don't want to keep everybody any later than we need to be here but i just want to say thank you for all of your work and attention to the details of this and really expand our gratitude to the city staff but also the community members who spoke up and shared their concerns with the specific aspects of the ordinance and as you can see that um the issue is complicated and the ordinance is complicated as well and i feel really i feel really good in the direction that we're going in and the clarifications that we've made this evening is particularly around the misdemeanor the families um around identifying the locations the sensitive areas in our community around some of the accountability metrics um but also having just really observed a lot of conversations this is really big for our community this is actually this is a big step in a direction to provide a lot more um services and resources and that's a really big deal for a lot of unhoused individuals here in our community um and those impacted and i wonder and then i'll leave with just the brief suggestion and i wonder if when we're thinking about communication strategies if we can have some sort of quick kind of like fact sheet of what what this looks like so that the community is really aware of um some of these nuances and um it just it just you know um adequately communicated to the community all that this entails and i know it can be forthcoming and iterative but um some sort of you know clarifying document i think would be beneficial to the community because i heard a lot of misinformation this evening as well thank you uh council member brown and then council member Cummings and then i'd like to if we can take a vote comment i've already given my uh comments on multiple occasions about uh the kind of the ethics and efficacy concerns that i have uh with moving in this direction i just want to say you know um council member Watkins you said earlier that um and others kind of alluded that um we have we need to be in action and i totally agree i um you know i've been hoping for some action for a long time now on this issue um but you know i also think that there you know there are other actions that we can and should be taking i'm glad to see that uh safe sleeping programs and managed encampment uh you know possibilities are now on the table and i totally support that um you know i i i would have loved to see that happen uh sooner and um you know and and now i think you know we just are where we are uh i you know i think that investment in those kinds of programs is going to be a much more effective way to provide relief for uh you know our community both housed and unhoused um then you know investing money in uh defending uh the lawsuits that i believe are are coming and so i'll just you know and i think that that in partnership with community and faith-based organizations this could actually be a much more affordable than the cost that we've seen um you know the projections so um i guess i'll just i'll leave it there um you know i'm i'm pleased about some of the changes that are being made and and yet i cannot support uh moving forward in in this direction at this time help the member coming thank you i have um one comment to make i think that the second to last the probability of camping in all areas and say they're not safe sleeping sites i don't think that was accepted and so i think that should be stricken and then um glonnie if you could scroll back the top ones you've removed that i did have to see if we can separate i didn't see that part of the motion tonight was to adopt what's currently before um and so i would like to see if we can separate the motion because i'm supportive of the changes that we've provided and the direction to move back to bring us back um on april 13th however i'm not i'm not supportive of adopting what's before us and i also have a question for the city attorney um regarding um that action so at the last meeting i think even before the meeting started there were uh changes that had been suggested to by staff um were not included in the packet and then the council went and made so significant changes to the language that was before us at the last meeting and having had discussions with other members um of the public uh one of i think a lot of people would see what's before us tonight is a first reading rather than the second reading and it wasn't published as a second reading and so i'm wondering legally can the uh council adopt um the ordinance was before us tonight since it wasn't publicly advertised as a second reading and given the substantial amount of changes that we made the last meeting it was my my understanding and obviously we've only been doing this for two and a half years now but my understanding is that it should come to us as a first reading and so i'm wondering if you can speak to the the uh recommended action is consider adoption of a mint of ordinance 21-03 amending chapter 636 of the code and consider potential modifications as part of the current ordinance as drafted or as part of subsequent amendments so i do see this as uh teed up for adoption tonight if that's the direction of the council and i'm familiar with arguments that were made that um somehow staff recommending that the council consider additional changes before it was introduced at the last meeting and then the council making additional changes before it was introduced somehow um was improper or was even a brown act violation and i just don't buy that um the council has the ability to make changes to an ordinance before its introduction then it's published in and um in and the charter says that you can't finally adopt it until at least five days after it's introduced for publication so i i don't see any procedural impediment to the council taking final action tonight i would like to make a comment about one thing that i i guess i missed during the discussion of the amendments um incorporating the recommendations from council members Watkins and callant sorry johnson um and if this is not the appropriate time i can i can defer that but um yeah i don't see a problem with the council taking action tonight as a second reading tony just for clarity okay tony you want to go ahead and just if and then i'll go back to council member coming if there's something that we need to clean up is uh yeah so yeah if i could just very briefly the original language that was proposed by the the initial maker of the motion council member golder was that the city staff shall not implement enforcement until amendments are made and the cdc covid tier is orange and the council by consensus changed the orange to uh yellow i got that but what i did not realize is that the amended language only refers to the daytime restrictions and there are a lot of new prohibitions in the ordinance i think it just makes more sense if it just if the language stays as initially proposed by council member golder to say that implementation will not occur until uh the cdc guidance changes or we enter the yellow tier so just throw that out there this one right here right yeah that makes sense tony to um take out the daytime restriction and and have implementation thank you for pointing that out thank you all right and so just just to be clear the language that was proposed is that implementation shall not occur until amendments are made and the cdc covid tier is yellow so also the amendments are part of that did you say yellow yellow yes that's what that's what i understand this should be yellow okay yeah i really appreciate i'm sorry mayor i it's okay i just really appreciate you clarifying that because they are really in tandem right in terms of the adoption really is contingent on us also moving forward these amendments before actual implementation occurs so by adopting tonight is also acknowledging that these amendments have to occur before it's ultimately implemented but keeps us moving in a direction of action i guess yeah well i have to admit at this late hour um i probably would have overlooked that if kassie hadn't been giving me a nudge uh text messages thank you kassie that's coming this language will all come back to the k a new ordinance that makes these amendments to the ordinance that the council would be adopting tonight sorry i should have been clear with that statement the language that was just used will be no implementation until the amendments until its amendment amended right are we're in the yellow tier right is that language a part of the ordinance or is that language separately from the ordinance and applying to um the kind of first motion and the reason why i ask this is because if that language is incorporated into the um the language that's supposed to come back to us that means it's not going to be included in the language that will be adopted should the ordinance so it should just be considered second reading and adopted that language my understanding would not be included the language you're right the language will not be in the ordinance itself it will be in the motion however the says and you know this is the order in which it's it's presented which is you know it's complicated but essentially says pass the ordinance for adoption tonight direct the staff as follows return with an amendment to the ordinance with all of these changes and among other things defer it implementation of the ordinance until the amendments are made and the covid restrictions are lifted or we enter the yellow team so it's additional direction on top of the adoption of the ordinance just as it is direction to come back with an amendment to the ordinance at a future meeting with the language on the 13th and then it wouldn't be included in terms of the um second reading yeah essentially saying that there will be no rollout until the council makes amendments as per the direction that you're giving tonight okay all just my my final comments which would be that everybody's time and hard work on all this and all the changes that were made um i'm not comfortable supporting the um the make the amendments i feel like and then i guess this is a question they'll come back to us again for a second reading we'll then have to wait 30 days again correct before it will take nothing's gonna probably so well late may right thank you everyone for all your comments lee i see you have your hand up yes if you can go back bonnie to number five um that we were just working on city staff shall not implement enforcement until amendments are made and um either cdc guidelines change or covet here is yellow i think that was the intent correct or i caught that behind the scenes thanks laura yes whichever is dinner yes bonnie all um for a roll call vote second reading now we're voting on the adoption of the ordinance introduced last meeting and there will be a second vote for the amendment yes right tony can you one more time explain the time the timing of this either option i'm not quite sure i understand your question what's there the adoption of the second reading the adoption of the second reading would would take effect 30 days from from final adoption tonight however the direction that would be given should the council adopt the second part of the motion which is next would be to defer its implementation until the council has amended the ordinance uh consistent with the follow-up direction with all of these elements that we've been discussing and and uh or until cdc guidance has changed or we enter the yellow tier it sounds like so that makes it that the 30 days is kind of out the window well that's yeah i won't be in effect in 30 days but i will just say that um you know um i won't say that city city council legislative time is like geologic time but it's it's a lot slower than uh regular time and so if we had something in place in 45 or 60 days i still think that would be a big step forward for the council i'm sorry no please go ahead place mayor and then the other um scenario is that this goes back as a first reading you were you were saying and then that process starts over again yeah you can't you couldn't even do a first reading on this tonight because we would we would spend the next four hours trying to figure out how to how to to convert this motion language into the actual text of the ordinance so at a very minimum um we would have to bring back the ordinance for introduction at a subsequent meeting or unless you wanted to stay here all night and hammer out the all of you thank you so my vote is i and mayor meyer my vote is i so that motion passes with five let me grab my i got this right all right everybody give me the language that i need to so the motion passes with five yeah with five to two councilmember brown no to vote on the next that's right as the amendments yeah i think the second part of the motion is to um the phone the direction set forth in the in the text okay okay the motion is direct staff to return by april 13 2021 with an amended ordinance to include the following and we've reviewed all of those right the additional staff direction that's contained in the written motion okay do folks have questions on this like lots of hands up there was just one bit that was missing whichever comes sooner for phrase number five but i think bonnie you just added that yes that'd be perfect okay lee did you have a comment on this no i think everything was captured okay and councilmember coming i actually have a pretty major concern so if you can scroll down to that language to number five the i interpret this is that if because looking at the calendar it looks like april 13th is more than i mean we continue at the rate that we're at we could end up in yellow before like they said they did not want to see how we're living in so not implement enforcement until amendments are made and either cdc guidelines change or the covid tier is yellow so the guidelines can change the covid tier can can turn to yellow but the amendments are made in addition to that so one does not preclude the other adopting what we did tonight we're sort of acknowledging that we're not going to go into the details of it but we're not going to enforce it or have it be applied until these amendments are made so we're you know essentially process life saving time okay thanks for my clarification um councilmember coming as if it is helpful it says when they're made and yeah yeah instead yeah and not or i want to just make sure that was clear but i'm not having it before me i'm concerned so glad we were able to earlier did you have a question i had another clarifying question i think um it would be helpful to maybe state what when this comes back these amendments will there be an opportunity for public comment input and that prop what does that process look like so that everybody's clear it's a complete do over so yes there will be opportunities for public comment both uh assuming that it's introduced on the 13th and then when it comes back for final adoption just as just as we've gone through over the past to me so that's great i think there's a lot that happened tonight and so i think um that that's great to clarify thank you okay so bonnie i will um uh ask you for a roll call vote welcome for what can i voting yes and um one voting no uh councilmember brown voting no and i believe we almost beat our record from last two weeks ago but not quite anything else um let me look at our i believe we are officially adjourned just want to thank everybody for hanging in there and um vice mayor bruner did you have another comment no okay well we are officially adjourned and thank you everyone and we'll see you soon good night everyone thank you