 Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the 1215 session of the May 25, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz 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, cityofsancruz.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 9 on your phone to raise your hand. If you're time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that has been unmuted, that you have been unmuted. The title will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented on your item of interest. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Watkins is absent. Calentary Johnson. Present. Brown. Vice Mayor Brunner. Present. Thank you. We'll now move on to our first item today under presentations. The presentation on Beach Safety Week. I'd like to welcome Rachel Kaufman, our Recreation Superintendent. Welcome, Rachel. Thank you, Mayor Myers and City Council members. I'm happy to be here today to recognize National Beach Safety Week. And at this time, I'm going to share just a brief presentation that we have. We'll be joined today also by Daniel Lawson-Thomas, D.C. and Chief Hayduke. So we'll get started. Are you able to see the presentation? Yes, we can. Perfect. So yes, each year, the week of Memorial Day is recognized as National Beach Safety Week. And we, to kick off the summer season, the United States Life-Saving Association sponsors National Beach Safety Week, you know, in an effort to remind beachgoers to use caution in the aquatic environment. And it begins the Monday before Memorial Day and ends seven days later on Memorial Day. And last year over the summer, you know, the beach closures Santa Cruz had approximately 500,000 visitors. In a normal non-COVID year, we have 750,000 on Main Beach. And, you know, with the governors beyond the blueprint, you know, the date of June 15, we are gearing up for a busy summer this year. And so each year Parks and Recreation and Fire collaborate to spread the word on beach safety. We will be posting beach safety tips each day on social media through Memorial Day. And another way that we promote beach safety is through our programs. And so Jim Booth will return to offer Learn to Swim programs at Harvey West Pool this summer. And I am thrilled to report that our Little and Junior Guard programs and Captain Corps programs will be returning to Cal Beach this summer, beginning on June 14. And this is a great program that instills a lot of ocean confidence and awareness. And so at this time, I am happy to introduce the new supervisor for sports and beaches, D.C. Lawson Thomas, to talk to you more about this summer's Junior Guard program. Hello, Mayor Myers and City Council. Thank you for the invitation here today. As Rachel said, Junior Guard is back this year. And why this is important as far as ocean safety goes is that Junior Guard participants gain confidence in the beach and ocean environment through beach games, ocean activities, and conditioning workouts. And additionally, the Captain Corps program is that next level of Junior Guard where the A's and double A's are 15 to 17 year olds have this opportunity to volunteer with the program. And they serve as role models for the Junior Guard and Little Guard participants and assist the instructors with marine safety through participation, education, creating a positive learning environment. And it is the perfect stepping stone for these Junior Guards to go program into becoming a lifeguard for each year. Most of our current instructors are previous Captain Corps members. And actually, we had a record-breaking 28 potential captains come out and try out over last week and interviewed with us. And this Friday, we will announce who's getting those positions and going from there. The program is going to be a bit different this year. To help maximize participation, we are doing four two-week sessions with still a morning and afternoon session. So it's going to be the 9 to noon and the 1 to 4 still, but then only two-week sessions. And this is also what Capitola and the state programs are doing as well. Our program is going to run June 14, all the way through August 6. That's all I got. Thanks so much, D.C. And now Chief Hiduk will be joining us to talk through our top 10 beach safety tips. Good afternoon, Mayor and City Council. Jason Hiduk, your fire chief. And are you sharing your screen, Rachel, because I can't see it anymore. Sorry, it disappeared for a second, but I'm coming back. Okay. So while she's breaking that on, I just want to highlight, you know, the entire reason why we do this is we want to prevent incidents before they happen. And I'd like to take a moment of silence just to recognize the track of the life that we experienced on May 16. A father was trying to rescue six-year-old and 12-year-old children. And, unfortunately, despite the heroic efforts of lifeguards, firefighters, harbor patrol, the entire system, he passed away. The children were saved, but one life is too many. So I'd like to take a moment of silence just to recognize the realities of what we're trying to edge. So in front of you, you have the USLA's 10 beach safety tips. And this is something that these messages have not changed. And I'm not going to read them to you verbatim, but I do want to highlight the partnership that we have with Parks and Recreation and the Junior Lifeguard Program. And if you look at these tips, how many of them are directly related to the Junior Lifeguard Program and the increased safety, awareness, athleticism, teamwork, all those things we want within our community, literally hundreds of children every year go through this program and thousands and thousands. Myself being one of the product of a JG program, my wife, my daughter, the fact that we had a cancel last year was heartbreaking, but the fact that you're wholeheartedly supported. And learning to swim, learning the ocean environment, learning how to interact with other people, and knowing what to do in a situation that is why we have the JG program. It is such an incubator of creating good humans for our community. Safety tips really want to highlight the fact that talk to a lifeguard, they understand the conditions that change on an hourly, daily basis. If you have any questions, don't go out. And at all times mother nature is stronger than any of us. And so these safety tips are nationwide, they don't change. And we want people to take these to heart. And again, if you have any questions or concerns when you come to our beach, we're expecting close to a million people to come. We want them to check in with our lifeguards and we want our community to engage in the Junior Lifeguard Program. These can save lives and more importantly, they can prevent a rescue in the first place, which is really our goal. And again, I'd really like to thank DC and Rachel and the entire Parks and Rec Department for their efforts in getting the JG program up and running this year. It's one of the more valuable programs I think we have within the city and I completely support it. And that concludes our presentation. So we're happy to stay on, solve questions or comments. Thank you so much, Rachel and Jason and DC. Welcome to your fun. I would imagine fun new job with Junior Guards. It's pretty cool. And I'm happy to see if it first have any comments. I just want to share quickly. I just have so much respect for what you all do. We're a small city and it's amazing that we have that many hundreds of thousands of people coming to the beach here. And we have very, very few accidents or, you know, drowning, thankfully, and not a lot of places can say that. So I think we just have an extraordinary trained team, a great fire in Parks and Rec. So really appreciate all the work you guys do to keep everyone safe. And I see Council Member Golder and Council Member Contari Johnson. I just want to echo what Mayor Meyers said. And I thank you guys so much for getting it up and running this year. It's such an invaluable part of our community. And our Junior Guard also and a captain and my husband was and my sister and my brother and my kids and being part of the boosters. I just know how it's not only good for kids like Bonnie and mine, but it also really does create a community of people out there that can help out moving forward as young adults. Or not adults, but out of the ocean. And I just can't thank you guys enough for all the work that you did. I know it was like extra work to get it up and running this year. The kids and the community and the parents and everybody is just super, super grateful. So thank you for Council Member Contari Johnson. Yes, I would like to echo those sentiments. Thank you so much for the work that you do. Thank you so much. Thank you to the Junior Guard program. We have benefited as a family and it truly is, as Council Member Golder said, an invaluable part of our community. It goes beyond, I see it going beyond ocean safety, which is essential and so important in our community. But it really, I see it building community. I see it bringing kids together from different schools, resilience. It's just, it's all around an amazing program. So thank you for the work that you do. Thanks for bringing it back. I forgot to mention that because Council Member Watkins didn't hear the request. We want you to take all of us to do the jump with the. Let us know. Let us know when we need to jump. It's guard building. Oh, we'll, we'll definitely keep you posted on that. Okay. We're all in. Thank you. I like it. Thanks everybody. I'm just like a quick moment just and Renee is talking about the time I just have to really shout out to DC because the time that he is put in to putting together this program and the spreadsheets and I cannot convey enough. The work he's putting into this program up and running this summer. So thank you DC. Thanks so much, you guys. And I can't believe it's Memorial Day this weekend. Crazy. Thanks. Thanks for doing that. And we'll see you back here next year. Next up will be I will. Few announcements and then we will 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. City of Santa Cruz.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. 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 meetings are numbers nine through 22 on our agenda with the exception of item 19. The council members if there are any statements of disqualification today. Seeing any. Okay. I'd like to have Mayor Myers. I have my hand up. Sorry. Go ahead. Vice mayor. I have a statement of disqualification. For items. For. 15. Okay. Thank you. Vice mayor. And everybody like to ask the question. Sorry. We need to know we need a reason for the discussion. I just had a question. The reason. Sonya Bife, mayor. Yeah, conflict. I don't know what officially I should say, but conflict is my job. Is that sufficient? Tony. We're voting on the resolutions for the downtown. I think it would be appropriate to identify that the job just to put it in context. downtown with my job with the down of Santa Cruz and is also partly funded by the downtown management corporation. That is perfectly adequate explanation. Thank you so much. Next I'd like to ask the city clerk to announce any additions or deletions. We have that. Next I'll just make an announcement about oral communications for today. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda number agenda item number 21 at the end of our agenda today. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications please call in towards the end of number 21. Next up is a report on closed session from our city attorney. Yes, good afternoon mayor Myers members of the city council. This morning the council met in closed session via Zoom at 10 a.m. to discuss the following items. Item one was public employment, the council met to just ongoing city manager recruitment. Item two was a conference with labor negotiators involving OE3 and the SEIU temporary employees. Council received a report from its negotiator HR director Murphy. Item three is a conference of legal counsel concerning liability claims. The liability claim of Brian Cuarolo. Item four was a conference of legal counsel and existing litigation and there were two items of existing litigation. Council received a report from and take direction to city attorney's office on the matter of city of Santa Cruz versus Santy at all. Also in the matter of sunset farms LLC versus the city of Santa Cruz. Those cases are both pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. No reportable action on any of those items. Thank you, Mr. Kandadi. Next up is item number six, which is the city manager report. And I'll have Martin Bernal go ahead and give us a report and provide updates on the city's business, COVID-19 response in events. Good afternoon, mayor and council. Yes, as we've been doing the last number of council meetings, we have updates for you today on the pandemic, as well as the homelessness related items. And so we've got the chief high Duke will do a health COVID update. And then Bonnie Webster and we'll do an update on the yellow tier and its impact on the business community. And then finally, we will talk about the latest developments with respect to some of the homelessness of actions and issues that the city is facing. I'll first turn it over to Chief High Duke to give an update on the status City Council, Jason, hi to your fire chief back again. So in front of you, I've got the latest update from a worldwide perspective. This is from John Hopkins, the COVID map. And the US is holding fairly steady. India, unfortunately, is rapidly approaching the point where they're probably going to eclipse us as far as overall numbers. But again, the US is doing well. One thing that I think is of note within this is the number of vaccines that are administered. And that number goes up, the new cases will go down. And I think that's really the learning point that you can get from this next slide, Bonnie. In Santa Cruz County, we are below 100 cases in the county, which is phenomenal compared to where we've been. There's only two or three people hospitalized at this point. And they had an entire week with no one hospitalized within the county. So we are definitely heading in the right direction as a whole. That large surge we had is steadily decreased. And a lot of that is because of the effort to what people have been doing. Only for the number of vaccinations that are going into people. Next slide. So within the state, we're approaching approximately 50% of the state population as far as people who've been vaccinated here locally. Over 296,000 vaccines have been distributed to our population. And yes, that that number is larger than our population, but a number of those doses are sequential first and second dose. Comparatively to the rest of the nation and the rest of the state, we are ahead as far as that effort. And we need people to continue to do that. We have more vaccines available than people to give them to, which is different than what we had a few months ago. And that dynamic has not changed. Next slide. So if you look at the breakout between the age, we're doing really good that 50 to 65 were over 80% for either fully vaccinated or at least one shot, which does offer some protection until that second shot is delivered. We're catching up in that 18 to 49 bracket. We have 62% a little over 62% that have that shot. And since the Pfizer vaccine was opened up to that age group of 12 to 15, we have about 30% that either have one shot or the second shot. It's just been opened up. They are expecting that possibly by September that the age range that 5 to 11 age, that they will apply for an emergency use authorization to get the vaccine to that age group, which has really big implications for full time in person, like I think most of us want. The good news is that the efficacy of that vaccine for that age group is really good. They're not finding a whole lot of side effects from that. And so that's really encouraging news. That age group represents about 12% of all the COVID cases. However, they represent about 24% of all the new cases. And that makes sense when you think of the age group of who has been vaccinated. They started with the elderly people who had healthcare issues and they really focused on giving them vaccinated. And now they're moving their way down in the age brackets. So here, locally, again, our numbers are falling off. And hopefully, you know, we're getting closer to this. But again, that vaccination effort, in addition to, you know, masking and, you know, paying attention to how you interact with people is really, it's making a difference. And so locally, we're doing really good. Next slide. So again, all Californians 16 and over are eligible and that has been dropped to 12 to 15. You still have the same vaccination portals, myturn.ca.org or Santa Cruz Health.org or your private provider. And again, if you haven't been vaccinated, I would urge you to get signed up. There are vaccines available. And there's a multitude of different ways you can look for where to get those. Next slide. And then here locally, I'm going to end with this because I think this is the best source of information is go to Santa Cruz Health.org, our public health officer and our organization here in the county have done an outstanding effort of getting vaccines into people's arms and getting us out of this pandemic. But simple things still work as far as washing your hands, wearing a mask, keeping your distance and stay home if you're sick. They've also seen a huge reduction, a concurrent reduction in colds and flus because of the actions that we've taken because of COVID. So keep it up. We're getting closer. Summer is here. Outdoor activity is encouraged. But again, put a mask in your pocket and if you find yourself in a situation, just, you know, do those simple steps and get vaccinated. And if you have any questions, I'm available. Thank you, Chief. Are there any questions for Chief Hayduk today from council members? You see one. Council member, Collin Tari Johnson. Thank you, Chief Hayduk. Was the 80.5% of vaccinations, was that the statement about our county percentage? That's our county percentage. And so if you look at that age range of that 50 to 65 plus, we're above 80%. We're close, we're close to 90% in that age bracket as far as either fully vaccinated or at least one shot. The state as a whole is just under 50%. And again, that's for fully vaccinated or at least one shot. Thank you. That's a great name. Yeah, that's impressive. Any other council members with questions or comments? Okay. Thank you, Chief. I'll bring it back to Martín. Great. Thank you. Next, I'll ask Bonnie Watzkin, our Economic Development Director, to do an update on the yellow tier and what it means to the business community in particular. Thanks, Martín. And good afternoon, Mayor and members of the council. So I have a brief presentation and I will share my screen. I'm going to go over a few slides about the yellow tier. And I will say one of the main things to note in the yellow tier is that we have four tiers. We're in the least restrictive tier now. And this is a report that we put out and actually Nathan Q and our Economic Development Team as part of our Economic Development Team prepares these each week. And we put this out through the Economic Recovery Council. So this becomes an official document of the ERC. And it sort of talks about each time we enter into a new tier, it goes through the metrics of we have to be three consecutive weeks at the next lower tier to move to that tier. So we're in the least restrictive tier now. And I would say that the main thing that's different in tier four in the yellow tier is that we go from 25% allowed indoor capacity to a lot of 50% indoor capacity. That's some of the main distinction and I'll just go through that in a little more detail. This is just to show a little closer. We put these out each week in both English and Spanish. And we should have another one out this afternoon. We usually get those between one and one and two when the county posts the latest stats. So we'll update that a new one. And we expect to continue doing these until June 15th. However, Dr. Newell did indicate that it was possible right now while we're planning on continuing these until June 15th that there may be an earlier period where we largely return to normal based on the metrics. And if that's the case, obviously we'll update that sooner. So specifically allowable operations. This is just the lower half of the screen I showed you before. These are available through the ERC. They're also posted on our ChooseSantaCruz.com website under available COVID-19 resources. So restaurants, I'd say again, some of the main changes from the last year, gyms and fitness centers previously were at 25% capacity. They're now up to 50%. And additionally, movie theaters are at 50% capacity. Amusement parks went to 35% from previously being 25% capacity. I would also, the hotels and fitness centers went up from 25% now at 50%. And finally, at the bottom of the screen there, the wineries breweries and distilleries went up from 25% to now 50%. Previously there were 100% people and now it's 200 people, whichever is fewer. So those are the main distinctions. Just to go in on a little more detail, there are some additional allowances. If events, special events, gyms, fitness centers, and restaurants want to require guests to show proof of negative tests or full vaccination, they can potentially go up to 75% in the yellow gear. Obviously that's a sensitive area and not all businesses, gyms, fitness centers are going to want to do that, but it's something they can do if they want to exceed the 50% capacity regulation. And then finally, what will change on June 15th? Capacity and distancing restrictions are anticipated to be listed for most businesses and activities. However, for a large-scale indoor event, we'll have vaccination or negative test requirements for anticipating this to go at least through October 1st. And similar to Chief Haidus sort of referencing other sites, you know, if you go to the California COVID-19, ca.gov, safer economy site, you can even do a deeper dive on this. We have links to this, to this site as well on our Choose Santa Cruz website, as well as additional resources for businesses in our community. And that's ChooseSantaCruise.com. And with that, I'll take any questions that you have. Thank you, Bonnie. Is there any council member with any questions for Bonnie today? I'm not seeing any hands. Okay, thank you. Okay, oh wait, I think I see council member coming. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you, Mayor. I did have one question. It's not so much on the yellow gear, but I've been having a number of business owners who have been reaching out, asking about the outdoor dining. And I know that there's a state bill in the Senate currently to discuss extending that further and working with the ABC to their businesses to maintain their outdoor. But just one thing that's going to come, I got this, people are have been really hesitant around, you know, like some of the stuff that they purchased was only supposed to be for a few months, and now it's extended to October with the possibility they could be extended longer. And so I just wonder if there's anything that we can say the business community or anything we can do in terms of further, because it sounds like it's been really helping businesses kind of come out of the pandemic. And many would like to see that extended for a longer period of time as they recover. So I don't know if you have any comments on that. Yeah, thank you, Councilmember Cummings. We actually have a request for proposals out right now to work with an architecture or design permanent outdoor dining. We hope to be able to come forward to you for consideration of some financial offsets to really enable that to happen so that businesses can invest in outdoor dining. And we have some consistency at a lower cost point, because that cost is high. You know, some of our initial estimates of doing some of these permanent outdoor dining structures was anywhere between 40, 80,000, the size and the scale of some of those. And so we want to be able to provide some financial incentives and offsets, because we recognize how hard it is to invest in this space, particularly if you're using temporary, you know, chairs, you know, tables, awnings, to really make that jump as you're recovering from the COVID. It's difficult. So we're hoping to get some standard templates and sort of design for these outdoor dining areas and reduce that cost by doing some of the legwork, working with planning and building and public works and getting them sort of pre-approved from a permitting standpoint, and then potentially even coming forward to you for some consideration of some forgivable loans. We've been talking with Santa Cruz Community Credit Union for partnering with us, similar to our microloan programs. We can have really quick turnaround on these, and then the concept is that we would forgive a portion of the loan each year they stay in operation with their outdoors. They can borrow from us at a low sort of risk point, and then we forgive a portion of that loan each year while they maintain their outdoor dining. So that's part of our sort of strategy of enabling restaurants to invest in these outdoor spaces longer term. So we hope to have this out this summer, and you know we will come forward recommendation and sort of overview of potentially extending the temporary for those that aren't quite ready for that yet, but also having this option for those that do want to move forward with a permanent outdoor dining. And then if we have business owners who are contacting us, is it okay if we just put them in contact with your office? Absolutely. And that program is headed by Rebekah Unit in our office, but they can contact anyone in need, but she's running that program right now. Thanks. Thank you Bonnie. Any other questions from council members? Not seeing any. Martine, next item. Oh you're muted Martine. Thank you. Thanks Bonnie. Next we'll have Lee Butler do an update on the homeless items. Thank you Martine, and good afternoon mayor and council members. I will talk to you a little bit about the ordinance and the request for qualifications and some updates on the Benchlands this afternoon. So first off, as you are aware, the screening of the ordinance moved forward at the last meeting and the agenda today identifies that it will be considered at the June 8th meeting. And I wanted to point out that we've got information on our website and an ability to provide comments on the ordinance on our website, www.citiesanacruz.com slash homelessness. There's a link to the ordinance and you can provide comments right there on the website. Next up, the council is aware and wanted to use this opportunity to plug the request for qualifications that we have out right now. We are looking for organizations can provide operation of nighttime only safe sleeping sites, of safe storage programs, of 24-7 managed encampments or even 24-7 sheltering options, as well as street outreach services focused on directing individuals to sanctions facilities and mobile services such as showers and laundry. Also wanted to let folks know that if you have locations where some of these operations could occur, we're requesting that individuals respond with those potential locations. We hosted a general webinar Friday related to the RFQ and our general homelessness response in the city and we have another one coming up this Friday. The one this Friday is focused on bidders. So those who are looking to respond to the request for qualifications, we encourage you to attend that meeting on Friday and information is available on the website with the RFQ. Finally, a few updates regarding the bench lands. We had a successful move of the agreement camp that was at the Harvey West Friendship Garden to the bench lands south of the pedestrian bridge and about 20 of the 30 campers in that area chose to relocate to the bench lands. We also still have the area north of the bench lands occupied by the encampment that was relocated from the area in the top of San Lorenzo Park. A couple of updates related to that encampment north of the bed bridge. The latest federal court hearing happened and essentially maintained the status quo for the injunction which is based on COVID considerations until the next hearing which is scheduled for June 29th and we do have a lot of staff effort going into that encampment. So we've got police parks, public works, the city manager's office, water and various other departments working together. We've got some contract staff doing, helping with refuse management out there and we also have two part-time staff who have been regularly on the ground in the bench lands and they've been able to have some great successes recently. They've connected three people with family that were out of state. They got three people into the county shelter system. They just recently went over 25 on the shelter referrals that they've and they've been able to assist a number of individuals in referring them to connections to drug or medical treatment and with that I am happy to answer any questions that you may have. Are there questions from council members for Lee today? Council member Cummings, council member excuse me Vice Mayor Bruner, council member Calentary Johnson and then council member Brown in that order. Thanks. I just have one question. So if members of the public want to learn anything about kind of homelessness we should direct them to that website. I just ask because I think it's just really important that when people want to understand what's happening now there's a website up that we can send them to and that's going to be on the landing page if they want to know about anything homelessness related from here moving forward. Yes that's the best site to find the latest information whether it's on our general homelessness response info or on the ordinance itself. Thank you Vice Mayor Bruner. Speak a little more about locations. As you mentioned input on locations is that through the website if anybody has location ideas and I know that several location ideas have already come through or is this in conjunction more specific? Thanks for that question Vice Mayor Bruner and I appreciate making sure that we're clear on this. The RFQ is actually requesting that if a property owner or someone who controls a site maybe they're leasing the site and they want to sublease that site or that facility you know maybe someone has a warehouse that's currently occupied but they know in two months their tenant is going to leave. We may have no idea about that but that could be a location where we could have a safe sleeping facility or a storage facility and so what we're specifically requesting as part of the RFQ is that if you have a site and you're willing to lease it or sell it even for any of the types of home service operations or facilities that we let us know. There's no obligation associated with that this is just a request for qualifications and so it's hey I'm interested in leasing my site I'm interested in selling my site I've got this one tenant space in a building that you may be able to utilize so really we're trying to understand what other options are out there besides city-owned facilities. Great that really helps clarify that and is that again through the website you are a link that you mentioned? There is yes there is a link to the RFQ website or you can just do a search for RFQ homeless services and it'll bring you straight to that but you can go to the homeless the city of Santa Cruz.com slash homelessness and there's a link to the RFQ there as well. Thank you. Thank you Leigh. Next is Councilman Recall and Tari Johnson. Thank you so much for that update Leigh. A couple of questions. Thank you for clarifying the point around sites I think that's really important and we just we have to work together as a community as we all know that it's very difficult to site these projects so I hope that folks will step up and and support these efforts. So I'm just looking at I started out my questions I'm wondering if you could just share how was the attendance of the first webinar that you both did and then I'm looking online for the information on the second webinar maybe I'm just not navigating well but I don't seem to find it and then my last question is are there other partners in the Benchlands? Tony partners or non-profit partners but are supporting the outreach and engagement and case management efforts? Sure so we had about 20 individuals at the first webinar it was roughly I would say half providers and half general interest community members and then the link to the webinar should be as part of the RFQ I will check that while I am talking to you here because I have that open it may not be posted yet unless I just need to refresh this and so we'll get that posted it will be with the RFQ and that yeah I don't see it that it's actually posted so we'll make sure that the Friday webinar is linked there and then your third question is the Benchlands that does have regular visits by HP HP sorry the homeless persons health project as well as other county services and facilities and our teams have been seeking to connect individuals to to those members there and they have actually communicated with a number of folks down there and helped get them connected with individuals who they knew needed services so that is ongoing obviously we want to expand that to the extent to the greatest extent that we can and there are capacity constraints andizations as well but we are looking to to partner with others as much as possible. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Cummings. This is more maybe a comment than a question but just given what we're kind of learning about or not learning but you know what we've heard about fire danger and you know this is a conversation that's always on everyone's minds I think I just want to really encourage all of us here those who are listening out there to really think about you know getting proactive about citing this is always a challenge and this is kind of the the point at which our best laid plans have fallen apart in the past and I just want to really stress that if we as Council Member Collentary Johnson said if we you know if we put our hud together and really roll up our sleeves and work towards this then we can get it but it is going to take some political will and it's going to take community members stepping and I think just being as proactive as possible to make sure that we can identify some of those sites I'm already hearing I imagine other Council Members are hearing since Highway 1 and 9 was cleared that you know there's more people now up in you know up towards second more Grove and in other places that there's there's legitimate really really really big concerns about fire in those areas and we know if there isn't an alternative that's where people are going to go so and and probably more so as you know once the the community services and standards ordinance is takes effect so just want to really stress that and instrument that when you hear more concern about fire danger it often parallels moving people out of places that are you know higher profile so that's my my big thought just please let's get proactive and aggressive about sighting thank you Council Member Council Member coming thanks I just wanted to make a quick comment as well I do know that last year there's an individual who had property that I think is on seventh ab that's still in the city limits and they had mentioned and they brought it up again I think earlier this year that they'd be willing to work with the city to provide homeless services there the city could use it and so I can't remember that contact was I think they had reached out to martin so that might be going to follow up with if we're trying to site and I know that that you know is on the border with live oak but at the same time really trying to work with the community to move forward on all these solutions I think is really important and and also knowing that the county had mentioned that they were going to be looking for 120 safe sleeping sites as well that that might be a good person to reach out to and connect with thank you Council Member Cummings and I do know that you know we've heard that individual to the county and I know that the county has been working with them on some potential options for that site I haven't had a report on that in a few weeks to a month maybe but I know that they are actively in talks with that individual on on seventh avenue and in fact I just wanted to follow up on Council Member Calentary Johnson's question the webinar right now is posted on citysantacris.com slash homelessness under the rfq tab we'll get it on the actual rfq page as well thank you Lee yeah I have I just have one question Lee just sort of comes around kind of brought up my concern you know my my question my my understanding too was that we do have some active assessment teams that are going into our open spaces right now they're kind of also trying to assist people and kind of understand you know how many folks are there and what they're trying to obviously find additional shelter and could you speak to that we we are getting obviously a lot of emails about fire risk associated with our you know open spaces and I'm just curious if you just let us know a little bit about programmatically how we're approaching that sure be happy to um you're correct and and thank you Council Member Brown and Mayor Myers for those comments about the Pogunaf and the fire concerns see our fire chief is here I know that his teams have been out there last week and this week doing assessments of individuals in the area we've also had park teams out and water out at the the areas in and around Pogunaf and so Jason if you want to add to any of the specifics there in terms of your approach and the recent static collection and I see our parks director is here as well. Sure Mayor City Council so this is something that we've been doing for a while now tracking fires in our open spaces and also identifying those ignition sources whether those are fire pits, barbecues, gas cans, propane grills, whatnot and so we're going out in a collaborative effort with we have Santa Cruz PD and Water Department identifying these sites on a map and also educating these folks of the dangers so that we don't have a catastrophic event happening because of that. So we have these sites located we also have an overlay from our actual fire events and working with Lee who's been working really closely with the county we are not taking individual information and the county is really clear that they want to make sure that they're not connected to this enforcement they want to be able to reach out to these people and connect them but what we are doing is sharing the information we gather with them so they they know the locations and this is through our our GIS and so we've got GIS points we have pictures and we are sharing that information so that they can do that outreach as we get closer to July and our fuels dry up that's going to become imperative that we actually don't have a fire start in those areas. Fuel right now is not as critical as it's going to be but we are doing that outreach and education and we're doing it within Pogonep we're doing it in San Luis Apart it's a continuous effort on our part and again it's in conjunction with all of our citizens but I share your fears and concerns and we're doing everything we can to eliminate that potential. Thank you very much for that update Tony did you have anything to add at all? No thank you Mayor Chief I do cover it perfectly so thank you. Great thank you. Any other questions for me or Jason or Tony or Marchie? Yep that concludes our updates thanks very much. Oh wait I see Council Member Cummings let's hand again. I was just wondering you know maybe if not at this at obviously it's not going to happen to this meeting but maybe at the next meeting if we can get enough on the eviction moratorium and kind of what's happening with that because we've been starting to receive comments from individuals who've had difficulties with getting assistance and you know really kind of navigating that landscape and I think the governor's this eviction moratorium is supposed to expire at the end of June and so there's a need for us to do anything it'd be great for us to get an update and figure out what we can do to help I don't understand. Yes thank you. Okay next I'll call on the city clerk to provide any updates to the calendar. There are no updates. Okay thank you. Next all this is item item eight on our agenda which is council memberships in city groups and outside agencies. This is the time for council members to report out on actions at external boards committees and joint powers authorities meetings and so I'll go ahead and call on individual members. We'll keep these fairly brief today. We do have a long agenda ahead of us so we'll try to keep them pretty brief today and I will go ahead and start with council member Cummings. Thank you mayor. We just had one group to report out on LAFCO. The commission considered the adoption of a service and sphere of influence review for scott's valley water district and yeah that's pretty much all we had in terms of actions that were taken that we can report out on and so that concludes um our reports. You get you get the award for the shortest report out. Well done. Who's on my screen? Vice Mayor Reuter. Let's see we had a two by two meeting prior to last week's presentation from the county and um so we did discuss uh items for the presentation and that plan um also uh working with them on continuing to identify um kind of the long-term uh transitional shelter and housing paths created uh in needs and locations and wrap around services and case management available in traditional sheltering modalities. Anything else that I missed? I will leave to Mayor Myers. Go ahead yeah go ahead. Other other committees or anything? Yeah is there anything to report out on the revenue committee? Question um our team do we do you want us to do an update on the revenue committee today? Martin Bernal? You here? I think um primarily we continue to gather information um uh regarding a potential revenue measure um and we anticipate coming back to council in June with um some update and action. Yeah. Yeah not much to report at this point so yeah. Okay uh councilmember Calantari's Johnson please. They attended the metro finance committee and the metro board and um just two highlights. One is that we had the um annual performance evaluation and um contract renewal so that was completed last Friday and we're presented with uh uh preliminary budget for next fiscal year um which is approved to move on to receive a final uh recommendation and budget next month and I'll let um Mayor Myers add anything that I might have missed. I'll see you down and when I call on myself for sure um councilmember Golder down that board then to that board. Got it okay vice mayor um we're presented to that board and gave an update of things happening downtown and the other and there was a unanimous vote to write a letter of support in National Marine not that Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary um they're working on provide service learning opportunities and places for student research and collaborative faculty research. Thank you councilmember Golder councilmember Brown. Thank you mayor I have a couple of updates the first is uh the area agency on aging did have its uh master plan on aging town hall we heard from uh folks at the state about how the rollout is is happening and uh the introduction of uh tools for us to be you know working on this have to have a local playbook and so through the AAA and the seniors council we will kind of um this with our launch to develop some programming and and planning and recommendations around um uh making uh responding to the needs of our aging community we learned a lot about shifting demographics and the you know the rising number of uh seniors living in our states and um uh the diversity and so really trying to think about um you know how we incorporate cultural competency and you know thinking about equity and sustainability for seniors in our community uh it was really well attended lots of energy and um if anybody is interested I always say this um please do reach out and I'll uh I'll find ways to help uh the RTC met at our May meeting we discussed uh the uh we had a public hearing on the unmet paratransit needs and transit needs for our community this is a process that um we go through each year to identify and um you know attempt to to identify and prioritize unmet needs and as funding becomes available use funding to to to meet those needs or to try to address those needs and um you know it's it's been great because measure D has allowed us to invest much more in paratransit and um lift line and and um metro and so I just wanted to highlight that those services are available the critical services for people who are um you know mobility impaired um seniors low income folks who live off of main bus routes or you know mobility impaired and need additional transportation help so it's it was really nice to see you know that we're we're shipping away at the unmet needs but there's still a lot uh a lot to move to work on and then I finally um I just wanted to say uh that it I wanted to pledge that today is the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and um we we are meeting during a time when lots of folks around the the country and really around the world are um recognizing that and um taking a knee and and and doing you know the nine minutes of silence and I know we don't have time for that here but I I did want to just say um that I stand with all the folks out there who are continuing to fight for uh and addressing uh systemic racial injustice in our society and um and police violence so um for those out there who got to head out go out and be without with folks up I was with you in spirit thank you councilmember brown yeah I I've I've been thinking about that all day and I was trying to figure out a way to fit it into our very packed agenda and unfortunately um hopefully we can all um yeah be in solidarity and and I appreciate you bringing that up today okay I think I have heard from everybody it looks like maybe some council members have some questions I think I'll do my report out if if that's okay um real quick I think a lot of mine were covered uh I will talk just briefly about the three CE um or the central coast community energy policy board which I attended this um attended a workshop um primarily on the rate structure proposed change uh there's a lot of discussion in our community um regarding um rooftop solar and its role in the rate structure um and purchasing uh policy of the three CE board and uh future of how the agency is looking at um the the methods by which it will achieve both climate goals as well as um operational standards so um spent a lot of time speaking with some local solar companies who have a lot of concerns about this um and this extended throughout San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties as well as um the original members of the three CE um been working with Tiffany Weiswest on understanding all of these issues and um that issue that um conversation will continue for the next two policy board meetings for the for the agency um also just briefly um the other item on metro that I think is of note um and um is you know the schedule as council member commentary Johnson mentioned um we will be having a budget the budget adoption uh at next month's meeting um I also just want to let the community know that um I'm on the capital um facilities committee of metro and we did approve a resolution for metro and the city of Santa Cruz to submit a grant for the Pacific station north affordable housing project um in combination with the full retrofit and remodel of the existing transit station um we approved that submit 30 million dollars to create that project in the downtown and that includes the 165 units of low income housing there and compliments specific station um south which I think is programmed for about 85 units so we'll be hopefully realizing some of that and we feel that that um grant which is is very tied to transit oriented development where you have housing and transit combined in an accessible and meaningful way for we feel like that is it probably going to be a very competitive grant for us to to achieve um and that I believe will do it for me um I unfortunately was it not able to attend the downtown management corporation but council member boulder um to present on that um I think there's some questions council member coming to do you have a question uh commuter one was and I'll be brief uh the one was the the public safety committee and uh one of the things that we did I think that meeting is we had an update on the public safety crime report I think for the first quarter of this year and so people are interested um I think you can find that online but just interesting to see our um crimes through all those but if you want to attend the meeting that's a good place to hear of those um statistics and then one of the actions that came out of that was um I think it was early in 2020 when the quality of life ordinance was coming before us or the police chief had um kind of let us know that uh we was going to be doing outreach on that but the outreach was especially the pandemic one of the things we recognized is that there was some overlap with certain provisions that at the time were being proposed in the tolo which is now the um the new outdoor living ordinance and so after that ordinance is approved we're going to we we um we've provided directions to um bring that to the public safety committee to address any get um after it comes back to counsel for full approval so uh we'll be revealing those and then with the criminal justice council um I think today's a good day to give updates on that as well uh I've been working with uh the chair and we had successfully administered a survey to all of the chiefs of all the law enforcement agencies in the county asking questions around policy related to uh use of force and accountability we received those results and at the last criminal justice council meeting um they had determined that there was um funding in their budget and so they allocated eighty five hundred dollars to an outside firm to compile all the data and um they will be bringing forward a report toward but we'll be receiving updates uh in the subcommittee which I'm at I'm on as a community member not as as a city representative um but they'll be receiving reports then and then we'll come back to the criminal justice council for full approval and that report will be made available to all the cities and to the county supervisors and and then the criminal justice council will have we'll have a website so that if people want to see the agenda so it'll be the first time I'll have a live website so people can check that out once it's made live and that's that concludes my report thank you councilmember comtari johnson thank you yeah I have one other update as well um some community members have reached out about the federal aviation administration and flight pass so I just wanted to announce that the um ascandic loose county airport community roundtable is taking place um in a special meeting tomorrow via lebanar um from one to four and information can be found at scscroundtable.org so those community members who are interested um and just briefly thank you councilmember brown for bringing um your comments into this space I saw stand in solidarity with you and others across our nation thank you so one other thing um I did miss one also I just will mention um at the two by two meeting um a week ago or whenever it was maybe two weeks ago now um we also had a conversation about the governor's announcement of the 12 billion dollars for homelessness um and we discussed um some some uh around potentially inviting some electeds down to um understand some of the issues that were facing here as well as some of the solutions that we're seeking to put together uh and so we're gonna scope those out a little bit more since that time I know that city staff has been in contact with um uh both senator caviera and couple senators about some specifics around some of that funding and so I just want the council to know that um both working through the two by two but then also working um through our own staff we are certainly very very engaged in understanding what opportunities there may be and um obviously submitting requests as as requested from our uh state electeds in terms of some of those resources so we're working hard to try to see if any of those things can can be uh can be achieved for brought to our community okay um I will go ahead and um go ahead and start on our consent agenda next and catch up here so uh the next item for the public is our consent agenda and this these are items 9 through 18 on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items 9 through 18 instructions are on your screen remember to mute your streaming device press star 9 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 are the any council members who wish to comment or pull any items and I see council member Brown council member Cummings so council member Brown yeah thank you I have uh just a quick question on item 13 and I'd like to pull item 16 and then pull 16 council member we have had item number 16 is pulled uh excuse me on item number 13 council member Brown he had a question on item 13 so this item is the funding uh potential funding for our Pacific station north um affordable housing project which I'm really excited to see moving ahead as um as I'm sure we all are I am I mean this is an expensive project and we do have uh fortunately some potential funding sources and so I'm just wondering if if we if you have a sense um kind of based on the funding outlook and where things are out with our um partners what the timeline looks like for design and kind of moving forward with that piece of it will we and maybe that depends on the funding but I just love to get a sense if you have it so yeah uh yeah go ahead David yeah David McCormick with economic development um yeah I could answer that question um as far as the sort of project timeline moving forward uh our development partner first communities housing they're really targeting uh breaking ground hopefully in the summer of 2023 um of course that is very continuing on this funding uh or funding in general but um we do think these are very promising sources uh particularly the the HSC cap and trade funding iig will be a little more challenging the pot was cut this year um by i want to say over 300 million uh so this year's round is going to be a little thin um but we'll be able to apply again next year before we break ground if if we're not successful this round thank you thank you councilmember okay i'm going to go ahead and um open up our consent agenda to public comment and if there are any members of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda section of item number 16 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 so this is for items uh all items on the consent agenda except for item number 16 and i see we have two hands up i'll go ahead and call on ann simonton first go ahead please mayor mires and council members my name's ann simonton as the chair of cpva w i'm reaching out to you today um unfortunately we haven't completed our current annual report due to covid admitting commissioner changes we've only met seven times in all of 2020 and so far 2021 this doesn't mean we haven't been getting a lot accomplished which we are excited to share in detail through a letter if not in an upcoming council meeting if there's time cpva w's work is very crucial preventing sexual violence and sexual assault is doable i've dedicated my life's work to this and i'm always researching internet we have been busy collaborating with many local groups and are looking into working with a group out of boston called mentors in violence prevention it offers gender violence prevention leadership training the idea is to provide mostly male leaders with information and inspiration about how to use their leadership platform both personal and personal and professional to help create and sustain environments in which sex abuse sexist abuse along a continuum will not be acceptable this is not only because it's against the rules for the law and yeah i'm sorry to interrupt you um this isn't the time no yeah this should be public um i just wanted to make sure i know that um i know there was a resignation from your committee so i just wanted to make wasn't stopping you unnecessarily i just want to check my agenda it's not just about that it's just we were supposed to have our you know our thing in on a april our annual report and it's just i wanted to let the council know where we were at and what we were working on okay thank you and yeah if you could i we would be we would be happy to accept any correspondence and if you do want to come back for public comment i'm so sorry to cut you off but we can't um but please definitely send the report and i'm happy to agendize um you know an update from your committee as needed okay thank you so much may myers thank you next we have um caller number ending in 9867 and again this is for items on our consent agenda with the exception of item number 16 go ahead please good afternoon uh mayor and city council this is abbey young with a firewise group in prospect height and uh as a leader in prospect heights and also member of a growing firework a firewise firewise network throughout the city i'm in complete support of uh item number 11 i was really heartened to see this item on the agenda which would approve a grant application to the california coastal conservancy to provide fuel reduction and vegetation removal in the la vieca park and a royal psycho canyon this is a huge relief for our volunteer firewise neighborhoods and residents as volunteers we're all doing our part for this preparedness that we can't work on the scale that will be provided by these funds so i'm very supportive of this um uh grant application i applaud the forward thinking and proactive planning on the part of the santa cruz fire department um especially knowing that it came they had projects ready at four days to prepare this so great commendation to fire chief hajuq we're grateful for his work and for the city's uh moving this application forward thank you for identifying the opportunity and we hope for a positive outcome thank you okay um i will go ahead that's our last public comment um on this so i'll look for a call for a vote on the remaining items of the consent agenda before moving on to item number 16 which has been pulled the council member brown i'll move the consent agenda with the exception of item 16 second okay and so we have a motion to move the items on our consent agenda with the exception of item number 16 uh and i'll go ahead and ask the clerk to take a roll call vote council member watkins is absent calentary johnson i with the exception of items 14 and 15 as stated earlier in my statement of disqualification and mayor mayer aye that pass that motion passes unanimously we'll now go back to item number 16 and by council member brown um bonnie lipscomb is here as our director of economic development this is the item uh uh noticed this resolution declaring two non-contiguous city-owned parcels on the 300 block of front street as the exempt surplus property pursuant to the surplus land act and i'll go ahead and turn it over to bonnie so um bonnie do you um have a presentation or do you want to run through the staff report so kind of get everybody up to speed and then council member brown happy to have your questions in comments yeah thank you mayor and and i did prepare a brief presentation just an anticipation that this might get pulled i'm happy to go through that first or um respond to questions i know there have been quite a few members of the public who have some questions so i'll defer to you i think um uh council member brown you pulled the item do you would you like to see the presentation um is that is that appropriate i think it makes sense i i'm you know pulled it also because i've been hearing a lot from the public and i think it would be nice to just lay out what the issue is for those who are watching thanks okay thank you yeah go ahead bonnie okay i'll go ahead and share my screen okay so the item before you is the consideration of surplus declaration of city-owned property on front street and i should i should preface this by saying that the city attorney and i worked on the staff report together um he may uh be best to respond to some of the more technical uh questions about the surplus lands act but i'll go through uh briefly in the presentation and sort of give you background on today and what is being considered um at today's agenda item so the parcels under under consideration are the two that are highlighted in blue um with the yellow arrows pointing to them and just to clarify um each of those parcels um the most northern one um right here is a portion of parking lot 11 the front street parking lot um and uh one parcel here is the south of parking lot 27 the front uh laurel east parking lot it's important to note um as you're looking at this that this is actually at the parking lot um this portion right here that the city owns is sort of that landscape buffer that slopes up fairly dramatically to the corner of um laurel and uh front street right there on the corner tried to make that a little transparent but you can see a little bit the pathway through there that's the parcel in question this parcel right here in orange is not owned by the city it's privately owned as are these other parcels that you see right here and there were some questions that came in from members of the public so i did want to clarify what is the area that we're talking about so specifically uh we've been asked by the developer to consider the disposition of this city owned parcel right here which is approximately 4400 square feet and this parcel right here which is approximately 4600 square feet i also want to acknowledge that the legal lot size of this is just slightly over 5 000 square feet however that includes some public right-of-way and some sidewalks and some and we have easements for utilities so the portion that can be dealt with developed as much smaller and on top of that um it's too bad i don't have a photograph showing that i think most people are familiar with this little wedge is that um the grading is pretty excessive and we're right there at the water table so it would be hard to fully develop this lot for the proposed projects right here the particularly the metro station we are proposing to do an additional turn lane not an additional but a wider wider turn lane so that the buses can come off of front street instead of pacific avenue and in doing so we need to actually take 15 potentially 20 feet of this edge right here as well to enable that turn lane so we're going to be taking additional part of this corner which further reduces that lot so i did want to clarify that because there were some questions about the suitability of these two city on lots for affordable housing and i'll go into that in a little more detail that is something that we take very seriously and and you know i i do want to mention these two parcels right here are actual public city affordable housing mixed use projects that the city is pursuing pac station south i'll show you in just a minute is we're in the final stages of securing our financing we're anticipating breaking ground on this next spring underway and this one as the mayor mentioned a few minutes ago is pac station north which is a joint mixed use project with the metro and it in here in light green would be the portion that we would develop with the affordable housing project on top of some commercial retail and for the metro so i did want to show those in proximity because there were a lot of questions about affordable housing and the suitability of these parcels for affordable housing so i did want to point out what we do have and the size of the parts we have here for affordable housing development across the street and that's important because the size of the parcel is important for the number of units you can do which relates to the financing so typically you want to see preferably you know a lot size it's about you know 20 000 square feet this one is just slightly over 20 000 square feet because you you leverage for that unit you can get more units the cost per unit goes down or that you can do and typically developers do it's hard to get them to do under 20 units that are actual affordable housing developers so on a a lot this small it would be hard to get interest specifically on an affordable housing developer to develop that this lot is under the minimum lot size for develop a substandard lot size and it would be hard to do a large-scale affordable housing project on a parcel this size this is just to show you this is taxation south this is 70 to 85 affordable housing units in the front here you'll have three to four thousand square feet commercial retail and then above is a new home or for Santa Cruz community a health center in the interest on the second floor and then all of the housing is above that i wanted to show this picture particularly because of the peseo and this is a requirement in our downtown plan we have three connections to the river walk in the downtown plan this is one of them this is the maple street to go it's about it's taking a little bit of the parcel here and a little bit of the parcel on the side to make this wise to say oh which then actually under the downtown plan as you cross front street widens to 50 feet and that is the requirement in the downtown plan and i'll show you that in a few minutes but this is a really important open space and pedestrian connection between our two really large affordable housing projects here on pacific as it connects to front street these are our renderings with first community housing for our pack station north project i'm not sure if you've seen these these yet these are definitely very much in progress but you can really get a scale of what 90 to 100 units of affordable housing looks like and will look like right here and then you can see in the back the newly reconfigured metro tarmac with our solar solar canopy the roof the roof deck open space and again you get that visual of the and it crosses front street and then widens on the city parcel that goes that connects up to the river walk and again i'll show you that in a minute this is a close-up of the center section right here we really worked with the developer and they came up with a great design you can see some of these natural elements this is going to be lead platinum with a really nice open sort of connection this is the elm street connection terminus really opening up the project and connects to the metro transit in the in the back and then here is the corner of where maple alley seo is and so there is sort of a cutout so that you can have an outdoor seating area this is actually a stairway to the second to the office space that's on the second floor and the metro and the tarmac back here and then the maple street the actual pedestrian seo is here this one doesn't show the enhancement to the seo but i showed that to you on the earlier slide and then this is the view from the back side to say you're in the tarmac you're on front street and you're looking towards specific this is what the back the edge of the solar canopies with the bus tarmac here this is the commercial retail the back side of it with the residential above this is the downtown plan that was approved originally originally 91 adopted into 2017 and then by the california coastal commission in 2018 and amended in 2020 and these are just two sections that the maple street seo and the importance of those three riverwalk connections along front street really connecting our downtown to the riverwalk and so this one that i was just showing you the maple street seo is a really important pedestrian connection and in the downtown plan it specifies that it be no less than 50 feet 50 feet is key because it was something we went back and forth on that is actually the width of these parcels that we're talking about the full 50 feet is the width of both of the city owned parcels that are part of consideration and just to put this in context one of the other connections the one at kaskart street is part of the proposed development the river riverfront project with owen lala and Doug ross and that one is a 60 foot wide one and so this one is required to be a 50 foot street and then we have the smaller one at elm street which i just showed you a little bit through through that project so just to go back again i wanted to talk a little bit more about the suitability for affordable housing so the two that we're talking about this one we just couldn't develop affordable housing on this remnant particularly with the additional taking we're going to have here the slope that goes up here it's just not well the smaller than a typical single family home lot size and it's just it would just be too challenging this one on itself sort of is a similar situation if we i think it would become a little different if we included what's slated in the downtown plan for the public open safe plaza however it is slated for one of these important connections we've required it up here in the other in the other two projects and through this project and this is the third final navel street to say oh and so this is the 50 foot width and i'm showing the additional extension here because it's important to note that if this private project does go forward one of the things we for council to consider is the development of this which would stay in public ownership but would be an expansion of the public open space obviously the focus of today is not this project it's really whether or not council is interested in going through what under the surplus land that is a requirement which is there's have to go through before we can even consider selling the public land and that is a noticing because this is part in the coastal zone we have a requirement under the surplus land act to do noticing to park entities public agencies and so that's part of what is before you today is to specifically decide and consider whether or not you would like us to go forward with this noticing so what that next steps would look like would be we would send a 60 day notice if you approve us to go forward today to park and recreation departments and agencies both in the city at the county and at the state level for 60 days if we receive any interest we'll come back to you at the city council and with a discussion and a recommendation of whether or not you would like to sell those at fair market value for an open space or park use and then i thought it was important to also mention that declaring the property surplus now so that we go forward and do this noticing does not obligate us to sell the parcel it's just part of the requirement under the surplus land act for even consideration of selling them so this doesn't mean that if you approve this today that you have to sell these parcels to a private developer or even to parks and recreation for open space purposes this is something that just allows us to do the noticing and then come back to consideration and discussion and with that that concludes my presentation and i'm happy to answer any questions along with the city attorney around the surplus land act and the process thank you bonnie helpful helpful background information councilmember brown i'll go ahead and open up for you for questions or thanks so i do have a question about actually i have many questions but i think most of them can be answered through the read of the surplus land act which i've been doing so the the assessment of the the value of the i guess i'm trying to get a sense of the valuation process because the parcels themselves are just each of them are just under the five thousands conveniently just under that to allow for an exemption but i i guess i'm i'm just wondering how we're i i've never seen a valuation done on looking at a land being appraised on the what portion of it is developable versus what has an easement i mean you if you have a property you say here's the square you know here's how the square here's the developable square footage so i'm just wondering how that decision was made and you know if you could somebody could just talk a little bit more about that the legal implication actually from us you know from the standards of if the profession for appraisers the the portion of a parcel of property that's burdened by an easement for instance it's it's not valued the same as one that's unencumbered and so in this in this case if you if you look at the version of the map that's attached or that's part of your agenda report it's actually a rectangular parcel along laurel street that just out significantly into the streetscape and so um so if one were to evaluate that on a per square footage basis the portion that is part of the sidewalk and and part of laurel street and it's a very oddly shaped parcel it's mostly rectangular with it with kind of a horn sticking out into the street it's kind of odd shaped but you would certainly take that into account in determining its valuation because the developer would be required to adhere to setbacks from the curb line essentially as opposed to from the street i mean from the from the property boundary yeah thank you and if i could get just a an explanation just a refresher on the northern parcel because if i understand it correctly it's dividing a city owned property the north end of which is going to be the peseo and i'm assuming we go forward with this the other piece of it but that continuously that parcel is definitely of a size that would be developable so i'm just wondering how the i mean was it how that decision was made like precisely to get the the fake numbers that we did the square footage of the two northern parcels was determined based on their property boundaries which it is a single site for that's used as a parking lot but it is two legally created parcels so there were no lines drawn in order to separate the um the southerly portion from the northern it was just because they were two parcels in existence then thank you i i just i've been i've figured that one out but so they were they are separate parcels yes good question um great i will um i'll turn it over to um my colleague with questions and i do have comments but i'll wait till after the public has a chance to speak council member coming do you have questions or at this point i do i'll be brief and then i'll say my comments for later so the one question that that um i have is really related to the potential for um these two parcels to be incorporated should should there be a developer for example who's interested they have that center lot there's these two parcels on the side that more or less equivalent are the equivalent of a nine thousand square feet i mean i just i'm kind of curious about how if the developer was interested in building or if there was a in building um you know market rate housing or just housing in general if the city would could the city be in a position where we could incorporate that land into the project to expand the footprint of that building so long as that went towards affordable housing you know so in a way it can help offset the cost of production affordable housing because they wouldn't have to pay for that land able to expand their footprint so i'm just wondering if there's you know instances or if that could be a potential possibility since you know this the surplus land that seems like is really intended to increase affordable housing and so could that be a potential way to make that work given those circumstances um council member i could just clarify because this has been a confusion as well and it was actually uh mistakenly printed in the sentinel on what actually is under consideration today so there are only two parcels for consideration of surplus so are you talking about the two in the staff report the northern and the southern one or are you talking about the two northerly contiguous parcels only one of which we're considering today no the two um non-contiguous yeah okay so the question is if uh and if the privately owned uh land in between the two city parcels if there was interest in developing affordable housing would we consider that is that the question housing in general you know and then that way you know to be able to expand that footprint to allow for a deeper affordability into a project yep okay yeah i i think you know this is an unsolicited proposal to the city which is why we're looking at it so the developer that has assembled uh the private property that i showed earlier in the middle um in in that light orange um is looking at a proposed hotel uh project um they have not considered or have not come forward with any interest in developing um that as housing or affordable housing thank you okay any other questions from council members at this point i'll take it out to the public then not seeing any other council hands um taking out the public and i am not seeing any hands up oh there's one there um Sabina Holber go ahead please this is for item 16 on consent i'm just here to ask why on earth you would want to sell our public land to a developer to make a luxury hotel that none of us will use i truly believe it's because the moderates on this council are all bought and paid for by real estate interests some of you got on the council by um i don't know really racist campaign to recall other council members you all know who you are it's really frustrating i'm tired of it the city's tired of it it's really depressing that our one's progressive city is run by you folks you're failing as a city council you're failing as leaders you're failing us your constituents we deserve better than that and you should be ashamed that you don't even bring this up with the public until it's on the agenda where is your outreach remember how terrible tola went because you had no community outreach this is another example of that um i listen to the presentation and i find it funny that the city staff is always talking about how impossible things are it's impossible to have affordable housing and then the council just goes with it every time who is the elected representative here who is is it the city staff it's not so please listen to your constituents i know it's two in the afternoon so a lot of people are not able to make this call i have a meeting to go to him literally one minute but i'm glad that i had the time to be able to do this today um thank you to council member brown for making sure that this can get public comment and a presentation and not just go through the consent calendar thanks vicki winners in that in the public go ahead please i i just wanted to say uh thanks andy for taking this up the consent agenda so that we could bring some public scrutiny to it and i just yeah i just want to really public land to develop our poor luxury hotel we're looking at massive gentrification that is going to displace people and having affordable housing that's based on you know a median income where we have a huge shortage of housing for low in low wage workers in our city you know so just saying oh affordable housing affordable housing is really not solving the problem for a critical segment of renters we need low income and very low income housing and we need more social housing and something that's going to make developers rich so this really looks bad and i think the council needs to follow the public's will and not just be a rubber stamp for the planning department which you know they know which side of their bread is buttered on and that's through um developers so so the pressure for for the city planning department is you know to make squeeze the most profit out of every square foot of land and you guys need to be the roadblock to that you need to stand up for the people that live in this town the city is not the planning department the city is not the city government it's the people who live here and we elected you to present us so please do that and do not represent outside thank you next up i have caller ending in phone number 8466 hi there uh this is rosserson and so i was just calling to uh voice a concern today about about the um uh proposed uh concern that if you include the sidewalks may be more than 5 000 square feet which would not be uh something that would be uh legally allowed to be surplus so i definitely think that that needs to be reviewed um i want to just uh recommend that any plans here need to uh maximize uh affordable housing options and uh i would hope that the city uh parcels even though they're not contiguous can be used on the affordable housing either uh by selling them and for the affordable housing trust fund or using the land itself affordable housing project uh would be 100 percent affordable housing um i think there's a real opportunity there and i recognize today doesn't uh limit the city or doesn't bind the city to do anything specifically but uh there's there's a lot of uh potential that would be missed if these projects just get sold without particular constraints or without a particular uh angle to them thank you very much i'm except for the pauler n8 and 6871 press star six to unmute yourself there you go hi there can you hear me yes we can hi this is derrius mostening i just want to enter my uh heartfelt uh approval well not a approval from us but um from basically approval for this project that's quite transformative to the downtown it will totally make great use of the parcels that uh are highly underutilized right now and i think a lot of folks don't understand is that the tax revenues that could be generated from you know this all of these units and the tenants that are in these units and then they'll spend their money locally downtown it'll increase the tax croppers and when we do that then we can use that money for we have more to city more money for other programs including affordable housing so this is this is definitely the way to go thank you thank you and no other hands i'll bring it back to council um we are running a little bit late so about 15 minutes late um so i'll go ahead and turn it back for um comments by council and look for a motion again this is on item number 16 which is resolution declaring two non-contiguous to be owned parcels on the 300 block of front street as exempt surplus property pursuant to the surplus land tax council member brown yeah thank you mayor thank you bonnie i have one last question and then i do have a couple of brief comments i i just wanted to double check as well on some of this land is i believe is in the coastal zone um i read that lands within the coastal zone at least in the surplus land act um uh are if they're um that they're not subject to the exempt surplus rules so given that i'm just wondering if there's any conversation that needs to be had with the coastal commission um about uh coastal act i imagine you've thought about that but i just haven't thought to ask until now bonnie did you want to respond or tony i don't know um if you could give me a minute um perhaps um let other council members weigh in and i will try to answer that question in a minute okay questions from council members or comments there's no other questions i can just make my comments while okay yeah please go ahead look at it so i you know i just want to say you know i recognize the um the goal here i recognize that this is a response to a solicitation that this was not something that the city itself is is promoting but is responding to um that said i i believe that um if you read the well i know that if you read the surplus lands act the first sentences really make it clear that this is about um a process for uh finding surplus lands and the the primary this was is affordable housing right i mean this is why we have this process and so to not use our ownership of those parcels to leverage affordable housing um at a time when we know we are at crisis levels and i appreciate all the work that's been done on the other projects um thank you for bonnie for you know putting showing that to make it clear that this is part of a bigger plan i guess i just i just feel like there's much more public benefit that we could get out of um this process and so the declaration of surplus um and kind of just trying to dispatch it as quickly as possible seems like a really missed opportunity for me so um you know at a minimum we should be using it that it is leveraged to you know achieve the maximum public benefit and get affordable housing out of it so you know it's fine asking if the developer would be willing to pay above the appraisal make a contribution to our affordable housing trust fund things like that and i know those are conversations that um we may say today can be had down the road but once we go down this road it's pretty clear to me that those conversations aren't going to happen um you know once the developer sees that it's just a done deal so um i guess that with i'm just not um comfortable supporting this outright without some uh you know um conditions put on it okay i'll take councilmember coming's comments and then tony if you have an answer and then see if we can maybe get a motion yeah i can i can answer the specific language of the statute states that um now paragraph one which is the which is this part that that authorizes the declaration of exempt surplus land it's um this part two of that section five four two two says a written notice of availability of surplus land for open space purposes shall be sent to the entities described in subdivision b of section five four two prior to disposing of the surplus land if in relevant part it is located within the coastal zone and five four two two two b uh refers to any parks and recreation department of a city in which the land may be situated or uh of the county within which the land is situated so parks and recreation one of the county or any regional park authority having jurisdiction within the area in which the land is situated or to the state resources agency or any agency that may just succeed to its powers so i think councilmember brown is right is that the the central focus of the whole statutory scheme is to identify or at least in part is to identify land suitable for affordable housing across but there are other public purposes and in this case property that's when that within the coastal zone has to be um or that park and recreational entities in the area need to be notified because this property is in the coastal zone so it doesn't prohibit the city from moving moving forward but it does affect the notice that we will be required to send out thank you councilmember coming thank you mayor um and i guess for the city attorney does that i mean depending on the direction that's taken i guess do we have to include some language around consideration of how that you know the coast this being in the coastal zone impacts our ability to move forward your meeting party um i was on you um no it doesn't because um the resolution requires staff to follow through with the statutory required notice so so it's written to um to make sure that the only authorization the council is giving is to send out the notifications that the statute requires um and then wait out a certain period of time after which the council can engage in negotiate property owner um in those negotiations could include whatever terms the council believes are critical for the negotiation um as well as you know obviously the developer is interested in pursuing a hotel project thanks um i guess i'm in response to what we've been hearing from members of the public i guess i'm a bit concerned with um you know really moving forward in such a way as to provide you know for the construction of a you know higher-rate hotel um you know just so the members of the public are aware i mean we have three large hotels that are going to be going in um one is on riverside mabrant which is under construction um there's another one on second and front construction and then there's going to be another one at beach and main street which used to be lava here and i do want to point out that lava here was housing and it was actually affordable housing um before they decided to kind of cut that off and and move that towards demolition and so you know i feel like we we have a lot of hotels that are going in we have a lot of hotels currently and you know this is a unique opportunity where we have land in an area where we could potentially you know work with developers to actually increase affordable housing in a project and we could actually make that work and oftentimes the two things that are most limiting factors for moving forward with the construction of affordable housing is land or funding and so i feel like this would be a really good way for us to work developers to kind of have a win-win where we could you know build more housing and build more affordable housing and subsidize those costs towards the developers and so um i'm prepared to make a motion i just sent bonnie the language but i'll read it and it's really even you know trying to take in some of the information we've been hearing but um my motion would be to direct staff to express the council's interest to the developer and having ourselves incorporated into a housing project to provide for increased affordable housing above the required 20 percent i'll second that and so you know this doesn't you know hinder us from moving forward with development on those lots it meets the goals of the city you know i could see that it would meet the goals of the developers and it would provide us an opportunity for a conversation on you know how we could meet the needs of the also do what's intended under the calisthenics surplus land act which is to really you try to provide for more affordable housing in our community council member goals we have a motion on the floor to direct staff to work with the developer of the hotel and have them i'm sorry i'm trying to understand the motion so it's to direct staff to express the council's interest to the developer to have these parcels incorporated into a housing project to provide for increased affordable housing above the required 20 percent is that the 20 percent of the our bar inclusionary ordinance i don't know what the 20 percent refers to our current inclusionary ordinance requires 20 portability be built into housing projects and so you wanted above that the second to that um i'll go to council member golder and then council member pampar johnson i just want to remind everybody we're ready about half an hour late prepared to make a motion for the resolution as it's written in our agenda pocket but i have some questions and a couple of comments now and so i i'd like to hear staff's response to this idea council member coming because my understanding with the developer was interested in developing a hotel developing low-income housing and these they already own that are adjacent to these i guess you could just refresh my memory on that and then i would also like to remind um my colleague back in 2013 the public safety task force or 2013 to this uh extensive year-long study and one of the recommendations was to increase the number of high-end hotels the way to increase transit it was affordable because it had so much deferred maintenance that building had to go so you know buildings have a lifespan and they change over time and i think that this that area great opportunity here affordable housing but i think what makes vibrant housing where people can live and work together in a central location and i think that contributes to our you know vibrant economy thriving downtown so for me the idea of this hotel is really exciting and um i i i i think um bonnie's presentation made total sense explaining why thank you council member council member called tarry john thank you um council member golder to ask some of the questions that are running through my head is um it i what i heard from bonnie is that we um uh we have talked to the developers about the possibility affordable housing and there isn't interest there but please correct me if i heard incorrectly um and i'm also just curious about um above the 20 percent um has there been any researcher investigation if that's feasible as developers could even do that um build affordable housing whether it's on this parcel or not beyond 20 percent i'm truly i'm curious to see if that um and i don't expect an answer right now but um it cannot be done here in our community given the cost of building um and not to put you on the spot but i would be curious to hear from vice mayor brunner as well given your extensive knowledge and experience in downtown and and sort of downtown revitalization because i hear some of council members golders points is that a mix of different types of services and housing and venues is what makes a vibrant downtown um and i'm certainly no expert in that area be curious if if vice mayor brunner has any thoughts on that to hear your thoughts so thank you i don't know if vice mayor would want to jump in on this um you're what you're welcome to do if you'd like yeah thank you uh council member calentary johnson and thank you bonnie for uh the presentation i know that we've received um concerns especially after some of the information that was published in the sentinel that didn't match the staff report um so it was a little confusing and my understanding with this is we are not deciding to sell for to a hotel these parcels um we do have due diligence to really make sure that any city-owned land um is uh you know we are in a housing crisis and um any opportunity to build housing to add to our housing stock is crucial and uh in you know looking at these individual parcels um in and of themselves it would be very difficult is my understanding not just from staff but speaking to other people um just these parcels alone without the middle pieces that are owned by someone else um just the parcels we own would be very difficult to build housing and infeasible with the fund all the requirements that go along with funding for affordable housing so unless the land in the middle um you know that's up to them and sure we can give incentives um we could certainly explore those options and we're not here to decide or sell to a hotel right here today um is my understanding that we're looking at these parcels as surplus declaration and as bonnie mentioned i think a really key point that i came to understand is we don't have to decide to even sell um the parcels so that can be our ongoing further conversation and and and knowing that the next steps are the 60 days out there might be some responses for from the parks in wrack county and you know open spaces which should be interesting to see if we were to go that path that being said that's what we're deciding today i think there's value in the conversation overall in looking at the best use of space as always and as always i'm always looking at the whole picture just a one-off situation here looking at the whole picture bonnie brought in part of the whole picture and in terms of showing pacific station north and pacific station south and the maple street passeo um leading from pacific avenue to the riverfront um but it's a much bigger picture than that if you take an even out we have the front street laurel pacific um development going there we have you know the the other two developments going further north on front a front street um to the river and they all have affordable housing and housing getting added to our stock and so knowing that in the sure you know for years um so many residents and businesses um have really yearned for a hotel downtown they're all in the beach area they're all in other locations in the city and most city centers will have hotels in their downtown district and um um you know there is one the pacific blue is on south pacific um on um you know near the 555 pacific building there um which is technically outside of the downtown district um but having a hotel downtown and increasing that beach to downtown uh connection um is really part of a bigger sustainable plan that we could certainly continue having that conversation um i think it's really um you know it was touched on in terms of the vibrancy and the economic um uh sustainability of that possibility it could really bring a lot to our downtown district um and so i mean that's something we we certainly should have that conversation but here today this item is about two individual parcels and um um we're not talking about selling them uh so yeah i i don't know if that answers your question uh county farky johnson um yeah i it's so important to look at the big picture of the downtown district right now and all you know the the Calvary church that all there's like five different um affordable low-income 25 permanent supportive housing units all coming in all right there and so having you know i'm so excited having uh community health centers the entities the metro the offices the the businesses the restaurants the the library just having this vibrant city center um yes a hotel could be a great addition downtown there is none but that's a further that's a different conversation yeah thank you vice mayor um yeah we're we're running very late now and i'd like to um just go ahead and get a vote on this on the do you have additional comments um councilmember comings um go ahead please thank you you know i i did and i just wanted to be clear that you know i don't think there's a problem with this having hotels downtown you know for having a hotel downtown a hotel downtown i think that you know if that's something that you know private developers would be interested in you know i don't think that this you know we're in a position to really argue with whether that would be good or bad for the downtown i think the issue is that we're going to sell city property in order for that to happen and that is that if there were private property that were owned on any of these sites especially for example across the street at where the um pacific and Laurel project is about to go in if that were slated for a hotel that was private property they can make that decision but what we're considering right now is selling public property for the purposes of a private business and i think that many people in our community um express the need that for public property if we're going to develop it we need it to be affordable housing and we need more affordable housing i think we all ran on a platform of saying that we want to provide more affordable housing in our communities and if we're using public land that's the issue is that the public is really upset with this selling their land for the production of um what will be a private luxury hotel again there's three hotels under construction um and we need and i'll just no i'll just i'll finish with the circle question today not we're not we're not talking about hotel development and you know we're we're getting off of i'm just trying to get us on the agenda item itself which is and then a resolution to to go ahead and put it out as on surplus and i'll make i'll make my last statement which is you know and this is a general report which is if the council approves the proposed resolution city staff will send written notification to the above entities to begin noticing the process for the availability of the declared exempt parcels for purchase at fair market value and so you know i just want to put that out there is that we're putting this up to the public to these entities the parts for selling this at fair market value which means it'll come back and um and i imagine that the developers are going to be interested in and wanting to purchase this land so um and the only thing that i'm trying to get to move forward with this motion is we're very late councilmember we're very late we're very late i mean order can i ask a point of order um our council members allowed to complete their comments so we're being interrupted aren't agendized right now we're we're trying to get us to focus on the agendized item i'm happy to continue but we're debating housing versus affordable now we're talking about housing or hotels that are being built in beach in the down in the beach area so we've kind of gone out of a little bit out of the agenda item and i'm just trying to make sure that we're focused on the agenda item which is a request to issue a resolution and to basically um you know list these as exempt surplus properties i'm just trying it's my job to try to make sure that we're staying on the agenda items that's all i'm doing so go ahead and understood mayor i just have to say the agenda report is clearly tailored to a proposal for a hotel so just because that's not the vote that we are taking today that is part of the conversation it is council member coming did you have additional comments um no i'll end it there if this is in the interest of time so there's a motion on the floor and the purpose is for for trying to engage the developer around rather than a hotel having housing and so i'll leave my comments there so i'll go ahead and i'll go ahead and um i will take a vote on this motion and then we'll have to depending on the outcome of this motion we'll revisit um bonnie did you have any other comments that you wanted to make i saw you sort of well there were a number of questions that uh council member com sorry johnson brought up and council member boulder brought up that i could respond to but if you want to wait i can do that as well go ahead yeah so we can go ahead and finish yeah okay um there was a question about for the privately owned parcel how many there are four and they were assembled especially for the purposes of developing a hotel project um so they did approach the city our early conversations were there's a process and um because of the surplus lands act and this isn't the coastal zone these are the steps so um just backing up that's why we came to closed session earlier there was interest in at least doing the initial step so that we could have that conversation down the road of whether or not you wanted to sell and what kind of public benefits we could receive um in exchange of selling this land for a hotel project so we did talk about uh you know funding and this is you know for future conversation of uh you know going towards the affordable housing trust fund or leverage benefits all those are things that i think are really viable and will actually get us more affordable housing than trying to develop these individual parcels which just are not suited on their own for affordable housing development so can we leverage the sale of these into more funding for affordable housing absolutely and we can do that a couple of ways we can do that from for the parcels but we can also do that if that's council's direction um through the fact that we're going to be receiving fairly substantial tot this the hotel is proposed 228 units so tot from that could be you know upwards 101 you know 1.5 to 2 million a year coming to the city and if you wanted to designate that which i would love a portion of that uh to affordable housing creation that could be our ongoing revenue stream for affordable housing creation that we can leverage to create more affordable housing in our community that's how we got the pack station south pack station north um projects going forward is leveraging our affordable housing trust fund so i'm all for having this discussion where it makes sense of let's strategically plan for more affordable housing in our community so i'm excited to continue that conversation down the road is the question about interest by the developer and affordable housing you know i'll back up and say the llc my understanding the makeover that is live it's the main equity partner is a hotel developer so they're not in the business of developing housing the question is came up around a market rate project with 20 percent or over 20 percent feasible without and i think this is where you may have been going council member Cummings the donation of the land you know we have to rerun um you know a performer to see if that donation of land leverages enough for them to go above that feasibility we just don't know at this point but typically our last analysis is 20 percent not affordable on a market rate unless there's some additional concessions made so we would have to run that math if the addition of this land a portion of it in the south which just is not developable you know how much they could actually leverage so i can't answer that today but that is something that we could look at if it were slated for a hundred percent affordable yes because there's different funding sources available than there would be to market rate developers um however for uh you know it's that fine line if you're looking at a market project but our inclusionary you just can't get really above 15 percent without some major incentives or concessions financially so that's kind of where we are right now and there's a special developer that develops affordable housing your typical market rate developers do not do affordable housing because the financing for that is so complicated that it takes a lot of expertise and years of experience to successfully develop large affordable housing projects and if we were looking at all the private four parcels plus two city parcels that would be considered a large-scale affordable housing project which would be a very unique set of developers of which we do have in the community but the primary and largest part of this parcel of these parcels are privately owned and the interest is from a hotel developer at this point so i think that largely answers the questions that came up but address those further if needed are there any other questions or comments from council for a staff or comments about about the action today i did not mean to cut off conversation but i am trying to am trying to move us through our agenda so okay we have a motion on the floor bonnie can you put that motion back up just so i can make sure the language right we have a motion on the floor uh by council member Cummings seconded by council member brown to direct staff to express the council's interest to the developer in having these parcels incorporated into a housing project to for increased affordable housing above the required 20 percent so bonnie i'll go ahead and request a roll call vote please council member Watkins is absent council member coantara johnson no mayor brunner that motion fails with four voting against and two voting for so i know this is an important item i believe that you would probably like action on so i'll look for a seat council member golders because i can get a motion regarding this item council member uh golder and then vice mayor brunner okay i'd like to make a motion declaring the two non-continuous parcels designated as the record of the fifties christ county assessors a ppn 005 15148 005 15135 um as exempt surplus property pursuant to the surplus lands act that's a motion um regarding the resolution um for these two parcels and vice mayor brunner did you want to second that second that great thank you very much and we'll go ahead and do a roll call vote please barney council member watkins is absent coantara johnson sorry no boulder vice mayor brunner and mayor fired hi that motion passes uh with four votes in favor and we next up um we will go ahead and move on to our public hearing um and i just want to announce that uh item number 19 will not be heard today uh it has been continued to the june 8th meeting and um if you are interested in the draft ordinance for the first reading on may 11th 2021 that can be found online at www.cityofsanacruz.com slash government slash city council slash slash publication of ordinances and that is published that link is published in the agenda for today next up we'll have um item number 20 uh and if possible i think we could all take a five minute seven to eight minute break i know some of us probably use the restroom and stretch our legs so we will come back at um 250 if we can 250 252 thank you everybody welcome back vice mayor um chief council member golders coming in here every um everybody's back thank you everybody for coming in back on time we'll go ahead and move on to our agenda uh item number 20 um this is a resolution amending the city of tana cruz personnel classification and compensation plan for the city manager classification 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 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 in action we will invite i'll invite up uh lisa murphy our human resources director to provide a short short presentation good afternoon mayor council members i'm before you the resolution to amend the classification and compensation plan for the city manager classification as you all know the city manager will be retiring in august and in preparation for the city manager recruitment we conducted a total compensation analysis the position has not been reviewed in nearly 14 years since 2007 and this analysis revealed that the position is approximately 26 percent below market there's a number of things that contributed to that factor and the reason why we're having this discussion is because as we enter into this uh recruitment uh it's very highly competitive and to remain uh competitive with the other recruitments we that are adjusting the compensation for the city manager position so just to brief back on how we got so off in the market uh in 2015 and 2018 we had a compensation study where we were able to adjust 80 positions throughout the city to bring them within 10 percent of the median but we did not adjust the city manager's position in addition the current city manager martin Bernal he voluntarily deferred colas since 2017 which was about nine percent again without adjusting the salary range has again led to further below market in addition we have a three-tier retirement system unlike most cities any new city manager coming this a highly experienced city manager will most likely be in what's called the classic tier we will not offer that to the individual which then becomes an issue for a lower retirement benefit for in this position and pushes us back further in the market these factors have led to a significantly falling behind the generally accepted 10 percent within market the additional information with this is that this is also led to significant compaction between the positions of our police chief our fire chief and the assistant city manager where the difference in salaries is just 11 percent and generally accepted standard is 15 to 20 percent and we we try to implement that throughout the city's compensation system therefore in order to attack the highly qualified candidate to apply staff is recommending that we increase the salary range to bring it closer to market increasing the range an additional 10 percent in addition we recommend lowering the employee contribution to the per the employee per portion from 12 percent to 10 percent and hoping that this will again attract more candidates and with this change and also I apologize a contribution to a deferred hunk program all of these these three adjustments with would bring the city manager's position within 10 percent of the market and the market is going to are the the cities that the city centers has used in the past two compensation surveys so therefore we believe that there's validity in the in the research that we conducted so with that my brief presentation has concluded my recommendation to the council is to increase the for the new city manager this will not be for the existing city manager again the new one when this person hopefully takes over in late august if there's any questions i'm happy to respond great thank you lisa are there any questions from council on this council member brown thank you thanks for the presentation i um i'm wondering if i somehow i'm just not clear is is this increased budgeted in the draft budget that we have received that we're going to be discussing later and over the next few weeks roughly is it in the budget now and um if it's not um or if it is really more if it's not um is there where is the discussion on where that money is going to come from we we generally whenever we are asked to make to increase uh an expense we're told it needs to come from somewhere else so i'm just wondering what the thinking is there um if it's budgeted and where the money will come from it will be incorporated into this budget and it is through the general fund and a couple of things that to that is that the city manager is not we budget the city manager's position at top step uh he's not receiving top step and and also in addition whoever comes in will be in a lower tier for their benefit program so that lowers the amount that the city has to contribute which will offset the increased cost as well are there any other questions from the city council on this item i've not seen any hands up i'll go ahead and take it out to the public this is for item number 20 on our agenda which is a resolution amending the city of santa cruz personnel classification and compensation plan for the city manager classification i'm not seeing any hands in the public so i will go ahead and bring this back for council for a motion from our council and uh just for uh for a council member who'd be willing to make that motion unless there's further comments vice mayor bruner and then uh council member colin tarry johnson oh you're muted um vice mayor thank you you're receiving all the information and really i want to thank uh lisa murphy for breaking everything down into comparables and background and historical context and and understanding how far behind um we've landed this to know it sounds like a lot of money and is a lot of money um i hope that we can implement going forward where um we don't fall so far behind but um i would like to make a motion a resolution amending the classification and compensation plan for the city manager classification thank you thank you vice mayor and uh council member colin tarry johnson yeah and i also just want to thank lisa and um the team working with lisa and the community for participating in the community surveys that help us uh define uh the characteristics and who we're looking for as our new city manager thank you council member so we have a motion by vice mayor bruner uh a second bike council member colin tarry johnson for uh the resolution amending the city of van cruis personnel classification and compensation plan for the city manager classification and i will go ahead and ask for a roll call but oh i'm sorry council member brown thank you just a quick comment just for members of the public who are paying attention to this i just want to say that we're making a decision here to increase the top paid position at the city by um probably around three thousand dollars a month which is equivalent to or maybe a little bit less than what many of our workers make a year so the raise itself is going to be um you know and if you're a part-time or temporary worker less so i just want to understand that when we're making this decision i recognize the um lagging behind uh the market and um i hope that uh my colleagues will remember this when we talk about other positions it seems to be that when the top paid positions come up for discussion um we do um you know where the money is going to come from the need for it to to be competitive but when we talk about virtually every other classification of worker at the city we don't follow that same um approach so i just want to have a chance to say that before um before the roll call thank you okay we'll go ahead and uh but please uh could the clerk please call the roll council member what kins is absent calentary johnson right no i just like to say for the record that i do understand i'm trying to recruit um high-level candidates that have been members of the public reaching out to us especially given that we've had furloughs and um and many people have been expressing that um they are not in favor of this at this moment in time and so i'm just reflecting and respecting the comments that we've received from the general public on this item boulder did we go to the public on this and forgot if we go to public comment okay sorry i'm moving away nice mayor brunner hi and mayor meyers motion passes four in favor and two against uh we will now move on to to item number 21 on our general business um agenda today and this is um the local roadway safety plan and um 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 a presentation of the item by all by questions from the council we will then take public comment and then return to the city council for deliberation and action uh i'd like to uh invite our presenter today claire gowley um our transportation planner with our public works department good afternoon mayor and council recognizing that you have a packed date today i'm going to try to keep this presentation quick into the point i can you see my screen yes we can thank you okay um so we're excited to give you this presentation today on our local roadway safety plan overall we're going to go through the vision goals for the plan an analysis of the results uh highlight of the emphasis areas that this plan will focus on and some key next step actions that we're going to be taking um we did as we went through this project on highlights that we worked with a consulting team from kim lee horn this was a grant funded project um and we also engaged directly with our department public health department metro county and um our subcommittee of the transportation public works commission and folks from the university of kelvin sanikers so why did we undertake a local roadway safety plan you may remember those of you that were on council at the time in august of 2019 council directed us to work on vision zero um specifically what's on the screen right now council directed that we adopt the vision zero policy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2030 there are task force to focus on this and then finally in bold here to gather analyze utilize and share reliable data to understand traffic safety issues to prioritize resources based on evidence of the greatest need and impact and to evaluate the success of those efforts so this item before you is really focusing on the roadway safety plan is a deep dive into our traffic safety data over the past five years with an analysis of where we see the greatest need and a projection of what the greatest impact solutions could be to that and then an ongoing analysis of what what other tools we could use so the local roadway safety plan is one of the tools that we are using towards implementing vision zero it is not the only tool but it is a key data pillar of this effort we also focus on education encouragement enforcement equity evaluation and all the other ease that we use in traffic safety really is looking at systematically our entire city identifying and analyzing where our traffic safety problems are oftentimes we get collision reports of a location here a location there but taking the time to do a deep dive of five years and see what trends we've been seeing and what countermeasures we can put in place to address those trends and make our roadways safe for all roadway users we really take the time to focus on our local partnerships within the city so in the department so we worked a lot with police and fire and have stronger working relationships there as well as public health and external transportation partners as well we really wanted to develop a tool of what we could use to address issues that we saw on the roadways and a key component here was that we looked at where the locations were hot spots but we also looked at systematic improvements that we could make that address trends we saw in collisions city-wide so even if it was a hot spot here you might have similar collision characteristics in any other location and similar countermeasures could be applied there I really wanted to be proactive so looking at what could we do to address these to make them better in the future and then finally a key thing here knowing that we focus on funding a lot and in my department we spend a lot of time doing grant writing having an adopted local roadway safety plan will be required to access grant funding through the highway safety improvement program starting in the next cycle um the name of the misnomer highway safety improvement program we use this for biking pedestrian projects primarily as well as other roadway safety projects this program has funded sidewalks on bay street a protected left turn at bay and king to enhance bike head safety and uh just a couple months ago we got about 1.5 million dollars in this program with two projects one to improve six pedestrian crossings in the city and the other to improve our signal city-wide to enhance roadway safety to reduce ruined collisions and right angle collisions so really important that we have an adopted plan so that we can continue to access that fund source getting into the vision and goals of this document really the primary vision there was focusing on complete streets to meet and exceed our vision zero goal how can we really incorporate safety into every action that we take in transportation uh we broke this down into a couple key goals identifying areas with the highest risk for collisions so where can we really focus to make up a big impact on collisions developing a comprehensive safety program and supporting systemic process so how do we look at the roadways holistically react to locations that we seek places but proactively plan for how we can improve our roadway system to prevent them from happening um really looking at future safety improvements that improve multimodal options so not just focusing on safety improvements for cars but as we're making safety improvements how do we ensure that those safety improvements also support those and taking transit in other modes and finally to find some safety projects for future H2P and other programs from the consideration so getting a couple key projects that are very very vulnerable and so working with kimmy horn they do a lot of work in this area as well looking at how do we have something in the queue that we can start applying for that would be very with grant applications and make a big safety impact i'm going to say safety a lot in this presentation because that's kind of the the basis of what you should take from this looking at an analysis of results so we looked at data from 2015 to 2019 um over that hundred we had 2496 collisions most of them as you can see were on our arterials and about 18 percent of them included a cyclist or a pedestrian safety collision rankings in some ways to analyze how we're doing compared to similar size cities you'll frequently hear that we rank very very poorly in terms of our rankings for cyclists typically we're between the number one and number three for cities by size um we have been something to note we have been improving in our rankings this is 2017 and 2018 side by side in most of the areas that we look at we have been improving the exception to that is that we have not been improving in a DUI related collision not something that we've flagged in discussions with the police department as well so key takeaways from the report and keeping this really high level is that a third of our collisions have an unknown primary collision factor when an officer shows up that it's unable to be determined what was the primary cause of that collision but other things that are high primary collision factors are improper turning unsafe speed and an auto right-of-way violation so an auto will be able to move in a way that they they were not supposed to um again to note that many many of the collision factors have remained constant or decreased but driving and influence has been steadily increasing from 15 collisions in 2015 up to 26 in 2019 which is you know doubling over this time period so something that the police department when when we discuss this with them they're going to be including target DUI enforcement and their next OTS enforcement branch so to be able to specifically address that as a result of this data deep dive um a key highlight here is that in 2019 0.5 all collisions were fatal 0.34 were severe so key thing to note here is that while any collisions that are fatal and severe are too high we are moving in the right direction of reducing fatalities and severe injuries uh there is more work to be done but it does help us to acknowledge this and track our progress and then finally again to reiterate that 18 percent of total collisions that we saw those five year periods by cyclists in the pedestrian um as we know cyclists and pedestrians when they are involved in the collision because they're not protected by a vehicle those collisions are more likely to be fatal and severe other things over 90 percent of our collisions occur within 250 feet of an intersection this really helps us in looking at this to dive into where can we make sure that we're making safety improvements where can we focus our efforts and what future policy and engineering actions can we bring to you to continue to improve roadway safety at our intersections you may have seen our recent street smart ads that we've put out but one of the key topics that we're focusing on this year is intersection safety jennifer's government office has really been working on promoting that message we also have a lot of ruined and site-like collisions and hit objects um the major reasons that we have for collisions that occur that we really want to highlight is aggressive driving so aggressive driving collisions make up 18 percent of all collisions in the city um aggressive driving includes speeding and of this 18 percent 77 percent of those were speed related it's been on a kind of hot topic to talk about speeding is included in aggressive driving and the big reason behind that is because it is defined that way in the strategic highway safety plan which is the caltrans planning document and the fund source that funded this grant so we really match up our local roadway safety plan to what those caltrans terms are because then in turn when we go seek funding from caltrans matching up to their key challenge areas of which aggressive driving is one makes the improvements that we seek that much more fundable so keeping speeding under both of driving that's the primary driver there finally get into our emphasis areas and key next step actions that we're going to be looking at improving disability and lighting for all modes but we found that a higher than normal rate of collisions were occurring at night and so one of the next actions that we're going to take is to do a citywide lighting assessment to look and see are there easy tools that we can put in place with the system that we have city-wide that would address this and could minimize that 38 percent of collisions that occurred during non-daylight hours the next one is reduce aggressive driving behavior speeding is definitely one of the elements that we will focus on here because it's the largest partial aggressive driving but other components there as well and finally improving driving safety for all our vulnerable roadway users which are typically considered cyclists and pedestrians but then house population it's been a population that's been really hard to reach it's a population who is often involved with some of our fatal and severe injury collisions especially around the high volume roadways and so we have our key recommendation here to continue to work with our public health department to do targeted outreach to our own health populations to focus on roadway safety. Next steps that we will be undertaking is initiating the ongoing vision there our task force this will be a multi-disciplinary team that we'll put together to quarterly review our roadway safety data and make recommendations towards continued implementation of this plan. If you may remember from the second slide that was one of the recommendations that council made so now that we have the baseline data we'll be we'll be jumping off on that. To continue to work through the implementation and best practices that are included in this plan and implement many of the recommendations that are there to continue to pursue HSTP and other grant funds to make these targeted improvements for roadway safety. To continue to work on incorporating these best practices and are of high value safety improvements into planning studies and also implementation of the projects and to continually be assessing opportunities and think about how we can continue to do things better and be open to new information. I'm available for any questions and my email address on screen also if you want to follow up with anything offline. Thank you very much Claire appreciate the the the presentation and yeah it's just a lot of really great work. I will go ahead and open it up to see if council members have questions. Council member coming. Thank you for the presentation Claire. I had a couple questions just actually one of them just slipped my mind but in particular you know as you know this the implementation of this report moves forward I guess what's the best way for community members to kind of you know reach out to staff for work in terms of being able to bring their their concerns with their sheets forward. I know for example all of our street there's often speeding and people complain all the time about how much speeding happens on that street in particular and obviously down the beach area there's also a speeding down here on beach street and some of the other streets and so in order for people to kind of understand how the city is going to prioritize dealing with that and and what options are there what's the best way for people to be able to engage with the city to get these concerns met. Yeah I'll say two points on the bridge if it's a specific concern that you have of speeding along my street between here and there using our community request for the portal. Chris is really really helpful because it allows us to continually trust that. It does get routed to us and we partner with the police department on that on doing speed enforcement as well. If it is more holistic ideas or things that you'd like to discuss you're always welcome to contact me. Probably here at a pretty accessible so feel free to reach out or call me and I will get back you know and we can continue working on moving things forward. It's a big plug for the community request for service portal as well. Thank you. Next I have Vice Mayor Brunner and then Councilmember Calantar Johnson. It's been answered. I was going to plug Chris. I use it almost every day the community request for service portal. It would be under traffic concern and I just directed a constituent to report they were interested in lights on the crossway their house that they have a lot of seniors in the area and cars driving by not slowing down for the crosswalk and so I know it's on the City of Santa Cruz website it's also a free app and you know bike or pedestrian hazards can be reported through their syringes can be reported through their graffiti sewer spills back up etc. But yeah thanks Claire for bringing that up. Thank you Vice Mayor. Next is Councilmember Calantar Johnson and then Councilmember Brown. Thank you so much for the presentation and all the amazing work. When it's appropriate and you have more information I'd love to understand the strategies and how how the specifically reduced aggressive drive improved traffic safety for vulnerable roadway users including on how those will be operationalized when there's more information I'd love to learn that. Absolutely. Thank you. Councilmember Brown. Thank you. Thanks for the report and all of your efforts to squeeze a lot of in the short presentation on a 100 page plan that has been a long time in the making. I really appreciate it. I'm just wondering if if you could talk about because as some of our some of our correspondents have suggested this is this is certainly part of our overall effort to achieve Vision Zero and and and I think that using this as a tool is really is a great start. And so I'm just wondering if like how you're thinking about using it in terms of operationalizing making decisions prioritizing and what role if any would the Transportation and Public Works Commission play in that. I know they have a lot of ideas and you know a lot of expertise in this area and so they fit in as well. Absolutely. So the Transportation and Public Works currently have the Transportation and Public Works Commission currently has a standing subcommittee to focus on Vision Zero. So as we assemble our Vision Zero Task Force it will be multi-disciplinary. We will also have those subcommittee members participating in that. So there'll be direct engagement there as well as continuous reports back to the Transportation and Public Works Commission. I do want to reiterate that yes this is one component of our Vision Zero framework and it's an important one it's the data component that says these are the fact patterns that we have there we may also have feelings we may also have thoughts we may also have beliefs that go into the whole Vision Zero process and framework but always remembering to center back on what what is the collision pattern that we've seen where can we make an impact and where should we immediately be looking to make an impact based on countermeasures that we know will help them for roadway safety. And so making sure that we have those community conversations and continue to carry that forward as we continue to implement I want to emphasize also Vision Zero is a program it's not going to be a project it's not going to end it is an ongoing program that's going to be an iterative process. And so as we move through that making sure that we do focus on we do also focus on experiences and enforcement and equity and education and all of the other components that will make it well grounded and really be able to reach more broadly into the community than just kind of transportation gear has said that we work with a lot. Thank you. The good turn the gear head. I have a question Claire that came in a came in an email to us it's regarding kind of the whole approach to lighting and sort of you know bright lights versus you know lights that really kind of really provide more of that ground-based you know ability to kind of see and I know when I'm riding my bike at night you know yeah you get those experiences where you're blinded by you know headlights or whatever it's little just that's all part of this planning work right is to kind of look at these different approaches to lighting. Correct and it depends on where you are you know if you're on a river walk on an off-street path where you're only oriented the lighting towards cyclists and pedestrians it is a lower more human scale lighting. If you're on a high volume roadway where the majority of people who are on that roadway are motorists it's a higher level streetlight to more broadly illuminate where the runway is so really context sensitive solutions there they are appropriate to the user group that we would take. Okay so that will all be part of kind of wrapped into this is not those you know facilities and safety and all that but this but really that infrastructure of of how you stay safe even at night. Okay thank you I'll go ahead and take this out to the public and see if we have anyone in the public that may want to comment on this. I am not seeing any hands so I would go ahead and bring this back to council and I see councilmember Golder has her hand up. I'd like to make a motion to adopt the local roadway safety plan is of the commitment of the city of Santa Cruz in pursuing vision zero. And we see councilmember Cullentary Johnson has her hand up. Yeah I'll take it thank you. Great thank you for the great presentation Claire and all your work I will go ahead and ask for a roll call. And councilmember Watkins is absent councilmember Cullentary Johnson. Hi that motion passes unanimously. Thank you Claire. We'll now move on to 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. If you are interested in addressing the council please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. You will 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 comment so that we can accurately capture it in the meeting minutes. However it is not required that you state your name. Please remember this is a time for 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. Okay so I will look to any members of the public today who would like to address us. This will be for items not on the agenda and I am not seeing any hands raised. So we will go ahead then and move on to our presentations for our afternoon session. And next up is item on our agenda is item number 22 fiscal year 2022 proposed budget. This is part one of the city's budget presentations. We will receive presentations from some departments today. We'll resume at 9 a.m. tomorrow for the remaining department presentations. At the end of today's presentations I will call for public comment on all the departments who have presented today. I will call on the city manager to get us started. Martin Bernal will speak and then he will call on finance director Kim Krauss and then I will call on each to give their presentation from here on out. And we will maybe take a short break in about maybe about a half an hour maybe about maybe about an hour maybe right before the water director water department presentation will just take a 10 minute break to just stretch our legs 10 to 15 minutes we'll see how things are going. So go ahead and let's so I'll turn this over to Martin Bernal our city manager. Thank you mayor and council we do have a PowerPoint presentation to go over with you. I'll ask Kim to put that up and Kim and I are going to share the presentation this afternoon and this is the start of the budgetarians which will start this afternoon and then continue tomorrow. So the agenda will include an introduction and overall outlook, a fiscal summary and then what happens next in terms of the process and the decision making for the city council. Introduction so I'll do this portion here. Just wanted to start off by noting reflecting a little bit on the really unprecedented and unparalleled year of change that we've had in the city and the impact to the city. Not only has the COVID-19 pandemic had really major effects on our fiscal position, our work, our personal lives and but also on our region as we've experienced you know the trauma of the fires and the impacts of all that and I don't think we've never really had a time where we've had such a drastic requirement to act really swiftly and in the face of really mounting challenges it's really been our president. And the fiscal impact of the COVID-19 is really the most significant of Santa Cruz in my opinion even greater than the great recession of 2007 which we had to make some major significant and difficult decisions as a result of that as well and we have never really faced such a dramatic and drastic reduction in revenues while really at the same time having to respond to public emergencies and maintain central services so this difficult balance to remain fiscal solvent but also to respond to the increasing needs of our community. Unfortunately the city does have a strong record of prudent fiscal practices including Senate side reserves to address enforcing events and disasters as we've experienced although experience more than our usual number and with respect to the General Fund the city did see a significant loss of 10 million in fiscal year 2020 and a loss of 11 million in fiscal year 2021 and as we'll see in a few minutes with our finance director's presentation we do protect some recovery but also a deficit and she'll go into the details of that impact. It's important also to note that just as as important each and every city employee also stepped up to these challenges over the past year the city froze hiring encourage show of retirements and for fiscal year 2021 most employer goods took a 10 percent salary reduction through furloughs these sacrifices resulted in approximately seven million dollars in savings as the effects of the pandemic continued in October the city council adopted that resulted in another five million dollars in cuts most severe was the elimination of the you'll recall the city's park ranger program which is a difficult position to make so we had to quickly respond and enact two main solvent and even still our general fund reserve decreased 32 percent from fiscal year 2019 to 2021. Since community organizations and businesses also personally felt the effects of the pandemic in 2020 unemployment skyrocketed in the city do i have of nearly 14 percent and into the year averaging about eight percent all of that has improved comparing you know fiscal years 2019 and 2021 we saw the number of this license issue drop 35 percent. Our finance team estimates the city will experience revenue deficit of 27 million to the end of the upcoming fiscal year so that's pretty significant. With respect to our enterprise funds the pandemic also had an effect one of the most significant was the parking fund we saw a loss of 4.5 million as parking just went away the parking fund will be able to weather the loss due to prudent reserves as well as well as the ability to just raise and return of parking demand into parking district but but it was a challenge of interest is that the golf course fund which well technically it's not a enterprise fund did experience a boom as a result of the pandemic that requires a subsidy from the general fund as we had been experiencing it was one of those interesting sort of outcomes of the pandemic or more and more people did activities outside and golfing was one of them. Looking ahead to fiscal year 2020-22 we see signs that recovery has begun we started to move to the last restrictive COVID-19 cures as you heard about this afternoon from our chief and economic development director by our chief economic development director and more people are getting vaccinated and it's really allowing the local economy in terms of the began to reopen and rebound. As of March of this year the unemployment rate in the city fell to 4.5 percent and in May we left at the city employee for about six weeks I've had a schedule so that has helped to also improve our ability to provide services. The city also received federal relief funding. First round which we received in December of 2020 of approximately 780,000 was used to address added costs to responding to the pandemic and have to say it was really an inadequate amount for the city like us who had to respond to the impact of the pandemic. Unfortunately the city is set to receive approximately 14 million in one pro-american rescue plan stimulus funds uh half of that this year and half of that next year to help stabilize the budget. However being one time funding it will provide really interim stability to the city allowing the deferral of additional reductions replenishing reserves and essentially allowing the city the time to develop and implement a long-range fiscal sustainability plan and that's what we've been working on. It will not close our significant structural deficit or fully restore the massive revenue gaps brought on by the pandemic as that is structural. The bottom line is that the city is facing a structural budget deficit and you'll see those charts in the details of that in a few minutes. So we are facing a structural deficit and it's important to recognize that. 2021 the city launched a revision Santa Cruz and the council adopted that an interim recovery plan to carry us through a 12 to 18 months recovery period. The plan envisions executing a bold vision that centers on the priorities of long-term fiscal sustainability which is key downtown and business revitalization and building up infrastructure. We will explore ways to inject our local economy with new jobs, clean businesses, affordable housing and resilient green infrastructure and we will bolster what makes Santa Cruz special by supporting our businesses advocating for new and improved funding sources and reinventing in the downtown infrastructure for roads, water, to parks, facilities and open spaces and you thought of that work already begun and underway for many of the items that have been before you in recent months. Our focus during the 2022 budget year will will not only be on recovery but also on resilience again because of the scale of the structural deficit the city will continue to identify areas for expenditure reductions and explore potential for a new revenue measure. As the council is aware revenue has been in the process of looking at that poll, public opinion poll has been conducted in that poll as well as the recommendations from that committee will be before the council in the next month for how to proceed with potentially a revenue measure. Currently the committee is engaged in stakeholder outreach to determine the viability of a ballot measure to bolster without the addition of revenue sources, new revenue sources to the city we do base deficits over the long term so it is really essential to our long-term sustainability and again it's very important work that needs to be done by the city. As a city we are limited in our ability to raise taxes and so this is one of the ways that we have had to really look at historically to continue to the community and to respond to needs effectively. I want to uh before turning it back to to our finance director for she'll go over the some of the details of the budget and highlights I want to thank her, Kim Kraus and our budget manager Lupita Alamos for all of their hard work and as well as the budget development team on putting the proposed budget before you there's a lot of work that goes into putting the budget together and they insert that recognition for being able to do that. I also want to thank the executive leadership team and really the more than 800 employees of the city for their sacrifices this past year and work that's been done to get us there and they really have totally demonstrated their unwavering dedication to serving our community and deserve recognition. So with that I want to now turn it over to our finance director and then after she concludes I'll come back and talk about next stuff so thank you very much. Great thank you Martin. Good afternoon vice mayor and members of the council it's nice to be with you today I'm pleased to present the fiscal year 2022 proposed budget. I would like to follow on Martin's comments recognizing people for their work that they did in this budget. First I want to thank the council for their commitment to fiscal sustainability and the work that you've done on the two committees that you've created to make sure we stay sustainable. I also want to thank Martin Bernal and Laura Schmidt for their guidance and leadership during this budget process. I want to acknowledge that it's Martin's last budget process and he is really going to be missed. I very much appreciate this guidance and leadership and I need to steal his institutional memory out of his brain so that it stays here with one of us. I also want to recognize the department directors their managers and their budget staff as they spent hundreds of hours not only doing this budget but this is the third budget we've done in a fiscal year in addition to a mid-year and there are times because of the challenging fiscal situation we we had to change course dramatically like when we were awarded the American Rescue Plan funding so they did it with good cheer and I very much appreciate their hard work and acknowledge it. We also changed the format of the budget document a little bit this year we changed the narrative. Hopefully it's more concise and but they also did a lot of work to help us get through that process and last but not least I want to recognize the finance staff who worked on this budget. Lupita Alamos if you would turn on your camera. I would like to thank you and recognize you for the hard work you did leading all these budget processes in the last year. On her team is Tracy Cole and Jillian Morales. I want to thank them too and recognize them for their dedication and hard work. They all worked many nights and weekends even though staff were on furlough so I very much appreciate that and two more finance team members to recognize for their work on the capital improvement budget and that's Nick Gong and Edward Torres. So thanks to everyone who put so much time and a little bit of love into this budget. So I'm going to go over kind of the fiscal summary. We'll spend most of our time talking about the general fund but I have a little bit to say about some of the other funds. So Martin covered this a little bit our actions that we've taken to date to maintain the general fund. We implemented a hiring freeze. We had the furloughs or other cost savings agreements with each of the bargaining units that saved the city about four and a half million dollars. We offered the early retirement incentive that netted about 1.4 million dollars. We used reserves. We drew down on the general fund reserves as well as the workers comp reserves and we stopped the transfer to the economic development trust for one year. We implemented about 5.3 million in budget reductions in the fiscal year 2021 budget. We offered employees a voluntary time off policy. We deferred any general fund support to capital improvement projects. We've continued to pursue FEMA reimbursements and federal and state aid. You know the claims we have billing are the CZU fire and the COVID claim. They're both very complicated and will take a long time to to know how much we're going to receive in the end. The council also established the ad hoc budget committee and the revenue committees. I want to talk a little bit about the trends in the general fund revenues and primarily the revenues that are affected by tourism. The sales tax estimates for fiscal year 2022 are about 5 percent below our original fiscal 2022 estimate. And the I want to talk a little bit about where we're at to date. So fiscal 2020 actuals and fiscal 2021 projected sales tax is slightly less than fiscal 2019 actuals. So we didn't we didn't see the loss in sales tax that we saw in the great recession but we didn't see any growth either and we had some positive sales tax actions when the court approved the wafer decision and online sales were taxed and we could receive taxes for those. So we should have seen growth and we really didn't. But I'm happy that we did maintain almost what we were receiving in fiscal year 2019. The TOT budget estimate is for 2022 is about 19 percent below fiscal year 2019. So that was our last full pre-pandemic year. This summer season we'll be telling on how fast we're going to recover. So our largest TOT months are July, August and September. So we'll see how the June, July and August I'm sorry we'll see how that how we recover there. The same with admissions tax we estimated about 55 percent below where we were in 2019. The current fiscal year 2021 we're 97 percent below where we were in 2019. So hopefully we can recover to at least about half of what we were collecting in 2019 but the summer will be very telling for where we end up projecting like a full revenue recovery in fiscal year 2024. So next fiscal year we're you know projecting that we won't be quite back to normal yet but time will tell. The budget also includes just under 14.2 million in American Rescue Plan funding. As Martin that was collected this fiscal year and then half will be collected next fiscal year. There is a qualification process that we're working through and they're also currently making the rules for the allowed uses for those funds. One of the the difference between the legislation and the introveral adopted by the Department of Treasury is that we cannot use it to restore reserves. So we are lobbying to be able to do that and but we're also working on another plan for how we can claim those funds and make sure that the city benefits from that. On the expenditure side the budget that's being presented to you today is primarily status quo from fiscal year 2021. Additional reductions in it and then we also restore the one-time cuts that were implemented in fiscal 2021. We did not include any furloughs we also lifted the hiring freeze. We have as I mentioned we have some budget reductions implemented for four departments and each of those departments will present their reductions when they present their budget to you. We restore the transfer the TOT transfer to the Economic Development Trust Fund that should aid in our recovery of our business community and we continue the reduction in the workers' comp rates and there are some minor staffing changes that will be covered by each department. Excuse me for being a public speaker like you guys. The capital investment program is mostly unfunded. We did set aside two million to use as a match in case there are federal infrastructure funds available. We did not include any funding for street resurfacing. We can only do this for one year as gas tax requires that we have a general fund maintenance of effort. So there's a minimum level that we need to contribute from the general fund for street resurfacing every year. We do have a backlog of projects so we were able to skip funding for this year as some of that backlog will be done and that will meet our maintenance of effort requirement. New in this budget is an inter fund transfer to reduce the deficit fund balance in the general fund CIP fund. We have three CIP funds that have deficit fund balances that we need to start addressing. We included a million dollars this year to start bringing down that deficit. So those transfers will go on for a number of years until we can get those funds out of a deficit fund balance. It's been building up for years. On the debt service side we the general fund borrowed from the workers comp fund in 2018 to prepay PERS liabilities. We should have established a repayment of that loan starting the next fiscal year and we didn't so we're establishing that this fiscal year. So that will take approximately 10 years to repay that loan at $500,000 a year. And I also want to note this is the last year of the pension obligation bonds that were issued maybe that will end up with a savings of about $3.2 million next fiscal year and that is built into the forecasts that I will show you. So here's the forecast graphs that come from the management partner's forecast model. I have two side-by-side graphs without federal stimulus and with federal stimulus. This blue line is our reserve goal. So the general the government finance officers association best practice for reserves is two months of operating expenditures. So that's this goal right here. This is where we project our reserves to be. Structural deficit is when your revenues don't keep pace with your expenditures. So the fact that the reserves are being drawn down means that our expenditures exceed our revenues. So without the federal stimulus it's a pretty steep decline to no reserves and fiscal year 2023. With the stimulus we get back to our reserve goal a little bit above it but we still have a structural deficit and on the next slide I'll show you what these deficits are but you can see the stimulus does buy us some time to make decisions about how to handle the structural deficit in our budget. I also want to know these projections do not include funding for ongoing capital or emerging issues like homelessness. So these graphs match the the graphs that I just showed you and they're without federal stimulus with federal stimulus and this is the amount of surplus if it's above the line or deficit if it's below the line. So without the stimulus our deficit is one to eight million per year. So you can see the worst year would have been the the proposed budget year fiscal year 2022 at eight million and then there are years where it improves and it's only one million but it's never a surplus. So we have a continuing deficit to address. This is with the stimulus so we have a we would have a surplus in fiscal year 2021 with a seven million in revenue. In 2022 we have about a 1.3 to 1.4 million deficit and then the future deficits would range from one to five million dollars reductions in this proposed budget. They total just over 1.2 million and the largest I think is the parks department at 617,000 and if you recall they had almost all one-time reductions in the fiscal year 2021 budget. The public is also projecting 495,000 in new revenue in addition to their $348,000 in reductions. This is a reserve chart that we've looked at in the past with I added on the fiscal year 2022 estimates so these reserves are what we typically call the general fund reserve. There are four reserves that we include in the general fund. The other post-employment benefits reserve, the pension reserve and the stabilization reserve. The OPEB reserve and the pension reserve are invested in the section 115 trust fund. So this is the total of all those reserves and then this green line at the bottom is the reserve goal which is approximately 17 percent or months of operating expenditures. The reserve estimates include the American Rescue Plan funding. Our reserves are also a sign of the city's fiscal stability. It's good reserves help us when we have to borrow money. We get lower interest rates when we have good reserves. It's looked on favorably by the reading agencies and in times of fiscal the last two fiscal years we also have more time to make decisions about how we want to make our budgets sustainable again and since 70 percent of our budget is staffing it reduces the impact on city employees when we can take more time to make decisions. So I just want to note that in fiscal year 20 we dropped below our reserve goal in fiscal year 2021. With the stimulus funds we should be above our reserve goal and then in fiscal year 2022 we're drawing down on those reserves a little bit but we're still right around our reserve goal. Funds we often look at for funding the economic development trust fund. We did stop the transfer of that for one fiscal year so that was about a million dollars to the general fund. The majority of that fund has been committed for projects and so the fiscal year 2021 ending estimate is less than a million dollars and then with the restoration of the transfer back to that fund the transient occupancy tax it gets back up to 1.7 million dollars but that allows the economic development staff to propose to use those funds for projects that would help us stimulate our economy. The workers comp fund we drew down four in fiscal year 2020 so we had over an eight million dollar balance that fiscal year. We drew that down and we're still hanging around the four million dollar mark. The city public trust fund is the fund where we deposit the proceeds of property sales. So there are some projects proposed in the fiscal year 2022 budgets that draw down on that fund a little bit. We do have a few funds and deficits on balance so I mentioned these three earlier the general fund CIP the street maintenance CIP and the stormwater overlay fund so we will develop like a long-term strategy for bringing those funds out of a deficit. Our parking fund it did have very healthy reserves and we depleted those during the pandemic unfortunately but that we will be able to build that fund back up as soon as the tourism returns to the city. The equipment operations fund also has a deficit fund balance. The public work staff and the finance staff work together this year to make sure that that deficit grow and then as part of the cost allocation plan we are doing we'll develop a plan to make sure that fund gets out of a deficit. I want to talk a little bit about the unfunded capital investment program so we always spend a lot of time talking about our capital program but not our unfunded capital program. Tomorrow we will discuss these general fund priority one projects. They were projects that requested the fiscal year but weren't funded. They total about 3.7 million dollars. The entire total of the unfunded CIP is over 300 million dollars with the majority of that being in transportation projects. So the calendar the tentative calendar because some of these may change a little bit or we may change the order since today the overview and fiscal outlook and then we have five departments presenting their budgets. Tomorrow starting at 9 a.m. we have the rest of the departments presenting their budgets closing with the capital investment program and we're scheduled for adoption on Tuesday June 8th and we could push that to June 22nd if we need to but I think our budget staff is committed to getting you thing you need to adopt on June 8th and with that I'll turn it back to Martin. Thank you so as far as next steps are concerned really it's just continuing to build on or already doing to try to develop a fiscal strategy that focuses on recovery resiliency and trying to balance the need for traditional revenues and addressing critical needs so we can hopefully focus on trying to restore some of the existing services that we have we do have major deficits in particularly our maintenance parks maintenance have been particularly hard hit and you'll hear from that department about the some of the challenges and it would be helpful to try to catch up with some of that particularly as parks particularly have had high use and that continues to to be the case even post-pandemic. We also need to really have a more robust investment in capital program and infrastructure as you saw we have a long list of unfunded projects in this proposed budget we do have made an attempt aside the two million dollars to try to take advantage of the potential additional funding that might be available to the state and the federal grants process and so we want to be in a position to try to leverage as much as we can and also if we were able to successfully have revenue measure that could also potentially be revenue source to do that the timing is critical in that respect and again looking at the ahead at what our new services and direction that the council might also be interested in in exploring given the changing needs of the community as far as generating new revenue as i noted we will be looking at potentially a ballot revenue measure in November of 2021 the council would have to make a decision next month although there is a since about whether it will be a special election for a recall election and whether that might impact the timing of the revenue measure but we don't know yet so we'll update the council and we know that and then also we we want to continue to to do as much cost recovery as we can in all of our programs as appropriate so we'll continue to kind of make progress there to recover costs wherever we can do that in all of our eligible for cost of services and so with that again the next steps are for you to hear all the department's presentations to ask questions if you need more information we will get it to you so that when this comes back to you you can make a decision about the next fiscal year budget and with that we're happy to answer any questions you have thank you thank you martin thank you kim and thank you everybody for all your work um been a rough year and i know you've been working non-stop to understand the impacts and so really really appreciate your work but also that you know things look a little brighter ahead so thank you for tracking things and also just personally want to thank all of our employees as well for their sacrifices past year and recognize that that helped tremendously in terms of keeping the city financially stable at least through this time are there any questions right now from council members regarding the presentation so far next up will be susan nimitz who will give us a a presentation on the library budget questions i see council member cummings thank you and thank you for that presentation i did have one question um that's somewhat related so in previous years we've gotten received um packets that have you know council members need to make cuts there were programs where there was like contributions to meals on the wheels or different types of programs um we would usually receive you know a packet that outline you know what programs we're going to maintain and what we're going to cut and we didn't receive that this year and it's really not clear um you know what's happening with the funding for those programs and so i'm just kind of curious about whether we were going to be receiving another document that we've been making decisions on or when we'd be discussing those items yes those recommendations typically come from the community programs committee um i have to ask uh i think allora is uh what the status is for you you're muted laura thank you sorry about that mayor um council member cummings the community programs committee it's status quo budget so nothing is changing from fiscal year 21 to fiscal year 22 so all of those um programs will stay status quo at this point i guess well um since that include for example i know that there are things like the um ucfc task force um the person who we've hired for that and then there's also things like tenant sanctuary that have been included in the past does that also mean that funding will be included for that because i think want to ensure that some of those programs are going to be maintaining their funding and it's just helpful for us to see if we're going to pass the budget and that information's not present um each department who has respective funding for a given program will cover that for the long-range development program consulting funding that was a one-time funding so and it was extended i believe for six months and um i i believe that's the case lead butler can correct me if i am wrong so the question of further pursuing funding there will have to be handled in the planning and community development budget and then for any of the funding um details related to the core programs as budget that was in council i'll be covering that during the council member um the council team manager's office and city attorney's office budget um tenant sanctuary and um the core service programs were held at status quo from fiscal year 2021 okay um i just yeah i just wanted to bring it up members of the public were mentioning they were concerned that those programs wouldn't be funded and so since we don't have anything to share with them it's just it just wasn't clear so yeah so just a little more clarity so those will be covered under the city council budget and city manager budget as appropriate and what's being proposed as status quo essentially and so council will have to give direction on some of those or one time if you want to continue to do that that'll be the opportunity for council to wait okay this is what we did this year for next year we'd like to see those or there's a different direction so we'll make sure and cover all those items within those respective budget whether budgeted in each of those departments and then i guess my last question is well can we if this is status quo it's not changing from last year can we get a printout of the different programs that we funded in previous years sounds like we could just that shouldn't be too hard to yes yes i think there's a bit to talk about but yes well make sure absolutely yeah are there any other council members who have questions at this point does it look like it okay um we're going to take public comment at the end of all the presentations so i'll invite um susan imits the director of libraries to give a presentation on the library budget welcome susan i was hoping the powerpoint could go up that's okay um i can start it without it um do you have it yeah does somebody have that or i wasn't told i'm supposed to run it do you want me to i'm sorry i can share it i have it i have it here if it would be okay if you want that'd be great i am susan imits i'm the director of the Santa Cruz public libraries i'm happy to speak to you today about rfy 2022 operating budget um as the powerpoint comes up it'll show you an organization chart uh the Santa Cruz public libraries is sort of a department of the city of Santa Cruz um i actually report to a joint powers board that consists of the city of Santa Cruz the city of capitola the city of scott valley and the county each with their city managers and county administrator serving as the board it is a joint powers board that requires under its agreements i'm pretty much unanimity to move forward on any major item and we also have a citizen advisory commission that serves as sort of the community standards board and does a lot of the policy making and strategic planning for the very system bonnie if you could move to the next slide of course library patrons with masks so the next slide i just wanted to talk about our strategic plan we did a plan in 2016 that really focused on transforming the operations of the library as we transform the building one of the things that we're going to do over the next fiscal year is redo that strategic plan in preparation of the opening of the vast majority of our buildings at the end of fiscal 2022 the next slide talks a little bit about the last year and valley g it's been a tough one we started the fiscal year by reducing our staff by about a third we did a major reorganization to provide citizens we've gone through three service models in 12 months the first was perbside then grab and go where people come into the building and get pre-ordered materials and we moved at the beginning of may to a modified open we created a laptop wi-fi checkout we created remote printing so people could drive up and grab their printing job we switched all of our thousands of programs to digital with a real focus on resilience programming i know many of you participated in that in the last year and i'm very grateful we coordinated with school lunch programs to provide library services at school lunch pickup sites with picture that you see in front of you we provided deposit collections at some of our traditional bookmobile sites like nursing homes daycare and isolated parts of the county we continue to partner with encompass and wings to provide services for people experiencing homelessness you'll have seen tables set up around the library we were providing most of those services outside and we provided a mailing program for books we also went incredibly digital um actually the next slide is great because we can a little bit about where we are in our facility project in 2016 the taxpayers of Santa Cruz provided 67 million dollars through project s to begin to upgrade all of our facilities we have completed the Felton library and the La Selva library capital opening on the 12th of June it's beautiful we're very excited Boulder Creek Garfield Park and Brant Sephora 40 are all under construction as we speak and this fall we will start Aptos Scott Valley we have a major seismic upgrade that's going to go on there Live Oak is going to have a small remod and we're going to begin developing the Live Oak Annex at the Symptoms Swim Center and then we're in design development in the downtown library the next slide so because we are JPA our funding comes from a variety of sources and we have about 15 million dollars this year in revenue the city under your budget pays 1.8 million from its general fund the library in return pays $500,000 for overhead costs I have to say that employees of the library because you're our fiscal agent our employees of the city of Santa Cruz we also pay for things like counting legal and human resources this 1.8 million dollars is an increase of about $70,000 that $70,000 increase was negotiated over five years ago as part of the library financing authority another JPA's agreement and today under your consent agenda you extended that agreement one more year next year though a new agreement needs to be developed and there is expected to be a large increase in the city's share of funding that will vary um we're probably looking at something in terms of maybe $300,000 and so that is something that we're going to have to work on over the next year the county library fund which includes both the cities of Capitola and Scotts Valley is looking to put nearly there's more in the library funding as well our remaining funds um about half of our funds come from a .25 cent sales tax that was approved I think in 1997 and I may misspeak the next slide shows you the detailed budget which I'm sure no one can read and unfortunately it's not in your budget packet um because it's in the JPA's budget packet um what it shows is we have about 15 million in revenue and about 17 million in expenditures we do have a structural imbalance this year we have very large fund balances and reserves that will get us through the next fiscal year and then hopefully the negotiations between the city and the library county library fund will happen and we again expect about 2.3 million dollars from those negotiations the next slide just over the next year what are we going to be working on construction projects construction projects construction projects um I think we'll all be wearing hard hats we are going to try and raise a million dollars for Garfield Park ransom 40 and uh at the Aptos libraries I know many of you are involved with the friends in doing that I really appreciate your commitment to that we're going to have to renegotiate the funding contract we need to develop a long-term capital maintenance plan and leases for each of our building we need to improve both staffing and hours and probably not in 22 but probably in 23 we're going to have a reshuffling of library staff where staff that belong with the downtown library need to be in the building and staff and administration need to be in the administrative building so that we can assign costs appropriately that will require us to move our server room and will be a major step in preparing us for the building of the downtown library next I couldn't resist showing you a picture of the empty brand support library it's a beautiful mid-century modern building with these boomerang wood ceilings again we're going to honor the beauty of the building the picture on the right is what will it will look like each summer of next year and the following picture is our beautiful Carnegie Library Garfield Park which I'm sure none of you have ever seen empty when we were in it we had all the windows covered with bookshelves and you can see what an extraordinary space this library is on the right is what the children's section of the library will look like again it will honor the beauty of the architectural style of the building and open it up in the way that it existed as a Carnegie library when it first opened with a shelving around the perimeter this will open probably in March of 2022 and then last but not least we're working hard on the downtown multi-use project as you're fully aware the rfts for both the housing partner the master architect are out and the selection process is beginning with recommendations coming to you later this summer we're really looking forward to doing the design for this project and of course anticipating the amazing library that will become last but not least I just want to thank you all for the incredible support that the city council has provided the library over these years I think that our progress is really coming to fruition and I can't wait to invite you to a library opening with that I'll take any questions thank you Susan is there any questions from council members now for Susan at this time I am not seeing any hands raised oh I do see one council member coming thank you for that presentation and it's great to see getting on all of our beautiful libraries I did have one question so there's about four or five libraries it seemed like from the list that you had that are going to be under construction I'm just curious you know what happens to all those collections during those times do they go to the main branch or is there somewhere where they're being stored and you know because there's always that concern you know when the branch is closed how do people get access locally and so I'm just wondering how that's being addressed and there will be one point this year councilmember Cummings where five of our branches are closed at the same time which will be a peak moment for us the friends of the library have moved out of the downtown branch with part of our work plan they had a large storage space for their downtown before and we're taking that over and putting books out of the public view but accessible to staff to full four holds but I do have to say that there will be a moment in time where we're going to have to put some in storage and just take them offline we're very lucky that we have amazing tools that will tell us what are the books that are least likely to go out sort of based on popularity we will also offer in your library loan so if there's any item a person really wants we can get it from another library and then I guess are those costs covered under the funding that was previously available for those we have established moving costs in the cost of the project as we move forward curious whether or not those were additional costs or where those costs come from because I know it's come up in the past so thank you yes it has thank you any other questions from councilors at this time thank you good luck with your budget process thank you Susan great to see you I appreciate it I will now call on Kim Kraus our finance director to give a presentation on the finance department budget hi Kim Kraus flight eds director I'll share my screen again so this time I'm presenting the finance department budget I'll have an overview of the department how we're organized the fiscal year 2021 highlights of our work our proposed budget and then our goals and initiatives for fiscal year 2022 so we're organized into five sections accounting they do financial reporting and grants they also do the capital improvement budget the revenue division in addition to collecting all the money that the city collects they also oversee trends in occupancy tax audits and debt collections the accounts payroll and the accounts payable and payroll division they also have purchasing of the budget division they also assist with long-range forecasting and costing for bargaining unit negotiations and the risk and safety management division they are in charge of the city's liability insurance and claims property insurance any accidents we might have and workplace safety from fiscal 2021 include we expanded our online portal for payments and reporting to include cannabis business taxes and utility user taxes previously this was only used for t-o-t tax we implemented or part of a team the digital payment portal known as my city of Santa Cruz for utility bills and business licenses where our primary portion was a business license section we also implemented the management partner's forecasting tool that guides us and inform us that we make so we can see what a $500,000 decision that's an ongoing expense or revenue looks like 10 years from now it's very helpful we've been collaborating collaborating with other city departments and FEMA to submit the application for the COVID-19 disaster reimbursement we've only submitted for reimbursement through last September it is a very slow and time-consuming process to submit those claims but we're working on the next claim I think which is through partially through January we streamline the budget adjustment process to improve our communication and turnaround times so sometimes the budget adjustments will get stalled and and didn't get approved or moved along internally in finance for weeks so we made an online process where it goes through workflow it notifies everyone by email that there's a budget adjustment to approve we initiated the cost allocation plan update so our cost allocation plan where we spread overhead costs to other departments and the utilities is very old so we were under to update that plan and it will be an Excel model that we can update our costs every year and make sure that we're current they will also provide a guide that's very transparent as to how the costs are being allocated we we were recognized by the government finance officers association for excellence in our we're preparing our comprehensive annual finance report and our budget documents and then on the risk side we supported the development and update of all safety program policies including COVID-19 protocols you know which change and are difficult to figure out so that has been quite a workload for that division to stay up with those and make sure we're all following the right protocols and those staff working conjunction with HR this is a picture of the finance department proposed budget for fiscal 2022 so the overall citywide staffing is about 70 percent of the budget in the general fund budget in finance it's about 87 percent we have very little in supplies and services it's it's almost all personnel our total budget is 4.1 million we did propose some reductions that would not impact our services we reduced our temporary employment staff by 34,000 we reduced professional services and subscriptions by about 40,000 and then miscellaneous office supplies by 5,000 for total reductions of 79,000 we also oversee the liability fund so that's the risk management the insurances and the claims and you know litigation costs so that is the opposite of the finance department budget it is 90 percent of services and supplies and 10 percent people i do want to call out the cost increases in the liability insurance so this is you can see since fiscal 2018 it's gone up by more than a million dollars for liability insurance and this is the result of the environment that we're in and the amount of litigation that cities are seeing we're becoming hard to insure in some cases also you know the result of like some of the climate change actions so insurance companies have seen huge losses so with you know fires and floods and hurricanes it all has a bad result on our insurance costs our goals for fiscal year 2022 include updating our investment policy we want to see if we can diversify our investments to provide higher yields while maintaining our safety and liquidity we're going to continue to work with the council ad hoc revenue committee to find new or enhanced revenue sources we will continue to pursue federal and state aid and ensure that we comply with the american rescue act requirements the initial interim rule was 150 pages long so i'm looking forward to the final rule and having some some guidance in that area we will continue to use a forecast just from management partners to guide our fiscal strategies and decision-making as i mentioned before you can input 500 000 and see the long-term input impact of that on our for our core services we're going to finalize the cost allocation plan we will continue to update our financial policies to ensure that we're following best practices and we want to improve our operational efficiencies and we will continue to support departments and help them with you know cost recovery and if it's feasible so that concludes my presentation i'm happy to answer any questions you might have thank you kim are there any council members with questions at this time councilmember callentary johnson thank you so much for that kim um could you just really quickly go back to the slide um with the proposed reductions um i'll buy a little quickly for me so i just want to take a look at that flip so the personnel is just temporary staff so we hire temporary staff to do things for us like scan documents and that's the reduction there thank you so much questions from council members at this time so um cam thank you and your and your department for all your work and i'm sure we might have some questions as we work our way through the budget this year great thank you for all your work next step i will call um on misa murphy our human resources director to give a presentation on the human resources budget welcome lisa can't see good afternoon everybody good night to see you all again i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and i'm assuming you all can see my screen so today i'll give you a brief overview of the human resources department your screen yep okay just briefly our mission as a resource entrusted advisor we strive to cultivate inspiring and fulfilling work environment that attracts and engages a talented workforce some major accomplishments i really can't say and have it's been really all about COVID-19 response the policies that we created that having our employees sending them home place for them every day was really pretty much focused on for my team on our COVID-19 response we did have some negotiations in between there we have a major initiative underway for diversity equity and inclusion just within the HR department as part of that we've been revising our job descriptions we've reduced minimum standards which uh tend to be a barrier to entry on education uh well did word uh just releasing our requirement from listed bias training for all hiring channels and we also initiated a new employee bias training program another big move for us in between all of this was moving to online application process we're trying to move everything we can with regard to the recruitment process and i'll show you why that's important later when you see that we have over 3 000 applicants uh each year and doing those paperwise was just not efficient and again lastly although there's a lot of accomplishments and i have an amazing team more COVID-19 response and honestly this took the entire department for that to implement our response our benefits team and managing all the federal state leaves confusing trying to uh everyday something new uh again trying to recruit and do training online via zoom very very difficult but my staff pivoted really well to make that happen so i just want to do a shout out to how my department has the employees in the labor relations arena as well has really responded to to what 19 for our budget we are very small we are just two percent of the entire for general funds of the entire free budget some major changes you'll see that i'll just jump out real quickly is in 2019 we added what we a medical insurance uh is all now centered in my department which makes me look back at the huge bloated budget but i really don't you'll see that nearly 80 percent of my budget is made up of medical insurance 19 million dollars one thing i thought was really important for the most part my budget is very status quo um from the previous year we did eliminate a part-time position as part of the budget reduction but one thing i want to call your attention to as a result of COVID our unemployment insurance dramatically increased from an average of 90 000 a year in FY 20 to 278 000 claims in FY 21 and that's really significant in terms of the number of folks that have had to seek out additional resources and unemployment insurance so an overview of our budget were really five divisions that make up my budget administration which is blue and administration means that's us that's the people that are doing the work uh unemployment is this little tiny orange workers comp these are this is in the gray here you can see that that's 13 percent of my budget and that's where we pay out claims from our department and then the bulk here is the medical insurance premiums that are now coming out of my department it didn't use to and you can see this is what it looked like in the old days pre medical insurance so it looked like a pretty standard budget i had just a minor amount but now for accounting purposes it's all located within my budget and then we also have the volunteer program which is just 40 000 dollars or 45 and it's uh it's less than one percent of my budget briefly about what HR admin is we support 750 over 750 regular employees any time between 400 and 500 temp employees and those those services include training and development recruitment employing labor relations workers compensation and benefit administration just an idea of how important it was for us to all of with our recruitment information our application is you can see what our recruitment data looks like from 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and what you can see here actually unfortunately if you see this big dip but that's again because of COVID in our hiring freeze but we're pretty steady from a high of over 4500 applicants just as a slight little decline here to about 2 000 applicants that in this current and an FY 21 although the year is not over but we definitely had a decrease but when you handle over between three and four thousand applications and review my staff we use each and every one of those applications it's extremely important that we become efficient and we do that online handle employee labor relations and what does that mean we handle all the negotiations for eight units we work a lot on resolving workplace issues whether it's discipline or investigations conflict resolution we also house the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee commission please add community commission out of employee labor relations we also have our employee engagement program development program all of our mentoring coaching programs all are housed here as well as our new initiative for the diversity equity and inclusion we see our EEO committee that is in our house is our department but is in our department its purpose is to serve as a communication channel between city employees the community city manager city council an EEO coordinator for equal employment opportunity things and that body is made up of nine members two are actually appointed by your council I believe you just recently did and had an appointment and then we have internal appointments from the city manager's office we have employees I have an area so the executive from three employees we have one FDIU and two other bargaining units and they're working on an annual report which is going to we'll be online on our website that everybody should take a look at because they do a lot of work and a lot of initiatives underway including they are the leaders in the diversity equity and inclusion initiative reason why I just you know tout our own horn about our employee training and development that we put on we have over 65 development classes that includes mandatory training leadership development academy cultural awareness financial management and wellness programs there's so much more that happen in here in these courses and of course it's been really difficult to maintain attendance on the zoom but we're hoping to get back to live training at some point in time but I want to commend my staff for maintaining the enthusiasm to keep our folks in these training classes and keep them exciting so again in these classes also open and available to yourself as well and just a reminder our HR benefits team they help our team with their benefits including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability and retirement and remember we have over 700 close to 800 employees and have a very small staff that deals all of these questions that on a daily basis that are very complicated and really honestly it takes a really get through some of these difficult rules and laws about all of our benefits so again I want to commend my staff for their work on that and finally with our workers compensation division we had over 105 new claims that's pretty steady pretty average I don't have a comparison over the years but it's not anything to be a concern it can be anything from an injured finger to a bad back there's a number of different claims but everything needs to be submitted and this also includes claims that are COVID-19 our volunteer program just want to shout out to them how great they've been doing for us at the contract service with the Santa's Volunteer Centers although the numbers are quite down from the previous years because we had 316 volunteers with over 8,000 hours volunteer hours previously those numbers would be almost triple and I think they're looking forward to me getting back there's a lot of need for volunteers out there and front-tap resources and and we have a new individual Laurel who retired just recently and we stopped taking over and we wanted to shout out to Laurel Baker for her hard work and just briefly our priorities this year I have not changed them because I think it's good to have them although I've added my staff has added a few employee development really means is a focus for us we want to continue with our professional personal development succession planning is really going to be needs to be on the forefront right now we've had over 25 of the retirement incentives we've had a lot of people retired due to COVID-19 there's a lot of institutional memory there and so we really we started our efforts a couple years ago and we've been lucky that we've been able to hire internally but it's still going to be a huge push because coming this summer we're going to be opening up a number of those retirement center positions and it's going to be tough again we always continue to improve our organizational culture we put the employment program on hold we're going to put because of COVID we're going to start that back up again I think we're going to have a lot of new challenges I don't even identify in here about the culture with folks working from home and the impact of people coming back from COVID-19 it's going to be changes for people and a lot of scary feelings of coming back into this the setting so I think we're going to have to pivot on that and have a whole new focus on how to retain our culture and support our employees while they're off site it's obviously very different culture when you're not all within the office working together so we're going to have to really learn on on the fly and how to do better and how we can maintain our culture and that concludes my presentation just as a reminder that we serve the people who serve the community you can't can't function without HR you won't have your people without HR we get you this those folks and and we take a lot of pride in our work and hope that the community understands the importance of it does and for them to help you deliver the services and implement the policies you want implemented and that concludes my presentation thanks very much Lisa appreciate it and I always learn a lot about what your department does the small little department over there on the other side of City Hall but you guys do so much so thank you thank you are there any questions from council members at this point I have not seen any hands so thank you again Lisa we appreciate I'm sure we'll have questions next week and I will move on to inviting Ken Morgan director of information technology to give a presentation on an IT budget please welcome Ken good afternoon can everyone see my screen yes good afternoon Mayor Myers vice mayor Brunner and this is Ken Morgan IT director and I'm here to give you an overview of our proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year the presentation will include a department overview a discussion of our core services I'd like to highlight some of our key accomplishments this past year as well as some of our goals for the upcoming fiscal year and then finally a couple of slides summarizing our 22 budget amazing people make up the city's IT department when we are fully staffed the IT department has 21 full-time equivalent employees this includes three individuals being funded by our enterprise departments and what you were seeing collectively is 195 years of experience working and the average IT employee has been with the city for 11 years eight of us have been here for more than 15 years so a lot of a lot of experience to you our mission is to cultivate increased connectivity of people technology and processes and we do this by trying to deliver business driven efficient quality technology solutions and services for both the staff and the public and these efforts really do start with our client services team these folks are responsible for receiving thousands of annual requests via phone calls work orders to the city's help desk they do an amazing job of supporting the hardware and software in the city's endpoint infrastructure we have PCs we have laptops mobile devices desk phones and all together our device ecosystem is about 1900 different devices that we support our infrastructure services team manages network infrastructure and data centers and offices throughout the city this includes our wired and wireless networks our server infrastructure which includes close to 200 virtual and physical servers our voiceover IP telephone equipment we have 600 desk phones and then they spend a lot of time on security and whether that's cybersecurity to keep the bad guys off of our network or physical access we need to protect our assets and facilities process and application solutions team provides support for over a hundred citywide applications these folks are our database admins our developers our custom report writers our project managers and really just our application experts and then last we have our strategic and admin services division and workflow special projects personnel decisions of course budget planning and execution like we are today before i get to our accomplishments i did want to give a little perspective on how covid impacted it last year and really kind of how we responded um it was a focal point for really maintaining that business continuity with us 200 users requesting to be connected from home and then as the pandemic kind of played out of the last year we continued to shift our service delivery to adjust to this new normal so not only were we supporting the on-premise computing for infrastructure but we were also helping people from home supporting personal devices home wi-fi networks web conferencing tools coffee machines you name it we we jumped in and did our past to kind of keep that business continuity moving forward but to really kind of calm things like a lot of departments we suffered some pretty extreme staffing levels we had retirements hiring freezes medical issues and in the end we were left with about 70 percent of our staff for the majority of the fiscal year and you know when you're a small team losing six people of 21 is a pretty amazing challenge but it's a challenge that in my estimation was really met with some incredible determination and a lot of pride in what we do and led to some pretty cool accomplishments it starts with our client services team i think martin mentioned employee resiliency and these folks really epitomized that traditionally this is a team of four specialists and an IT manager they operated with three specialists for the I the entire year and still completed close to 6000 tickets they were turning those tickets around in about three days of the 800 or so employees we received requests from 600 different employees so clearly a service that is used throughout the the enterprise and then when these folks were we're bored and had some free time they were busy replacing pcs as part of our annual pc replacement program a considerable effort and it resulted in being on track to replace 121 pcs this year our infrastructure team was also down the key player for almost an entire fiscal year but still managed to squeak out some some pretty impressive projects we did an update to our city's email system this is an on-premise email system we have over a thousand mailboxes we received 10 000 inbound emails per day and we store about five terabytes of messages on site so the migration of all that data with knowing that this was taking place is a pretty significant effort and required a lot of late night efforts from that team they also partnered with our public works department to facilitate the installation of city on fiber that now directly connects to our so-called front garage this increased our network species allocation it's going to provide public works with some exciting things that they have planned and then in the kind of the long run it's going to save us money and then finally we push forward on a multi-year project to modernize our physical access security this year we were able to complete work at a number of water facilities our so-called front garage the wharf harby west park and we're currently wrapping up at our fire stations and strategic admin teams this past year we had some notable upgrades we have a timekeeping application that's used to period chronos that was upgraded our enterprise resource planning application Eden Eden's responsible for just about every aspect of business we do here we do utility billing payroll human resources accounts payable purchasing and so forth this was a huge lift for our department and really a lot of regression testing with staff across the city we also completed the upgrade to our document management and agenda management application on base that's the application that produces the this for your meetings and commission meetings and it's also what publishes our stream to the internet security awareness is always a big party for us we continued our ongoing security awareness training for city employees this is a campaign that requires employees to watch awareness videos and take short quizzes we used to prizes the departments that complete the task first and really just kind of a fun way to help remind employees of their role in and the city to remain vigilant when it comes to the city's technology and resources and then last i just wanted to highlight some of the gis stuff that's gone on in this was just really to kind of commend rich west wall and it's less of a fiscal year 21 accomplishment and more of kind of a lifetime achievement word rich is really gifted when it comes to the marriage of data and cartography and he continued this past year to really grow our gis presence for the city for the it and really the community it really comes at a great value these are just some examples of the maps that rich created but just a small subset of that of what he's done and is one of our most popular yet humble it employees and if you've not yet done so i advise you to check out the map section on our city's website because it's really fantastic in the conversation to our goals for fiscal year 22 and really trying to align our efforts with the broader re-envisioned Santa Cruz objectives but at the top of our list is we need to get healthy we have some key positions that we are very much looking forward to reoccupying with more bodies that should help us to sustain our operations and really shifts our focus to some project-oriented goals our projects like our land management and permitting and license application track it it's long overdue for an upgrade and we have initiated that and we're hoping to complete that in the next fiscal year we will be hitting the streets this week with an rfp for a computerized maintenance management system cmms and this will help really track operations in city infrastructure and facility assets really used heavily by our water and public works divisions my city of Santa Cruz is our consolidated online bill pay platform that was launched this year we want to continue to add new payment types there as well as improve the services that we are currently providing and then last we want to continue the rollout of our physical act security project we look forward to completing the parking garages and really shifting our focus to some of our downtown facilities like city hall that brings us to our budget overview slide our proposed budget is about 5.7 million 59 percent of that are 3.3 being in personnel services in the remaining being in our services and aside from those personnel services the major costs for the it department continue to be the software and hardware maintenance services as well as our telecom services with telecom being the cost we pay providers to physically connect our various locations and provide that access as far as changes from the last year there's there's a few even though there's an uptick in personnel services it's not an indication that we will have additional staff rather has to do with an increase in it for group health and benefits and perns obligations and those expected annual salary compensation increases so our headcount will remain at 21 on the service services applies I mentioned telecom we will be seeing a small spike in those costs because of an expiration of a concast franchise agreement that the city received as well as the county since 1989 to receive free fiber connectivity to our corp yard our police department loud Nelson and fire station two for a dollar a year so we're pretty fun that that's going away but we'll have to move to a constant solution for those locations and it's quite expensive we've also taken on some new hardware and application projects over the last year and as each of these projects conclude we inherit the ongoing support and maintenance or subscription fee that goes along with those services and then finally we have this annually anticipated increase the cpi that we will pay for our ongoing contracts with vendors to pay for that support and maintenance and we typically see this as an average of around one to three percent beyond that we continue to really deliberately manage manage and kind of cost contain those contracts and as much as possible try to remain status quo that was my presentation and happy to answer questions thank you ken I just want to personally recognize you guys your help desk are the most amazing people every time I call they're super helpful and they just jump right on things it's good to hear despite everything you guys just were still able to service us all so I really want to thank you and recognize your staff that does that and I know there's a lot of other people doing a lot of important things but that's part of the people probably the people I touch the most when I'm having issues with staff so please please thank them I do have council member Cummings and council member Brown with their ham treats into that presentation and just you know huge thanks to your department I mean when we shut down last year and couldn't meet I need the IT department really stepped up to make sure that we could still meet and get the city's business done in a really efficient way so we really want to thank you all for everything you've been able to do to help us go digital with that being said one of the questions that I was I've been thinking about is you know this past year we've moved to everything being online but now we're going to start shifting to kind of back to in-person meetings but you know given the utility of being able to do like hybrid meetings I'm just wondering how like are we going to continue to use zoom and I know that those licenses cost money so any sense of how the you know trying to kind of maintain access through these kinds of platforms like what costs those might have or how those costs might change as we kind of come out the pandemic and then I guess associated with that is there's a lot of uncertainty still with all the variants and what have you with you know with tenders first to slide back into you know lockdowns again so I'm just wondering how that might play into budgeting around key services and things like zoom yeah so the telecommunications policy will probably need to be revisited but we're from it kind of approaching like this is this is probably a new normal so we have actually built up the infrastructure that people are using to connect remotely so we feel like we'll be able to satisfy the the hybrid model or the in-person and working remotely model whatever it be for the next number of fiscal years we spend some some of our hardware money in the last fiscal year to really kind of put position us so that we'd be prepared for that and then I think the other caveat to that is really recognizing the security vulnerability with having folks working remotely so we're starting to really shift our attention to what we need to do from a security perspective to make sure that you know people connecting remotely with passwords that they may have on stickies or whatever it means we can make sure that we're covering all of our our shortcomings there okay thank you and I have council member brown next thank you mayor and thank you 10 the question I had was related to the technology needed to get our meetings as open to the public and accessible as possible given the challenges and but mostly I just wanted to say thank you so much for all the work that you do and your staff I mean your staff is just amazing I'm gonna pile on here a little bit with the mayor and say you know I really really just can't can't really express enough how wonderful it is to and I have a challenge know that there are people I can go to who are going to help me out who are cheerful I mean it's so calm you all are so calm I just I really just you know it's so great you do amazing work and you do it really like cheerfully and and and calmly so thank you thank you very much can oh by breeder thank you so much Ken um it was really great to get that overview and those details uh my question is the website does that where does that fall in your in your scheme uh we have at all the technology here the the governance of the website is sort of a shared responsibility with Elizabeth Smith and the uh the ceo's department and us um but you know as it being a kind of a technology in our footprint we try to do whatever we can as far as helping the content editors resolve or update content but from a governance perspective it sits with Elizabeth thank you um and thank you to your team for being available um through through this I definitely have been one of those tickets thank you thanks guys and councilmember golder did you have your hand up no you're good okay thanks so much Ken I'm sure if we have additional questions we'll get get for the budget all done thanks again okay um I think since we're moving along pretty good here I think we'll go ahead and um just have our last um uh department uh budget presentation and I'd like to welcome Rosemary Menard our water director hi there Rosemary hello good afternoon mayor and council thanks for the opportunity to talk with you today oops started in the middle not good appreciate the opportunity and I'd like to pile on also with the uh the appreciation for all of the um those uh central departments uh finance and IT and HR who really have supported us in maintaining our business continuity uh through this year it it has been a huge challenge I know a major part of our organization sort of took a breath on whatever day that was March 12th or whatever and then the next day business as usual from a completely different location and the work that happened in working with our employees as we transitioned through the COVID process uh working through the furloughs it's just been an amazing support and I think when we all look back on it we think to ourselves holy cow how in the world did we do all that um anyway so I would really like a welcome opportunity to give you about the water department's budget and one of the things that I'm going to do is I'm going to share this presentation with my new CFO David Baum who started uh with us in October so in the middle of COVID we um added a position in last year's budget and we were able to fill it with an extremely well qualified individual in David and so I'm going to give you the front page a few of the front end of this and then I'm going to turn the financial um over kind of walk through with you and then we'll take your questions um so what we're going to do is we're going to dive a little bit into water we're going to do a little bit of looking back we're going to do a little bit of looking ahead and we're going to tell you about what it's all costing and some of the other work we're doing as we go along this photo as you know is uh or probably most of you know is the Graham Hill water plant and is a big focus of a lot of the capital planning work we've been doing and major construction is going to get underway at this facility uh here in the next few weeks and it's going to go on for about the next eight or ten years so it's a it's a major project that we're going to basically rehabilitate replace and upgrade this facility for the next 35 to 50 years of use in our community big project uh long overdue um but what we do is we um we collect water in water systems particularly when it rains it's kind of good when it rains which it hasn't much the last couple of years we um we obviously store and treat it both in our reservoirs and our distribution system storage we deliver it to customers homes we put it through we we provide billing to the customers and provide customer service and there was a lot of that this year both with the covid issues or people you know had questions about whether they're going to pay more if they were working from home etc and then also with the the drought which we've been implementing the first stage of restrictions in the last month or so uh do a lot of informational educational outreach and working with customers and stakeholders obviously protect fish and natural resources a major focus of what our work is and we build and maintain a billion dollars in infrastructure that's about the value of the Santa Cruz water systems roughly a billion dollars so we are uh we're really busy we've had a very busy year and um this is our organ chart which you probably can't read but we have about 116 people working in multiple divisions a lot of folks were working from home this year obviously our our distribution system and our our operations folks here most of these people after the very first shutdown started coming to work on a routine basis and kind of haven't skipped a beat since then but they've been amazing in producing delivering that really important water that we all depend on making sure that the testing is ongoing fixing leaks uh dealing with our various and sundry natural resources obligations and challenges and you know making the water come out so that we can all sort of live our lives in some halfway normal way. This has been a little overview of the year we've had and I think that uh the fire with one of the things we've talked about a number of times in today's conversation issue obviously didn't get into town but there were a lot of concerns that we had over the period of this fire and just the the lead up to it and the aftermath that we would have major impacts from the fire on either our watershed or on our on water quality following the fire the fact that we didn't have a very wet winter probably is the the big um the big thing that we've benefited from in this particular year. We have major construction going on at the no creek dam we uh this the center photo at the top is the construction of a new pipeline under the river which was begun and completed entirely under the pandemic conditions uh and that that site is now uh fully restored and you know back in our hands you know we've been doing planning on uh replacing something at the Laguna diversion which has a plaque on it that says 1890 so the work is going on there. This this big picture here on the bottom right is the flocculators which is part of the treatment facility and then I and I would be remiss this is sort of going back to the conversation that we just heard from Ken about deploying a numbers of folks to be working from home. This is our customer service officer's office from which he managed uh ongoing customer service pretty much without skipping a beat for several months between about mid-march and then the first part of uh June when they moved into the NIAC building and only recently this month have this staff who was uh sort of split up between NIAC and Locustry has now come back but you can see that you know folks they needed to do in spaces in their homes wherever they could and got the work done uh extremely extremely important and with that I'm going to turn this over to David Baum to give you the rest of this presentation and we can take your questions as of getting into the financial aspects and I just uh to introduce him to you because most of you haven't had a chance to meet I will say that David came to us after you know a long and illustrious career working in public finance which completely lined up with the kinds of issues that we have since the capital program and financing the capital program is such a major uh focus of what we're up to these days and so we feel very lucky to have him join us and bring his expertise uh to helping us with the financial planning and forecasting and management of the resources we need to reinvest in our system so with that go ahead and take it away David. Okay thank you Rosemary and thank you for that generous introduction and I'm really happy to be here today um so I'd like to take you through the next 10 slides mostly just talking about the printing budget the capital budget and forecasting um this first slide is showing the the primary source of revenue on the top two pies um growing about five percent from the current fiscal year to next fiscal year it's primarily driven by the six percent proposed growth in the uh water rates that was deferred from this fiscal year due to the COVID pandemic to next fiscal year so there was a reprieve the six percent will not quite probably generate six percent new revenue because it's a five percent or I should say to a five percent growth by um lingering effects of COVID and and now the drought um the one thing we can say about operating expenditures is that the staff has been very good about containing operating expenditures the budget from last year to next year they expected to drop two percent so that's the proposal to reduce it by two percent next year from last from the current year next slide please I'm sorry okay there you go okay so this is um looking looking ahead to the next fiscal year these are the goals that are outlined in the budget summary that's now is um is on the city's website if um if there's one thing to uh I was focused on from my perspective is that we have this big process of doing rate settings every five years and we're at the end of the last cycle and we're ready to start a new cycle it's something that was introduced to um our very engaged water commission and then to the council um last month so you know that um this bullet number uh four here is um to bring forward the next five years of rate did produce about 10 per cent per year so it's kind of a daunting task but the um the staff is engaged in doing community outreach right now and holding panel discussions and so we're very excited about that you know much of what the water department does is rosemary pointed out is ongoing so the project that we're starting last year are still on going on this year which will be going to the next year because of the hundred plus year history of the water department so um anyway for more information on this you can go to the budget summary in the um on the website um this slide also bears some some effort to explain it's um it's a slide that talks about about our budget process and it's really a good overview and it connects to the long range financial plan that was created by the water department and approved by the city council in 2016 and that we plan to you know bring forward again this year but um in that long range financial plan we have you know all kinds of assumptions and financial targets that um we want to focus on and so it's a big process of course starts with the setting those water rates what are the what are the needs looking at the capital improvement plan what's needed there and really doing a long a long range form with the water commission the forecasting is a 15 year forecast now but for the today's purpose we boiled it down to 10 10 years I want to highlight just um one particular aspect of this slide here is that due to the um the need for capital improvement um we're enjoying now the lowest uh rates in in at least my lifetime for for borrowing and so in in this model this model we've created we're now um putting in rates of 2.25 percent in the next couple of years and then 2.5 percent thereafter with the benefits loan programs through the drinking water state a revolving fund that as what we call the SRF we've been able to get 149 million committed to the water department um at a 1.4 interest rate over the next 30 years and so that allows us to really finance the the important products that we have next slide please so this here is the operating expense forecast over the next 10 years as the previous slide mentioned the the personnel cost and the non-personnel cost they grow at an average of about 4.5 per year over this 10 years but the big growth factor is in the debt service because of the need to finance the the capital investment program so if you look at the green bar in the first year in 2022 it's 15 percent in the last year in 2031 it's 33 percent the operating um portion of the operating budget service and then put another way the the other two components the um basically the operating and the non-person the personnel and non-personnel capital outlay are about 57 percent in the 10th 10th year next slide please um so the capital improvement program also known as the capital investment program is funded through a mix of debt and surplus revenue or what we call pay go the the long-range financial plan that's been adopted calls for a mix of 75 percent debt and 25 um pay go but here this is more you can see more debt and it's it's about 85 percent debt um really focus more heavily in the first five years here and then as the the capital improvement program starts to taper off a bit in the out years there's more pay go funding is better for rate payers in the long in the long run because it means that we don't have to rate raise rates as as fast as in these earlier years because of the deferred maintenance on the system next slide please forgets for us is to meet the long-range plan goals and so we have these cash balances to ensure that we have the right kind of cash on hand to meet the rate agency requirements that ensure our favorable interest rates so that we can go out and we can borrow at the favorable rates that that we enjoy here these are the unrestricted balances mostly that need to be held in in place and um i wanted a dark orange category here this is our rate stabilization fund that's a ten million dollar fund that we have on hand for times like this year with covid and now some impacts from drought that we use money from that fund to revert back to our operating fund what we call fund 711 operations fund in difficult times i'd also mentioned that because we're now heavily into our capital program we have been drawing down on some reserves and we are about to come up with a 50 million dollar line of credit that we'll be bringing to city council next month for approval next slide please and this is the debt service coverage slide capital program it's always important to keep an eye on the debt service coverage legally we're required by our bond covenants and by the state loans to have a 1.2 coverage or another way of putting that this the net revenue for every dollar of net revenue a dollar 20 of net revenue we have a dollar of debt coverage is 1.2 to 1 however because of the long-range financial plan we have a more conservative coverage ratio of 1.5 and so the orange line in this graph is the is the revenue surplus revenue and the blue bars represent the annual debt service next slide please and just real quickly through the capital investment program wanted to point out that it is 291 million over the next five years it's really kind of remarkable that in the last five years it was 150 million and so then there's a real push then to build projects and the focus in these projects is climate adaptation water supply resiliency infrastructure and also management and risk reduction projects including one of the things that kin mentioned being able to keep the bad guys out of the you know cyber security out of the system so there's those kinds of priorities CMMS the SCADA all kinds of systems that operate the the water infrastructure next this is a breakdown of the types of the CIP the total amount over the next five years is 291 million and most of those are focused on infrastructure and we're going to be talking more about this tomorrow some of really quickly go through these next slides and here again is that previous chart in the form of these bars and it shows the first year's bar is next year and then the following four years is the second bar and again most of these are focused on infrastructure resiliency and climate adaptation and the three biggest projects of course are the Newell Creek Inlet Outlet project the water tank replacement project as rosemary mentioned at the Grand Hill Water Treatment Plant and also the facility improvement project also at the Grand Hill Water Treatment Plant those three projects alone are 256 million in the CIP and so that's I must say that's 56 percent of the 291 million so those are the big three and I'll stop there I think we're running out of time yes we're that is the end of our show and we will be happy to take your questions thank you rosemary and it's nice to meet you thank you are there any questions from council members for the water department at this time a couple of comments that I just like to make one is so we are going to be planning some opportunities for tours of the system and our construction projects in the next probably in July so I'm going to be organizing sending out some dates so if you're interested in going I probably will have you know the brand day which might be the whole system thing and maybe a couple of other things that would be construction related visits particularly to the dam so I'm happy to do that also we are as as David mentioned we will be we've had a very engaged water commission and they will be including in your packet that you get next week or next time for your meeting a whole sort of a letter from them with recommendations and the process they went through in the last year or so to work the planning and and the budgeting in the and the rate making which are really at the core of everything that we're focused on these days because of our very aggressive CIP plus the you know need to maintain operating revenues so we've we've been blessed with a really effective and engaged water commission and we really thank them for their participation and their partnership and all this work thank you very and thank you David and welcome to the city you're working in one of it you're working in a wonderful department so I am not seeing any hands at this point from council members are there any council members of questions at this point I am not seeing any okay I believe that is our last apartment presentation and so I will go ahead I'm sure we'll have questions for departments as we make our way through the rest of the budget over the next several weeks but I will go ahead and move on to public comment and again this is for any folks who have regarding all the presentations that have just been completed if you are interested in commenting on fiscal year 2022 proposed budget 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 time rule will then be set to two minutes so again I'll be looking to folks in the public to raise your hand by pressing star nine if you have if you would like to comment on any of the presentations given this evening I am keeping a look here I am not seeing any hands coming up from the public tonight so we will go ahead and move to adjournment and our council will reconvene tomorrow morning at nine a.m. and we will continue with the budget presentations at that time so thanks to everybody and thanks to all the staff for your presentations today and I hope you all have a good evening thanks everyone thank you thank you