 Okay good morning everyone we are just returning from our closed session this morning welcome to our 1130 a.m. session of the June 14th 2020 to meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council and I would like to ask the clerk to please call Thank you Mayor Councilmember Callentary Johnson President Boulder here Cummings Mayor Watkins currently absent and Mayor Brunner President thank you their first item on the agenda here is a presentation and this will be a mayoral proclamation declaring June 15th 2022 as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day and I'd like to welcome Whitney Barnes social work supervisor of Adult Protective Services hi Whitney welcome thank you for being here with us well thank you for having me and I just wanted to say that on behalf of the entire Adult Protective Services team here in Santa Cruz County we appreciate the city of Santa Cruz for making this proclamation our team investigates allegations of abuse neglect self-neglect and exploitation among older independent adults throughout the county as such we strive to reduce the risk and help enhance the safety of this vulnerable population the issue of elder abuse is significant not just in terms of impact but also scale and the issue that's certainly growing over time according to the National Council on Aging about 10 percent of Americans over the age of 60 have experienced some form of elder abuse other studies also give us an estimate that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of older adults in America suffer from some form of self-neglect so I do ask that the you take a minute and kind of reflect on your personal connections and your neighborhood your family your church community and consider that one or two out of every 10 older adult you're interacting with is potentially suffering from some abuse neglect self-neglect or exploitation it's because of that that it's imperative we we continue to have events like this raising awareness on this issue will increase attention and hopefully ease fears for people in the community who might want to seek help or support so that we can all come together and work for the elimination of elder adult abuse thank you thank you so much Whitney it's such a very important topic to bring awareness to and I really appreciate you connecting with us thank you and so I'll just go through its brief and present the proclamation so whereas the state of Santa Cruz is home to over 8,000 residents age 60 or older who enrich and strengthen our community by serving as leaders mentors volunteers and vital members of the community and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and whereas over 1,600 reports of abuse against our elderly are received every year by Santa Cruz County adult protective services and it is estimated that one out of 10 Americans age 60 and over have experienced older abuse and as few as one out of 24 elder abuse cases are actually reported and whereas ageism and social isolation are major causes of elder abuse and as our population lives longer we are presented with an opportunity to think about our collective needs in future and whereas it's up to all of us to ensure that proper social structures exist so people can retain community and societal connections to reduce the likelihood of abuse and neglect and whereas today there is a system of collaboration among the county of Santa Cruz human services department adult and long term care division the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department the Santa Cruz Police Department the district attorney's office the seniors council area aging agency on aging which council member Brown sits on and I'm an alternate the long term care of ombudsman program the public guardian program and many community service partners to prevent abuse protect victims and prosecute offenders who abuse our elderly and whereas Santa Cruz County is a leader in the state of California and assisting our vulnerable elderly citizens through education advocacy and collaboration on abuse issues so now therefore I Sonia Brunner mayor of the city of Santa Cruz do hereby proclaim June 15th 2022 as world elder abuse awareness day and the month of June as elder abuse awareness month in the city of Santa Cruz and encourage all citizens to join me in this observance supporting our elders and voicing opposition to any form of abuse thank you and I'd like to call on councilmember Brown to say a few words I thank you mayor thank you Ms. Barnes for being here today and for all of the work you do I'm really pleased to see this resolution or this proclamation I'm really very committed to ensuring that we have services in place and obviously the county and our community partners are a major part of that really the core of our network and so I but I did want to ask you while you're here because you know we some of the programs that were mentioned in just just now by the mayor the council and the county board of supervisors have approved pretty significant cuts to those programs including the ombudsman program which is the purpose of which is to prevent this kind of abuse and so I'm just wondering based on your you know I'm not sure if you have anything you want to say right now but how you see those the cuts to our community partners kind of intersecting with our broader efforts and our goals which I think we all share just would love to hear something about that I appreciate you bringing that up I'm not in a position to speak to to specifically on that I can say though that in the world of older adult services we we have become fairly unfortunately accustomed to having a significant amount of volume of work with with too little resource to meet the need it's unfortunate to think that that might be continuing in the future here but my team were dedicated to doing the best we can to make sure that we resource and research every every avenue of support for the folks that are that are in our care I really appreciate that and I guess you know on a more positive note just want to express my commitment to being a part of that conversation through the area agency on aging and as a council member thank you thank you council member Brown thank you again Whitney Whitney Barnes thank you for joining us today thank you again I really appreciate it have a wonderful day okay moving on I have a few announcements and then we will move to the regular meeting today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website cityof Santa Cruz dot-com 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 may be a delay in the streaming so if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device you may miss your opportunity to speak when it's your turn for public comment to raise your hand dial star nine on your phone or select raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer please note that public comment is heard only on items that council is taking action on and not on regular updates and reports the items that will be open for public comment during today's meeting our numbers 8 through 30 on our agenda today I'd like to ask the council members if there are any statements of disqualification today then from council members I have three statements of or three agenda items I have agenda items 24 25 and 30 that I will be disqualified from participating in as it relates to my employment out of an abundance of caution and consulting with our city attorney's office vice mayor Watkins will be taking over those agenda items today I would like to ask the city clerk to announce any additions and deletions we have none thank you at this time I'd like to call on the city attorney to provide report on closed session yes so almost good afternoon mayor Brunner members of the city council this morning the council met at 9 30 a.m. by zoom to discuss four items on your closed session agenda the first item was a conference with labor negotiators involving our all bargaining groups council received a report from its negotiator on those items second item was a public employee performance evaluation of the city attorney item three was a conference with legal counsel concerning existing litigation the matter entitled regions of the University of California versus the city of Santa Cruz currently pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court item four was a conference with legal counsel concerning anticipated litigation in the council received a report on the potential initiation of litigation on one potential case there was no reportable action taken in the closed session this morning thank you thank you city attorney at this time I would like to call on the city manager to see if there are updates and provide a report on city business and events of interest thank you mayor and council I do have a few updates for you this morning and we have a heavy agenda so I will keep we'll keep this brief thank you all right so slight please first off I know there's been a lot of anticipation and perhaps some anxiety around the grand Murray street bridge improvements this will include both the seismic retrofit as well as barrier rail project this project unfortunately has met some delays in the revised timeline due to permitting and private weight issues that the staff are working through will result in us pushing the groundbreaking out to not not before spring of 2023 so we'll keep the community updated there will obviously be some significant traffic impacts associated with the project once it gets underway as we wanted to update the community on this important project as it goes along next slide we've had a bit of a roller coaster week coming out of the primary election and I wanted to touch specifically on two of our important local measures to provide some updates on where things currently stand we are actually anticipating an update to the vote counts within a matter of minutes today and there are there are still several thousand votes yet to be counted by that by the county folks office however based on current trends it looks as though measure E will most certainly receive voter approval that means that we will be establishing a six district election structure including for the first time in history a independently elected mayor and that mayor would be elected to a four-year term as part of this and in anticipation of moving into this new structure Bonnie our city clerk is going to be working with the county clerk's office to be offering the candidate info night for any candidates that may be interested in running for the seats that'll be open this November and that includes includes the new mayor's seat as well as council seats for district four and district six so I'm going to make that information available you can find that on our website the maps are also available on our website folks are interested in understanding what district they may live in and that can be candidate info night will take place on June 21st from 6 to 7 30 so more information to come on that that's fine so measure F has turned out to be more of a male liner we are currently reporting a fraction of a percentage difference in terms of yes and no votes again we're going to continue to closely monitor that the nearly 25,000 votes are yet to be counted but the current trend and trajectory of this measure certainly has us concerned so we're going to continue monitoring this we attribute this close count to a number of things not the least of which is some of the challenging storm clouds we have on the horizon when it comes to our national economy we're now facing nearly a 50 year high in inflation along with a number of other concerning economic trends and that certainly influences whether or not the community wants to be supportive of a sales tax increase during this current challenging time that we're experiencing without being said I'm still crossing my fingers we're going to continue to monitor this closely and we'll see what the final outcome is for measure F as we move along slightly and to provide a few updates on our homelessness response work more specifically the ongoing work that all of our city departments are collaborating on along with our homelessness response team on the bench lands closure I know this is a topic that our community has been as I close interest in wanting to provide a few updates slide please by and please to share that our homelessness response team along with support from all of our city departments has been successful and fully standing up the city overlook shelter of the former armory space that includes 75 spaces 50 of which are occupied and 10 spaces that are being kept available on demand for those that need them the team is also working on options of really maximizing the full capacity that we have up at the overlook space and of course this is in addition to the river street shelter that we've also been operating and in conjunction with the ongoing conversations we're having with housing matters the county just ended up with additional shelters space so that work will continue to be ongoing and I want to applaud the efforts of larry and walley and our homelessness response team to continue pursuing all the shelter options that we have available to us there's also been some information shared recently in the media regarding the county's demobilization of their COVID funded armory shelter and the ocean hotel shelter as part of that work the county is in the process of and has responsibility for finding alternative shelter locations for the folks that are still utilizing the shelter sites there in the process of moving through that work as we are also standing up shelter I'm also unfortunately have to share with the community that over the last couple of weeks we had a significant attack on our park shark this was a targeted attack associated with our ongoing homelessness response work and specifically our plan closure of the of the benchlands camp this attack resulted in over $500,000 in damages the destruction of several of our of our parks vehicles and it's really added to the to the sense of concern for our employees safety and the safety of our community so as we move through our plan closure of the benchlands the closure really as a reminder depends on a number of factors that includes our ability to staff as well as hire contractors to support the closure and support work that has to happen along with the plan closure that has been an ongoing challenge and these concerns around safety have only exacerbated those challenges as we work through that with our collective departments it's also underscore the need to really redouble our efforts to ensure that both inside and outside the camp are safe we have been reevaluating the process for closure looking at ways we can help to ensure site control and safety of the camp as we move through the closure process we've also engaged in conversations with the county sheriff due to how stretched our police department is we're down essentially 30% of our officers as things currently stand and the county sheriff has been willing to engage in conversations around how they can help increase safety of the camp with with more public safety presence as we move through the closure process and then of course as I mentioned earlier almost all of our departments in some shape or form are assisting with standing up adequate shelters so there are alternative locations for folks that are in the benchlands camp to be relocated to but with these recent developments and these concerning incidents impacting the safety of our employees we are reevaluating the overall closure timeline and we're anticipating that that will stand beyond July into late summer so this continues to be a real Herculean lift as we move through closure and what has now been a camp that's been in place for over two years so we ask for some patience as we try to move through this process and help define these individuals at with safe alternative shelter options next slide as the council knows we have also been working towards standing up a safe parking program as part of our oversized vehicle ordinance to help ensure that individuals that are in our community looking for safe places to sleep safe places to park that we have a number of options available to them in fact on today's agenda we have a contract with the association of faith communities to put a contract in place to provide 24 seven program programming with wraparound supported services this program will accommodate approximately 22 vehicles at any given time and the program will be located in tandem with the shelter that we already have established at the armory and the overall location so with the council's approval today we anticipate standing these services up this July and this will help to ensure that we have tier one, tier two, and tier three safe parking options available to those that would seek to utilize them next slide and then lastly I wanted to provide a quick update on some exciting developments related to the Coral Street Astro planning effort we were successful in May in completing the purchase of 125 Coral Street this provides some some real opportunities to better leverage the campus as a whole that work will also be tied in to the design shred master plan for the campus we expect those bids to come in on June 22nd and we will then move into a process to help inform the development of a navigation center and permanent supportive housing on that site some more to come as part of our collective efforts to stand up additional sheltering options and permanent facilities and that's all I had for you this morning I think answering questions any questions from council members council member Myers I don't want to disclose anything that wouldn't be appropriate but I'm just curious just for the public do we are we is it still a continuing investigation into the destruction of the city staff vehicles as a council member Myers I don't have additional details that I can share at this time but our police department along with our fire department are actively investigating that incident and with regards to the bench lands um I'm just curious for the public um as we're able to find folks um moving into other accommodations or shelters either here locally or I'm assuming we are also I saw in the in the recent reports that the county has also some 200 some odd two or 90 housing vouchers so you know with this big effort about the rehousing way of trying to get people um into more stable situations um what is our call what is the sort of what is the strategy about someone coming back because they either didn't accept the shelter or they felt it was you know it wasn't accommodating maybe of their pets I don't know exactly you know but you know I'm just curious um if we are trying to you know move people out of the bench lands into other facilities and and uh shelter etc um I'm assuming that at some point you know we sort of in a sense have to kind of put up a closed sign in a sense um because that is not a sustainable site obviously long term because of flooding and all the other things that unfortunately we've learned over the years I'm just curious about how we are managing anyone who's trying to come back into that side and whether or not they are redirected or how we manage that yeah so I would respond with um a couple of thoughts council member buyers first and foremost we are no longer sending individuals to the bench lands that decision was made a few weeks ago as we moved into this closure effort we did discover last week that some of the individuals that had secured alternative shelter insights for one reason or another made the decision to return to the bench lands so that is certainly part of the challenge that we're encountering as we move through the closure and we do think it warrants um getting getting some stronger controls of the physical site in place to help ensure that once individuals are relocated we don't have the possibility of folks repopulating the camp again the real goal here is to get all the individuals that are in the bench lands into a safe secure um a higher standard of shelter as we move forward so we can avoid the situations we've had in the past of um you know those areas that are really at flood risk as we move into the winter um from happening so that's that's the process we're moving towards um and of course all of that also overlays with the safety issues we're having um and having challenges fighting contractors that are willing um to operate in and around the bench lands which is making our work um more difficult and my last thank you and my last question is um uh are we finding that the folks there do we get a sense of where you know one of the questions I get a lot is are people just coming here to Santa Cruz because you know there's a campsite that they can be in are we getting any sense from I know we have not I don't believe the um the um the the survey from this winter has been completely vetted yet but I'm just curious about um there's a lot of cities doing a lot of this work right now um all over California this sort of unfortunate situation because of non you know continued sort of non direction from the state cities are now really grappling with these issues with these uh unfortunately unfortunate folks are you getting a sense that people are moving in moving in from other areas or do we have any sense of that at all in terms of the flow of people or have they been there for the couple of years or just curious um if you have any and if if we really haven't been able to sense this that no worries if you don't have data or information on that yeah council member Myers I think it's a it's a combination you know the past point in time counts if you're referring to uh have shown that a majority of the individuals are locally rooted uh we certainly know both from the data and anecdotally that we also have individuals that are traveling into Santa Cruz from all parts of the country for different reasons and as we move through the closure part of the goal and we're doing this in tandem with the counties to stand up a mobile case management office on site so we could do some of that triaging in case management work to get a better sense of what services individuals might be able to access whether or not they have family member or friend that we could help them get in contact with and perhaps shelter so it's it's really it's really all of the above we're going to be pursuing you know all options in front of us to identify those alternative sheltering options in addition to the direct work we're doing to stand up these these shelter sites okay thank you for the report thank you council member Myers a council member Cummings thank you for that presentation I guess the one question I have is I'm wondering if you could describe or if you have any information on what the county is doing for the individuals who are currently at the Armory and the Oceana hotel um that you're being that you know if those people end up going out on the street that's then just another group that we're going to have to help find housing for or you know or shelter and so I'm just curious if we can maybe update the community on what the county is currently doing and maybe even and maybe also the number of people that they're trying to provide alternatives forward in those two shelters so council member Cummings I'll admit that at the timing of the closure of those facilities is certainly not ideal I know it hinges on one time pandemic funding that the county had received that is running out as we move into the the end of the fiscal year they have committed to finding alternative locations for the individual still residing in those locations I don't have the number right off hand I want to say it's around 50 individuals that are still seeking alternative sheltering sites and of course you know we're wanting to ensure that the additional facilities that are being stood up at the overlook are net addition to total beds and spaces that could be made available to to those that need that so outside of that the county does have a few home key projects that are in the pipeline one that was recently awarded body dune the veterans facility but they also have two other locations one in south county and one in vint county that they're in consideration for at the state level they have also agreed along with the investments we're making at the housing matters campus that with the investment in the physical infrastructure whether that that takes the form of additional pallet shelters or some other form that they would be willing to fund the operations associated with those additional shelter sites as a another partnership opportunity and then of course as part of the closure as I mentioned earlier we've been in conversations with housing for health hsa health and human services county sheriff's office to all bring resources to bear to assist with with the closure thank you thank you councilmember Cummings um if there are no further questions that concludes our city managers report thank you so much yeah but let's see I'll now call on the city clerk to provide any updates to the calendar we have no changes to what was in the packet thank you now we are at the consent agenda these are items number eight through 23 on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this is the time to call in if you'd like to comment on items eight through 23 instructions should be on your screen please remember to mute your streaming device and raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer all items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion are there any council members who wish to comment on or pull any items I will be pulling items 24 and 25 to have that be a separate motion since I'm deep disqualified from those two items mayor 24 and 25 are consent public hearing thank you I'm jumping ahead on my myself um so are there any other council members on items eight through 23 and council member Cummings I'd like to pull items numbers 13 and 21 13 and 21 okay and council member Calentary Johnson I have a comment on 13 comment on 13 council member Brown I have questions on 18 and 20 18 and 20 council member Cummings did you have one more I forgot I had questions on 14 17 18 and 20 14 17 18 and 20 questions okay so we'll start first um um there is a uh we're pulling items 13 and 21 so uh we will go to the other items questions on number 14 we'll start with that for members of the public this is um number 14 is a war contract for graffiti abatement services and um I had been speaking with some folks that invented to a few events and where it was pointed out that you know the seawalls mural project has gone up and on some and these some of the projects some of the murals that have gone up have been on walls that were um some of the hardest hit by graffiti where they required a lot of removal and since those murals have gone up many of those walls have no longer been experiencing you know this kind of graffiti and so I was just curious about um whether we can get an update on you know how how much we've seen graffiti go down in the recent the near the recent future um recent times and also we can get this kind of some sense of um how frequently the graffiti removal folks are going out because if there are these alternative ways that have been determined graffiti um you know whether there's an opportunity for us to get some kind of savings on on the service um I will call on uh economic development director Bonnie Lipscomb to answer that question since that department oversees the graffiti abatement program thank you mayor Brunner and thanks for your question councilmember Cummings um you know it we actually have been exploring um this concept of working with artists in the community um particularly around murals and opportunities to help reduce graffiti you know across the city so that is actually an ongoing conversation we think we might be able to pull something together likely for next year in response to your question on on is it a deterrent absolutely we have found where and that's one of the reasons why we have that program in our department is we really do see that it both benefits the community particularly in our commercial areas to have murals on walls as a deterrent to graffiti um but also it's just sort of that impact positive impact that murals have in our community and um art has on economic impact in our community um as part of and sort of number of graffiti tags when we do put put up a mural it does um reduce the amount of tagging we have and in fact for some of our larger scale murals it it really reduces it to very low numbers and sometimes you know we'll go really long periods without getting tagged whereas some of our problem areas um without a mural or aren't conducive to murals areas do are frequently tagged so that's part of the conversations that we're having ongoing is looking at some of these areas um that may be suitable for murals and other works of art um and to see if we can pull a contract together specifically around that um as far as the numbers overall this year we could follow up and either provide that to the city manager for a future update to actually provide you some numbers of how things are trending as far as graffiti tags we do have that on a monthly report I don't have it in front of me right now but that is something that we report on we also report on it to our downtown management corporation meetings that we have um every other month so that's something we can follow up and provide to you and then in the near future thanks yeah just see it as you know there's any potential for us to have any kind of savings around that you know why not explore all possibilities thank you thank you we agree thank you councilmember Cummings you had a question on number 17 yeah this is um general obligation refunding bonds um and one of the questions that I received from um a member of the public was how many more years before the bonds are going to be paid off welcome finance director bobby mickey thank you for joining us uh yes thank you um good afternoon mayor brunner and members of the council um I I don't have the exact uh date I'm looking for that right now I don't have the exact date on that um at the moment off the top of my head but I can certainly research that and get back to the council on that one okay thanks okay councilmember brown you had a question on number 18 thank you mayor actually my questions on 18 and 20 kind of fit together so I don't want to jump ahead but I I may end up raising both here um so that I was really glad to see for item 18 this is um sp1 funding for uh road projects and um we did get uh um overview of where that money would be going and I'm I'm just wondering um is is there funding if what if we could get a sense of what those priority areas will be for the street maintenance uh road maintenance and then relatedly with item 20 the um measure d funding has a line item for the bay drive bicycle improvements and this is the one that I'm kind of thinking about um in relation to 18 as well uh there is an allocation for this year and it's 50 000 I believe and I'm just wondering if that is um you believe that's sufficient to do that project I'm it's I know it's a priority and I'm really glad to see it um but if not then is there additional money programmed in the sp1 or through the sp1 funding to complete that project um and then just generally for the sp1 projects where the priorities are and welcome public works director mark dettle thank you for those questions uh councilmember brown I'm going to defer to josh as a project manager and of that um of the sp1 he kind of manages that or nathan assistant director can answer those questions for you directly thank you and I'm sorry I didn't get these in earlier I it was a big agenda and it just I got jammed so apologies hi nathan win assistant director public works to the engineer I'm happy to answer your question and councilmember brown with regards to the sp1 funding um that that rm uh road maintenance and rehabilitation account funding uh goes to our pavement program that's c 409 project um some of those projects that are up and coming with regards to our paving program we are looking at ocean street um we are looking at San Lorenzo river we're looking at bay street um those aren't fully funded quite yet um you know we are we are struggling to kind of put together a full funded package but those that additional 500 plus thousand will be directed towards um those next priority streets for paving um as it relates to item 20 um those funds uh in particular the sp1 funding can't be used towards um you know the the bay street protected bike lane projects those are restricted funds for pavement uh improvement and so um there are the our additional funds that we're looking at to fully fund the protected bike lane uh on bay street which is some tda funding and we will actually be proposing an h highway safety improvement program grant to look at the bay street corridor for further improvements beyond the protected bike lanes so some some lighting some speed feedback signs etc wonderful to hear thank you so much yeah thank you Nathan you and does that answer your questions councilmember brown great and councilmember Cummings you also had a question on number 18 that was that was my question okay wonderful councilmember meyers did you have a question no i'm sorry i i do have a question on 20 when we get there so sorry okay well we're ready to move on to oh um bobby magie welcome back do you have an answer uh yes i do thank you mayor to answer answer councilmember Cummings question on the expiration date of the um of the bonds on today's agenda uh i just confirmed with finance staff that the expiration date of those bonds is september uh september first of 20 29 great thank you that was a quick answer and a quick response okay so moving on to 20 councilmember brown councilmember Cummings and councilmember meyers um to go to councilmember brown i think maybe your question was answered uh councilmember Cummings do you have a question on number 20 yeah mine was similar to the bike lane improvements um so okay councilmember meyers yeah i had a question on the um there is a line item i think it's for 200 000 it's for the swanton boulevard um i think it's a a bike lane i was just curious what uh i know that project i know there's been various grants that have been applied for that but i'm just curious if i could get a very quick update on that uh swanton boulevard uh budget item claire would you like to join okay happy happy to jump in on that claire globally transportation planner uh glad to see you all we yesterday submitted a grant for the swanton boulevard multi-use path to the california active transportation program cycle six just shy of three million dollars would fund a multi-use path on the west side of swanton boulevard a sidewalk on the north side of delaware connecting between antinelli pond and the coastal sciences campus and a two-way multi-use path on the south side of delaware uh connecting between swanton boulevard and the ucsc multi uh ucsc coastal science campus as well as intersection improvements at delaware natural bridges and delaware swanton so the overall project that we've talked about for the last couple years we're really hopeful that the package that we submitted will be successful and we anticipate finding out in early fall and uh is the 200 000 uh is that match or you know we actually had some brilliant engineering back here and we're able to make the project budget come in under three million dollars so we did not have to provide a match we will reserve that funding for any um optional extras that we want to see that go above and beyond what the grant would provide for and if we don't program it to this project then we do as measure d funds have the flexibility to program it for other projects okay great thank you so much that grant works you'll make a lot of people happy over here thank you yes thank you cap member mires thank you claire good to see you back okay i think that answers all our questions um so then we will um go out to um public comment on items number eight through 23 with the exception of 13 and 21 if there are members of the public that would like to speak now it's the time to do so i will go out to attendees raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand and you will hear an announcement so it looks like we have some hands raised this is on items number eight through 23 with the exception of 13 and 21 we will hear those separately trace on spinner mh tan is the first name go ahead and unmute welcome and let us know which item you're speaking to star six to unmute yourself or uh the unmute feature on the uh computer see it doesn't look like it's unmuting you there's six on your phone or there we go hello this is trajan spinner welcome which item are you speaking to um mh can it's a grant i can't remember the grant name i apologize but it's mh came the whole program the core grant i apologize okay um we are not on those items yet so um we're taking um public comment on items 13 to 23 with the exception of i'm sorry 8 to 23 with the exception of 13 and 21 um the item you i'm looking to see what you would like to will be if it's the if it's the grants is it the one on the 28th yeah that item is not on the agenda today yeah i think if you're referring to core funding grants that will be on the June 28th agenda okay not today okay thank you thank you it looks like we have another name from mh can um Brianna Delgado are you calling for the same core item you can press star six to unmute yourself just to make sure i don't want to miss anybody for public comment well to next person we can come back um Pablo Velazquez go ahead and unmute yourself press star six or how's it going hi there which item are you commenting on i am commenting on item 11 i'm the one listed in there for the latinos affairs commissioner great thank you yeah i just want to take the opportunity to just quickly introduce myself my name is Pablo Velazquez i had the great opportunity to meet some of you already and it's nice to meet the rest of you today i just want to express my gratitude and your consideration for confirming my nomination today and i'm very excited to do some great work with the city or actually the county of San Cruz today and thank you thank you for your public comment uh the next name is i am watching you what item are you commenting on yeah in regards to item 17 a few details revealed in that resolution piqued my interest and i acknowledge my understanding of muni bonds from the issuer standpoint is very weak i suspect the timing of the 1999 bonds was awful occurring just before the dot com bust and missed those better lower rates later especially also using capital appreciation bonds which normally carry an even higher interest rate and do defer to a real doomsday maturity those original bonds then were a big loser for bag holders for i mean property taxpayers at least in retrospect but yes for this item somebody was showing financial discipline to cancel those in 2009 and issued refunding bonds in 2009 at better rates i note however when i look at my 2021 property tax bill 98 and 99 property assessments uh still show up there and nothing about this 2009 refunding why are they still there and why not anything instead called 2009 refunding our questions i do not see all i do see the county refunded its school bond in 2019 nice but it seems so we didn't refund any of ours again i lack the details the knowledge about such but since taxpayers surely we were paying more than $515,000 a year for 10 years before 2009 and now for 13 more years after we've paid then easily over 12 million dollars at least so far on that original sell 7 million dollar bond and all that intervening time and other refunding was not done however the last two years 2021 saw historical lows below 2 percent for munis but this year's rates have now exploded higher to double that or kind of explode higher will continue to do so i ask a serious question did we miss our big chance to refund all our taxpayer bonds at historic lower yields and save taxpayers serious money last year please answer as a comment i know there are a lot of sanctuaries many bonds and i sure hope periodically your financial analysts like the ones back in 2009 are reviewing bond holdings and the market to seize opportunities to save the taxpayer's money no matter how little or a lot perhaps in addition to spending a lot of time creating justifications to jack green building permit fees up 400 percent i also note for the resolution the refunding was for up to eight million which is more than the original voter authorized bond well why was that anyway please answer all these many questions thank you thank you for your public comment we have the name steven ronzano go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself or choose the raise the unmute on your computer hi steven welcome you're still muted there we go hello my name is steven ronzano i wanted to speak about the mh can core grant issue and i'm sorry to interrupt you but that item is not on today's agenda the core items will be on june 28th city council meeting agenda not on today's agenda uh next uh caller is surge go ahead welcome surge hi good afternoon um mayor bruner there there is a confusion and i think i know why some of the callers are confused um the human uh care alliance and some of the nonprofits we're hoping to speak about number 27 the proposed budget um so uh for the i'll i'll log back on for that one but i think that's what people are hoping to make some comment to get a um a set aside for some more core funding is that thank you is that your public comment um and do you know what time number 27 is happening for a lot of people that are holding on for all day long 27 um around two two o'clock potentially and there's always the option for anything not on the agenda um during oral communications and um that will be at six o'clock okay thank you very much hopefully that's we it looks like that's it for any attendees and public comment for items 8 through 23 with the exception of 13 and 21 which were pulled okay so i will bring this back to the council um let's see for emotion i see vice mayor Watkins yeah mayor i'm happy to move the consent agenda with the exception of item 13 and item 21 which have been great thank you and councilmember holder i'm happy to second that we have a first by vice mayor Watkins and second by boulder may we have a roll call vote councilmember calentary johnson hi boulder hi coming this mayor Watkins the mayor brunner hi that motion passes unanimously thank you and now we will um return to item 13 which councilmember Cummings pulled councilmember Cummings thank you yes so the members of the public are aware item number 13 is contract for operation of the safe parking tier three program um and this is a the motion will be to authorize and direct the city manager to execute contract and the former crew by the city attorney with the association of big communities for safe parking tier three operations and this is a program that will be operating um up at the armory into the city manager's point with sort of about 22 vehicles um in 2020 um when i was mayor when the the armory when we first opened the program there one of the things that we did was we went and had a community meeting with the neighborhood that was um just adjacent to the armory and um at that meeting we were able to hear their concerns and and address some of the issues that they had and given that we're now going to be reopening a program and adding additional services there i just wanted to include in the motion that a similar meeting would be held with those community members because they asked that if we deviated from the original plan that we set out with in the future that we meet with them and kind of give them an update and discuss um the new plans and think that the community members really appreciated we had that meeting and so wanted to provide additional direction uh so that we have that meeting and um that occurs before the um safe parking program starts up so that those community members can express any of their concerns and we can try to address them so that we can have something that's compatible with surrounding communities thank you council member Cummings and council member count Terry Johnson you had a comment on item 13 yeah i just um i wanted to acknowledge the work that's been put into uh getting us to this place um i want to acknowledge my council colleagues who supported the spring work and staff and association of faith communities we've been meeting as a subcommittee for nearly a year and there's been a lot of time and effort and outreach put into getting this tier three stood up um and i also want to just acknowledge that this is the first time our city is committing and investing in safe parking in this way afc has been doing the work successfully in our community and it's the first time that we are contributing to their work um and i want to thank afc because they've been an incredible partner in helping us design what will be a successful program thank you council member count Terry Johnson okay at this time i will take this out to public comment for item 13 contract for operation of the safe parking tier three program and if you are a member of the public that would like to comment on item 13 please raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand on the webinar controls on your computer when you you're trying to speak press star six to unmute yourself okay let's see there's no members of the public with their hands raised on this item um bring it back to council for a motion council member comings so i'll go ahead and move the staff recommendation and then i've sent some language to Bonnie um and include that staff have a community meeting at least a month prior to initiating the safe parking program at the armory to provide updates and discuss any program concerns with the surrounding community okay so the motion is as staff recommended with direction to have a community meeting at least a month prior to establishing okay is there a second i'm ready to second but i do have a question go ahead i'm wondering if larry or lee or matt could speak to any work that has already been done and also just that we are there is already homeless services that are taking place in the place that we're going to stand up these um safe parking spaces so if you could just kind of speak to that shift in transition and the work that's already been done yeah thank you council member calentary johnson i'm happy to pull larry into this conversation there is in fact meeting with the neighbors already in the works that's my understanding that that will be occurring within the next few weeks i don't know if it strictly falls within a month prior to activating the program i'd like larry to speak to the ongoing outreach we've been doing in the surrounding neighborhood and plans for an upcoming meeting yes thank you matt thank you mayor and members of council we've already communicated we sent a letter via email to neighborhood group leadership talking about all the variety of changes up at the armory sites in terms of the programs that have been operating there under the county that are now the city is setting up both the city overlook look setting up the safe parking and looking at using the inside of the armory once the county program is done so we've done that initial communication of the changes and the use of that property and the programs that we are planning moving forward and we received feedback from them asking for a community meeting so we're in the process of reaching back out to set up that meeting and meet with the neighbor neighbors to hear their you know to communicate further and hear their issues and integrate that into our planning process so thank you for that update so it sounds like this work is already being done so i'm not sure if the motion gives you further direction i'm concerned about the month piece it sounds like we already are about a month out and you've engaged the neighbors i just don't want to delay standing up programs and services that are greatly in need for a community and delay supporting the work at bfc so councilmember coming are you amenable to adjusting your language yeah we can just remove the timeline so it would just move that staff have a community meeting prior to initiating the safe parking program with armory so yeah i'm glad i would second great we have a first by councilmember Cummings and a second by councilmember calentary johnson and any further discussion i see councilmember brown thank you okay um may we have a roll call vote please councilmember is calentary johnson hi boulder hi coming brown hi mayor watkins and mayor bernard hi that motion passes unanimously thank you councilmember Cummings yeah and if i could just make one comment maybe for staff maybe this could be for the subcommittee but when that meeting is established it the community very much appreciate the fact that representatives were present for it so if they can let whether it's a subcommittee now to go or it's like the mayor and vice mayor or if it's councilmembers in general i know that when we had that initial meeting they very much appreciated having elected representatives there to hear their concerns so just wanted to put that out there thank you councilmember brown i just wanted to comment that i i do see that uh joseph jacobs has a hand up and i know we've passed the public comment portion but um given that he is representing afc i just wanted to let you know that he may be interested in commenting not sure okay oh and the attendees i see um councilmember calentary johnson that was an accident um and so let's see uh joseph jacobs um are you commenting uh on item 13 yes okay um i guess i missed you i apologize we passed public comment but if you have anything you'd like to say i just want to thank the city council for passing this motion and for working with association of faith communities we are most looking forward to working with the city on this program so thank you so much thank you thank you councilmember brown for pointing that out i appreciate it okay um moving on to item 21 uh that was pulled by council member comings item 21 was the murray street bridge seismic retrofit item uh councilmember comings this is just similar to the last um item um just acknowledging that there's going to be significant impacts on traffic in that area and so again pulled this just to make sure that there was language and and direction included that staff hold a neighborhood meeting in the area at least one month prior to breaking ground to make sure that neighbors were aware of the traffic flow plans and to take input prior to construction so really just making sure that people in the area are aware of the impacts that are going to be taking that are going to happen there and just providing an opportunity to to a community to have a community meeting for instruction to the place thank you um i see joshua spangred who is the senior professional engineer on this project has joined us do you want to speak to any existing outreach neighborhood meetings efforts plan yes yes mayor brunner members city council i'm joshua spangred senior civil engineer public works uh yeah we intend to have a robust public outreach program prior to actually going into construction once we can have the dates a little bit more lined out and in fact i see a sort of a series of meetings because once we have the dates lined out we have an initial meeting and then once we really have uh details ironed out with the contractor on board we can have the subsequent meeting we also have a webpage set up for this project in order to keep the public apprised of any scheduled delays or additional additional impacts that may be may be occurring but we intend to do have a like i said a robust public outreach effort for this and uh nathan ewin assistant public works director engineer you have additional comments nothing to add on top of that thank you okay uh council member comings are you um wanting to um make sure to include language in the motion for this okay um so i will uh take it out to public comment then at this time for anybody wishing to comment on item 21 which is mary street bridge seismic retrofit and barrier rail replacement um now is the time to raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls on your computer let's go out to attendees i don't see any hands raised on this item okay so bringing it back to council council member comings would you like to make a motion so i'll move that move the staff recommendation and direct staff to hold a neighborhood meeting in the area at least one month prior to breaking ground to make sure to make neighbors aware of the traffic flow plans and take input prior to construction okay we have a first big council member comings and a council member brown may we have a role or is there any other discussion you don't want to exclude anybody okay mayor i do i just i'm not i'll support the motion but it sounds like the staff already planned these public meetings so i'm just a little bit confused why we're giving additional motion staff direction maybe it's the 30 day time period i'm not i'm just a little confused because i've heard from in both items we just discussed that there is um planned public meetings and outreach so i'll support the motion but it feels very duplicative and i'm not sure that we're really giving direction because i believe the staff is already into the work so i'll support the motion but it does feel duplicative to me so it's it's just a little bit odd to me well i i'll just add that i think in the staff report it really said something about a robust you know outreach and engagement plan given that this is such a critical infrastructure project affecting so many in our county so you know kudos to keep going with that um but again similar to kelvin remayer's comments this is definitely duplicate duplicative in terms of what is already outlined okay um looks like that that concludes our discussion thank you for everyone's comments and discussion and council member Cummings you're calling this out and emphasizing this importance uh so let's move forward with a roll call vote council member kelin tarry johnson hi older hi oh i coming i'm sorry hi um brown by smear wadkins hi and mayor broder hi that motion passes unanimously looks like that concludes our consent agenda items and so now we are let me get to my notes here moving on to next up is consent public hearing uh these are items 24 and 25 on our agenda um and these are items that i am disqualified from so i will be handing this uh item over to vice mayor wadkins no problem i'm happy to facilitate this process so for our consent public hearing items items 24 and 25 um for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you want to comment on item 24 and or 25 now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen all items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion um item 24 is the the subject of item 24 is that cooperative retail management business real property improvement district assessment for fiscal year 2023 and item 25 is the downtown association parking and business improvement area assessment for fiscal year 2023 are there any uh council members who would like to pull either item council member mayors i'm not interested in pulling any items but i would be willing to move both items i believe they're both second readings so when the time comes i'm happy to make a motion okay thank you mayor vice mayor thank you council member okay we'll go out to public comment before we come back for that and we'll see if there's any member of the community who would like to address this on this item um let's see please raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting the raise hand feature in the webinar controls on your computer and um when your time is uh when you are identified to speak we'll go ahead and allow you um two minutes to speak and i see one hand raised lily um from nmh can are you wanting to comment on item 24 or 25 on our consent agenda public hearing agenda go ahead and unmute yourself if yes and again you can unmute yourself by um pressing star six or unmuting yourself via the zoom feature i'm not sure lily are you interested in addressing this here on item 24 25 i'm gonna go ahead and guess that probably not um go ahead and allow a few more minutes a few more seconds okay well why don't we just come back to the council then at this time and council member mires we'll go ahead and go to your motion and i'll go ahead and see if there's a second i am going to go ahead um just and move uh item number 23 let me double check here 24 and 25 yeah 24 and 25 let me just grab my so i will move item number 24 which is a resolution confirming the cooperative retail management business real property improvement district annual plan and levy in the retail management business property improvement district assessments and item number 25 um i would move resolution confirming the parking and business improvement area fiscal year 2023 plan prepared by the downtown association and letting the parking and business improvement area assessments for fiscal year 2023 great this second what's over colder okay see that as a second any further discussion seeing them we'll go ahead and then take the vote to you bonnie council member it's calentary johnson i holder i coming so that passes with six in support and with mayor bruner um needing to recuse herself so i'm able to vote on those items i'll go ahead and hand it back to our mayor thank you vice mayor whatkins um at this time uh i will take a 10 minute break and we will return at 110 for our next item which is item number 26 on our general business parks and recreation commission appointment thank you council members can turn on your cameras great thank you we've been going since 9 30 this morning so um thank you for everyone's patience the short breaks are vital to our well-being and continuing through this long meeting so we are ready to continue with item number 26 on our agenda this is a parks and recreation commission appointment for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen we will begin with public comment and then i will call on to bonnie bush our city clerk to lead the council through the nomination and action process you are interested in commenting raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone i don't see any hands raised for this item okay i will bring it back and i will call on city clerk bonnie bush thank you mayor council members do you receive applications for four people for the park commission um bradley and joe uh deborah christie or hey leonardo cruz and samantha rose and we have one opening so if anybody has a nomination you can raise your hand or i can do a roll call you want to go ahead uh councilmember calentary johnson it's going to nominate bradley and joe i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing the last name correctly councilmember brown i'd like to nominate whore hey cruise any other nominations it looks like we'll have a vote between whore hey leonardo cruz and bradley and joe um councilmember calentary johnson bradley and joe holder bradley and joe go ahead leonardo cruz whore hey cruz councilmember meyer bradley on health vice mayor watkins bradley and now and mayor brudder bradley inhale bradley is appointed thank you to both bradley and whore hey and deborah and the other applicants okay thank you so much next up on our agenda is item number 27 this school year 2023 proposed budget adoption for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from council we will then take public comment and return to council for deliberation and action for members of the public that wish to comment on specific core programs we will be discussing that on our june 28th meeting core in relation to our fiscal year budget adoption is a one bucket line item and so the contents of core in detail will be discussed on june 28th okay so i will now hand it over to uh lupita alamos our budget manager and bobby mickey our finance director welcome thank you mayor um share my screen i have a brief presentation here okay and just to remind the uh the council you've pretty much seen everything that's on today's presentation but we did want to bring this back and refresh your memory so this is the fiscal year 2023 budget adoption and on the agenda for today's presentation is the proposed budget a summary of the budget solutions as well as some of the challenges that we see on the on the horizon and so with that i'll dive into the fiscal year 23 proposed budget so the major expenditures in 2023 includes some significant increases in liability and property insurance costs it does include a set aside of five million dollars for priority one capital projects we do know that the city's erp system will be sunsetting in fiscal year 27 and so we do need to start setting aside some fundings for that now um this invests in organizational capacity to implement council goals and strategies and then as the council knows we're currently negotiating um bargain unit contracts for five different units major investments include homelessness response um that's responsive to employee and community feedback um taking a very proactive strategy and a citywide integrated approach to solutions there's a need to build some capacity and then uh we are going to continue to work with our lobbyists to find systemic solutions that are needed at the state and federal level so for the general fund um in fiscal year 2023 the the total budgeted amount is 127 million dollars which is primarily comprised of personnel and then some services supplies and a few other things um so the revenue to support that is approximately 122 million dollars plus 5.2 million dollars in unrestricted general fund reserves citywide the operating expenditures total 290.6 million 44 of that um is general fund money and then as you can see on the graph here there's a number of other funds that are included in in the budget as well and this is the uh the capital improvement program by our capital investment program i'm sorry by department um obviously uh um public works comprises a very large amount of this as as well as the water department and then a number of other departments that have items in in their capital program so as i mentioned during the budget hearings these are the the priority one um capital projects as a group and we will be asking the council today to approve this list as a group um and then these will be further evaluated by staff during the year um this is not a priority list here this is the group of all priority one projects totaling just short of 5 million dollars the unfunded capital needs for this year is identified to the departments is currently estimated at 365 million dollars so obviously putting five million dollars into the budget this year is barely a dent in in what the known needs are going to be in the future so this slide shows the uh the current general fund reserves um the unrestricted amount which is on the top line there uh is budgeted to be drawn all the way down to zero in fiscal year 2023 now one of the questions that that i've received a couple of times is um on the annual report the city's annual report we noticed that there is some funding that is uh that is listed um and that is correct from an accounting perspective it all rolls up into the act for um which includes a number of of funds that are technically general fund reserves however they are restricted such as the op-ed reserve the pension reserve and the stabilization reserve so the total amount of general fund reserves is 20.89 however i will point out that that is all restricted funds there the unrestricted amount is budgeted to be drawn all the way down to zero and so we'll talk a little bit about the summary of budget solutions in order to achieve a balanced budget this year so knowing that the city does have a a long-range structural deficit issue um we asked the departments this year to have a target reduction of a total of 2.3 million dollars uh departments went back and looked at their budgets and came up with proposed solutions of a little bit more than that a little over 2.4 million dollars in proposed solutions this is a combination of one-time solutions as well as structural cuts and when we look at that by department you can see that that 2.4 million is comprised primarily of police fire um and some money in planning and community development um but i will say that across the board all departments did contribute a fair share into finding these structural solutions for this year in order to achieve a balanced budget and we wanted to summarize a little bit of the american rescue plan act commonly known as arpa so in may 2021 um 450 thousand dollars was used to uh end the furloughs early the council has directed some homelessness response programs um that's as you can see on the chart here that's just short of five million dollars and then the remaining um approximately nine million dollars is sitting in a special revenue account right now um which is uh been identified as revenue loss so we want to talk a little bit about measure f also so measure f was a ballot measure on the june 7th ballot for the city of santa cruz general fund so one half of one percent sales tax or five cents on every ten dollars would be collected if the measure passes um as the council knows um the the current um uh uh ballots uh on the on the county's website shows that it's a very very close vote at the moment so the measure f would maintain essential services and if if this measure ends up passing it would raise about eight million dollars annually if the measure does not pass we wanted to do a little bit of modeling so what the budgets would look like in the future absent to any budget solutions um when we built this into our budget model we included uh five million dollars annually towards future cip projects um 1.6 million dollars in new positions um roughly four million dollars in ongoing homelessness response programs the set aside um for the erp system for the next four years uh some one-time money for a homelessness cip a cost um we made some assumptions for modest growth and employee costs as i've addressed in the past um and we do know that there is going to be some liability insurance increases this model also includes the 14 million dollars that was received uh from the state of california um as well as some one-time and ongoing reductions and then uh just uh about two weeks ago we could go two weeks ago now we did receive the second half of the arpa funds the second tranche of that and so what i'll draw the council's attention to is this graph on on the right here as you can see that in uh the available reserves is the blue bar there uh that is the unrestricted reserve amount and so in fiscal year 23 um that is to be drawn down to zero so without any future budget solutions if measure f would not have it does not pass we would be in a negative uh general fund reserve um by by next year some budget solutions would have to be found if measure f were to pass i'll draw your attention to the graph on the left here as you can see revenues and expenses are pretty close to each other um although we would need some solutions in theory by uh by fiscal year 2030-2031 this graph obviously also demonstrates on the right that the total amount of general fund reserves given current known expenditure plans would not equal the council's total reserve goal of 16.67 percent and so uh council council discussion items um at the budget hearings the council did make some uh comments related to the parks and recreation department and its budget just wanted to highlight for the council that uh the parks and rec department has um has suggested $178,000 in expenditure reductions in order to meet its fair share of the of the target that amount includes $96,000 in the temporary staff budget services would remain status quo and $75,000 in non-programmed budget for special projects fleet printing and a few other minor things core is one of the uh discussion items for today um we're asking council to appropriate and adopt the core fiscal year 23 budget of a little over one million dollars with transition options in uh process with the county for non-selected uh current fiscal year 22 recipients on june 28th in concert with the board of supervisors there will be transition details for non-selected fiscal year 22 recipients as well as the fiscal year 23 award recipients along with the appeal results there are a number of uh ongoing challenges that are on the horizon we wanted to address also one of those is pension costs and this graph here shows the uh historical rates of return for CalPERS over the last 30 years and as you can see this graph shows that there has been some very wild fluctuations in what CalPERS has actually earned in any given year we've had a couple of years where CalPERS earned as much as 21 percent on their investments and one year where they earned negative 24 percent the CalPERS discount rate is currently 6.8 percent which means that is the assumption that they're making uh that they will earn on their investments in any given year so the potential uh for this upcoming year um current CalPERS estimates as of mid-may they're projecting that their investments are going to earn negative 5 percent for for this current fiscal year those uh those costs will not be demonstrated to the city and the result in the normal cost and for about roughly two to three years but that's obviously not good news when uh when there's a significant decrease in in the amount of investment earnings and so what has the city done to mitigate some of the pension costs well um we have adopted the lower tier pension plans obviously um there has been a higher employer retirement contribution uh the city has made annual prepayments of pension liabilities which lowers the amount of interest payments back to CalPERS and then as I mentioned earlier there are a pension trust that are currently funded to generate returns which will pay a portion of future um payments to uh to CalPERS part of the overall fiscal strategies um finance staff will continue to work with the council's ad hoc revenue and budget committee to explore new revenue uh uh possibilities uh next year we intend to do a citywide fee study to address full cost recovery across um across the city we will continue to work with our lobbyists to secure any available federal and state funding and we currently have an rfq on the street to select a consultant to assist the city with developing a long-term financial plan and so with that I will say thank you and uh let you know that I am available for any questions as well as some of the finance staff great thank you so much for that overview presentation and some of those updates I think at this point uh do council members have further clarifying questions or vice mayor Watkins yeah I appreciate the update and the overview um I guess like my question is maybe um if there could be a little bit more of an elaboration on what uh the discussion is looking like in regards to the community concerns or the council concerns of the programs that didn't get funded through core um so I know a number of members of the community are on the call or watching the zoom and I just wanted to see if you could just sort of further refine or clarify what you are doing and what you anticipate happening on the 28th. Sure uh council member Watkins Bobby I could take a crack at that and then um for us as a team we're welcome to chime in um so as part of this joint process that we've embarked on with with the county both the board of supervisors through their deliberation as well as the council through the initial core hearings received feedback from our community partners and specifically those that had historically been funded and were not recommended for funding through this upcoming three-year cycle in response to that fund that feedback and direction from the council to explore what opportunities there may be to just help soften that transition for some of those organizations that were not successful through this round of funding. We've been in ongoing conversations with our county colleagues and I know they've been in conversations with their board as well to talk through what that might look like so we don't have all those details to share today but our plan is to return on the 28th it's the same day that county staff will be returning to the board supervisors with options as well and really again the spirit behind that is to explore what could be done to try to soften the blow to those organizations that weren't successful. One of the recommendations we are planning on bringing forward as well is utilizing the community programs committee subcommittee of the council to explore what other funding sources could be brought to bear as we as we move forward here core is one of many ways that we help to support the community organizations that we work with so I think that is also work that we could do that's ongoing with our community programs committee as well so that works somewhat fluid it's underway we plan on bringing that back as those details come into focus on the 28th today and this was mentioned earlier by Bobby and the team the council's approving the total bucket of core funding which is about a million and eight eighty thousand dollars I believe that's included in the proposed fiscal year 23 budget and then the individual allocations will run through the core process and be part of the discussion on the 20th. Thank you yeah I appreciate the work that's being done and and I look forward to the conversation on the 28th. Thank you vice mayor Watkins thank you city manager Matt Huffaker and and for bringing up the core item I do see a lot of hands raised that might be wanting to speak to core and you know the core awards that we set aside that dollar amount I think the question for clarification is can we add more dollars to that amount and I think it's important to understand that different fund sources have different uses and earmarks and can you speak briefly to the core core funding where that comes from and maybe an example of like how we've used other types of funding to help support nonprofits and community organizations. Sure I'm happy to speak to that Mayor Brunner and Bobby may want to chime in as well. The core funding is general fund dollars there are most flexible dollars and a funding stream that the council has total discretion over so if there was interest in wanting to increase that amount that's certainly direction the council could give the budget that Bobby outlined today and that our departments have been working hard on is bare bones it's drawing our general fund reserve down to zero so any increase to that total line item would require reductions to other general fund operations or to the CIP projects that were listed that are also general fund it would have to come from one of those places if that was a direction the council ended up going outside of that there's other dedicated funding streams last time we had the core discussion I believe council member Cummings raised the question about the children's fund those are other avenues that we can explore as we move forward here of some of the organizations that were not recommended for funding could qualify under some of those other funding streams so I think that's what we could do with a council subcommittee to explore what that looks like as as we move forward but what's currently proposed is general fund dollars and that total amount is currently at a million dollars and eighty eighty thousand that we're contributing to the larger core funding and the county shares I believe about nine million uh in addition to that thank you so um today's uh I called it earlier I think a line item bucket of for for core funding that we're allocating is a million eighty um and um out of the general fund and if I may really quickly vice mayor I mean um mayor I uh had a conversation with David Brody who helps us oversee the early childhood development portion of the children's fund just to kind of touch base and I think there's definite interest around if that um if as we move forward with the core process if if that process could also be used to help support some of the child care particularly those that qualify for you know for his role as the early childhood development stuff um just flexibility there so just kind of wanted to put that out there so that there is work we want to do what we can in ways that we can to support our um all of our programs and given that we do have the children's fund and these partners who have infrastructure in place I think that could likely be one way too excuse me that's a great example vice mayor Watkins um I know that I received many emails and even um regarding uh child care programs and even from one of our city employees um with um one of the program child care programs not receiving core funding and the impact that would have and so looking at other funding streams that could assist programs like that such as the children's fund um would be the perfect uh direction I think for the community programs midi um to look at okay um council member Cummings and then council member Myers thank you mayor thank you for that presentation um one quick comment before um getting into my questions I do want to point out that this is an aesthetic thing with graphs if you use red and green people who are colorblind can't see that so just something to think about for accessibility and people who might have that disability um but my the one question I had is you know in the past um you know we've always tried to have a balanced budget but my understanding was that we had you know reserves and that um you know we haven't gotten to the point where our reserves are zero and so I'm just wondering if we're at a point where our reserves are reaching zero how did that come about because I've always thought that we do have a significant you know we have a substantial amount of money in our reserves we try to avoid tapping into that but I wonder if we can speak to that yeah thank you um council member Cummings so the reserves themselves actually total um a little over 20 million dollars this year but like I said that is uh primarily restricted funds so they they have specific uses that they can be used for the unrestricted amount that the council could in theory use for anything that is the amount that's being drawn down to zero uh in this year's budget thank you um and then I guess um sort of a question comment um I think some people in the community who've been reaching out so I think that you know because we had that additional day when we're gonna hear about the core funding we're thinking that we were gonna have that discussion at the same time in conjunction with our budget because if there was a desire for us to adjust the budget in any way to fund those programs that'll be an opportunity to do that and so I think there might be some confusion as it came up earlier even in our meeting that you know it sounded like the core discussion was going to be on the 28th but then we're actually making some decisions today and so um I just bring that up because I think it might be worth if we're gonna and with the uncertainty around measure f um you know if there's an opportunity for us to have this discussion all at once as it relates to the decisions we're making on funding it might help members of the community understand what actions we're taking today versus what we're taking on the 28th so that's just a comment that I wanted to make. Thank you councilmember Cummings and would Bobby McGee or Matt Huffaker would you like to speak to that? Sure Mayor Burner so a couple of comments regarding our long-term financial health as Bobby had mentioned as we move through this budget cycle we're going to be embarking on a long-term financial plan that I think will allow us to better flush out what impact either the passage of measure f or the failure of measure f will have on our longer term financial trajectory because we knew that it was unlikely we'd have any certainty around the passage of the measure one way or another when it comes to having to finalize the budget we haven't built in any assumptions into the fiscal year 23 budget one way or another for measure f and there's a good chance I would argue that even by the 28th we may not have certainty or by the time we have to post the packet for the 28th given given the pace at which the votes are being tabulated and how close the election is and likely that there will be a recount given how close the election is so I think we're going to need to proceed without having certainty around measure f and just acknowledging that that's going to be some longer term analysis we're going to have to do once we get the final outcome when it comes to the core funding really because of the position we're in the the total bucket of funding that's being proposed and that we're contributing to the larger pool that the county's also contributing towards is all that we have available to offer towards the core programming without doing some major readjustments of the other department operations that's not something we're recommending at this point the discussion on the 28th was really around within that bucket of funding how does the council want to divvy up the funding and whether or not that's consistent with what the recommendations were the key amount of core or whether or not the council wants to make some modifications to why those recommendations were that's the intent for the 28th and it was our anticipation that that could be done regardless of the direction that the council lands on today on the budget or that the budget didn't need to wait until that discussion should say thank you I wonder what the timing and alternative funding streams recommendations and kind of community programs committee looking at this what that timeline would look like exploring other options of funding outside of core funding if if if we move forward with this total dollar amount allocated to full core funding and what what do you anticipate the timeline being for looking at other options of funding to help those programs and organizations that didn't weren't awarded core funding to explore other options yeah thanks for the question Mayor Burner I think there's two pieces to this one is whatever agreement we reach with the county over the next week or so based on the current cycle the current three-year cycle and and whether we can reach some agreement or compromise on providing the transition plan for those organizations that weren't funded I think that's piece one or part one and then part two would be working with the council subcommittee on other options other funding streams and working with those organizations to provide some technical assistance as well to kind of help them pursue whether it's city funding or other grants that may be available providing some ongoing technical assistance to those organizations as well because the economic environment is so fluid we anticipate we're going to be most likely bringing more frequent budget updates and we typically would particularly as we wait to see what happens with measure f so that could be as soon as this fall or this winter but we I don't have a definitive timeline at this point okay thank you a council member Myers yeah I had a couple of questions just to kind of I guess put this budget in context for sort of the decade ahead and Bobby I'm thinking about your chart there that even with measure f we still we're not going to get our general fund reserve back up and so you know I think it's really important that the public understand that our reserves are restricted for certain purposes except for the general fund reserve which has now gone to zero I'm not sure when that was last done but I would imagine it was probably during one of the recession periods if so we're sort of at an historic point in this budget which unfortunately happens with city budgets and local government budgets in California you know in a cyclical fashion but um you mentioned a reserve goal of 16.7 percent of the total general fund Bobby is that a council policy or is that a best practice or what what is the what is the policy direction on that specific goal for the reserve fund yeah thank you thank you council person Myers the 16.67 percent is a GFOA recommended best practice for unrestricted general fund money that is also a council adopted goal okay great and when we go to a zero general fund reserve um is the council policy have a timeline on where to rebuild that and what kinds of budget um tightening we will have to do to basically get get us back to our reserve goal and for the public um I think it's really important that all the financials that are in the city all have to do with the way that the city can then convey itself um with all kinds of the financial things we need to do such as bonding and getting money for projects it all has to do with our credit scores just like just like the rest of us and so when you go into these kinds of budget decisions and you don't acknowledge that one of your most important buckets is now empty um it it has a cascading effect across um not just you know a hundred thousand dollars here a hundred thousand dollars there it's basically you know establishing um basically a long term uh you know it we're basically going to be having to go into some really hard decision making I guess is what I'm saying and so um you know it's important for folks to understand you know where we've gone um I have not been a council member during budget other budget recession periods but I have certainly been on uh different commissions and watched the budget come and go um and it's this is a huge a huge step back for us especially um coming out of covid and all those other revenues lost as well and those lot those revenues are lost forever just for the public to know those revenues are not coming back um so let's hope that every we can go over the finish line on measure f but um just maybe just bobby if you would mind just a little bit about you know the policy around filling that reserve back up and you know how do we plan for that because um moving numbers around today to me does it seems irresponsible at this point because we have no security ahead of us at all so I'm just curious about how um that policy works and how long we have to basically put that reserve back together yeah thank you the uh the policy does not require a specific timeline on when those reserves would have to be replenished however what it does say is that we need to come up with a long-term plan um and figure it out and so that is part of what we will be doing uh with the selected consultant firm to assist us with the long-range financial plan and then of course we'll we'll bring that back to the council with what that plan would look like okay great um yeah I'm I'll just say uh publicly last of my comments I'm supportive of the budget as presented by the staff um and I know that um we all hope in the next few days we'll learn some good news about measure f but um I appreciate the staff's um really presenting the reality of what we're facing um rather than being optimistic and um uh definitely appreciate the work that's gone in and um and I appreciate really the reductions that every uh uh department across the entire city has taken um hoping was hoping for a much more um you know optimistic view as we came out of the election but um appreciate all the um work that the departments did when they did do their cuts it's unfortunate that we're back where we are but um let's hope something changes and so I'll be supporting the budget as proposed by the staff thank you thank you council member Myers council member Brown uh yeah thank you mayor and thank you Bobby for the presentation um I my question is about the timing for adoption of the budget I recognize that we're pushing up against the beginning of the next fiscal year um but I just wonder given the unknowns um if it might be worth hearing this on June 28th and I'm wondering if there's any legal reason that we couldn't do that I recognize the urgency and the practical challenges but um just wondering if we if that something that could happen yeah thank you the recommendation is to adopt the budget today for a number of reasons and one of those is is we have not made any assumptions as to the outcome of the election in this budget and so if uh the measure f is pushed over the finish line in the positive then uh then we would be coming back to the council with some recommendations on on what to do with those funds either way so um the recommendation would be to adopt the budget today but technically we could um I I would have to defer to Tony Kandadi on that one but I believe technically you could until the 28th I'm not aware of any legal obligation that the council take action at the first June meeting thanks okay are there any other questions from council members before I take it out to public comment okay thank you um at this time if you would like to comment if this uh item number 27 fiscal year 2023 proposed budget adoption is an item you'd like to comment on you can dial star nine on your phone to raise your hand or select raise hand feature in your webinar controls when it's your turn to speak press star six to unmute yourself and I will go out to the attendees and the first name is Trayzon spinner mh can go ahead and press star six hello how are you doing welcome hi thank you thank you um I was just I wanted to comment actually if you could set some money to the south mh can we uh the the area that that money is in a lot of people know you and I would hate to see my co-workers then I said okay thank you for your public comment our next member of the public has the name Sarah L hello um my name is Sarah Leonard I'm from mh can and I believe that you should adopt the budget however I would ask that you adopt the budget with a set aside of $500,000 to cover any changes that you might make on the 28th not just for mh can but for suicide prevention for the toddler center for um the advocacy Inc which advocates for elders and it also advocates for people who are vulnerable mentally who are again held against their will in psychiatric institutions a lot of things that are essential to an ethical administration of services in the city have been cut including mh can and the reason that I address ethics and that is that before we even turned in our proposal I was told on the phone that it was unlikely we would be refunded um I believe that is an unethical thing to do to have already made up their mind before they ever had the panels before they ever had our proposal I should not have been told that on the phone that should not have been a reality that should not be the reality that we are living and working in in Santa Cruz County in 2022 thank you all for your service to the community and I hope that you value mh can because we are a really good place that you won't miss us until we're gone and when we're gone you guys will wish that you kept us and the cuts that that are really impactful and I hope that they are reversed thank you thank you for your comment our next caller is lily mh can go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself or choose to unmute option on your webinar controls hi my name is lily I work at mh can well I wanted to say that I do support the budget but with a fund set aside specifically to refund some of the incredibly important programs that have been defunded like the suicide mention mh can the toddler center programs that are really important to have an ethical and healthy infrastructure in Santa Cruz which is really what we need and it's heartbreaking to think that some of these places could be cut when they're so important and do such good work in the community thank you for your comment and next member of the public Blair Boracis name is Blair Boracius I also work at mh can while I do support your budget I'm very concerned about the cuts that you are making to the services that are necessary for people who are struggling with mental health and just other things that make quality of life better for vulnerable people here so I'm very heartbroken to hear about the funds that so many of our clients could be losing services and many of us could also be losing our jobs and you know it's just I really hope that you're able to reverse this and set aside some money for mh can and other services such as the toddler center and some of the other and the other ones mentioned thank you thank you Blair our next caller is Steve Ronzano hi there yeah I'm here and hello hi welcome yeah I just wanted just I've been involved with mh can for quite a few years on an on-off basis as far as like I help provide support services and repairs and things like that and I just want to say that you know they provide a very vital service to the community as far as offering things to home not necessarily homeless people because a large portion of the homeless community is mh can or mental health clients I should say and you know they provide like such laundry you know telephone food you know a lot of very vital services that would be drastically missed by a large portion of the community if they were cut and I think that you should continue to fund them as they are very dire need and that's basically all I wanted to say is they provided a very useful service to the community thank you thank you for your comment and next member of the public has the initials ls welcome good morning this is leah samuels I'm the executive director of the human care alliance this comment piggybacks on the letter that you received from Karen Delaney and hopefully you'll have a chance to read if you have not already the core process I think is a discussion for another day HCA wanted to express gratitude that you really saw the same unavoidable glaring problem that some proposals that offered essential services did not receive funding and there was no funded proposal with a duplicate service to pick up the slack or to refer clients to and I thank you for asking hard questions expressing your willingness to work on a path to remedy this and I'm also asking that you know this process among its primary objectives was equity giving smaller organizations a greater opportunity to provide innovative services and in trying to sort out what happened I'm hoping the information that will be released and looked at moving forward will show you whether or not that really happened because from what I'm seeing so far I'm not seeing a lot of small innovative new nonprofits that were funded to pick up the slack of where the money came from I appreciate your efforts look within your own budget but I'm proposing having looked at the county's budget granted I'm not a budget expert with my peers that I urge the county to use its discretion I urge you to urge them to use their discretion that discretion is built into the core process that budget is not so tight that all the money is going towards essential county programs and services and needs there is plenty of money there to write this in a way that folks will not be waking up and having no service to replace the one that they're going to lose these are vital programs I don't care which operation offers the service but some of these are services that just this county needs to have here somewhere and if there's no new service coming in asking for funding to provide that we need to look at how we're going to provide it it's just not acceptable for individuals for my neighbors for my loved ones people I know that are using the services and I know you guys are doing a great job looking at this critically I really want to thank you there's plenty of blame to go around here my heart is so heavy after watching that board meeting that just there was there was so much work done for this process to go well and it just breaks my heart that it came out this way and I know h.c. is going to be doing our job to do some repair work so that we can have better conversations and have this go smoother next year but please do what you can to help ease this a bit this year thank you so much thank you for your input our next member of the public is Serge welcome good afternoon thanks for giving me some time the recovery cafe Santa Cruz provides a unique service which is also a needed service with with the homelessness problem that and the challenge that the city is trying to take on right now we stabilize people that are getting ready to go into housing and we also support people staying in housing what we ask is that the city council adds more to the core funding of the one million dollars anything more they can add will actually motivate the county to add significantly more a correction on something matt huffaker said the county is not putting in nine million dollars the county is putting in four point seven million four point eight million with a total of five point eight million with the city's amount I uh I ask as a smaller nonprofit that has um I won't go into the reasons we did our appeal and how the scoring was done but we're all just trying to help our community and try and find ways to do that um I would ask that the city council keeps an open mind as they hear um the nonprofits and the actual participants on how these programs affect them um and I would I'm sorry I would push back a little bit against um city council member Matthews who already said that she supports the budget as it is before hearing the uh the public there are a lot of people who are not trying to point fingers but we are trying to correct the system and support our community so I thank you for hearing my words thank you for your input our next member of the public is Helen Bradley mh can ms Helen Bradley and I'm a part of mh can I've been a part of mh camp about 18 to 19 years and uh and they have really helped me and I was a little disturbed about the the grants uh and I was just wondering could you all please set aside you know some of the mh can mh can gave me a life and I really appreciate coming here I'm 77 years old and this is my outlet and so I do uh I'm a peer specialist and I help the people and it helps it really helps me to stay stable because I'm not told it's so effective the idea of you know things but I've been around for a long time and this is a pleasure for me to come so if there's any way you all can set aside some funds for mh can it would be really appreciative thank you very much thank you for your input our next uh member of the public is I am watching you yeah this might be a little rough uh I'll remind you last year's final approved total budget revenue projection was 259 million and we see in these documents the actual total revenue was 276 million nice except the adopted total projected budget expense for 2021 was 323 million and we see the 2021 actual expenses were 293 million so for last year you planned on losing 64 million but actually only lost 17 million so strangely you beat projections making more revenue which is historically rare and then spent less than planned separately which is historically common but one could you know sarcastically ask whether you really ever get it that these two bottom line numbers need to be subtracted my general impression is that over the years when cuts need to be made in the past I recall public works usually taken a hit like a really bad landlord the place continues to fall apart no matter how much they raise the rent capital improvements when money available reads like the groundhog day script I know in spite of financial difficulties only two unfunded current positions were expendable but you're adding 16 new full-time jobs most interesting the term systemic problem is used to describe the city's financial situation but nobody really says what that is exactly what is it then I doubt it's because we don't have nearly enough non-tax paying non-profits being funded insufficient socialism or social programs a lack of free needles or government dependence not too few mayoral proclamations protests or a lack of time spent writing indignant resolution letters a lack of radical grievance bongering too little poverty importation for entitlements insufficient government employees or fat pensions or union advocacy or union political contributions or too too few k-pride transindulging ipoc crusader propaganda advocacy flags improperly hanging on public buildings six foot swells and not nearly enough in inclusivity training and slow street signs sitting in a warehouse somewhere we all have plenty of those I'm thinking it must be something I don't envy your task just an idea but try capitalism where you're supposed to provide what the people want need but you've got to face up to what they're willing to pay for to be sustainable you might need to attract more high paying taxpayers it appears from early voting results so the voters like raising taxes on other people but not so much on themselves since measure aft is losing by a little more every count update even if it wins by a hair that's hardly a mandate the public believes a relatively ever more relative to economy bigger government is the answer thanks thank you for your comment I think that concludes there's no other hands raised in this back to council for deliberation and action is there any action we can have discussion on council member comings yeah um you know given what we've been hearing the members of the public um and the uncertainty with measure f um and the ongoing conversations with the county I like to make the following motion which I sent over to Bonnie um the motion would be to continue the budget discussion to the June 28th coincide with the discussion around programs that didn't receive core funding and to better understand the outcome and impacts of measure f second okay we have a motion like council member comings seconded by council member brown if I can also speak to that a little bit as well go ahead council member coming yeah it sounds like if measure f um you know if it seems like it's going to be successful but this item is going to come back to council anyway and um you know it also seems as if we're going to be making some decisions on changes to who's getting funded under the core process that having these decisions be made at once um would make the most sense and so since we're going to have an item on the agenda on the 28th and I think some people were actually assuming that they would both be coinciding with one another budget discussion with the core funding um that's really the motivation behind this okay thank you council member comings uh now we can have discussion um uh city manager matt huffacher did you have anything you wanted to say on that sure mayor bernard and I appreciate council member comings um concerns and direction I do just want to make crystal clear that um I think it's very unlikely that we will have a final outcome on f in time for the 28th I believe that county clerk has until July 6th to certify and given how close the races and the high likelihood of a recount I don't expect that we will have an indication of what direction it's going um and time for us to finalize the budget so that that piece will be a longer term discussion I share your concerns council member comings of what impact it'll have on our long-term health but I don't expect us to know that by the by the 20th thank you uh so uh the the motion is to continue this budget adoption to the 6th dune 28th uh meeting um and there is a chance that we will not know measure f outcome but we will have that discussion and can make a decision then is is the direction in your motion as I'm understanding okay uh vice mayor Watkins thank you mayor yeah give him what we've heard from our city manager and our finance director and that having this budget adopted now um in terms of the input that they've already shared makes the most sense in knowing that we need and we will be beginning our fiscal year starting July 1 and that on the 28th we will have um a further conversation around core so I don't feel comfortable delaying it so therefore I'm prepared to make a substitute motion um to approve the recommendation and I don't know if in the recommendation is the direction to bring back the core uh a conversation on the 28th but if it isn't then I will go ahead and add that additional direction uh so that's my motion Matt I see you can back up did you want to clarify uh thanks vice mayor Watkins I don't think that's explicitly included in in the recommendations but happy to accept that direction um we're planning on doing so anyways fantastic okay thank you so that's my substitute motion okay so we have a substitute motion by vice mayor Watkins to accept the um recommendation um as uh uh recommended and a second by vice mayor uh by council member Myers um so we need to vote on the substitute motion to accept the substitute motion oh that's correct well member Callentary Johnson hi that motion the substitute motion passes four to three and so the council member Myers I'm sorry mayor I did not I did not um put my hand down after the second the council member Brown um so we are now I just want to make sure I'm clear we're now on to hearing or considering the motion made by council member vice mayor Watkins correct correct so I'd like to uh make an amendment to the motion and I'm not asking for a friendly amendment here I just send it to Bonnie and hopefully that can you can um put that up yeah I have to clean it up a bit sorry pretty quick here I thought we might have an opportunity to have more conversation about our budget priorities under the circumstances but since we're moving ahead today I'm just going to put these on the table here with me I have to clean oh sorry that's terrible with the formatting I'm so sorry are these meant to be multiple so it's yeah so there's three items that and then the list goes underneath item three so folks should now be able to read this amendment um so my motion or the amendment would be to include an additional five hundred thousand dollars to restore funding to assist with the core transition including support for previously funded critical safety net services I am using the five hundred thousand dollars figure I just want to say this now um as you're reading the amendment because I had a hard time you know and I've gone through all the materials various PDFs and charts and I just couldn't I probably could figure it out but I wasn't able to in the time available to me to figure out exactly how much of the city's portion of some of these programs was out of the total 2.2 million in funding that is going to be shifted to new programs and so I was guessing somewhere between 350 and 500 thousand and since I I thought there'd be time to try to do something about this before the 28th but it looks like we're settling on a number today I'm including it here and I'm just make making a high end estimate um so that's why the 500 thousand um and additionally to fully fund the parks and recreation department's temporary staff positions for teen and youth programs I believe that uh there will be uh impacts and I appreciate parks and recs um willingness to try to step in and participate in making reductions but I think these are just so important and I committed to this previously and so I'm this seems to be my only opportunity now to get that out on the floor and then to fund these additions explore cuts I'm we're told we have to find places to come up with the money and these are just a variety of areas there are plenty more that I think staff could look to um but these are my priority areas to look for budget savings um a consultant budgets be reducing the management to line staff ratios to pre-covid levels I see that in particular in the city manager's office see place an embargo on new military equipment purchases and d an embargo on the purchase of gas powered vehicles and that's my amendment I'll I'll second the amendment the motion on okay and these are simply areas to look for savings not all inclusive so we have an amendment by council member brown seconded by council member Cummings I'm wondering if okay sorry I'm reading through the three points and the additional areas um so I know some of these points have were brought up in discussion including additional funding um which would come from somewhere else the five hundred thousand and um it and fully funding parks and rec meaning not the reductions that can you clarify that uh council member brown yeah that's correct I um am talking about the proposed cuts to parks and rec temporary staffing the I don't have a figure readily accessible to me what we saw today was an overview slide that had the entire budget and what we received uh included a various line items within that budget it was presented in a way that was different than what I had seen during our preview uh budget the study sessions with various departments where the numbers were more were were clarified for those two particular pieces and so I don't know what that total is um because I just don't that was on a slide that we didn't get a copy of I just saw it so um it's uh it's a little bit nebulous there because I just don't have those numbers at my fingertips but um I think that uh were this amendment to be adopted which I'm skeptical it will be um but I'll just say where that to happen my um you know I would assume that staff would then um you know kind of look back at that and try to figure out what the options are thank you council member brown I appreciate your intent in um showing priority for um some really important aspects of our community and um showing that priority and wanting to show that priority in our budget um I'm a little concerned about um how this you know shuffling around would impact what's already been described as a bare bones um budget proposal and um you know the city itself having uh limited funds and um how that will affect some of our critical uh uh in capital improvement projects and um our investment in other kind of invisible necessary uh equally valid important um items as well so um is there any other comments on this amendment or questions do we need to go to a vote for this amendment can we have a roll call vote please council member co-entry johnson no vice mayor Watkins no mayor brooder no so that amendment does not pass five against two in favor yeah we're back at the main motion is now back on the floor thank you city attorney um we have a motion uh by vice mayor Watkins seconded by council member mires and um can we have a roll call vote council member Cummings i just had a quick question on that because um i think part of the direction was bringing back the core discussion but my understanding was at the last meeting we already voted on that it's to come back before the council on the 28th for final action as i understood the discussion at the last meeting so i thought too there was also direction uh council member Cummings to bring back some options for transition plan as part of that so that that is our intention i would also just to clarify when that comes back on the 28th regardless of what action the council takes on the overall budget this afternoon the council still has discretion to make adjustments to the total amount or the individual allocations again this is that this is at the council's discretion so um one of the one of the make declar and so i have a follow-up question on that too so the action the motion before us would take action on finalizing the funds for the approved core recommendations is that correct for the core recommendations that have come to us from that program it's finalizes the amount of money that we're allocating for the core funding right uh the mayor is correct today's an approval of the total amount um with that said when the signing comes back on the 28th the council is so directed you could increase that amount you could reduce that amount you could adjust the individual allocations i just want to make clear the council will continue to have that discretion related to um again it's a general fund resource council can make changes to them thank you council member Cummings thank you city manager for that clarification um okay uh we clerk can we have a roll call vote please council member commentary johnson hi folder hi no and for the record um my no vote is because we should be making i believe that we should be making these decisions around the budget and core funding at the same time council member brown that's no and for the record i believe that ought to be we ought to be reconsidering our priorities because i think that the general public believes that we do have enough money to get our needs met and um may be concerned with some of our priorities or our concern council member meyer nice mayor what can hi mayor bruner the motion passes five in favor to against and um thank you to uh finance director bobby mickey for um the information and we look forward to updates and also to all of the members of the public that have shared um their input as we continue to look to ways to prioritize um funding so today's budget adoption did approve putting a million eighty dollars to core funding and um as stated for those that are interested june 28th will be further discussion on that for community funding as well as continued work on looking at other funding streams that could help support a lot of these organizations and programs that are needed um i think there were requests and proposals for um nearly 16 million dollars worth that is needed in our community and core funding with city and county i believe was around six million so just to show you the need for exceeds um resources um and um at least in these unrestricted funds right so thank you so much we will continue on with our agenda we are now at item number 28 and this item is uh emergency ordinance amending chapter 60.02 water conservation of the santa cruz municipal code for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from council and then public comment and then we will return to council for deliberation and action and joining us will be um uh i see heidi luckenbach kyle peterson and uh i don't know if rosemary monard water director will be joining us today now okay well welcome heidi and kyle thank you for joining us thank you good afternoon mayor brunner and city council members heidi luckenbach deputy water director i'm sitting in for a raise money monard in her absence while she's on vacation i just a few remarks and i'm going to pass this over to kyle peterson kyle's our customer service manager who will speak more specifically to the implementation of these guidelines the recommendation before you is the adoption of an emergency ordinance regulating certain uses of water in response to the ongoing state drought conditions in california this process transpired pretty quickly in mid april state water resources control board staff released a draft approach to reducing water use statewide through the implementation of agencies stage two in their watershores contingency plan with a goal of achieving between 10 and 20 percent water use reduction across the state the draft approach was very straightforward black and white if you will and did not make any allowance for agencies like ours who are disconnected from the state water systems only use local water sources and aren't experiencing the same conditions as others in the state so final language was taken to and approved by the state board at their may 24th meeting we largely rosemary staff had been able to work with state water resources control board staff and others to develop an alternate compliance strategy or exception criteria for agencies like ours again with very low water use per person per person water use not connected to the state system and just not experiencing the same shortage at statewide so with respect to timing or urgency of this item we currently have language in the muni code to address water waste and water use restrictions in support of our water shortage contingency plan but that language doesn't contemplate these new state regulations that are providing for this exceptions and because the state's actions went into effect on June 10th we worked with the city attorney to draft language for an emergency ordinance modifying an amending chapter 16.02 water conservation and now framing it as water waste prohibition and other water use regulations so i'm going to hand it over to kyle um to talk more specifically about implementation and then we can be available for questions good afternoon mayor brunner vice mayor Watkins and thank you Heidi for the introduction kyle peterson customer service manager for santa cruz municipal utilities um bonnie can you start the slide thank you so i'm speaking to you today about an amendment emergency amendment to chapter 16.02 of the muni code chapter 16.02 regulates how water is used specifically it prohibits the wasteful uses of water and what we're seeking today is to incorporate the new state regulations for water use this summer into our muni code so that we can implement those requirements this summer next slide please so a little background um as i'm sure you all know uh the state of california is in pretty bad shape in regards to water we're in the third year of a severe drought many of the key supply reservoirs are at 50 percent or less of capacity um abysmal winter um statewide and in march the governor made an order to the state water resources control board to consider statewide mandatory restrictions next slide please there's a little look um at the reservoirs across this across the state and you can see um there's a lot of half empty cups there and so the you know the bad news is that our neighbors and friends across the state are in a tight situation this summer the good news is that we are not in that same situation where we're different um our reservoir is uh it started at 90 percent capacity in april it's currently at about 88 percent capacity and um we have a very different supply situation than than our neighbors and so with that in mind we sought um for recognition of those circumstances and an alternative approach to to this summer's regulations from the state next slide please so working with the state they they did recognize that we were in a different situation and they set up several criteria to um allow for an exception to activating a stage two drought restriction so those criteria were to have at least two years of reliable supply to not have any water imports from the state or the federal water project or to be supplied from a critically overdrafted aquifer and to have residential water use that was lower than 55 gallons per capita per day so we we'd meet all three of those criteria and in the next few slides um I'll show that next slide so here's a look at um our reservoir again we started at 90 and I believe I I asked our conservation manager yesterday where we were at and and we were right at about 88 percent this graph is is still very accurate um and our projection is that we'll end this year at 70 capacity um and so we did from their model a second year of uh water hydrology similar to 2014 with which is a pretty pretty bad water situation and we still have yet another year of supply um at that point so we've met that first criteria from the state and next slide please so look at our um residential gallons per capita use and you can see that we're at at 45 gallons per person per day for residential and our gross per capita is at 77 the state's requirement was for the the residential per capita water use so we've met that criteria being below 55 and I think there's one more slide and the the other one was was um the criteria of not being you know supplied by the state water system or the federal water system as you all probably know we we have our own local independent supply so um the alternative actions that the the state has asked us to implement are it's really three things um and they're they're pretty I think they're pretty sensible and basic things that that we do already um with with a little little twist so public information campaign emphasize it emphasizing water wise use um this is pretty run of the mill for us so um we can easily meet that requirement um enforcing waterways prohibitions including irrigating landscape between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. I can tell you from years of working here this is basic practice I think for for most of our customers to not water in the middle of the day so um but that is a formal restriction this summer what is a little little bit different is a limitation on not watering more than two days a week so that is another part of that restriction no more than two days per week this this last one is is somewhat new territory for us and um I expect there could be some discussion around this item it's a prohibition on irrigating non-functional turf for business properties and HOAs non-functional turf is turf that is strictly ornamental um and we can talk more about that um and I can field some questions about that but those are the three main um restrictions or actions that we're supposed to implement this summer public outreach no watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. and only twice a week and no watering of non-functional turf for business properties next slide please and so with those things in mind that's what this emergency amendment is meant to do it's meant to incorporate those additional restrictions that have been handed down from the state to be implemented this summer I think that about covers it and I open it up to two questions thank you Kyle Peterson it was great to see the bullet points like that appreciate information um I will hand it to councilmember brown for question yeah thank you mayor thank you uh for the presentation Heidi and Kyle uh super helpful and really all of the work you do I mean this is as laid out here once again testament to the amazing work that you do to manage our water system under challenging and increasingly unpredictable circumstances um I had a question uh a couple of questions that came in through uh written communications that the council received and I just wanted to ask them here um one of them is related to you know the question around um outreach and education for customers and the way that that happens and I recognize that it's challenging to ensure that the message gets to the end user in residential and commercial settings really you know workers and tenants right so people who aren't actually receiving the bill and so I'm just wondering if uh you know if what ways we can sort of try to expand that outreach and communication to ensure that everybody's getting the message so that's one question and the other question is related to uh the use of potable water for construction I saw in the um documents that it's kind of it seems to be discouraged or only you can only use potable water if other water source isn't available but it's not an actual restriction and so I was just wondering if you could um comment on that and clarify just make sure I understand that correctly sure uh thank you for the questions council member around um um on the first question about communications to tenants and um if I can if I can add a little context there it's true there's this disconnect between um account holders who are the landlord and then end users who are the tenants who they use the water but don't get the utility bill and maybe don't receive some of the communications that come through that utility bill channel we're very aware of that disconnect and we um we think a lot about how to to reach sort of through um that relationship and get all parties aware of the situation last summer we had put together a resource um it ended up as a as a web page as well as a booklet for multifamily residential um properties and one of the best and foremost recommendations in that resource is to create a team and we now have um the ability through the water smart application which you which you may have heard promoted by the water department to allow account holders to give permission to tenants to receive information and alerts and communications through that same customer portal it's a really powerful tool um and we we think that it's it's a way of of kind of bridging that gap between those two parties but it is it is a real challenge um to to get those two parties to work together in all in all cases so we recognize it and we we we have ideas about how to thread that needle but um you know it's it's not as if um we have a whole lot of power at a certain point to to get the parties to connect um in terms of potable water use in construction settings um typically that potable water use is used for dust control and so when when it is used for dust control it meets a health and safety purpose for the use of that potable water which is acceptable and so most construction services use what's either um a hydrant meter or a potable um like a water tanker that brings water to the site and that is using um potable water but it is for dust control purposes and it's it's it tends to be pretty minimal thank you sure and I yeah I I do recognize I just want to I recognize the challenges associated with my first question and that obviously you're thinking about it as well I'm just kind of trying to brainstorm and and and use this opportunity to make sure that people are hearing people who are out there listening hear the message um because I think it's really critical that we um get as many people as we can on board absolutely project thank you thank you councilmember brown that was actually um one of my questions as well was the um on the outrage to the actual tenant in in um and I know in the past mailers have been sent out to each address as well um on the water smart app is their incentive for the account holder to include tenants or how do they is it up to the tenant to request that how does that work um we we've promoted it really I think in in both directions so um in terms of an incentive we believe there's a strong incentive for that relationship to to be made um and put together through the app um it basically increases the communications between those two parties and so for example um you know a landlord who's who's off-site doesn't really have a sense of water use um or water waste on the property but probably in most cases has the responsibility to address to address that and so um if tenants have the ability to make the the landlord or property owner aware of a running toilet or a or a leaking pipe or a sprinkler system that is going off you know every night um that actually has a cost benefit you know to the bill because that water use is is turning into water charges so um for the parties to be brought together on the same view through that customer portal I believe there is a pretty clear incentive for for that relationship to take place thank you vice mayor Watkins yeah I just have sort of more of a general question in regards to sort of this bigger state initiative and and effort and other jurisdictions coming into compliance do you I mean what is the horizon of success here and do we anticipate them being in compliance I mean I don't know I it it seems like um we're very aware and willing to put a lot of these in place but I'm not sure about other jurisdictions so I just you know I I welcome your opinions or thoughts on that I do have an opinion I I just went down to Los Angeles for a wedding and it's a different world down there and when I think about how those agencies will implement these restrictions and actually do the enforcement of those rules I frankly think it's a it's an insurmountable task yeah for the size and the and the you know the amount of um kind of cultural shift that needs to take place down there so we we are in really we are ahead of the curve and we have been for a long time and that's really the uh the great news here is that we have to do something this this summer but um I really don't think it's going to be that big of a deal for our customer base. I have another thought on that too thank you for that question and it's the inclusion of this non-functional turf and I think that is really an opportunity to um make cultural changes or lifestyle changes without necessarily having a large impact on people in other words these large medium strips that are all grass that aren't serving a purpose beyond being really pretty I think once those start to be removed we will see or the state will see a reduction in overall water use without really having an impact you know in golf courses and things like that where people really are actively participating with their landscape um my hope is that that was the forethought with putting that in there and really thinking about how can we ensure that that we are seeing the reductions that we need to be seeing. That's great no I I yeah I appreciate the perspective and I you know also of course appreciate all the work you all do to keep us ahead of the curve but that's hopeful to hear that this could also be a transition initiative that could be meaningful and I think you're right in terms of the enforcement I can see how that could be a challenge too but um anyways thank you yeah thanks so much. Thank you Vice Mayor Watkins Councilmember Meyers and you're muted okay thank you for the presentation Kyle and Heidi I had two quick questions um so this will go into our code as an emergency ordinance and so does you know for future droughts or future conditions does that mean the council has to make those conditions or meet some kind of condition to basically activate the ordinance is that based I probably read the ordinance but it was deep in a pile of lots of other things I would imagine does it just take council action to basically say the ordinance is is now in effect based on you know conditions that the water department would would bring forth. Yeah what we tried to do in changing the chapter was to include language that allows us to activate these kinds of actions this summer or at any point in the future when the state says to Santa Cruz you need to participate essentially but your level of drought response as articulated in your water shortage contingency plan isn't required so that's that's the way we tried to craft it as to make it activate in those circumstances in in most cases I would say we would get to um a water supply situation that that would require an activation of one of our our stages articulated in the water shortage contingency plan okay so it's just so the public's very clear this is sort of us meeting this the obligations that the state has now handed down to every jurisdiction throughout the state which is drought the drought emergency versus our contingency plan which is our kind of operational plan on how we you know ramp down folks use you know based on all the conditions that we map over the year you know over the over the water year so all the data that we collect and the way that you guys have developed that that stage you know process that we approved a couple months ago that that's sort of our active management and this is just okay state of California now says you must do these things but in reality we have so much of that already in place but this helps us meet those other those last few items basically right the state the state has essentially told most all other agencies to activate a stage two level response and our stage two response is very intensive and would be frankly heavy-handed this summer it's not commensurate with our local supply situation so the state recognized that and said okay we understand you don't need to activate to that level but you do need to take these actions got it okay thank you yeah very uh very concerning situation around the state so thank you for your proactive and mayor I'm happy to move the item after public comment um but yeah thank you so much for taking care of our water most important thing thank you councilmember Myers okay I will um at this point bring it out to public comment if you are a member of the public and streaming this meeting if this is an item you'd like to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen you can raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar controls and when it's your turn to speak you'll hear an announcement that you've been unmuted I will go out to attendees and low attendees I don't see any hands raised so we are on item number 28 if you'd like to comment on item 28 emergency ordinance amending chapter 6.02 water conservation of the Santa Cruz municipal code you um okay I will bring it back to council and councilmember Myers you had a motion oh and yep I'll move the staff recommendation and councilmember Brown second that okay we have a first by councilmember Myers and a second by councilmember Brown and um council discussion councilmember Myers your hand still sorry councilmember Cummings no I just wanted to express my appreciation for the city staff and their work on this and also um senator Layard's office and how we've been able to push the heart to get this exception for the city of Santa Cruz and it just goes to show that we've been doing a great job of water conservation over time and look forward to continuing to you know improve that over time as well thank you councilmember Cummings okay um we have a motion no further discussion then we will go to a roll call vote city clerk councilmember commentary johnson hi older hi coming hi mayor Watkins and mayor Brunner and that motion passes unanimously seven zero okay mayor could we take a uh a bio break for about 10 minutes yeah so we actually um our have caught back up in our schedule and we haven't taken a lunch break yet we've been going since 9 30 this morning with closed session so um I would like to recommend a um lunch break and we will return um at 3 30 thank you okay can councilmembers turn on their cameras okay welcome back everybody hope you enjoyed the lunch break sorry it was a little later and planned but we had important discussions to get through we will now uh continue is the city clerk ready looks like is the city clerk ready i am sorry thank you thank you great at this time we will continue with our Santa Cruz city council meeting we are at agenda item number 29 this agenda item is the housing element which includes item 29.1 approval of a contract for consultant services for the sixth cycle housing element date and item 29.2 resolution providing guidance to the city's sixth cycle housing element for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you wish to comment on now it's time to call in using the instructions on your screen please note that the public comment period will be for both items 29.1 and 29.2 you will be limited to no more than a total of 30 minutes each speaker will have a minute the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from council and then we will take public comment and return to council for deliberation and action welcome Catherine Donovan I will present Catherine Donovan senior planner and Matt Van Hoa principal planner advanced planning to begin thank you thank you and thank you council um let me are you wanting to share a screen yes and it's not um Bonnie can you bring up my presentation my screen is not sharing the way it should thank you Bonnie so the the item before you today is the sixth cycle housing element update consultant contract next slide um the housing element is one part of the general plan it is updated every eight years and the process for updating the housing element is the subject of state law um part of this update is to address the regional housing needs assessment um which in this next cycle is going up from 747 units to 3736 units so that's a significant increase in housing um there are also some new requirements that have to be met with the housing element since the last update in 2015 and the housing element itself will be due to the state department of housing and community development in December of 2023 next slide um so part of what's new in the requirements for the housing element this this cycle are the outreach requirements which are which are um um uh there are some significant uh requirements from the state that include um reaching out to all all um members of the community particularly um traditionally underserved community members we also must meet all the legal requirements um including meeting the um affirmatively furthering fair housing requirements of both the state and the federal government um the housing element itself must be certified by hcd the state department of housing and community development and judging from other communities that have been on a track that began and before our cycle the hcd is taking at least two review cycles so we have included that in our schedule and the state has also added new consequences for failing to receive certification for your housing element that include um not being eligible for certain state grant funding and um if your housing element requires rezoning to be able to meet its rena targets uh the timeline for that is normally three years to get the rezoning done and if you um do not get it get your housing element certified by the deadline you only have one year to get that rezoning done um the bright side of this is that it provides an opportunity for the city to take a fresh look at its housing policies and action items and to really zone in on um what has worked in the past what has not worked so well and to be able to um look at what other jurisdictions have done and what has been successful and to incorporate all that into our new housing element update next slide um so this planning department released a request for proposals in a on april 6th of 2022 and um the kimley horn response scored the highest um and they had extensive sixth cycle housing element experience which was very important to us considering um the number of review cycles that hcd has been requiring they also have considerable sequa experience um the price was the lowest and their scheduling will meet our needs to get this approved on time they were also very responsive to the city's stated concerns next slide so included in the scope is a significant public outreach uh program um it includes community meetings and numerous community meetings and focus groups and the focus groups or the the program will focus on outreach to underrepresented communities there's also a an significant online outreach portion that includes um surveys and informational items and because of the uncertain times that we're in right now the strategy is flexible in case um there are changing conditions and we're not able to have the type of public meetings that we normally have for this sort of outreach next slide um and one of the most important elements this cycle will be the affirmatively furthering their housing and um showing how our how the city plans to meet those requirements AFH requires that the housing element facilitate deliberate action to address combat and relieve disparities resulting from past patterns of segregation to foster more inclusive communities and that's a sort of a broad description of some very specific um actions that have to be taken that include assessing fair housing practices from the previous housing element analyzing available sites and how they relate to the high and low resource areas and the project scope includes addressing the requirements of the AFFH next slide please um the funding for the housing element update comes partially from the local early action planning grant the LEAP grant half of the funding will come from that we had originally intended to use all of the LEAP grant or a larger portion of it and um this data assured us that we wouldn't need that much but it turned out they were wrong um so we will be using additional funding from our department consultant services budget um which is available for this purpose next slide and so the staff recommendation is to direct the city manager to execute the contract with Kim Lehorn and associates in the amount of $260,769 to procure consultant services to complete the sixth cycle housing element update and I am happy to answer any questions you might have thank you Catherine for defining the acronyms and giving the overview I think that's always very helpful um in addition to the staff report um and I just my quick question before I um ask other council members we just recently had budget adoption and core discussions and one of the items that came up um and was proposed was um exploring reduction in consultant services and um we did receive some correspondence as well as to um the need for consultant services in this um um context and situation can you speak a little more to why the consultant service um as opposed to city staff doing it um since there were so many changes to state law um the the scope of the housing element is is significantly increased and the for the last housing element cycle the fifth cycle we did it in-house and um I was the project manager on that and had some help from other staff people but it is beyond the scope of our existing staff at this point and um it's a it's you know we would have the choice of hiring new staff members which is not an inexpensive or a quick process or hiring consultants who this is what they do they are professionals at this and they have um a lot more experience which for the housing element update is really important um since there have been these changes in state law since the last cycle and we need to get through this um process pretty expeditiously so having the consultants with the serve with the experience of working with hcd and the knowledge of what it is that they are um expecting and looking for uh it it makes sense and it it actually is probably in the long run cheaper um to hire the consultants than to try to hire new staff to be able to expand our capacity we just we don't have the capacity now to do it in-house great thank you for clarifying um council member coming so I'll open it up for questions for council members um captain thanks for that presentation I had a question around process so are we right now hearing um 29.1 and 2 is that what we're going to be making decisions on are we gonna I'm just talking about one and then there's and there's another presentation on two okay so those are gonna be hers two separate items um that's how we have it set up I think I'm not sure if you're voting at the same time or separately that was just that's one question I had but I appreciate the presentation and the information on the update sure thank you my understanding council member Cummings is that um they are two separate items are there any other questions for Catherine Donovan council member Brown thank you I was just trying to get the raise hand button um yeah thank you for the presentation and you know really appreciate the significant task ahead and uh moving the the housing element forward and so I support the the recommendation to hire Kimley Horn um I was wondering if you the there's it looks like there's $20,000 in that budget for CEQA compliance and which seems low um I'm just wondering if if if you wait if that's if it's possible that that number is going to be higher will that mean coming back for additional funding from the city um how might that be covered should that happen and and do you think that's enough um it's it's uncertain at this point we're not sure there's a look there's it's moving there's there's a moving target here at the downtown plan the downtown plan expansion um what happens with that will significantly impact what we do with the housing element um we also need to do a closer look at how much housing we have built since the general plan EIR um was approved and because that looked at a given amount of housing and so if um the combination of the downtown plan and the general plan cover the housing we need then we can we will probably end up doing an addendum for this which can easily be done for for probably significantly less than $20,000 however if um we need to do something more um we may need to come back thank you appreciate it thank you council member brown um if there were no other questions from council I will um I know I had uh suggested and and stated that public comment would be for both items and um so I'm going to move forward for the next presentation and then go out to public comment um so the next presentation uh is 29.2 resolution providing guidance to the city's sixth cycle housing element and um this is uh something that I will be presenting along with council member calentary johnson and council member mires um that we have started to look at based on um the information of this housing element the new housing element beginning in 2024 and our new rena the regional housing needs allocation numbers coming um and um uh looking at um you know the new state laws that are required and and realizing the outreach that needs to happen and so really starting those conversations now and based on a lot of the communication we've received over the past year and and um some of the um information concerns and direction and kind of compiling all of that and working with staff to implement some direction that we wanted to bring forward to start having those conversations as the extensive outreach starts happening with that housing element um and so you know I think the importance of the housing element update impacts our our city's region and uh supply of affordable housing housing development and growth and to comply with the state laws of af hh the affirmatively furthering their housing that catherine had had brought up um we have to really make sure that fair housing is considered in our housing element and um plan for affordable housing and high high resource neighborhoods we have to help create more equitable and inclusive neighborhoods and really it's about reversing decades of policy that have created racial and economic segregation and housing shortages and um we're we're excited to be working through this and um it's important that we all um participate here um I think it's really important that all of the council members all of the staff with all the experience and the information and the community as those community outreach meetings are happening as you heard catherine donovan speak to some of the timelines around this it's important to start the work now and so um that is um why we have started kind of diving in and and making some recommendations um with this resolution and so with the resolution in the packet there are um specific items in there um and um let's see maybe we can begin with is the slideshow of bonnie and pull up thank you that might be helpful my city clerk can pull it up what slideshow I don't have one you mean the one that kath are interested no the um other presentation maybe I can pull it up I I do not have that okay um council member mires you're muted it would have come from that van waa bonnie not not to you I do I don't have that you don't okay I can send it real quick mayor if you'd like I can talk I can well I think it would be helpful I mean I'm happy to talk through each resolution policy I think um it just kind of bullet points um you'll send it right now thank you I'm a visual person and and I know it's helpful to visually see rather than the text of a resolution on me it'll be there in one set you just got sent thank you for multitasking that and so um I'll just talk through maybe the first few and then I can hand it off to you council member mires um and maybe you can talk through a few of them and council member calentari johnson um you can also speak to speak to some of the policies um that we were reviewing thank you um so next slide great so as I was speaking to um this kind of this stemmed from the city's six cycle housing element which begins in 2024 so really wanting to start now with these discussions and not feel that we're not getting enough community input enough staff input enough council input into some of these um elements and new state laws and um really looking at our new rena numbers which are five times greater than the fifth cycle housing element um so here's a chart of those numbers of very vli stands for very low income units li is low income and then there's moderate above moderate so these are the draft six rena cycles that our city is um needs to achieve so next slide and so um resolution policy number one um again I spoke to just really emphasizing that we are complying with AFFH and developing policies that support affirmatively furthering fair housing um and um you know what tools and outreach strategies are we using and utilizing and making sure we're engaging um all of our communities especially underserved communities those unhoused those that are you know different social and racial uh and economic backgrounds so um we really want to make sure that we help address some of those disproportionate housing needs next slide and resolution policy number two is um to explore creative approaches to incentivize higher density residential development or and or smaller units within the same building volume um or slightly larger building volume and so exploring that as uh potential options the next slide resolution policy number three evaluating possible locations where additional residential capacity development height or indoor density maximums could be increased um and including but not limited to exploring use of SB 10 legislation which is also one of the newer state uh laws um and that residential capacity increases are being evaluated so um having starting those evaluations and discussions now on the locations and objectives the AFFH objectives number four consider evaluation of site inventory capacities that exceed the arena target by a small amount um so even though there are those targets our goal um hopefully is to strive to do more than that and um a small a little bit more small excess capacity could serve as a buffer um you know there are so many reasons why housing does and does not get built and some of it has to do with funding sources and and other factors so it's oftentimes pieced together through many different avenues and also the um hcd um has to start has to be certified so um aiming for above our targets and next slide and to consider allowing 100 affordable residential development to be considered a by right use that only requires ministerial planning approval and building permits to be constructed so to really make um 100 affordable residential development uh easier uh and um more accessible to be constructed I think I will pass it on for the next slide to council member Myers thank you you're muted sorry I'll start off with um uh number six uh the policy number six and the resolution um and that's really geared at um really evaluating whether alternative inclusionary approaches may produce more affordable housing or deeper deeper levels of affordability um and I think this is something that you know we have looked at over the years we've done a number of studies on um and so this is a area where you know we want to have um up-to-date uh studies and um not use the inclusionary sort of as as a way to um you know move percentages to areas where actually the counter may happen whereby um financing and other issues um may come up with regards to trying to uh put together a especially an affordable either 100% or mostly 100% affordable uh or very low income type of unit so um we want to make sure that this inclusionary piece of the puzzle um really is reasonable and is based on current economic studies as well as um analysis of financing and then also um using uh examples such as incentivizing land dedication um which of course really helped in pacific station south to actually get that project over the finish line and get um 85 units of very low affordability put in put into place so um we want to make sure that we're um uh we do that as part of this as part of the housing element analysis that was we enter into these things next slide please resolution policy number seven is really focused on the recognition that the city has done um you know really decades of work on ad use um one of the first cities in california to really look at ad use as a viable way to um provide both multifamily as well as um you know generational housing which um is really needed in san cruz because we're we're also as as well as you know it possible increase in student students into town we're also an aging population here so ad use are a very strategic um method to provide housing for a variety of generational um needs in santa cruz um so part of this will be looking at the continued incentive incentivizing and promoting ad use and i know there's been um work at the staff level there's also been input by the community on success about these kinds of concepts of incentivizing um i know there's been some corrections to our code um this data california obviously wrote extensive law about ad use a few years ago and our code is up to um is really up to date on that um but we again can look at using ad use again as part of this housing stock goals for the for the housing elements we think this is an important piece we don't want to you know we do not want to leave this out of the out of the mix with regards to um how to achieve some of the reading goals that are out ahead of us uh next slide please and then policy number eight um again always going back to the work um that was done um a few years ago on the housing blueprint which is continuing going back to look at barriers to development um that may include uh parking minimums it could include impact fees that may either um offset some of the financials that folks are trying to put together for their construction loans etc um and then also concepts like uh delaying the collection of impact fees until um the issuance of the certificate of occupancy so again looking at all the various stages along the way that um someone who's building affordable housing um all those various pieces they have to jump through and looking at how do we how do we continue to look both at barriers and at incentives as well and then i think i have one more next uh next slide please resolution policy number nine is that um really recognizes in the event that rezoning for additional housing capacity is required as part of the housing element process um that residential use in an industrial land really only consider residential use in industrial zoned areas if it is actually ancillary to the industrial lands full employment capacity so in uh non-planning uh language what this means is um since the city of Santa Cruz has very little zoned industrial land and that industrial land which is you know light industrial as well and and for people to think about what this is it's places like harby west or the outer west side um what we want to do is make those lands um both uh both production you know uh workforce development as well as producing jobs but at the same time um let's also look at how we make couple housing with that so you have a area for example the outer west side sort of is turning into this where you've got people live living nearby their jobs they're near the rail trail there's good transit those kinds of things and you're not just looking at converting your industrial land but you're really using that um that jobs generation and economic benefit to try to marry a you know create a place where those things can be done together and so this really recognizes that sometimes um communities go in and they they end up taking out industrial land or they rezone it um but uh we want to make sure that we're looking at the benefits of providing housing but also um good paying jobs in Santa City and that's what this policy is intended to do and I will turn it over to Council Member Kantar and Johnson to finish off great thank you so um we can go to the next slide um so I have the last resolution policy number 10 and that's to expeditiously perform any necessary rezoning after housing element certification so that's pretty straightforward once our housing element is adopted that we really look at if there are rezoning that's required and necessary and we update our zoning ordinance so that's what that slot that um resolution policy is addressing and we could just go to the closing slide and I'll just make some closing remarks that you know this is really an effort for us to address our housing crisis that we have here locally um and um to respond to the state mandates and the needs um we have been um the three of us Mayor um Brunner and Council Member Myers have been um working with um sorry distracted with kids one second sorry about that kids on summer break um um we have been working with uh Mayor Brunner and Council Member Myers and I and um planning development staff have been working with housing advocates in the community for the last many months um we've been doing research on what has help support other communities as they approach their housing element and this is uh these are all directions and guidance none of this is set in stone this is for the consultants and staff to consider some of these best practices that have been effective in building housing and affordable housing in other communities so I think I'll leave it there and hand it back to Mayor Brunner. Thank you Council Member Callentary Johnson um are there any questions on this from Council Members and we can stop sharing screen thank you uh City Clerk are there any questions before I take it out for public comment Council Member Cummings. Thank you for that presentation um I had a question for City Staff I'm just wondering if anyone may have available the number for the last rena cycle if there's anyone who can maybe put up the um the rena housing goals that we had then and then what we were able to produce I think it would be helpful for this discussion and presentation to be able to show that so rather than just having what the goals were for the previous cycle and what the goals are moving forward what the goals were and what we were able to produce um I don't have those to be able to be put up right away they um there's about two or three pages of of goals that are incorporated throughout the housing element I can send you them after the meeting if you like I know there was one chart in particular that for example um each jurisdiction is um you know required to build X number of very low X number of low moderate market rate and that table I've seen in previous presentations and I'm wondering if that table is available to show what the goals were versus what we produced um it was actually on the slide it was on that first slide from um uh the resolution presentation that it didn't show what we actually built out of the goals that showed fifth cycle goals and six cycle goals um we I'm I'm sharing my screen now um and this this I believe is what you're looking for accounts member Cummings um the blue showing um the um current rena cycle the green showing what we've constructed during that current rena cycle and the red showing the draft sixth cycle and the one thing that I'll note is that um you can see that the green has exceeded the um the blue so we've exceeded our targets in each income category with the exception of very low income however um we do expect um that we will meet that um very low income category in advance of the um end of this cycle we've got a number of projects with metro south having just been issued permits um that's pacific station south the city uh sponsored project with 70 um very low or I believe they're all very low income units um and then also the cedar center project um on the parking lot the former parking lot where grading has now started um south of Calvary church that has 65 so we uh we will be looking good in terms of meeting this very low as well but I think this is what you were looking for councilmember Cummings yeah I think this will suffice I was looking for the the table but a graph does the same thing the whole point was really just trying to to show in the previous cycle um what the goals were and how we were able to meet those goals where we exceeded and where we were deficient because I think it's important for this conversation um you know that that very low income housing is difficult and is some of the housing that we desperately need in the community and so as we're thinking about and talking about the rena cycle and this next session we're going into really needing to make sure that we're meeting those needs as far as housing production is concerned councilmember Cummings I I do have the that table available you would like to see that test that would be great I think we can put it up right thank you Matt uh Lee Butler that's the one I'm a lot of showing notes you see that okay okay yeah and um you know I really just wanted to emphasize that you know we've been able to really reach our above moderate housing production and you know as we're moving forward especially given that you know what we're facing right now isn't just a housing crisis it's an affordable housing crisis and it's getting worse and so we're really making sure that we're emphasizing that and I think it's critical and important as we're moving into this next housing moment thank you councilmember Cummings uh councilmember Brown thank you mayor and staff and council members who brought these items forward I have a couple of questions one is for staff and the other is for the council members who brought this resolution um so the I'll ask the staff question first in the resolution there are several items that you know seem um like this is already the city's policy and practice and so I'm just wondering how you see this um you know kind of along the lines of some things that were said earlier today on another item they seem to be a bit redundant so I'm just wondering um you know for example with uh by rights um I just want to ask to clarify what what's happening here so I'm clear what's already happening um I believe that 100 affordable housing projects are now by rights as per state law and council has taken some action for that on that and so I'm just wondering um I thought we'd already done that and I believe that's policy item number five so that's one um and I have a couple of others but if you want to yeah I can the other one first council member thanks and I have another question on item on policy item six so I think you're referring to we we have passed some resolutions in the past couple of years that have made supportive housing by right and supportive housing is 100% affordable but has a specific supportive housing component okay and we have made that by right but we haven't made just purely 100% affordable by right and state law does not require that at this point correct okay okay I just wanted to clarify and then on item number six incentivizing land dedication I mean I feel like that's you know Bonnie Lipscomb does a really good job of that you know and and that seems to be a tool that's been used and so I'm just wondering why we're talking about um why that needs to be stated if it's already happening um I'll go ahead and jump in on that since I'm on camera I was I was going to add on to the last one just briefly that the state law does allow for those supportive where it's 25% supportive of 100% affordable housing projects that if it's 50 or fewer units then it's allowed by right the council actually has for specific projects identified that greater than 50 so a number of our recent projects have benefited from those council actions the cedar center project and the metro south metro north so those those were what the council did above and beyond state law and as matt mentioned this would expand that even farther to 100 affordable projects and not just the um that the 100% affordable with the supportive housing component and with respect to the land dedication I think the idea as part of this policy exploration would be to see if in certain instances it might be better to take alternative approaches to the inclusionary and we've seen that from time to time depending on the type of development that it is where either in lieu fees could actually result in the production of more affordable housing than a um a inclusionary unit within the project itself or in this case as you mentioned the land dedication and we saw that with the metro south project where the land dedication allowed us to do things like two bedroom and three bedroom units that we wouldn't have achieved with the the smaller unit mix in the market rate project so there can very well be some benefits associated with that and I think to the one of the closing comments that councilmember counter Johnson mentioned um that um the the um policies essentially say explore these opportunities and and do that analysis to see if that can happen because I don't know that that's the right thing it's it's not the right thing in every instance in some instances it could and so if we can structure our policy to capture those um benefits that would be great yeah and I I thank you I appreciate that and I understand that and that's you know I've been you know uh with some exceptions because of the details I'm happy to support those but I guess I just it the way it's written it appears that that's not something that we do and so we need to kick into year to get it done and it just it just feels a little strange to me given that that's actually happening um so if are you suggesting that there needs to be a study done about that or would are you still thinking about case by case well kind of just doing what we've already do with the policy um written into a resolution that you know to kind of I guess memorialize that is that what's happening here I think the idea would be to take a fresh look at that and see if there are um tweaks to that because as you mentioned yes it can be done we had that with the Pacific Front Laurel and PAC South projects um but um we might be able to revise and tweak that ordinance to really um encourage or allow the city to require or promote how to know that we could require it because state law actually um requires some flexibility there but there may be some options where we could look at those policies and strengthen them so that when it does appear to play into our favor in terms of production of additional affordable units how might how might we be able to promote that or encourage that through policy shifts got it um thank you and so my my follow-up question then is for the council members who brought this forward uh given what we saw uh when the chart came up it was in graph form and in the table the numbers the the fact that the city has and we know this has um is challenged by uh developing very low income units and low income units as well though I think we've done very well this past round but those opportunities rely on significant public subsidy um given that need and that we know we are in a you know what I would call an affordable housing crisis and not really a housing crisis so much as an affordable housing crisis why there was so little mention of policies that promote affordable housing the only one I see is the buy right uh streamlining for a 100% affordable housing project so I'm just wondering why that wasn't really addressed in in your um framework I mean I can I'll take a stab at that and then um also you know my co co-bringers will um I'm sure have comments I mean I think that obviously the whole point of the housing element and it is really to direct us to the rena goals so our you know the affordability goal the affordability delivery is really set in the rena goals and then the housing element is the way to get there so I think when we looked at this um we didn't question the affordability goals that had been set in the rena process um I think we were looking at ways and methods to get there so that the production which um admittedly has been slow and um not uh you know not keeping up with uh although it looks like we might we probably will meet our current housing element current um round by the time that um you know 20 whatever it expires next year um we you know we really were looking at some of those policy objectives that helped with further direction to keep on track and um I think it's really about um scaling up delivery at least in my opinion in terms of some of the things that we looked at with the staff so you know the the goal is set you know the affordability as goal is set and um now how do we get there so we can get people into housing and keep people um here in Santa Cruz so that's that would be my comment right yeah you're go ahead I have a follow-up question about that but go ahead if you wanted to add something council member Palantir Johnson yeah yeah and I would just add that um a lot of these policies are about a range of housing including affordable housing um the policy number five explicitly calls it out but in producing housing you're also producing affordable housing so it's all encompassing and then I would say that the first policy um affirmatively furthering for housing does also specifically speak to um as a larger policy speak to affordable housing and and I would argue that we have a housing crisis across the board um there are families that I know who do not qualify for very low income or even low income who can't afford to live here thank you um so I guess I'm just trying to clarify so it seems it sounds to me like the premise that you know your starting point is that housing supply will make housing affordable um and so there's not a need to explicitly call out afford low income units is what it sounds it is called it is called out as you pointed out and policy number five as well as policy number one um thank you thank you for your um question council member brown and um I'm curious uh where you see do you feel that calling out affordability should be in more of the resolution in this context or absolutely I have some thoughts on that for later okay I'm I'm happy to hear those those thoughts thank you are there any other uh council questions before I go out to public comment okay thank you so um let's see if you are a member of the public and you would like to comment on this agenda item number 29 with and 29.1 and 29.2 which relates to the housing element approval of a contract with kim lee horn and associates and a resolution providing guidance to the six cycle housing element um please raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand on the computer webinar controls so going out to our attendees the first name I see is rafa sonan felt go ahead and unmute yes good evening council um I'm calling in on behalf of Santa Cruz um in strong support of the uh resolution uh the guidance resolution supporting the housing element um we we really appreciate the um the thoughtful uh direction that the council is looking at going into especially concerning the by right approach to 100 affordable residential development um and and we look forward to seeing what what comes out of out of the housing element process as as we move forward engaging in the community um as far as the um the other agenda item um your uh approval of the the contract with uh kim lee horn um one of the benefits of uh of this process is that it is public and um uh kim lee horn is experienced in in um housing elements creation um we've been tracking a number of of cities that they've been working with including ensenitas tosta mesa and chino um and the thought is uh just make sure that that uh those uh because there are cities that have not had approved housing elements with kim lee horn um make sure that that uh you get some satisfactory answers as to why that's happening thank you very much thank you for your comment um our next member of the public has a phone number ending in zero two four nine hi welcome you know good afternoon council this is carol fulhamis um thank you for all the hard work that went into um developing the resolutions i have been really interested in listening to all of them i have a specific comment uh regarding resolution eight and adu's i think we should do everything we can to encourage adu development because it's the one thing one way we can include increased infill development with no cost to the city which is definitely value added so one of the things that i think really encourages people to build adu's is having most flexible use and i know that the state no longer requires the owner to be occupying one part of the property in order to run out the other but the previous folks who built adu's before the state changed the law all have um these restrictions on their property requiring them to live in either the adu or the main the main house and i think that even though that wouldn't increase the building of the adu's it would increase the ability to rent them which would be you know more housing of value added thank you for considering thank you and um i believe it was item number seven on adu's just to clarify that um our next member of the public and phone number ending in seven four zero seven hi thank you um my name is alise casby i just want to quickly say that the technology is so faulty uh i was prohibited from speaking on the water issue but this issue is really um very important and i just want to say that our city readers have been really um preventing the public in all ways from really having a robust and community-based discussion about all aspects of housing i've been except for a brief period during the covid crisis attending many city council meetings and i think it's very anti-democratic that you don't have voted to exclude the public except to have city council meetings on zoom um and i think this is very deliberate and the public needs to become very aware of the insider moves that have been going on to build luxury condos at the end of pacific and royal to exclude low income to basically have more regular workers be forced to leave the city and of course the recall which was legal but unfortunately very unethical which unseated two of our progressive members which it has a lot to do with the whole housing um the devious machinations that are going on with housing and i would just say that it's time that we protest and thank you for your comment and your input our next member of the public is the name kyle kelly uh hey all thank you so much um sorry i just want to point out that like doing this housing element this is just a a process to kind of assess what what the needs are like how you want to direct that that work both for the consultant and the rfp so this is like you get to make a choice on do are we going to build car oriented communities or are we going to build transit oriented communities um you know everybody on here we can we can talk about how many subsidized affordable homes are on there or you know how many uh homes that are non-means tested are going to go on there like that's up to you you can you can say that you want to exceed the rena goals for all all you want um but that but the real thing here on this is really just directing uh staff and then directing the the contractor in this case to go and explore how you want to see the community develop right it's just one in a series of many many many things coming up within this sixth cycle um and you'll you'll give yourself a lot less stress if you can just come do a good arrangement here thank you for your comment it looks like that concludes there's i don't see any other hands raised on this item okay i will um bring it back to council for motion action deliberation council member mayors mayor i'll go ahead and make a motion to approve the resolution presented which is the resolution providing guidance to the city's sixth cycle housing element and it is included in the packet great and we um still have the other item as well we'll get to i'm sorry right and i'm yeah i'll have someone i'll someone else can make that so i'll just move the uh resolution at this time unless you want to vote did you want to vote for both of them or are we voting separate that's fine we can do it separate is there a second to the motion i can second the 29.2 okay and we 29.2 we have a first by council member mayors and a second by council member calentary johnson and then um council member comings and then vice mayor Watkins thank you mayor um you know i guess the comments i have are so much ones that were brought up earlier really around the fact that you know what we're really missing in our community and what we're continuing to see a loss a loss of affordable housing and over the course of the next 10 years we're probably going to see an even more significant traumatic loss of affordable housing as many people who provide affordable housing um age out and and get out of the the mental housing uh market so you know i think that if we're going to move in this direction with this resolution i'm happy to make um an amendment with a number of added where as is edits um and edits to the resolution that i think will address some of these issues and so i've sent it over to bonnie and the um maybe she can put them up on the screen is this are these friendly amendments or are you making an alternate a separate motion um well we can start with friendly and see where it goes but the amendments would be whereas the city of santa cruz is one of the least affordable communities in the country and is experiencing a severe housing crisis moderate low and very low income residents and whereas a significant percentage of the state's target arena numbers to the city are for housing units to serve low and very low income residents which are the most difficult to construct whereas the city can't rely on 100 affordable developments to attain the low and very low income housing unit targets under rita and must increase the percentage of inclusion area affordable housing units required in private developments whereas increased densities need to be balanced by consideration of the high density development impact on neighborhoods the city residents quality of life and other community values those would be the whereas is added and then in the therefore add number 11 consider the creation of policies that would facilitate the production of affordable workforce housing and delete from the now therefore uh item number five um and the reason for this is because one of the things that we've been hearing from or I've been hearing from community members is that you know it's our responsibility to evaluate projects that come before us and to ensure that the developers are doing this in collaboration with the community and that we're making sure that these developments are and the applications are sound and then replace number six with evaluate whether alternative replace number six with increased affordable housing requirements and high density housing developments both for regular and density bonus projects both before and during the housing element process and you know we've already increased our inclusionary um requirements we know that there's an item on our agenda tonight and we've been hearing from community that we should be doing everything we can to maximize affordable housing and so that's the um if it's if it's accepted as a friendly amendment I don't think it will be but I'll leave it there at first and then if it's not accepted then I'll make a motion to amend with the following recommendations I just go ahead and second it I counsel member Myers um are you amenable to these um the friendly amendments to um add I'm okay with um the first whereas um I think that's been stated many many times in multiple documents for years um as well as broadcast on that probably through the New York Times many times um I'm okay with the second whereas I don't not gonna X I'm not going to accept the third and I'm not going to accept the fourth 11 is specific to one type of housing that's actually housing that is recognized by the state but we have a variety of different housing types including permanent supportive senior lots of others so I um you know I think that's just too narrow for the intent of the resolution which is really a guiding guiding set of policies to be analyzed by the consultant so I'm not going to accept um number 11 I'm not going to accept the deletion offered and I can accept number the the the proposed replacement with with the and and really the reason is that I understand the the urgency to try to get affordable housing underway um I will state again that we have a record number of units coming online um hopefully 125 of those won't be stopped um that are associated with the library project and I think my main reason for not taking on the six number six is um I think that we have multiple policies in place that are already pushing us for um creating as much affordable housing as possible so the language um says both before and during the housing element process I believe that based with everything that was done for with the housing blueprint that and multiple um policies already in place I think that six is I mean that is the world we sort of are living in and that's why we've been able to uh successfully bring in over 50 million dollars for affordable housing projects just this past year and a half so I think we're on track and I'm not sure that that needs to be added at this time those would be my recommendations as the motion maker and I'll look to the seconder okay so um councilmember calentary johnson the one first and second whereas were accepted are you yeah those are I'm I'm agreeable to accepting those and I'm in agreement with um the comments that councilmember mires made in terms of which of the other ones um uh are accepted and and I I do have a comment when that's appropriate okay so but so like councilmember Cummings your first two warehouses have been accepted as a friendly amendment and then I'd like to make a motion to amend um to include the remaining items that were discussed second okay so councilmember Cummings is making a motion to amend to include the remaining items that were not accepted by the friendly amendment and councilmember brown seconded um so how do we vote on the amended motion then do we vote on the amended motion first uh councilmember cummings made a motion to amend the main motion so um you will vote on whether to accept uh the amendment to the main motion and if you vote yes it is the amendment in the totality of what was proposed tony or is it that's right and then we would go back and um accept um the items that we were going to accept just as friendly amendments is that correct uh yeah that's exactly right if the if the motion if the council accepts the amendment then you can vote on the motion as amended by council member cummings uh motion if it doesn't then you can consider adding the first two items as friendly amendments okay thank you for that clarification i mean we have a roll roll call vote on the amendment i'm sorry uh mayor brinner point of order too can we make comments i've had my hand up quite a while thank you i'm so sorry thank you councilmember brown and uh vice mayor wackens has yeah thank you councilmember brown i think council i think vice mayor wackens had her hand up first but that's okay i'll go unless do you want to go you could you're welcome to go okay so i um yeah i'm i support the amendments i um um i think that they get at um i'm just trying to read through my notes here get at the um some of the concerns that i have maybe not all of them but um in particular i'm concerned about the language included in this resolution to that suggests an evaluation of alternative inclusionary approaches um the way it's worded and given that it is coming from um a group of council members at least two of whom have stated they oppose the current 20 and would like to see that reduced um i'm nervous that this language um could actually lead to a reduction in our inclusionary uh uh requirements and so i'm very much committed and i can't support a resolution that includes language like this given it's um not very clear and given the kind of the history here of uh around our inclusionary debates um i think it's such a weak commitment to talk about you know looking at alternative inclusionary approaches um it's it's it's a weak commitment to affordability at best and um at worst and what i fear uh is intended to reduce inclusionary requirements on developers who are going to be given the opportunity to build much higher density housing even with higher construction costs higher land costs the density suggests to me that there's definitely capacity to meet afford increased inclusionary requirements and we know that developers will always say they can't do it until the requirement is in place and then they figure out a way and the fact that project applications have not slowed with the change to the 20 suggests to me that uh trying to undermine that at this point is um uh you know just it's it's it's an unfortunate uh objective or apparent objective um so i'm i can't support uh the main motion without these changes so i um absolutely will support the vote on the amendments and see what happens thank you council member brown vice mayor walkins yeah no problem i you know i originally had my hand up just to second the motion so um you know that has now happened um but while i have a floor i i think what i just want to thank my colleagues for putting the thought into this resolution and provide this guidance as we move forward with this really kind of uncharted territory that we're going to be entering in um i understand the intention behind the amendments um and i have concerns similar to some of my colleagues in regards to a few of them and therefore i won't be supporting the full package of amendments here and you know i also just want to echo what was said in terms of the adu production that was something i think you know we as a as a council and our community has overwhelmingly supported so um that was also something i wanted to kind of put an exclamation mark on um but yeah i'm happy to proceed if we want to take the vote so that we can move forward this time thank you vice mayor walkins um council member calentary johnson sorry um thank you mayor you know i i think what's a weak commitment to affordability is taking out the 100 percent ministerial approval um which i found was a very strong policy statement um you know we allow for single family homes but not 100 affordable housing i don't see how that affirmatively furthers fair housing and i don't see how that furthers um my colleagues goals of building 100 affordable it's just very counter to what i heard earlier and there's no conspiracy to reduce inclusionary this is about building housing it's about building housing responsibly for our entire community um you know we've we've worked pretty hard on this for the last however many months with members of our community with advocates and it's it's really for the well-being of our community so um i do take some offense to some of the comments that there's some you know ulterior motive here um the motive here is to build housing it's to build 100 affordable housing it's to build housing for everyone so that we can remain and stay in our community and i do want to thank my colleagues for their work on this and i want to thank um the community members who helped us get here thank you councilmember county johnson um and uh um i will say that um i appreciate the input from everybody it's it's really important and why we wanted to you know get a head start on some of this guidance that we saw um and um even one of the callers mentioned community input and that's still to come this is um you know we have 2024 is um when the new cycle begins and this is a start to where um we see this guidance and um um councilmember brown on um items six um i'm you know i didn't even think of it the way you had mentioned and so um i am wondering if there's a way you know this was um number six evaluate whether alternative inclusionary approaches may produce more affordable housing or deeper levels of affordability was simply that we have an inclusionary um you know set set now is is there more we can do is is that enough and and that was kind of where i was coming from and how i saw that so um you know i don't know if there's you know this is kind of just a broad evaluate whether there's other approaches that could help with that um and so you know language is everything and if there's a way to improve that it's not to replace um or reduce um but how do we maximize everything is how i look at all of these um guiding um directional um broad um resolution statements is you know with the ad use like why limit ourselves to state minimums like can we have more than 180 you on a property where it's applicable where it could make sense for if it really you know just because the state requirements as one thing for example so um i um you know i'm not i'm not in agreement with replacing six with six um and um i am in agreement with keeping the 100 affordable um as is and um you know i i was really thinking this um this was broad enough to give some guidance that um we could direct as staff is you know you know contracting considering this um consultant and direction to explore that these are things to explore so um i'd like to get to a point where um we're all in agreement of um these are the elements that we agree on and we'd like to have staff and as they contract with consultant um kim lee horn um if we should approve that um next item that um you know any of these other ones that we can tweak it enough so that it encompasses the intent um and so if there's a way we can get to that in the next you know 10 minutes um i think it's it's a it's a start for us to continue this work over the next couple years right um this guidance so and the discussion so with that we have a um amendment i believe that looks like i don't see any other hands up i don't want to miss anybody's opportunity for discussion uh council member mayors i mean i may or i'll just echo your comments a little bit um you know these are just these are really meant to be guiding um guiding uh you know we're not adopting policy right now we're just providing some guidance on what's become an increasingly complex world of housing providing housing in the state of california um the housing element is a public process um it is going to include a lot of public outreach the council will probably receive multiple decision making points where um uh the kinds of things that are addressed here i agree in broad broad language we are there's nothing in this resolution that says that we are reducing the inclusionary percentage that is currently on the books i personally don't i think that inclusionary um and i've stated it before as you know i think the only council member um i think it it is not producing the outcomes that we we had hoped um but that's just a personal i get to have my own personal thoughts on that um so i think the language is broad um we are not trying to nefarious really try to reduce inclusionary or prevent affordable housing these are just some guidance to try to help our um consultant uh focus on the things that we have all been grappling with for many years um and these are some of the spots where we've identified that you know some intent and um but again this is going to go before council multiple times this will be before the public before the community members um i know it'll be before um housing developers as well as people who are do not want higher densities or more housing in town so this is just uh it's just a guidance document um and um so while i would appreciate maybe trying to nuance every single line on here i just don't think it's a good use of the council's time today um and um i'm you know unfortunately i think it's it's a guidance document i'm hoping that you know we can provide this to the consultant and have our staff be able to refer to it but um i think nuancing different words um my experience is that that is never done in 10 minutes it takes usually actual multiple hours to get something like that done so um i hate to be a wet rag on this but i'm just trying to make sure we we don't extend into a you know extended meeting for hours tonight so thank you thank you councilmember mayers well we do have a um motion an amendment on the table that i think we're ready for a roll call vote but this is council member Cummings and seconded by councilmember brown thank you council member calentary johnson no holder no coming no mayor brunner no an amended motion does not pass five to two against okay have a motion by councilmember mayers seconded by calentary johnson with two friendly amendments um accepted the two first where as is is is there anything else we're going to vote on that i have a roll call vote please oh councilmember Cummings that was safe that um i appreciate the intent of resolution that was brought before us today and i think that you know there's i do have some concern that's shared by many members of the community that building market rate housing is something we haven't had a problem with the building below and very low is something that we have consistently had problems with constructing and um you know it's reflected in the arena numbers from the previous cycle we are getting there but in this next cycle we're going to have a substantial amount of affordable housing that's going to need to be produced and again you know with many single-family homes not being accessible to working people anymore but with many of these properties that are affordable because the landlords have owned them for long enough to where they can keep your lens down a lot of those are going to be coming offline during this period that we're going to go into the cycle and um you know that's the one thing that we struggle with the most and so while i do understand that um we need all forms of housing and while i do understand that um you know there's some people who think that any housing is good housing i think that one of the consistent things that we've been hearing across all sectors that small business city county is that retention is a is a huge issue of our workforce and most of this market rate housing will not will not provide housing for our local workforce and we're going to be really struggling to to attract and retain people if we're not committed to maximizing that workforce low and very low-income housing so it's just something i'm concerned about as we move forward and um and we're going to have to think of many alternatives including the increase of inclusionary 80s but we're not going to solve just building 100% thanks councilmember Cummings um i think we all share those concerns and um you know this this diversifying our housing and um really looking at policies that make it flexible and easy because funding is such a challenge um i think is part of it there's many reasons and um it's important that we go through this process exploring all of that with that front and center this is definitely a concern of mine so i know many many of us here working on on this um guidance as well so um if there we can councilmember Myers yeah i'm happy to go ahead to the vote mayor but i just wanted to make sure it clarified that the resolution and i know maybe the public probably hasn't had a time to potentially look at all of this but the resolution is not supporting market rate housing so i just want to make sure it's very clear that um you know this is not uh this is not an attempt to just establish market rate housing so again i think there's some misconceptions being put out about the intent and i just want to make sure that it's very clear that that is not not mentioned i don't believe the words market rate show up in the resolution at all so um i just want to make sure that there's um accuracy being conveyed in our comments this evening thank you mayor happy to go to the vote thank you um city clerk may we have a roll call vote councilmember calentary johnson hi holder hi mayor watkins hey and mayor brooder that motion passes five in favor to the gounts okay and now going to item 29.1 approval of a contract with kim lee horn and associates for consultant services for the sixth cycle housing element update um vice mayor Watkins have you moved that recommendation okay we have a first by vice mayor Watkins council councilmember coming second comment so there was a go straight to a roll call vote okay city clerk councilmember calentary johnson hi coming hi vice mayor Watkins and mayor brooder hi that motion passes unanimously thank you so much kathryn donovan thank you thank you to everyone for the discussion and um for the callers who called in for comments it looks like we recess to the six p.m until six p.m six p.m will be oral communications and um item number 30 the downtown plan expansion excuse me and this item will be led by vice mayor Watkins since i will be refusing myself from this item so at six p.m we will return for oral communications thank you we can council members turn on their cameras good to see everyone's faces welcome let me get my notes up okay so we will begin we are returning from a dinner break um i'd like to say good evening welcome to our six o'clock p.m session of the june 14th 2022 meeting of the santa cruz city council is the city clerk ready i am thank you great i would like to ask the clerk to please take roll call councilmember is calentary johnson is it boulder here member mayors is currently absent vice mayor watkins here and mayor brooder president thank you we are now at the point in the agenda for oral communications oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda today for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you wish to comment during oral communications now is the time to call in instruction and should be on your screen i do want to say we were hoping to meet in person uh today but again we had to do strictly virtual due to covid cases and so um for those who like to attend oral communications in person at our council dia city hall location um hopefully that will be our next meeting uh so stay tuned but in the meantime please dial in and it's your opportunity to speak to us that uh on items not on today's agenda you can raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting the raise hand feature in the webinar controls on your computer you will have three minutes to speak and 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 can address questions raised after oral communications so let's see if there are any members of the public with their hands raised for oral communications i have one phone number ending in seven four zero seven go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself hi there thank you hi hi mayor brunner um my name is elise casby i'm a political activist here in santa cruz and i'm calling in today because uh we have just been through a primary election on june 7th and i am also speaking to the public um in making this call i'm um calling to make a plea to anyone in the public who is listening to just encourage them and actually plead and really uh ask people to come to understand that we are we are at a time when our democracy is is really fading and that's not just my opinion it's it's a fact if you do the research on it public participation in our city council meetings is critical public participation in our elections studying up on politics it's one of the best games in the world and the reason is it's because it shapes our world i love to be active with the santa cruz metro system because that system first of all is my primary mode of transportation but it also is any enormous vehicle for change a nexus of workers riders community members and our ability to impact reducing fossil fuel emissions um from cars and other in other ways um addressing climate change through climate justice so i just want to say um this election is critical uh miss carlontari johnson has enormous amounts of money and she's advocating taking um some actions that might be considered illegal i believe to get more money even though she has more money than just about anybody in the county in terms of a politician seeking office politics is about struggle it's about compromise it's about fighting but more than anything to have a real political game a real meaningful system we need to engage it and covering up the truth and just placating people as she did a few minutes ago when she said to me oh there's no insider blah blah blah there is an insider system in santa that is has taken over our city and we need to absolutely address it we need to bring democracy back to the city we need to engage workers we need to do everything we can put our shoulder to the boulder in the next six months to try to restore some semblance of truth and justice to the elections in city council we also need to heal from some significant damages that have happened so i'm just asking people uh if you're still there if you're still listening are you there yes to compete for the truth and fight for our futures it's now and if we don't do it soon it just may be never because we're going to lose our planet to fires to climate change to all kinds of problems that we're contributing to thank you very much for my chance to speak thank you for your input your next member of the public is don wilburn go ahead and unmute yourself yes um my name is don weiberg i am a emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at uc santa cruise and i live in santa cruise uh i have it for the past 20 years i want to say regarding the proposed um building of uh a new space in downtown that both the kaiser permanente arena which is temporary in the outdated uh santa cruise symphony auditorium can in fact in that plant be very efficiently combined into one building that is acoustically sound i have done some research on this matter and uh as one example state park where the university of uh state university of pennsylvania is located has such a facility in somewhat similar situation to santa cruise that's all i have to say thank you for your oral communications are there any other attendees members of the public that would like to speak to us on any item not on today's agenda it looks like seeing none i will bring it back to our agenda and um at this time uh we are moving on to agenda item number 30 the downtown plan expansion and uh this item i have recused myself from is out of an abundance of caution related to my employment and um vice mayor whatkins will be leading this item on the agenda thank you great thank you mayor happy to do that um we'll go ahead and jump right in then so um for members of the public who are streaming this um meeting this is item number 30 our downtown plan expansion and what will happen is we'll have a presentation on this item from our staff that will be followed by clarifying questions from the council um with our understanding that council members had the opportunity to ask staff questions before this item and then we'll go ahead and take public comment and return to council for action and deliberation so at this time i'll go ahead and hand it over to our staff for our presentation thank you vice mayor whatkins and good evening council members i'm libel there i'm the director of planning and community development and i'm going to um kick it off here briefly before handing it over to um sarah noisy our senior planner and matt van wa our principal planner in advanced planning um so before you tonight is a step in the downtown plan expansion process it is a consideration of various um alternative land use scenarios that um we have been vetting with the community and that we are looking to get direction from the council on with respect to what our preferred land use alternative should be that we will then study as part of our california environmental quality analysis as um we have talked about previously downtown santa cruz is the most sustainable place to grow in the region it's got close proximity to jobs transit to entertainment goods services housing great mix of uses and that makes it a really walkable environment where residents and visitors can utilize active transportation and minimize vehicle miles traveled we've also talked um even earlier today about our um arena numbers that's the regional housing needs assessment numbers and um we've got a really significant number um 3760 or 3736 units that we are planning for over the next um eight-year cycle that will start in um 2024 um to put that in perspective a little bit um that's five times the number of units that we need to plan for as part of the current nine-year cycle and um it's substantially more than what we studied even in the environmental impact report for our um general plan eir that we're currently operating under and over the past seven years we we have seen a substantial amount of housing development and yet we would need to triple the pace of development in order to meet the regional housing needs targets that we have in this next cycle so um there's some substantial um uh capacity that we need to plan for coming up but not just in this next cycle but in future cycles buildings um that will be constructed of this scale in this area in the area south of laurel here um they will be around for 60 70 80 100 plus years and so we're not just planning for this rena cycle that has substantial amount of growth incorporated we're planning for the rena cycle after that and the rena cycle after that and the one after that really we're planning for decades of growth into the future and um we want to make sure that we are taking advantage of this opportunity and not looking back in uh a few decades from now and saying this this was a missed opportunity and so that's that's one of the reasons why we have the recommendations that we have in the report and that sarah will explain to you momentarily this also offers an opportunity to really connect the beach area and the downtown this is something that we've been talking about for a uh a really long time for decades and um this visual connection that new development in this area can provide will serve as a a direct link as a visual connect connection between the visitors to our beach area and uh to our downtown and many of those visitors don't even realize how great of a downtown we already have and so this uh this is an opportunity to supplement and enhance and improve upon the downtown that we have and um it will allow us to um hopefully um achieve not only the additional housing units that will help for our um rena cycle planning um in the upcoming round and in future rounds but also hopefully to achieve a uh permanent warriors arena and to have the benefits that the warriors have brought um in the short time that they've been here seven plus years over the long term and um we're looking forward to to that opportunity but there are also some other amenities with respect to um public space on spruce street with respect to um enhancing river levy access and um with respect to um enhancing that connection on cliff street between the beach area and the downtown so with that i'll turn it over to sarah noisy she can provide some of the background on the project and then we'll move into the recommendations that staff is um asking the council to weigh in on this evening good evening thanks lee um good evening uh vice mayor and council members um i'm going to invite our consultant on this project bill wiseman to join me and share his screen he's got he's running the presentation tonight so thanks for that introduction lee we're going to um walk you through the um the project as we as it exists at this point so we're going to talk about some of the work that we've done in the past a little bit of the background on what got us to this point i'm going to go through the background relatively quickly so let's go ahead and go to the next slide so my name's sarah noisy i work for the city of sanacruz um members of our team bill wiseman is the our primary consultant with kim lee horn he is supported by justin dual at dollin architecture who's been helping us sort of um conceptualize and visualize different development scenarios um as an architect and then we also have matt thompson working with us he's a local architect with just a deep history um understanding of sanacruz has been helping us understand and visualize aspects of streetscape and public space as we move through this plan next slide please um so we're going to go through the whole project and summarize some of the work that we've done talk about our um outreach events our our primary one being the open house event and then we'll have time for discussion at the end next slide please so let's get into the project overview next slide so for a little bit of context the project area that we're talking about this evening is um the area shown in red here south of laurel street so the current existing downtown plan is shown in the blue line that's the downtown plan that was initiated following the 89 earthquake and sort of encompasses the existing downtown and then um also shown here in green is the beach south of laurel area plan which um was a plan from the mid to late 90s that talked about development at the beach and did also set up some expectation about connecting the beach and downtown so both of those existing plans will be affected by the work that we're doing um and the focus of our discussion tonight is going to be within that red line so that's the area that we're going to be talking about next slide please so just really briefly background um you know this project this the downtown plan has been around since the 90s it's been amended several times most recently to add additional housing capacity and we've seen that be really successful this project is funded by various grant funding sources which are allowing us to bring on this great consultant team that we've got and make sure that we can really do the in-depth analysis and the SIPA environmental review that we need to do next slide please so here's our project area again closer up 29 acres included um you'll see the existing temporary warriors arena on the right side of the screen there that big white box that's the existing warriors arena um also in this area we have um the ace hardware site that's at laurel and pacific we have 555 pacific down towards the um the bend in pacific avenue and then we also have the site of the 130 center um sorrow project that was recently approved and um i think reviewed also by the city council so we also have that existing traffic circle we've captured that into this plan and for streetscape improvements to be part of the area that's um sort of being addressed with streetscape ideas next slide please so just to go through these project objectives these are printed in your materials they're on our project website um we are primarily our main focus as the city um in this effort is to create more capacity within the city from multifamily housing that was the point of our grant applications that's um really what we're seeking to do at this point with our downtown plan is to create more of a mixed use context where there's more people living downtown and more um activity that's baked in people living close to jobs as we mentioned we also have this opportunity to create opportunities for um new public amenities so we have our existing public amenities of the river walk and our natural resources at the beach so how can we enhance those and create better connections so that both locals and visitors can connect to all of these different features that make santa cruz a special place we're looking at um also creating new economic opportunities for local businesses creating new business space that's modern and updated we and all of those things will go to create tax revenue to support city services which we all know are important and funding is really a key component of keeping those things running as you all have been discussing with the budget um we also specifically want to think about improving the pedestrian and bicycle experience so we understand that there is existing traffic congestion in this area and we also hear loud and clear from the public every time we go out that we want to create walkable environments we want to create places that are safe for bicyclists of all ages so that's a key component of this plan as well thinking about how all of those different types of circulation can happen effectively and then lastly we do want to incorporate a site for a permanent financially viable warrior's arena into the plan so we'll show you how we're looking at a couple of different options for where that might be located within the area next slide so our project schedule um we started about a year ago and did a lot of background work which bill is going to talk about in in a minute and then use that background work and our first round of community engagement to create some development scenarios which we then were able to take to a public open house at the end of April and then to the planning commission and to the downtown commission to get gather feedback leading us to the point where we are now of having sort of a recommended scenario and then over the next year we're going to be writing those down those actual amendments and policies into the downtown plan working on our sequa project our sequa document and doing all of the environmental analysis that's going to be required and then our target is to be back here a little bit less than a year from now with um a final plan and an and an EIR for all of for the council to review based on recommendation from downtown commission and the planning commission next slide please next slide bill oh where's the next slide you yes that's okay so now bill is going to take over bill wiseman of kimley horn associates is going to take over and talk through um the next parts of the project okay just want to make sure it's working first can you guys hear me okay so i'm trying to start with a video but it doesn't like laser and whatnot so give me a break give me a second here to um thank you sarah so i'm just going to play this drone video in the background this is a drone of the project site just to sort of give us a context of um what the project site's looking or what the project site looks like from a bird's eye view and while that's showing this is just about four minutes we're going to look across the project site in downtown and the connection to the beach and i just was just want to reflect real briefly on uh what draws us to santa cruz i know for myself when i was 18 year old i came out as a junior summer and lived with grandpa and felton and i came down to downtown santa cruz and the cooper house and all the wonderful amenities that santa cruz has to offer there's really something special about the downtown and i'm not just saying that i think it's really important and i remember not too long after up on the ferris wheel at the boardwalk and i looked out across the city scape at sunset and i said i'm gonna live here so for the last 25 years i've lived here with my family and i really really like santa cruz and i love it and when this project came about i got a sense of like this is really something important and i think that kind of carries on for what lee was talking about is that this is you know more than just rina numbers it's about creating a there for the downtown and thinking about downtown kind of in a i call it a post-covid city if you will and what's happening with migration patterns and whatnot and the amenities that santa cruz has in context to the sports arena and its beach community etc it's it's really something special so i think tonight from my perspective it's really taking this passion and i know i share that with matthew tomson who i'm just totally pleased to be able to work with on this project he's brought a lot of great insight so i give some kudos to matt he's been wonderful to work with so it's really about thinking about a vision then for what this downtown can be and it's not just for the downtown it's for the city as a whole and really for the region because the the warriors uh the tourism attraction and whatnot and trying to really bring the glue which i think this is an opportunity to do with the downtown the the boardwalk and really you know the entity as a whole so we'll get into that as we go forward so this is just looking at how that connection out actually up to the to the boardwalk would work along cliff street as i go to this presentation there's from my perspective and the team's perspective there's really two critical components and there's looking at both the public realm and the private realm so what i mean by that the public realm is really the streetscape it's the the horizontal and so if we're going to create a there we're going to want to do housing and we're going to talk about numbers and and kind of what works from a financial standpoint but the real element here is what happens at the streetscape how do we create a there that people want to come to and live in and and how does it relate so that's going to be an important discussion and we'll talk about some of the methods that we're going to that we looked at for for how to do that and then the other side is obviously the private realm and that's the vertical so the buildings and what they look like and you know what the composition of the housing is and and how it works with the retail etc so there's sort of those two components and really what i want to try to convey is is that we really want to set this vision for what's going to happen for 50 to 100 years from now just like we was talking about so this kind of ends it with our relationship with the river and and looking across at the Kaiser Permanente arena i'm going to move on and thanks from the indulgence and giving you a little aerial tour of the site so let me start with the first phase of the project that sarah was talking about and that's what we called the project discovery and the community engagement process for that so what we started out by doing was through the city's website we hosted a number of activities first was we did a community workshop and that was held online we did that on a saturday to get people's basically initial thoughts and concepts about what they'd like to see supporting that we did a community survey we did what's called an ideas wall and an interactive map the data here at the bottom is giving you kind of the number of people that visited we basically with the survey we got 88 responses and we got a number of comments that were based on six different topics on the idea wall and then people were able to interact by actually making comments directly onto the map so you know maybe at an intersection improve safety at this intersection or i'd like to see you know various different concepts and ideas of what they like and don't like um just to note that the survey we had running for about six weeks almost two two months as we did the ideas wall and the interactive map we then took that down or stopped it um just so that we could then take those comments and consolidate into looking at the scenarios and then from that we did the um work the open house which i'll talk about a little bit later and then we reopened that with another idea as well so the website is acted as an ongoing forum for people to provide comments back and us to be able to interact and and also post materials as they've been developed for the project so far so just a few highlights from the survey that i think are worth noting one of the questions we asked was before COVID how many times did you go to the Kaiser Permanente arena and as you can see people frequented quite a bit so it's a regional draw and um you know it's it's it's something that people really see as an asset for the for the community uh they largely get here by car which maybe is no um surprise just given its region later in draw but also that helps a good implication as far as how parking gets managed so something to think about as we go in the futures as how we might be able to reduce some of that car traffic but also how we can accommodate it um when people arrive and then when they do get here uh question 37 asked how would they typically go to go to a bar restaurant or some other venue before or after the event so this is a good implication of the economic driver that the arena has on the restaurants and local businesses downtown people come they park they walk they go to a bar restaurant either before or after the game so it's a real stimulator and it's not just a game maybe it's some other event a concert etc so it's that sort of implications of of how it stimulates the economy um the last one i want to talk about this is a question we asked them to rank some of the urban design features and determining how the south of laurel area should be redeveloped the basically in looking at this graph the green and the blues are what people feel is important or very important and the reds and the yellows are less important and if you group these kind of the first three on the left are addressing those issues about the public realm that i was talking about so the sort of the horizontal what happens at the streetscape and these issues are really important to people what happens at the sidewalks and pathways the connectivity between downtown and the beach areas and quality civic spaces on the the three on the right side is dealing more with that private realm that i was referring to and that's sort of the built form so what does it look like from the ground up and the importance is our quality of materials and architectural details and interestingly from our survey of 88 of building heights was not as important so i thought that was an interesting data point that came out of the survey and there were a lot of comments written comments as well in fact for the survey itself we received over 400 written comments so we got a lot of rich feedback to help sort of ground what people's vision were and what they would like to see for the south of laurel area so just a conclusion then on the discovery outreach the projects area the concerns about feeling unsafe i'm going to just highlight that there were a significant number of comments about people having issues about feeling safe and and what the downtown friendliness safety and i know that's a hard issue it's a difficult complex issue but it's really important to people and it's it's a barrier that we need to think about and sort of confront and and think about what how we can address that there's strong support for redevelopment and a mix of uses including restaurants entertainment and housing streetscape civic spaces and connectivity were high priority improvements and then a lot of comments on keep the Santa Cruz warriors that was like for sure this is really a great asset and let's not lose that opportunity so the results of that discovery outreach were put together in a community outreach report the cover of what you see on the left side and then also there was a real estate market overview that we did another consultant that's on the team is eps economic and planning systems they looked at kind of a baseline data and as you might expect strong support for housing in the market a moderate support for for office as a potential in other words don't don't negate it but maybe uh it's it you know over time it could develop but there wasn't a super strong market for that and then on the retail side it was assess in essence maintain retail but also keep it flexible in case that there's sort of a saturation so there's always that balance between you know what's viable and how much retail the market can support so keeping flexible storefronts was one of their recommendations so following this project discovery we worked with city staff we've incidentally we've been working with city staff pretty much every other week we have bi-weekly meetings and I have to say working with this city has been fantastic everyone supported multiple departments involved and it's really been a very collegial approach working with them in a real joy so it's it's been great and I look forward to the second half if you will so part of that when we went through looking at what we had and sort of start to say okay we've got all this information now how do we coalesce that into the concepts and and ideas and really that broad vision that matches those objectives that sarah was talking about so we decided to do an open house and and I found this to be really engaging and and really a lot of fun so on the 20th of April we hosted an open house we did it at the arena which was really a fun forum this is a picture of people gathering we had 150 people show up so we had a really good good broad spectrum of people that participated and the way we organized it is we did a series of stations and that way the idea was we wanted people to engage one-on-one directly with both the consultant team members and staff so we manned the these stations and it was enable an opportunity for people to talk directly and address their questions and and get feedback both from the people that were participating in you know in the open house management but then also we had large boards and people were able to provide post-it notes so we received over 190 written comments from people commenting on topic areas these topic areas that you see at each station so really a rich way of getting good feedback and a broad cross spectrum and just ought to note as far as how we advertise this because I think it's important a lot of times people say well you know we didn't get enough spectrum of participation we need to have more people just to note how we advertise for this we produced like some 500 flyers that were distributed at businesses downtown we got on the santa cruz county chamber of commerce mailing list of which has something like 7 000 people on their mailing list so it went off to them on a that they have a monthly list a monthly newsletter that they put out and then we also advertised through the warriors they were kind enough to share their mailing list which i think is upwards of something like 20 000 people so we did a lot and we also did noticing in the perimeter of the site to make sure that people locally who live in or nearby the project site were contacted so we wanted to make sure it was really robust there was a lot of resources that were put into the open house we want to make sure it was a success and that everyone you know as that was interested as best we could reach out effectively um was able to participate so i'm going to go through uh most of these topic areas and then sarah is going to pick it up with housing and development scenarios so i'm going to start first with talking about circulation and streetscape this slide illustrates kind of one of the foundation principles of how the site should work or may work in looking at the circulation because that's really the fundamental core of of then determining well how is the building footprints going to work and and sort of the vertical side so what you're looking at on the left side is a diagram showing the existing street network so for context i'm like on a skip the laser go over here so this is uh pacific avenue here's front street it comes back down in merges this is spruce street cutting across here and then the laurel street extension extends out along the river goes down in this way and here's the arena just for context and there's a uh a parking area kind of a dead end road and parking area that's along um that's kind of the other side of the laurel street extension on mature if it has a name on the right side these are some of the major circulation improvements that are proposed as part of the plan one of the first elements that you'll notice is to basically close off a portion of spruce street from front street out to the river and to realign uh laurel street extension along the base of beach hill along the the the toe of the the hillside there and the idea is to open up the space uh and create a much stronger relationship with the san lorenzo river and show you functionally how that that can occur but the idea is to really create a that civic space and that public realm and and that reinforce that relationship with the with the river between front street and pacific the idea is that and that this could be temporarily closed for programmatic components as could pacific avenue lost my mouse here is down this way through the concept of flex zones which i'm going to talk about a little bit longer or later another component is to look about look to potentially put in a new service alley to basically avoid curb cuts for these narrow parcels along the front the west side of pacific avenue and so that would reduce curb cuts directly onto pacific avenue and provide parking from the rear so basically improving how pacific avenue functions uh the concept of putting in a new roundabout uh down here uh where front street and pacific avenue merged together and that really creates a nice feature not only for improving in safety and circulation down there which is a little bit problematic at the current time but also creates a nice gateway entry as you get you know really into the project site so how that might manifest itself then in in a plan design so this is the concept of how this spruce street really becomes a civic core and it becomes a civic space for gathering and i'm going to talk a little bit more about that when we talk about civic spaces in the arena but this is a diagram showing and what we've got is a series of cross sections that show illustrously how these street sections might work and these sections are put together by our esteemed colleague mr. Thompson and i'm going to show just a few of these so this is the first image this is showing and you'll see in red this is the context for what you're looking at with the cross section so this is a cross section looking east on uh spruce street so the if the arena were to go in this area here as a possible alternative to relocating it for its current location here uh this is what it would look like so this is the arena footprint building just diagrammatically and then looking out and you'll see what you're noticing this is is a very wide street so it has a lot of function to be able to use more than just circulation but also to be able to program that this is a cross section down along front street after the curve if you will and looking at the relationship of beach hill and the importance on this is to look at there's you know not only are you elevated by the topography but then there are some larger buildings on this up on the hill this is the golden gate villa which was you know built sometime in about the 1890s and the height of that in context to the footprint of what we envision the arena to be about 75 to 80 feet so just some context of of relationship and scale this is showing a cross section along with the proposed realignment of the laurel street extension in this case putting the the roadway it's currently a one way so maintaining that as a one way but with a separated path right up against the hillside and then showing that relationship with potential building developments associated with this odd here for this parcel this is an image looking basically a relationship along the levy that I talked about earlier so one of the key components is how we deal with the elevation as it relates to not having a levy so one of the things I want to highlight let's see and I think the best way to do that and pardon my changing things but I want to go back to this image here one concept that we've come up with is how do we relate the streetscape to come out to the river so that you basically don't have a hillside in front of you when you get to the levy so the idea is to look at changing the grades starting at Pacific Avenue and if you do about a one and a half percent grade which is almost imperceptible as you're walking you could go you could walk from Pacific Avenue and by the time you get out to the levy you're basically at grade and that has a lot of advantages for relationship and then built form for how the entire area relates to the river you're really unifying it without barriers is the idea so that's where this drawing here is showing that by the time you get to the levy you basically come at grade to what the levy is and so that relationship becomes basically ubiquitous okay the next station that was part of the open house was beach connectivity that Lee and others have talked a little bit about and what you're looking at here is just a diagram to illustrate kind of the current status and the way people get to the river from downtown is in the blue and that is going around the hill and the idea is to reinforce a new way basically that provides a strong wayfinding connection between the downtown and the beach and that is along cliff street so there's a stairway that is located just at the base here and from that stairway there's a lookout that rises up to a lookout and then the idea is to create and reinforce a new streetscape right now you kind of have variations in parking layouts intersections are a bit ill-defined it's a pretty broad wide street which is actually advantageous you know to do something with and maybe and through the concepts of using landscaping and intersection and pedestrian improvements and and mobility bikes as well is to really create a boulevard effect and the interesting thing is is that the view down cliff street goes straight into the coconut grove so you've got this really nice axis relationship this is the center image is looking from this is a drone image so it's raised up a little bit but it gives you a good idea of that straight shot connection this is a view at streetscape uh street level of uh of cliff street from that um from the lookout and then there's images on left and right show the street or the excuse me the stairway that connectivity which would obviously you know the idea is to get some improvements there and then this is what that lookout looks like looking on the images on the right side here you really get a nice view looking out towards the river and the the Santa Cruz mountains etc so it's kind of a special place that really should be celebrated it could be enhanced okay um civic and spaces and arena so in looking at this area what we're thinking about is the context of creating a safe accessible and engaging social gathering space for the community for arena events and for visitors so when um the arena gets built and the idea would be if it gets built either on excuse me on this side or in its current location is to really create a special gathering streetscape along spruce street the you noticed in that cross section that the buildings are pulled back a little bit and the idea is that between this sort of uh basically I call it an H the enhancements to Pacific Avenue spruce street and the San Lorenzo river we could create a truly centralized community gathering space that Santa Cruz doesn't have at the present time we kind of have the clock tower in that area but it's not really conducive if you were to create a space that that we're showing in with the cross sections that we've got in the development scenarios you basically could create a gathering space for like 4 000 plus people so it's not insignificant um so imagine food trucks come on a Saturday or there's an event before uh and some sort of arena activity there's um christmas tree lighting there's the halloween chaos that goes on downtown etc whatever it is this could be a really central important gathering place for the community and the region and for visitors that come so the idea is to create a connection where parts of the streets closed and part of it is not and then that levy connection by not having a you know a raised levy and really merging directly into that to the riverfront you can open up this whole riverfront experience as well and this is a great spot on the river it's got a bend there it's got the bridge you can look upstream and downstream and it's just really a spectacular spot along the river that could have a lot of improvements to it in in relation to an overall development plan so part of this is looking at what's not only opening up spruce street and or closing it i should say in context of here and opening up a specific space but allowing traffic um also along pacific avenue but programming that so the idea here is to create what's called a flex zone so that by day you've got normal traffic and parking and this is an example of a flex zone that was done out of first street in livermore and so this very much matches actually the scale for pacific avenue so it can function with parking angled in parking when there's not a special event going on and you'll notice that there's trees parked in the middle or parked there's cars and trees trees are parked in the street here um but they exist sort of together with with cars etc and there's a different pavement treatment as well so the idea is to to modify that so that you could program that um those spaces on the edges of the street for for functions so here's where this is a livermore here's another example for mountain view and you can get a better sense from this image in the lower right of how that street can really change and function so it's really opening up and really thinking about it in connection not only to spruce street in the river but how a continuation of pacific avenue from north of laurel street can continue down south of laurel street the other component of this is really thinking about how that place is how this area is activated right and so it's we need to think about it in the context of a public realm is it needs to be a draw to place to come to it's something special we really see this as an entertainment district that creates a multifunctional gathering place for the community so we've come up with this term energy engagement and wayfinding so using art and illumination which i'm going to talk about in a second is really to engage that space and create activity that's a draw right so playful and fun by day it can have activities in the streetscape and furniture that create intrigue and interest and then also at night and so this is uh this is one of my visions at three in the morning with constantly thinking about this project because i really like it was i came up with this idea of of using light as an activator if you will to engage a sensory connection to the space so you know you're drawn to light it has a lot of special and motive elements to it and it's something because there's events you know you've got it's not uncommon to see at basketball arenas across the country they've got this big giant light screen and there's you know there's this sort of concept of activity both inside the arena and outside the arena so how do we transfer that and really create an entertainer entertainment district that's a draw for city residents and visitors alike so this is just some concepts of of how we could use light for engagement and how it might relate for example on the river and people sort of in exploration and really making it thinking about it in the context of art so engagement and dynamic um interface with light so you can you know you can push on it you can touch things and they change color and and so Santa Cruz has got our super strong um connection to to art and art culture and this is be a great venue a great palette if you will to be able to promote that as a concept um for for entertainment and engagement and it doesn't just have to be at the at the you know at the at the level of the street and and finite but it can also be how we use the the buildings themselves in sculptural components and the concepts of the building uh as as an art form is from my perspective is maybe and tastefully so i'm not suggesting that you know we've got Las Vegas but i'm saying it's done in a tasteful manner but what we could do is is actually use the buildings as a palette you know why not why not think about technology and how we could use light forms uh to to promote an artistic engagement so this is an example what you're seeing on the left this is a site in in Denver this is the 13th street corridor it's also a theater district so this is where there's shows and restaurants etc they're using special lighting along the streetscape to create a wayfinding component and then there's also this clock tower and i'm going to show you what they did with this clock tower as far as lighting it up so the idea is is light as a as a wayfinding tool um and it's not just in the district but it can be beyond along the river etc and i'll show you an example illustrator illustrator of how that concept might work oh sorry with the audio let me turn that off this is that uh this is the Denver this is their clock tower in Denver and i just want to use this as an example of how light is projected onto buildings and really creates an interesting experience so here's my scenario it's uh five years from now it's a saturday night and the arts council santa cruz county has sponsored a competition and we've got ucsc students and others and there's a light show that can be interchangeable and it can be thematically um addressed to you know is it beach balls bouncing across the street or is it sea otters or is it some you know creative um concept and technology but the idea is to integrate light and technology and art and bring that together as possible you know function of how we could activate that space so diagrammatically um the concept here is to think about this um the project area is what we're calling the zone and the zone becomes really an entertainment district um and it's it's it's activated but there's also spine so i kind of think of it like a neural network if you will and that that doesn't just have to be focused within the the the zone itself but there can be visual cues and lighting that can extend up a pacific avenue they could extend along the river uh where you've got nice tasteful lighting obviously we have to balance it with river ecology so i'm not suggesting again trying to do it tastefully in a santa cruz way but um we could provide these visual cues for wayfinding we could also do that along cliff street um along the the front street where you have those uh the stone wall could be you know maybe tastefully low lit so the different venues have been able to do this but the idea is one it's a wayfinding tool for connectivity because that lighting is also programming lighting has become a long way and so there's a lot of stuff with led and computers talking to lighting where you could use that to to create pulsations and whatnot and energy but also it could help to address the the safety concern we heard from that from the downtown commission where they go yeah that would be a great way to address and planning commissions as well actually that whole issue of safety is a it's a big concern for people so if we can think about lighting so that it people feel safe at night it can have that added benefit as well so i'm using the term the zone and we're doing that a bit on purpose because we're using the metaphor of a zone in basketball uh go warriors and so uh you know the zone is a is a defensive formation but it's also has these metaphors of getting into the zone and getting out of your comfort zone right so so for purposes of you know trying to give it some identity we came up with that idea of the zone and um you see this icon here for Thrive City um our our parent organization or the parent organization to the Santa Cruz warriors is the new chase center up in san francisco and they've got associated with the arena is what they call Thrive City and when um I was reading a new york times article some time ago and one of the factors for success when they designed this by the owners was they wanted to make sure that people came to the arena and the the Thrive City not just when there was an event an event a basketball game but when there's not an event so I think we need to think about the same parallels is how do we get people to come to this entertainment district to the zone you know when it's a tuesday night or it's a saturday in the summertime but there's no event going on at the arena so how to activate that area it's been done on a lot of arenas and I think the the warriors golden state wars is a good example of a venue that's got public spaces gathering places restaurants etc it's got it's got that energy and vitality going on the last station that I'm going to talk about is sustainability and resiliency and um obviously there's the river and the relationship of river ecology that's very important um and there's also we've got a lot of issues associated with sea level rise being in floodplain issues and groundwater so we need to think about how we can create mitigative actions or at least design features within the project that can address resiliency and to help protect the neighborhoods that surround it there's also the issue of water so basically new development being very water efficient and the city's water department has planned for growth and continues to look for ways to improve water storage despite climate change and threats to supply and this type of housing and the efficiency that's being proposed and the commercial uses are very efficient ways of doing that from this standpoint of of you know using the water that we've got in a wise manner so with that I appreciate the time and I'm going to pass it over to Sarah Bill so I'm going to get into the details here about housing and then walking through the development scenarios and talking about our staff recommendation for today okay so um here's a graph of the arena numbers um your your council has discussed these a couple of times already today um this was a graph that we used an image that we used at the open house to just sort of illustrate um what our regional housing needs allocation heads is currently in the current cycle that's shown in the blue bars on this graph um the green bars show what we have built during our current cycle starting in 2015 to present day and then the orange bars are the arena that we have been um handed for this coming cycle which begins in 2024 so um I think this is pretty straightforward visual we have a lot of housing to plan for and so we are looking at using all of the potential areas in the city in a really efficient manner so that we can not be wasteful with those urban land resources we know it's in limited supply and um this is a lot of housing that we're going to have to be planning for and accommodating in our city over the next seven years next slide please so one of the things I want to mention about meeting the arena that housing obligation from the state is that it does affect the way that SB 35 applies to the city so um your council is will recall that SB 35 is a bill that streamlines the planning process for certain types of applications the city is currently in the 50 percent tier so um SB 35 only applies to projects that provide 50 percent or more of the units as deed restricted affordable units um that 50 percent threshold could change if the city fails to make adequate progress on meeting its arena during the um the next arena cycle so adequate progress is defined as um meeting at least half of the above moderate housing obligation um so if we fail to do that then the city falls into the 10 percent tier and then essentially every project that comes in given that our inclusionary requirement is 20 percent um deed restricted affordable housing if we fall into the tier of SB 35 that says any project with at least 10 percent um deed restricted affordable housing qualifies for the streamlined review process in Santa Cruz that would essentially be everything would be eligible for that almost everything there are some other qualifiers about how projects qualify but essentially much more would fall into that tier getting streamlined development review so that is something that we're thinking about as we're thinking about development scenarios we not only want to plan as Lee mentioned for decades and decades of housing we also want to plan for housing that can get built because um we would like to retain what little bits of discretion we have in development review uh next slide please so um just to summarize what we heard at the open house so so those are the stations we had and the last station we had was about development scenarios and I'll so I'll get into that next but just to sort of summarize um what we heard from the public at that event in April was overall very positive people were very excited about the design concepts they were excited about creating a new district and bringing some new energy to downtown and to this part of the city there was a lot of support for housing um housing downtown people who were interested in finding housing downtown people who are interested in having housing be downtown rather than perhaps be elsewhere um there was a lot of really really strong support for the Santa Cruz warriors and finding helping them create a permanent home and be a permanent part of this community in Santa Cruz and then of course there were several issues that people had real concerns about and brought up you know brought up to the project team repeatedly parking and traffic congestion in downtown in the beach we know that that's going to be a challenge in this area and we know it's an existing challenge and so that's something that we'll be you know thinking about in terms of what types of policies belong in the downtown plan related to those issues um support and opportunities for local businesses we heard some concerns about businesses being displaced we heard some excitement about this from business owners about having like modern tenant spaces to move into so kind of all sides of that but but in general um seems like the community wants to ensure that local businesses are supported that spaces that are added in this um in this new area prioritize local businesses and perhaps even there's some programming component that supports local businesses those are kind of details that we'll be needing to work out as we move through the plan um and then there were a variety of opinions about the development scenarios and we talked about these in the staff report there were some folks that were very enthusiastic and excited about creating height creating intensity building a lot of housing there were some folks who were very um I would say surprised at the levels of intensity that we were proposing and did not have a good reaction to it and there were also a lot of folks who were surprised and then when we talked through the housing needs and the the tradeoffs that come with you know the return on intensive development like that and how that allows for creation of civic spaces who really kind of came around and said okay if that's what it takes I want all of these things I want a permanent arena I want to see this great civic space I want to you know have the city participate in meeting its housing obligation for the state um and so if this is what it's taken this what it takes then this is what we should do so um I'm going to focus at this point on the um two development scenarios that we're going to talk about um tonight with your um council which are a scenario that was um essentially what would be created by a motion that was passed by the planning commission don't try to read the text on this slide this is my prompt to talk about there were we we initially showed three development scenarios to the public at the um open house we have those if you want to get into any of the details of those original three scenarios I'm going to spend tonight focusing on the scenario that was proposed by the planning commission and the scenario that's being recommended by staff so just to orient everyone to this portion we have labeled all of these blocks with a lettering system so um we did this based on our analysis of sites that were actually sort of ripe for redevelopment and that's a matter of um looking at the size and configuration of the parcel and then also the age of the existing structures and sort of there's a calculation that we do about the land value relative to the value of the structure and um below a certain ratio those sites are considered ready for redevelopment and so you'll see in here when we talk about the numbers of housing units that could be created in this project area there are certain parcels that we are excluding from that so we're not counting 555 Pacific that's unlikely to redevelop in the next 20 years we're not talking about you know the SRO project down there of just above the traffic circle that's pretty recent development so again not lead to turnover in 20-25 year time horizon and the same thing was 130 centered that's just recently been approved we expect that project to be built um you know no problem so we're not we're not counting on redevelopment happening in there so we've identified A through J as sort of the parcels the blocks or you know individual parcels where redevelopment could actually happen in the next sort of 20 to 25 year time horizon and so that gets us down to about 15 acres of actual like developable property from that initial 29 acres of project area next slide so um our I'm about to show you some uh development scenarios that involve buildings that are taller than we have seen in Santa Cruz and so I just want to talk briefly about how we're thinking about height and density controls so um the heights that we're showing right now staff is thinking about those as like that would be the final height so that height would be achieved either through doing a development agreement with a developer if there is a developer who's ready to have a conversation about that and that requires a willing partner on the development side on the private side or that those would be the the height to which you could get with a density bonus so you know absent a development agreement with a developer staff would be thinking about you know how can we structure our policy and set our zoning allowances such that when a 50 density bonus is applied this is the final building form so that's the intention with all of these um and as I'm sure your council is already aware our current inclusionary requirement at 20 percent it essentially makes every project eligible for a density bonus not every project pursues it not every project pursues bonus units they may use the density bonus to do um get a waiver of a certain site concession or for site standard or ask for concession um but uh every project that we are currently processing is eligible for a density bonus under the state law because of our inclusionary requirement so um we would really prefer to do these with a developer agreement it gives the city a lot more control and working with a willing partner allows us to like lay out some of these details and a lot more fine grain so we're not sure if we're going to be able to do that and um that is something that we're kind of still considering as we move through the next year of this process about how are we going to structure our policies so that they can work even if we don't get a developer's agreement so um just to keep that in mind next slide please so first I'm going to talk you through um the planning commission's scenario so when we took this when we took our information to the planning commission their their staff report and attachments were part of your packet today um so we showed them the initial three development scenarios that we had also showed to the public and we were just there to sort of solicit their feedback and input and they opted to provide that feedback and input both through discussion and by passing a motion so um the motion that was passed included a few components that um have been addressed by your council earlier with your um housing element resolution so um I'm not going to go into a great amount of detail about those components of the recommendation the physical components is where I'm going to focus my time and so the physical components of their um motion uh included meeting 1600 residential dwelling units which is a significant increase over the baseline the baseline in this area based on existing zoning is just over 900 units so um the planning commission motion was to allow up to 1600 housing units um and to cap the heights of the buildings after density bonus at the same height of the tallest buildings that currently exist downtown so the the tallest building in downtown is the palomar hotel it's a 90 foot height limit so we modeled the scenario looking at like a 75 85 foot height limit because under current building codes like building a 90 foot structure like your your floor plate isn't higher than 85 feet anyway because of some technicalities with the fire code so um so that's what so what we modeled here is actually 85 feet um and that can on paper get you to a zoning capacity of just over 1600 units um the reality particularly based on the feasibility of developing these smaller parcels on blocks e f and g is that that number would would that would be it would be very hard to actually build 1600 units just given the configuration and geometry of those particular sites um so what we think is actually feasible under this scenario and capping those heights in that manner is closer to 1450 housing units um to really get those other units you're going to have to introduce some kind of taller component of a building that's more limited in in floor area so um we've modeled this in 3d so that we you can all take a look at what exactly how this would look for the city so one thing i would just like to point out is the way that um the block along laurel and pacific at that intersection framing the existing neighborhood um just how tall those buildings are relative to the um the neighboring um residential area and i bring this up in some places we aren't as concerned about this this neighborhood actually carries a special zoning called the neighborhood conservation zoning and so the idea there is that within that district and actually extending beyond the edges of that district all the development is supposed to support investment in those existing homes and support um just the vitality of that neighborhood so um holding these heights down in this manner creates a bit of a wall around that neighborhood that staff has some concerns about but we'll just now walk you through um looking at this development scenario if we hold the heights down this really does limit the total unit count um and we wanted to model it and and show you what the planning commission um had the motion that passed so this is looking from just over like up in the air above beach hill giving you an overview let's go to the next slide this is from across the river so this is and these are building envelopes right these aren't building forms so you know there's no articulation here um just intended to show you sort of the height and you know overall massing of a building next slide and this one is up um on depot hill sort of looking um northeast and then this is the last point of view looking sort of that's laurel street on the left side of the screen um and then center street comes down in the foreground that way so um some other components of the planning commission motion related to um the timing of making this change with the laurel street extension the planning commission was very concerned about there's an existing board and care facility uh located on front street and they were concerned that we you know kind of planning to just pave a road through there so um we share that concern we have no intention of paving a road through an existing facility so um we do want to have policies in place in the plan we share this concern with them so we'll make sure that there are policies in place in the plan stating that the realignment of the roadway to the toe of the hill can't happen unless and until you know this facility is adequately relocated either within the project area or elsewhere within the county we probably will study um two two different alignments so we'll study our preferred alignment along the base of the hill we'll also study another alignment just on the off chance we can't find a replacement facility for that existing um uh board and care facility and those existing tenants and beds or they're not tenants but the beds and occupants of that building um the the pc motion also because of the way that it um recommends that we limit heights to be 90 feet after density bonus that actually reduces the base density below the existing downtown so in the existing downtown the base density is 75 to 80 feet in parts that have the increased height so if that's how we want our final height to be after a density bonus we would have to choose something lower than that for the base case scenario um and we have some concerns about that actually you know not really meeting the goals of the project which are really to increase the capacity for housing if we have to rely on a density bonus for every single one of these things to happen for any kind of increase to happen we're a little concerned that we're not really going to be meeting the goals that we've set out for ourselves for the project um also um the site constraints and construction feasibility i mentioned this would actually result in closer to 1450 units rather than the targeted 1600 you're really going to need some kind of taller component to get to 1600 units um and significantly on blocks a through d which are those four primary blocks on the east side of the project area next to the river and then in the center between pacific and front those are the four blocks where the warriors have some interest already and um the development that we can place on those blocks is the development that's going to directly support the financial feasibility of creating an arena and so we are thinking about and concerned about how how much of the housing for the total area gets placed onto those four blocks because we're interested in having the development support that arena to the extent we that's appropriate and feasible um so related to those above concerns this um going with the scenario from the planning commission could really you know put us in a position where we have to find other locations to rezone outside of the downtown for arena requirements that may come to pass anyway and um any number of units that we can put in this part of town we don't have to find a place for elsewhere and you know this is one of those locations that is going to stay really relevant being close to downtown it's always going to be close to transportation it's always going to be close to jobs so um we don't we really want to take advantage of that it also creates just a very flat skyline um of Santa Cruz with not a lot of particular interest in that location um so after we went to the planning commission and got this motion from them the following week we went to the downtown commission we had a very different conversation with them they didn't pass a motion to um send their comments onto city council but um they were very enthusiastic they preferred the highest intensity scenario that we had proposed whereas the planning commission scenarios is more in the middle of the three scenarios that we had initially proposed um and the downtown commission uh really pushed us to consider more intensity they asked well why aren't you why not more you know why aren't you why aren't you doing you know more of these tall components of these buildings why you know why would we stop at this point um they were very excited about the opportunity to bring more people downtown to have more activity to support the warriors and have this ongoing events facility that could bring people downtown at different times of day different times of year different times of the week so um we heard also similar sort of enthusiasm from the members of the public as well and so taking those components we moved into what we've called scenario 3.1 so um this is just a little bit different than the original scenario 3 that we brought to the planning commission and discussed with them so um this gets us to just over 1800 housing units and um it does this by shifting around the way that we do intensity so you'll see in this um on the map that we're including these taller flex zones on four of the blocks so on block a b c and d there are these taller components that are introduced um so I'll show you the 3d rendering in a minute but there are some there are some reasons that you would do that in terms of the construction feasibility so I won't go into all the details with the building code but essentially by limiting the floor plate that goes much taller you're sort of constraining the costs that would otherwise be spread over an entire that would have to be like multiplied over an entire building and you're also able by getting that height it just changes the return that you're going to get on that development to be able to use that return to facilitate an arena and to facilitate full build out of these civic amenities that we're really interested in and um we just we think this is a great opportunity this also allows us to shift density toward the river intensities toward the river and away from the existing neighborhoods so we can have more of a height transition rather than just one um height limit throughout the whole area so um there are there's a lot more detail about prefer why we prefer this scenario in your staff report I won't go through all of it but let's take a look at the 3d renderings so this is just the overview um from above beach hill so um I'd just like to point out that that block at pacific and laurel again you'll see how in this scenario those buildings were able to come down because we've shifted that intensity away from the neighborhood and toward the river um and you'll also just see how this skyline even just from this point of view it's it's more dynamic and it's more um there's more going on there's more height variation um and you know I think a lot of folks would say that makes it more interesting sort of engaging place and we do know that those that variation and height is something that is used frequently by urban designers and architects to create a sense of place and to create interest in their buildings and all of those are things that were after in this area uh let's go to the next slide so this is the view from across the river and you'll see that um you know these these buildings are significantly taller than what we have downtown this is adding a a really new component to our downtown um something that we don't currently have and so um um we think there's actually a lot of excitement around that and um we're really excited to see you know where this could take us and where we could go let's go to the next slide so this is the view from above depot hill uh looking to the northeast and then here's our final point of view again with laurel street on the left and center street sort of in the foreground and so you can see how these um taller elements can become sort of a visual cue for people sort of moving across across town um and from many different directions and um sort of create the idea that there's really some activity and some energy and excitement that's going on in this part of town next slide so this is the the last slide that will show you this just is intended to illustrate a cup there are actually a couple of things that are being shown here so this is illustrating the height transition so we're really showing this is showing a 200 foot tower element at um the river levee um and the final height that we're recommending in scenario 3.1 is actually 225 feet so imagine two additional stories on this building it's really an increment so this this what's shown here was actually our original um scenario three but then this also shows you how um so you can have a height transition of buildings and then you can have a level transition of the roadway from pacific to the levee so that when you walk up to the levee this is now more ADA accessible this is easier to find for parents and children it's just easier access for all of us it's easier access for cyclists there's no hill to climb so again thinking about making access available to cyclists of all ages um I think the intensity that adult cyclists can take on is different than older cyclists or younger cyclists so just thinking about how this creates that opportunity to um regrade the site so that you have a relatively um even transition from pacific avenue all the levee um and then that allows you to create that big civic space from the levee along spruce street and it's all sort of just at a level like a very very gentle grade um along the whole along the whole street I think it's a really wonderful opportunity for the city so now we'll wrap up with our summary so in in scenario 3.1 we're recommending this um a staff and consultant team um the number of housing units speaks for itself I would like to point out this does also because of the way that the density is shifted instead of evenly spread out it creates more intensity on the box a b c and d which we know are more important for the warriors team it also allows us to have these step down heights between the river and the existing residential area which we think is sort of respectful urban design it creates some variation in the in the skyline which can create like it actually creates a skyline for Santa Cruz there's actually a skyline which creates a sense of place um you know and again we're just looking at building envelopes at this point you know the individual forms of those buildings are going to be working on the design policies of that over the coming year um with you know with the planning commission with the community talking about um you know the environmental issues the design issues policies that we should put in place um to support making this a place where people want to spend time where they want to be where they want to spend money um and where they want to engage with their community um and then lastly um this scenario is is preferred by staff and consultants because it does provide all of those financial incentives to create excuse me create those streetscape and civic improvements that people are really excited about um we just want to make sure we're not we're not missing an opportunity that we're not planning for less than could be supported and then missing out on some of these um improvements and amenities that we think could really support and serve the community next slide okay so our staff recommendation encompasses all of these components that we've talked about over the past hour the circulation and realignments the connectivity to the beach via cliff street and making improvements to that roadway and wayfinding it includes the building heights which include taller elements that go from 125 feet up or 165 feet I'm sorry 185 feet up to 225 feet of those taller components the base components in our scenario are held to 75 and 85 feet or in some places of lowest 50 where it's neighboring up where it's bumping up against the neighborhood there um the head number of housing units at 1800 is the component the arena location we are focusing on um we have we share this with the planning commission recommendation both of these scenarios prefer the arena to move to the central block in the building area block c which is bounded by pacific spruce and front but we're also going to study we we are recommending that we study also a second location where the arena sits currently on that block which is block d in our scenarios just to ensure that we have studied an appropriate location so if something you know ends up not working out on block c that we've also studied block d and that that could be an appropriate location for the arena um and then it's also the civic spaces so the idea of creating these civic spaces the idea of creating this um wayfinding and engagement and activity through um through lighting through programming and the idea of closing offspring street to create space for those civic amenities that is all part of our recommended motion which we have the cliff the cliff notes version the reader digest version of our motion is that for our recommendation is that your your council pass a motion to direct staff to initiate work on the eir based on development scenario 3.1 and associated circulation and civic improvements we have the full text of the motion if you feel the need to read it but it's quite lengthy so um i think we'll leave it at that and just close our presentation and move on to questions and discussion thank you for your time great thank you um sarah and to our consultant bill as well for the um thorough overview of the item before us tonight i was thinking maybe it was a little suspicious with the warriors almost to game uh seven here but we're we're pulling for the golden state warriors for sure here in Santa Cruz in terms of timing um no i'm i'm teasing you i'm just saying um this is really a big deal for Santa Cruz and we do want to do our due diligence no no doubt and i really appreciate the level of community engagement and outreach that occurred um and just the different considerations that have been brought before us as we move forward with this really big plan that is definitely keeping kind of the long the long game in mind for Santa Cruz and what's possible here um so with that i know we have a number of community members who have been waiting and wanting to address us on this item we've all had a chance to review the agenda item um hopefully got some of our questions asked in advance so i'd like to ask our council to ask any brief clarifying questions and we can always come back after we hear from our community um so i'll go ahead and start with council member mires thank you vice mayor and um thank you our consultants and also um sarah i know you've done you and your team matt and others in planning department have just done amazing work um and um wow yeah really really um really interesting and really kind of exciting um but big change so you know it's it's hard to take in a little bit but um i i you know your visualization and your study of not only just the exact site but the really creating a whole new neighborhood is really obvious and i really appreciate the way that you've thought about this um you know including the connection from cliff street and and really just really taking the time to think through and try to help people understand what this may look like um i have just a couple of quick questions one is and i don't remember all the numbering of the blocks but um over here in the um in the left quarter uh above spruce street i'm just curious um displacement is one thing we've heard in some letters about existing residents and is there a measurement of any of the existing housing in that area that would need to be um either removed or um would potentially be altered or go away as part of these design plans i wasn't quite clear on that and i know that would be something that the eir would probably be looking at as well but i'm just curious if you get any work on that so typically with long-range planning we um we don't like do that sort of inventory at this point in the process um you know we're planning for all of these parcels that we're not expecting all of them to get developed all at once and um which is not to say we haven't thought about it at all so there are the city has policy and there's also the state law has recently changed and is now stricter than the city's policy so that's what we're following following in terms of displacement that requires um support for existing tenants and helping them find alternative housing as well as for any tenants that are um low lower or very low income that they have a right of return into new units that are created to replace those existing units so any existing units that are occupied by lower income tenants have to be replaced by units that would be affordable to those households and then those households have to be offered a first right of return um into an equivalent size unit so um at this point we've been we we are assuming that the state law will be in effect that it will be complied with that we will ensure compliance and um that's that's sort of the extent of our analysis at this point in time okay um my next question was um about birds um I got a couple of questions from folks um and I believe in our code we have bird friendly code requirements in terms of um types of windows and things like that but because the river is right there and um many of the bird species move back and forth between Uri Lagoon to the river and then over to the beach just curious about how do we make sure we're not creating places where birds are going to be you know running into big glass buildings and potentially um perishing from that sure uh great question and very timely because um we what we actually have right now are guidelines that the development review team has been using um in appropriate situations and um when we come through in a few weeks with our objective standards we're going to be um codifying a reference to those guidelines so codifying these apply when development happens within 300 feet of natural areas they you know requires that alternative designs be created for all the windows that are 40 feet and below which is where the bird strikes tend to happen um so we are just right on the cusp of putting that into our code so it'll be in our code before any development under this new plan would come in to play in those uh guidelines I would imagine reference something like the autobahn guidelines or whatever leading kind of bird scientists I know there's I've seen those references but I don't know that they're actually real or not but where do we where did you get those guidelines yeah so we worked um we worked with the Vantana chapter of the Sierra Club on those and then we had them vetted by an ornithologist to make sure we were addressing all of the right components and and identifying all of the appropriate mitigation or not they're not mitigations but the um accommodations or designs that that need would need to be included with okay with glass specifically got it thank you and then my last question um it was the slide that you were looking at when you looked at you were looking at the I think it was the planning um commission scenario um and you had a slide that was discussing the the rena both the rena goals but also SB 35 I think the slide was titled SB 35 and I didn't quite understand exactly where what you said at the end there which but my understanding was that with a 30 inclusionary rate um even in this type of in this area in this planning and development area you may not be able to my understanding is what you said but correct me if I'm wrong that with a rate that high you would still not be able to satisfy that in this plan development area you would still potentially need to build out in other areas to get to our goals because of that ratio is that did I understand that correctly um okay so that's not what I was trying to say about SB 35 so let me see if I can try again and I might ask Lee or Matt to jump in and help out so the point I wanted to make about SB 35 is that um so SB 35 is a bill that just creates streamlined process review and it exempts projects from CEQA so currently in Santa Cruz um a project doesn't qualify for SB 35 status unless they're providing 50 of the units as deed restricted affordable housing at the right level um that's we are in that there are there are three tiers within SB 35 Santa Cruz is in the 50 percent tier there's also a 100 percent tier right so for for communities that have met all of their arena they are not subject at all to SB 35 SB 35 applications are not accepted in those locations and then there's a third tier that's a 10 percent tier so in those cities and counties and jurisdictions any project that provides 10 percent of the units as deed restricted affordable housing qualifies for that streamlined review and exemption from CEQA what gets us into the 50 percent tier rather than the 10 percent tier is meeting half of our requirement for above moderate housing within half of the it's making adequate progress and adequate progress is defined as meeting half of your above moderate allocation within the first half of your housing element cycle so they're essentially taking that whole arena number they're amortizing it over the whole eight years and they're saying you need to build every year essentially adequate progress and the one that they check up on at the midpoint is the above moderate market rate housing so that was the point I was trying to make we need to ensure that we're building housing at all income levels we know that housing at the lowest income levels is the hardest to produce it needs the most of our financial resources and land resources and when we're planning in my department we need to be planning for all the income levels and what keeps us um what keeps our exposure to SB 35 reduced is meeting that market rate housing allocation the market rate piece so I mean I like to I like to refer to this as you can't just um create you have to create a housing ecosystem to basically survive SB 35 in a sense I mean because you really I mean the state wants you to continue to build for everyone in your community not just you know one type or the other and that could be so that's helpful for me I didn't understand it but now that you've explained it I do so those are my questions thank you for the presentation thank you councillor Myers we'll go over to council member boulder council member Myers asked my question and I'll hold my comments till after public comment thank you councillor Cummings do you have any questions before we go public comment I do and I just want to thank uh everyone for the presentation today it's very informative and helps paint a picture of the um you know change in the downtown plan I do want to ask though because I feel like the one thing that we didn't touch on really during this presentation was the arena itself and so I think it was mentioned briefly um something along the lines of the housing helping to finance the construction of the arena and I'm wondering if you can speak to that because I don't think that's very clear for many folks in the community um but you know how are we going to actually get the arena built and how does the housing and the increase of housing in this area actually contribute to that uh sure so I can I can do my best to answer that I understand that Chris Murphy is from the Warriors is here tonight and he's requested some extra time so hopefully he'll you know address this to some degree as well so um so so so a couple of things so first of all you didn't see a lot about the arena because we the city will not be building an arena we what we are going to do is to plan for a block of land or or two blocks of land we're going to study whether they can support an arena of a certain size and a certain activity level um and so and then we're going to set you know use requirements and use allowances to allow that to take place so we're going to set the ground for private development to come in and take over and we have been working with the Warriors and they've been a great partner and we've had a lot of great conversations about you know how do we how do we support your endeavor to build a privately funded arena so part of the way that they get there with a privately funded arena is by holding interest in additional real estate and then using returns on development of that other real estate to subsidize the development of the arena so that that's my understanding of how all of that works is that um returns on residential development support the development of arena they also facilitate the creation of all of the civic space which then supports everything um and i think chris could probably provide any more detail on that that you might need i think that's as much as i feel really qualified to comment on thank you i think it would be he'll be having extra time just so you that so you do know he's got to say we really good to just kind of get the community to understand this connection between the production of housing and the arena um and the financing because i think many people i still included don't really understand that connection as well and so i hear what you're saying but i think that even having some visuals and a deeper discussion about that might be helpful for the community to really understand the synergy between this these projects and how that brings about a new arena okay any additional questions councilman um no i think mine um were answered the displacement of residents and um those are all my questions for now thank you councilman thanks so most of my questions have also been answered at least the ones that probably can be answered given the stage and the process we're at um but i i so i wanted to follow up on a couple things i heard in the presentation actually that i hadn't thought about before um so we heard that the base density for the area is currently in 900 the planning commission proposal is for 1600 however the planning commission proposal also proposed to cap heights in such a way that um it would be unlikely that developers could get beyond the 1450 so there's a gap there um i'm wondering uh what about capping heights at the downtown plan maximum density inclusive of density bonuses so allowing for just extending the zoning from uh the downtown the current downtown plan into the expansion area how many units could we get out of that uh proposal like that uh yeah okay so um sorry to put you on i know that's on the spot a little it's not a problem it's not a problem we we modeled that so that was our initial scenario one was like basically taking this the um existing zoning and bringing it south and um i just i've forgotten off the top of my head i think it was like 1400 or 1500 units i'm just trying to find it bill do you have that number or matt can someone help me out here what's that number that we had from scenario one i i probably read it um this is our baseline so let's skip ahead to scenario oh right because bill has the whole presentation so can we skip ahead to scenario one scenario one gets us to 1319 residential units okay so so scenario one but but then i thought i heard that the planning commission which was more restrictive was could maybe get us to 1450 maybe okay so yeah very good point yes very good point so so it's more restrictive on blocks a b c and d okay it's less restrictive on blocks e f h i and j gotcha okay thanks i just was trying to make them not figure out how many how many stories to get to sure right no it's a good question it's a good question and there's also like i'll just mention that there's sort of there's a there's this economy that happens at um one story of like retail and commercial development underneath seven stories of residential development that gets you to 85 feet and that's the limit that is essentially the height of a fire ladder so that's the limit on the height of a building before you have to start adding things like additional emergency ingress and e-graphs so um there's a reason that that's why that's kind of usually the podium height and that any any component that then goes much taller that thing goes taller than that they don't want to go just two stories taller than that they want to go much taller because they have to build it differently out of like fires retardant or like steel and concrete essentially rather than wood um so all of that i mean it gets very detailed very quickly but yeah and one day i'll ask try to get to the bottom of how many stories to make that pencil out when you go higher and you need to go steel frame but not i'm very curious about it but i'm not going to ask about that tonight i know time is short so i'll i'll leave it there for now thanks and matt if you had more yeah thanks um yeah just to follow up on what sir was saying yeah so essentially if you set a building limit to nine stories for instance based on the current construction and economic feasibility you're still only going to see seven maybe eight stories uh regardless and that's kind of what we see in our downtown currently um no one's building beyond that those eight stories even though it's exclusive of the density bonus no one's doing a density bonus above those current heights so that's where you're coming to push beyond a little bit more to make that economically feasible thanks okay councilmember calentary johnson thank you um thank you for the presentation and all of the tremendous work it is it is a lot to take in and i really appreciate the work a lot of my questions have been asked but i did want to ask um you mentioned in the presentation that there was outreach and engagement of residents on spruce street is there a sense of how many folks from spruce street like showed up to any of those community engagement was there um i just i happened to talk to some of the spruce street neighbors who um um wanted to be included more so i just wonder um if we tracked the outcome of that engagement and if not if there's an opportunity to do so because this is of course a very long process okay so we did we sent postcards to folks who lived within the project area and within a 500 foot radius of the project area they got direct mailed postcards to owners and occupants um and those were those were for the community open house meeting that we held so that was the first time we sent direct mailed notices we wanted to ensure that they had the opportunity to learn about the project hear about the project you know get involved with it um i spoke with at least two groups of folks from spruce street um on the project night but we didn't request we didn't ask people to identify you know where they were living we collected email addresses um so i don't have numbers on that um moving forward we could think about how we collect our demographics and just sort of ask people to pin drop maybe with their address so that we can sort of see where we're getting our feedback from that's something the city's trying to um get better at is collecting demographic data about engagement so that we're getting better at ensuring more equitable engagement across all all types of demographic features so um yes that's something we can certainly um keep in mind as we move forward great yeah and um yeah i think just again this is a long process so maybe we can think of really directed outreach and maybe even just a community meeting just for those residents um just something to consider and so along those lines and i'm sorry if you addressed this i had to step away but what what um efforts have been made during the community outreach to reach latinx and spanish speaking community members that are in the surrounding neighborhoods and i apologize again if you've already addressed this um yeah no we didn't address that directly um so with this process we have not had direct spanish language outreach um i think within our project area i don't know i i the the demographics are a little bit um trend a little wider in this particular neighborhood um and that's a good point you know to keep in mind as we again as we move forward through the rest of the process to um focus some of that outreach into those neighborhoods that are just across the river or over beach hill on the other side great okay well those are my questions thank you again for the great work yes thank you council for your questions your clarifying questions let's take a like a two three minute stretch break bio break and we'll come back at um 752 ish and we'll hear from our community members who have been wanting to address this on this item hopefully you're like council colleagues had a moment to stretch their legs take care of whatever they need to take care of i know we've had a number of uh members from our community who want to address this on this item we've also received i think i see in our script here 44 emails sent to our city council account um and i've heard from a number of people as well that way um council member i mean excuse me mayor bruner allowed for chris murphy from our warriors to have extra time and um we'll go ahead and have chris address us first you'll have four minutes um to address us and uh we'll go ahead and have you get started uh now and you can just go ahead and unmute yourself or um if you're yep perfect thanks chris are you able to hear me are you able to hear me we can hear you chris yes all right perfect um i'm gonna go ahead and pause you for a second if you want go ahead um have your your computer maybe to to silence the computer so we don't have the the echo i'm just gonna use only the computers very perfect is that better perfect thank you good evening everybody my name is chris murphy as many of you as all of you know i'm president sancar's warriors in addition my role at the warriors i'm a father to two young children active community member throughout the city in the county um quick anecdote when i first attended my game my first game as president sancar's warriors is november 13th 2015 and one thing stood out to be more than anything else it wasn't the ring ceremony held pre game in front of all the fans on or the team obviously it was the amazing atmosphere in five and kp arena that exuded passion and support for the local team it was seeing 2,500 fans cheering in unison high-fiving each other smiling at your ear proud of their team of the sancar's warriors and i had goosebumps and i knew right then and there that sancar's was somewhere special the the gold state warriors the sancar's warriors all things warriors love sancar's we love this community this community supported us immensely from day one and we consistently try to do everything in our power to support the community i believe many of you are aware of our immense reach throughout the community but i want to highlight a few of my favorite things that we do um you know it's starting with our school educational programs focused on math reading health and wellness that serve thousands of kids annually our relationship with second harvest that's resulted in over a hundred thousand meals in the last two years alone for community members over three hundred thousand dollars we fundraised in the last five years alone for local non-profits multiple anti-racism webinars and discussions we've held with sancar's youth the numerous river and beach clean events the parades from mlk day to pride the holiday to the championship parade we could go on and on and there's the not so bright moments too the honoring our fallen officers administering over 20,000 vaccines COVID-19 vaccines being a resource recovery center for higher victims all tough moments but elements that brought our community closer and allowed us to come together as one sancar's we don't participate in the community because we have to we participate in the community because we're a part of this community a piece of the fabric that makes sancar's special we love sancar's we don't want to go anywhere however we need a new home our vision for a new arena includes a new venue for more than sancar's warriors we also envision dozens of concerts and shows a home for the sancar's symphony ucsc athletics local and regional youth sports tournaments community plaza spaces and much more our goals for this project to be primarily privately funded in order primarily privately funded arena our vision is for a mixed-use development project including housing retail commercial community spaces and more i know there was a question about it and i will respond to that uh when when asked again um to reiterate though the success of a mixed-use development is the primary funding source for the new arena we all know housing's a major issue in our community whether market rate or affordable across any level we have a major shortage and a tremendous challenge ahead to achieve the arena numbers in our site in this next cycle building more housing downtown helps relieve some of the pressure from other neighborhoods as we strive to reach the state mandated numbers our project will provide a substantial amount of housing that can make a significant dent in the housing shortage for our community our project will provide a multitude of affordable housing units at varying levels and building more housing in the downtown provides a vibrancy and injury energy year-round in our downtown core something we all know has innumerable benefits another element to the project that brings excitement to me is the creation of local jobs for our community not only the countless positions needed to build the mixed-use development of this magnitude but also the hundreds of jobs that will be necessary to make the newer area of downtown thrive daily this type of project creates a multitude of quality jobs for our Santa Cruz residents we all know and love what downtown looks like on a warrior's game night the streets are buzzing the restaurants bars and shops are packed the air is filled with a strong sense of positive community vibes imagine more vibrant local businesses resources for community family gathering spots with friends and seniors alike engaging the San Lorenzo river and the connectivity to the beach we can have all these things and create a more successful downtown as part of the mixed arena project thank we understand this is a big change for downtown Santa Cruz and we're sensitive to the needs and values of the community because i'm going to stop you here because your time is up and we want to make sure we have time to operate the housing our community so desperately needs i don't think we're hopeful that the final okay thank you chris yeah i um gonna go ahead and stop you there i know that you're available to to all of the council as well so we'll go ahead and follow up with your with any questions if we if we have some we'll go ahead and go on to other community members wanting to address the council on this item you'll have two minutes to address the council if you need it when the timer goes off that is when it's time for you to wrap up your comments so we can hear from the next speaker so on the top of my list i see chris minroe and we'll go ahead and have you unmute yourself or to um yes go ahead good evening my name is chris minroe and i have the honor and privilege of serving as superintendent for santa cruz city schools today i'm here to speak in support of the downtown plan expansion project it's really exciting to hear about these opportunities and what it's going to mean for families and for our staff who um desperately need access to more housing it's very difficult to re recruit people to come to santa cruz because just even finding a rental is such a difficult challenge um the civic space and other benefits that this plan encompasses are are really exciting um and i also most importantly want to speak to are equally importantly want to speak to the importance of finding a permanent space for the santa cruz lawyers the santa cruz lawyers have provided incredible support for our schools and for the wider community since they've come to our community some of the programs that they provide in our schools are read to achieve program for our elementary schools with incentives for for our youngest students uh players and coaches assigned to each school the math wares program where the wares paid for our middle school and high school teachers to build statistics lessons around basketball and then they paid gave tickets to students to attend and have some real uh world learning experiences the nutrition warriors program support for our high school athletics programs and wellness support for the boys and girls clubs basketball program the teams providing um service projects in our schools during the mlk day of service anti bully bullying assemblies anti racism webinars um providing access to santa cruz lawyers games for students and staff across the district to make sure that their their programs and uh are accessible to everyone in our community providing meaningful employment opportunities for our high school students and so much more every time i call the santa cruz lawyers presidents chris murphy to ask for assistance east he shows up i'm gonna say one one quick story that i can just really important when we were holding small cohorts outside during the pandemic bringing kids back to school who needed us the most when we still didn't know how to keep kids safe we had kids outside and i had kids without coats and he got me fleece blanket fleece warriors blankets to support our students it's just he steps up and the wear step up all the time for our kids and i just want to say we need to find a permanent help for them so thank you all for all you do and i will stop and have a good night thank you okay our next speaker is philip uh rosin bloom and you can go ahead and um have two minutes to address this on this end well thank you martin can you hear me yes okay um i'm surprised by this project i live on beach hill i've lived in santa cruz 30 years i went i finished up school ucsc i'm a teacher here i've raised my kids here um this is a zoning bomb this is incredible yes little postcards get sent every now and then and they're couched in legal leads and i can never understand what they mean this has been going on for a year and the first i heard about this was two days ago the public outreach has been absolutely horrible i pay attention to things i read the santa cruz sentinel i look at next door neighbors i haven't heard about this until and none of my neighbors have either my wife is part of the beach hill book club you know the idea that there has been any outreach is somebody checking off a box saying that you know there has been input by all the appropriate stakeholders it is absolutely not true um i don't know how i feel about this yet but i'm i'm shocked that this has been in the works for a year and this is 10 times bigger than the library project and the rail trail project put together all right who benefits from this listen obviously the city from revenue obviously the warriors um okay great um the city has to build more housing okay um do the local residents who are we're here do we really benefit from this well we benefit if you want to widen streets you want to build plazas you want to plant big trees you want to make more walkways you want to improve beach connectivity absolutely does that have to go hand in hand with building skyscrapers uh okay and traffic is the last word i'm going to just end you with it takes me an hour to get home i have to park my car down down sometimes thank you thank you vote okay our next speaker is Zachary demons go ahead you have two minutes thank you um i'll try to keep it brief um so Zachary Davis small business owner in Santa Cruz with businesses come towards the northern end of downtown as well as the beach area so on either side of this project um just want to say i i've participated in um a couple of the opportunities for engagement around this project and i i did feel like there was outreach and i appreciated that um what struck me um was that it you know it could have just been about an arena it could have just been about the housing um but when you step back and you look at how this project is being considered in the context of downtown and the community as a whole and the way it connects to north pacific the way it connects to the beach that's what really gets me excited that that the folks that are thinking about it are really thinking big picture and i so i wanted to support specifically the staff recommendation i think um we're fortunate to have some really fantastic staff members who do a great job analyzing these things really thinking in detail really getting into that you know all the weeds that that only experts can and uh i really appreciate the work they've done and and i just want to say i mean we need housing desperately this is a perfect place for intense housing to go and we deserve to have a team like the warriors in our community and have that connection Santa Cruz is a special place and um i just think it it makes so much sense that um an appropriately sized development league team would be in our community that would reflect the fact that Santa Cruz is you know it's it's a small community it's a closely knit community but it does have a place on the world stage and i think that um you know this is just another way that that we get connected to the world and uh and reflect it positively upon so thank you very much appreciate it thank you Zachary okay our next speaker is jim sandal thank you can you hear me you can hear me okay um good evening vice mayor Watkins and city council my name is jim sandal and i am a beachill resident at nine ten third street i support the concept of more housing and vibrancy in the downtown expansion i also support a new arena for the Santa Cruz warriors and other community events the warriors are a great asset to county residents and the existing venue has brought vibrancy to the blighted area of Santa Cruz uh down in south laurel and produced a myriad of benefits to our community a permit arena would certainly increase those benefits although i support our rena goals i do not support the three concept design scenarios presented uh in the study the building heights in all three scenarios will ruin the quality of life for residents on third street and the character of beach hill proposed scenario 3.1 will create a wall of buildings along the foot of beach hill between the depot park roundabout and the river that will exceed the height of third street properties by 50 to 150 feet that's four to 12 foot stories of solid building façades hovering above our homes along third street across the street from us even scenario one will overshadow us by four to seven story blockade uh at least 52 residential units on third street enjoy vistas with a unique perspective of downtown and the Santa Cruz mountains along with stunning sunsets over bonnie dune uh this is all going to vanish i have participated in the expansion public outreach meetings although these plans were shared the elevational impact to the beach hill neighborhood was not clearly discernible until i dove into the detail building height data this weekend that was attached to the staff report and compared them to a topo map of beach hill the realization was shocking and caught me and the five neighbors i spoke to this weekend by surprise the agenda report states that the three scenarios were designed to protect residents of pacific west of pacific avenue but what about beach hill um thank you thank you is there a way to soften the building heights towards blocks a b and d you know towards laurel street towards the river thank you jim your time your time is thank you thank you okay our next speaker is a caller and that phone number ends in 7407 and i believe you hit star six to unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes okay thank you very much city council this is really fascinating um tremendous amount of work and very interesting i actually agree with shabra i want to jump to that very quickly um thank you shabra for bringing up that question about tracking the outreach i'm i'm afraid that i'm a very close observer city council i live right there downtown at pacific and laurel very close by in the city uh sent a postcard like something like four months in advance and then the meeting about the front one of the front street properties with several city staff and developers very few of us citizens anyway just want to say there is a huge spanish-speaking community thank you again shabra for bringing this up they live there it is right behind spruce street it is right on the other side of laurel it is very close to the arena they are being left out excluded this sounds extraordinarily racist to me and they must know what's going to be happening in their neighborhood it's right a stone's throw away i also go to downtown every day i'm down there every day i never heard about this not once i go to coffee shops i go to the library i'm conducting my job search down there it's my home that's why i'm paying attention i never heard disney squad about this not one flyer reached me but you got the chamber of congress you got your warriors production great i'm not necessarily against that but this is a not an environmental design i did go to the college of environmental design and boulder years ago all those lights are going to kill a lot of our enjoyment of the beautiful dark river where plants and animals thrive we need a much more harmonious not las vegas picture i hated the pictures of chase closet those are not human friendly designs i've studied design the wayfinding too garish too like there's a lot that's good here the housing obviously you guys are going to harp and harp and harp on that but we love our city and we want to keep some of the character please more outreach back it track it please don't snowball us we'll cancel the whole thing thank you okay let's see our next speaker is casey fire and you can go ahead and unmute yourself and you'll be given two minutes to dress thank you vice mayor uh marquine i really appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of the santa hoose county the chamber of commerce we represent over 500 members in the the santa cruise area all over the county and i'm really uh struck by the dynamics that we're seeing tonight where we're looking at an opportunity for the future of santa hoose county and the downtown in this project please note that what we're looking at is the future of santa cruise not today but tomorrow we have a lot of vital companies that want to expand in santa cruise we have people that want to work and live in santa cruise and we see this as an opportunity a once in a lifetime opportunity to make a future for people that will be here i talk to residents i talk to interns that work with the santa cruise chamber that ask the question i'd love to live here but i have no place to live so you have an opportunity with this opportunity to look at the downtown and address our our housing issues but also address the economic opportunity that this project creates we're not living in the 1970s let me say that again we're not living in the 1970s we're looking at the future of downtown and expansion will happen and you have an opportunity as a city council to move forward with a great opportunity for economic vitality in the core mission of the chamber this downtown expansion plan can bring more job to more people than live in the creation of an opportunity so thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight thank you kasey okay our next speaker is a phone caller ending in 8672 and you could press star six to unmute yourself you have two minutes uh thank you can you hear me we can hear you okay great uh good evening council members um my name is uh jesse bristow from some builders and we just wanted to uh express our support for the downtown um plan expansion and i really would like to applaud staff um i think they've done a great job on outreach and you know i've seen articles and look out santa cruz and santa cruz local and even some blogs of those who might not be in favor of this type of development so i i think um that outreach was really uh constructive and i appreciate um all the time that they spent on um their recommendations and i just want to encourage uh council to adopt the recommendation for the 3.1 scenario we've built a 555 specific we built 401 specific uh long time ago we've now um have 130 center street entitled they're really excited to see um other areas of the community and that and uh connect downtown to the beach and i think this is the best scenario for um long range development and to meet those rena numbers this location is uh you know one direction you're right at the rail trail connection and then in another direction you're you're right at the the new transit uh center that's going to come to be so i think it's the appropriate location and we really need to take into consideration the need for for new housing and investment in this area so i'm very excited and i just want to thank staff and thank you for your time thank you for your comments um okay we'll go on to our next speaker and that is a phone call uh with the phone number ending in five three six two and please press star six to unmute yourself good evening council um this is judy grunstra um one of the specifics uh that i read in the uh kim lee horn uh contract i guess is that it's optional for them to whether to provide full volumetric 3d modeling and i think people deserve to see what those building masses and heights will be downtown so what uh you should require them to provide that 3d modeling um have an idea of what it's going to be like um and it's interesting to see how the city or the presentation uh you know claimed how great it would be to have civic spaces with activation and all kinds of events and uh entertainment district and uh i'd just like to remind you we do have an entertainment district downtown uh we have the civic the catalyst and um um um a jazz center a real treasure and um if the city really wanted to activate the space we have a wonderful spot on lot four that could be a wonderful town plaza thank you thank you judy for your comments our next speaker is caroline and we'll go ahead and have you unmute yourself thank you hi thank you my name is caroline and i'm part of the downtown commission uh i first heard about this project when i got invited to the open house at the warrior stadium the prospects of the project was very exciting um especially with the ability to invite a lot more neighbors who want to live here in santa cruz um we have this unique opportunity to be able to mold and change as our city grows and with that i do want to say that as we do make these changes that do we want to serve the private automobile or do we want to do people and as a city we cannot serve both um after all how many times have you heard of parents or their childhood their children of the dangers of being their street in fear of being hit by a car or how many times a cyclist has complained of the dangers of riding with cars um this project is very exciting because it has the ability to really make a space for people and for children um i would just like to ask that the project as moving forward to aid in public transportation so financial aid to our train financial aid to bike safety bus access and even the trolley that connects our downtown to the beach um and thank you again for this presentation i really look forward to see how it changes over time thank you carolin okay our next speaker is former mayor don lane go ahead don thank you my name is don lane as one of the folks that help bring the santa cruz warriors to town you can count on the fact that i'm a fan of keeping them here permanently however i'm even a bigger fan of affordable housing and of the warrior's willingness to build housing because of that i'd like to make a couple of suggestions first as you consider the appropriate height for buildings in the new district please find that sweet spot that balances community sentiment about tall buildings with the need for a lot more affordable housing we won't meet our housing needs if the community fights against a plan with buildings that seem too tall for many people in the community i appreciate the the staff idea for pacific having lower heights near the spruce neighborhood for instance and for a variation of heights on different blocks on the other hand please don't be afraid to allow some buildings to be significantly taller than eight stories we don't need to be stuck with the 100 year old eight-story palomar building as our standard forever we have new needs and i hope we'll adapt to those needs many people living and working in santa cruz have been left out of achieving their dream of an affordable place to live third i want as many affordable housing affordable apartments as possible built downtown emphasis on the word possible please make sure the inclusionary requirement you establish is both ambitious and feasible if you're not certain exactly what the feasible standard should be please crunch the numbers with impartial housing development experts to get it right it will serve no one to establish a number that gets us zero affordable units and zero housing and one final thought more housing at this location means we the taxpayers are not being asked to subsidize the warriors thanks so much thank you don okay our next speaker is natalie goff and unmute yourself natalie you'll have two minutes hi this is natalie i just want to say i'm another i'm i live on pacific avenue and i have only heard about this project on sunday as as two other people have stated i live in a community of 90 homes and none of us know about this and i think that um it would have been nice if we were included if we were invited as well since um this is our neighborhood downtown is our neighborhood and um it sounds like 20 000 warrior people on their waiting list on their guest lists they were invited but people who live downtown were not invited so i would like for us to be able to have further input from the community thank you thank you okay our next speaker is danie keith go ahead unmute yourself danie thank you council thank you uh vice mayor for giving me the chance to speak on this topic you know we've had some great people bring up some really great points i mean it's hard to follow don lane the guy's such a magician with his words but when it comes to what the warriors has brought to santa cruz and and really the investment into the youth i was part of that first group of people that got the opportunity to work in the santa cruz warriors and golden state warriors organization and the culture that they bring the the strive for excellence the investment in education and just the overall outlook that it gives the youth of santa cruz to be able to attach to combine that with the ability to provide affordable housing for the jobs that don't pay a hundred thousand dollars a year whether it be working in a restaurant you know working at hotels you know those people are being priced out and you're seeing businesses being affected by that because these people can't commute from san jose or deep monterey county to be able to come to their 20 to 30 dollar an hour job so i think the combination of dawn's point is that we have to find that sweet spot we have an opportunity to have an anchor with the santa cruz warriors in the golden state warrior organization the things they've done for the youth like i've said has been immeasurable when you look at what the opportunity outlives for us to connect the northern and the pacific to the southern and the pacific plus add affordable housing i mean i don't i don't think you can argue that fact so i implore the council to you know grind the numbers figure out the best way to come to a decision and i have all the faith that we will make the right decision and we'll retain the warriors in our town and continue forward thank you thank you danie okay our next speaker is another former mayor hillary bryant we'll go ahead and have you unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes let me thank you vice mayor wattkins and council members first i want to thank you all for your service i can't tell you how much it's appreciated by the community i'm grateful for what you do every day and i have actually not addressed the council since i left the council because i leave it up to you and your good decisions but i couldn't let this one pass i took many votes and some were ones that i wish that i could change and some were ones that everyone was unhappy but this was one of the few that i was most proud of um bringing the golden state warriors to the santa cruz and having a team here was just such um a great opportunity for a community and it's a great opportunity for our community going forward you think about the chance to keep this team here build an arena build a civic space for our community that we can all use and embrace and put in affordable housing in our downtown i can't think of a better combination and i know these decisions are incredibly challenging and i trust all of you at the dais to figure out how best to do that but don't miss this opportunity for santa cruz for our future for the youth in this community the warriors have done so much more than they um have just on the basketball court it's one of those rare times where an organization came and said they do all these things and you know people come with these projects and they promise and they promise and they promise and they don't deliver and the warriors over delivered every day in our community everything from being a vaccination clinic to providing a place where we can have civic engagement and go vote to helping us after the fires to just being there when our community is at its toughest moments and then bringing so much joy and i just want to thank you again for all that you each of you do and hope that you allow for the greatest amount of flexibility in this project really listen to the community the concerns are very real but the opportunities are so big don't miss this chance to make a vote for the future of santa cruz and i thank you again for your service thank you hillary okay our next speaker is angela our next speakers angela and richard go ahead and unmute yourself hey thank you thank you council for allowing me to speak um my husband and i have lived on beach hill for me over 20 years him almost almost 30 years and we were so excited when the warriors came into town and so the fact that south of laurel started to be developed you know when they came into town or more developed um we were just thrilled so we were very happy and just passionate about the warriors and and again what hillary just said about them being a top notch organization and and the opportunity we have to partner with them to provide affordable housing and jobs and you know civic spaces and other events is just huge i mean this team is on the verge of you know winning another you know the nba championship so it's a huge organization's first class run and i understand that the the community has concerns and i myself too i i heard jim sandoval raise one about the height and don lane say yes we have to reach some kind of sweet spot absolutely agree um traffic you know for those of us you know everybody lives downtown and um traffic flow and i appreciate relocating cliff street i'm sorry laurel street extension and you know the corridor that's going to be developed upon cliff street it you know it all sounds really promising very supportive of it but it is delicate and it does affect a lot of people and you know you heard some negative people who said they hadn't heard about it which is you know you know frustrating if you live up on beach or in the community and you don't hear about it um you know we maybe we could somehow do that to try to include them i do feel that uh people reached out to do that um i received not only the postcards and emails but i believe it was in the paper which i had seen it and i've had just heard about it from talking with various people so um in support of it really appreciate what the council has done and um you know your work towards just you know every issues that come up and thank you for taking um my call and just wanted to add yeah so supportive of this project thank you thank you sandra okay our next speaker is linda burrows you'll go ahead and unmute yourself for two minutes thank you very much good evening my name is linda burrows and i am the president of the santa cruz symphony i have been involved with the symphony since 1992 and on the board most of that time this is my 10th year of being president i let you know this because i'm very involved with what goes on with them in our concerts um the symphony currently performs at the civic auditorium uh for our saturday night performances the civic poses many challenges for our audiences as we are all well aware and these include um steep and dangerous unrailed stairs um being located right next to the fire department doesn't allow us to leave our windows open and it gets intensely hot in there for our patrons and our musicians it's it's a challenge it's the only space that's available for us now so we're happy to have it but we wish there could either be improvements there or another option and that leads me to um i've been committed to finding a some kind of performance space for the symphony for over 10 years when i met chris um several years ago i proposed to him the possibility of creating a permanent um scott's valley or santa cruz warrior's arena to include um enhancements so that the symphony and other orchestras like ours and other concert goers our performance groups like ours could have that space to use as well um we both believe that this is a good combination and we're both in favor of doing whatever we can to acoustically enhance the arena so that the symphony can have a home there instead of at the civic my husband and i've been season ticket holders since the first year the santa cruz warriors started playing here there's been a tremendous level of community involvement and positive influence in our community the games are attended by families and people of all ages a joyous spirit and civic pride prevails in the arena as we all have heard i totally support the building of the permanent home for the santa cruz warriors and the shared use with the santa cruz symphony the expansion plan would enhance downtown provide much needed affordable housing enhance our as well as providing wonderful viable outdoor spaces thank you so much for your time thank you right now okay our next speaker is raffa sundown and raffa you'll have to yeah thank you um good evening council um i've been involved in uh local land use issues in santa cruz for a couple years now i've been involved in uh working to solve homelessness uh i worked for the county managing a shelter downtown and you know one of our biggest challenges is finding places for folks to live um we have a huge waiting list of section eight vouchers um and section eight can be used in market rate housing and um we need housing for folks of all income levels um and we need as much affordable housing as quickly as possible hundreds of units we have to plan for the next few years and this decision this evening i think represents you know the the fastest way to achieve our housing goals to get folks into housing um across across the income spectrum and uh you know this eir plan uh we can go as big as we need to go to get as many folks housed as quickly as possible and you know worrying about delay uh adjusting the heights that that all can happen throughout this process um but you know delaying decisions is going to make it just that much harder for us to meet our housing goals and um you know we heard about sp35 earlier this evening that will have that will you know affect other neighborhoods as well if we're not meeting our housing goals so you know if folks want local control this is actually probably the the most the best way for our community to retain control in our other neighborhoods thank you thank you rafa okay our next figure is carol um go ahead and unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes hello good evening council members thank you and um i appreciate being here um i moved to santa crs in 1983 and i was at the very first santa crs warriors came and had been at been at almost every single one since then so i am a very ardent supporter of the santa crs warriors and i grew up going to sporting events our father took us to them and it is one of the most meaningful parts of my life and i like that the santa crs warriors has pretty affordable tickets and there's a lot of families that attend and um that is a real asset to the community that we have that i i have some concerns about the proposed heights of some of the buildings and how that would reflect on the character of santa crs um i do agree that we definitely need to have um a lot of outreach in multiple languages definitely english and spanish but mostly i do want to really uh say that i support our um finding a way santa crs warriors support our community in so many ways and uh reading warriors math warriors all the kinds of things um it's been a team personally enriches my life in an enormous number of ways and i'm very very grateful for their presence so um go warriors and let's find a way to make it work that will we still if this still is santa crs thank you thank you carol okay um next up is mad and um we'll go ahead and have you unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes thank you members of the council i appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight i'm matt wittstein i'm usually known as the president of cabrillo college but tonight i'm here as a santa crs warriors fan and a fan of downtown santa crs i think you have a great opportunity and a great plan in front of you tonight i just have a few comments in support of the warriors as others have said it's a great organization that has done so much to support our community uh just i think what should be mentioned that has not been mentioned is the work that they do with united way with the stuff the bus campaign to provide backpacks to students including cabrillo college students i'm also a member of the symphony board so linda burrow's comments about the opportunity for the symphony to have a home venue that is new and acoustically better is a real asset for the community and i'm really excited about the opportunities that would come with concerts downtown add a new arena uh a larger size venue that will draw more acts to downtown santa crs and and just be a great thriving art center for our community the final point i want to make is that i i was um i moved here from stockton and so i was in stockton when they had an opportunity to develop an entertainment center back in the 1990s and i would assess that project as having made the wrong choice because it did not include housing they made the decision to build a hockey arena a basketball arena and a minor league baseball stadium and lost the opportunity to build housing along the riverfront in downtown stockton and because of that i think the entertainment entertainment sector that was built or planned to be built there never really took off you have an incredible opportunity to install uh in a large number of affordable units for our community housing units for our community that are so desperately needed by staff from cabrillo students who attend college in this town a greater community so i appreciate your your efforts and hope that you'll back this plan thank you matt okay our next speaker is natalie natalie go ahead and unmute yourself and you'll have two minutes okay natalie you're our next speaker you can go ahead and unmute yourself using the webinar feature and you'll be allowed two minutes so natalie goff you'll have speaking okay there i already spoke oh okay yeah have you um lower your hand and thank you for addressing i can say i will say again that i would really like okay so then our next speaker is kisha broder from united may and go ahead kisha you'll have two minutes well good evening everyone thank you council for inviting me um again my name is kisha broder with your united way of santa cruz county as matt mentioned before um when we talk about the santa cruz warriors one thing that we know for certain is that they didn't just come to build an arena to play a season in basketball they really invested and gave and poured into our community everything from the work that they've done with our united way to ensure that youth who are experiencing homelessness have the school supplies that they need to go and return to school um serving as that go to spot during our emergencies in both our pandemic and our czu lightning fires to all of the things that they all the programs that they do in our schools with reading and equity and all of the diversity equity and inclusion work that they do it's more than just basketball it's more than entertainment they are a part of the fabric here in santa cruz county and i can appreciate what kasey buyer said when he lifted up that we're talking about our future where do we want to be and who do we want to look like as a community five ten twenty years from now um and i i am certain that uh both our warriors and our city will continue to hear the voices the concerns because those are real but also be willing to have that flexibility and that optimism that we can create the magic here in santa cruz county that we can create this space that'll be vibrant it's a civic space for us to be um to have that space for family friendly events for us to have that connection for us to have that transportation to be not only there to support games but the symphony the plays the concerts the affordable housing the new jobs that this can bring to our community we have so much more to gain than we have to lose with this kind of a project so i appreciate you all taking this time to hear these uh potential development plans and i hope that we can work together so thank you and let's make this your home forever thank you kisha okay i think unless there's anybody else who would like to address the council natalie i'm going to go ahead and ask that you please lower your hand since we did already have a chance to hear from you um and again welcome uh you to reach out to us directly via email um or phone or a meeting but it i do see one hand additionally raised now and um we'll go ahead and ask that person to unmute themselves and that number ends in seven zero zero three and you'll have two minutes oh this is derrius mostening two things one and we're in response to folks that have said they weren't aware of this uh again this was widely publicized in sentinel emails on facebook uh postcards my tenants who actually live at 690 at the corner of spruce and pacific uh they themselves went to the um managed to go to the arena event back in april they were certainly aware of it and um you know they always obviously very concerned they've apparently the basketball court goes right through their living rooms in i think scenario two so um there was it was widely publicized i believe second um i'm very supportive of this project for a lot of people talk about the warriors but i'm concerned for we need people downtown there are currently 17 empty storefronts starting pacific avenue places you know the starbucks is still vacant logos it's there are more vacant storefronts than there were than after the 89 earthquake something is is a myth that myths downtown and it's missing people that will frequent businesses and restaurants and craft breweries and so forth and this project along with all the other projects going on currently now at the front laurel and further up front street all will contribute to revitalizing this you know this gem or one gem of a downtown and bring it back thank you very much okay we'll go to our next speaker and that is the individual with the so number ending in 5542 and you can go ahead and unmute yourself good evening councilor mayer i'm ron pomerance staff's subjective report about how well received the plan is ridiculous i was there staff's plans were half baked and not close to what staff presented tonight public outreach has been abysmal tonight's recommended plan is like what was on the drawing boards in the mid 1960s it rides hotels along west gliss built in hotel and convention center and lighthouse shield freeways crisscrossing our city nuclear power plants and dab import i find tonight's plan equally outrageous attempting again to turn santa cruz to silicon beach miami when the downtown plan extension was initially proposed it was just that an extension of the current downtown plan under today's proposal staff has at least doubled the downtown plan limitations preferred development plans eir should reflect this initial intent and direction it's been quite a bait and switch planning to build steel and glass canyons wind tunnels wind tunnel streets like pollution noise congestion with the loss of solar access doesn't sound too appealing to probably a lot of people santa cruz not silicon silicon beach miami and must never be affordable housing is essential the staff's attempt to make the case that 225 foot buildings are needed to motivate the warriors to stay in santa cruz appears crazy how to mass mix use 20 story buildings encourage the warriors to stay in santa cruz all the warriors require is a large enough area for their permanent arena please don't use the charm and excitement of a popular sports team as an excuse to get free rein to real estate and development interests the excessive building impacts of noise parking congestion water and security expensive housing loss of place and the like will long outlive the warriors staying in santa cruz aiming this plan down our throats will create a backlash you can't imagine thank you for your time thank you and i believe our last speaker is phone call phone number ending in 2174 and you'll have two minutes a good evening council julian greenside here there's no question that the warriors are wonderful and well supported however i feel that they are being used a bit like a trojan horse and inside that trojan horse is the mythology about housing yes the numbers required under rena are quite alarming however the city has the option of pushing back and appealing those numbers which are unrealistic and and will are guaranteed to transform our town and be unsustainable there's a lot said about we need housing across all areas we do not need more market rate housing we have already provided more than the required amount and the problem with market rate is that even though you add a bit of affordable it raises the area median income which makes you fall a bit affordability less affordable that has to be addressed a couple of other points um i think the consultants and architect need to get on board and educate themselves about dark sky issues that lighting display next to the river and on the buildings i found totally out of sync with modern thinking also the uh the comment that sander cruise doesn't have a skyline i think that was miss noisy yes we do it is beautiful cliffs and trees and sunsets these buildings are totally out of place lastly traffic has to be studied it barely gets a mention the circulation is all about how to put roads to make plazas the circulation or the traffic congestion towards the beach towards the wharf towards the boardwalk that goes through this gigantic development is going to be a huge impact your eir must study congestion not just vehicle miles travel that is critical and if there are empty storefronts downtown having this new bright shiny object south of laurel is not going to help downtown i would say back to the drawing board the first time i saw 90 feet was at the open house this is out of all proportion thank you thank you and i see we have one more hand raised and we'll go ahead and ask the individual in with the phone number ending in 0 3 1 9 to unmute themselves and you'll have two minutes hi my name is rachel meroyan and i'm calling tonight as a former council member for the first part of the call it's very rare when an opportunity comes up like this where the convergence of needs and wants all come together in one project i know it is a little overwhelming the scale of it and i can understand why people would be concerned but we have to make sure that we don't nitpick a project to death we're really good in Santa Cruz at doing that and i want to make sure that that we listen to everybody and that you know there's a little give and take that this is not a winner take all sort of project to defeat so let's work together on this i think we can and i think we could have something absolutely fabulous it's exactly the right type of housing in the right place uh and to be expanding in Santa Cruz and i live downtown i walk everywhere i don't use my car much when i don't have to work so it's a wonderful place the other hat i'm wearing is as a staff person the community and uh relations director at second harvest food bank we work very closely with the warriors they have been incredibly generous with their swishes for dishes program every time somebody scores um a basket or a point with the Santa Cruz warriors during the regular season they donate ten dollars to the food bank and it has resulted in a wonderful contribution to really make our community a better place so they've really shown up for the community they've shown up for people who are food insecure and and need our health and they truly seem to be an organization that's invested in Santa Cruz so i think we should work with the warriors we should work with folks who want to provide housing from everything from very low income to market rate i just think that this is really a great opportunity to seize the moment and move forward and and um hopefully get this done thank you very much city council thank you are there any other members of the community who want to address the council on this item now would be the time to raise your hand and indicate that you are interested in addressing us i'm not seeing any additional hands raised okay um i just want to start by saying thank you to the community who um reached out to us via email and other ways but also who spoke this evening and voiced their opinions about the proposal before us you know a lot of things were referenced um when i want to thank the the the councils who've had the foresight to bring the warriors into this community it's obviously done an incredible and been an incredible asset to our community um and i don't think we want to be short-sighted here as we're now tasked with thinking about the future of Santa Cruz whether it be the integration of the entertainment district keeping the warriors the affordable housing we had our housing element earlier we know that more housing requirements and needs are upon our city and other jurisdictions alike and um and it's exciting to see um our local warriors at the you know the national stage and um you know as they you know enter our you know game six and and potentially getting another ring you know it's people that we get to see sometimes you know um fostered here locally and there was no question without a doubt that the warriors have been a really great partner to our community and have given so much to a lot of very um important causes and our task now is to find that sweet spot hopefully um that will you know really dig sure of this this jurisdiction this area as we move forward um with uh with our plans so I look to my colleagues to have that conversation um I'm not sure if there are any um clarifying questions that might arise um there were some that were brought up I know that um you know other folks had brought up some questions during the public comment as well and we could have those addressed if needed uh so on my uh panelist list I have Councilman Remayers, Golder and then Cummings with their hands raised so we'll go have you um address our kind of take the floor at this point in that order so I'll go ahead and hand it over to you Councilman Remayers. Thank you Vice Mayor um I just want to make sure can you hear me okay my earplug just okay great thank you um well first I want to thank all the um members of our community who spoke um to us this evening um you know a number of leaders in the business community um Mr Murphy obviously um who I think everybody knows is just Chris because he's that much of a part of our community um we also heard from neighbors who are obviously wanting to know more about what's going to happen um either near them where they live or below them where they you know are you know I'm sure wondering about the transformation of this particular area of town so I'm very cognizant that um you know we are now at a place where we're giving direction that gives a scope of what this may be to our staff um to actually do the analysis about the impacts um and so we're now at what's called the CEQA stage or the environmental impact report stage which is um a very smart tool in California that's been in place for a long time which is really taking that step to really assess um a scenario and and look at those impacts that come to the community and I heard tonight a few people say you know we've got to look at traffic we've got to look at shade and the kinds of changes that that some of the residents in that area may experience um noise uh uh you know issues with environmental issues such as we discussed earlier um impacts from lighting on onto a river corridor into a repairing area which is a rare habitat in California um issues with uh the birds um as they may move through these areas through this um downtown little corner here which actually is buffeted um by many people who know the area by actual a number of natural areas including nearly the river and even out to the beach and um out to the river mouth which is also a really important habitat area for birds in this very dense little neighborhood area um and so I'm really aware of kind of where we are in terms of our decision framework right now which is um until you sort of put something on the table it's very hard to get into that next level of impact analysis um really having those conversations again at the neighborhood level uh at the you know the the level of folks trying to get from one side of town to the other um folks who have gotten used to um you know a slower pace in an area and now looking to see that wow this may become a place that is much more active and then even the economic pieces that we need to um think through which have been pointed out by a number of the speakers tonight which is you know how do we how do we care for our whole downtown? We do have a business district it is it has been hit hard by COVID so again you know not replacing one district with a with a new one but really understanding how to tie an active um living space which I believe downtown should become into um this new this new reality as well um all anchored by um I think what we heard tonight is a use that pretty much I think 100 of the speakers support which is um this the the um warriors who have come have have made Santa Cruz their home um and so importantly have invested so much back into our community so um you know we have you know what what would callingly be known as in planning terms as an anchor tenant or an anchor entity that is desiring you know to see an outcome in an area that um you know can be um planned for and looked at and rezoned and all those technical terms but more importantly I think what we have is we have basically a a pretty prominent love affair between an organization that came to Santa Cruz um and stands for things like health and stands for things like togetherness and stands for things like family and that that relationship has grown with our um community members and with the folks who not only live downtown but throughout you know Santa Cruz County and even into Monterey County so um the number one thing I have to say tonight is where we have a lucky problem here but it is a difficult problem um because we want this use to hopefully um make its way into our town and be retained here in a way that also provides those other benefits that many of the other speakers spoke about a new home for the symphony um you know the capability of having that type of site should we have additional um natural disasters or emergencies um and I think about when I go to the warrior stadium and you know at full capacity it's got about 2000 people in it and it doesn't seem like a whole lot of people so when we're talking about you know building homes for a couple thousand people that's what we're talking about we're not talking about you know building homes for tens of thousands of people we're talking about building homes for the people who fit in the existing warriors stadium right now plus maybe a few more um so you know again really imagining the impact of what what we're talking about tonight um I do have a motion that I'd like to put up on the screen um and what I'm really trying to do I think with this motion is initiate a conversation with my colleagues obviously um a couple of things that I think are very clear in Santa Cruz which I think we have to um think about as we move ahead is that building large buildings is is is atypical and it's very um intimidating to our community and you know I share the feelings of wanting to maintain a certain character a certain type of a feel in our downtown and I'm a huge advocate that um you know this neighborhood it can be noisy but it shouldn't be noisy all the time it shouldn't be lit up should not become sort of a noisy area it's next to the San Lorenzo River uh that is a very sensitive habitat that doesn't exist in a lot of other places and we need to be very respectful of that place and in fact it needs to be a quiet space but it also plays an important transportation corridor so here we have a location where we have this amazing civic use that we want to put in amongst um these natural features like the river near the lagoon um recreation areas like the beach and depot park um I mean it really is it going to be a new neighborhood so I think what do we study to understand impacts in this new neighborhood um the motion I'm putting up here actually makes some changes to um the staff recommendation um I'm looking at uh suggesting that we look um at a taller maybe one building one taller building of about 100 of 165 feet versus one of 225 feet um and then to look at um and not to exceed 100 feet on the remaining buildings um and I've retained the language that was in the original motion including in the packet which is really looking at how the height is inclusive of the anticipated height increases associated with the density bonus um I think that the staff did a really good job of really showing that a uniform height um creates um it creates you know a less interesting civic space um so I appreciate them doing that modeling and I do want to recognize the comment we had earlier that that type of work should be continued so that we can learn as we go into the environmental impact stage on this so I'm offering that we reduce the taller building um to 165 feet and then we look at a not to exceed 150 feet on the remaining buildings as they as they are positioned um I've kept the rest of the motion pretty much intact I do have a couple of questions for staff um that I would ask after I get a second on this but I'm hoping this is a bit of a starting point for us um and look forward to the conversation with my um colleagues I appreciate your comments council member Myers um willing to second I would council member Golder or your hand up for a second is that yeah I'll second but I have comments as well okay great so we'll have you as our seconder and um I just want to say how much I appreciate the comments I appreciate this proposal I think it strikes that balance that we seek and um and looking forward to hopefully move as long I know that you mentioned that you have questions so council member Myers why you have the floor why don't you go ahead NASA's um I had one question um for staff when they calculated the the I think was about 1800 units in what they called um the recommended their recommendation which I think was 3.1 um I'm just curious about the makeup of that 1800 um residence's figure is that did you do a mix of various housing types so you know uh whatever they may be I'm just curious about how we got to that 1800 housing units it was it a variety of housing uh type housing unit types so apartment townhouse one two three uh bedrooms etc just a very brief answer would be very helpful yeah so for running these like sort of ballpark scenarios we use an average unit size that's based on um in this case we based it on you know other recent projects that have happened around Santa Cruz and that average unit size that we used for these for these scenarios was around 750 square feet so that would encompass some smaller units and some you know one two few three bedrooms but definitely some a significant number of two bedroom units are factored into that average that's great and then um just a question around the EIR and what we can do to look at impact through that process um Sara is it possible to do additional modeling with regards to scale and mass shading all of those things I know we've seen that done in other you know um proposals development proposals that have come to us but can that type of analysis uh be part of the environmental impact study or how does that how does that read how do those kinds of concerns relate to the EIR process it's a very good question I might actually invite um Lee Butler to join me in answering this one because I actually am not a CEQA expert myself maybe Bill has something to chip in I my understanding is that some you know all the massing of buildings and shading are not CEQA issues so they aren't necessarily things that we would have to study as part of the environmental review um but those types of topics would be discussed as you got further into the actual refinement and then also the conditions of approval architectural style objective standards right so the design yeah so the design standards for these buildings are definitely um that's that's the piece that's going to kind of happen side by side with the environmental analysis over the course of the next year and so that will set um you know standards for how buildings meet the sky you know what how does that how do we treat that those taller elements do we require them to taper do we require that the you know base components be like stepped back in certain manners do you know how are we addressing some of these other you know challenges that are associated with really intense development which I you know I hear the community's um interest in those topics and you know concerns border you know interest boarding on concern for a lot of those um and so you know those are certainly things that we can look at and um I want to be realistic in what we can achieve with that kind of analysis I don't know you know this isn't this is a significant change I'm not you know we're not going to mince words about that this is different than what we have now it's going to look different and it's going to be taller than what we currently have in downtown you know lots of our downtown is currently only one story tall that's not that's not going to be this area if it's if it's zone for redevelopment so um you know those are certainly things we can think about and and continue to try and discuss with the public and if we set a target for a number of units that is going to constrain how much we can adjust the height of these components of these buildings thank you those are my those are my questions I appreciate that sir I know we're we're part way through a process we used to have a long way to go and so um those are that those are my changes to the uh staff motion um vice mayor and um yeah I'm done thank you thank you council member Myers so we have a motion we have a second by council member boulder and we'll go ahead and hand the floor over to council member boulder for your questions and comments I thank you um I just want to thank everybody that took the time to call in it was great to hear three former well respected council members um the superintendent of schools the president of the warriors the president of the symphony kc buyers from the business council neighbors from the from around um town and just the overwhelming support for revitalization of this neighborhood um years ago mike and I lived on sycamore street and just to see just the slight transformation that's happened down there where that new wine bar is it like it's it's looking so amazing and so I really want to also thank um bill for mentioning the word vision because I feel like there's been kind of like an absence of that in this part of town and I love the idea of creating a there and sharing what we love about Santa Cruz to our visitors and I think for decades we've turned our back to the river and over the last several rounds of development it hasn't really been at the you know the forefront and so this that the idea of the street with the slow incline was so exciting to see I also think um having lived through the earthquake and how long it took to rebuild the mall after that um the the the idea of this you know elevate um you know evolution of Santa Cruz and with the elevation changes and the streets gates and the new roundabout the presentation really exceeded my expectations and I was really excited but I but I was kind of trying to hold it back I really want to gauge what the public thought as well um but I was excited to hear from the public that they were also excited I think that the idea of connecting downtown the river and the beach has been something like of a missed opportunity and so I think this is one step forward and it's a amazing opportunity for potential revenue um um development and it's unfortunate but it looks like our tax revenue measure probably won't be successful and so thinking ahead like well okay what's next having this idea of this entertainment area where um we could potentially host youth basketball tournaments or volleyball tournaments or other indoor maybe soccer tournaments things like that where traveling teams from around the state could come and spend the weekend stay at the hotels eat at local restaurants shop at local shops like I know kids with or people with kids on traveling teams and they do that every weekend and they go to Fremont and you know Turlock like why not have them come here where we could um capture those those um tax and tourism dollars then you know ingest them into our local economy I love how you mentioned Mountain View I have mentioned that to this group before I've gone up there a couple times before concerts and I've seen how they close that street down and I the idea of Spruce Street being closed down for either like you know markets or concerts or things like that would make just just such an exciting vibrant feel for the for the area and the other thing I really loved and I I hope it doesn't offend bird people Donna but um the lighting concept I thought it was just so beautiful and so we've been lucky enough to to travel to Europe a couple times during the winter and we saw similar concepts in Venice and London and Austria and I'm sure I speak for thousands of people in Santa Cruz that would love to see these like amazing ideas come to fruition and I really want to thank the staff and the community members that have been working so hard for the engagement and for the much needed redevelopment um in this neighborhood and so you know I'm just a full supporter at this point and I and I agree that that the mass of that one building was a little startling and I was kind of thinking whoa you know I googled that how tall the double shot was at 125 feet and I was like ooh so I think um but if you scale it back to what council member Meyer suggested and then you think about the the kite of the cliff and those sorts of things like I don't think that it would be unreasonable to to think ahead in the future that this building will likely be standing long after we've kicked the bucket like we're going to be gone and the city is going to look different as it looked different before we were born right like it's going to change it's going to evolve and I think this is a great opportunity as one of the callers put it to to really to really take control of the area and and develop it with thoughtfully so it doesn't just become some sort of hodgepodge so thank you to everybody and I'm fully supportive of council member Meyer's motion. Thank you council member Golder. Council member Cummings and then council. Oh sorry I did have one question I totally forgot no and I didn't hear the answer is and so um I know she uh Donna asked if there was like a concept in yet I know it's still not going to all happen tomorrow even if we approve it tonight it'll probably be 20 years before it's all done but I'm wondering um to the extent possible if there could be encouraging that not everything's a rental unit that some of those are units for sale and then then that we could have opportunities for measure j units because I think those are great entry points I know lots of teachers that have been able to purchase homes because they were measured j or measure o in the county uh units and so it's a great like stepping stone for people trying to get into the housing market that can't necessarily afford it you know market rate right out the gates their first purchase so it's kind of a comment kind of a question I guess but well we'll go ahead I see Sarah's jump speak to that a little bit I'm sure so I guess I I have sort of two answers to that so first of all I'm typically the city doesn't get into regulating tenancy um and you know this being sort of more of an area plan we can sort of you know set some like policy intentions in the document so that's sort of like one avenue we could take um you know and if we get into a situation where we have where we are able to start negotiating a developer agreement with like one you know significant developer wanting to develop several whole pieces of property that that could potentially be a component of that type of agreement as well um and I think that sort of naturally in a project in an area this large where there will be some kind of mix of ownership and rental housing that would certainly be my expectation just sort of understanding the market um but yeah I mean if you want to add anything like that in into the motion I guess we could I don't really want to add anything I just want to I think what you said is right and I just think any place where there's a mix of housing of affordable market rate owners renters like when everyone's living together it creates a better community in that and so that's more I guess of a comment and people that own the properties and are going to develop it like think about it maybe I think it's actually a really great suggestion and I think finding ways for individuals to enter the housing market as home buyers is a really great idea so as counts as the staff continues down this path looking into that um I something I definitely support okay council member or council member Goulders that conclude your questions at this point okay manager council member Cummings then counts council jump in I just want to start by thanking the staff and the community for coming out tonight I'm supportive of the creation of a permanent home for the warriors they've brought many benefits that we've heard about here tonight and there's many community benefits that we're all aware of that the warriors brings the community I mean this is an opportunity that can bring you know more jobs and many benefits to our community in terms of instruction jobs opportunities for the warriors sort of small businesses and include them in their concessions and then just jobs in general for working at the arena and so there's a lot of great opportunities here and I've been supportive of the warriors since I've been on the council and before that I'm in addition to this I understand that the need there's a need for more housing in our community especially the need for more affordable housing and I just want to acknowledge the concerns that have come up as well traffic and parking concerns that were raised are real I've lived in the beach of south with Laurel area for over half a decade on and off living living in Lava here beach flats beach hill and so I understand how real these impacts are when it comes to traffic the summers alone I have brings significant traffic impacts for people living in those areas and this will likely bring more as well so I just want to start by saying I appreciate the effort to lower the height because 225 feet which is about 22 stories will be double the size of the dream in and I think that if that were to move forward many people when they find out would be extremely upset with that type of massing in our community and so in the effort to try to find the middle ground I do I have another motion prepared but I think I'm going to try to just make a motion to amend and if you could we could put the old motion up because I just want to look at that so in that motion to amend the rather than have a minimum of 1800 housing units have that be a maximum of 1800 housing units this is a friendly you're requesting this is a friendly amendment or in what form are you I think that well we'll see I think that there's aspects that aren't to be accepted and so that's why we'll just I'll just go ahead and make it as a motion and we'll see if it passes or not as a substitute motion is that what you're going to amend a motion to amend the main check and then I'd sent over some language and so no body number three and four in the language that I was going to provide if we could add that and I guess while we're waiting I'm wondering with staffs at what point are we going to receive some any kind of information about like the warriors project and how the arena is going to come forward and how that's going to be financed because we've spent a lot of time talking about as I mentioned earlier talking about this item within the context of the wars but we really spent the whole conversation on housing and you're able to speak briefly to how that kind of coincides with the wars but I think it'll be good for the community to get a presentation on you know how does all this fit within the wars expansion and so I'm just wondering is that going to come to the planning commissioner to see council at some point before we go ahead and jump into questions around this I wonder if there's a secondary to your motion to the second okay well finished I'll finish my I'll put that question out there and then I'll finish the motion so the rest of the motion it will be maximized have a maximum of 1800 housing units at least one third of the total new higher density housing units in the expansion area shall be affordable to low and very low income households and the inclusionary requirement for individual projects shall be 25 percent with a 30 percent requirement for projects with density bonuses and then the next piece would be in order to minimize the potential impact of the proposed plan on additional displacement of affordable housing within the planned area and in the surrounding areas particularly the beach flats south of Laurel and lower ocean and advisory committee of residents and affordable housing experts shall be formed to study and recommend effective impact mitigation measures in coordination with the planning commission second we have a motion to amend the motion with a second by council town um and then you had a question I believe both motions are debatable so we can go ahead and hear your did you want to go ahead and ask your question this day yes I don't know if we or Sarah will be able to answer that question around when we're going to get some kind of presentation around how all this fits with the instruction of the arena thank you councilmember Cummings um I have a series of comments um that I'd like to share at some point around um both of those motions if if it pleases the council but um let me start with addressing the question that you have councilmember Cummings because it relates back to some of those other questions um and um also your change in the language the motion language your suggested change from the to state maximum of 1800 units so with those height reductions there is a change to the number of units that could be accommodated and there's also a change to the number of units that could be accommodated on um parcels abc and d and um taking that back to your question councilmember Cummings um those are the key parcels in which um the warriors are developing partnerships with the property owners and so um the um the question about how many units can be built on those four parcels um with those height limitations um that are identified in the motion um is something that um I think um Chris Murphy from the Warriors is the best person to speak to um and um that's something that if it pleases the council that he may be able to speak to right now um I can say um that in order to come up with that um that specific number we would do need to do some analysis but we could come up with a ballpark um I I would have one question that we would need to um answer in order to come up with that sort of ballpark um number which is um the motion speaks to um 165 feet on one um at one location and 150 feet at other locations um the difference in scenario two and scenario three there's actually one location where there is an additional taller building element and so the question would be it does that apply to that parcel as well um which is um sort of the south side of um parcel c and I can share my screen if that would be helpful because I think it will be um and I'll just point this out for you so um let me zoom in a little bit here if it works um so can you see can you see my screen here oh it's fine to share yeah I'm sorry it looks like I am frozen um you can still hear me though we can hear you yeah all right typically does not happen here in the office but um I cannot stop my sheets oh there we go uh let me try that again um I will try to share my screen again I can jump in Lee if you need me to share my screen um do you have it now there you go okay great sorry about that um okay so you can see here scenario two and scenario three and um here on c2 here there is an additional taller building element on c2 here um that isn't on this so the question would be is is there additional taller building element contemplated in that motion in this area and um there are a few other comments that I would make I'll I'll just um put one of them out there which was um that um councilmember Myers you you talked about the variation um being something that was attractive to you and I will just mention that you know at those heights with the difference of 165 and 150 feet um that um those aren't going to be um particularly noticeable at at those heights you know there isn't going to be a a really uh distinct difference in those building heights um at at that small of a difference so I just wanted to put those out there for council consideration given what I've heard um and I'll turn it over to you guys turn it back to you guys thank you Lee and then I guess all up to that was just the you know opportunity to have some kind of presentation regarding the financing and the warriors and how this is because that's I mean the big question of we're the whole conversation here is about how we're going to keep the warriors in town I think it'd be good for us to understand like how does all this change in our zoning actually allow for the warriors to stay in our community and so I I believe that um Chris Murphy is prepared to provide some perspective on that and he may be able to do so but with respect to the general height limits that have been provided but I do see that he has raised his hand here and he's going to be best suited to speak to how those financial arrangements are occurring. They're going to be helpful to hear from Chris they kind of speak to that right now um go ahead Chris I think thank you um Vice Mayor Watkins appreciate it Justin appreciate the question and the opportunity um to speak uh you know I think ultimately what we were referencing before is in any development like there's going to be a difference between the proceeds and the expenses right uh so it's no different in this one where we are looking at a primarily privately funded development where some percentage or some portion of those proceeds from the housing and retail and other development are going to go to help fund the arena the exact numbers of all of that to be honest at this stage are still undetermined because I think so much of what the the model that we're building to try to find the best solutions for the community hinge on a lot of what we're doing now right understanding how large of how how many units can be involved how what the height requirements will be so much of this stuff impacts our next steps I I anticipate there being multiple meetings in the future and presentations that I look forward to giving you when we have a more concrete project around this is how tall these buildings will look this is where they will be in relation to the entire plan area this is the type of densities and units unit mixes that we have in mind um you know I definitely envision a multiple presentations to this group and many groups throughout the community to help them all be informed on what we're thinking so that we can try to stay here in Santa Cruz thanks Chris yeah and I think we heard that this is sort of the foundational elements that we're laying here at this time to essentially is see these things move forward at some point in some iteration so we appreciate you saying I'm being available for that question and any additional comments customer coming so nice yeah I guess I just add one piece to the the emotions to amend which would be that that the design would align with scenario two and that's just because we heard some comments from folks on beach hill about buildings blocking the view and it looked like between scenario two and three that one building that was directly against the hill would not be there and so that's other and then I would add to that so long as the second of the motion's okay with this and vice mayor I guess my question would be for staff on that particular um I don't believe in the original motion there was a selection of the scenario um I mean I'd like to recognize you know trying to avoid some of those impacts to some of those folks up on beach hill so not against that particular um but Lee do you need that level right now for what we're where we are right now we do need specificity to move forward with the environmental analysis um and that would be helpful to have the specific information um yeah I don't think that that you know with modifying building heights here tonight we're going to have the specific number of units that we're going to be studying right we'll have to model that and see um where that ultimately lands but getting a really clear understanding of where the council would like to see those taller building elements and what those heights would be will help us get to that number that number will then help drive a lot of the environmental analysis can you put those scenarios up again lead for the public and then I my vice mayor asked for um maybe at one point maybe but that um uh alternative or the amended motion up just so um there was a lot of pieces to it so sure sure go ahead take a look at that and then we'll go ahead and ask um and we'll have uh council for council members yeah so scenario to removes that um that closer uh building um and would sort of put those taller taller taller buildings more towards kind of grouping them towards those front end of the properties um is the maker is the seconder okay with directing scenario too or do you have thoughts are you on the motion to amend are you discussing your original motion councilor meyers oh excuse me you're right let's let's back up so yeah oh let's wait on let's do the motion to amend thank you okay he's getting late there's two motions on the floor your motion i'm seconded by councilor boulder uh the motion to amend the main motion councilor coming seconded by councilor um so we haven't voted which one to accept at this point I think we can debate both uh for a little bit longer we can get Tony condone but before um maybe we get to councilor calentary john since my news had her hand up we'll see if if tony you want to weigh in on anything uh procedurally here yes uh thank you I I briefly reviewed the amended motion language and I realize this is really just giving direction to the staff to uh select a preferred alternative to analyze uh to prepare an environmental impact report but I do think the subject of whether or not the city has the ability to require a higher level of inclusionary units uh to qualify for a density bonus than that is required for the inclusionary ordinance is a legal issue that we've impined upon in the past believe we've advised the council that you cannot require a higher level of inclusionary uh as part of a density bonus application that is something that I would want to analyze I'm not suggesting that the council can't include it in um this action because again it's an alternative that you'll be analyzing but I would like the opportunity to um provide some additional legal analysis and report back on whether or not that's legally viable I have some suspicion that it's not yeah I can see how that would be and I appreciate you weighing in on that um so yes thank you tony okay councilor killin turning to johnson brown and then maybe we can take a vote on which motion we want to continue moving forward with great thank you vice mayor Watkins and um I just I just want to make some comments I also want to thank the staff for all their work and all of the community members that called in and we had educators non-profit service providers neighbors so real wide diverse range of um folks who called in so I really appreciate that and I also want to thank our former mayors and council members who called in tonight who really had the foresight and the vision to see what's possible with inviting and partnering with the warriors um however many years ago now I know my family um has benefited and and um my kids have grown up um at that stadium so it's been a real asset to our community and I really hope that that our council um it looks like it's heading in that direction will carry that legacy in creating a vibrant corridor that really provides housing recreation walkable communities for everyone here in our community um and I do think it's important that we do this while maintaining the integrity of our community and what we love about our community so I appreciate what's happening here with um some creative thinking around where that sweet spot is as don lane said um around a height and um what can be tolerated in our community right now um I had questions about um the inclusionary as well I think Tony addressed them but but I do just want to pick up again I'll I'll bring in Don Lane's comments that um it's important for us to what did he say crunch the numbers and and have it done by folks who are impartial to just make sure that we get it right and that it is doable so if we head in that direction I would want us to do a study rather than jump right in if it's even legal for us to do that um and then just one last comment about um the outreach efforts you know kind of heard um there was a lot of outreach it was enough outreach so um so there was sort of a range of comments there and you know this is this is a process and this is um one of the steps in the process and and I certainly think that we can look at how we've done outreach and we can uh maybe work together to think of some more targeted specific targeted outreach for those community members who live in the surrounding uh neighborhoods so those are my comments for now and I just really appreciate everyone's work and and wanting to um wanting to create this opportunity for our community. Thank you councilmember count Terry Johnson um we'll go to council and maybe take the vote on the two motions before. I my understanding just as a clarification Vice Mayor Watkins was that those were amendments to the main motion so rather than having to do the extra vote of whether to accept we can just vote on the amendments. My understanding of the motion to amend the motion so it's the motion and then amending the motion and that we would vote on the motion amendments the amendments the main motion yeah got right not too much yeah okay great thank you um so I I I don't want to I'm not going to wax forth about all of the wonderful contributions that the warriors make to our community that's been done plenty um but I will I concur um I think that you know I mean I'm I'm thrilled the warriors are here I would like to see I mean I would love to see I want to make a permanent home possible um you know their contributions go far beyond the economy obviously um very deep into our community um I'm I'm I'm a little dismayed that the conversation has essentially been shaped around this idea that the only way to keep the warriors is to have um uh what I think somebody um in a speaker suggested was a a zoning bomb um that's how it feels I understand that's how it feels to people who are just just learning about this and maybe in the immediate area um I I support the need for more housing and increasing density in this area and I just haven't seen any evidence um which I think we all agree is very important to convince me that we must have 20 22 20 plus story buildings in order to keep the warriors so I just think that's a false narrative that's really been like drummed up here tonight and it's um I'm I'm just I'm dismayed by that um I guess I'll I'll say um with respect to the question of increasing affordability uh in this in this area um you know I think that we have an opportunity to do that where people have called in and spoken tonight about how this is a wonderful opportunity for affordable housing but if we don't change some something about the way that we um are addressing our inclusionary requirements which I believe is kind of one of the only um options we have unless we get those voluntary development agreements I'm a I know that's an open question um to get to actually benefit from that significantly increased density and so I want to ask um Tony Kandadi as part of your review um you know we're not talking about in this case proposing an increase in the inclusionary percentage in an existing zoning context we're talking about a serious upzoning and so I think that that may have um some that may have some bearing on you know how hcdu would um would view a higher percentage for inclusionary so I just want to suggest that I think that's an arena for exploration I hope we can hear more about that element of it yeah thank you council member Brown and I I think that's right we can explore that as a an aspect of um a rezoning analysis and I think I was trying to draw the distinction between an increased inclusionary requirement and and an inclusionary requirement for density bonus that's higher than the base inclusionary requirement and I think those are all subjects for additional analysis and happy to report back to the council on I just wasn't prepared to say this evening that I thought that the proposal made by council member Cummings which I understand I don't I don't have any objections to or any concerns with but just requires a little bit further analysis absolutely and I appreciate that and I was I didn't want to put you on the spot about it but I will say um we don't have the opportunity to get we've been trying to get that item on our council agenda and we as two council members don't have the ability to do that in spite of a planning rec commission recommendation that we take it up um so we haven't been able to create space to have that conversation um in a public meeting of the city council so I think um this is why you you see it come in and these this is this is the only opportunity we have to talk about that um so just you know appreciate your willingness to explore it if um that we can get a majority of council members to agree that it's worth doing um yeah I of course I'm happy to um if any uh legal researcher analysis said the council directs me to you I appreciate yeah um well we'll see if um uh we can get a majority to agree on that um um well I'll leave it there um yeah I think I I'll just leave it there I mean there are many things I'd like to say about you know all the concerns that have been expressed about traffic um really you know ingress and egress out of the beach area with that increased traffic um all kinds of impact potential impacts to the surrounding low income neighbors which I think is captured um in uh council member Cummings amendments so I'm I want to support those and um I'll I'll leave it there okay uh I see council we're coming to you have your hand up do you have a further comment in regards to your motion before we vote to accept I just have one last question for staff so it sounds like the fact that we're deviating from the staff recommendation there's going to be some analysis that will be done on this proposed what's being proposed tonight and this will come back to city council I would not anticipate that um we bring back the we could bring it back as an informational item but um I would say whatever motion passes tonight if if council says 165 and 150 feet limits then we would go off do that number crunching and get going on the um environmental analysis that's how I would anticipate proceeding if the council would prefer that they understand that um those numbers and that we come back before proceeding then that's up to the council and we're happy to do that um so uh and the other approach would be to also you know keep things moving quickly would be to move forward and um and just provide an informational memo to the council to say based on our analysis of the heights that you've proposed here are the total numbers that we're studying as part of this I guess also the distribution of those heights within that that footprint correct right the the uh the council motion as I understand it would be 165 and I'm assuming that is for the um the taller building element at wheel works that's where the um the tallest building element was for scenario three and then um 150 feet for the other um elements um and I'll share my screen again here just so we're all clear um and my intent um Lee was I believe I used the term not to exceed 150 feet so I'm not sure that I'm trying to get every single building to be held at 150 feet they may vary in height or bulk or using that 150 but you know again try not to just get that monotone you know nine I think was nine stories that you showed some of those um but I just I don't know that the community is ready for a 225 foot building um and so I understand the I'm not an architect or a planner so I respect that work but yeah I'm trying to provide um sort of a bit of a ceiling and we also received some notes from additional planning commissioners trying to understand a little bit of a ceiling that can be expected with the possibility of of identifying a taller building but maybe some variation so um yeah looking here I think the taller building would be uh if we were working off of scenario two which I think was so the taller building would be yes in in that area there right in the income right and then um the other building heights of 150 in a and then two here in d and then I think the council I don't know that the council ultimately decided on what they wanted to do with c2 it sounded like several of you said um to not include that but I don't I think that's still out there as a question yeah I think um we I'll I'll I'll we'll see what the motion how the motion gets um sort of developed but I think scenario two is offered as a preference um lead to your point of the 165 not being that different from 150 um you know if we went up to 175 on that one building um and again these are all just figures that we're still figuring out um and uh this is a big project that I think will change a lot as we move through this um does that provide um that more uh that outcome that uh you know the design outcome or you know I'm just curious about your comment that you know 165 versus 150 wouldn't be noticeable and I don't know that that needs to be our goal but just curious to learn more from you on that I would say that that 25 foot differential would provide a better aesthetic so if we went to 175 so we went up 15 10 more feet than the ones 165 that that would be more noticeable as a kind of distinct difference in those building heights is the make is the seconder okay with going up a little higher on one building I think that's maybe what we could do if I could count some reminders if we to make the amendment yeah let's do yeah let's go ahead so basically what will happen we'll go ahead and ask the council to vote on whether or not to accept the motion to amend and the amendments and if that's passed then we'll go forward with that motion and if it's not then we can go back to the main motion and make some of these modifications that you're suggesting council members is that is everybody clear okay thank you Bonnie so this is the motion to amend and we can go ahead and take a minute to review it I won't read it unless somebody wants to read it but I think we've we've discussed it we can look at it on the screen unless there's any further questions I think we can go ahead and take the vote on that and go from there you don't need a moment just reading it real quick yeah take a minute I just want to be clear so we're voting on whether this will be the motion or we're voting on whether to accept this as amendments to the main motion okay and and if not then we'll go back to the main motion and we can have friendly amendments and further discussion if we'd like if yes then we'll move forward with this as the whole motion thank you as a rise did I interrupt you I didn't know if you're I just had a question on why the why limiting the maximum of housing units was put forth just curious sure go ahead what's going to come in yeah at the um I know that the planning commission and tried to set a limit on the number of housing and I think that um it seemed like with having the the very high heights that that um in terms of the 22 units the 22 stories and the other height um of the other buildings would accommodate more density in that area I think there's some concerns of having um you know really high densities in that area of people and so while we need to develop in that area it seemed like there was um some consensus at the planning commission around the 1600 being a maximum and hearing some of the conversations tonight increasing that to 1800 was my attempt at trying to see if we could take some of the recommendations from the planning commission but then increase that number similar to wanting to support the 165 and um not to exceed 150 feet really trying to figure out ways to reach some kind of compromise and then include language around affordability and and community input I believe the original staff motion was actually where the 1800 housing units came in so I was just curious about the maximum so it sounds like you want to try to cap um I think uh the staff uh motion was a minimum of 1800 units um I think this is to kind of sort of moving away from some of the staff um some of the staff analysis so I think I'd be more comfortable at this point by scenario to take a vote on the amended and then see if we can recapture some things as friendly amendments okay if if if you're amenable to them yeah procedurally I think that would make sense and you know forward with that I share I share your your sentiment so let's go ahead and take a vote and um open that so Bonnie um we'll go ahead and take the vote at this time as to whether to accept the motion to amend Councilmember Callentary Johnson I'm a no and that's because I also share some of the concerns that have been brought up folder no coming hi Brown Mayor Watkins no and so that passes with four in favor two against um Bonnie do you mind putting up the other motion and then we can go from there um vice mayor the motion failed I'm sorry the motion fails thank you the motion fails for uh voting against two in favor okay thank you okay I'll hand it back to you Councilmember Myers I don't know if there's elements that you wanted to to modify yeah I mean um so Lee my understanding just want to make sure um you do want us to choose a scenario um as well this evening I do think that would be helpful um and really what it boils down to based on how you have updated the motion here is just a confirmation of whether that um 150 feet on the remaining includes that um that parcel on the south side of uh sea so there was a taller building element on the south side of sea and then while while I'm I'm talking here um you also have a minimum of 1800 units identified and I just want to be clear that um with these heights um I don't see us getting to 1800 units um and so um and the total number will vary depending on whether or not that additional building height is included on the bottom of C2 and bottom of parcel C right you'll get more units if you include an additional taller building element um which actually would get you close I would say you know probably I'm just guessing here without doing the analysis based on where those different scenarios fall but I would say it would probably get you over 1700 units um if you have um that additional building element and um it would get you over 1600 units if you um don't have that additional taller building element and the taller just his bumper okay okay uh let's come back to that let's try to knock off um so Lee the if we added a so we're gonna act so I believe we're adding we're changing this motion maybe Bonnie you could make notes um with the one taller building at 175 if if the seconder is okay with that um yes okay um and so Lee you're saying that if we if we added for example a building at 165 in that in that corner area in the in this seat you could get closer to the 1700 units is that correct again ballpark estimate based on because because these heights don't line up neatly with the heights in the in the scenarios um so um scenario two had um let's see let me scroll ahead 100 I mean scenario two had 1500 and 79 units with um um heights of 160 and 120 so going up to um 165 or 175 and 150 you're gonna be probably at um you know adding maybe 100 units probably a little less so around um 1650 units ballpark um okay um I think I think my biggest goal is um I don't see support for a 225 foot building so I'm feeling like I'm just sort of now I'm starting to get a little bit lost in the weeds um let's go ahead and just keep it to the one taller building on 175 feet um and not to exceed 150 feet on the remaining um I realize that's going to uh change the housing unit up there so why don't we say um um uh 1600 to be uh closer I didn't realize the the motion as it was proposed it's hard to have all these moving pieces in the larger motion language so you know I'm trying to trying to understand what was intended in the original motion written by staff which included a lot more detail and now as we're starting trying to make some adjustments I I believe which was what the community is is looking at we're I'm starting to fall a little bit into a little bit of a calculation rabbit hole so um if it helps I can say that um with 175 and 150 I would fully anticipate that it goes over 1600 units and I can't say where that is going to land exactly but um that we we can model that and then study that as part of the environmental impact report great thank you me um that include I mean I'm happy to um again I'm I'm I do believe that what we want to do here is create a neighborhood I understand the the focus on always the focus on affordable housing we need a lot of other housing as well um the 30% uh inclusionary seem to be tied um to you know outcomes that Tony needs to do research on my suggestion um would be that we try to tackle that in um uh hopefully another agendized situation I I I'm I'm I'm I feel like we're spot using the 30% inclusionary in this one project and I'm not clear that that's really the best policy for us to do at this point so um uh Tony I would look to your recommendation but I don't think I'm going to tackle that one as part of this motion um in front of us um because it it it does seem that we have an adopted policy at 20% and now we're sort of going to spot change that and I'm not sure we want to go down that um with regards to this uh with this uh stage of the project right now again this is really a direction to analyze a preferred scenario and I think we can explore those options as we move forward okay I don't think it's necessary to give that direction at this evening's meeting thank you um the other thing that I wanted to look at um I just double check here um I think we're getting close um is the seconder okay with this so far it's okay I see if that's that okay um I understand also I just want to just final comment is um uh Bonnie if you could go up a little bit um roll up past the motion to amend um I think there was some language about the impacts to adjacent neighborhoods and creating a um a committee um I under definitely understand that the um the intent of that um I I would imagine that that a lot of this will come out um and again Lee I know CQA doesn't necessarily require displacement of affordable housing my understanding from what Sarah mentioned earlier tonight was that there is new state law that does have in a sense um mitigates this um situation which I I agree was occurring as places were getting changed out and redeveloped is that correct um Lee and that we will have to um abide by that new state law with regards to those mitigation mitigations available for um for any kind of housing displacement that's correct the state law is actually stronger than our local ordinance with respect to replacement housing right now so we would have to follow that and um I'll note that um related to this this this was something that the planning commission had suggested as well and staff had recommended that it be studied on a city-wide basis and included as part of the housing element and so um that is something that we'll be looking at um through that effort as well as how we can really address this important issue on a city-wide basis for um the preservation of affordable units and um how to limit displacement when redevelopment occurs I'm glad to hear that I think that's a much more comprehensive approach to it um because it's not going to be just site specific so I would be supportive of um that's good to hear so I think um I think we'll go with the the existing edits um Bonnie that are up above and uh vice mayor if the seconder is amenable then I think we're good to go for a vote I believe the seconder is amenable um and then I see council member brown has her hand up before we take the vote and then councilman thanks thank you I just wanted to make a quick comment uh because council member mires you said you didn't understand why um a proposal we'd bring a proposal to spot change the inclusionary and um it was I was a little surprised because it was right after I laid that argument out we've not been able to council members to get a conversation about this on the agenda for the city council to talk about on its own separately from this so we end up in situations where we make proposals like this to make the case that this is really important it's viable and it's a community benefit when we have the opportunity so I'd prefer that we have a conversation about that writ large we just can't seem to get uh you know we don't have the power to make that conversation happen so here we are okay thank you council member Cummings and then calentary johnson I guess to that point um you know as was mentioned by people who called in tonight you know maximizing the inclusionary housing and trying to figure out how to maximize affordable housing and this is something that was expressed and it's also why it was included in the um motion to amend because it's something that I think we you know we have a really good opportunity we can get 1600 units of affordable housing or sorry 1600 units of housing and have you know potentially 30 percent of that be affordable that's really going to help us as we're trying to meet our rena goals because the low and very lower the ones that are most difficult to achieve and when we call that out and make that priority and our recommendations you know it really shows the community that we're serious about that so that was the intention of this um I don't know if we need to provide any other direction this evening to bring back an opportunity for us to um consider increasing inclusionary requirements in certain parts of the city or for certain types of projects or zoning but if we're if the if it's been expressed that this is something that council would like to discuss then I think having it come back would be um something that sounds like would be supportive thank you councilmember calentari johnson and then I don't know if if council members you want to respond in any way yeah thank you um I just uh wanted to acknowledge that we we do have a larger housing um effort underway with the housing element and perhaps that is the space where we can explore this I I think there needs to be a study done to see what is feasible because we don't want to prevent affordable housing from taking place so um I know that agenda item is past but we'll have other opportunities with the housing element so we could consider a study of inclusionary as part of that process which was which was embedded in the um resolution so thank you yeah I don't the as the maker of the motion I don't think I'll add anything to the motion this evening but you know as we enter into the housing element I agree it seems like we have room for a lot of these discussions okay great I agree okay well I just want to thank you all for your time and energy tonight on this item and I want to thank the community again for coming out and speaking to us on this I think you know I too wasn't comfortable with the height and and I think where we landed it feels um like a big change but it also feels like it really accommodates a lot of the things that we want to see move forward and um we'll do it Santa Cristal and so I just appreciate you all um and your work and your thought and energy and uh with that we'll go ahead and take a motion I mean to take a vote on the motion before us so I can hand it over to you Bonnie okay thank you and can I just confirm that um it was scenario two right we were adding that okay yeah yes okay councilmember Callentary Johnson aye folder aye coming no and for the record um I'm supportive of the warriors and keeping the warriors in the community um but without having a commitment to affordable housing in this I can't accept I can't move forward with supporting this um Brown for the record this is about affordable a meaningful commitment to affordable housing for me as well I'm going to say yes and I just want for the record to recognize that um in actuality this evening we didn't talk about the various types of housing that we're going to be in here um we really are looking at the broader scale of putting the pieces down um we did not vote to not support affordable housing this evening so I just want want to be clear on that thank you I'm a yes um Mike I'm sorry sorry yes vice mayor Watkins I'm a yes too and I agree with councilmember Myers for the record and um we don't have our mayor here because she had to recuse herself um so then that concludes our votes on this item and that passes with foreign favor two against and um that is the last item on our agenda and again thank you all for a very long meeting and for your time and energy and to the community for sticking with us as well and um go warriors uh on thursday and uh we'll go ahead and join the meeting all right bye