 All right. Well, I think we're going to call this meeting to order of the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District Board of Directors June 24, 2022. And maybe we have a roll call, please Donna. All right. Director Brown. Present. Director Downing. Present. Director Dutra. Do not see him. Director Colin Terry Johnson. Present. Director Conig. Here. Director Lynn will be late. Director McPherson. Here. And Director Myers will be late. Director Pagler. Here. Director Parker. Not seeing her. And Director Rockin. Here. And ex officio director Henderson will be coming in late. Ex officio director North. Do not see her. Here. Okay. So we do have quorum. All right. Thank you. We'll go to announcements today's meetings being broadcast by community television of Santa Cruz County. Thank you, Walter. Go to item four, Board of Directors comments. Do any of our directors have any comments to make today? You can't see my hand. I'll just, I'll just say, Mike, for people who joined us late, we're having problems with the cameras. We're having problems with the cameras. We're having problems with the cameras. We're having problems with the cameras. Disappeared even though you're just seeing a photo or a name. Thank you, Mike. All right. Oral and written communications to the board. I know we've received the letter from on an issue in our packet. I understand there have been no additional written communications. We have members of the public who would like to speak on items. Brian, are you there? I see your hands going down, but I don't hear you. What's up? We hear you now. Hey, thanks a lot, everybody. This Brian from trail now. Great to hear your voices, but not see you. I miss seeing you. I'm actually out in Vermont. But I wanted to call in and just remind everybody that, you know, our goal and the community's goal is really to get the Santa Cruz coastal corridor opened as a transportation corridor. It's been sitting there for a decade. And it's a very important corridor for our community. You know, the enormous costs and physical constraints of using that corridor we've seen over the number of years now a decade and we're really need to look at how can we open that corridor for both trail and transit. You know, that's that's cool. And I want to remind you all that, you know, the state C level rising requirements is really a major restriction on how we use that property. And we got to find ways to legally use it. And speaking of legally keeping using it. It's very important that we keep this property as preserve it for as a public own publicly owned transit corridor transit and trail. And, you know, with segment 12 coming up, it's there's like five bridges and it's really important that the rail banking process be applied there to ensure that we keep that as a important resource. And then finally, you know, it's really important that we spend our, our limited resources effectively. And, you know, as we talked about in the past, we want to minimize the cost of opening that corridor as a transportation corridor. And, you know, that gives more resources for Metro as we saw with lift line and and transit. So anyways, appreciate your time. And I'm hopeful that we continue to move in a cost effective and timely manner for opening the coastal corridor. Have a good week. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. I see a hand from Tate bar. Would you like to speak please take right now take. There you go. You hear me. Yes. Yes. Hi, I just really heard the board member Brian mentioned the coastal corridor. I know I'm not supposed to ask questions but I just, I just need to find out like how I can be able to ask questions. At some point because I want to understand what that coastal corridor is all about because I think it's because I think it starts to sound familiar I'm not 1% sure though. The only thing I'd offer is that Brian is not a board director. I'm sorry, a member of the public who was speaking on behalf of his group trail now. Uh huh. Okay, well, sorry, if you'd like to know more about the quarter. I recommend that you use the URL. Hold on. Hold on. I'll go slow. Sure. I'm sorry. Hold on. I'm going to write this down as possible so I don't take up so much of your time. Give me a second. Take it down. You're good. Yeah, it's fine. You get two minutes. Okay, can you tell me. This is CCRTC.org. And that's the Regional Transportation Commission that owns the corridor. And on their website you'll find a lot of information about that quarter and some of the issues that are going on there. Okay, because I think it's starting to sound like it's the same corridor that could be the light rail, which is connected. It is exactly that. Yeah, next to the bike trail. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because I'm going to, because I have some questions because I hear there's some rumors going on, which I don't know what it is. And the last thing I heard was there was a testing of that light rail last fall in October, which didn't last very long, like some kind of tour or something. Okay, anyway, we'll find out more about that quarter at that URL. All right, thank you. All right, I don't want to take much of your time. So just you can, that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Tate. Any other members of the public to have a comment or question. I'm seeing no additional hands rise. With that, let's go to Labor Organization Communications. Do we have any communications from our crew I see James Sandoval your hand is up please feel free to speak. Morning morning. Nice to see you and your pictures, I guess. Good morning. I feel like we're doing this every month but I still got to do it because a lot of good things are happening from what I heard Brandon did a good job capturing all the good things that are happening but there's been more things that are happening. Just working with Michael tree and just all the ideas that we have it's just been working great. I'm sure he's going to report on a lot of this stuff. But, you know, little things like, you know, he's getting us a cardio gym. So we can start focusing on health a little bit more and just having it here in operations for, you know, easier access, you know, ice makers for the hot summer that's coming up. We had a really fun time at the bus rodeo. And we're looking to hopefully, you know, host our own someday. So we're playing that. We came up with a referral incentive to hopefully get our, you know, employees here at Metro recruiting and trying to get us a bigger class for bus operators. I think you've seen it on social media we're blasting it everywhere we're trying to get more people here. We got a company picnic coming up on July 30 that I'm hoping every board member could attend. We're reaching out to a lot of retirees and hopefully it's just going to be a place where we all could see each other in person. And the last thing that we know we greatly appreciate that's been going on is the fact that he's been out and about a lot of drivers seen them at operations quite a few times and, you know, being at the transit center and just, you know, really getting to know the ins and outs of what what it takes to run Metro. And the thing that I greatly appreciate is communication. It's been there. We've been talking about everything and we're working together on a lot of great things that are to come from Metro so, you know, I'll try not to do this every month but it's just been a good change. And as you can see we've been pretty happy. So thank you. Thank you James you're always welcome to speak every month especially when it's so positive and upbeat I really appreciate any other communications from labor. Seeing none let's go to additional documentation Donna I don't know that we have anything else for today's. Yeah there is nothing. All right, thank you. This is the consent agenda. Are there any questions or items that the board members care to pull or approve as whole. Any questions or comments on the consent agenda from the public. Looking again for hands to raise and entertain a motion. I move we approve the consent agenda this is Mike rockin. See that. That second person. Second, Bruce McPherson. Yes. Thank you. Any discussion? Seeing none, let's go to a vote. Okay. Director Brown. Aye. Director Downing. Aye. Director Dutra. Has not joined yet. Director Collin Terry Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Don't see Director Lindy yet. Director McPherson. Aye. And I don't see Director Meyers. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Parker. Don't see her. And Director Rockin. She's there. At least her thing is up. I'm here. I'm here. Thank you. And that's a yes. Thank you. And Director Rockin. Aye. Thank you. And the motion passes. Very good. That takes us to the regular agenda. We have a resolution of appreciation for retiree Jane Ng. Don't have any other information, but I believe she served over nine years with Metro. And I believe we have an action to approve that resolution. I need a motion. I will move approval of that motion. Mike Rockin. Thank you, Mike. Do I hear a second? Rebecca, second. Thank you. We have a motion and a second from Rockin and Downing. We've got another vote, Donna. Okay. Director Brown. Aye. Director Downing. Aye. Director Dutra. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Don't see Director Land yet. Director McPherson. Aye. And I don't see Director Myers. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Parker. Aye. Director Rockin. Aye. And the motion passes. Very good. Thank you very much. That brings us to the Metro Advisory Committee. And I think I saw James Von Hendy, the chair available. We have a report from our chair for Mac. Yes, we do. I had trouble finding my unmute button. That's okay. Take it away, James. All right, great. So I'm going to report on the first half of the year. The Mac meeting, Mac met twice in February and in April. And in the first half of the year, we continue to be fierce in our representation of the needs and requests of our ridership, also respecting the needs of the Santa Cruz Metro itself. We strongly appreciate how Metro has continued to strive to provide public transit service to Santa Cruz County, especially in these still lingering and ongoing COVID times. And in communications to the advisory committee in the first half of 2022, in February 11th, on our February 18th, Mac meeting, we revisited a ongoing request from the public to reconsider adding bus service to the Enterprise Technology Center in Scotts Valley. This is something that we've had a number of times brought up and discussed in the meeting. And once again, planning and development director, John Urgo, provided his detailed response regarding the several impediments that prevent adding such a service at this time, including an apparent lack of potential ridership. And in fact, we have not actually heard any support from the university itself since they would be primary candidates for that service. And at the same time, director Urgo also informed us that no response to a request from the public beginning in the spring of this year, Metro would add weekend trips on the Route 20 to help UC Santa Cruz students get to their research jobs at the Seymour Center. Finally, Mac member, Elsie asked that the Metro send text messages regarding the beginning and end of school terms and Metro staff agreed to review that issue. In the April 20th, Mac meeting, Ms. Elsie asked, said the election department would like to work with Metro to arrange transportation to 18 voting centers in the upcoming June elections. And Ms. Elsie requested a contact person for the election staff to consider, to contact about that. I don't know the upshot of that. That was what happened in the meeting. Member Mr. Pizano asked about measure D stickers on the Metro buses and vehicles at that time. Margaras responded that the Santa Cruz Metro, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Committee gave approval to cover up the 2016 measure D stickers until after the election. And then Mr. Martinez, also of the Mac committee, asked that the Paracruz van operators could be given cash to provide change to riders. Ms. Ross explained that it was not an option and Brandon Freeman bus operator added that will be a liability to the Metro. So that issue was dropped. In communications from the Metro Advisory Committee in our April 20th meeting, I reported on the letter I wrote to the board of directors requesting staff to create a section on the Metro's website to share the steps Metro is doing for sustainability and environmental issues as requested by the Mac in our February meeting. One of the things about that is that we know that the Metro already provides that information in various places, including in the headways. The goal there was to provide a single location for the public to see what steps the Metro is taking. As of this time, the board had acknowledged receipt of my letter at your February 25th meeting. But as far as we know, the board has not directed the staff to act in any way on that request. In updates from the Metro to the Mac in both February and April, Metro staff has always provided the snapshots of COVID-19 impact on operator staffing and the cost in some cases for the availability of services typically seem to affect the Highway 17 quarter at that time. Let's see. The board acknowledged receipt of, okay. In both our meetings, I said calling IT and ITS director report on the latest developments regarding the positive interactions with our new ITS vendor on clever devices with initial planning and estimated timelines. Committee chair and members, Elsie Pizano and myself as chair expressed our gracious director Holly's ongoing efforts in this regard. John Ergo, planning and development director provided quarter of his typical reporter on the quarterly ridership reports. And in February, updated the Mac on the cost of providing Braille bus stop signage, something that Mac have been asking about. Mac member, Ms. Tyler suggested providing only the stop ID be included to reduce the potential costs of that. And in April, Mac meeting, Ms. Taylor asked for an update about that signage. And after further discussion, Mac member, Ms. Elsie agreed to follow up offline with director Ergo. In the February meeting, director Ergo reported on the award of $30 million for the Pacific station North redevelopment project and expressed appreciation for partnering with the city of Santa Cruz on that project. You also responded to Mac questions about the access access to the Pacific station lobby. In both our meetings, reporting that the lobby itself was still closed, though the restrooms are accessible, the metro market is open and food vendors are also available. In the April meeting, director Ergo added that fencing at the Watsonville transit center would be removed. And finally, in response to a previous suggestion from Mr. Pizzano about supporting a bus route to the new Kaiser facility, John Ergo said that the new Kaiser medical facility was not on an existing metro quarter and metro is not currently planning to provide any service to that location. Finally, in other Mac discussions, Ms. Elsie suggested revisiting the abandoned bus stop committee in our February meeting and agreed to provide a historical perspective about that committee's role and its disbanding since most of the other members on the Mac at this time were not familiar with this previously existing committee. In the April Mac meeting, Ms. Elsie did provide a brief overview of the bus stop advisory committee. Some discussion ensued on the type of work that committee did before it was dissolved. For clarity, as chair, I asked if this was something that Ms. Elsie was hoping to have reestablished or revisited. And CEO, chief operating officer Ross said the issues of that committee are currently being handled by operations and planning department itself. And bus operator Mr. Freeman added that the customer service can also be contacted on information regarding bus stops. Ms. Elsie asked who the public should contact. And that was when both Ms. Ross and Mr. Freeman added their information. And that I think is a summary of the main content of our meetings for the first half of 2022. Our next meeting of the Mac will be in August. Thank you, Chair Von Hindi. That was a very thorough report. I see a question from Mike Rockin. I wonder, I know nothing about the construction of websites, but I wonder if our staff, not necessarily today, but at some point might respond to the issue about having a sustainability section that's sort of on its own that pulls together information about things like our move towards electrification and other sustainability issues. I have to say that that one issue is the main, you know, probably responsible for probably about 90% of my contact from the public about what Metro is up to. And I think it would be helpful to provide. We also have scattered through the website information about the role that the bus service plays in sustainability generally in our society and so forth. And I think there's quite a bit of stuff there that could be pulled together in that way. And I don't, as I said, I'm not looking for an answer this morning, but I hope that our staff would consider that. And if it's something that's feasible and doesn't mess up the way we're thinking about our website, I think it's worth a serious consideration at least. Thank you for that. Very good, Mike. Any other comments from the board? Any comments from our attendees in the public? Seeing none. Thank you, James. Please express our appreciation to the entire Metro Advisory Committee for their participation this year. Appreciate all their work. I will do so. Thank you. All right. And if there's no other need for me, I will exit. Okay. I think you can go. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you very much. All right. That brings us to item 8.5. Excuse me. 11. We're up to 11. Thank you. Public hearing, final adoption of Santa Cruz Metro's fiscal year 23 and 24 budget. We have our CFO, Chuck Farmer. Hi, everyone. Can we go ahead and bring out the presentation or should I just share it myself? Walter, do you have that handy? Nope. That's not the presentation. This is the short version we're looking for, Walter. I have to pull it up. I think I have it here. Let me see if I can share it. Is that coming through? Yes. You're going to get it full screen here. Okay. Awesome. Very good. All right. I'm going to move to the next slide. So at the last board meeting last month, I went through in pretty relative detail over the budget. So to spare the time and effort to kind of go through it again, I'm going to talk just about what has changed since the last budget discussion until now. On this slide right here for our budget, we have now balanced the full FY23 budget as circled in red down on the bottom right. That basically shows that we are now net zero on an operating surplus deficit after transfers. So if we move to the next slide, so on the May 20th board meeting, we had operating surpluses of $293,000 and 23 and then 482 and 24. Since then, we actually made some adjustments to our COVID ARPA grant. This is money that we'll be drawing down. We shifted about $375,000 from FY23 to FY24. We had two adjustments due to changes in positions. Our capital planning grants analysts to a manager as well as a mobility training coordinator. And then we also had to update our calculation for our capital and bus fund. So that made some slight impacts. So net net overall, our final operating budget now for FY23 bottom line is now zero. And our FY24 is actually a little bit higher now at 945, but we'll adjust that next year when we get into the FY24 budget. Any questions on that? If we want to move to the next slide. On our capital, on the other hand, on our May 20th board meeting, we showed $15.8 million for FY23. And then those projects carried into FY24 and beyond of about $18 million. Since then we've made adjustments. We've added in two big items. This is the grant that we will not know until I think August, if we receive the funding, but it's for 20 hydrogen fuel cell buses, as well as a hydrogen fueling station. So those are the biggest changes that have been made. Since then, as well as we've adjusted our CNG and seven CNGs in one Arctic. So that's about 6.2 million in 23. So net net overall for on our capital, we increased FY23 by about $9.7 million to go to 25.5 million. And then 24 and be honest, this could be 24, 25 as we receive them in the future. That number dramatically increased by 43.5 million. And that's driven by the hydrogen fuel cell buses as well as the fueling station. And now we're at $61.5 million for 24 and beyond. So if we move to the next slide, give a little perspective. This is kind of the breakdown now of FY23 of the 25.5. Our FY24 is about 19.6. And basically 25 and beyond when all the hydrogen buses start coming in, this is a $41.9 million. And down below, as you can see, we put in the number of buses to be purchased. So this kind of gives a little perspective on how we're spending our capital. We're expecting to receive about 20 buses in FY23, 15 being CNG and Arctic, as well as five electric and 24, five CNG and one hydrogen. So the first one delivered. And really where we start to see everything are the rest of the hydrogen buses, 19, as well as five more CNGs. Any other questions on capital? So we'll move to the next one. And this is the last slide and we did not present this as a first time presenting it. So our operating reserves that we're projecting as of the end of this month, we expect it to be fully funded, the top four buckets fully funded. This includes our working compensation reserve fund, our liability reserve fund and our operations sustainability reserve fund and cash flow reserve fund. So the first two, we put those aside because we have to and then our operating sustainability reserve fund. So this is three months of operating costs. So if something were to happen and we needed funding to keep the operations running, this would provide three months, providing no monies coming into the agency, three months of operating sustainability. So that's the 15.3 fully funded now. And then our cash flow reserve fund, 3 million. This is money that we use. Think of that as your float money. So we would have dips and valleys where we'd be sending out a lot of money out the door but we haven't received money, for example, from our sales taxes. So this helps with the ebbs and flows of cash throughout the month as we go forward. On the bottom four buckets, these don't have minimum balances. These include our bus replacement fund, which is now fully, what I call is fully full right now, which is basically three million. So this is the three million we set aside each year. Our UAL and OPEP is now at four million. So this is two million every year that we're putting into this bucket. And there'll be more down the road talking about how we saw for OPEP and so on, but this is critical that we keep this bucket even though we did go out with a bond to fully fund our UAL, we still will end up having some kind of UAL or for that matter OPEP and we can use this money for that. Our COVID recovery fund, so this is money. So this money's gonna go away. This is one time use money. As you can see, we're gonna get ARPA funds over this next year, but then it's done. After that, then we are on our own and this money is gonna go help us extend our service before we hit that physical cliff, which is probably somewhere around 2030, 2031. And then our operating and capital reserve fund, so this is our 2.6. So this is our matching money that we use to match certain items or for that matter, little projects that are like below $500,000 that we need to fund such as replacing air conditioners and something broke that we got to fix and so on. And so I think we're in pretty good shape this year for our operating reserve buckets. And that concludes the budget. And so therefore closing out the public discussion period. If there's any questions or anything, let me know. Thank you, Chuck. Thanks. I appreciate the term pretty good shape. Yeah, I'm looking to the board and the public. Mike, I see your hand up. Yeah, I wonder, Chuck, on the board, all the board members understand what UAL and OPEB mean, but I bet members of the public don't necessarily. And it's a little complex, but I wonder if you could give people a basic idea of what we're doing there with that $4 million. Sure, sure. So UAL is our unfunded liability. So that is our pension. So we now actually, our pension was underfunded. We went out with a bond and now we're fully funded in our pension. So that would be our UAL. OPEB is basically benefits associated that we pay for our retirees. So when you retire from Metro, we continue their benefits like health insurance into the future. And that is an obligation of us here at Metro to pay. The reason why we have this bucket is to help, is that as we go forward in time, we know that our OPEB costs are gonna increase because healthcare costs increase and more people are retiring and they're living longer. As well as our pension, our pension is subject to what's happening out in the market. So when everything is going great, that's great because we have great returns and we don't have to worry about our pension. But when we start going where returns start dropping, what happens is if we're not earning a certain rate of return, we build up kind of a balance that says, hey, we need to go in and actually fund that balance. So between that balance when we have bad returns like CalPERS or OPEB for that matter that we have to fund our future obligations for health insurance, we're building up a balance in that bucket so that we can use that in the future to pay these balances as need be, as well as look at a strategy to take that money and possibly put it into, I'll just say an investment return and actually use those returns to pay for some of the OPEB or if there's a UAL that's outstanding. It just, it minimizes the risk that the agency is fully burned to have to pay all those risks at once. We have something to help offset some of that risk in the future. Thanks, I appreciate that explanation. I'm sure the public will have a better understanding of what we're doing with $4 million there. Yeah, very good. And Chuck, if I could, I'm sure on the reserve fund, the three months of operations, historically that's what we have done at Metro. Is that correct or is that more or less than we've done in the past? I think it's the same. Yeah, I mean, we've been trying to keep, we don't update it every single month. We update it like once a year based on what we expect our budget to be. We look at three months and then we update it. And yes, we're initially a little bit lower than three months because we didn't cover 100% but we're covering now 100% of our operations so that we won't miss a beat for three months. Thank you. Very good. Any other questions? Do we have an action here? Yeah. You have to hear from the public too. Yes, thank you. I'm looking to our attendees. Any comments from the public? Raise your hand. Back to the panelists. The answer rising and falling. All right. There we go. Mike, please go ahead. Yeah, this budget is recommended for approval by the Budget Finance and Audit Committee two weeks ago and I move that we approve it. Why don't you go ahead and close the public hearing? Thank you. All right. Seeing no other comment from the public, let's close the public hearing and we have had a motion from Rockin. I can second. This is Shebra. Thank you, Director Calantari-Johnson. We have a motion. Any discussion? I'll just say, it's great to be in this as good financial shape as we are. I'm sure we have some rocky moments ahead of us in our days or months or years ahead of us but right now we're in pretty good shape and working for a public agency it's always nice to know that we're not in desperate straits which do, does happen to public agencies from time to time so it's great to have our staffs on a great job and I particularly appreciate Chuck and all of his staff's work and getting a budget together that reflects this really positive situation we find ourselves in. Very good. All right. Donna, I think we're ready for a vote. All right. Director Brown. Aye. Director Downing. Aye. I do not see Director Dutra. Director Calantari-Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. I do not see Director Lind. Director McPherson. Aye. And I do not see Director Myers. Director Pegler. Aye. Director Parker. Yes. And Director Rockin. Aye. And the motion passes. Very good. Thank you. Next item 12 consideration of adoption of Santa Cruz Metro's amended conflict of interest code and approval of resolution confirming this action with our general counsel, Julie Sherman. Thank you. Yeah, this is an item that comes before the board every even number of years. In fact, it comes before every local agency and special district. It's required by the political reform act and the conflict of interest code is a document that tells metro personnel who are listed in the code what disclosure categories they have to disclose on their form 700s. And so every two years, we have to take a look at the code, make sure it's updated in terms of any changes in the law. And most more importantly, look at the board chart and update the position titles. So that's all we really did this year. If you look at the red line of exhibit A, you'll see the changes in the code are just updates to position titles. And that is it. It's pretty straightforward. After the board approves this, it will go to the county, which is the code reviewing body and will be done with us for the next couple of years. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Very good. Any questions from the board? Comments from the public. Seeing no hands. This sounds fairly straightforward. Do we have a motion? I'm going to be recommended action. I'll second that. Well, I'll wait. Let's go. I'll wait. I'm not seconding it. We have a motion from McPherson. Right, correct. I'm happy to second that. I'll second that. Or you can, Mike. No, no, I'm seconding everything here. So that was directed. Director Downing jumping in with a second. All right, we have a motion. McPherson second, Downing. Ready for a vote, please. All right, Director Brown. Aye. Director Downing. Aye. Director Dutra not seen. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. I do not see Director Lind. Director McPherson. Aye. Director Myers, I don't see. Director Pegler. Aye. Director Parker. Aye. And Director Rockin. Aye. And the motion passes. Very good. And with that, we're on to the oral report from our CEO, Michael Tree, item 13. Michael. All right, everybody hear me okay? Yes. Well, hey, it's great to be here this morning, happy Friday, and I hope you're enjoying a good week. I have just kind of a handful of things I thought I'd share with the board. I think overall though, you know, it's, I'm enjoying the opportunity to continue to get to know the employees and the union representatives and community leaders. And so, still super excited to be here. I just want to make sure you knew that right up front. Good. You know, I have a slide deck that has like three slides and let me see if I can just share with you. And did that come up? Yep. Okay, let me put it into motion here. So, you know, the first thing I wanted to start off where it was on June 11th, for the first time in a long time, we sent a team to a rodeo. It was put on by Sam Tranz up in San Mateo at their South San Francisco yard. And I just wanted to make mention, I mean, this team did fantastic. And a rodeo, a bus rodeo, you have kind of two different things going on at the same time. You have some events for your drivers and some events for your maintenance team that you send. And so, in this picture, you'll notice the drivers are wearing the light blue shirt. You've got Mario Espinosa and Bonnie Ferris, you know, longtime really great drivers. And then you've got your maintenance team. You've got Cesar Alvarez there on the left, Ivan Ballesteros in the middle, and then Chris Lannard on the end. And so, this was your team that went over, you know, it was a fantastic day. Big picnic, the driving rodeo obviously, and then numerous events for the maintenance guys. Just to give you an idea of the driving portion of it, it's an obstacle course with like 11 or 12 different challenges. And so, you know, you're driving a bus all by yourself out on this obstacle course. You've got a fairly large crowd watching you. There's three different agencies there and they've all brought their families. And then you have an announcer who is actually critiquing your performance on the course while you're doing it. And so, there's a lot of things going on. And I just want to say the team did great. I think I have an additional picture here. So, this is a lot going on. I'll just kind of highlight the pictures. You've got, obviously the buses in the rodeo, you can see there in that event, the drivers backing it into a narrow set of cones. And of course, the challenges to not knock over a cone and they each have different point values. I'll kind of go clockwise. So, in the upper right hand portion, moving away from the picture of the bus is your maintenance team. That board is set up with all the elements of an air brake system. So, of course, they bug the system. They create problems with the system and the team has a defined time to go out and diagnose all of the problems with the air system. Couple other pictures, lower right. That's your team diagnosing issues with the air conditioning system. Again, they bugged it with like six or seven different problems and they have a certain amount of time to get those. In the middle, they're working on an engine that doesn't work, it won't start. So, they've got to diagnose all the problems and then start the engine and our team started it. So, it was really fantastic to watch them walk through that. And then, of course, we had, you know, we had Eddie Benson from our management team on the fleet. We had Tony Castillo and his family there. You had James Sandoval from SMART. And that lower left hand picture is a picture of James Jr., James Sandoval's son. They had a really fun go-kart out there that was electric and so he was having a blast out there. But, you know, I just want to thank everybody for that rodeo because it just, it was great to get back into competition and see the talent at the agency. I have just a couple other events and pictures. This is a picture of Candace Almanza. She's the one with the flowers on the dress. She graduated recently, it was June 16th from the leadership Santa Cruz County program. She's got her partner, Andrew, there to her side and then Anna Marie from our operations management. And so that, I think that picture on the right really shows, you know, really shows how excited she was to graduate from that program. And that was like a three-year program based on the fact that COVID was ongoing. I think I have one other picture here, and this is the last one, but I do have some other topics to cover, but we took delivery, as Chuck mentioned, the first of four new Gillig buses. These are CNG, they ordered about maybe a year ago, but I just wanted to let you know and see what Daniel did with the design of just these four buses coming in. This is spectacular. When you see it in real life, the colors pop even more, but it's a nice sub-fleague of just a fun design. So I wanted to make sure you saw them and had an opportunity to comment on them if you'd like. You got the big Metro logo in the kind of the rear side panel of the bus, but really a gorgeous design on the buses. So with that, I think I'll stop sharing, that was it. So just a couple of other things, you know, as you probably saw in your consent calendar, item 810 was in regard to the renewal of your insurance policy with CalTIP. And I just had a couple of follow-up comments on that. I sit on the CalTIP board and their steering committee and your insurance right now, as you compare it to the private sector, which is continuing to harden, is about 15% cheaper than what you'd pay in the private market as opposed to being in that insurance pool. And I just wanted to let you know, your safety rating in that pool is outstanding. You're in the top 10 basically of the pool in regard to safe systems. And that is rewarded on an annual basis with some dividends that you can draw down to offset the cost of your insurance. But it's a pool of 32 agencies, all different sizes. And I just wanted to let you know you rank in the top 10 within that pool. In addition to those buses that I just showed you, I just wanted to remind you, you have five battery electric buses. They're on order and you also have the grant out for those 20 hydrogen buses. So I think from here on out, your board or your executive staff is working really hard to see if we can pull together funding so that we continue to go zero emission on your future bus purchases. Your biggest challenge as mentioned before at this agency is new operators, operator recruitment. And the board authorized a pilot program where we took the wage from $19 and like 97 cents, up to $23 and 75 cents. And then beginning July one with some inflation kicking in or a bump kicking in, which is planned that wage goes to $24.58. So effectively coming up, you've got a $24.58 cent starting wage. And so we've implemented that pilot. We've been advertising for a week. It's accompanied with the hiring bonus and also referral bonus. And I just wanted to let you know the impact that that has had in one week. We've had 23 new applicants operate. Fantastic. Yeah, I think we're really turning a corner. You're in a new strategy or so to speak with that pilot program on the wage. So that's going well COVID-wise, another big challenge at the agency, the rolling 14-day number for the number of positives over at the operations is 16. So we're still in that minor outbreak category, which requires that they're wearing masks over at the office building. So I think it's been manageable, but it's certainly a distraction when you're putting together your run cuts and making your runs, which has been a challenge. So I'm hoping we turn the corner both on the operator recruitment and the COVID recovery. A couple of other things. The agency picnic was mentioned. We've got a little committee working on an agency picnic to get everyone together and to enjoy some good food, some games, some good music and a raffle. Let's send out to you this afternoon, basically a flyer that we've just put together on the picnic. Again, it's July 30th. It's from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Be a great opportunity if you'd like to come out and just mingle with the employees of the agency. Final two comments. We're still planning on working with the board to put together a board workshop and hoping for September or October at the very latest. But I just wanna remind you the topics we're honing in on are your operations. We think there's some opportunity to make some adjustments in your routes. And so we're looking at having a consulting team come on board and help us out with an operational analysis. We wanna talk to you about that at the workshop. We also wanna talk about the ADL and the APC, which is your automated vehicle location technology and your automated passenger counter technology. I mean, it really takes technology and makes the bus system perform better based on the fact that we can monitor and troubleshoot quickly. It'll give your customer the ability to look on a phone app and not only see where the bus is in its arrival time as it relates to the bus stop and where the person's going, but also see the number of actual passengers on the bus of the bus that's coming. So it's got a lot of advantages. We wanted to make sure you knew all about the costs on that that you've been obviously budgeted for in that technology itself. We wanted to talk about the battery electric bus and the hydrogen bus, your two options for zero emission buses. And our game plan with that, the implementation plan. And then finally, we wanna make sure you know from staff's perspective and have an opportunity for the board to comment, you know, about RTC's planning efforts, that Santa Cruz branch, rail corridor, that Highway 1 corridor with the bus on shoulder project and how we view the buses will perform in that project and also the so-called corridor. So the final thing is we want to talk to you about the marketing program. We've got a really innovative marketing program coming up to kind of pitch the agency and a new view for the public, so to speak. So we're pretty excited to talk to the board about that and get your input on that. So if there's other topics on this and while we're working really hard behind the scenes to put together that workshop, you know we'd love to hear from you about that. And I think the final topic before I just end here is the state budget. You've been watching what's happening with that. There's a from what I'm seeing about 10.9 billion in that budget for public transportation and they're working through the details on that, you know, what'll get funded and so on behind the scenes. And then you've got obviously that large surplus that is part of that budget. So with that said, I'll conclude my comments but certainly you would love to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you, Michael. I see that director McPherson has raised his hand. I just want to reiterate a warm welcome to Michael. You've had a very positive initial impact all around and you know, that new bus design, it looks like it even has a smile on his face or the side, so it's even better. So come on in and welcome, we're friendly people but thank you for all your efforts. I know you've really been moving around a lot. So it's really nice to have you here and I just want to reiterate a warm welcome to you and thank you for your efforts and meeting with everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Bruce. Mike Ratkin. I just want to commend all of our staff particularly Dawn and Danielle but also particularly call out James and Smart for the work they've done on their recruitment. It's so fantastic to have so many people applying. We sometimes had five applicants or something when we needed to fill 27 positions or something outrageous. So it's really great that we're obviously making progress and this little pilot program we did obviously would help with that but it still takes people to get the word out and make it happen and our staff and the unions have done a fantastic job in advertising the fact that driving a bus is really a way to make a decent living. It's a career and we have some of the best benefits around and it's fantastic the job they're doing. I think the whole board really appreciates it. Thank you, Mike. I would echo those in comments. I also appreciated seeing the photos, Michael, of the bus rodeo. I'd seen some of them on social media from James and I wish we had one of those little electric buses to ride around the parking lot in. That would be kind of fun. All right, any other comments from the board? Leave with that. It takes us to the announcement of our next meeting which will be on Friday, August 26th at 9 a.m. We plan to continue to have it via teleconference. So we will be back in this format once again and I believe with that, it brings us to adjournment at 9.57. Thank you very much, everyone. Good job, Larry. Have a terrific weekend. Have a great weekend. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Take care. Bye.