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We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note public comment is heard only on items Council is taking action on and not on regular updates and reports. The items that will be opened up for public comment during today's meetings are numbered six through 28 on our agenda. I'd like to ask council members if there are any statements of disqualification. None will move on to I'd like to ask the clerk if we have any additions or deletions today to our agenda. We do not like to make an announcement about oral communications or all communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on our agenda. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda item number 27. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in towards the end of item 27 today. I'd like to call on our city attorney to provide a report on closed session today. Yes, good afternoon, Mayor Myers members of city council this morning the council meeting closed session via zoom to discuss those items that are listed on your posted agenda. Item one was a conference with labor negotiators council received a report from its negotiator with respect to all bargaining groups of fire IAFF local 1716 fire management. OE three mid managers and supervisors. SCI you local 521 and unrepresented employees. Item two was a conference with legal counsel regarding liability claims the claim of Rebecca Baraza. That item is also listed on your consent calendar this afternoon for action. Item three was a conference with legal legal counsel. Regarding anticipated litigation, specifically considering initiation of litigation. A council discussed one potential litigation item under item three item four was also anticipated like litigation involving significant exposure to litigation. Item three was a conference with legal counsel received a report from legal counsel on two potential items was no reportable action. Thank you, Tony. Next, I'll turn it over to Rosemary Menard for the city manager report. Good morning, mayor and council. I'm going to have Rob OD give you a quick update on COVID-19 there's been some recent development that I think we're all monitoring very carefully and so with that I'm going to turn it over to Rob for a minute or two. Thank you, Bonnie. Yes. Thank you, Mayor Meyers, Vice Mayor Brunner and council. I'll try and keep it brief but again some pretty important information to present just in terms of where we stand locally statewide and nationally. In terms of Santa Cruz County. COVID outlook. It's improving. We have seen a 14 day change. Actually, when I prepared this start preparing this presentation last week. We were seeing a 14% in sorry for 4% increase in the last 14 days. As of today meeting that I had early this morning with a bunch of clinicians that specialize in this area. We actually are seeing it's now up to 8% increase. Still a vast improvement. I want to remind everybody that back on November 29. We were seeing a 14 day change of 42% of an increase that dropped down to 17% on December 1. And again, as of last week, we're at 4, but again, holding steady. I think we're doing okay. And I think a lot of that has to do with a lot of the mass mandate that's been instituted both in the city and county as a whole. Delta is still the dominant and surging variant due to the holidays and colder weather. Again, that was to be expected with this. They call it now really commonly being referred to as a surge. Omicron is in the state of California. It is five times more transmissible. So that's really the big concern. Early indications are that the sort of disease profile is a little less severe in terms of the effects of the Omicron variant. But again, still trying to gather a lot of information. I think the big takeaway again is the transmissibility and the fact that there are about 50 variations on the spike protein, which really lead to this concern in terms of transmissibility. And trying to get more information about how this will truly have an effect. It's been detected in 25 states nationally. And of course, as of yet, there have been none in Santa Cruz County. Early, again, like I said, indications are that Omicron has a mild disease profile and we're getting information from professionals in South Africa and Israel in terms of collecting more and more information. Larger groups they can study to actually determine specific answers to this question specifically. Per the CDC, our transmissibility has dropped down from substantial to moderate. So again, it's not as significant as before, but I think we still need to be vigilant in the county. For those that may remember previous presentations, a lot of the community spread was comprised about 66% of overall spreads down to 45. And we're seeing an uptick in household. I think some of that, at least some of the professionals are indicating that a lot of it has to do with detection being caught with household take home tests. And of course, I think a lot has to do with people being indoors because of the colder weather weather. Again, Santa Cruz County still has the indoor mask mandate and it is working. And for those that may not have heard, California will be instituting a statewide indoor mask mandate starting tomorrow or tonight at midnight. There's other requirements with that. There's some testing to have to do with large gatherings with 1000 people or more, where people need to show a negative test within 24 to 48 as opposed to 72 hours. And of course, anybody traveling from out of state will have to show a negative test within three days of arrival. So those are some of the new things are instituting the sort of bluntly effects predictive from Omicron as well as sort of battle a 47% rise in cases since Thanksgiving. So again, that holiday and cold weather bump that a lot of the experts were predicting is sort of what is led to this indoor mask mandate statewide. So in terms of vaccinations, the county actually as of today, it's been a year of the vaccination effort that launched here last year. We've seen 452,150 vaccine doses administered. This includes the primary series, as well as boosters currently 76% of the county has had at least one dose. I have a slide that'll reflect that that have been fully vaccinated. So we're making progress. But again, much more work to do. I think it's important to note in terms of the city in the 9506 area code, we have 77% that have received full vaccination and 80% in other city related and over the areas of this area. So again, we're making good progress. There's still appointments available at my turn.ca.gov. There's also a valley backside up in the valley that happens every Wednesday in December, as well as a Watsonville vaccination clinic that they're pushing Monday through Thursday through the month of December again put the next for initial series as well as boosters. Next slide. This is the data dashboard from the county. We've seen this all before again a snapshot of sort of the Delta surge from July 1st until now. And as you can see the graphic on the left, just to the upper right quarter, you see it flattening out leveling off, which is again a good indication of us sort of hand having a good handle on this. I think a lot of it has to do with the preventative measures, the masking indoors, the social distancing and of course, the testing that has been going on. So I think I want to point that out in terms of success, but again, remain cautiously optimistic. You'll see up on the COVID deaths. We had another one last week to reach the total of 225. That individual died, of course, important to note had some comorbid health related issues. But again, I think it's important to point out that this individual was not vaccinated. And of course, all a lot of the information from California Department of Public Health indicates that again, you're 7.1 times more likely to be infected if you're unvaccinated 13 times more likely to be hospitalized and get this 15 times more likely to die as a result. So again, really trying to push the message to everybody in our community, both city and county to get vaccinated and of course get the booster. Next slide. So this is your demographics. And I think this was a big topic of discussion in my morning briefing with a lot of the clinicians. As you can see, in the percent of active cases by age, the black vertical line indicates sort of the county population. As you can see, the number of cases exceeds that. So we're seeing proportionally higher cases and the 5 to 14. And of course, in that 25 to 44 year olds. So again, we need to get the message out. It is affecting those of you in that age group. Of course, as you can see on the upper left, it's affecting more males. And it will see another slide here in a couple that indicate that the vaccination challenge is within the same age group as well. So we have a lot of work to do. Next slide. Again, here is the 14 day change. We've seen a 15% decrease overall in the new cases. But again, this slide is available currently online. But of course, the clinicians indicated that we're actually seeing a 8% increase as opposed to what you see. So that was the most up to date information that I had, and unfortunately did not have a graphic to reflect that. Next slide. The R number or transmissibility again is good. As you can see in this graphic, we're in the green. And of course, this was from last week, the one they used this morning, which was unavailable to me actually shows a significant improvement in this area where we're actually dropping further below one, which is sort of that line that we're our target line. So again, we're doing good work. We just need to stay vigilant through this holiday season. And we can hopefully keep that number below one. Next slide. Again, here I mentioned vaccinations in the county and the city. Again, you can see here we've got a 75 over 75% actually have at least one dose and 69% of the population have received full vaccination. And of course, the big push is boosters and we've seen over 7 million booster shots delivered, which is in the state, which is tremendous. And so we got to keep pushing that forward, especially locally here in this county. We have seen that as a whole, and how we're we fair in terms of all their counties in the state, we are the sixth best, only behind a lot of the Bay Area, which include Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Moran and San Francisco. So we're doing a great job, both as a Bay Area, but I think we're still in the running there with the other, you know, in terms of being the sixth best in terms of our numbers and spread. Next slide. And here is the demographics, like I mentioned, the gray is the total population and the blue line shows how many of that population have received it. So we see a much larger gap, of course, in males, but also in that younger population, we're catching up with the five to 11 year olds, we've given today about 6500 to the five to 11 year old children. We still have a lot of work to do with the 12 to 19 and of course that 20 to 45 44 year old range, the biggest one being the 20 to 29. And a lot of the clinicians indicate that this is that sort of invincibility perception that this age group has. And so they're really battling with trying to conduct outreach and make that connection and ensure that we would get that but because of course the more people that get vaccinated, the less likely we are to see variants develop. Next slide. And so that's all I have. I do want to make sure I remind just like all the clinicians did this morning as we head into the holidays, we want to make sure that we're, you know, mindful of the variants that we have with our families. They want to talk about, you know, of course, getting vaccinated but of course if you haven't got your booster, please get it. Go to my turn, the my turn website. And you can also get that at the center to his health.org to get more information where your mask in groups, and then please, please, please stay home if you're sick that's both in the workplace. And of course, at any gatherings that you may participate in during this holiday season. And that is all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Any questions for Rob? Seems like COVID is the gift that keeps on giving. I just have one other item, which is to announce some news that was approved by the library board earlier this month, which is we have a new librarian for the Santa Cruz public library system. Her name is Yolan Wilburn and she comes to us from Torrance, California. She is formally someone who worked up in Nevada County, which includes Grass Valley and Truckee and Nevada City. So it's kind of a mixed rural with some smaller urban. So it's sort of somewhat similar more to Santa Cruz County from then Torrance, for example. There's also a history of working in a variety of libraries, including the Chicago public library and some library overseas and and then some really interesting work in Los Angeles as well with the a African American history archive. So that was a really, I think a really big component of how diverse her education and experiences. We're joining the library on the 3rd of January. So that seems to be freshman day and in Santa Cruz with the new city manager coming on board also on that day. And I think the team of folks that did the final interview. There were a lot of folks involved in the process. So community groups and staff and what have you. And the board of us as the library board, JPA board that did the final interview were extremely impressed by her. She's very outgoing and energetic and I think she's going to be a really great addition to our community. So as I'm saying all these great things about the new person, I do want to extend our thanks and acknowledgement to Eric Howard for the work that he's done as interim as being an interim myself. I will tell you it's that no small task to step up and be part of that. So thank you Eric for your contribution and to all of your staff for the great work you've been doing in the last couple of years. And with that, back to you, Mayor Myers. I appreciate the report and I just want to actually give my council member colleagues time since we're running a little bit early, not a lot early, but a little bit early. I just again want to recognize you for doing exactly what you just said, which was stepping up and, you know, we were in the middle of the major transition and then also just a lot of very complicated work. And so I feel like you have just really seared this ship just so true in the last couple of months, many months that you've been doing this job. And I think more importantly, you really have, at least from what I've heard from my colleagues, you know, you've really created a partnership with your city council members. And I think that is really, really greatly appreciated. And I think we've all learned something from you in the time that you've been here. So I want to thank you and I want to also offer my colleagues a chance to, if you'd like to say a few words, please do. So I'll look for hands if they come up. Shabra, I'll go Shabra, Sandy, Justin, Sonia, Renee, I'll write down the line. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, Rosemary, I just want to take a moment to thank you for stepping up in such a gracious way. You know, you came into lots of fires and the fires continue and your ability to stay calm and bring in the various perspectives that are in the works and keep everybody calm. I really, really appreciate and clearly you're not going anywhere, but you're you in this role I will miss. And I feel like I have formed a deeper relationship with you and I hope to continue it and just thank you. Thank you for all the work that you've done. You're most welcome with my pleasure. Sandy. Yeah, I did owe the comments from Councilmember Calendari Johnson. And I just want to add that, you know, having worked with you as the water director for most of my time on the council, I already knew that you have tremendous level of, you know, commitment and concern for our community and how we address address our most processing issues in with respect to water, just so competent and, you know, work with your team. And what I have seen in working with you in this role is, in addition to the graciousness and all those things, you know, you're willing to really be address these issues in a problem solving way and how really provide support to council members as we muddle through what it is that you know how to do what we want to do effectively and how to, you know, how to get things done. And it's just been it's been really, really so refreshing for me to have this experience. And I will miss you in this role and very, very happy to keep working with you as you return to your your passion in water. Thank you. And I suspect from my meetings with Matt that you've got somebody who's kept from this cloth, not the same as me obviously, because for one thing he's much younger but but but I do think that he has a lot of the skills and the sort of energy and the vision that I think is so important in this role. So I'm very optimistic about that. And I've got Justin next. Thank you. Thank you. Rosemary just want to express my appreciation, especially for you to step up into this role, because, you know, I'm sure when people are kind of looking at who can we pull into this role. And I know that not everyone's going to want to be put in that hot seat. And so just really want to appreciate you stepping into that role and then really helping us to navigate, you know, our decision making and being honest about your opinion and you know the impacts that our decisions make on the community on the staff and so just want to thank you for everything you've done this far gives us a different perspective on how city managers operate and looking forward to continuing to have you as a water director. So make it rain. I'm not responsible for yesterday, but I'll take whatever credit that anyone else wants to bring to the deal so that it keeps ringing. Thank you. And Sonya. Thank you. Rosemary, thank you so much for stepping up for working extremely hard. I know I would often come to council office at night after work and you would still be there right on at the computer working. I just wanted to acknowledge that we see you created a workplace culture that really supported staff and council members. You were available and responsive. And you have an amazing way of looking at the big picture and breaking it down into and I think council member Brown said problem solving into attainable solutions that we can, you know, take steps to working towards and that went a long way and I hope to continue with that process. Great appreciation for your role over these last months of transition. Thank you so much. Welcome. And I've got camera wait shipper you went already I've got I saw routine pop on here for a second. There she is I'm sorry Renee and then Martin. I agree with everything that everybody has said so far and I just also wanted to say that you had mentioned this morning in close session that you wouldn't want our job as electives right now. I wouldn't want your job. Yeah, so thankless and and we truly thank you you really stepped up and we appreciate you appreciate you stepping up there so we could have time to make our selection. Great. Well, I think it's good that you like what you're doing and I like what I was doing so that works out best when it's that situation. And routine. Well, I'm just so glad that I was able to make it back in time to have my public appreciation of you Rosemary and I just I agree 100% with what everybody has said. You're extraordinary you're an incredible leader and you've done an extraordinary job on this interim role but also as our water director. Our city is super lucky to have you and within the short period of time I feel like he brought a lot to the table in terms of how our city operates, both internally and externally and I continue to learn from you and just truly appreciate you and wish you a really successful holiday break and have our you know just the sincerest gratitude for you to step into this role so thank you very much. You're most welcome. Well we'll look forward to hearing back from you as our as our water director which I know is one of your favorite seats in the world as well. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Now you get to take a break from us all so lucky. We're doing more things to do. We're still adding things to your to do list right up until I got to change those dates. That was good. It's safe. Okay, we'll move on now to our consent agenda. And our consent to today includes items six through 23 on our agenda. All members of the public who are streaming this meeting now is the time to call in if you want comment on items six through 23. Instructions will be on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the queues saying you have been unmuted. All items will be acted upon in one motion, unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to comment or pull any items today from consent. And raise your hand and do that. Justin, do you have an item. Yes, I have a question about item number 11. And item number 14 and 14 a question on both of those. Okay. Thank you. I have a question on item 16 and 20. And just a quick comment on item 18. Question on 16 and 20 and a comment on 18. I am going to, I'm going to make a comment on 13 and one on 20. So any other council members. Nope, everybody else is good. Okay. Can I make a comment on 11 to just briefly on 11 shirts. So we're going to have, yeah, so why don't we go ahead. I'm just going to go in order down the line here. And we'll go ahead and go ahead with comments and questions. No items have been pulled from the agenda. So for the public. We'll go ahead and have either comments or questions asked by council members and then we will look for a motion for the entirety. We'll take it out to public comment after that. And then we'll look for a motion after that. So council member walk ins and I both had a, let's see, sorry, I'm tracking everything here. Let's see, you had a comment on item 11. So there was a comment for you and a question from council member Cummings. So why don't we go ahead and have your comment council member walk ins and then we'll go with the question for Justin. Sure. No, I'll just briefly, I just wanted to take the opportunity to acknowledge how overwhelmingly measure a pass by for, you know, thanking the city voters for their support it passed at almost a 3% in favor. I just want to thank the council for unanimously moving forward with putting it on the ballot. And I know it didn't necessarily come any other items that we wanted to see. But nonetheless, it moved forward on its own. And certainly the community is an agreement that we should continue our investment in youth and and that was definitely overwhelmingly heard. And so I just really want to take this moment to thank our voters and thank the council for their support. Thank you council member council member Cummings. Did you have a question on item 11. Did I was, and I brought this up to the city clerk, but I asked about because I've been receiving a lot of communications as prior to the. Election or the vote on that item around around the costs and finding out the final costs were and so just wanted to ask, you know, if we have received information on that and if not when. We might expect to receive information on that. I don't, I have an answer but I don't have the answer you're looking for I have we're waiting on the invoice and it's due this week. And I did reach out to the county this morning and I haven't heard back just for a verbal number so that I could respond to your question I don't have it that I can share it. Once I get it. Thank you, that'd be helpful. Andy, did you have a comment or question on item 11. Your hands up. Nope. Okay. Sorry, no, that's okay. Okay, we'll move on to the next item which has been asked for a comment or question that's me on item number 13. I just want to thank the staff for their work on this and just, you know, I just want to recognize the opportunity here I think that Santa Cruz is really uniquely suited for. According to the analysis that's been done as part of the climate action plan development. We have about 3500 existing green jobs, which is about 10% of our total employment in the city of Santa Cruz. And projections are that there could be upwards of a million jobs per year cal in California created that are green jobs which are primarily blue collar jobs in many senses. And that projection is actually here in California to basically go on over a decade so a million jobs a year over a decade. There's an enormous amount of funding and job training and investment that's coming out of the federal infrastructure act as well as California's legislation and commitment to climate change and so I just am really excited. But I kind of wanted to focus on I had to sort of put it aside a little bit but we had two really good roundtables. We had a roundtable that was a regional mayors roundtable that was well attended we had about over 100 people I believe attended. And there's just a lot of energy around this and actually other jurisdictions are taking note of our commitment through this resolution to really make a green economy and green jobs a priority, especially for our young, youngest members of our community and working into good paying jobs. So I want to thank the staff for this. I think everybody was scratching their head in terms of what this meant. We've tried to identify it. And I think this is just launching an effort to, you know, again look at a regional strategy around these kinds of jobs that are both occurring in the natural environment like environmental restoration environmental monitoring etc. And also in the built environment with building electrification and some of the other items that are going on. So just a lot of exciting work and I know the climate action plan will include this as part of its part of its contents as well when it comes to us. So thank you to the staff on that one. I have council member Cummings. We had a question on item number 14. That's my question. I was just curious. I know that we just hired someone who's kind of full time homelessness. You know, I can't remember to coordinator, you know, or what the actual title is, but I know that we just hired somebody to work on homelessness full time. And so I'm just curious, you know, why that person wasn't the representative on the hat. Since they're the one kind of doing full time work on homelessness and I know our planning director is deputy city manager planning director working on homelessness. So I was just curious if there could be some clarity on, you know, why the full time homeless person isn't playing that role. So that that was me. So I've been participating in the homeless action partnership. During the time I've been in this role and a lot of the issue from my perspective had to do with the crossover into the two by two. As I think I described a lot of the issues. So I don't think it was intended to be a. Any kind of a lack of acknowledgement and expect that our homelessness response manager will, you know, participate as often folks do in, you know, staff goes to meetings that electives and others go to. So I think it's just matter of putting our a team there. We have a lot at stake in that particular environment because that's the funnel through which all the state and federal money comes and gets allocated. And so those were the, you know, suggestions that I made. I don't know that it's, you know, be all and all we certainly can change that in the future. It was just curious. So thanks. Thank you, Russ Mary. Next I have a question on item number 16 council member Brown. So item 16 is the annual report for variety of fees, the traffic, childcare and public safety impact fees, which we have in place. I don't have questions or comments specifically about those but in conversations that I had with people in the community. In anticipation as we reviewed the agenda. And recent action taken at the county. I, or recent proposal at the county. I won supervisor I started thinking about the, this idea of looking at a transit impact fee we know our metro is completely underfunded we know that our general plan and our zoning and a lot of the work that we're doing. Is intended to promote transit oriented development, you know that projects. Get can get certain points in various competitive rounds around being in close proximity to transit. And so thinking about ways to support that transit that actual service because we are our level of service we know is inadequate to really address, you know, a comprehensive transit model in our community so I am wondering if it and I understand that these projects require nexus studies to kind of figure out what we're able to do and I'd be really interested in exploring that I wonder if. Council members would be willing to support just the general idea of asking our staff to give us some kind of memo or some kind of information about. The transit impact fee moving forward. This would not be asking staff to put in a lot of time at this moment, but to just kind of give us a sense of what the parameters parameters might be and what, you know, what we would need to do to try to explore that further. And so I don't think it rises to the level I didn't pull it to try to make that as a separate motion but I wonder if that's something that folks would be willing to just kind of say yeah we'd love to hear that when you know as you're working on impact fee stuff. Can you get us a little bit of information. Not necessarily a count an agenda item at this moment but just some info. I'm just going to ask Tony a little bit here so it's not a motion is it I'm not quite sure. Yeah, if I could just say it's in my I this came to my attention just in terms of a way to address this at the RTC as chair I'm trying to figure out how to manage the consent agenda as well and I don't envy you may or so do that. But, you know, that minor things like this can be done without actually pulling an item if we just add, you know, direction to tell us you know give us some information I can give. It's a request for information I don't see that as requiring us a modified action. That's what the consensus of the council. So if this the sense of the council is we'd be interested in getting a memo about that I asked that we just add that before we approve it. Okay, thanks. Thanks member Brown can you restate what it is that you're sure. Okay, so the the ask is for staff and the city attorney's office to provide counsel with an FYI that describes how transit impact fee might be developed or how these are developed and determine whether a transit impact fee could be considered. I got it. Thank you. Thank you council member. Let's see. Council member. Let's see we're on 18. That's me again. You okay quick. This this item is to amend our city's personnel compliment. Due to the increase in the state minimum wage, which is a requirement under state law. I am I just want to say I am looking forward to the day that I hope this is the last time that we are in a position of doing this as we move towards increasing the wages of our lowest paid workers at the city and kind of getting ahead of this so that we really are making that commitment to a living wage for all city workers. So I just wanted to say that it's happening here due to the state law and you know I've been hearing a commitment to do better and so I'm looking forward to that. Thank you council member. And then let's see the last item for calm well comment from me and a question from council member Brown maybe I'll have you go first council member. Thank you. Yeah I am so I am you know I'm supportive of this I. I do think there's some questions about what the nature of that relationship that partnership will be and how decisions will get made in light of that that aren't fleshed out and I understand that. But my my question is about the role of the Parks and Rec Commission here because it feels like this is something that the Parks and Rec Commission should be weighing in on. And so I just wanted to ask why that hasn't happened is that going to happen. Can we get and we make that happen. I guess Rosemary I'm excuse me Rosemary is Tony I would imagine Tony Elliot is on there he is. And he's on mute you're on mute. All right. Yeah good afternoon mayor and council members and yeah council member proud of it. It's a great question. Typically for MOUs that we enter into we most of those we don't take to the Parks and Recreation Commission. In this case we certainly could the council wants to direct us back to the commission to review it. Certainly happy to do that. What this is in terms of proposed MOU is really a way for us to organize and memorialize the collaboration and the relationship that we already have with save the waves. So right now the way that it works is frankly on a little bit of an ad hoc basis but from a stewardship angle from a strategic planning or coordination angle. You know whatever that might be it's a little bit ad hoc. I would say that Parks and Recreation is not the only department of course that save the waves works with. So they're involved with Dr. Wise West in terms of the West Cliff Adaptation and Management Plan with public works on a variety of topics as well. But with a lot of moving pieces what we've tried to do here in this MOU is not create something new necessarily but really just kind of organize and codify this partnership and this collaboration that we have already. So no new giant events are necessarily going to take over West Cliff or anything like that. This is really just kind of memorializing what we're already working on in the spirit of preserving our world surfing reserve and preserving recreation through surfing. Which is of course part of our brand part of our identity here and surf city. So really want to build that collaboration and memorialize that. And again typically we wouldn't take these things to the commission but that's not to say that we can't. Should the council direct us to go back to the commission to review this more detail. And I should mention that I think somewhere on this call with save the waves Nick Strong so vettich and Sean Burns would save the waves are also on the call if you have any questions. Thank you council member do you have questions of members from save the waves. Not at this time I'm for expediency but I may get in touch with you all kind of moving forward. I appreciate the explanation and just would say you know if if this does results in you know any major changes to you know the. What's happening that that would could involve parks and rec that they be consulted before you know programmatic changes are made or and if that happens so but I appreciate the explanation thank you. And Nick and Ryan. Thank you for all you do. And I just like to make a comment on on this item. Yeah I'm just thank you. Tony for bringing this forward and I want to recognize Nick strong to bet it's the executive director of save the waves coalition. And you know these kinds of nonprofit city partnerships are really important we've seen a lot of success with Shakespeare Santa Cruz is a great example. You know the work that you know we do with the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. So you know there's just there's these great partnerships that are long standing obviously the sort of preservation society and the surfing museum. So there's these really nice situations where you know working with the nonprofit sort of you know amplifies both the community outreach and also just frankly the community buy in and the stewardship of places that we care about and you know surfing is basically you know a heritage activity in this town dating all the way back to the Hawaiians and you know it's often times hard for surfers I think to really gain access to the kinds of needs that they have because sometimes those aren't really evident to people and so simple things like staircases and the ways that you get in and out of the ocean safely moss on rocks railings that have you know open you know eroded steel all those kinds of things are very hazardous actually to surfers you know I've known people who broke their you know broke their feet broke their shins caught up in their arms getting in and out of the ocean especially during as well is pretty risky and can be quite hazardous and these kinds of like exactly like public access is a good example is you know how do we maintain access points to our ocean safely so that you know we can get kids who want to learn how to surf in and out and then also just expand that access across all ages and folks that want to get involved in the ocean so I see this as a really positive step especially for the world surf reserve which you know as someone who travels around a lot to surf areas you know having a world surfing reserve here in Santa Cruz it's one of ten in the world is not is not unrecognized as you travel around and talk with other folks and other communities it's really a commitment that shows that we recognize that surfing is an inherent part of the ocean environment and that it provides a lot of recreational activity for both visitors and for residents so I just wanted to thank Tony and thank Nick for working on this I know I dipped into some of your conversations off and on over this year to try to help people get connected and get questions answered so I'm just really pleased that you guys were able to get this done and celebrate the start of this relationship. Okay we will go ahead and take this out to the public now and so this we have not had any of our agenda items pulled today but the public is available to make any comments on the items that we do have which is items number. Six through 23 today if you do want to speak on an item on our consent agenda now's the time to do that if you could please raise your hand by pressing star nine and then I'll call on you using the last four digits of your phone number or your name so if you do have any comments on the agenda item consent. Let us know by raising your hand. Okay. I'm not seeing anything. So I'll go ahead and bring this back to council and I would look for a motion on the consent agenda item consent agenda excuse me. Let's see I've got council member Cummings. I'll go ahead and move consent. With the addition that for item number. It was 18. I remember correctly. Let me double check. It was item 16. 16. In the informational item we provided on. It was a traffic. Brand impact fee. Yeah. And council member golden. Happy second. Okay. So I have a motion by council member Cummings seconded by council member boulder and I would like to ask clerk to please call the roll. Oh thank you mayor. Sorry go ahead. You do have a member of the public could just raise their hand it looks like. Okay. I'd sort of gone back to council but I'll go ahead and Derek do you have a few comment. You hear me. Yes we can. Okay. So for some reason my phone didn't work. As far as raising my hand. Okay. As to COVID emergency item six this 20 month year old perpetual emergency status is wearing thin. At some point we should admit the vaccines are not as safe or effective as promised mixing science with politics produces politics and the vaccines themselves produce COVID similar spike toxins that can also cause damage. Right. Are destroyed. Should the emergency make the mask mandates for private residential indoor places be legal or enforceable. Not to me especially when there's no clear evidence mask mandates have done anything except generate fear. It's clear public health and other officials have lied from day one. Every media whore repeats the false narrative. Children have more risk and possibly more now have died from vaccinations than COVID max vaccine adverse reactions are suppressed. Science is about questioning science but not anymore where the regular safety study updates and or why were and are useful treatments being denied. Why is the full Pfizer trial data being kept from public view. Why are heart and stroke problems skyrocketing. Why is just any vaccine will do instead of the best one. We need truth filled answers not emergency declarations although keeping food not bombs and homeless tents from in front of the post office worked out pretty good. Now regarding your public housing study session recorded in item 10 the unelected m bag bureaucrats ignore it's the corrupt and immoral federal government disservants that are the primary cause of mass inflation and credit bubble housing dislocations. The delusion that low density private property has no value or rights to protect is a dereliction. The heinous delusion that there is value in using white race or income data to overfill to white affluent communities with dense public assistance housing is expletive worthy. You'll never fully meet these outsize any white leftist demands anyway. Don't try from just because the people voted down measure M doesn't mean we can't do it anyway to. Yeah, let's put it to be tax vacant private properties like the leftist home office in Oakland. It's known who carries the leftist simple and hammer politics and Santa Cruz. But the rest of you should reject many of them. Thank you. Let's see. Mr. Meisler, do you have a comment on the consent agenda item on it on the consent agenda today? Yeah, I was going to comment on the extension of the CZU declaration of emergency. Okay, I'll allow it but for the rest of the public. I did. I did move past public comment, but go ahead. Mr. Meisler. Right. Yeah. Thank you. I see that this is being extended. And I guess my question is just what this does. I have been out talking with people living in RVs who were victims of the CZU fire. Off of Delaware and natural bridges. And these folks are getting ticketed and treated like them living in vehicles is some sort of traffic violation. If we have this emergency ordinance, are we going to do something to like sort of soften the laws around sort of making these people even more houseless than they already are? Because I think that would be really important. And it would be a really great use of this emergency ordinance. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so we have a motion by councilmember Cummings seconded by councilmember Golder to move the consent agenda items 6 through 23. And Bonnie, can we do a roll call vote, please? Councilmember Watkins. Aye. I want Tori Johnson. Aye. Mayor Brunner. That motion passes unanimously. I will now move on to agenda item number 24, the Santa Cruz water rights project, final environmental impact report and project approval. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff, followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to Sarah Easley Perez and Chris Berry. The order today, again, is we'll hear from staff and then we'll take questions and then we'll bring it out to public comment. So I will turn it over. Good afternoon, Mayor Myers. This is Heidi looking back your acting water director. I'm going to kick it off really quickly and then hand it over to Chris Berry, our watershed compliance manager for a brief presentation. You raise a really good point though. There's a lot of people involved in this project. And I first want to reiterate and emphasize that this is a project that's 20 years in the making, as some of you will recall. And as you can see in the project description, it combines our commitment to local fisheries. And I think that the ability to use our water resources differently, operationally through regional projects for conjunctive use of our resources is an important piece of this whole project and puzzle. In other words, if we need to, we need to be able to operate our system differently to be able to meet our commitments to our community and the fisheries. So while asking for no new water through this project, the Santa Cruz Water Rights Project creates these opportunities. I also want to point out that because of the complexity and importance of this project to the city and the region. The water department has utilized our water commission in a significant way to ensure an open and transparent process by providing additional opportunities to describe the project to the community, receive input, build on that input, and create a project that I think will successfully serve our community. The water commission, by the way, unanimously supported staff's recommendation of their December 6th meeting to recommend to the city council certification of the environmental impact report and approval of the project. Finally, today is one of the steps in this whole process, this long process and an important milestone to recognize as it weaves together water rates, water supply and habitat management. But it's also a real celebration, I think, in real successful collaboration of the city, the community, and our resource agencies. As Chris Berry can likely attest, we've worked together over many years and worked through many complex and hard issues to get to this point. And while we have a lot of work ahead of us, this is a real milestone for all of us. So I'm going to turn this over to Chris Berry. Again, Chris is probably one of the longest standing members of this team, our watershed compliance manager to complete the presentation. Chris? Chris, you're muted. First cardinal sin of zoom, but thanks Heidi, thanks council members. And to reiterate what the director of Scots Valley water district said at the water commission meeting last week I had a hair when this started. So it's been a long road. But thanks for giving us a chance this afternoon to talk about the project. I'm going to race through this because I know you have a busy agenda today but we'll have a chance for questions at the end obviously. See if I can figure out my technology here. You already met Heidi and of course I'm Chris Berry, watershed compliance manager, little overview. We're just going to give you some background on the project, the sequel review process and the state board process as Heidi shared the sequel is not the end of the story. We still have to complete the state board process as well and that's already underway but I'll share more about that in a few minutes. First I want to give a shout out to our great team. There are many players in this. Some of them are no longer with us. Former staff at the city of Santa Cruz but want to give a special shout out to Sarah Perez who really did a lot of the heavy lifting on the sequel. And of course our great consulting team and other staff, some of whom are here today in case we get really deep into the weeds on the questions. But it really has been a great team effort over many years and I'll just quote Hillary and say it takes a village and it truly does take a village. So this project follows up on the heels of the water supply advisory committee work and the water supply augmentation strategy and is well aligned with what we've been trying to do in the Habitat Conservation Plan as well. So it's really gratifying to be able to bring a 21st century water project to you today. So the overview, mostly we're just trying to make our system more reliable, more resilient in the face of changing climatic conditions. Also be a little bit more of a holistic water resource manager and providing those in stream flows for fisheries which, frankly, in most cases we're not required of the city for the last 150 years as long as the city's been around. Many of our water rights don't even have bypass flows attributed to them. We're just trying to set the stage for infrastructure improvements and I know you've heard a lot about that over the last couple of years is under Director Menard's leadership. We certainly have ramped up our program and really begun working on improving our infrastructure. But also trying to set the stage for us working a little bit more regionally and collaboratively with other water agencies in Santa Cruz County. So I won't bore you by reading all these but this is just drilling further down on that point of working regionally, working more holistically, speaking to the state mandate to work in an integrative fashion in terms of groundwater and surface water. The overarching theme being use the surface water when you have excess surface water and use groundwater that's been stored during those cleaner times when we have high demand and low stream flows so that we can protect the flows for fish. To that point of the collaborative regional water resource management planning. I don't know if you can see my little hand here but our service area basically follows highway one up to Bonnie Doon this brown area and a little bit up into the rolling woods area and then over to live oak. We're currently changing the place of use with this project to be inclusive of the key groundwater basins that are that now have groundwater sustainability plans or a draft plan in one case. In our neighboring water agencies as I said previously to include their service areas, those being San Lorenzo Valley water districts so Cal Scots Valley and central so that we can work a little bit more holistically as I said moving forward. And I had to throw in the obligatory shot of the mayor here. Both when we were, we were both a little bit younger back in 2003 when we were looking at how the city was operating its system. And you're going to make fun of me for my plaid shirt I'm sure that's sort of an inside joke but you know the city has a, we've grown up around managing our water resources in a way that's much different. And then we will in the future and that's really important for you to know without these water rights changes we can't change our operations to protect those instrument flows. This will certainly change our operations and our water supply planning significantly. That said, it's comes at a time when those improved flows can be really beneficial. And we started implementing those flows voluntarily a few years ago. And it's been really gratifying to see that in some cases the fisheries have already responded, particularly in the case of the lower San Lorenzo and Laguna Creek especially. We've had coho and Laguna Creek a couple times now during the drought which has been really great to see. So, I'm told by our water rights attorney this is very unusual but we got support from the Department of Fish and Wildlife on this project they even wrote a letter to the state board supporting it. I wanted to memorialize that here in this presentation to Heidi's point about working collaboratively and working toward, you know, win-win effectively. We've come up with a project that I think it has a good balance of meeting our supply reliability and also moving toward fisheries recovery goals that's really gratifying. Now on to CEQA. We've had a fairly long CEQA process starting in October 2018. Since I'm the old timer I'll just share that we actually started in 2006 on the CEQA. We ultimately never moved on with that CEQA because our first petitions to the state board did not include this regional focus or this attention toward in-stream flows. And that project was quickly aborted and we moved on and the project is what you see now. So, we've had quite an extensive public review process, quite a lot of outreach in various forms be it printed media or community guides or what have you, public meetings. The water commission was very supportive last week which was really gratifying and we're hoping that you'll also be a supportive today. So summary of findings, we don't have a lot of remaining impacts. We did evaluate the typical things that are evaluated in CEQA processes. We do have some beneficial impacts. The CEQA is by its nature not something that is designed to really look at benefits but there are benefits that you should be aware of, whether it be to our water supply reliability or the in-stream flows for fish. And, you know, near and dear to my heart is that it will improve conditions at Loch Lomond so that we don't have to close the reservoir as often by virtue of keeping the lake levels higher in the future. We do have a couple of small significant unavoidable impacts. One is some temporary impacts associated with noise from drilling ASR wells. I understand that's on the nature of a couple of days where that will occur, so that's frankly not a big deal. And then sort of inherent to the project is we're increasing the size of the utility which is considered a significant unavoidable impact, but that's the nature of the project is to leverage our water rights to actually make our utility more reliable and more resilient. So there are some changes to the utility. So again, I see that as a non-issue. Like with most CEQA processes, we chose the alternative that had the greatest benefits and the fewest impacts that spoke to our objectives. So that's a bit of a no-brainer, but I just wanted to be clear there. And again, there's multiple benefits. That statement of overriding considerations that you're adopting today, again, speaks to those significant unavoidable impacts, one being the noise and the other being the expanded utility. And then finally, the mitigation monitoring and reporting program, obviously with a project of this scale, there are a lot of mitigations to be implemented over time and certainly I'm not going to be here in 20 years and Sarah may be. But there's, you know, the mitigation monitoring and reporting program is an important part of this to sort of build that institutional memory and provide a framework for ensuring that the mitigations are actually implemented over time. So now on to the state board process. We're at about bubble three here. You can see my hand there. They're waiting for us to complete the CEQA review and then they'll decide whether they need to publicly notice our petitions or not. The petitions have already been put out for the process where they received protests and we're in the midst of resolving some of those protests. We did get a couple of protests that were by and large manageable. So as soon as we finish this certification process, we'll be on to meeting with state board staff and directors and determining next steps with them. And that said, let's see. I think it's important to know we're hoping for a six to 12 months for completion of that. Of course, if the drought continues, and it still could, even though we had that great rain yesterday, if the drought continues, you know, all bets are off on state board workload. They tend to get distracted by things like the state water project and whatnot, but we're optimistic that we can wrap this up in 12 months. Let's see. I should note we did get a couple of letters from the public. One of them didn't present any new information other than what was presented in their original comment letter on the draft EIR. So we didn't feel any need to have further follow up on that. The other letter that came in that I know you all got, we had reviewed by our legal team and our CEQA team and sent you a response to those issues this morning. Again, we didn't think that changed our perspective on project approval or EIR certification, but we do have our team here today. If you guys would like to get into the weeds and ask some questions, we're happy to answer them. So with that, I think I'll turn it back to Heidi. Anything else to add? I'm happy to answer any questions. Hi. Thank you. I will look to council members for questions. Council Member Boulder. I just have a, I just want to say thank you to both Chris and Donna for working on this for decades. It's something that's, you know, super important to me as well. And I've said before in other meetings that fishing is also another, you know, part of our economy and green economy. And so I appreciate, you know, all the hard work that went into this and stewardship and forward thinking. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. Vice Mayor Brunner. Thank you. I also wanted to comment and express appreciation for highlighting the enhancement of the stream flows and fisheries. And I thought it was really neat to see some of the photos of the endangered coho salmon and. And just it's amazing all the work that goes into this and. Beyond the things we think about that a city does. Thank you so much for all of this work in the presentation. Oh, you're very welcome. Yeah, and I'll cue myself just for a quick comment. Just for the public that's listening and then my colleagues, definitely a. Self, you know, I've been working in watershed restoration for a long time and on water and the difficult choices that California has to make right now between. Literally saving some of the animals that survive on our on our surface water and understanding how we use our groundwater sources smartly for future generations and so. This project is so rare in that it does both of those things. I mean, I think it might be the first of its kind in state of California so for a little tiny water utility of like ours. It's a pretty amazing project and. And it you know hopefully it will stand up as you know really an example for the rest of the state to really understand how to manage. How to manage those two objectives because it's just going to get harder so. I remember finding those fish in that creek that day Chris so yeah I'm glad that you stuck with it I've wandered all over the place Monterey County and back so. From myself and a few more rivers but congratulations and congratulations to the whole department because. Many, many groups would have given up or many utilities would have given up and just said you know all we do is serve water and they don't have that that really like completely different mindset which is. We've got to we've got to be thinking 50 100 years forward and I think. Heidi and Rosemary and all of your staff you guys do that and it's really rare in a water utility that that's happening so thank you for your work super exciting. Any other comments or questions from council before I bring it out to the public. See any other hands so I will go ahead and bring this out to the public. For those who want to comment on this item which is item number 24 Santa Cruz water rights project final environmental impact report and project approval will you please raise your hand by pressing. Star nine. Seeing any hands going up I do want to recognize that. Doug Infer is in the audience here and just want to thank Doug and his leadership on the water commission as well on this and our water commission as a whole. Any last chance for anybody coming on item number 24. Okay, we'll bring this back to council and we will look for a motion. Council member Watkins. Well I'm happy to move it and also just want to extend my congratulations and gratitude to the years of work and giving us to this place today so I'm happy to move the recommendation. Thank you council member council member Brown. I'm happy to second this and we'll also just say. It's just not even possible to wrap your mind around how incredibly complex and challenging a project like this must be. And I've been in and out of like had snippets of it along the way you know what what you all have done and so I just want to make a comment that like the magnitude of this achievement is is really, really amazing and so happy to And look forward to. Bearing on. Thank you council member. Okay, we have a motion by council member Watkins and a second by council member. Brown and this will be for proving the resolutions to refine the environmental impact report for the water rights project and approving the water. And resolution approving those standards water rights project and adopting the mitigation monitoring reporting program and the secret findings and statement of overriding considerations. Can we can you do a roll call about please. Council member Watkins. Hi. I want to hear Johnson. Hi. Graduation that motion passes unanimously and thanks again for all your work you guys. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Fish thank you. Thank you for your leadership. Okay, we will now move on to item number 25 today. And this will be a 31 water street for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. Thank you. Thank you. And this will be a presentation of the item by staff. Followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Public comment will be limited to 30 minutes today and each speaker will have one minute. Groups who received approval by the stated deadline will have two minutes to speak council will then return for deliberation and action. And this will be a final statement of the motion and materials that will be part of the plan. And this will be under review by a city of San Cruz tomorrow and eight early over one responsible development. So I will go ahead and turn this over to Ryan Bain from our planning department for a presentation. All right, just check and check if you guys can hear me. Yes. We can run. Okay, let me go ahead and share my screen. So yes, I'm Ryan Bannon, senior planner with the planning department and we're we have an oversight meeting for the 831 water street project this afternoon. So just a quick background from most recent meetings on October 12 there was an oversight meeting by the city council where a motion was passed to deny the project based on several issues specific to potential objective standards not being met. We'll go over that a little bit later on. And then most recently on November 23. There was a motion passed by council to rescind that October 12 denial and directed staff to complete SB 35 objective standards consistency review and schedule the follow up public oversight meeting which is what we're doing today. So, as I mentioned, there were several issues that were brought up as part of that denial motion on October 12 at that oversight meeting. And so one being the anti segregation standard and inclusionary ordinance and density bonus organs that requires dispersal before we units throughout a project. Another being the slope regulation that projects be located no closer than 20 feet from a 30% slope. And the lack of a completed stormwater management plan and completed drainage plan. The lack of a traffic study demonstrating that the city's traffic standards protecting the public health and safety from the proposed driveway crossing a bike lane was prepared. The lack of a completed noise study documenting the city's objective noise standards would be met. And for not showing the breakdown of area median income and my levels and density bonus unit locations. So following that October 12 council oversight meeting gaps can work to address the objective standards I just mentioned. But by council and on over on November 10, an updated set of plans was submitted to the community development department that address the items previously identified by the council. In regards to the dispersal before we units our municipal code states that inclusionary units shall be dispersed throughout the residential development to prevent the creation of a concentration of affordable units within the residential development. So section 402E of the HCD SP 35 guidelines allows a local jurisdiction to impose all the objective requirements and inclusionary ordinance to an SP 35 development project. So that's basically we would that based on those two we'd be requiring to disperse all of the affordable units throughout the project. However, section 402F of the SP of the HCD guidelines also requires that the affordable units shall be distributed throughout the development. Unless otherwise necessary for state or local funding programs and have access to the same common areas and amenities as the marker eight units which that's what is being proposed to share common areas and amenities. So the local requirements to disperse inclusionary units throughout the development would apply to all affordable units and then development unless the applicant can provide evidence that is necessary to concentrate the units for reasons related to state or local funding programs. Now, the state local funding has not been identified yet. So those are going to be ongoing with the applicants as they're applying for these this funding so we won't really know what those funding programs are going to be. So that's why we added a condition of approval that basically follows this in terms of all units will have to be dispersed unless you provide some type of evidence or documentation that your funding program requires otherwise. So with a base density of 109 units, there's a minimum of 55 affordable units that would be required to be provided for the project to qualify for the SB 35 streamlining. So the 55 units will be restricted to households at 80% AMI and restricted to rents at 60% AMI. So the applicant is proposing to disperse 22 of these units throughout buildings A and B these are these 22 units are identified as the inclusionary and density bonus affordable units. So it's 20%. These numbers are consistent with the objective standards and the inclusionary ordinance density bonus ordinance and state law and SB 35 legislation. So the applicant has maintained the request for a density bonus incentive and session to allow for the remaining 33 affordable units required rescue 35 be consolidated in one building based on funding permits is what we just talked about. So we've included that concession just in case that the funding program requires that they be consolidated. Also in regards to slope setback so as part of the initial review staff had indicated that there were no slopes greater than 30% on the project site. This was really due to the interpretation that the retaining wall that a bus water stream is not a slope. The local code defines slope as an inclined ground surface inclination of which is expressed as a ratio of vertical distance to horizontal distance. So with a vertical concrete retaining wall not constituting an inclined slope surface. It's really difficult to argue that the wall meets the definition of slope particularly when it comes to the SB 35 which gives deference to consistency with objective standards. Given the identification of slopes greater than 30% on our GIS layer staff cited this as support for the council's motion on October 12. So our municipal code states that no building shall be located on a slope of 30 to 50% or within 20 feet of a 30 to 50% slope. So with the exception of the underground garage structure which are but the water street property line. So instead of arguing consistency to address this issue of applicants are requesting a waiver of this objective standard pursuant to state density bonus law. So this has been an added as a waiver. line. So instead of arguing consistency to address this issue of applicants are requesting a waiver of this objective standard pursuant to state density bonus law. So this has been an added as a waiver. So a stormwater management plan, stormwater and low-impact development best management practices requirement worksheet and drainage plan were submitted as part of the September 9 resubmittal and then a completed stormwater control plan was submitted as part of the November 10 resubmittal. So public work staff in addition to the city's contracts stormwater reviewer have reviewed these plans and determined that they meet state and local stormwater requirements and a standard condition of approval has been included that the stormwater plans be implemented as part of the construction plans at the building permit stage of the project. So as to traffic study, so the public works department commissioned a site ingress egress evaluation and conceptual engineering drawing study which was prepared by Kimley Horne and associates and what this study evaluated was the general plan roadway build out, the right of way impacts, site distance evaluation and fire access. So the findings of the study were that the city should require a southbound exclusive right turn lane along Brentsville 40 Avenue which would also involve relocation of traffic signal and storm drain facilities. It also found that the site distance along Brentsville 40 Avenue meets the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials or AASHTO minimum requirement of 250 feet but one of those mitigations were required the removal of on-street parking and landscape strip to be maintained with low height vegetation from the project right way to the Belvedere Terrace. Another finding was that the site distance along Water Street is met based on AASHTO requirements and that the fire egress point on Water Street is sufficient based on their analysis. So the traffic study recommendations were that the site plan to be include the southbound right turn lane along North Brentsville 40 Avenue for the city general plan and as I mentioned those approval plans will have to include relocation of traffic signal equipment and a catch basin. It also recommended a neighborhood permit parking program that would exclude A31 water residents how that be established to provide adequate parking for residents and offset the parking removal on Brentsville 40 Avenue. Another recommendation is that we can remove the channelizers for the protected bike lane along Water Street but keep the striping for the buffered bike lane and the median can remain. And that the applicant work with the city engineer to install warning signs along Water Street due to the retaining wall screening vehicles entering and exiting the driveway. And then also that the applicant install an electronically actuated warning device that will emit light and sound when vehicles exit the driveway on Water Street due to the limited vertical site distance. So this device would be placed on the retaining wall so bikes and vehicles traveling westbound would receive warnings well before the slope in the roadway. Also as part of that recommendation was to install a rapid open and closed gate system to minimize vehicle queuing. So a lot of times we have noise studies that are prepared as part of the building permit requirements. We had them go ahead and prepare them as part of this oversight. And so there were two preliminaries noise studies that were prepared and submitted as part of the latest and middle. One is for preliminary property line noise analysis and the other is a preliminary environmental noise study. So the preliminary property line noise analysis evaluates the project's mechanical equipment noise levels to the adjacent properties. And this analysis concluded that the project's noise generating equipment will meet the city property line standards without the need for any mitigation. But as a standard as I mentioned this usually happens at the building permit stage. The analysis also recommends that a more refined analysis be conducted once the specific equipment has been selected and the mechanical equipment systems have been designed in greater detail. That usually happens more at the building document stage. The preliminary environmental noise study determines the noise environment at the site and compares the measure data with applicable standards and proposes mitigation measures as necessary. So this is a study as I mentioned is normally at the building permit stage to confirm that indoor noise levels for the proposed residential units meet certain decibel levels per building code and city noise standards. It also takes a look at recommends certain STC sound transmission class ratings for windows and doors to meet minimum etuary noise criteria and also looks at outdoor spaces as well. And so that study found that the project is within the city's goals as articulate in the general plan with those recommended STC ratings mitigations. So also in terms of the area median income levels the applicants provided us this table so it provides a breakdown of the affordability levels of all affordable units which indicates that all 55 units were provided at 80% AMI with rents at 60% AMI. These numbers are consistent with objective standards and the inclusionary ordinance, density bonus ordinance and state law and SB 35 legislation. The applicant continues to propose the use of an incentive concession to allow for the 33 remaining SB 35 outside of our 22 inclusionary to be consolidated within one of the two buildings in the development. So this of course will be solely dependent on the funding sources and their requirements. So this request for consolidation units if needed for project funding is consistent with the 402F that I mentioned earlier of the HCD guidelines given the conditions of approval that will require the applicant to submit evidence of such funding to the city for confirmation that the specific funding mechanism necessitates that consolidation prior to building permit issuance and the condition of approval that requires the affordable units and the project to be built prior to or concurrently with the Marguerite units to ensure that the final project is consistent with the inclusionary density bonus and SB 35. So as I mentioned if evidence of such funding rent is not provided then all 55 before the units will need to be dispersed throughout the two buildings. As I mentioned so there was we the project is entitled to three concessions or incentives. The applicant originally was requesting two one for the consolidation of the affordable units the other for electrical vehicle charging. The vehicle charging concession has been removed as they've moved on the plans that all of them will be ED ready and we've included a condition of approval that a minimum of 17 ED charging stations be installed to meet the zoning code. In terms of waivers the original four waivers are unchanged and then as I had mentioned earlier regarding slope we've added a fifth waiver for the reduction of setback from a 30 to 55 slope. So staff has found the project consistent with the city's objective standards and with the standard necessary to grant the requested density bonus concession and waivers. So therefore is staff is recommending that the city council review the objective standards table and density bonus information prepared by staff and refer the project to staff to complete a formal response letter to the SB 35 application including objective standards consistency determination and determination of the granting of a density bonus. And that concludes my presentation and I'm available for questions as are we have several other staff here available for their specific specialties. Thank you Ryan. Okay I'll look for questions from the council members at this point. Any council members with questions? Councilmember Brown and then councilmember Watkins councilmember excuse me vice mayor Brunner and then council member Cummings in that order please. Thank you mayor and thank you Ryan for the presentation. I have a question about this the language and the intention with the language on the recommendation because I'm still trying to figure out if the where we're at in terms of the decision the council made about making itself the final approval body for SB 35 projects and whether or not we are going to revisit that and I think that was going to be revisited as a separate conversation. But what I'm seeing here is that rather than recommending that we approve you're recommending that we refer it to staff and so I guess I'm trying to figure out if there's some substantive difference because what it appears to me is that we approve this recommendation we're approving the project basically but is the intention also to be saying we we want the staff to do that. I'm just still trying to figure out what the what the language means or what your intention is specifically there. Yeah I mean I think the in previous counts and I may look to leave her some direction on this but I think in the past at the previous council meetings that you determined that all SB 35 projects would be becoming for the council for an oversight review but I think with SB 35 it's being a ministerial permit that staff is actually going to be sending out the letter for the determination of consistency and all of that. So I don't think it changes the process in any way and so it would always be coming to council as my understanding but in terms of the language I think it's basically having the council review for objective standards and then once that's determined handing it over to staff to follow up with whatever approvals and and conditions of approval that should be included as part of the project ultimately in the end before it goes on to building the building phase. Thank you yeah I just I was just trying to get clarity on the intention there thanks. Lee did you have anything to add on that or? Sure I think the primary thing that I would add is that the council does have the ability to come back at a future meeting to revise the process you know the council has said for these types of projects bring forward a public oversight meeting and that isn't you know we're here for that public oversight meeting that isn't a consideration of you know should we bring future projects to a public oversight meeting or not that isn't part of the agenda today but the council could consider a revised process at some future hearing should they choose to do so. If I could just add to that this language is also consistent with the direction given by the council at the last meeting at which this project was discussed. Thank you Tony. Council member Watkins. Yeah I'll thank the staff for all their work on this I know it's been a heavy lift for you all and for the presentation I just wanted to get clarity if I can on the consolidated housing for one of the buildings for the affordable units and then some being integrated into the other building but there is still discretion for them all to be consolidated if financing works out into one building is that correct? Right yes based on HCD guidelines basically it states that if there is a funding source that specifically has a requirement that they have to be consolidated into one building then that would be that would be allowed and we wouldn't have to follow the city's specific inclusionary ordinance which requires dispersal of their inclusionary units and that is specific just to the units above and beyond the 22 or the city's inclusionary units so in this case it would be 33 units in fact I probably kind of skimmed over my I did a I should probably bring it up a table that kind of explains it a little bit better. Do you want to show that at all? Yeah I can do that. Yeah. Council member Watkins. Yeah no thank you I appreciate that yeah I just wanted to get clarity because I know we talked a little bit about not really wanting to see segregated kind of towers if you will but it sounds like even though they've made this concession there's still the ability for them to pursue all of the affordability in one tower. So can you guys see this slide? We can see that. Yeah sorry I actually kind of skipped right over this so basically what we were looking at is different scenarios that could come up depending upon the funding source so one scenario is you know public funding where there's no restrictions in that case as I mentioned we would be applying our inclusionary ordinance which requires dispersal of all of the units between the two buildings and so there would be in that case there'd be 11 in building B 11 and building A and then we'd also disperse the remaining 33 SB 35 affordable units amongst the two buildings as well for a total of 55. The public funding with restrictions on location as I mentioned if that were to happen then we would still require the 11 inclusionary density bonus units in building A and B so those would still need to be split up but the remaining SB 35 units would be consolidated in one building in this case probably building B and then another scenario could be public funding source where either requiring that 100 percent that a building be 100 percent affordable if that were one of the requirements of that funding in that case there's a possibility that building B would be 100 percent affordable there's 71 units in building B so we'd have the 71 affordable units in building B in addition to the 11 inclusionary units meeting our inclusionary ordinance in building A for those dispersals so potential of 82 units so it they're just so you know with with public funding sources it's it's really going to be dependent upon how the applicant moves forward with those sources and what they qualify for and what they're granted so we kind of need to give them a little bit of flexibility with that thank you for the clarification I have uh let's see here I've got uh vice mayor Bruder next so thank you thank you and that was exactly the slide I was going to ask Ryan Bain to bring back up so I know that question also came from members of the public who have reached out with questions it was not it was a bit confusing and not clear uh with the different amounts of units and where and the dispersal so um thank you for clarifying that I guess I have one more question on that and what would be the timeline anticipated and the context for knowing about the funding and what is that next step in this process I might defer that to either Lee or Jessica DeWitt in our housing they they tend to know a bit more about uh those type of things than I do in terms of housing funding and all the deadlines and those type of things before Jessica. Good afternoon council um so it is a little unclear the applicant has actually approached the city with probably I want to say four different financing proposals so far and they haven't been formal proposals they've been ideas so we haven't seen anything concrete yet um and so it's a little tricky trying to answer that question but um what I can tell you is that a lot of the timelines are based on what the state funding issuance of NOFA's so notice of funding availability when those are published that's really when you know the scramble occurs and the developers start looking for you know funding sources to piece together a pro forma that will be feasible um so typically nine percent tax credits are offered uh around in two rounds per year um they're competitive it's not guaranteed that a developer going in will get them um and even the four percent tax credits which have typically been non-competitive are also now competitive so those are offered more you know those come more often but again they're competitive as well so there's no guarantee unfortunately um I think the best we can do is really um you know sit down with the developer once they actually submit a concrete funding proposal and and work out how what the next steps are. Thanks. Thank you Jessica. Thank you Jessica. One more question um I had another question that came forward regarding um the slope and um if you could go back to that slope um information but um one of the questions um there's still a lot of people asking the question about the health the the public safety impacts of um the development due to the scale and and mass the height and underground garage um and so in the hydrological issues of that site if you could speak to that slope again when you talked about the 20 foot setback just so it's clear so that understanding is yeah um as well what I had mentioned in my presentation is that you know the city has our definition of slope in our zoning ordinance and the reason as I as I had alluded to earlier was that we didn't include we didn't say there was anything greater than a 30 percent slope because the wall that essentially is on the property line along water street doesn't meet this definition of slope um so we really don't without a slope being identified on the property based on our zoning ordinance definition um we didn't feel we needed to apply the 20 foot setback which is required in our ordinance for structures that are adjacent to a slope so or I should say a 30 percent or greater slope so um but basically what what I was alluding to was that you know just to be safe you know there was an argument that that wall could be considered slope we were identifying that one that the both the above ground buildings meet that 24 20 foot setback from the wall or what someone would consider the slope or identify as the slope and then we added a waiver to that so there's the underground portion of the garage actually comes out to that wall and so that does not meet technically meet the 20 foot setback so we added that as a concession um to allow for that in terms of the concerns for the issues that have been brought up with um the hydrological issues of the site when does that get addressed those would all be addressed and are typically addressed at the building permit stage so that's when we're going to have all of the um all of the underground studies all those things we're going to be looking at um structural aspects soils reports geologic all those things happen as part of the detailed construction plans great and what other checkpoints are there to address the concerns that have been brought up besides that building permit process in regards to um in regards to what we were just talking about in terms of hydrological i mean that's basically what's reviewed um at that building permit stage okay um yeah they review those reports and make sure that the building is structurally designed to whether you withstand uh withstand that or if if anything needs to be done in terms of drainage that's incorporated into the design of the building um all that's done at that stage great thank you so much i have questions from councilmember calentary johnson and then councilmember brown again thank you i have a question about the state tax credits um maybe this is a question for jessica um so i hear that they're very competitive how on average how many times does a project apply before they're funded is is that is that an answer is that a question you can answer is there an average like are we you know do projects we years and years or what does it typically look like uh here we were there was a unique situation this last round because of the cz wildfires this this geographic geographic region of the santa criss county was actually put into a special bucket that had disaster credit rounds and we were lucky enough to be able to get two city funded projects um out of this latest nine percent disaster credit round will they do another disaster credit round i know they're talking about it um really i think what's most important for the city is to work with our our our partners to to advocate for the city and make sure that our city is competitive for additional additional you know pots of tax credits coming through as well as if there could be another tax credit award or sorry another disaster tax credit round that to make sure the city of santa criss is in that round um so that those are things ways that we can try and look to to be more competitive but you know it could be could be three years could be um kind of unclear also is up to the developer how much they want to you know put on put out there to be more competitive right to be the most competitive application sometimes you're you're i don't want to give up things but you're making trades right maybe you're doing a hundred percent special needs or you're switching from more of a workforce housing to a special to a family property um style apartment so um it's it also kind of depends on what the developer is willing to uh to do to be more competitive and are we to so follow question are we competing with ourselves are projects competing with each other when you mean our projects do you like city projects not not city led projects projects within the city yes they are competing however again remember i was sort of describing that there are different buckets so so you could go in under a hundred percent special needs versus a family project so then those two wouldn't necessarily be competing in the first the first rung of it's so complex because there's you know there it's a geographic region that you're looking at then it's a family you know it's a type housing type um so we could we could sit down offline and go through it but you know there's there's yeah quite a few different complexities that um but you oh on the whole yes you are competing competing in your region thank you council member brown i sorry i just wanted to follow up since uh vice mayor bruner brought up the slope questions i you know i have major concerns that remain about that which i'll reserve for later but um i just want to make sure that i'm clear now um given that the the the space for addressing any potential structural integrity questions potential um erosion um uh water etc if the city approves that based upon whatever studies the developer pays for um we have no liability like if that because that the potential for that retaining wall to fail for you know just given geologically that site what i understand about it which is only so much um you know i worry and uh just making sure here that we are in our efforts to avoid a lawsuit and figure out ways to make this fit for the developers demands are we putting ourselves in any um is there any potential legal exposure there i i'm guessing if we check the boxes we're okay but i want to clarify that um yes i i think that's right if um the city evaluates the project under its building codes and determines that it's in conformity then it would not be legally liable for a failure of the structure the developer potentially would be uh or the property owner about the city would not don't remember coming he had a question going back to the uh hydrology study and i'm just wondering i know typically this comes at the building permit phase but this is a very atypical situation and so i'm kind of wondering is is that also you know an objective standard that would need to be met um in order for the products to move forward that they are able to address any hydrological issues and i ask because you know we don't have um you know if i feel like we're trying to do our best to um meet the public's needs around addressing all the concerns possible and since we have to use objective standards that's our only mechanism to really try to address these concerns and so i guess my question is would that be considered an objective standard as well and maybe to the legal counsel could that be considered at this time since you know our role here is to evaluate the project based on objective standards so the that's right and um and i'm gonna let lee chime in but just briefly um that the city has to evaluate the project on objective standards and it has to do so in the same fashion in which it evaluates other projects uh and because um the the hydrologic study would typically be required at the building permit phase uh to rely upon that as a basis for finding that it doesn't conform to objective standards i i don't think there's evidence to support that yeah i would just add that's the same um that we would have with you know plumbing electrical structural green building we require all that detailed information at the building permit plan check stage hey any other questions from council members at this time any additional hands i had just have one question i believe i know the answer to this but i just want to make sure i want to make sure that uh it is true that no fee waivers have been granted you know the word waiver is used in the density bonus world as well so i just want to make sure that i understand that we've granted no fee waivers so far on this project correct no and that if if there was a fee waiver to be applied for requested that would have to come back to the city council for for participation that's my understanding yes and that's um and that is discretionary that is not fee waivers do not come under sp35 i don't believe so okay lady you know the answer that that's my understanding as well that there's nothing in sp35 that would compel the council to um provide a fee waiver okay thank you my last question is on the density bonus law and the waivers um that can be sought through that um such as the waiver five that um the applicant requested that's really tied to density bonus law and and that is not somewhere where we can we can deny this that's not a question for city council correct at least under this application yeah i don't believe so i mean i think it meets the the requirements of the waiver um and again you would need to there's certain findings that need to be made in order to deny that waiver and i don't at this time we don't believe that it meets any of those findings to deny it so we could yeah so we wouldn't have a legal way to say that you know a denial findings of denial for that yeah okay thank you okay i'll go and take this out to our members of community who've joined us today so we are going to go ahead i'm going to have the folks who have received extra time today i'm going to have them go first you'll each have two minutes and i'll need you to raise raise your hand by pressing star nine and the first group i'll call on is santa cruz yimby and i have janine roth as the person who will be speaking for them so welcome janine looks like you're unmuted so you should be able to go ahead great thank you mayor vice mayor and council members my name is janine roth i'm speaking today on behalf of santa cruz yimby we want neighbors of all ages cultures and incomes to call santa cruz home and as you well know many experienced rent burden live in overcrowded conditions have long commutes or otherwise struggle with the lack of and cost of housing in this region while today's meeting is all about assessing consistency with the remaining objective standards a dominant narrative on 831 water street has been the neighbor's opposition i want to elevate the voices of the santa cruz community members who want these homes bills and recognizing that not everyone can take time in the middle of the day for public comment here are a few of the voices from a couple hundred people who signed our petition in support of 831 water street ryan says we need more structures like these and santa cruz to support housing for the area stacy said build up not out it's ridiculous that staff of our university and grocery stores live like students in shared housing density not crowding nicolas adds absolutely everyone has a right to housing without housing for our essential workers the quality of life of the whole city will fall even further so green light this project and dan said it's time to support affordable housing housing close to transportation and shopping also helps us reduce carbon emissions and there are many more in our community that feel this way santa cruz is eligible for an sp35 project because our city is not building enough affordable housing so pursue all the options champion affordable housing in our city approve mixed income projects continue to work with nonprofit developers to build on city land consider zoning reforms and pursue the pro housing designation from hcd thank you to the planning staff for their hard work in finding that 831 water street is consistent with objective standards under sp35 it's time to move the project forward thank you next i have kyle kelly from neighbor lee santa cruz but i saw him on the phone kyle are you here not seeing him now kyle if you're here many people's hands i'll go ahead and have santa cruz tomorrow which is lira filipini as the speaker lara if you're here i see you go ahead please like you're unmuted lara filipini speaking for santa cruz tomorrow council can and should deny this project once again for the following reasons the state density bonus law says that local governments must quote provide a list of all documents and information required to be submitted with the density bonus application in order for the density bonus application to be deemed complete end quote santa cruz municipal code on a complete density bonus application requires quote a site plan showing total number of units number and location of affordable units and number and location of proposed density bonus units nopen's application site plan only shows the location of the 22 inclusionary units not the other 33 affordable units and not the density bonus units this is technically incomplete without conforming to the density bonus requirements no waivers or concessions for sp35 can be given it is additionally unclear as to whether the development is eligible for sp35 due to tribal resources and the confidentiality of the archaeology archaeology report the city has executed a monitoring agreement with the tribe however did the city only send the invitation to consult with the tribes or were they specifically asked whether this site at the center of bill de gran safari was on any of the tribal cultural resource registers which would disqualify it per sp35 amendment ab831 the development still poses health and safety issues due to its size mass and scale as well as proximity to a slope it is also still plans to segregate the majority of the affordable units the city's first denial of this proposal included many anti segregation laws of which only the inclusionary ordinance has been fulfilled in this last iteration of the application a final note is that this proposal no longer provides very low income units and potentially provides 15 fewer affordable units overall not helping us with our arena while attempting to force a dangerous development with threats of lawsuit we hope our council will represent what is right for your constituents and not prioritize legal threats from umby thank you thank you i'll go ahead and see if kyle kelly has arrived or if anyone from neighbor lee santa cruise would like to speak into this as a group i've seen anybody's hands going up last call for kyle kelly then to 831 responsible development and brook madison please awany do you see brook in the audience there she is i see her thank you yeah please okay uh i'm speaking on behalf of 831 responsible development and the nearly 600 community members who have signed our petition against this ill-conceived and haphazardly submitted project we've consistently said that we support affordable housing at 831 and we've been clear that the current proposal is a careless overreach that would compromise public health and safety for years to come noven development has submitted nothing to alleviate our very serious concerns in fact the never-ending changes have made reviewing a current version almost impossible how can the city council be asked to approve an application when it's not even clear what's really in the application it should be a simple and non-controversial matter for the applicant to provide a single coherent comprehensive consolidated and final proposal for the city and the community to review where are the affordable units located are they still segregated how many are there noven play this density bonus statement dated november 12 indicates he plans to build 55 affordable units but his previous plans dated october 13 said 71 so which is it the developer is also seeking another variance to build the underground garage next to a steep water street slope the city should refuse to allow a variance given the profound impacts on public health and safety by having the only entry and exit on a steep street across a protected lane and then there's a probable destruction of via de branza 40 and native american archaeological resources which is untenable sp35 clearly states that sites with known tribal resources or the damage or destroy historical structures do not qualify for streamlining this is still the wrong project to be approved for fast tracking even the latest version continues to raise more questions than it answers it's wrong because it lowers the standard to an unacceptable level for other significant development projects that are likely to come up in the next few years thank you for your continued willingness to listen to your constituents many serious concerns and for your attention and commitment as stewards of safety in our calm thank you okay we're going to go ahead and move on to our regular public comment now everyone will have one minute will allow up to 30 minutes so if you do want to comment now go ahead and please raise your hands so we kind of get everybody queued up uh first off will be ryan mitkel go ahead please well uh my name is ryan mechel i work at uc santa cruise uh as a student who just graduated there are now a staff member and i am speaking to you to encourage you to approve this project it's something that the city desperately needs as somebody who was hoping to stay in santa cruise for an extended period of time housing is an incredibly difficult thing to find here as i'm sure any of you know this is a project that would appeal to young professionals such as myself students and small families who are hoping to stay in the area for an affordable price i encourage you to approve this project and support young professionals and younger people who may not have the means to buy an entire house in santa cruise thank you thank you next is barbara fargo press star six to unmute yourself please am i unmuted now you are go ahead okay thank i've written several letters to the council about this but my biggest concern i'm an attorney for starters and i live on berkeley way uh which i'm sure you all realize is one block uh off of from bill that air terrace and will be substantially impacted by this project but my biggest concern is the public and safety issues that i believe the development impacts and also um is very dangerous to all of us um the sleep whether the wall counts as part of the slope that hill is a very steep hill you don't have to live two blocks from it and know that and your no one is encouraging you to approve this project with the fears of lawsuits they're going to sue you if you don't approve it therefore the city is concerned about being sued the city needs to be concerned about being sued by the bicyclist coming down the water street hill and getting hit by a car yes you can put bells you can put rings you can do all of that to warn people but this is dangerous and i encourage you to disapprove it thank you thank you dug in for his next and let's try to keep everything to a minute thanks Doug go ahead thank you mayor can you hear me yes i urge the city to deny this application for sp35 streamlining in words and deeds i have supported and continue to support development of housing in Santa Cruz and at this site this project however is not worthy of our town the application is a shambolic collection of errors omissions and conflicting statements no capable developer would submit such a mess let alone expect favorable treatment one can only imagine how the project will go the proposed development threatens public health and safety in ways that i and others have documented thoroughly it will destroy historic archaeological and cultural resources in clear violation of sp35 it is a local job killer the applicant's modular approach will export most jobs and money outside the area most cynically it provides no affordable housing at very low income levels the very class of affordability that subjects Santa Cruz to sp35 at all no responsible housing advocates should support this application thank you all for your work on behalf of our town thank you Doug next up is Logan hog hog yes hello uh my name is logan hog i'm a first year student at ucsc with the student housing coalition of uc santa Cruz i fully support this project affordable housing in any of its forms the so-called union in santa Cruz and as a student um trying to look at the future prospects of renting this area is frankly like really depressing um and this project is sort of needed in this city thank you thank you next is rafa sonan fell yes uh thank you i'm uh calling it on behalf of vmb law um i just wanted to point out that uh as the planning staff has uh deemed this project consistent with uh the objective standards uh your only legal option here is to approve the project um i also know uh that attorney kandadi has has astutely pointed out that uh that objective standards that are normally done during the uh the building permit phase can't be applied at the uh the design review phase which is where we're at now um and uh finally i just wanted to point out that uh uh we don't exactly know how many units will be affordable because that depends on the the financing that comes through this may end up being a 100 affordable project so um folks complaining that this isn't affordable enough let's wait and see what actually happens when when it comes to the affordability in this project this this may be much more than a 50 percent afford thank you thank you next i have phone number ending in zero five nine three press star six to unmute yourself we cannot hear press star six to unmute yourselves not hear you quite yet there you go good afternoon mayor and council members thank you for the time to speak today my name is james redriguez and i'm a field representative with carboners local 505 i'm speaking today asking the council to approve the 831 water street project with noven development's commitment to use a signatory general contractor on this project it would ensure a good parent paying union jobs for members of this community allowing union brothers and sisters the opportunity to work closer to home spend more time with their families all while building something to take pride in in their own community and working towards respectable retirements i urge council to approve the project and thank you again for the opportunity to speak thank you next up is logan jackson hello yep go ahead please all right um hello my name is logan jackson uh i'm a brother in the carpenter's union and i would like this to get approved uh this project is one that will be built right in my home community uh this is something that really excites me not only because it's a project that i can participate in and feel proud about contributing to my community more over it would allow me to spend more time with my family and be there for them when they need me this project would not just help me expand my knowledge but it would also help me be a better dad and be there for my kids thank you guys for your time thank you next is laura wilson please thank you my name is laura wilson i'm a resident of santa cruz i grew up in the area um my family has been trying to purchase a house in the area for um six years now and the housing market is just rising above our ability to do so i fully support um this project and the affordable housing it could bring our students our workers our essential workers are all desperate to find housing that they can afford in the area and this project could help a lot with that thank you next we have fund number ending in 4892 press star six to unmute yourself thank you this is tim willoughby the point of sb 35 was to apply objective standards rather than political views so if you're going to be here into the political today to make your decision i'd like you to think about the over 7 000 people on the housing authority wait list for waiting for affordable housing desperately waiting for affordable housing thank you thank you next i have jim uh can you hear me yes we can thank you may or mayors and other council members respectfully i recognize i only have one minute as you all know that's not nearly enough time for anyone to detail the unbelievable number of should be deal breaker problems with this application so i'll just make three points what application it's not even clear to most of your constituents exactly what is in the latest iteration of this tragic proposal two it's obvious that this proposal and process have very understandably left a bad taste in your and your constituents mouths a developer who makes absolutely no effort to engage with santa cruz residents while continuing to present an awful unsafe and disjointed application three since that's the case please deny this application again if you can't do that please at least stand firm on the waivers and or variances that the developers assuming you will grant him under litigation threat and ask our city planning department to also stand firm if stupefyingly this were to move forward please also toughen up the conditions of approval thank you again thank you next is andrew barber my name is andrew barber i'm a phd student at ucsc my fiancee and i live on katala street just a stone's throw away from the proposed development i'm here today because i want to ask a really fundamental question here to those who have written letters and made comments opposing this development where are we going to live where is my generation going to live where are you my kids your kids going to live my entire generation is stunted by the chronic housing shortage that has been brought on by people who can't stand to have apartment buildings in their neighborhoods and that is an outrage what right do we have to shut the door behind us as residents of this beautiful town there seems to be a misunderstanding of where these future occupants would live in the counterfactual they don't cease to exist they live in cars vans on couches in school offices stacked many to a house or have a long commute to to work here shouldn't we want these human beings to live in safe units up to code near their place of employment shouldn't we want to have more families joining our community shouldn't we want to make this an integrated city where low income people can live and work where we have a mixed income community mixed race mixed ages instead of becoming an increasingly wider and more fragmented society where we have vast areas of the city that are zoned for single family homes zoning that's deliberately designed to forever thank you next up I have zenin you you'll yate zenin yeah it's uh hi uh council thank you for your last your last part of your name disappeared so zenin please go no worries hi uh my name is zen my pro i'm president of the student housing coalition and i'm just want to come out today in support of this project and i actually wanted to highlight a comment that someone who wasn't able to attend today because they're working right now spoke this is from Ruth Ann Butler she is a registered nerf and a master's student at the ucsc stuck in documentary film she voted in the city council election and she plans to continue to do so she moved to santa cruz for school and in contemplating on staying community longer term however she doesn't know if this is going to be feasible the primary reason I may leave is housing prices the fact the fact that I have an ethical and generous landlords who are charging significantly less in the market value for my one bedroom adu the only way I can go forward to live here as a student is to work part-time in the hospital which may not continue to be an options that translate to full-time work as a filmmaker when I graduate and this is the only to make rental payments and the current reality of sand crews owning a home into the absolute impossibility for me having options to house in an achievable price range would make a huge difference to me and my choices about whether to stay or go I don't know in the hospital you see the consequences of hopelessness and communities mental health and so she really wants to iterate that she really supports this housing especially the portability component thank you thank you next up is joseph thompson and if everyone could try to keep your comment to a minute I know I'm asking a lot but appreciate it joseph please go ahead hello yes my name is joseph thompson I am affiliated with the white essay which is young democratic social America and student housing coalition I also work on starbucks ocean and water street and you know as a resident and student of Santa Cruz I believe that only is a affordable housing project necessary but denying it and allowing people to go and house is completely unethical you have a 140 homes that will allow for students and residents of Santa Cruz not only to like have more of a housing but really to have a home in Santa Cruz and as someone who's faced like housing issues their entire life and has faced homelessness I think that as a city council you have a moral priority to approve this project you know working at the starbucks at ocean and water street I could literally afford to go and live this home and be able to walk to work having that affordable access is not only important for Santa Cruz residents but it's also important for the community and really building that like affordable home structure and I just want to like last to say that if you look at the people who are against this project they already have stable home environments students and residents who don't are the ones who are supporting this project thank you thank you okay I've got 10 people queued up um so these will be the last 10 speakers our last speaker will be bode chargail I'm sorry but I'm going to cut folks off after that um go ahead MJ thank you so much for the opportunity to speak I'm a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz my commandment is Michelle England Johnson um I just want to reiterate a lot of the comments that the other grad students are making housing is very unaffordable here I've had a number of friends who have gone unhoused for an extended or short period of time due to lack of affordable housing constant moving is a huge problem I have seen rooms that are literally like five by seven feet going for 800 a month and it you know and especially when you're my age I'm 26 but you know I have plenty of friends who are also in their early to mid 30s and you know we talk about wanting to start families and think about long-term planning and um there's a lot of structural barriers to being able to do so from like the university not paying us enough to lack affordable housing in the area what I want to end with is creating more stability from graduate students and for low-income people in general is going to be really important going forward and I support this project for that reason thank you Emily Hamm is next good afternoon my name is Emily um I'm the executive director of the Santa Cruz county business council and I just want to iterate some points uh that I included in my letter to you we really do recognize the difficulty of deciding a council action for this project and we also implore you to contextualize your decision within our ever worsening local housing crisis that has been described by many of the speakers before me this is also a workforce crisis in many ways and so beyond the legal obligation to approve this project we also have a moral one to approve it this project supports our mutual goal to create a sustainable and compact community within defined urban boundaries as outlined in our general plan um and we once again are due to support this once in a lifetime a high impact project thank you very much thank you next is brian did did george brian georgio yeah it's a georgio good job um so i'm brian georgio i'm a phd student at uc santa Cruz and I support the project for a lot of the reasons that have been articulated by other speakers already but I don't want to talk about those I just want to talk about how this is just a good place to put an apartment building it's right next to the high school it's right next to the middle school it's within walking distance to several grocery stores and many restaurants and it's right along the path of a protected bike path that goes straight to downtown the people that would be able to live in this apartment building would have great lives within Santa Cruz and this site would be wasted if there was no apartment building that was there thank you next I have Elizabeth conlon hi council thank you for your time um it really breaks my heart to hear that 26 year old from earlier talking about struggling with long term housing stability because at 33 I still feel that in Santa Cruz too like many renters and workers it's really difficult to comment midday um but I felt like I had to after seeing the agenda packet and I think it really highlights the need for objective standards people are criticizing this project it's ugly saying it looks like a prison but it's going to house transients or transients like uc sc students and I really hope that even if you don't agree to move forward with approving this application that you will stand up for renters in this community because these attacks are just awful thank you next I have phone number ending at four nine six five my name is canis brown I'm on the transportation commission first of all there's some misnomers low-income housing tax credits and home funds do not allow for full-time students to live there this is not a project designed for families according to chamber this is missing middle type of project it's not if it was I'd be in favor of it but most importantly I have not seen anything addressing the vision zero standards that we've established that slope in the speed of those bikes and I'm most concerned about people making a right into that degree into that garage at even 142 days that's 51,000 opportunities to have a head-on collision with that bike most bike accidents and fatalities are at above 20 miles an hour most occur between three and nine p.m. which is when those cars will be turning in there and about 50% of fatalities are our youth under 25 thank you please consider reevaluating and deny this project thank you Michael wool is next please and Michael wool I'm a third year uc sc student and lifelong Santa Cruz County resident and um affiliated with the student housing coalition um I am urging the council to approve 8 through 1 water street and more housing projects like it this is a complete housing crisis if you guys saw what was going on at the homeless encampment over by the levy this that should be even more incentive to build more housing it is a complete embarrassment that there are that many people suffering at the hands of our county like this is ridiculous I've lived here my whole life I've never seen it this bad and I know personally two people who dropped out of uc sc because they couldn't get housing for fall quarter so we got to approve more projects like this thank you next is Eva chin hi can you hear me yes we can awesome um I am Eva I am a fourth year uc sc student also affiliated with the student coalition um and I would like to speak in support of the approval of this project I have personally um let students who don't have who couldn't find housing and fall crash on my couch and it was really appalling because these students have been searching for months I personally know other students who are likely going to be unable to continue at this school as the previous speaker said because they can't find housing here um so I really urge the council to approve this project thank you thank you next is Bodie Sharkel my name is Bodie I'm a first year student at uc Santa Cruz as well as a lifelong Santa Cruz county resident also associated with the student housing coalition and ydsa um I just want to say that it doesn't seem like we really have the the option here to not approve this proposal it can be the most terrible proposal you've ever seen I don't care if it's the worst bicycling hazard I've ever seen I ride my bike past there um regularly and I don't care if it's a nightmare we we don't have the option to not build more housing at this moment I I can walk around and just see dozens or hundreds of people living out on the streets in terrible conditions we've seen how this is affecting people's lives over the last weekend with the weather we've been seeing we need to build more housing to make the housing costs go down make this more affordable to people who are currently having their human rights uh violated so I hope we can approve this proposal thank you because we don't have another option thank you thank you next is christian artiega and our last speaker will be with phone number nm1535 go ahead christian hi could you hear me yes we can uh good afternoon mayor and council members my name is christian and i am a carpenter and the senate cruise county resident um I have three small kids and I'm tired of commuting over the hill to the bay area to look for work uh this project will provide good pain local jobs and I urge you to please support this project and thank you for your time thank you next we have sue terrence hello I am absolutely for safe affordable housing especially for very low income that we're low in I feel I've been concerned from the beginning with the geology hydrology uh we have uh foundation 15 feet and we have perched groundwater at nine feet there is no way that this can be done without um pooling water and I think that that uh mr novan has repeatedly shown his willingness to sacrifice health and safety for a profit I think this town is built on standing up for what's right we need to provide housing and we need to do it safely please deny this project thank you next up I have phone number ending in 1535 good afternoon council on behalf of the moderate day economic partnership in addition to what we had already stated in our letter thank you first and foremost for powering through this learning curve we understand it's been a rather complex and politically charged process and so we appreciate you revisiting the project and directing staff to review the additional materials provided by the applicant based on staff's latest review and thorough presentation and determination of the project consistency with the city's reflective standards alongside subconcessions and pending state funding we support staff's recommendation and encourage you to advance this project which is a massive step in the right direction toward accelerating the city's housing goals and the need for affordable workforce and this middle housing progression it also seeks to the dire need for the state and the city to create more flexible financing structures that enable more mixed income and integrated communities thanks so much for your leadership thank you very much thank you to the public today for attending um as you've all mentioned this is a very it's the first type of project of this kind and we appreciate your comments and your concerns as well as your um you know your honesty about your thoughts on the project so thank you for attending um I'll go ahead I see councilmember Cummings has his hand up thank you mayor and thank you to members of the public who called in this is a very you know difficult project that we've had before us for months now um you know and the city has been put in a very difficult position where the state's really constrained our control over land use and decision making that being said it's clear that this project um has not been meeting some of the most basic standards which are around submitting a complete application in a timely manner even at the last meeting when this was discussed the applicant was submitting materials while we were discussing this item and you know I think that for many people in the community and you know when we talk about development it's really critical that we're creating processes and setting standards and timelines for when um developers are going to get us the materials so that we can the community has a chance to look over them the staff has a chance to review them and this process has just not been meeting those standards of accountability around submitting materials in a timely manner as someone who's a big proponent of affordable housing um I just believe that this process has not been smooth it's not been transparent and there are still many unknowns I think that you know many people from that neighborhood have expressed they do they are in favor of affordable housing they're in favor of a project that fits well but um given the fact that um the developer has not been wanting to work with the community to meet some of those needs um and you know I think based on what we've been hearing from staff is that there are still some objective standards that are not being met and so I've um brought forward a recommendation that I sent to Bonnie in terms of about motion um and so you really just want to state that you know without concessions or waivers this project still violates our inclusion ordinance which was identified as an objective standard and the slope requirements and so um the motion that I would like to make would um oh in addition to that you know one part of the staff recommendation is that we give this project to staff to make the final decision on and you know we're elected and put in this position to make difficult decisions and I believe that um and we'll move into the motion that we need to remain the decision-making body for projects that are coming before us including this one so I'll move that the city council remain the decision-making body for the 831 water street project and SB 35 projects moving forward the second part would be to deny the 831 water street application based on the following substantive and procedural reasons number one condition 13c violates the city's inclusionary requirement the project does not meet the slip requirements the constant revision of the project without submission of a new application confuses the public it makes it difficult if not impossible for the council to be sure what they're deciding on the council and the public were not provided the final drawing showing the project and particularly the distribution of the affordable units throughout the project in determining whether the project meets all the city's objective standards the council and public should have been provided the project plans on the agenda as was done previously and as argued at the council's last meeting we're sending the previous denial of project and not requiring the applicant to resubmit the application violated good public practice and sets a negative precedent so that's a motion um that's before us and i those two points um condition 13 and the slip requirements out are you um are violating the objective standards then the project does not mean those objective standards so i'll end my comments there what's member brown yeah i'll second that um i'll be brief in my comments um any of my comments are related to kind of substantive concerns around um public safety health and safety um and you know traffic and some some other things which we have been advised and apparently the intent of laws like sp35 are um have been established the intent is to not allow us to talk about those things so i'm i'm not going to do that here and many thoughts on that um which i'm happy to share if anybody wants to get in touch um but i i do think that under the circumstances of this particular application the way it has been presented to us um or to the city uh and left to city staff i i've said this before but also i'm just going to say it again um to to try to navigate through a morass of internally inconsistent and i would argue in some cases contradictory materials to cut to basically create the application for the applicant right find what's in there to um and make that a coherent application that's what i'm seeing you know that's just terrible process and so um you know i feel i feel confident in you have the ability to um reject this today and to um tell the applicant to come back with a complete application um if that is indeed the um if this is you know to tell us what project they would like i understand there are some concerns or um challenges with the number of units related to um you know subsidy for in whatever form that takes uh for those units and i encourage um you know any and all subsidy to be brought to bear to get us affordable units um in new development and um so i support that but i i don't support this kind of wait you know let's just see because i have all you know i we have the right to do this i believe there are arenas in which we can push back and challenge and so i'm seconding the motion for that reason um i just also i really have to say um you know the irony of having a being told as you know one of the arguments to support this project um the city's failure to meet its low its very low income um arena allocations are arena goals um and to have a project that is allowed to request streamlining because we haven't met those very low income goals um and then not give us any very low income units you know there's just a real irony there um it's legal i suppose um and so that's not a basis for rejecting this but um it certainly is uh frustrating so um i'm all for affordable housing on the site i'm aware that um the neighbors are supportive of that and that there are others who want to be involved in conversations about how to realize that and um so i hope that we can have that conversation um i can't support this uh this proposal in its current form thank you council member are there any other council members who have comments or should we go ahead and take it to the vote vice mayor brooder you just i'm looking through my notes um spell out condition 13c please does staff have the conditions up i do have my conditions here if you'd like me to read it the staff have that readily available mayor i can try to find it and i'm sharing my screen just give me one second okay i've got it here if i uh bonnie do you want me to share my screen um sure uh i think i have it that way i can just say you see that sonia i'm happy to provide more context around this as well thank you any other comments by council or our questions at this time council member walkins i didn't know if the staff wanted to comment on the motion at all or um our city attorney i'll start off um with respect to 13c um that doesn't refer to the inclusionary um units that that refers to the density bonus units the inclusionary units are um are proposed to be distributed through the buildings and so maybe council member comings if that's if there's a separate part of the inclusionary ordinance that your um thinking is inconsistent maybe that clarification could be helpful council member comings it's a my understanding is that the city's ordinance that provide an exception for the dispersal policy if a funding source uh requires a project that's 100 affordable and so the other thought is that if the developer gets the funding for the affordable units that's technically we have two separate projects right one would be the affordable project and one would be the market rate in terms of if they get the state or federal funding that would require the instruction of 100 affordable building i guess that's where the confusion comes in around how they're going to be able to provide um i mean well actually i'll take i'll go back and stuff you know previously when this came to us the discussion was around the fact that um the units that were inclusionary and affordable had to be distributed throughout the entire project right and so if we if they get the state or federal funding to allow them to produce 100 affordable building that's technically two separate projects right i wouldn't call that two separate projects it's still one project they're just financing it separately is there any other comments on the motion that uh staff would like to make um i so a couple of things i would say with respect to the slope requirements you know um ryan um spelled out the staff positions related to that but i'm happy to answer any questions um or um have the team answer any questions you have related to that um with respect to the information being available there were links in the application that um provided not only the plans but also a link to all of the project documents and all the things that have been submitted so um i think that information was readily available for the council and the public um and um i think that's all that that i would respond there i don't know if tony if you have anything else to say i think that covers it i don't really have anything to add i have a question for staff um there was uh so i think everybody is struggling with the way this whole application process kind of happens it appears that things kind of can get submitted at any point in time um we have certain deadlines we need to you know provide letters back in terms of consistency um and there was a section in the hcd guidelines um that was included in the staff report that talks about um um it's on page 25.2 of the staff report it says hcd guideline 301 b5 states that protections of the housing accountability act apply to sp35 projects the housing accountability act in government code section 65589.5 j2 states that if the local agency fails to provide required documentation pursuant to sub paragraph a which unfortunately we don't have the a um the housing development project shall be deemed consistent compliant and in conformity with the applicable plan program policy ordinance standard requirement or other similar provision and then it's and then there's sort of a just a conclusionary statement that says in other words items not previously identified is inconsistent or deemed to be consistent therefore new inconsistencies not previously identified cannot be raised so i'm just curious if staff can talk to talk to that a little bit um i've heard a couple of comments with regards to whether this application is um deemed complete and i know that that is not really you know the intent of sp35 is is different than a typical application that we would render under our regular planning rules and so i'm just lee i don't know if you can kind of i don't know if you can hear here where i'm going i'm trying to kind of get some clarification on that those relationships between this conclusionary statement and whether or not basically the the application continues to be sort of in it it's an iterative my opinion is that this is kind of this iterative thing you know that this material gets submitted and i guess for the public you know when did when do the actual decisions start being made and i think that is at the building permit stage so there will be a determination of whether or not certain criteria are going to be accommodated based on you know sort of some of those building permit issuance types of conditions of approval if if i'm understanding kind of the process from here on out did you understand my question sorry that was kind of long and rambling um maybe i'll maybe i'll take a crack at it and you can let me know if there are other things that you'd like me to speak to or the team to speak to you so first off i would say that yes we understand that you know going into an sp35 projects especially one that is the first one that the community has seen here has been a different and and sometimes confusing process i will i will say that it's it's typical that the development review process is an iterative one so you know the difference between sp35 and what we currently do for a non sp35 project is there's typically a letter at 30 days and it says hear all the comments and hear all the inconsistencies here are the things that are missing and under the current law under sp35 that sort of completeness letter that's usually done at the 30 day letter at 30 day stage and the comment letter which is are you consistent with all the objective standards are lumped into this one first 60 day period and there's a separate timeline at the end that allows for 30 more days the 90 day period in which minor inconsistencies can be revised or in which the an objective or a public oversight meeting can be held to confirm consistency with objective standards um usually that iterative iterative process happens you know at that staff level there are you know plans they come in we say hear the comments and they were sitting to submit revised plans and with with this project and with sp35 how it's currently applied you know that iterative process is has been more public you know we've put that information out there every time that there's been a plan revision you know we've posted it online and you know we post plan revisions for other projects as well but there's certainly oftentimes not getting as much attention until you know a a more settled upon plan is ready to go there is some changes there's some changes to the state law with respect to completeness letters and that will help clarify how sp35 projects move forward starting the beginning of next year when that takes effect and and Darcy's here on the line can provide more information on that in a moment but the other thing that comes to mind is part of your comments mayor Myers is the information about the building stage and yes it is typical for us to require a lot of those detailed drawings as I referred to earlier the the structural plumbing electrical mechanical the green building requirements you know very detailed design drawings of how all those systems are going to work together and making sure that exiting and accessibility and so forth are all met those codes are evaluated at the building permit stage and that would be the case for this application as well thank you one last question is if during the so also seek what does not unfortunately seek was not you know used in a review in sp35 if there were archaeological artifacts found during the construction of this project what would happen that's a great question so and a very important one because you know there is that potential and we have a series of conditions of approval as well as an agreement that we put together with the tribe so there will be during any ground disturbance work there will be both archaeological monitor as well as a tribal monitor there and if something happens in terms of there's something discovered then work will cease and there'll be consultation with those technical experts the tribal representative and the archaeological monitor to determine next steps in terms of how that resource will be treated okay thank you okay I see I've got council member commentary Johnson we do have a motion on the table still up for folks to review I've got council member commentary Johnson and then council member Watkins and then Vice Mayor Bruner thank you I want clarification on the first part of this motion earlier I believe council member Brown asked for clarification of all that is if the if the staff recommendation is written such that that we are giving up our oversight position or not so that's I just had there was a lack of clarity for me as to what the staff recommendation was and then if this was the first part of this motion was addressing that kind of leave you can answer that yeah I'll take a shot at it so the a ministerial project technically comes to staff for the determination so similar to last time it was you know wrote we wrote a letter staff wrote a letter that basically identified all the things and fleshed out the the statements that the council had agreed upon so the the recommendation does say refer the final decision back to staff you know how the council wants to structure that is at the council's desire you know we will write a letter consistent with whatever direction it is that the council provides and the council can say you know there is not a required council action I should say but the council may take that action and staff will take that action and and translate that into a letter that that speaks to the council's motion all right okay so the way it's written now is not indicating that we would give up that oversight well there there isn't anything related to SB 35 projects in general the way that it's written again it's it's refer it back to staff how council wants to to word that motion specifically is up to council the council can say we've received this we agree with staff we want to send it back we've received this we agree with staff and we want to make a explicit motion with respect to that consistency with objective standards or we've received the information we disagree with stuff and we want staff to craft a denial letter based on the the following criteria got it okay thank you for clarifying that's member Watkins thank you yes thank you mayor and thank you to the community who share their perspective today this is this is a this is a really tough one let me just let me just start by saying that and I haven't been on the council for a number of years now I just really understand the complexity and the emotion behind our housing issue here in Santa Cruz from all perspectives um having been a student myself too for many years um I I also reflect on the process that we had as a city when we did a long listening tour you know listening to the community's thoughts about housing for our future and uh resulted in a blueprint of housing recommendations many of which I know have been accomplished and frankly you know over the past four years I've been on council a lot of the housing we voted on has moved forward more so than I think we've seen in many years in the past so I feel really proud of some of the housing production that we've had in place and continue to pursue I also heard loud and clear from the community that the housing growth that they like to see is in our downtown so the next item we're going to be talking about is going to bring that up and propose another project and um and other solutions on sort of the outskirts of our community and I've worked really hard I feel like my approach to housing and to these types of issues is to really try to do my best to look for ways for compromise and you know look for for people to for us to still produce housing but to do so in a way that's informed and iterative in a way that's moving forward and and feels like it's had a community process and even if everybody's not pleased with it I think at least we did our due diligence and that and that we can leave with a project that feels right for the most part I think what concerns me about this project is one I think just the SB 35 factor right obviously um it's the waivers you know in terms of who is for there's there's no I mean the waivers are for really no outdoor um living opportunity no play structures really it's all about maximizing the the um the space really to the best of their ability using SB 35 to sort of streamline it and given that this is the first SB 35 project I struggle with moving forward with this to be quite honest with you I understand my colleagues who really are on both sides of this that yes I understand sort of the legal process and the tables and and the staff doing the best they can and working really hard to to have these in place to meet these timelines and I still struggle with saying okay well I feel okay moving forward with this so although I'm not necessarily sure about the full motion here I I don't feel comfortable moving forward with you know approving the project at this time I think there are still issues for it it is confusing there are elements that feel incomplete to me and I feel like that you know at the end of the day we want to do our due diligence and I know that it's sort of this rapid timeline that feels like okay we have to do this and this is what we have right now but for me it doesn't feel like it's adequately enough to really say okay let's just go forward with it I I do understand it if we do go forward with it that there will be checks along the way in terms of the building permit process yet I also feel like that this project um as presented it doesn't feel like it it really works for our community and so I that's where I feel like I can't and you know move forward with the recommendation presented by staff because I feel like it is too kind of convoluted at this point for me so um I'm not sure about fully support the full motion other than that I you know I I do agree with a couple of the bullets when the time comes for the vote um I just want to remind the council we have a packed agenda today so um hoping to if we are starting to get into trying to amend the motion we should probably start to go ahead and try to do that um if if there are going to be any changes uh vice mayor bruner thank you I had a question um under SB 35 um can this motion here can an SB 35 project be denied due to I think what was put was substantive and um procedural reasons let me look at what it says I don't know where I saw that um versus meeting objective standards is my question the motion says deny the a-3-1 water street application based on the following substantive and procedural reason procedural reasons right um and so my understanding as the public oversight hearing and body that um it can be denied due to not meeting objective standards and um so that's my question here with this can you answer yeah I I mean I'm not I'm not sure I completely understand the question but I but I will say that the staff's recommendation represents the analysis uh of the staff and my office as to the projects uh compliance with both procedural and substantive requirements of SB 35 and our in our zoning standards um and so you know the council may disagree with that analysis but the staff recommendation is based upon our analysis of the you know the the circumstances under which the information before you got here um that that has not been um ignored or not taken into account um thank you uh Tony um and so I think you know there's I I really appreciate you know all the input we've received to date over several months now and um that certainly none of us I mean if there were concerns to the degree um that did not meet objective standards then um we would it would be different but I think there's been so much put into um analysis with this and that um so many of the objective standards are met and the concerns for the public in our community with this are so valid and that is yet to come I still keep coming back to that that um those those items will be addressed and even some of the calls with the archeological and the hydrology we will get to that point and um so I just wanted to make sure that I was clear with that thank you thank you council member contrary Johnson I think I'll just make it quick before we go to vote seems like we're heading that direction soon um I also appreciate everyone who's called in and all the work that's been done by staff and to say that this process has been frustrating is putting it lightly I think it's been very frustrating for everyone staff us council members and the community um I do um I'm hearing Vice Mayor Brunner's points and I do think that that um although there are a lot of issues that we have with the process um I don't think we have a real strong ground to reject this I think standing in a rejected project will once will not be successful and um it won't be ultimately the best interest of the city and the residents so I don't disagree with with the sentiments and what's been said um but I do not I won't be supporting this motion because um I don't think it's aligned with what we're supposed to be doing here thank you council member okay um I think we may be ready for a vote I might just just very briefly also um you know I think that the procedural aspect of what we're facing is unfortunately um probably the piece that is um the hardest to swallow today um it's very clear on what an oversight hearing is meant to do and the and the evaluation of objective standards and um you know I I'm very concerned that um a denial through this motion basically um will land us with a lawsuit and I'm not afraid of a lawsuit um when I feel like there is um but I but my my I guess my evaluation right now is um that you know through whatever it is either the determination by the court or through whatever negotiations that may happen um it is very likely that a project very close to what is basically been proposed will likely be ordered um and so I'm just letting my community know that um I the process around SB 35 the way that this particular um project has been handled has been extremely frustrating um but I don't personally see a place where we can continue to try to refine um I think the project has been changed somewhat um I think our staff has tried to make clear the the kinds of things that are going to be needed before any building permits are issued so um uh and I definitely do not support any fee waivers for this project at all and would would definitely not want that to happen um so I'm also not not going to support the motion today um and it's unfortunate that we're here today after a year of trying to really clearly work with the applicant and with the neighborhood to try to make something work and it's just a disappointing outcome to be at this point right now so I think we're ready uh uh Councilmember Watkins did you have additional comments we're ready I just had a yeah I had a quick question just because I I'm not I'm not prepared to support the recommendation as presented in the packet but I'm also not prepared to support all aspects of this motion I I I'm wondering in terms of how the vote could go if um if I could either for the record state where I feel um I land in terms of what is being presented or if it would be a future motion that I could specify kind of where I feel about how to move forward I looked at Tony on that yeah I guess um just given the amount of discussion that has already uh transpired here my recommendation would be that you go to go ahead and take a vote on this motion if there's another motion that incorporates parts of this that the council wants to consider that you take that up as a as a separate motion okay that would be my recommendation thank you for clarifying that Tony okay why don't we go ahead and take a roll call vote on this motion fine Councilmember Watkins no Helen Tari Johnson no Brown I Vice Mayor Brunner no no that motion fails uh I'm excuse me that motion fails um five against and two four um Councilmember Watkins did you have an alternative motion you'd like to make um I could make an alternative motion but I'm not sure if it would pass I I just sort of had a couple of things that I I don't necessarily feel like that this motion captures sort of where I'm at with it and that I feel like we've reviewed the proposal and for me it is just that bullet of it's just it's still unclear and confusing in order for me to make this determination at this time for approval is where I land and so I don't know if that is just for the record for a different motion or if you know I should make that motion and then we can proceed from there I'm happy to do you want to do you want to work off the staff recommended recommended motion and try to add in additional uh additional direction for staff but if I could um I I think it might be worth looking back at the action that was taken by the council at the november 23rd meeting just as a point of reference if I could share my screen briefly um I will pull up the minutes of that meeting so that so the action with uh senator lair speaking in the background is to rescind the denial the direct staff to schedule a follow-up public oversight hearing at the december 14th 2021 council meeting and to direct staff to complete the sp35 objective standards consistency review in light of the new information that was provided um so that is where we are right now is council is conducting the public oversight hearing and the prior council direction was to direct staff to complete the objective standards review um I interpreted that as a departure from the council's action taken in september but um certainly if that was not the intent then that could be clarified uh at this meeting as well councilmember Watkins so tony when you say that was a departure from the action taken from the council in september which was when we when the council determined that they that we should be the um approval body um and can while during not only conduct the oversight hearing but also have the powers to determine whether or not the objective standards were met correct and at that that's how I interpreted the council direction that may not have been the intent but that's that's how I interpreted it I'm not clear that what you just did is any help to councilmember Watkins at this point I'm sensing that it's not a blunt but what was that oh I said I'm sensing that it's not yeah vice mayor brunner I'm happy to make the staff recommendation um to review the objective standards table and density bonus information prepared by staff and refer the project to staff to complete a formal response letter to the SB 35 application including an objective standards consistency determination and determination of the granting of a density bonus and is there a second to that motion councilmember Cummings your hands up your hands down is there a second to that motion I'll go ahead and second that motion okay we have a motion which is the staff recommend we can see it it's also in the agenda yeah I okay thank you I can't I can't work while I'm sharing my screen hold on I'll go back okay we have a motion on the table um there is a second for that motion this is the staff recommendation councilmember Cummings I just wanted to um again see if I can understand this correctly from the staff's perspective so if the approval goes forward the staff will review the objective standards and then would they then be sending a letter to say yes the developer met all the standards and can move forward and so then they would be that ministerial approval body or is this going to come back to council for us to then you know have this project come before us again to approve or deny the project with this motion that would be crafting a letter in the next two days that says the project is consistent with the objective standards and they can proceed to the ministerial building permit process okay um I guess yeah so consistent with the analysis that we provided in the so in essence yeah so I mean the council could potentially though today say whether they agree with the staff recommendations on the objective standards and approve the project yes the council can take can take a definitive stance on that that council can have staff just convey the information that we've got in the letter their results is the same okay I just think that you know and this is the last comment I'll make I just think that it's really important as elected that you know we are taking formal decisions on development and not just handing those decisions over to our staff and so I would just recommend that you know if we move forward today that you know that the city council is the one who's making the determination and that that's that's reflected in the motion I'm not prepared to support this so it's not like this is a friendly amendment but that's just my feelings on this is that we should be making decisions about development in our community as an elected body and not just handing that decision over to staff and then the given where this is going as well I do have a friendly well I do have an amendment it's not again going to support this but it's something that I think the council may want to take into consideration which is that if this is the direction the council is going to take with um item with condition number 13 uh delete the set the language that says unless the applicant provides substantial evidence that for the product to be eligible for a state or local funding program it is necessary that the units not be distributed throughout the project I think that's really to get to many of our concerns around um the segregation issue within the project so the idea would be that if the developer is going to move forward with this project they need to have the affordable units distributed throughout the entire project and not consolidate the majority of them into a single building so I can send that language over to Bonnie if others want to consider it can you send it yeah I'll send it to you right now and I have a question while we're working on that um and possibly an amendment um I'd like to try to make it clear that fee waivers would not be appropriate for this project um but I want to understand Tony if that is an appropriate time or is that when the actual fee waiver would need to come back to come home who knows when that would happen could be a year from now could be several years from now yeah I think it would be more appropriate to um to to let the applicant know that that is the council sentiment about fee waivers um but the appropriate time to take formal action would be when it comes before you thank you if there was a request for fee waivers then staff would bring it forward at that time correct thank you council member brown while we're waiting for the language to come up I actually also have uh some proposed language that I sent to Bonnie for potential amendments so I'll just wait if um uh council member Cummings is if those are coming up first um but I can talk about them for a moment just so people are have a sense um so the first I I just wanted to revisit this question about um the site plan and you know what's been made available to us because I feel like we're kind of talking past each other um from among kind of constituents who have weighed in what I'm hearing from staff and um kind of amongst ourselves and maybe it's just because I simply cannot wrap my mind around it but um uh what I don't see is um uh locations for the density bonus units that uh within the site plan um which is I believe a requirement of our density under our density bonus rules um and so I believe that portion of the application is also incomplete I didn't want to go too far into the leads um but I'll add that here since it looks like we're heading towards approval um I believe that that must be provided and then um to ensure a thorough evaluation of SB 35 eligibility um that um projects are won't be eligible for streamlined ministerial process described in subdivision C of uh I'll just let you read the codes when they come up um around tribal resources that um that are on a national state tribal or local historic register um outside the project I understand that there there may potentially be those and that we could run into trouble um with those moving forward as well so those are my two um oh here they are sorry I was reading off my own page so you can see them right here I can try to explain further if um folks want to um you know have any questions but those I guess we'll just take them all together so council members Cummings um request would be to include in this motion in the stop motion or the existing motion that's on the floor um vice mayor Bruner that this um um this uh deletion I believe would come would would would uh be added to uh item number 13c in the conditions of approval so basically um let's see I'm just looking at that right now um kind of match up the language here can I ask a question about that sure how does that relate to section 402 e and f um regarding inclusion so there was inclusionary units dispersed unless the applicant can provide evidence um that due to funding it would all be one yes one one part of the project Ryan yeah thanks um I just wanted to clarify just a couple things one is just what we were discussing here um in terms of um 13c I mean this is basically consistent with the hcd sp35 design guidelines so that's consistent with that so I don't know if altering this could be I might leave that to Tony to answer if that may be an issue from a um legal standpoint the other thing I wanted just to clarify is that the applicants did provide us a list of their inclusionary and and density uh bonus units and I can show you where those are I've actually plotted them out on each level of the building so we do have those 22 specific locations identified the only thing we don't have is the 33 sp35 which as we've discussed is solely dependent upon what we're just talking about here um which is the funding sources you know are they going to be distributed evenly between the buildings uh is the funding source consistent with the 402 f going to require that they be um and consolidated those are all the questions that have yet to be answered and will be dependent upon the funding sources so I'm happy to show you the locations of the 22 inclusionary and density bonus because those have been provided but yeah so my understanding first let's quit first question real quick here um Tony is the suggested removal on 13c is that in conflict with state law um I I'm just looking at the hcd guidelines now in the language of the condition that's before you is virtually identical to the to the hcd guidelines so my concern is that it would be imposing a different standard on the project than what the s what the sp35 uh or the hcd guidelines provide um I might add that um that section 402 f also states that identification in the development application of the location of the affordable units is not required for ministerial approval but distribution of the units for this subsection can be included as a condition of approval under section 30185 so I I I do think the language as proposed by council member Cummings is problematic from a legal perspective thank you okay I've got vice mayor bruner and then council member Cummings and then council member brown I might just cue myself in here too I I think I want to I just want to be very clear that people are are understanding that under this under sp35 basically there is a an objective standards evaluation and oversight hearing those are the two pieces that we can cue ourselves into we could also cue our planning commission or we can we can basically say staff makes that there really is no ministerial there is no um non ministerial option under sp35 so we are not approving a project right now we are simply saying that we have completed the oversight hearing and that we are um referring our the remainder of the consistency and evaluation with objective standards to the staff to for completion so it's really important for the staff to realize or for the public I just want to make sure folks are clear we are not approving or denying a project that's different than what you you know a lot of people are used to in past where we had we actually had those duties we don't have those duties unfortunately under sp35 we're comparing it just against our objective standards so just want to be clear on that uh vice mayor bruner did you have additional um response to these um just just based on that those clarifications which was my understanding with um council member Cummings amendment I'm not amenable to that amendment and vice council member brown had some suggestions here um yeah so the second one the the next two are for your consideration as the motion maker yeah so I guess I um if I could um just want to get some clarity here I guess um perhaps this is a longer conversation for another day but I guess it may be as I understand it then and may perhaps I misunderstood um your call staff is calling the density bonus units and the inclusionary units one and the same so that 22 units is you're saying the density bonus units that you've mapped them out the developer didn't do it but so thank you staff for doing that the developer did it oh the developer did do it okay I thought I could say you did they provided us a table okay and I can show them I actually you showed you showed us the site I think I think we have that material available is that correct I believe so I mean they they part of the recent middle yes they included a table that identified the specific unit numbers on each floor and then I as part of I didn't include it in this I have I didn't include it in my presentation but I do have them available if you wanted to see it floor by floor each where all the units are um well you know I honestly I'm at this point I don't think I don't want to take more time unless others want to see it um but I I um I guess I was confused then that um there were two obligations related to the inclusionary and the density but you've combined it and said they're meeting that obligation with that explanation of where the 22 units are going okay well then I'll withdraw um the item one um I guess and um so then if there's anything folks have I mean I'm I'm just gonna leave number two on the table if others have anything to um say um just hoping that this is a consideration that um that you might make uh before we vote on the final uh motion um I saw Bonnie Bush's hand go up so I just want to make sure that thank you um yeah I just want clarification because um if these are amendment to the motion then we would have to have a second to them and then vote to accept them because they're not friendly amendments I don't believe Mayor Myers did a second I did second the motion and no no I mean to the I mean to the amendments you would need a second to this amendment and a second to this one because I'm under the impression this is right not friendly so well I'm is can we just put them in the minutes that they were requested as friendly amendments and if they I mean I can make it the other way but I'm just trying to get in the record here and maybe it will be accepted as a friendly amendment and if it won't then can we just say it wasn't accepted and we can so that's your then I'm just trying to save time here just try to save time sorry but thank you Bonnie for the councilmember coming to see and the same is there a second to your I'll second them I'll second them with the amendment and I'll second his so now here we are okay now let's go back and yeah all right just want to make sure go ahead so procedure I can we take a step back here um there was a request for a friendly amendment that doesn't need a second if it's accepted by the maker um I don't believe it was accepted by the maker so I believe what is now in front of you is a motion to amend the main motion to add this language yeah I was under the impression that councilmember Cummings was an amendment to you specifically said it probably wasn't friendly so that's the one I was mainly referring to right okay so um the discussions already occurred so hopefully we don't have to have that again but I'll second that and we can take a vote on that and then we can go on to the next one um I was comfortable just leaving it at not accepted but for process okay so there's a motion to amend the main motion to add councilmember Brown's language my recommendation would be that you vote on that if it passes add it to the motion if not then move back to the main motion okay um can I just clarify does councilmember Cummings had an amendment was that withdrawn or was that a friendly amendment that was not accepted no there's a there was an amendment and then it sounded like councilmember Brown just seconded that so we can move forward with voting and and then councilmember Brown was a friendly amendment that was not accepted but now I'm confused yeah me too I am just yeah the amendment the word the wording that was used was that you wanted to make an amendment but you didn't think it would be considered a friendly amendment so now we're having to vote on an amendment which I guess we can do um versus having the motion maker be able to respond to that friendly amendment request so sorry Bonnie I'll also I'm losing council members somehow people's internet is starting to not work at their home so I don't know what's going on yeah I I got a couple of texts as well if you want to take a break um now yeah why don't we take a 10 minute break I'm sorry for the public but we're we've had a couple of phone phone or folks letting us know that their internet is off so um uh let's take a 10 minute break and then um I just want to clarify the for the public so we were going to take a vote on the amendment proposed by councilmember Cummings correct if that was seconded by councilmember Brown and then councilmember Brown's amendment should be called a friendly amendment and I'll come back that was seconded by council member Cummings and then I'll come back it was not seconded because it doesn't need one it doesn't need one that's right okay but we'll come back to item two if it's okay with you vice mayor brooner we'll come back and look at that language after our break is that okay okay I just want to make sure if folks can get in they they can get in thank you we'll be back in 10 minutes just shepherds in transit I know that but yeah me too I'm back on hi there good afternoon we're going to go ahead and start back up again if council members are here please turn on your cameras I guess we're having um some there's just overall zoom issues happening so sorry to the public today um so I've got one two three four we have a quorum of council members here as council members arrive if they could please turn on their cameras mayor this is merteen I'm having a hard time with my wife I I'm gonna leave my camera off and hopefully it'll still work and if not I'll just call in okay I apologize councilmember counter johnson was having the same issue so we're just dropped so yeah I apologize for that no worries okay we've got six why don't we go ahead and get started again Bonnie can you please put up um the friendly amendment from councilmember brown vice mayor brooner just want to clarify that my understanding was councilmember Cummings made a friendly amendment which I did not accept and so and councilmember brown made an amendment and withdrew for part one and now we're looking at part two which I also want clarification on my understanding was when councilmember stated that he wanted to make an amendment he also stated that he didn't think it would be a friendly amendment so I believe Bonnie considered that an amendment which would mean I think that you know we would have to vote on that okay I I didn't hear that part so thank you I wanted to that's where Bonnie's question came in but councilmember brown distinctly stated she wanted to have the friendly amendment considered if I could I'm sorry to butt in but I when I pasted the language into the email I sent Bonnie I cut off the bottom so I just sent the rest of it to Bonnie and sorry I know you're dealing over there um but just if we can include that I don't think it's going to change the motion maker's position but I did want to make it clear so I can tell you right now where where is it it just sent it to you no no no I have it where do you where do you want it just right at right at the end there it's yeah it's that's part of the motion number two to ensure a thorough evaluation of SB 35 eligibility um and then the language that's in the quotes is actually the language from the section and then the so what I'm asking is that we get information to ascertain whether there's a tribal resource on the subject property whether or not that written correspondence to all most likely descendants on the list have if that's been done or that that must that should be done that makes sense so this would be added to the the condition as a as a condition of approval sandy or to okay I don't I'm not understanding this as a condition okay so maybe not as a condition of approval then I believe this is something that um I mean I would ask I would ask staff to weigh in here but I believe that this um I believe that this analysis of whether or not it's a uh on a historic register list has has been undertaken um my understanding is that a part of this has been undertaken but perhaps not all of what thought to be done has been as and again I'll ask leader clarified but as part of the conditions of approval there would need to be an archaeological and a cultural resources monitor on site in case here to for unknown resources are identified and that as a as a part of that process for the monitor so right now the monitoring is a condition of approval I understand that but um my understanding is also that a monitor has been identified and that what is not clear is whether or not the um as part of that process all most likely just descendants on the list um related to this to this site and the historical resources on an adjacent adjacent to where the building would be um have perhaps not been identified and communicated with so this is a level of um this is a second step Sandy I think what you're saying yeah thank you yeah I've had to do this step before so I know where it's coming from thank you thank you I know this language not under a 35 but under other other uh laws so or other actions um so I believe the question really is and Lee maybe you guys so this is um whether so basically has contact been made with the tribes on whether so part of the analysis that you would do as well as having an onsite monitor and a tribal you know representative is there a requirement or is can we require that that actual outreach to likely um descendants be done or has it been done is that it you sort of yeah I'm I'm happy to speak to that and then I'll pass it over to Sam because she was doing a lot of the work and I see I see Darcy has her hand up too oh great so um we did look we looked at the local state and national registers the national register does have information with respect to the inclusion of tribal resources we did find um information related to um the via the brand supporting and that was located it was identified as across the street at the location of the school so caddy corner from the subject site so this site was not identified that we found on those registers and I it's my understanding that that Sam has sought information related to the descendants the most likely descendants and that Sam has had conversations with the um the tribal representatives themselves and Sam I'll let you speak to any of the details that you'd like to add um that was essentially what I was going to say we we received a um a list of the tribes that we should contact from the Native American Heritage Commission and so we um contacted that you know those tribal representatives and um one did request a consultation with us which we held and that's where the agreement came from um and we did hear from either um you know over the phone or via email um I did end up speaking with the other representatives um many of them had conditions that we wrapped into the agreement um and the others um deferred to um the expertise of the representative that we met with thank you that's a brand councilmember brown does that do you feel like that due diligence has been done or do you still want this um considered by the motion maker as a friendly amendment um well I'm you know I this I I trust Sam um in the work that you're doing and that you've done your due diligence and I still am not clear that um because I think you know the invitation to consult is different as I understand it um from ensuring that all tribes have been asked if this site is on one of their registers so have if that's so that has that was that part of the communications Sam asking each of the tribe to say to say no this not on our register um you know I don't believe that that specific language was in the letter but we did solicit their review of the project and um ask them if they wanted to meet with us or if they wanted to consult with us further on it we did give them the location of the site and let them know what kind of disturbance was proposed to occur okay yeah I'd still like to see um uh you know more explicit correspondence um to the tribes personally I'll take your comments for your response and then Vice Mayor Brunner can you you you're you it's basically your decision on whether or not to accept the friendly amendment thirsty did you have more to add yeah I was just going to add the fact that SB 35 actually outlines specifics about the way that the cultural resources related to the Native American tribes are addressed and the planning department followed those requirements to the letter of the law at the time that the application came in okay thank you for that clarification Vice Mayor Brunner thank you I looked that up as well thank you Darcy for that are you do you have something else to add Darcy your hand went back up no I lowered my hand I'm sorry lower my hand yeah so I I I am not accepting that friendly amendment at this time okay so we I believe are back to the staff recommendation motion um language um which is review the objective standards table and density bonus information prepared by staff yep are we are we not are you including council member Cummings amendment to that oh we need to vote on that yes okay okay so we have the amendment um above sorry thank you for catching that which includes at removing the language um as stated in the quotations this is on condition number 13c um and we have a motion by a council member Cummings and a second by council members uh Brown and could we get a roll call vote on that one um council member Watkins I'm I'm so sorry I didn't I missed the discussion around this but I so I don't know I don't feel prepared to vote on it but I don't want to I understand that I don't understand we have a time constraint here too we're really running out of time we're an hour late now but but okay so I guess I'll I'll just vote no given that I just don't I don't know what happened here with my wife and I apologize for that that's okay council member Calantari Johnson I apologize I'm in the same exact situation um I I've been gone for the last half hour I missed the discussion so I apologize I'm also going to vote no because I just joined back on it sorry about that clarify this is to accept the amendment right yes that's right my votes no vice mayor Brunner no and mayor Myers my vote's no and I just want for the record because this basically is counter to the ACD state law so I feel it would uh uh all matter just from that perspective okay so that amendment fails now we'll go back to the original motion which is the staff recommendation which is just above um and any council members it's also in your packet review the objective standards table and density bonus information prepared by staff and refer to the projects project to staff to complete a formal response letter sd35 application including an objective standards consistency determination and determination granting a density bonus so we have a motion by vice mayor Brunner and I seconded that and Bonnie why don't we do a roll call but Bonnie are you there sorry I was typing council member Watkins no Bonnie we lost you again Calandari Johnson hi you probably having the same internet problems I am brown no holder vice mayor Brunner mayor Myers hi that motion passes for favor and three against we will now um move on to item number 26 which is the library mixed use project updated site program and design for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council we will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action okay and then when we get a little bit further out I do have some extra time folks that I will call when we get into public comment so I will go and turn this over to Bonnie Lipscomb our director of economic development good afternoon mayor and members of the council it's my um pleasure to be here this afternoon and to bring this item back to you today I'm going to start out with a brief update this is our regular quarterly update I'm going to go through it fairly quickly because we do have an exciting presentation from our master library architect that is really the highlight of the update today and I'll end the brief update with a with what the recommendation is in the staff report and then I'll turn it over to Abe Jason part of our master library architect team and Katie Stewart who is also part of our team so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen for my portion of the presentation and then I'll transition to Abe and Katie to bear with me just a second okay I want to make sure everyone can see that great we can see it okay great thank you okay so the agenda for the update is just a summary of our efforts to date since council approved the program back in June of 2020 a brief project schedule update a budget update next steps and the recommendation and I'm going to start out with a summary since this is a big project with a lot of elements there's a lot of moving pieces we had direction and we hired the owner's representative in the last year we implemented communications and outreach strategy we did complete a library reuse visioning process over the last year over the summer we secured an affordable housing master developer to develop the hundred percent low and very low income units we executed a contract this was brought to you before you in September with the master library architect team um since that time more recently in October um since October and over the last three months we've conducted multiple outreach sessions with the master library architect team including focus groups and community workshops and that will be the highlight of what we'll talk about today and then finally and and when I turn this over to our master library architect team you'll see the completed concepts for site configuration accommodating a 35 000 square foot library plus a 5000 a square foot outdoor patio deck to the library 125 up to 125 affordable housing units and some reduced parking which will go over in more detail this is our master library architect team jason architect with ape jason and katie stewart and I want to just briefly highlight the community outreach um that we've done to date um in November 4th first through 4th we had a series of six meetings um with stakeholder groups um around the library and we will have some highlights of that um and here's just a summary of the number of meetings we had the number of questions that were asked we had over 60 participants in the stakeholder groups and we had close to 800 responses and we have each of these I should say and I'll show that website in just a second all posted from each of the breakout groups and so we had two breakout groups for a number of the sessions per session for each of these six meetings and they're all posted on the project page of the city's website under economic development and then this past Friday we had three workshops um we also have posted from the workshops um on the city website same project page and here is the link below city of santa cruise dot com forward slash mixed use library and you can actually view a recording of a community workshop presentation and you can also download the presentation slide deck we had over 100 people participating in those workshops we're compiling those responses now there is a summary um that abin katie prepared and they'll go over that um a little bit later in the presentation I'm not going to talk about this I just want you to to let you know that um you'll hear about this more from abin katie but I did want to say that it has been a very engaged process that we've had with the team with the consultants and based on a lot of the community feedback of what was really important to be included in this project um from a reduction of the parking and increase in the housing and that feeling of really bringing up the prominence of the library so this is something you'll hear more about I wanted to briefly just talk about the project where we are right now is right here in quarter four of 2021 right in the concept design stage we still have a lot left to go in the project and we have more opportunities for public engagement here in the schematic design phase and design development phase I do want to spend a couple minutes on the budget update I realize this is a detailed slide um we've had a lot of feedback of just even wanting some big picture you know what are the costs um sources of uses and some of the estimated costs for the library so I did want to give an update um on kind of where we are I will also say these are very preliminary numbers and there's a reason for that we are in the concept stage so first we need um you know based on the recommendation today we need direction from you about whether or not you accept updating the program to include the higher count of housing the two-story library concept moved to the front of the project and the reduction of parking as well so if you approve that today we'll be able to go and refine some of these numbers specifically and come back to you with a full model in more detail but for today I wanted to give you an update um I have just for um the summary um we've been working um and doing doing some in detail work with the budget on measure s and we currently have over 25.5 million both and pay as you go funds and the ability to bond um once we issue bonds we'll have three years approximately to spend that funding um it's really those are just IRS tax rules so we are working both with bond council and with the county and the special council for the library um to make sure that we are that we are complying um with all rules and regulations around the bond funds um the both the Garfield and Branson 40 are getting to the near near end of their projects and I will say the friends of the library have been amazing and have actually done a pretty phenomenal job fundraising so we um there may be the possibility to release a little bit of the funds that were I'm going to say borrowed or the decision to take some of the funding that was earmarked for the downtown branch for the Branson 40 and Garfield and be able to move some of that funding back to the downtown so that is why I have a 25.5 million plus we're hoping to get at least 500,000 roughly of that back we do plan on financing for the parking district that's pretty uh traditional um my guess is that it will be considerably lower than this this is just right now a conservative number being held um we have through some funding that we've secured this year through two rounds successful rounds of local housing trust fund matches at the state we have over five million um earmarked and secured in our affordable housing trust fund for this project specifically which you know for a project this size that's a lot for the city gap to fill and I think it's going to go a long way um to this project and helping us be even more competitive for some of the uh next rounds and tax credits current approved cip budget that's approved for this project we have 1.35 million future cip and or grants we're actually in the process of thanks to some of our partners through um through friends of the library and others we are have actually in the process of applying for a grant for the library so we're excited for some of the grant funds that may be possible also through the mixed-use project combined uh combined with affordable we are very in a very sort of competitive grant position to be eligible for other grants over the next year so we're pretty excited about that um so our total source of funding is a little over 104 million the estimated costs right now I do have an asterisk on that we're we're really refining it and this does include some of the features that you're going to see today that are above the baseline library that you saw previously so previously we had an estimate did not include a fixture furniture and equipment it still does not include ffne that was always considered to be a fundraising item but it does include the roof deck the photovoltaics that you'll see and some of the really nice finishes that you're going to see as well so we do have a potential gap we may have a gap um but it's not a substantial gap and I will say that the reason it's not a substantial gap is because of many of the cost savings that you see from doing a mixed-use project together there's just a lot both on economies of scale and efficiencies from doing the project together so specifically the foundation overall is less expensive being part of the same time and sharing and material costs and labor sharing many of the exterior walls stairs and exits from the parking structure are being shared with other uses um share of street lights ADA parking eb charging will be included in the parking structures a lot of these things that were a standalone library project would have to bear the cost of these as a standalone project um you know adding to that building permit fees again shared across the entire project not specific to the library HVAC is also less specific as it'll be roughed in during housing construction so I wanted to mention some of those because we haven't fully absorbed some of those savings yet and we'll be able to do that when we get an approved um design and can get a little further on in the design and engineering for this project and then we'll come back to you with more refined costs for the project as well as we'll be able to move forward on applying for some of the grant and other funding sources so next steps um specifically um if approved today we'll move to the schematic design phase as I said they'll they'll will continue to be community outreach both in schematic and the design development phases um and we'll continue with our ongoing conversations with the farmers market we've been looking a little more specifically at the possibility of lot seven as well as their expressed interest and the recommendation coming out of the revisioning process of the existing library site to really explore that site as a potential long-term home for the Santa Cruz farmers market in conjunction with affordable housing um and then next steps also is a recommendation to come back to you if approved today um with an updated cost model so the recommendation before you today is to approve or accept uh the updated site program and design for the library mixed use project to include the following changes an increase in the affordable housing units from a minimum of 50 which you approved back in June of 2020 to a minimum range of between 100 and 125 units our goal is for the 125 units we'll go into the details of that that is an extra level of housing to five levels of housing over three parking and um there are some height uh discussion we should have about that um a decrease in the parking count from 400 to 310 parking stalls program expansion to include an on-site day care facility an approval of library design changes to include a two-story library facing cedar and Lincoln streets with a green roof and adjacent roof deck and other design elements as presented by the master library architect team um following this presentation and then finally um we recommend that you direct staff to return to council with an updated library cost model based on the library design and site program changes if you approve that today and that concludes my portion of the presentation and with that I'd like to turn it over to Abe Jason and Katie Stewart who are a part of our master library architect team mayor vice mayor council members it's nice to see each of you again we're really excited to be before you tonight we have a presentation to show you our progress since we last saw you and uh sort of establish kind of where we where we've come in conversations with the community and how that's helped shape the design that we're presenting you tonight we have uh myself uh i'm principal of jason architecture i know we've met uh previously but i'll introduce myself briefly and as a as a sort of refresher we have had the honor of working within your library system on multiple branches the recently completed lessel the beach branch as well as the boulder creek live oak uh branches within the county and then the branch authority and the garfield park branches within the city um and we're thrilled and honored to be working on your main library i'm katie stewart um you can hear me right just want to double check don't want to do the classic zoom mistake um katie stewart um very pleased to be here tonight i'm an architect and associate at jason architecture as well as the project manager for the downtown library project and i am also really pleased to be here today uh it's absolutely a privilege to get to work on a project of this scale and importance within the community and we've um been working really hard with your staff and with your community to make this a really excellent project um so thank you again for having us here today and uh with us tonight we also have uh jim renler with eden and for the future housing um he will not be a part of the presentation but he'll be uh part of the panel and available for questions after our presentation and uh bonnie as well uh who gave the intro so we have three sections for our presentation tonight the first is uh describing our conceptual design and the community process to let that led to that conceptual design the second is a section about what we heard and this is actually specifically going to be in regards to the december 10th uh meetings we had uh just this past friday where we presented this design to the community and we've poured over the feedback we received and uh sort of some key themes have emerged and then we're going to end with some next steps so we began our process with a series of stakeholder focus groups uh this was uh about two months ago and we had six meetings with people from uh diverse interest groups as it relates to the project we asked of these uh six six groups we asked 38 questions we had about 60 participants across these groups and we gathered over 700 responses so a really robust amount of information that helped us inform our decision-making going forward our process is one of uh sort of asking questions from the expertise of the community we are experts in the design of public libraries however we are not experts in your community and that's how we treat this engagement we we reach out to the community with questions rather than the community asking questions of us we are asking questions of them that help shape the project and what you can see here is that we get a diversity of responses and we're actually not placing emphasis on any one response in particular uh you can see you know some of the responses are insightful some of them are constructive uh some of them are kind of funny and humorous uh but in general what we're looking for is key themes to emerge as we move through this process and in aggregate as we we sort of read through this commentary we do see some things that start to become recurring commentary and sort of really starting to be identified things that are important to the to the community on the existing library we heard a couple things the first of which is it is well loved it it is a place that people have developed memories over the years uh they have raised their families in they have trained for careers in they see it as a social hub of the community and it has a special place in in the heart of Santa Cruz because of that at the same time we also heard very clearly that the building uh has seen better times it's dingy dilapidated and outdated and it is in need of uh you know uh sort of a revitalization it's not it's not ready for the next generation we also heard that it can be considered unsafe unwelcoming and stuffy on the new site we heard that it has great synergy with the downtown and pacific that there was a sort of real kind of excitement about the way that it could interact with the downtown businesses transit with housing there was concern about the loss of the farmers market expressed in these meetings and that's why i think it's fantastic that the city is working actively with the farmers market to identify a permanent home downtown there was also kind of consistent uh you know statements that it is a better use than a surface parking lot and that it is it is a better utilization of this downtown site on the mixtures project itself there was a real desire that it become part of the downtown fabric that it needs to become part of the interaction of this downtown community and sort of the design needs to take that into consideration so that the there's mutual benefits to the downtown businesses to the downtown residents and to the library we also heard loud and clear that affordable housing is needed in santa cruz and then there was also a kind of clearly expressed a desire for outdoor and green space and there were some concerns about how we would achieve that on this site on the new library we heard that this needs to be a library for not just this generation but future generations it has to be modern and forward looking it has to incorporate new technologies it has to be a place of information for the information age that we live in also true to the values of santa cruz it has to incorporate sustainability it has to represent the love for the natural environment that we see throughout the community of santa cruz and was clearly represented in the community feedback we received and importantly it needs to be a place for everyone it needs to be a place for young for old for people of different career paths and from people from different diverse backgrounds so how do we take this feedback that we got from our stakeholder groups and start to create a design for this downtown library mixed use project what you can see in front of you is a diagrammatic representation of the library housing parking and commercial program as was approved by by you by the council back in june of 2020 so what this represents is in blue we have the affordable housing in gray we have the parking in orange we have the commercial space and in yellow we have the library and i want to just take a moment to say that it's our professional opinion that these four program types work really well in concert with each other they have a lot of kind of great relationships between them the housing the library the commercial they all use the parking the commercial can entice new patrons to the library housing residents can use the library can use the daycare can use the commercial so we really see this as an excellent melting of these four program types into one building so working from that program from june 2020 we started to think about what we heard from the community and started to act on these program volumes so the first thing that we did was we moved back the parking and the housing to give the library more of its own identity and to daylight its roof next we increased the volume of the library to maximize the amount of programmable space with the library as well as increasing the volume of the housing to increase the number of units we also decreased the size of the parking then we pulled the housing volume along kind of giving it more surface area for light for daylight for kind of these perimeter needs of the space and we also pushed it back so that it steps up from the lower scale where calvary churches up towards the higher scale the higher volumes along pacific avenue next we started to carve into these volumes we started to think of them as more buildings rather than just kind of squares and we started to think about what sort of incisions do we need to make to maximize daylight and views so you can see here kind of with the red dotted line this is where we're beginning to carve into the building and create a new shape and maximize the amount of glazing that we can have so here those spaces are cut away you'll also see that this creates a space up at the top level for the library to have and kind of at level entry into a roof deck after we thought about these daylight and views carvings we started to think a little bit about how this building interacts with the street and how does it have more of a human scale for pedestrians that are walking along these street front so we've made a cut at this building to begin to shape it for that pedestrian scale pulling back so we have a more civically scaled sidewalk a more defined entry and a more prominent corner and then this view also starts to add in a sense of scale for the viewer we've got these little red people here what gives a sense of how large this building is and then last we start to think about areas of solidity areas of transparency the sort of areas where the green roof will be most effective areas of photovoltaics and then of course how do we populate this roof deck for the library to make it a really excellent outdoor space and this is the same view just orbited around so we're looking at it from the northwest corner this is a really prominent view of the library and you can really start to see how it has a street presence and is beginning to shape itself into more of a form all right so let's talk a little bit about the numbers of this project for the housing we are targeting between 100 and 125 units the program breakdown of the housing promotes use from a lot of different demographics there's studios and one bedrooms two bedrooms and three bedrooms so we think this will appeal to a wide range of folks individuals families seniors etc there's community space that's dedicated solely to the residential housing and this will be between 25 and 3500 square feet and this is a space where residents can come maybe share some time with an extended family group in a larger kitchen have some community meeting events etc that kind of thing there's also residential roof deck between 14 000 to 16 000 square feet of it which will act as a kind of outdoor space and gathering space for all of the residents of the housing for the library we are going to have between a 30 and a 35 000 square foot library interior with a three to five thousand square foot roof deck the library program and plans that i'll show you later do you show a 35 000 square foot library and a 5000 square foot roof deck and we're really optimistic that we can hit the high level of this range for this part of the program for the parking we're showing between 300 and 315 total spaces this is reduced from 400 and for the commercial and daycare we have space for seven to nine thousand square feet of commercial space and 18 to 2500 square feet of daycare another excellent thing about the these just different individual program types is how that while they relate to the programs in the surrounding area so we have a lot of surrounding businesses that have kind of a great synergy with the parking with the commercial space we have all of the businesses and restaurants along pacific avenue as well as the restaurants along all the streets of the uh front this project we also have a nice relationship between community uses with the church across the street and we have the housing that is going to be going in at the lot across cedar street which again has a nice relationship between the housing that is going to be introduced as a part of this project of course all of these program uses have a great connection with the existing business and businesses and shops along pacific avenue and we see this as a pedestrian connection as well as a vehicular connection something that we heard consistently in all of our stakeholder outreach meetings was the importance of sustainability as it relates to this project so we've targeted some sort of lofty sustainability goals we will have solar panels on the roof to provide solar energy for the project both the housing and the library will be all electric which means no reliability on fossil fuels we're trying to be forward thinking in the construction of the parking garage so rather than creating a ramped approach which would sort of necessitate that it remained parking in perpetuity we are thinking of the parking garage as flat floor plates which could potentially be converted to different use at some time in the future we're thinking about daylighting as it pertains to the library because it has its own kind of independent volume here we have been able to introduce glazing at all four sides of the building which will contribute greatly to the ability to daylight this space rather than relying heavily on electricity to delight it and this is also really important to another one of our goals to achieving zero net energy for the library as we sort of move away from dependence on electric lighting it means that our goal of zero net energy is more achievable and then last the library will have a green roof which will help with storm water management pollution and reducing the urban heat island effect and this is a section through the building here i'll click back really quickly for a second so it says if we're slicing through the building kind of right along i'm not sure if you can see where my mouse is but right along here and what you can see from this section is that when we pull the library volume away so the library volume is the kind of yellow lit volume we've created an opportunity for glazing and for windows all around the building so we're getting in light from from all four facades and we've also created an opportunity for natural ventilation moving through the space allowing the space to be naturally cooled passively rather than relying solely on fans and age back equipment we've also created a nice relationship between the public on the private uses of this of this site it steps down as it moves from a more private area to a more public area so we have a nice relationship between the pedestrian scale at the street level and the kind of more pedestrian and public uses and then we step up and we have more privacy as we move to the residential uses including roof deck area and green space that is given over exclusively to the use of the residence so they have kind of their own private outdoor space all right so what does this look like in plan this first plan is the site plan at grade so you can begin to see this more generous civically scaled sidewalk as it wraps around we also have street trees and generous planting along the edge of the building a couple of key entrances into the building and I'll point out number one is the mid block and main entrance to the library number two shown both on Lincoln and Cathcart streets is the entrance into the housing number three and this would kind of probably wrap around the corner actually is the entrance into the commercial space and number four is the vehicular entrance into the parking structure now we've moved up two stories and this is the site plan of the roof deck so you can see we're introducing a lot of greenery a lot of planting we're really striving to make this housing feel as if it's kind of within a park lake setting and we also have this really generous roof deck which will be excellent programmable space for the library so to kind of go through our numbers here number one is this 5000 square foot roof deck numbers two three four and five are all residential roof deck given over to the residential uses number three is a community outdoor space you know barbecue girls picnic tables that kind of thing for gathering number four is a children's play area slash playground and number five is a teen centric space excuse me a teen centric space tongue twister which is given over for teen recreation number six is the photovoltaics on the roof of the housing and the library and number seven is that library green roof all right so moving into the floor plan of the building the area in gray is the parking the commercial and the daycare the commercial and the daycare hasn't been articulated yet and the area in color is the library floor plan so i'll call your attention to again sort of these key entrances number one and number two are the entrances into the library one being the entry off of cedar street and two being the direct entry off of the garage 16 and 17 are proposed entrances for the commercial and daycare and number 14 is the vehicular entrance into the parking structure coming back to the library just to talk kind of high level about the plan once you walk in the front door at number one you are in a lobby area which has the new books and marketplace collection this lobby area is indicated in orange there are a number of community meeting spaces off of the lobby shown in blue the largest of which is number four the large community meeting room there's the staff area shown in green this is staff offices as well as back of house services like sorting and returns collections circulation etc and then we have the children's area shown in yellow occupying this nice prominent corner of the space moving upstairs in the library the second floor is given over primarily to the adults collection we will also be thinking in particular of the genealogy and local history collection we want to make sure that this sort of special and unique santa cruz collection has a place in the new library the teens area is also upstairs shown in yellow and there's a suite of small group meeting rooms these are kind of two to four person study slash work rooms are shown right over here on the right hand side of the building you'll also see at the south end of the space there's another staircase up that staircase up leads to the mezzanine level which is shown on this plan the mezzanine level would be this kind of fun almost airy space that overlooks the adults collection you could see there being lounge chairs here and this is a bulk or a guard rail height glass wall here so you would be able to kind of have a multi-use space there is another suite of small group meeting rooms shown in blue here on the right and then we have a direct entrance out onto this 5000 square foot roof deck which again we really see as programmable space for the library santa cruz has such nice weather that we see this as something that you could use probably 300 320 days out of the year as programmable library space then just to kind of touch on the other program uses at this level number seven is that residential roof deck and number eight is the footprint of the residential units all right and with that i'm going to hand it off to aben he's going to talk a little bit about cultural context so when we start thinking about how this library starts to look and feel we don't think about in the abstract sense we really think about a sense of place and we think about santa cruz as a community and what defines it and the qualities that make it really wonderful and special santa cruz is like nowhere else on earth it is a kind of special confluence of arts and culture and nature it's a creative community it's a diverse community it's a quirky community it's also funky and i mean that in kind of a good way it's not like a slick uh you know kind of silicon valley vibe it's a place that has a deep love of nature with a amazing proximity to the ocean to the redwoods to the fields of wilder ranch to the north we took great inspiration from the nature around santa cruz and how we thought about the design of this building in particular the cliffs of west cliff drive wilder ranch and santa cruz county as a whole you can see kind of in this collection of images the wonderful striation of geology that's created at the ocean's edge the layering of of rock and color as it moves from the ocean up to the plateau where we have the greenery that starts to mimic the sense of a green roof and the idea of these geologic forms moving against each other slowly over time we also took inspiration from the ocean specifically the textural qualities of the ocean thinking about the way lines of swell appear as they approach the coast and the kind of linearity to that the rhythm to that in some ways it has a diagrammatic nature and we started to think about that as an approach to how we might treat glass on this building that we just we don't want just any old shiny blue glass building we need to think about a textural quality to glass think about glass as a material that brought us to a material palette that reflects some of these natural points of inspiration the first of which is brick which reflects the cliffs that we showed you at wilder ranch and on on west cliff drive specifically a sand the light colored sand brick that has kind of a permanence and a civic quality to it it really has a kind of a geologic kind of feel the second is glass and again we're thinking about glass as a material as a textural quality glass with a patternization with a ceramic frit on it that might create texture help with mitigation of solar heat gain and create some creative and visual interest and then as an accent to these we're thinking about wood and in this case it would be wood with a weathering effect because we're by the ocean and we think about wood as driftwood or in the case of a wood screen over a glass wall wood like a beach bonfire over a camp fire so we love that idea of the play of that weathered wood and kind of the relationship to the outdoors there in terms of material palette for this building what you're going to see is the use of this light colored brick a green roof as a material palette in this case we don't mean green like a lush tropical roof that would not be appropriate in santa crews we're thinking green like a coastal california green so in that case that means warm warm yellows and browns like a like a grassland native native species with some rich sienas in there mixed in with the greens a weathered wood screen so it really has the feeling of driftwood that pattern i patternized glass you can see below and then we have accents of warm wood and then smooths light colored cement plaster so we've taken you kind of through the how we thought about this building from a programmatic standpoint you've seen it from a bird's eye view but now we want to take you down to the experiential level and we're going to start at the corner of linkin and cedar street what you can see here is we've really emphasized the prominence of the library as the civic centerpiece of this building it really steps forward and you can start to see the benefit of all of those diagrammatic moves that katie walked you through where we shaped the building at the street level and we set the housing back the housing really starts to form this graceful backdrop to the civic building at the forefront you can see the civic permanence of the brick shaping the podium as well as the sort of delicate use of wood as a screen over glass and then the idea that the upper level is this grand reading room fully daily from all four sides and topped by a green roof moving down the street down cedar street to the corner of cat cart and cedar we take a look from the other other side of the building here the southwest corner and what you can see one of the key things to point out here is the buildings actually step down again at this corner we're really thinking about gracefully interacting with the neighborhood to the west of the building which is lower scale more residential there's businesses along that edge that have less density so we're stepping the building down to this corner and that actually provides this wonderful opportunity for an outdoor roof deck and the roof deck is south facing so a great spot for kind of the warmth of the sunlight and you can also see it provides this opportunity for not just greenery on the roof but actual trees on the roof which will be visible from the street additionally you can see uh additionally you can see that the this podium this brick uh kind of uh base there's an interaction between the commercial function the library function so while they kind of distinguish each other as separate functions there is a kind of a playfulness about how they speak to each other you can see uh starting to develop the commercial entry and the daycare entry on cedar street as well as around the corner on lincoln's cat cart street the entry to the residential building and then down at the end of the block the entry to the the parking garage and you can see it's sort of gracefully integrated in a way where it doesn't actually feel like a parking garage it feels like a sort of very kind of well-calibrated facade with balance of materiality moving up onto the roof deck we want to take a look at a sort of more experiential level about how the space is going to feel and you can see it's actually quite a grand space of 5000 square feet i think many many of you kind of can relate that to the size of a house in some ways and get a sense of scale it's available it's a scale available for multiple programming activities in particular we're thinking about some small outdoor group studies uh these could be spaces that could be utilized like the indoor group studies on a nice day when it's a group of teens looking to do some homework or a startup group or he on their business plan and it's just too nice to be inside so a great place to huddle um and uh you know have a meeting do some homework with friends in addition you can see some great space to hang out with a book you know sort of lounging and had her on that chair and read for the afternoon at the same time it's a scale it's a scale of space where we can move all of these mobile furnishings out of the way and hold a programming event up here this could be a children's story time and all the reading it could also be an opportunity just to celebrate something that's worth celebrating in Santa Cruz and then again we've got a scale where we've we've got space for greenery and not just greenery but trees so we like the idea of shade trees growing up on this roof and you can pull up a chair and sit beneath the dappled shade of a tree up on this roof looking out at the activity below moving inside the library we're going to step inside the front door off see your street and the first thing you can see when you walk into the building is that your eye is drawn upward there's a kind of uplifting aspirational quality this space as your eye seeks curiosity in the reading room above the main stair sort of gives you cues about kind of the opportunity for learning that's ahead and immediately you can see the benefit of separating the library from the housing and that clear story window that wraps the building bringing daylight in from all four sides we love the idea of some creative artistic light fixture hanging some kind of fun chandelier occupying the volume of this space straight ahead you can see the entry from the parking garage and to the right there would be a circulation desk and information from the front the librarian as well as the elevator in the middle of the space new collections new books you know staff picks sort of fun materials as well as group study rooms moving upstairs what you can see is this space that we're thinking of as the grand reading room of this library and this really harkens to the history of library architecture where there is a grand reading room space that really inspires a sense of civic awe and it has a volume to support that again you can really see the benefit of daylight coming in from all sides but not just daylight the sense of greenery visible from this level greenery to the right from the trees on cedar street but also to the left and straight ahead this is greenery from the roof deck these are trees from the residential roof deck and the library roof deck straight ahead is the teen space and then you can see the study rooms on the left as well and then that really cool mezzanine level you can kind of really see the idea of how fun it would be to sit up there and kind of observe the activity down below and then lastly lots of wonderful books which is core to the heart of any library so this was the design we presented this past friday and we have some key takeaways from the presentation of this design that we're going to share with you today so we went through a similar process to the the previous focus groups where we had questions that we asked of the community and we really we actually do a breakout group so it's one of the reasons we had three sessions of about 35 people per session is because we wanted to then break those groups into smaller groups it's really about fostering a community dialogue and allowing people to kind of hear what others have to say and actually you know visually see the commentary from their fellow community members so you can see an example of one of these questions so we heard a couple a couple things the first it's just an incredibly wonderful thing to see the kind of civic engagement from the community of santa cruz the investment in kind of positive outcomes for their community and one of the key takeaways was that we kind of had an enthusiastic and primarily positive feedback and there were a couple things in particular that were very well responded to the first of which was the extensive use of day lighting which i think you can see from the design we presented tonight the other was the articulation of the form of facade i think there were some concerns with the in the community that it would the building would be blocky and lack character so i think people are very happy to see that and then the prominence of the library because it is the civic kind of star of the show and people were really excited to see that it was clearly defined and sort of you know had a had a starring role in kind of how the building came together we also heard that there is a concerned minority worried about the removal of existing trees on lot four and that was that was expressed clearly at the same time we also heard that other community members felt conversely that these trees should not be preserved citing concerns about maintenance leaves surface roofs and the fact that they're non-native so the the feedback received was not consistent on this but in general the there there is a minority of people that do have some concerns about these trees regarding the parking structure we actually had fairly balanced split opinions on the parking structure going in both directions there were absolutely some members of the community that felt like the parking structure was too big and it encouraged something that didn't in in their mind meet the values of Santa Cruz and encourage car culture it was not sustainable and that the library and the city should be thinking about bike and pedestrian travel instead on the other hand there were also people who represented members of the business community who actually felt the structure should be larger and that there was a real need for parking to serve the businesses downtown it was vital to their survival and the vitality of the downtown businesses so this was an area where we heard kind of a diversity of opinions and we did feel like it was fairly uniformly split in a split in terms of the feedback we received we received specifically constructive feedback on a couple things which are going to be really helpful for us in terms of how we proceed with this design we did hear concern that there might be congestion from a single vehicular entrance exit into the parking garage so that's something we plan to explore further we heard clear feedback that the library has to be flexible and forward thinking and that technology has to be integrated throughout this really needs to be a library not just again for this generation but for the next generation and that there really needs to be plentiful and specifically secure bike parking that was actually a really critical thing that that almost maybe should be the thing highlighted instead of the bike parking is secure and then over and over again we heard pleasantly surprised it was consistent throughout all of our feedback and I think it really spoke to people going in with some trepidation about what this important project would become and coming out really excited about where it was headed so I'm going to just briefly talk about next steps and then we'll hand it back to the council for question and answer because I'm sure you have some questions for us so just taking a step back and looking at the overall timeline and we've actually kind of been touching this project and this process at multiple stages along the way so we know how long and how hard the community has been working on this process I think the thing that's pretty exciting to see when you look at this overall schedule dating back to the master plan is we're actually at the beginning of the last third of the process you can see that we're at the very beginning of the design and engineering phase that's the we are here and we're looking at design and engineering through 2022 there's going to be two additional opportunities for public input once in the schematic design phase at that point we would be coming back with more fleshed out floor plans as well as really detailed computer rendering so we move away from the loose lines loose thoughts of the sketches and we start to get much more specific about some of the design elements and then we'll come back to the community once more in the design development phase at this point the design is essentially done but we will be looking for the last round of feedback before we finalize things and we are on track for construction and the project completion sometime mid 2025 to the beginning of 2026 so with that I want to thank you everyone for your time and then I hand it back to the council thank you so much Abe and Katie and Bonnie very very exciting what you guys have come up with so I will go ahead and turn this over to council for questions first and then I'm going to go ahead and take it out for public comment and I just want to make a note to council we do have a 6 p.m. session so we're at almost five o'clock now and then take it out for public comment tonight we will have three speakers with extra time those will be neighborly Santa Cruz our downtown our future and the friends of Santa Cruz public libraries and I believe those folks who are associated with those groups know who they are so I will be calling on you first for public comment and then we will allow two minutes for additional public comment this evening so I'm going to go ahead and open this up for questions right now for council and then we'll take it out to public comment and then we'll come back for additional comments and deliberation councilmember Golder councilmember Cummings and vice mayor Bruder I want to applaud you guys and your team for such an amazing design I'm the first to not usually like modern architecture or long presentations but Bonnie already ran us through this last earlier this week and then I was just captivated the whole time just imagining it and I think it's beautiful and you did a great job of getting the community feedback and and bringing this design forward and I'm so excited about it I do have one question and I don't remember to ask and I did ask I asked somebody and I didn't get an answer and it maybe was you Bonnie is this the structural engineer I didn't see that in the budget is that part of the architecture budget because I was like yeah we do have as part of the budget there's a lot of elements and so we have we have some smaller contracts for structural engineering we have it both on the overall project team and surveying so there's a lot of smaller contracts that that we're managing as part of the larger project right on well thank you guys very much thank you Renee councilmember Cummings well thank you all for that wonderful presentation it's it's probably it's from a long way and that I know that you know when I've kind of discussed some of the earlier designs and renderings with people in the community they were concerned with the fact that it's just going to do this like gigantic rectangle and I think by including some of those setbacks and providing more light that's going to definitely meet some of the concerns we were hearing I know well I'll keep my questions pretty short I just wanted to know with the regards to the green roof I'm just curious is that going to be currently the design is that accessible by members of the public because what comes to mind for me is that there's also an opportunity there like for example in California Academy of Science on the top of their building they have a green roof that people can walk on to and access and I think that you know depending on kind of where this goes there is also the opportunity to have that space on top of the library which is even more not only green space but public space right and so I'm wondering if there's an opportunity to kind of have something like that included as well yeah it's not currently as designed shown as accessible but that's a great idea and it's something we could certainly explore as we head into this next phase of design right yeah I think that might be just good I mean if we can we're putting vegetation up there already which is adding that weight you know how much capacity could it carry in terms of people who could access it as well and railings and other things so I think that could also be more programmable space that actually extend the footprint of that the roof of the library so um and then yeah that's it I'll I'll have a few comments later but those are the only that's only real question I had thank you council member I've got vice mayor Bruner then council member Brown and then council member Watkins I had a couple of questions thank you so much for the visuals that was really I was pleasantly surprised um so questions from the community and that I um just also have um first location of the old library site without going into too much history why why not that site for building the new library secondly is if um there is a way to keep heritage trees on the current on the current proposed lot four site third is there an elevator to the mezzanine you mentioned a staircase and then fourth um given that there is a petition initiative and we speak to that what happens with this process that'll be for staff yes or for Tony okay oh and then I guess maybe um uh that the other question that came up was regarding the Nelson my guard study saying we don't need a garage a parking garage and my understanding is that um there are other surface lots going away um was that can taken into consideration um there's um the you know the question that has been brought up is do we need more parking versus better parking management so a lot of questions in there but that's what that's what's there so okay um okay uh why don't we take those questions if we can um did you guys get a chance to write those down um I can answer or address one two and five and then I'll turn to Abe to address the elevator mezzanine and then maybe Tony for the in Bonnie Bush for the initiative okay um so for the first one why not existing site for new library I think one of the challenges with the existing site for the new library is that we would have to relocate the library for two to three years while we are building the new site so there that's that's one one reason um but we would have to demo it we would have to relocate them so they would be moving twice and that was something that we did talk about um in the earlier process but you know that's that's not a small undertaking um for the library and and the uses and even finding another site that's large enough to accommodate um the library um is not a small feat either so um one of the benefits of having a new location since we're doing a new library is that the library can stay where they are and not have an interruption of the services they're providing to the community while we build the new site and then they once it's ready it's you know as seamless as transition as as possible um and Abe and others may have something else to add to that um on the heritage trees um we do we have been working um on that both with our city arborist and um we've been working with um an outside arborist that our city arborist recommends as well and we actually have a meeting set up for monday to do an assessment of the trees on site i mean our goal is you know we all actually really do love trees um i will as i say up front it would be next to impossible to do the project if not impossible the project that you saw today and keep all of those trees it's just not feasible however we will look at some of the trees and evaluate them both for health um and um also look at particularly some of the perimeter trees to see if it's possible to include any of those in the design i will also say that you you know notice there's a lot of trees actually in the new design both some on the perimeter but also some on the roof deck um as well so we definitely want to look at both the health of trees the ability to include some of the trees in the project and also we're going to be looking at the possibility of whether or not any of the trees if were if they were relocated whether or not they would survive so there's going to be an analysis of the trees on site so we will come back to you with that and then um as far as the nelson-neigard study obviously that's a very um it's it's starting to be a very dated study i will say just as did we look at the other parking lots that are coming off online so much has changed in the last few years with the number of projects in the pipeline and the number of projects that are now moving forward so with just the projects including the three or actually just two of the city projects including the library mixed use project we now have the cedar street project across the street um we have two projects on front street our pack station projects we are losing um just with those projects i mentioned between 330 and 335 parking spaces just those projects alone we're not talking about any the new development or what that demand may be on the parking system so at 310 adding new spaces that isn't doesn't even quite cover what we're losing through plan development that doesn't mean we can't do transportation you know transportation demand management in the future hopefully we'll need less parking but we are not building new supply we're not adding to the system we are actually in a deficit position at this point so i did want to add that that's information that nelson niger did not have um with a lot of these projects um we're we're making a lot of strides and building affordable housing that's a really good thing but it does put pressure particularly in our downtown um environment and that is a concern particularly for businesses and residents alike um are we thinking about parking are we planning for parking so i did want to add those comments um and with that i'll turn it over to a to address the elevator question thank you bonnie uh simple answer on the elevator yes there's an elevator to the mezzanine and it's not just because it's good design it's also required by code bonnie could i just jump into about some of the advantages that we're at the library seeing so i'm glad you're on thank you yeah i'm i'm eric howard the interim director at the library and thanks again avan and katie that was fantastic um some of the other things that we're seeing in in the comparison between staying put we're moving as as bonnie pointed out um we would be unable to provide it's not in the budget to provide services um for those two years if if we had to close down for renovation um but additionally this option moving to the to the mix use project is a is a greener option for us um to which we treasure as a system for a number of reasons um one is that we've seen our power go out um the current library doesn't have the infrastructure to support um solar panels as you saw in the presentation of the mix use project would um we we really um pride ourselves for like in libraries um for being a community center during times of emergency so um the solar could provide that opportunity as a cooling station for the community whereas the current library doesn't have that and we're projecting that we will have the money for the 35 000 square feet with those economies of scale that bonnie first highlighted in the beginning of her presentation but the the renovation would would get us down to 30 000 square feet so we know that this city loves garfield park and so just to put this into perspective the difference between the current library and the mixed use is two garfield park libraries um and that's not counting the the uh outdoor space which we don't have at the at the at the current location um so that's a significant difference um in what we can offer the community in between those two two actions thank you okay vice mayor bruner is that good i believe there's a question about the ballot measure oh i'm sorry yes ballot measure exactly um yeah i can address that i think it's pretty clear that both the intent and the effect of the ballot measure should it qualify for the ballot and uh and be passed by the voters would be to put a stop to this project as it's proposed um it it essentially would amend the general plan to prioritize the use of the existing library site for the renovation of the downtown library um to discourage the use of the existing library site for other than library purposes to establish lot four as the permanent location of the downtown farmers market um it would further prohibit the construction of additional parking facilities above ground on lot four so it would prohibit the parking structure component of the project um and and really the library component too because it would authorize um only affordable housing to be constructed above ground on the library site or on the lot four and and most of the surface parking lots in the downtown area would also it would also prohibit constructing above ground parking above ground level parking on those um on most of those surface parking lots and would prioritize existing surfing existing surface parking lots for the construction of affordable housing above the ground level so those are essentially the components of the measure um and so yes if it were to pass at whatever phase we are in um in november of 2022 the the library project would be basically put on um would come to a halt okay next um i've got uh council member brown and i just want to remind the let's see the council we've got actually an additional item after this item so um keep moving as fast as we can um i've got council member brown next thank you mayor um thank you everyone for the presentations thank you even katie it's always nice to see you and um learn about all of the wonderful work you're doing um to try to bring us uh you know what the community is asking for and to really be part of asking those questions and engaging with our community it's really nice to have you on board uh i have i just wanted to follow up on the question around the heritage trees um so i i understand that um that's going to be looked at and i i guess i'm just wondering if we can get a little bit more um of understanding of like what those steps would be i mean we have a heritage tree ordinance on the books we have an obligation to um comply with it to take it seriously and we have um language in it that um does state that heritage trees can't be removed if some um i can't remember the exact language i could pull it up but you know if if i'll if site design or something the project could happen without removal of the trees and so i understand that you all are now like you've heard about this and you're clear but i am just wondering like what that means in terms of what the next steps would be and can the council hear back about that perhaps is just as an informational item um if it if there's some some more information for us prior to the next quarterly report like it would just be nice to know kind of how that's going because i know that is a big concern for some members of our community myself included and um you know and it's an ordinance on our books we adopted it for a reason so just hoping to better understand as we move along that that is going to be included in the considerations um i'll i'll respond to that um you know we can't come back to you and provide you an update with that and i think also we can ask the city attorney to weigh in on sort of the process and next steps but specifically on the heritage tree ordinance you know our next steps are really to have the arborist assess the trees and look at the trees and so once we get that information we will share that with council and we can share that with you prior to our quarterly update yeah i mean if it's even just like a memo an informational item that'd be great thank you thank you council member uh Mr. Odie i think you might have a little one that has got a hold of your ipad we're seeing a little spinning going on that's cute ready to look at the new uh going to the new library um okay next we have council member Watkins okay i'm gonna attempt to have my video on um but i'm i'm sorry i'm having the wi-fi issues i too just you know in the interest of time i'll keep my comments short but i just really want to thank you all for the the inclusive process that led us to this point and the compromises that also were incorporated as well as the innovation and incorporation of what is so uniquely santa cruz i'm super excited about the child care facility thank you bonnie um there's so much potential in need for that um and all the other amenities and particularly for those who really need to access this modern library for a community um when a question that was brought to my attention by a community member was is it possible or has it been considered to put a like a rooftop restaurant or a bar as a way to um generate revenue but also be uh you know a resource for the community as well um has that been thought of or explored um you know abe you might be better um to answer that but i will say that did come up in a lot of the community comments and we did if you look at that rooftop deck um you can see some of those alcoves it could be interesting to turn one of those into a little kiosk or something like that so that did come up in the community um comments we had if you probably didn't notice it because we flashed them up pretty quickly but uh some of the comments were coffee um you know a place to get a bite or you know and we just thought that that roof deck seemed like a good opportunity abe you probably want to add to that i would say it hasn't been explored in any detail but it's certainly something that you know many libraries uh you know incorporate cafes and uh some sort of small formal food service or beverage service um it's primarily a question about uh kind of agreements between a private vendor and the library or the city so it's it's it's less of an architectural question honestly that it is a kind of question about uh commercial leasing really uh but certainly certainly viable if that's something the the city of the library we're interested in pursuing great thank you okay i got councilmember comings next hey mayor i think most of my questions were answered i did um but just for transparency i was concerned about the um ballot initiative and the parking garage because my understanding i thought from that the ballot initiative was really going after um that if sorry i thought that in the absence of for example in the previous design the parking garage was kind of um not connecting with detached from the library and i thought that that might you know if the ballot initiative passed that that would not allow for that portion of the library price moved forward with the library would but it sounds like um the ballot initiative would not allow for the library to be constructed on the site is that correct that's my reading of it it identifies the existing library site as the priority location for the downtown branch library okay so i guess yeah so regardless of whether it's detached or incorporated into the design there's still the potential impact that passes okay i just wanted to get that clarification and then just wanted since councilmember vice mayor bernard asked about why the site not the other um i'll just say so that the community is also where there's extensive work that was done between the delac and also the subcommittee of the city council that had extensive meetings to compare the two and when the subcommittee met to evaluate similar to what um eric howard was saying in his comments you know we looked at how environmental the buildings were the potential for solar um a variety of different costs and and benefits and it turned out that this was the the site that was identified by the subcommittee along with staff to be the most beneficial site and design um and then finally i just also wanted to mention that on march 19 2019 we did have a transportation demand management study session and we actually had patrick siegman who wrote the nelson-neigard report come and discuss traffic demand management with the city council so i don't know if that video is available online but if folks are interested in reviewing that report that we spent you know hours with our city staff with representatives from nelson-neigard and with a professor from ucsc discussing transportation demand management so i just wanted to put that out there because we haven't it's not like we completely ignored that study and ignored the people who did that study we actually had them coming to give a report to city council just wanted to make sure that that was clear great and i have thank you council member i've got uh council member shepard voluntary johnson thank you and i'll keep my comments brief um i'm also just delighted to see this thank you for all the work that's been put in um by all of you and the process and engaging the community i mean just doubling our number of affordable housing we've had some extensive conversations about our need for housing um prioritizing children with the child care facility and the expanded space and then the green aspects um i know that you put up our timeline but i can't recall now that's there's my one question because all my other questions have been asked what when we anticipate breaking ground or if that was um identified you know it's really going to depend on when we secure the financing for the housing that's really going to drive the timeline we should um we have roughly a year for um entitlements and project design and then at the same time i mean if we can coordinate ideally and smoothly secure tax credits then you know potentially we could break ground sometime in 2023 but it's likely to be in 2024 thank you thank you council members appreciate your brevity and um and i i will just i will make more comments when we get get on the other side of the public comment so i'll go ahead and bring this off to public comment i'm going to have i mean and i misspoke earlier um so i have three groups neighborly Santa Cruz and i have kyle kelly um signed up for that so kyle if you can unmute yourself you'll be our first and if you are calling in tonight to comment on the library mixed use project updated site design excuse me site program and design you'll now want to press star nine on your phone to raise your hand and then when it is your time to speak you'll hear an announcement that you've been unmuted and then we'll set the timer for two minutes so that will be members of the public for groups that requested extra time uh kyle kelly please go ahead hey hey there i'm kyle kelly with neighborly Santa Cruz i'm a Santa Cruz resident that lives within walking and biking distance to the mixed use library project my whole family uses the library regularly as they are voracious readers we're absolutely delighted to see the library expand if it the needs of everyone especially as the city grows to welcome more neighbors which is actually the big topic of why i talked to you tonight i look forward to welcoming neighbors into the new homes as well as the shared spaces within the library i hope that everyone will join us in welcoming people to their new homes downtown as well as this beautiful shared community space we're currently in a housing crisis and climate crisis one proven way to address both of these crises simultaneously is by building more housing in areas well served by transit in Santa Cruz we are a welcoming community but unfortunately we haven't built enough housing for all the jobs created in our area the students and even our own children and grandchildren as a result the vast majority of us who are unable to afford a 1.3 million dollar home do not have many housing options the rest of us are left competing for the few rental or for purchase units that do exist we now have the opportunity to welcome more neighbors to Santa Cruz um and and we can welcome a lot more by maximizing the number of units of all types at the mixed use library site you know fires hurricanes flooding our world is seeing the effects of climate change this this is only the beginning to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions we must reduce the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in the u.s private automobiles a proven way to reduce driving is building more housing near transit where residents do not need to own a vehicle to get around furthermore we must also take steps to reduce our energy and water use to conserve future scarce resources in california we know that apartment units use significantly less energy and water per capita than single family homes which will go a long way to making our community more resilient to climate change for all these reasons i'm urging you to support more housing at the mixed use library site as stated in the staff's recommendation to increase the amount of housing and i i just want to say you know the overall process i'm really glad that we've been able to move um the project in this direction um and that that we've been able to shape it with community view over the over the last uh couple years um so again um i urge you to support more housing at the mixed use library site and i'm looking forward to it let's say yes to new neighbors thank you thank you next i have uh john hall you would just unmute and then you can start john welcome don't see john's name so i'm assuming he'll have a phone number is john hall here from our town downtown our future if he's a phone number i won't be able to tell who he is john you'll have to unmute yourself and start speaking if you're on the phone i need i need to be able to um i need to give them permission to unmute themselves and i can't do that if i don't know who it is john hall uh if you are how do i get him to signal who he is i'm gonna lower everybody's hand okay great thanks my only john hall to raise his hand john hall is ready to speak um at the extra time period for his group our downtown our future now's the time to raise your hand please by pressing star nine i'm not seeing him in the crowd so i'm going to move on to our third extra time speaker which is oh is that john okay okay raffa i don't think i have you on my list um i've got three i've got phone number ending in seven four nine six um and that i soon will be john hall but i'm not sure john if you press star six you can unmute yourself but that's only if this is john hall okay everybody's queuing back up um why don't we go ahead with um martin gomez and i believe his phone number is the four one five number uh nine six oh one awani i think is his number yeah so go ahead martin hi a good uh good evening everybody uh mayor uh may or may or mayors and vice-versa members of the council i want to thank you so much for continuing your support for the downtown library mixed use project members of the downtown forward community organization and the friends of the library attended the presentation by the jason architects last friday and we're all thrilled the progress has been made on this project and we urge you to prove this plan the plan as was stated will increase the size of the library to 35 000 square feet and all the wonderful new housing uh for low income community members in our outdoor uh rough deck we're looking forward to having a wine and cheese event out there to enjoy the sunset and stand the crews a reduced number of parking responding to a lot of their concerns that community members had earlier downtown forward as many of you may know was formed in 2019 specifically to support the city's proposed mixed use library project this project aligns with our objectives to integrate the 21st century library affordable housing parking and transportation features and uh committing to finding a permanent home to the romers market by the way the friends of the library are also very supportive of this project we have endorsed this project previously and i'm happy to say that friends are very close to reaching the first of fundraising goal for the carfield park and the france of 40 and the autos branch libraries we're very near our mark of one million dollars and we look forward to doing our part and the heavy lifting for the downtown library uh downtown forward includes members of the friends uh housing now housing Santa Cruz friends of the Santa Cruz public libraries and the county chamber and the Santa Cruz county business council and several other organizations we want to thank you for the support that you've given to the mixed use project this as you know was started in 2020 and this is a project that actually started as was shown on the graph earlier in 2012 it's wonderful to see this coming forward and the next stages are going to bring this all closer to reality we're really thrilled by the vision uh that you the jason architect that has presented we urge you to vote to support and approve item 26 we cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that you vote to continue the momentum that began over 10 years ago thank you so much thank you okay we'll move next into our regular public comments if you do want to speak to us um you will have up to two minutes but by no means do you have to speak for two minutes we are a little bit running a little bit late this evening um you'll want to press star nine and queue up right now uh if mr hall john hall arrives um john just identify yourself and i'll give you that three minutes but i'll go ahead and start with the folks that are queued up and raffa sun infill is our first um for speaker yeah thanks very much um so i'm just speaking for myself as a resident of Santa Cruz and um i have to say that the the proposal is really beautiful um i really like that uh you know we're looking at a grand reading room with a lot of light and um i really appreciate the fact that uh we're considering uh having a modular designed parking garage that can be converted uh to other uses in the future i think that's a really important sort of future looking um possibility for the city and i hope that we commit to actually having those flat plate designed um parking structures so that in the future if we realize we don't need the parking but we can convert it into um uh offices or more affordable housing or something like that um the other thing i wanted to say is um i hope that we can consider um making the housing component of this project uh more substantial like adding more units and maybe uh even going taller um if there's any place to have uh tall housing in in our town it that seems like downtown is the place that we should do it um so i would hope at the very least that we're as tall if not taller than the other um uh buildings in the area and um you know we've had a long conversation just earlier today about um uh the idea of uh segregation in housing and um you know as proposed we're looking at a hundred percent affordable housing project you know that is in a way is segregated housing um and so i i would hope that um as we're considering how to uh add more affordable housing that we look at cross subsidization where we actually add some um marker rate units that could subsidize adding more affordable units so we actually get more total housing in the project and more affordable housing on the project thank you very much thank you next up is michael wool hi can you hear me yes we can hi so i'm a ucse student lifelong santa cruz county resident and um member of the student housing coalition um i'm just coming out in support of the project um i understand that there is significant community concern and i actually share a lot of the concerns specifically the high number of parking spots i'm really happy to see that the number of parking spots has gone down i think it can go way lower and i think we should think about going way lower considering you know the climate crisis and the fact that santa cruz is a sea level town we should be really trying to push ourselves out of cars um recognizing these concerns i do understand how severe and urgent the housing crisis is i mean just look at what happened outside of the santa cruz um government building with all at the homeless encampment by the levy that's insanely awful it's a humanitarian crisis these are our neighbors these are people who live here and we have a duty as a city to help address this housing crisis and i think rather than starting over with a whole new project we got to move forward and make this project work um to address the needs of the county because we don't have a lifetime to build more affordable housing thank you thank you next i have jim meccus good afternoon uh jim meccus here i've viewed the updated project plans last week and i have to say the design is simply stunning i'd ask you to please move forward and build it i used the old carnage library through high school and the current library through its life library should grow with the town and our town has more than double in population since the current building opened a few people claim that the trees on lock four are special i'd say they are not magnate magnolias are non-native they're invasive nuisance trees that's not just my words southern living magazine that's the sunset magazine of the south places magnolias in their dirty dozen list of quote 12 trees that will ruin your yard unquote the proposed project has more trees and greenery than today uh the provided parking in the design is vital to downtown businesses as we're losing parking lots including the one across the street from the current farmers market uh do include electric vehicle chargers in the new building i'd ask you to just approve the project it's an excellent project we need to move forward thank you very much thank you next i have lyra philippini hey lyra philippini here jason architecture is excellent providing beautiful designs for their library projects that show thoughtful incorporation of features that reflect some of the community's input but they have unfortunately been given a partially wrong task and wrong parcel to work with overall this is the right architect wrong location and the project elements are rather mixed we do need an updated 21st century library we absolutely need this very low income affordable housing we do not need the parking garage the parking consultants hired by the city in 2016 concluded that we have a surplus of parking downtown they considered projections of increased development and loss of certain surface lots and still found that downtown Santa Cruz will continue to have enough parking what we do need is better parking management today you passed a green economy resolution that includes quote a working definition of the green economy as one which is low to no carbon end quote building this garage will create a carbon debt to our environment a financial bond debt for the city worth tens of millions and it would be basically investing in carbon while you're resolving to do the opposite not for as the best locations reserve as open green event space and to be improved to be a town square or downtown commons the air scrubbing heritage trees have seen a mix of generations gathering supporting our farmers and each other for good and bad times this is the epitome of building a sense of place of building a sense of community around a shared tradition in a specific location that sense of place is on lot four and the civic library important to thousands of peoples who have frequented it over many decades please step back and consider what it really means to invest in this parking garage and that we can build a new beautiful library designed by jason architecture in its historic and cherished location we can also build the affordable housing there and or on love seven thank you thank you i mean it go out of wine here real quick i see jonah hall did arrive mr hall if you want to unmute yourself i'll go ahead and queue in you have three minutes please i just saw him now he's gone um yeah i don't see him anymore either okay okay we're going to move on to phone number ending in eight eight five three please go ahead you can unmute yourself by pressing star six please can you all hear me yes we can hey good evening may or may or is in city council members this is elizabeth matthew calling on behalf of the modern day economic partnership we support staff's recommendation to approve the updated site program and design for the library mix use project include the proposed changes and to direct staff to return to council with the preliminary library cost model based on the updated library design and site program changes we continue to express our support for the inclusion of increased sustainable affordable resilient housing and opportunities for economic and workforce development we also continue to advocate for an increase in density measures to go beyond 125 homes and encourage the council to direct staff to do the same to ensure we are maximizing affordability and sustainable land use well we have not yet officially endorsed the project we hope to continue to play a role in the development of the design and affordable housing inclusions as they continue to take shape we look forward to next steps leading to completion of this visionary project when that fulfills we'll be sure community goals of a first class downtown library permanently affordable housing and a multimodal vibrant downtown thank you all for your leadership and time thank you very much next i have don lane hi can you hear me yes we can don great thanks thank you mayor and council members i'm excited about the prospect of getting something like 125 new truly affordable housing project apartments in this in this new building in the original project as you know there were none how did this happen it's because the city and its committees and consultants have listened and adapted and i'm glad to say you didn't just adapt in terms of housing you adapted by moving toward less parking you adapted by having an even better library design you adapted by not having parking on top of the library you adapted by creating new public open space downtown these are really important and they represent the fact that you heard many different concerns and different voices in the community i think it's time to recognize that some folks will make the dubious claim that you have not listened they say that because you didn't do everything they asked but you know well that nobody in our process gets everything we compromise we find middle ground we meet multiple objectives simultaneously please move forward with this new approach and new design new homes for essential workers a great new library and a modest amount of replacement parking thanks very much thank you so much next we have joseph thompson hello my name is just thompson and i'm a student at UC Santa Cruz and i also work so much uh let's probably think of the kid back here yes we can go ahead cool perfect um yeah so i'm just thompson i'm a student at UC Santa Cruz um i would just like to thank all the council members um who voted in support of the 831 artistry project and encourage you to support this project as well you know um it's really important not only that we invest in community but especially with this library project it's not only going to be really like building upon community but making sure there's also affordable housing for it too um and you know joining my actual story about homelessness um unfortunately about three years ago um i was living on the street to my car i'm 18 years old and i actually had to leave the state of california and go live with my with some of my family all the way out in texas um just because of housing prices and the conditions there luckily i was able to apply at UC Santa Cruz and come back to city california and that is why i'm 100 passionate about fighting for affordable housing is because in most situations students graduate students and lower income folks aren't having access to affordable housing and that's one of the main reasons why we need to be looking for projects like this and expanding them and really building upon the foundation of affordable housing in the city of Santa Cruz so i urge all the city council members to really support this project because the downfalls of it are not only be like less economic value for the neighborhoods but also really hurting the overall community in regards to affordable housing the library and everything else involved in this project thanks so much thank you next i have zenin zenin there we go hi uh hi everybody my name is president of the student housing coalition and i come to you today with really appreciation for this project i also was pleasantly surprised when i went to the community meeting this past week and i just really wanted to reiterate that you know as the student columns in coalition we really support more housing for students more housing for everybody because we know it's a crisis we know that every single thing is going to help and so when it comes to this project we're really supportive of the additional units and we actually i would also uh further want to call for more units because we know that this is a crisis and everything we can do can help and i also surely agree with a lot of the climate change concerns regarding the parking and i think one interesting fact is i actually read the neil guard study and it's really interesting to look at the maps in terms of where people are actually commuting in from downtown to get downtown in their cars and about 80 percent of people are within two miles of downtown driving their cars and i think there's a really really prime opportunity to there to convert a lot of people to different transportation modes to not have this reliance on parking especially as we tackle the climate crisis and know that this kind of induction of vehicle mild travel accounts for 60 percent of our county emissions and while i completely do have sympathy for the old growth trees i really believe that we need to preserve as many trees as possible i think in this case if we could additionally secure maybe some reductions in that parking space and some more housing the carbon benefits of people being able to live near their jobs not having to commute from Watsonville every day the carbon benefits of all of these um you know preventative sprawl measures would outweigh the downfalls of removing a couple of old growth trees and so i really support the direction that this project is going and i also would encourage further reduction in parking and further increasing of affordable housing thank you very much thank you next i have kasey buyer and unmute thank you mayor and council members i sent a letter in earlier before this hearing but i just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are part of the letter one i want to give a kudos to a bonnie libskin and her staff they've been a tremendous job throughout this five-year process and number two jason architects see your team uh hit it out of the park um the community workshop presentation on december 10th unveiled the design concept that incorporates exactly what the community wants a mixed-use library an affordable housing project an adequate shared parking for downtown changes that the jason architecture went through made the project in response to public comment or spectacular they transformed the entire project bringing light green space and character to both the library and the housing units i just want to say thank you for taking the leadership incorporating the community involved from day one and i urge you to prove this project thank you thank you next we have emily ham good evening thanks for having me again my name is emily i'm the executive director of the santa cruz county business council and i just want to echo the comments of um my downtown forward colleagues particularly don lane who pointed out just how responsive the city has been to community feedback um and while opponents will continue to create moving targets in hopes of ultimately squashing the project public input um and the city's responsiveness really is the reason that we have uh this beautiful project design and site plan in front of us um the city's thoughtful and proactive approach to designing the library mixed-use project has entirely paid off and we thank you for your leadership um on this and look forward to supporting um future decisions thank you next i've got phone number ending in 8288 hello can you hear me we can yes thank you so much um i want to thank abe and katie uh for the presentation and uh thank you city council for your time city council members we are apparently now talking about a project of well over a hundred million dollars for the sake of some local perspective this is roughly one third of the city's most recent expenditure budget for a project this major this expensive and having this much impact and debt for our community for years to come it's only appropriate to let the voters decide thanks so much thank you next we have phone number ending in six five three no excuse me five three four seven hi this is Cynthia Matthews and i'm speaking as a former member of the library joint powers board a library patron and a downtown resident i'm urging you to support the recommended site program and design the sites that you have before you now represent a long robust planning process going back over 10 years we've already seen what the new renovated libraries can do to other communities in the county and the downtown branch should be the capstone for the entire system and a key attraction for downtown others have spoken to the need for housing and which i fully support but i think it's also very important in mind that a library is part of civic infrastructure and social infrastructure and that's part of what we're getting here i've lived downtown for over 50 years and one of the attractions is so much that you can do without needing a car but people do need cars and the parking really is an important feature of a commercial downtown i think as don lane and others have said the project has evolved thanks to public input in a remarkable way it's a beautiful project and i don't consider the changes compromised i consider them improvements so i'm urging you to move forward with this it's a fantastic project it will be an asset to downtown to our community for generations to come thanks thank you next is eva kim hi i'm eva i'm a third year student at uc santa cruz um and i'm a member of the student housing coalition i would like to speak in support of this project i'm really looking forward to um all community members being able to use the library space and um to touch on the parking i i agree that um with points being made that it's maybe not necessarily uh you know necessary that uh we have all this parking space but i appreciate that uh the design uh has considered um how we how that this building and that that parking space may be used for different purposes and how that building may evolve as we can better assess uh what the needs are uh for parking as as people move in and as that space is being used and so just to reiterate i am uh i'm speaking in support of this project and i hope that uh the council will vote to approve thank you thank you next i have ryan meckel i'm ryan meckel i work at uc santa cruz and i live near downtown i just wanted to emphasize um the location of this project it's in a great location oh and before i begin i also want to say thank you for the great presentation the design looks phenomenal um but this isn't a great location it's right in the heart of downtown a block away from our transit center right in the middle of pacific avenue i think this is a great location for the town to be bold and be brave and show what santa cruz really cares about here i think we should push for more housing and less parking and enable the people who are going to live in this space micromo the access to micromobility you know bike sharing car sharing access to the transit center things like this uh to set an example for what santa cruz really does care about um which i would hope is you know our community our neighbors our environments things like this is what santa cruz to me is all about and i want this project to represent that i think the library does a great job of this with how it's designed with the green space with the light with the openness and i would love to see the housing reflect that as well so i love this project i hope to see it move forward just with a bit more housing and a lot less parking thank you thank you next i have phone number ending in seven four nine six good evening can you hear me yes we can all right my name is matt ferrell i'm the chair of the downtown commission and i'd just like to make a few comments on parking and also uh because that's the charge of the downtown commission just divides council on this and parking issues downtown and then secondly talk about some critical features of the project beyond the parking i want to remind council that the downtown commission has consistently supported this mixed use project as it evolves as it has evolved and that um this project will not only serve neighboring businesses but it will serve three affordable housing projects with in a block to two blocks of it those projects being pacific station north pacific station south which are next to the transit center and the calvary church project and all three developers of the affordable housing projects on those sites have expressed the concern about parking for their employees and customers so this project is making it possible for developers of affordable housing downtown to fill the property footprint with affordable housing because they can rely on shared parking at this location so it's a benefit that really makes it easier for affordable housing developers to move forward with confidence that they will have places to serve their customers and their employees secondly i just like to say that this project responds very well to the council direction that was given the last time of concern thank you thank you so much and i've gotten garrant as our last caller tonight okay um you know i don't really have too much to say other than i don't think you did a very good job of really analyzing and and being transparent with the public about the the value that you got for selling you know public aerospace divided by the number of people that you're actually benefiting and but i simple math would say the more people in that equation then the better the value so i i i like that idea and it is a beautiful design and uh but that's all i have to say about that thank you okay we got two more folks and then we'll call that uh we have phone number any and five three six two we're running very late so we're gonna i'm gonna call it on folks now five three six two please uh good evening this is judy grunstra librarian um i've got questions and i've also got comments i don't know which one should go first uh question what happened to the total fitness space um question how are where's this 20 million dollar is going to come from for the garage are we in fact subsidizing you know more parking for these you know people other people as well as community parking another uh where's this 49 million dollar is going to come from for the housing how can we be assured that that's going to show up um and the eight million dollar gap between the measure s funds and what the library is going to cost where's that going to come from uh yes the friends are good at raising money but but they can be able to raise that much money uh and let's see what so uh basically it's heartbreaking to think that we're gonna lose this opportunity to have a beautiful town commons on parking lot four you know we're gonna look back and see boy that was a mistake because that is the last great space downtown an increasingly intensified town um you know farmers market be there could be a lovely place for events and I would say that Abe Jason has produced a beautiful renovation uh uh plan also as a renovation of the existing library people don't seem to realize that could be a really beautiful space too with outdoor space all new hvac all new systems 21st century library blah blah blah that could be all in the renovation we don't need to destroy that building I'm just roughed you know the entire footprint of downtown yes change is inevitable but it's got to be wide change thank you thank you next I have phone number ending in 0193 and then I have Zach Davis and then we'll be done good evening my name is Henry Hooker and I really appreciate the council's taking the time to listen to everybody and I'm happy to be the last person and I'll take as little of your time as possible I love this new project looking at something that has several features that I just like to highlight one is that we're looking only at a concept a concept that evolved and will continue to do so as we move into actual design it will only improve the love that the housing is virtually a separate building with its own open space on top of the parking podium providing affordable homes for families and people of all sizes descriptions and allowing people to live where they near where they work we should look as possible at more housing on this site I like the fact that the parking space has flat floor plates designed with repurposing mind and we point out that there are currently projects in progress elsewhere that demonstrate the potential of turning such parking structures to other uses including housing library has its own identity with a two-story modern daily facility replacing an outmodable an essential feature for many folks who rely on the library is that there's no need to find a temporary home while the old one is being remodeled finally a look at the schedule for this project shows how much time and community effort has already gone into this project long imagine how long it would take start the process all over again to achieve on some undesignated site what we have in front of us now I'm hoping that the council will move forward with this project this evening great opportunity thank you thank you very much and last speaker tonight or last public comment will be from Zachary Davis thank you very much Zachary Davis I've had the the pleasure of this council for 10 years on the downtown commission vice chair of the downtown association board of directors but I'm speaking tonight as a downtown business owner a vendor at the farmer's market familiar with this project going back a long time I just hope you are all as excited about this project as I am it's beautiful when I saw the presentation last week I felt that this is the project for the present and for the future got the housing that we all desperately need that parking that will allow for more affordable housing development downtown EV capacity the ability for people to visit the central branch from all over our county and and how place to park it that's how they get here and it is an absolutely beautiful naturally lit inviting library fast outdoor space I wrote my business plan at our current library I would want my new business in our downtown to be next to this library you know we had a we had a library a hundred years ago in our downtown at the current site and it was torn down to build a new library we understand that as a community our our existing civic infrastructure at times outlives its life and new and better development provide for our community and and this is absolutely the project that meets the needs of of the present and the future and I'm just really excited about it I hope you all are too thanks so much thank you okay I'll bring this back to the council now I see that there is a council member walk-ins please yeah thank you mayor and yeah thank you to all the community members who spoke on this item and obviously to our staff and our consultants I have been on the council and this has come before us many times in different iterations and I'm just really pleased to see where we are today I think it really incorporates a process that is inclusive and reflective of various input and compromise and it was what I was speaking to in terms of I think the ideal process moving forward in these types of big decisions that we make I also appreciate the 100 affordable housing amongst our downtown where we want to see this type of housing and amongst like buildings so it doesn't stand out but ultimately what I am encouraged and excited about is a beautiful library and a community hub in the future and the design is really just remarkable so it's my pleasure to at this time move the staff recommendation I'm happy to read that just to make sure we're clear and the motion is to approve the updated site program and design for the library mixed use project to include the following changes one an increase in affordable housing units from a minimum to 50 a minimum of 50 to a minimum range of between 100 and 125 units to a decrease in the parking count from 400 to 310 parking stalls three program expansion to include an on-site daycare facility and four library design changes to include a two-story library facing cedar and Lincoln streets with the green roof and adjacent roof deck and other design elements as presented by the master library architect and rec staff to return to council with a preliminary library cost model based on the updated library design and site program changes so that's the motion that's the motion that was not for us and with appreciation I'm happy to move it and I'll second that motion and we'll continue with council comments and deliberation councilmember Cummings thank you mayor and I just want to say we'll express my appreciation staff and everyone who's really helped bringing forward what's before us today it's been mentioned we're not going to go into too much depth but there's been a lot of community input on this and this project I feel like really tried to strike the balance and continues to you know address some of the concerns that have been brought up you know initially when I was campaigning what I had heard that was going on this site was a six-story parking garage 600 you know new units kind of on top of a library and you know we've heard from the community about their concerns with the parking need for more affordable housing and what's before us today I feel like it's a really it's a big improvement as was what was mentioned before and what we have is you know a site where we mean it's an improvement from even when the subcommittee made its recommendations we're going from 50 to a minimum of 100 to 125 affordable units um we have increased the amount of green space on that site so it's not just a parking lot we have um we're you know going to get a beautiful lot library out of this we're also going to meet some of the parking man and you know to be quite frank I remember people who were saying we want no net new parking in the parking structure and we're not going to have any net new parking in downtown um and so you know I feel like we've the the staff and the council has worked really well with the community to meet their needs and I'm just I'm supporting this recommendation I did have a couple of friendly amendments I wanted to make on this project based on some of the feedback that I heard a couple of them uh are to address some potential legal issues and so and then also I think the other one is in line with the staff recommendation and Bonnie I'm wondering if you could put the either the staff recommendation or the recommendation because I was prepared to make a motion as well and change some language but the change would be to change from the staff recommendation approved to accept and the reason why is that I had heard from some community members that in other cities where they had approved designs for projects that they were contested because of the fact that this hasn't gone through SQL yet and then it's a it's a pre-approval of a project that hasn't gone through SQL design review so accepting the recommendations would allow us to move forward in that way but we wouldn't be approving the project until after it went through SQL review and came back and so that was a concern that was brought up I ran it by Tony and staff and they agreed that that was a fine compromise in terms of language and semantics the I think staff had the cost that they were going to bring back the preliminary cost model and that was part of the language I was bringing forward as well people were interested in learning more about how the measure S funds are going to be spent and then the the the last part that would be the friendly amendment would be direct staff to work with Jason architect to ensure the program in design is in compliance with the requirement of the city council's heritage tree resolution number NS 23710 and to fully evaluate with a certified arborist and developer and the developer whether any of the heritage trees can be included in the final project make every effort to include the trees were feasible and I think staff had brought that up but really just making sure that we don't get to a point where um but one that we're in compliance with our own ordinance because it would be detrimental to move forward to a point and then be faced with a lawsuit where the city was not in compliance with one of its own ordinances so those are friendly amendments largely changing approved to accept adding the information around for the direction around the heritage tree ordinance and I think that's it I would look to the motion maker who works by entities um the amendment from approved to accept why is that again I don't understand that because the the discussions I had was that by saying you're approving the design of this project and you're approving um if you're approving the design of this project then you're technically the project hasn't gone through CQ yet and so it could be construed as a pre-approval of the project and other in other jurisdictions when this has happened there have been lawsuits that have been filed saying to seek that the the cities or the jurisdictions had approved a project that had not gone through CQA and so as a result um we're not in compliance with that kind of review process um is that true on terms of uh our city attorney or other staff who have done this before I don't I don't know whether or not that's I I did speak with councilmember Cummings before the meeting and I think out of an abundance of caution that's not a bad idea and it also doesn't change the effect of the motion as far as the direction that's being given to staff so I don't have a problem with it from a legal perspective okay okay I'm I'm happy to accept that um in regards to the uh cost model I I read the uh motion to incorporate an updated um kind of uh preliminary cost model so I don't know if this needs to be really that number two doesn't need to be in there okay so let's go ahead remove that one um and then in terms of the heritage trees I I guess I'd look to staff to understand sort of what was already considered or where you're out with this and in general um have a chance to respond you know Tony you might want to weigh in on this as well I I think in in looking at the resolution and the criterion expanded just this exhibit at A I think the the one area that um you know we'll we will come back to you and discuss is let's see one C3 which says a construction project design um cannot be altered to accommodate existing heritage trees or heritage trucks I think right now we don't know the answer to that but as I indicated earlier in the meeting we cannot design and build the project with the number of affordable housing units that you saw today and include every heritage tree that's not possible so I I know that there are members of the community who have interpreted this language to mean that we can't remove a single heritage tree I don't think that's staff interpretation um but I I want to be as clear as I as I can be now I when I look at the language of that I don't want there to be an ambiguity of expectations from what the community is expecting and what staff's interpreting so Tony I don't know if you want to add to that no I think that's that's right um the the heritage tree ordinance does provide a mechanism for removal of heritage trees under certain circumstances if it would if the not doing so would render the project infeasible so those are findings that the city council would have to make in order to move the project forward and authorize the removal of heritage trees and incorporate mitigation measures into the project to offset the the loss of the trees so if I'm hearing you correctly it's sort of incorporated into our overall city approach to how to handle this type of um issue in regards to the heritage tree uh policy as well as the trade off potentially for this type of project to proceed so isn't necessarily needed to be a component is that correct that's right okay well in that case I won't accept that either since it's inferred and I'm I welcome the second year if it's don't I think yeah it sounds like yeah I'm happy with I accept number one as well yeah my understanding yeah is the second one is inferred as well and and I think Bonnie mentioned that they would be doing that work with the uh two arborists sound like very soon all right mayor can I just confirm you guys are accepting one and not two or neither of them we're we're accepting one and not two thanks uh council member brown um yeah I just I guess I'm wondering if so oh as I understand it part because I received a request to uh raise the heritage tree item as well and my sense was that the wanting to do that was because of a concern that this had already been directed and um the community thought that they had some assurance that that was going to be part of the conversation and then it thus far has not been and so this would just kind of memorialize that it's happening so um that just I understand that you're not inclined to accept it but that was the rationale for doing it even if it seems to be a bit redundant um just for what it's worth um I have some comments um are if we're heading towards vote I'll make them now and unless we have more to do on the motion no I'm happy to have comments now um I have a clarification on the motion okay um Bonnie it says uh vice mayor instead of mayor at the bottom there so if that could be um corrected council member Watkins and mayor Myers thank you thanks yeah go ahead uh stand here with your comments please please go ahead thanks um okay I'll be brief I um I'm I'm fine I'm having an internal struggle here a really really significant one um because I I do believe I agree with a lot of the comments that have been made here about the um kind of evolution of this project um when I first came to the council this what I saw in the city manager's office was a big six-story box with the library on the first floor and the rest parking and I remember thinking on that like third day that I was finally at city hall and I thinking can we have a green room for least on the top of this thing if it's gonna happen um and it was kind of laughed off I mean not by anybody here but some folks who were involved in early conversations and here we are and it's like that's gonna happen and um you know and I think that it has you know the new design has is very responsive to uh a lot of the community concerns and um you know and I like it and I'm I'm excited about the possibilities and I also recognize that there is a large swath of our community that is really really upset about the decision to use this particular lot for this project um and so you know and their their voices are are heard and not really incorporated into the conversation and that level of frustration has led us to this place um that I think is you know it's an unfortunate one to be making this kind of major decision about you know probably the biggest project the city will will do certainly in most of our lifetimes and um and so and I feel like those voices need to be heard um or at least represented on this body um I didn't support the library garage um I was involved in conversations to improve the design and the model and I'm I'm glad to have been involved in those conversations um and I look forward to uh what you know the the magic that even Katie and Jason and Katie Spencer have been able you know what they're gonna do here and what our community will do as we move forward and um at the same time I feel like I I I need to represent I this is a voice that needs to be represented here um people are very frustrated and um you know this isn't gonna end here and we have um you know pretty consistently and if anybody wants to challenge me on this I'll send you my spreadsheet received um at least during my time on the council um the messaging has been has run about two to one in opposition the messages that we receive so it's not just a small group of people um this is a community concern that I think should be taken seriously um and so I'm I'm gonna be voting no at the same time that I'm really happy to see what I'm seeing so it's it's it's hard to do um but uh I just wanted to say that uh to to be clear about where I'm at right now thank you council member I advice me a breeder next my hand was still up but I do have um comments and um this project and the history of it um predates my my time with with council um but thank you to the website up on the city website that has outlined kind of the the road to this point today and um you know it's always it's always good to hear and important to hear everyone's in the community and and their perspective on an impact of something and with this project there are clearly I think we're all in agreement a lot of positive impacts and um as council member brown has brought up there are community members that only want to see this site for an open space um um plaza type location and um you know and I did bring up that question earlier about the ballot measure um that had that initiative that has started and what that means with this project um and so I think you know we have to look at the investment into our community and um the overall um options that this design uh brings and and the open spaces this brings um and the working with the front farmers market to um find a location that um can really benefit them as well and um I don't think anything is um ruled out in terms of alternatives and um there are alternatives that we can start working towards and I know that some efforts have have been started in that um goal and the old library site there have been um some community engagement that has begun um as an example for potential farmers market location and civic center um area um potential more housing um we're really um I think it's it's it's a good step forward for us to be thinking of the overall investment that this this design and project it has brought to this point and the housing and the library we can't get that from the current location and from everything we've learned to this point um it's really um a wonderful investment into our our our main branch library system and to our community members that I know all use the amenities and and everything that the library will bring to this location I think it's a it's a bigger benefit so um I will be supporting this motion thank you great thank you vice mayor I'm going to cue myself in your council member coming did you have additional comments I just had a quick follow-up clarification because I didn't get to you after the um I made those from the amendments okay so just just for clarification with the staff because I want to you know be clear when I go back to talk to members of the public um so city is since the front of the amendment uh was not accepted I just want to be clear that the city is going to be um following the rules that have been set out in our heritage tree ordinance is that is that true I mean I guess to take that on so we are going to be doing the analysis I mentioned earlier we'll come back to council with some options um for you to consider um that's consistent with our ordinance and if we um you know have determined based on the analysis you know what could be feasible what not be feasible that would be a future council action for you to consider okay thank you I just wanted to make sure that that was clearly stated so the community members are clear about you know the city is going to be um following a heritage tree ordinance and if any decision needs to be made that'll be coming back to the council so thank you great any other comments by council members um I'll just also just briefly say that um I just want to thank Abe and Katie and your team um yeah I'm just I'm kind of floored by what you guys have come up with um and I especially enjoyed Abe listening you described to your uh you know your palette your uh the things that make you think about what to do with the you know a civic building as important as a brand new library you know that's going to last another 50 to 60 years um and I I think that not only did you inherently capture Santa Cruz in the way you thought about that but you know you also just created uh just I mean this building is a game changer in Santa Cruz I mean I'll just put it put it out there that that bluntly um we have not seen this level of creativity and quality of architecture in our town probably in decades and um so I I love that you have challenged yourself and I really respect the process that you've gone through to really acknowledge and try to understand what the community is really you know seeking as well as um also challenging our community to say yes to something you know to say yes to something this foundational in terms of an investment into our future generations and our future families and you know I just want to congratulate you I have zero hesitation voting yes on this motion this is what government is meant to do this is what we should be doing it's challenging ourselves to create a great and wonderful thing for future generations we're paying these taxes we've been paying them for a long time I see them every every every two months or every six months there they are and our community has stepped up and invested in the two libraries in the in the city already they're excited um other libraries capitol a la celda felton are gorgeous they're full of people um and kids and families sitting in these amazing little places reading books and there's beautiful playgrounds out front and people are enlivened in those spaces and I know we can do the same here in downtown santa cruz so I have zero hesitation um and and I acknowledge people who have struggled with this for many many years but um I'm a big yes on this I always have been from day one and um I'm just excited that I think you have captured the spirit of santa cruz in this building and um and I'm really really proud to um to vote yes on this tonight and give you that direction to keep going so with that that I will go ahead and ask for a roll call vote bonnie want to member rewattkin hi calentary johnson hi no holder hi face mayor bruner and mayor byrne hi that motion passes six in favor and wanted pardon me one against thank you abe and katie and we wish you all the best to have a happy holiday and thank you bonnie lips come in your team too I know you guys have been working hard on this we will go ahead um we are approximately two hours late so we're going to be moving into a late late meeting this evening uh we have three more items to go uh we have next up item number 27 which is the children and youth bill of rights and support for the youth action network for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of the item by the council members who brought the item forward followed by questions from the council we will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action so for presenters tonight I have a council member calentary johnson council member golder and council member walkins I'll turn it over to you guys thank you mayor um okay just take a moment and breathe and stretch with that so it's a little chilly too yes um but I'm really really thrilled to bring this item forward with my colleagues council members boulder and walkins um you know I'll just give a little brief intro and uh and then we'll jump into the presentation so you know we even though children are a part of each and every one of our lives in some way or another it's not uncommon for government at all levels to not prioritize children and youth um we just saw this week the surgeon general just just released a report on youth mental health and um there's a lot that he goes into but he really urges us to act differently and proceed differently um at all levels of government when it comes to youth and children so we have a brief presentation for you um we have some other speakers as well actually that I'm going to introduce um Anushka Shah who is a UCSC student uh Robert Acosta with our parks and rec department Amanda Gambon with united way and youth action network so and that's the order of the presentation and then myself and council members boulders and walkins will um we'll close it up so with that I'm going to pass it to Anushka and if we can proceed to the next slide one my name is Anushka Shah I'm a 30-year student at UC Santa Cruz and I've been working with council member Contari Johnson on the Children and Youth Bill of Rights project so in my experience I've seen my peers and I observe throughout our schooling and even college experience adults making decisions that directly affect us without our perspectives and opinions being taken into account we weren't allowed to vote in a lot of the issues and many of the times we just didn't have time to go to our local government meetings or even city council meetings to voice our perspectives and suggestions because of school and other work so I understand why it is so crucial for adults and governments to gather and prioritize youth children voices in other ways when making decisions that especially affect them in Santa Cruz children and youth account for more than 18.5 percent of the Santa Cruz population and national data continues to suggest that we consistently fail at investing into issues that affect our children and youth the national center for health statistics suggests that there were more than 6600 deaths by suicide amongst the ages of 10 to 24 in 2020 and mental health is a Santa Cruz issue as well 31 percent of Santa Cruz County children that participated in a survey said that they had feelings of chronic depression in the previous 12 months there are so many other issues such as poverty homelessness food insecurity affordable health care violence substance abuse that we must focus on for our children and youth and these issues just go to show how vital it is to keep young young people at the forefront of budgeting and policy decisions and any other initiatives that we support and especially we must protect and prioritize the most vulnerable members of our community the groups such as racial minorities lgbtqp and even children from low income families that are at an even greater disadvantage this is where the children and youth rights come in California at a state level as well as more than six jurisdictions in california have adopted a form of this framework and even operationalized the rights that they have listed in their bill of rights i hope to see our city do the same thing so that we can emphasize the rights of children and youth that are listed in our bill of rights and start to prioritize them within all city budget and budgeting and policy decisions that we make and i hope to also see more of our children and youths being voices being heard and incorporated when making decisions about them thank you so much and i'll be passing it on to robert now thank you and it's good thank you city council for the opportunity it's always a pleasure to speak with you um one thing i'll notice as you look one thing you'll notice as you look through the children's bill of rights one thing we realize is that every department in the city already kind of does some work that falls into within the children's bill of rights um one one example for example we provide jobs and volunteer opportunities for youth in the community however we can't do it without human resources doing their part and that's just one of the many examples of people who um of people in this city doing their their part to to make sure that the children um in this community are are well taken care of um you know we we have a lot of parks and facilities and and places that people use to benefit use some of them are indirect for example there'll be a board meeting for little league at the clubhouse or something like that but the kids will benefit eventually because they're planning things for you um as you know we have volleyball in our beaches we have baseball games in the hardy west park soccer classes at daylight vega games at depot there's a lot of stuff that we are doing already for the youth of this community one of the aspects of the children's bill of rights is to ensure that youth have a healthy mind body and spirit and one way to get that done is using our well-known outdoor spaces we are known for skating and biking there is a company company's called Santa Cruz youth are wearing the Santa Cruz name all over the world um and the things that we do don't always have to be organized we have great places for kids to gather and play um another aspect from the children's bill of rights is access to quality education now we're not educators here in parks and rec but we do have a working relationship with county office of education to get a discounted lease to cover the educational to cover excuse me to cover the educational section of the children's bill of rights county office uses space at harvey west park in the kids cottage and they use the space here at the london melson community center and in the past they have used the teen center as a place for alternative education as well some some of the things that we also do are done by the civic auditorium you know dad's club basketball tournament just ended we do fashion teens which is helpful for the healthy mind body and spirit we do the nutcrackers so families can go out and and see this presentation in their graduation mission hill that has graduated there before and there are many things that happen at the civic to make sure that youth are taken care of additionally here at london melson center we have junior theater youth theater we have classes for youth and you can go to the next slide thanks um we have classes for youth we have events like our frosty fun fast halloween events and even things that aren't specifically dedicated to youth like our juneteenth event it's for all ages but it's welcoming to the youth of the community another thing here at the london melson center is is something near and dear to my heart is our teen center and as i was looking through the children's bill of rights we we are art of nine of the ten items in the in the children's bill of rights we have adult mentors we have safe spaces for the teens when to come where it's tough just to be a teenager as we all remember and those of us are seeing in our own families it's tough to be a teenager we currently do circles which is where we get together with the youth and we give them a space to express themselves and and there's some of our gender so specific some of them are all genders but it is something that has really taught our kids to open up and just be themselves another thing that we are very proud of is our teen intern program i think many people on this call have benefited from our teen intern program which hires children teens who are in school to then intern in different parts of the city and many of these interns have gone on to become city employees outside of the intern program um another thing i want to talk about is the recreation programs that we provide that help the healthy mind body and spirit we have our well known junior guard and lower guard program and summer we have our summer camps we have classes and sports fitness dance art and everything and then we do city-wide events including our 13 days of halloween on the war and family events where everyone is welcome like our clan chatter um one of the other couple things i want to mention is our volunteer opportunities for youth we have our captain corps program that works with our junior leader our junior leader program captain corps program works with our junior guard program and then our junior leader program which works with our summer camps program and again many of these volunteers eventually become employees which is only is a benefit to them and then the last thing is you know we have job opportunities as i mentioned earlier starting at 15 and a half you can be hired to work in our summer camps junior guards summer trails crew in our sports leagues and kind of everything that the parks and recreation department does so we are very proud of what we're already doing for the children's bill of rights and what we're going to do in the future and i look forward to the opportunity down the road to uh to be able to talk to you guys about the state of youth and what and what is what is going on with them so thank you for your time and um i will pass it on to the next person thanks Robert hi everyone my name is Amanda Gamban i am the coordinator for the youth action network which is the community impact initiative the united way we're also formally known as youth violence prevention network and we're composed of youth and adults working together to identify emerging needs within our community and to increase overall youth well-being through youth voice and youth leadership we're very excited about this bill because it's directly aligned with our goals which are youth adult partnerships youth voice and youth leadership development and really just increasing all of those putting youth at the center and making sure that their voices are being heard so we're excited that the city's taking need and prioritizing overall youth health being by partnering with youth in the community and our hope is that this is just a starting point and that other cities and the county will work to create something similar to these youth children and youth bill rights if this bill is passed we look forward to working and partnering with the city and operationalizing these goals with youth at the center and then i'm going to go ahead over to our next slide and in this next slide i'm going to be sharing with you all why youth voice and youth leadership is important to youth themselves unfortunately we like to acknowledge that a lot of our students that we work with are unable to make it to this meeting at this time because it's a busy time of year it's final week for most of our students but i'm going to be sharing on behalf of them today so we have some quotes from our steering committee members that have been working closely with about what youth voice means to them and in the center we have a wonderful word cloud of the prep session that we had last week of what youth are looking forward to with this youth children and youth bill rights and i'm going to read a brief speech by one of our co-chairs Malia who is a high school student about what this means to her she wanted to speak today but isn't able to make it so we go ahead and leave that for you all youth voice and youth leadership is important to me because i believe youth should have a say so and what is happening in the community and we youth should have a say so and what solutions are going to be used to resolve these problems i also believe it's time for youth voices to be more heard and to be put into action as well youth leadership is important to me because it gives us a chance to lead something where adults are following along and helping us along the way and a chance for us to show what we believe in and to make a difference in the world both youth voice and youth leadership is important to me because youth come out and speak their minds speak their opinions without someone without feeling like somebody out there is going to shut them down when youth work together we use each other as an anchor we support and stabilize each other to fight for social justice racial equality and use each other to fight for what's right for all people all i can say is i believe if all of us use and adults work together we can make wonders happen in this world but we can't make wonders happen on our own so we can do it together hand in hand so we're really looking forward to incorporating more youth voices and more youth from across uh the family who's city area and making sure that they um are able to contribute to local decision making within the city so we're very excited about the opportunity um and what this will look like for youth and community moving forward and i'll go ahead and pass it over to uh shabra actually rene go ahead okay so we wanted to get um uh from the kids mouths the youth themselves what what what would help them feel um important and what would be um ways that they want to be involved in the community i don't know if we can go to the next slide so we made a jam board that we sent out to different groups and different um groups like um the youth action network the the teen center the the social studies classes at harbour and santa christ high school were able to add virtual post-its on their all about things that they thought would be beneficial from their perspective and so i just think that this is such a tremendous opportunity to really put kind of our money where our mouth is um as a as a council and invest in the future leaders of santa cruz and really putting um these pro social activities at the forefront of every decision that we make um for our kids and for our council i'm just going to keep it brief in the interest of time and i'm passing it on to martin right i'm happy to take it from here no problem so if we could go to the next slide um i too for me the interest of time won't read these but you know in the agenda report what you'll see is we have a number of statements uh you know ranging from employment opportunity increasing uh freedom from mistreatment leadership uh support and beyond and these are the bill of rights that are incorporated into the agenda report they're half of them and bonnie if you could go to the next slide and these are the other half which you know in terms of these values and statements we have uh committed and what we're proposing is committing to incorporating those into every aspect of our work and our hope is that every youth will be able to be thriving and healthy in our community and be engaged throughout and i want to think at this time the youth who participated uh in providing input and feedback and our various community partners uh who have helped shape where we are today and helped formulate the bill of rights um and these are the final five and then i'll have uh you go bonnie to the next slide please and essentially what we're asking is how do we put this into action a lot of this is actually kind of incorporated into the motion language and recommendations of the agenda report and essentially what we're saying is how can we kind of put our money where our mouth is how do we uh operationalize this work and that looks like having our council and staff appointed to uh the yen or other youth focused initiatives because having our youth being consulted on policy work and issues um youth voice and its involvement in the climate action plan which as a result of a lot of these conversations is already happening we talked about participation in leadership development through uh stipends for youth which is best practice and an annual presentation to the council on the state of youth in santa cruz and a lot of this work is actually already generated conversation i know councilmember calentary johnson was in communications with our law enforcement about addressing commercial exploitation of dildren through law enforcement training and that i believe is underway already as a result of these conversations happening um next slide please and so essentially what we're um what we're kind of looking like is ultimately just really youth well-being which you see on the slide is sort of standing out in bold that looks like uh many things from leadership to meaningful participation in government um and connectedness overall to our city and a sense that as adults that we value our youth opinion and as a result we'll hopefully also get some interested civic leaders who could be future council members and mayors and beyond but ultimately a incredible population that we want to hear their voice um throughout all the work we do so i'll hand it back over to uh councilmember calentary johnson thank you um so we can go to the next slide um so that to really to demonstrate that this is really important to young people as rename and or councilmember golder mentioned um we we went to youth and we heard from them and and one of the things that that i consistently have heard over the years and and was reiterated again through um these engagement efforts is that we need to go to youth we can't keep expecting them to show up on our schedule you know on finals week a couple hours later than what we said time the time that we gave them you know we need to go to youth we need to go to their spaces we need to hear them um so so we've heard that and that's part of what we've integrated into the operationalizing of the bill of rights um so this youth said investing youth is important to me because it affects me personally as i myself from the youth and it would benefit my younger sisters in the future thank you for prioritizing youth and investing in all of our futures and that is what this is about um i do want to read just one more quote from the surgeon general's report and if anyone um is interested i would really recommend that you look at that report the youth mental health report uh so dr murthy says this is the moment to demand changed with our voices and with our actions only when we do will we be able to protect to strengthen and support the health and safety of all children adolescents and young adults and ensure everyone has a platform to thrive and so as council members as um city staff as community partners like united way and friend and at life um as youth advocates we are responding to this call to action and we're asking the city to prioritize children and youth in this way through the city's bill of rights um you all have a a grid in your agenda packet that shows again how we're doing it already and some of the ways that we could expand on it so i think with that we'll pause and see if there are any questions are there any questions from council members at this time not seeing any um i'm going to go ahead and take this item out to the public for public comment then and uh we'll go ahead and allow um the public to speak um for two minutes on the item and i see David David Brody has his hand up welcome yes thank you can you hear me yes we can great thank you good evening mayor mires and council members um again my name is david brody i'm the executive director of first five santa cruz county and as you might expect i'm here to speak in strong support of your council's action to support the youth action network and adopt and promote this children's youth bill children youth bill of rights um as well as the important related actions including your direction to staff to provide an annual report on the state of youth in santa cruz i think that's just wonderful um you know in addition to the weld laid out case that was included in your council's report um uh and the record i'd like to thank you for your recognition in particular of your inclusion of young children in this action but i'd also like to focus as others have tonight for a moment um including annushka and council member kauntari johnson um on youth mental health in particular uh and as the council member stated the um the surgeon general's recent national health advisory is really a wake-up call for all of us just a few statistics you may or may not have heard already um in 2019 uh one in three high school students and half half of all female students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness which is an increase of 40 percent since 22 since 2009 and that same period the percentage of kids seriously considering suicide or attempting suicide increased by 36 percent those making a plan increased by 44 percent it is just devastating to hear those numbers and to think about our kids um and and you all know that since the pandemic began rates of psychological distress you know have only increased and and as admiral murphy states another quote that i loved in addition to the land that council member kauntari johnson shared this isn't an issue we can fix overnight or with a single prescription ensuring healthy children and families will take in all of society effort including policy institutional and individual changes sorry i'm almost done um and how we prioritize youth mental health so i would argue in closing that this action by your council is exactly the type of all of society effort that our youths desperately need and so i'm here again tonight to speak in unqualified support for this item and sincerely thank each of you for once again standing up for the youth of our community uh and to the united way and to the united way staff and youth um thank you sincerely for your leadership thank you very much thank you i think i have another attendee in the audience that would like to speak to more uh nor hawkman go ahead please thank you can you hear me okay yes we can thank you thank you i i have two issues to raise one is is the two thousand dollars the city council is allotting to a youth uh uh commission evidence of the commitment because that seems like very little money and i'm not sure that small amount of money would be allocated to an adult commission and the second question i have is is the city council going to do anything about the number of young people that are sliding away in the flood at the san lorenzo benchland thank you thank you and garrett you're next yes um i don't have much to say but i i do think that children uh nobody speaks for them uh you know they they have silent voices and uh you know a lot through and including like uh the border crisis is really you know just an open invitation for pedophiles to take advantage of of children coming across the border and no one speaks for them and as to your idea i don't know much about it but i i do have strong feelings about the government keeping their hands off of children in some ways such as in public schools certain things they teach and when you have a mention of health and all policies you know i disagree with that as an ideology and i think you can keep that out of it otherwise you know yes support children give them a voice thank you and i will go ahead and call on uh council member callantari johnson did you want to have do you have clarification i know there was a question um and around the funding i don't know if you want to respond to that and then councilman comings i'll go to your go to you and then council member walken sure i also wanted to present our motion um the two thousand dollars not for a youth commission we're not quite there yet it's to support uh a youth who would be designated liaison and working with city council and we came up with that stipend amount working really closely with united way and youth action network who have a lot of experience and expertise and have done a lot of research on compensating youth for their participation and and work um in youth adult partnership and and i did have a slide with a motion to present okay great i'm sorry councilman comings did you have questions no i had in my hand because i was going to move the item um so i had i was just going to say that i had my hand first do you mind seconding it then or i i think council member callantari john sorry i bought going on so uh i don't know how to read this will you second the motion she's in the middle of making the motion so if if uh if bonnie you wouldn't mind putting the slide up um we just put together a slide that articulates the motion that was in the agenda report and and i can also read it and that's a motion to adopt the resolution supporting the newly formed youth action network um adopt and promote the children and youth bill of rights direct the mayor to appoint a council member and staff person to participate in the youth action network and set aside two thousand dollars annually for youth participation and leadership development stipends develop metrics aligned with health and all policies to measure success direct staff to return with an annual presentation outlining the state of youth and Santa Cruz thank you so i have a motion and council member comings did you want to second that i'll go ahead and second it with um one amendment which would be to set aside the 2000 annually from the cannabis children's fund for youth participation and leadership leadership development stipends so you know we have this fund we just think the voters just agree to increase it and some of the questions i had um when the um when the election was taking place was you know what has the fund been used for and i think this would be a really good um you know program to have that fund support council member comings if i may um the committee that worked on this has discussed this and it's certainly going to be part of the exploration but we are still develop an advisory committee for the children's fund so it seems premature to um designate what it will be used for when the advisory committee that will be made up of members of the community hasn't been formed yet so um we'll we'll explore that this 2000 comes out of that but we're not there yet because we don't we don't have an advisory committee for the children's fund just yet then i guess my question i think a lot of people are going to be wanting to know where's this money going to come from and i mean it seems like you know a program that supports children i mean this could be absolutely and that's that's going to be our recommendation to the advisory committee um but we can't speak for the advisory committee just yet that will be our recommendation to the advisory committee that we allocate two thousand dollars for these purposes i'm wondering if a um possible way to remedy this is to say uh requested amendment number four the motion to recommend setting aside two thousand from the cannabis children's fund with that remedy that yeah we could do that trying to acknowledge sort of where you are in your process okay and then i do have another question related to this which is um when would this kind of terrible who that was okay keep going council member i'm just curious when this would take effect as well like when when do we anticipate this um this program to like start i believe with the passage of the with the passage of the resolution this evening these items would be start to be acted upon but i'll look to council members or staff that's correct i guess i'll just well i said the floor i'll just um you know thank council members for bringing this forward and one to acknowledge i think it was council member Watkins that mentioned um that yeah like you know there's a lot of stuff that's been happening bringing in youth voices to the conversation and really engaging elected officials with uh the concerns of youth um council member Watkins and i i remember back in 2019 went to give a mock city council meeting at i think it was westlake school and one of the things that came out of that was a recommendation that we display the lgbtq and trans flags outside of city hall and not only did we do that and working with mayor mires um who at the time is council member mires um but not only did we that all three of us worked on bringing that forward last year we kind of we codified that into um uh city policy where every year for lgbtq month we'll be displaying the rainbow and trans flags outside of city hall and that's just one example i think of how we've been able to amplify the desires of youth and their voices in decision making and i just want to also thank all the teachers who invited city council members to come speak to their classes i've spoken with many of many of the council members who are here have spoken to classes and talked to them about local government and their concerns and i will say that is a really good way for us to be able to hear the voices of youth and to be able to try to see how we can bring um their you know requests forward whether it's you know displaying certain flags outside of city hall or addressing you know the number of garbage cans are at our beaches i think these are great opportunities for us to hear from um the youth and their classes and we just also encourage if there are teachers out there who are listening who have not reached out to us please you know engage with us and let us know if we can come talk to your class and what you like to talk with us about and so happy to be supporting the motion before us and and i look forward to hearing how this program is rolled out and updates on the the program and how effective it is thank you council member council member calm tarry johnson this briefly i know we're out of time before we move to a vote i wanted to just acknowledge and thank um my colleagues um council member watkins and golder for working on this um amanda and anushka for all your work on this and and robert for the work they've done and then all of the youth who participated on the jam board and um who uh came to the meetings that i attended and for their voices so i just wanted to put make those acknowledgements and thanks thank you council member and uh us uh bonnie will you please take us through what roll call vote please yes council member is watkins hi ellentary johnson hi brown older vice mayor bruner hi and mayor byrd hi um yeah and i want to thank the council members um and it sounds like we have a unanimous uh vote on this one and the motion carries um so thank you for bringing that forward we should be a little more time to discuss but i appreciate everybody's brevity and thank you robert and amanda and anushka for joining us tonight and really appreciated your your presentation so thanks so much for all the work you're doing with our youth thank you very much thank you okay next item um for this evening will be our oral communications and then we are going to take a break uh and uh so we'll go ahead and do oral communications at this time uh for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you want to comment during oral communications now is the time to call in instructions are on your screen oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda if you're interested in addressing the council press star nine on your phone to raise your hand you will have two minutes to speak when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted we request that you clearly and slowly state your name before making your comments so that we can accurately capture the meeting minutes however it is not required to state your name please remember this is a time for council to hear from the public we are not able to engage in dialogue with each member of the public but when we are able we will address the questions raised after oral communications has been completed we'll go ahead and look to our meeting attendees um for folks who would like to speak to us and i see garrett's hand is up go ahead garrett okay one more okay following up on all those systemic racial discrimination left as ambag housing mandates i would mention all regional authorities including hud are among the worst structures in government as they are unelected bureaucrats granted regulatory authority by lazy elected politicians and are beyond the reach of the people in this case ambag did a big bend over to the radical yunbi activists who additionally overfill some communities based on their being too white with poverty enabling public or other housing is treating a singular group of people differently based on their race and is therefore a racial discrimination period full stop none of you even blinked no rational moral justification exists to zone one additional unit in communities citing simply they're too white a race demographic come to cram that idea of real type another standalone method of overfilling communities if they are too affluent is a mandate of action to destroy successful communities and remake them identically in a lowest common denominator cookie cutter fashion that is central to the growing to proletarian defective marxist equity dogma infecting our politics these are not opportunities zones they're the resource rich zones they are collections of people who produce affluence because they are successful capitalists not marxists not socialists who understand prosperity comes from capitalism with a moral and ideological foundation of the value of individual goals self responsibility knowledge skill building discipline hard work spirituality and family not a belief in state dependency victimhood worship real prosperity is not contagious nor an entitlement nor a right it is earned and bag is not about liberty and not produce prosperity thank you next is nor hawkman go ahead please good can you hear me now yes we can okay thank you um four and a half minutes ago i watched the city council under the leadership of you donna mires passed a vote on the whole package of uh youth and youth in all policies and when you cast that vote the clerk of the city council was already showing on the screen to all of us that it was a unanimous vote that had somehow magically taken place before you actually voted could somebody explain that to me thank you thank you miss hawkman any other members of our public want to speak to us tonight on items not on the agenda this is oral communications go ahead abby samuels please i want to understand how you can on a friday night around nine thirty p.m. kick someone out of their RV with a 12 year old child with a grandmother who has who's ill onto the streets a day before it's raining now they're in their tents with all of their belongings all strong all over the place in the in the rain drenched including their 12-year-old kid how do you sleep at night i want to know yesterday at nine p.m. i spent all day yesterday at the bench lands i want to understand how you can have the cops tell people after they spent all day moving up to the upper park of the bench of the san lorenzo park where they're out of the flood zone that the police came at nine p.m. at night and kicked all of those people out of the park and did not bother to go down about below where it was flooding instead all they were focused on were the people that were above the flood play in san lorenzo park how do you sleep at night really i couldn't sleep how i was there this morning at nine a.m. after around 20 25 people had already moved their tents up and and this morning at eight in the morning i was there the cops were there with the four remaining tents kicking those people out letting the people down below flood thank you next i have raffa sonnenfeld yes thank you um i just wanted to uh respond to a comment i heard earlier during oral communication about uh the so-called uh radical agenda of affirmatively furthering fair housing um uh this was in regards to uh uh comments i presume about the uh association of monterey bay area government's uh uh discussion around the arena methodology and um uh basically the the state of california requires uh cities and councils of government like ambag to consider affirmatively for actually to implement policies that affirmatively further fair housing uh to to break the uh historical um inequities and imbalances that have happened over the years when it comes to lending policies and segregation whether it's through exclusionary zoning or racial covenants or uh or redlining um so uh the fact that we're just now in uh uh 2021 uh working towards uh reversing some of these historic uh inequities is well it it it's troubling that it's taken this long but it it's good that we're finally here and we're finally making progress towards uh having a more just equitable society um and that that starts with with land use policy and um so i hope that in the coming years that uh uh as zana cruise is uh considering um where it's placing its uh uh housing as part of its housing element uh which will happen it's due by i think uh january 2023 um you know we'll have a really robust community process around this and um i hope that that we uh really think first and foremost about uh uh our responsibility to to reverse that historic inequity and to affirm affirmatively further fair housing thank you very much next i have um sabina three minutes hello um i would like to second abby samuels comment what happened at the benchlands and other encampments over the past few days is criminal where was the city we hear over and over again from council members like calentari johnson and watkins that we can't just do nothing you're always saying don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good we can't do nothing guess what you did literally nothing literally nothing at all have you seen the photos have you gone down to the benchlands have you done any of that it's really shameful um you need to stop taking avail the only available shelter away from children in the vulnerable for them to just go be intense in flood waters so next time that you're standing up for the children like you so valiantly did please think about those children that don't have homes think about the foster youth that are way over represented in the homeless population in our county you did absolutely nothing and so next time i hear you guys say well we can't do nothing i mean please vote these people out they're doing a terrible job thank you that'll conclude our oral communications it's now five after seven um and we will go ahead and take a half hour dinner break we'll come back and we'll have one item um on the regular agenda and then we'll transition into um the evening of um remarks by the outgoing mayor and then the swearing in of our new vice mayor and mayor so let's reconvene at um let's just make it 740 okay thank you everybody the council members are back just turn on your camera here's some jumping jacks getting warm sonia and martin hi sonia martin if you are on i'm gonna turn on your camera if you need to stay off just let us know okay rosemary's here body's here rosemary is the staff here that needs to be here for the um i'm looking at number 20 and i know we have bobby i see lee i see bobby we're good i see larry yeah okay great we're pretty good we're ready to go we're ready to go ready okay oh wait i gotta open up before next up on our agenda is item number 28 implementation of homeless response program for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen the order will be a presentation of all three sub items by staff followed by questions from the council we will then take public comment on items 28.1 28.2 and 28.3 public comment we limited to 30 minutes and each speaker will have one minute and i do have extra time for two minutes reserved for stepping up santa cruz so i will go ahead and um turn this over and um we will hear from rosemary minard our interim city manager thanks mayor council members and um i want to just kick this off a little bit and talk to you about item number 28.1 but it's it before i want to sort of do that i just want to do a little bit of an overview of of what these three items are they are related to each other and there's been a number of ongoing conversations over many months about how are we going to and and what's what's going to be involved in implementing uh some of the homelessness response plan and programs that that council have taken action on this year whether it's the um capping and standards and services ordinance or the oversized vehicle ordinance and a lot has been going on in this space uh i think that that would happen over the last couple of days actually several days as it relates to this most recent rainstorm is a really good sort of an example or a metaphor for what goes on which is you're moving down a path you think you've got things planned you know you're watching what's going on and then a little bit of a curve will fall not necessarily completely unexpected but you know you you uh you get sort of thrown down a little bit of a different path so uh yesterday our folks you know really worked hard to help a number of folks from the area behind the cemetery and the area at the confluence of branch 40 creek and the San Lorenzo river moved to higher ground and you know kind of created a emergency shelter for them in a place that um you know was a little ways from where they've been but it's still a very challenging and constantly evolving situation so i i think that's a theme that if you were to ask the staff what they've learned over the last six months as they've worked on this kind of uh the implementation of these kinds of activities related to the homeless programs i think they would emphasize it's it's constantly evolving and i think that's probably one of the things we can expect so the three items tonight are there's a there's a description of a process and an approach and for how the state general fund 14 million dollar allocation that we're working with the county and a way to both figure out how to what recommendations we have for how that money should get deployed but also using that process between the city and the county to sort of consciously develop a stronger more resilient more functional relationship where we are working together as partners and that the takeaway not only will be spending these resources in ways that leverage and are synergistic with you know that affects the efforts of both of them parties but also that leave behind a set of tools for us as staff to use in managing our relationships so that when we disagree we can sort that out in a way that is functional and you know gets the disagreements resolve the priorities that and allows us to move on so that's the first item and that includes a resolution to accept the money from the state so that's a that's an action for the second item the second and the third items here are basically i want to talk about the third one first because this is a thing that we talked a little bit about in an fyi that we released i think in early november that described kind of what was going on on the development of programs and services to implement the camping services and standards ordinance and then subsequently added the issues related to the services they parking and what programs etc that are involved in the um oversized vehicle ordinance that are part of that that process and so this is a number of things related to those implementation actions so there's contracts with the Salvation Army there's a lease with the with the National Guard with respect to the armory there's a resolution of support for the city support for a encampment grant that we're collaborating with the county on that the county happens to be the lead on just because it will be stronger and and work better if it works that way the staff have been working together and assuming that those things are aligned with the work that you've seen before through the the fyi that was just uh distributed and described to some degree then the last item which was actually happens to be the second item here the is the budget adjustment that gets us going that gives us the resources both one and allocates one time and um and uh ongoing resources for these programs and services this is not the be all end all in terms of what uh you know that once we've done this there's no going back for one thing I think I'm pretty sure that some of the state 14 million that's going to be discussed under item one is going to ultimately pay for some of the things that we're trying to get moving by allocating resources in number two here so we'll be moving money back into cover some of those things once we've gotten that uh that processed them with the county um so tonight what we have is like I said the three items I'm gonna I'm the first and basically briefing the first one I don't have a presentation for you I'm happy to take your questions and see if there are concerns and then uh we're gonna move right into presentation between Bobby McGee from finance and the staff um Larry and Lee from the homeless and services staff to brief on the last two items so um and actually I think that we're all going to do all the presentations and then we're going to open up for questions I think it's out of the planet so with that I'm going to turn this over to Bobby I think for his piece of it hi Bobby hello um actually I believe Larry was going to do the presentation honest I had heard okay I'm sorry I this is what happens when you have rain and you have to deal with the crisis yesterday and you're not in the loop so go ahead Larry that's Larry oh there he is go ahead yeah let me share my screen good evening um good evening uh mayor members of the council Larry Imwale homeless response manager um I'll be presenting uh this evening on the implementation of the homeless programming efforts and I have a short power point we can see it great thanks so yes so um I'll be providing uh an update and overview of the implementation of our homeless response programming as rosemary mentioned in our introduction this report really builds upon the updates in the informational memo that was provided to council on november 8th and was discussed at the council meeting on november 23rd um and again these are in relation to the implementation of uh the camping and services and standards ordinance and the oversized vehicle ordinance and so the first component um is our efforts around establishing safe sleeping and shelter the council direction was to add 150 beds in terms of shelter capacity and so the efforts that we have moving forward um are with the armory city outlook uh as it's being called is that that's the establishment of an additional 75 bed capacity up at the armory building uh we have a lease agreement as rosemary noted that we're working with to extend the use of the facility through 2022 this calendar next calendar year that starts in january to keep that current and for this lease the city is the will be the lease holder but we're sharing programmatic operations with the county has two programs up there as well so the county the city will be leasing the facility and we'll be working on a use agreement with the county for joint operations again the county is using the armory building through fiscal year 2022 so june 30th and 22 they have programs in that facility and then also the pavilion program they have which is under a large tent that's accommodating approximately 45 people will be winding down in january or february so there's some fluidity in terms of the use of that facility over the next 12 months uh we're moving forward uh in and recommending to execute a contract with Salvation Armory Army to operate a 24-7 emergency shelter for 75 people um on the back lawn it's been called the golf lands uh the language that the Salvation Army is is using as city overlook of those 75 10 of those will be reserved for overnight emergency and 65 will be for ongoing 24-7 services given the changes and with the county programs that are anticipated over the next several months we're recommending moving forward the six-month contract with Salvation Army that includes the operation of the shelter the staffing required meals and transportation service to and from the armory again this will give us flexibility depending on what happens with the county programs what other plans may emerge to just have the flexibility to and adaptability with our operations up at that location in terms of timing the Salvation Army we're hoping to have hiring and training staff early january and targeting programs start date in late january the next component of the safe sleeping is the transitional community camps that we're recommending again this is a different kind of model than we've had in the past where we're looking at a smaller group of individuals that are ready to make a change and our work will live together and create a community under an agreed upon code of conduct and the idea here is supporting that work with case management and coordination from city staff to support their pathways towards housing and creating connections to county services so city staff will manage those programs presently they're identifying the initial participants from the benchlands area and the city staff that will be working at that side of the existing camp stewards at benchlands chris and jeremy who are familiar with all the individuals down there and are going to help identify those who are ready to make that change and that's part of the rationale of the city operating this first transitional community camp is really to facilitate getting this up as soon as we can and then if the city is actually vetting the initial participants for this program related to this transitional community camp at 1220 river we're doing outreach in the neighborhood surrounding that location we've met with folks the tannery there will be a letter going out to the neighbors very soon that's been drafted and so we're hoping to start that again late december or the first week of january for 30 to 35 participants we've talked about establishing in the near term a second community camp we're currently doing the site analysis for that and after we get the armory outlook city outlook on online and operating and the first transitional community camp will put our emphasis towards getting a second transitional community camp up and online and there's the potential to do more of these later in the near term with the benchlands we're proposing to continue to have that as a location our goal though is really to reduce the size of the benchlands encampments as additional capacity shelter capacity becomes available and ultimately working towards the closure of this camp in beginning to prioritize with the lowest lying areas in the south end of the benchlands encampments with safe parking programs that were part of the oversized vehicle ordinance council directed the development of a three-tier program set of programs tier one was emergency with three spaces that space is available the police department lot currently right now associate the association of faith communities is operating one spot on that lot with two spots reserved for this the police to be able to use as needed tier two excuse me tier two which is overnight parking the direction from council was 30 spaces with a direction to have it operational early 2022 we've identified three lots for minimum five to six spots each we're doing the feasibility analysis presently on those locations in terms of the number of potential vehicles egress in and out the building have hygiene stations located etc and again we're continuing to look at additional lots that may be we available for these programs tier three program is an operator supported 24 7 safe parking program to be set up in spring of 2022 and presently that site analysis is underway and we'll be looking for potential contractors to submit proposals for operation in 20 early 2022 an update on some of the implementation steps of the oversized vehicle ordinance these are underway the permitting process development the need for signage on the new parking regulations and then there's work with in terms of getting the coastal development permit process underway and we have a hearing before the zoning administrator that is set for early january a couple of other items that are important as we think about again with this focus on trying to have our programs towards creating pathways to housing and part of that is really trying to also develop the support services community-wide that are able to create those pathways and create permanent housing solutions so as rosemary mentioned one of the opportunities that we're collaborating with the county on is this encampment resolution grant they will be the lead applicants for this but the focus is on working in the along with the acampments along the San Lorenzo river and working with the the new county grant through mental health behavioral health to provide outreach and service coordination with folks in encampments so we leveraging that county grant that's going to provide additional staff to work with folks living in that encampment the work collaborate with city staff in there to make those connections but the idea here is that the grant would provide flexible funds or the language is housing scholarships to support the development of personalized plans to move on house person persons in the encampments towards more permanent housing solutions so that's the goal of that grant it's focused on and has a priority for encampments that have 50 or more people statewide it's a statewide competitive process there's 47.5 million dollars statewide the target the expectation is that's the county Santa Cruz will be submitting grants somewhere around the range of 1.5 million dollars for this work and in addition to the programmatic work it's the request was also going to assist in formalizing policies and protocols for a collaborative city and county response to encampments so as noted one of the recommended actions on the agenda this agenda item is the adoption of a resolution that's formally endorsing this application from the county for this encampment resolution grant the other item is the development of additional affordable housing for low and extremely low income individuals that's project home key is there's two applications that are in development within the city of Santa Cruz jurisdiction one is an 801 river seven units to be restricted for extremely low income for 55 years and another application that is in development is at 119 Coral Street for 120 permanent supportive housing units that's the Harvey West Studios project after discussions with city and county staff in trying to work collaboratively to address these issues the county will be moving forward as the co-applicant with the developers on these projects but these are the two projects that may be submitting applications the project home key within the city of Santa Cruz jurisdiction the fiscal and funding impacts are related to this again as noted the agenda report the projected annual cost of the homeless program programming that we're recommending is 4.7 million dollars annually funding sources include real out potential reallocation of American Rescue Plan Act funds that's what finance will be speaking to also the use of community development block grant funds there's the 14 million dollars and the state appropriation that will be done in collaboration with the county and of course city general funds are another source of the California state and cabinet grant opportunity that I mentioned is an also a potential funding source that may be available to support these efforts and again we will continue to identify and develop new revenue sources that can support these homeless response programming and get us a note of the recommendations within this section of the agenda item and is to receive recommendations from the council directed homeless response programs and services including and not limited to lease and sub lease with respect to the national guard armory and additional direction as desired also authorizing direct the city manager to execute a six month contract in a form approved by the city attorney with the Salvation Army for shelter management at the armory in an amount not to exceed 1.2 million dollars and then to adopt a resolution supporting the county of Santa Cruz grant application to the California homeless coordinating and funding council for funding through the encampment resolution funding program and directing staff to collaborate with the county on the implementation of the grant of the work outlined in the grant that concludes my part of the presentation and rosemary is that is that the last of the presentation or do we have anything else oh you're on mute it's by me providing additional or is he just here for questions larry i'm sorry apologies i'm basically just here for questions tonight um i know the council's already aware of the uh the ARPA money that's come in to the city already which is about 7.1 million dollars and then our staff report kind of outlines um how that's going to be used in this fiscal year which includes the the one-time startup cost as well as a prorated portion of the ongoing operational costs and of course i'm here for any questions related to that thank you all right i think back to you then mayor okay are there questions from council members on the items on before us on these these three items um please let me know sandy excuse me council member brown thank you mayor uh and thank you larry and rosemary and bobby for being here for backup for giving us the introduction and pretty thorough documents to help us understand what's been happening and where we're headed i have a question related to the the armory and river street kind of the the safe sleeping component of this because i'm i'm i'm not clear that we're getting as a result of this and this is not not no offense to you all that you're you're working on the direction we provided the city council provided but um it feels like these may not actually really be new spaces that we're just kind of filling the gap that's going to be left by the county when those funds run out am i understanding that i mean like where we are i mean the armory is operating the golf lands the sprung structure is operating and we're talking about setting up there so um i know that my recollection is that the ordinance that you all adopted um did not state explicitly net um new spaces but i'm just wondering um if you could help help me understand that because it doesn't seem it doesn't seem like it we're going to make much progress if all we're doing is kind of backfilling and you know wondering what to do about the rest or you know tba on the rest and then the other question i had is related to the river street which i'm i thank you for um you know getting that moving um i know that's a site that's been used effectively and i i think we've talked about the numbers there but 35 it seems like i mean given the need that really there there is a possibility to for more people to be able to be cited there go ahead lady sure um so i'll start by um addressing the first question with respect to the number of spaces um we were able to um we collectively the county in the city you know but particularly the the covid funds that came into the county um allowed for a substantial increase in the number of shelter spaces um you know literally hundreds of extra spaces um not just here in san cruz but elsewhere in the county when you're looking at project room key and so forth and um a number of those have been um closing down as those funding sources um become no longer available um that is uh that's the case for um the golf lands area the uh the city overlook um which is on the south lawn behind the armory um that was open um and had individuals in a 24 seven camp there until uh the uh october time frame september october time frame uh when the county closed that down um and so we would be reinstituting a program uh the council will recall that were actually the um the county was actually um anticipating closing down the armory building itself as well and so we were planning on moving a safe sleeping program into the armory building itself and fortunately the county was able to um utilize additional funds uh to continue that through june so that's when we um recalibrated and back to rosemary's initial comment of this is a dynamic situation um we recalibrated and uh looked to that uh rear area but um you know i think as we're coming out of covid um a lot of those resources will ultimately be going away you saw um in larry's report the pavilion um with the uh the state funding um ending soon for the pavilion the county is going to extend that for a limited period of time but not for a um a extended period of time um so yes that is a challenge that we're going to have to continue to address is um with the dropping numbers of covid shelters we're going to continue to have um additional challenges with um you know meeting the types of numbers that we saw even um within the past six months even as we're adding overall there could be um fewer beds when you're counting those covid shelters being lost and then um the second part of the question was the number of um individuals there um they at 12 20 river for example um one of the things that we are looking at doing is really trying to set up a community at these locations one that allows the individuals to support each other and that allows them to um really form those social bonds that help create the the trust so that that um that location can thrive and the individuals in there can thrive um and we could fit more people in there the concern is that if we start increasing the numbers that um there's a inverse relationship with the success of the community and so um that's one of the concerns and that's why we we wanted to start off with a smaller number of people we had we had 60 there um and you know very small spaces um when we operated this a few years ago um so this is you know roughly half of that a little over half and you know that's not to say it's going to stay right at that number but that's where we want to start off to see if if it can be a successful model in um you know a light touch management you we will have staff there every day but you know there are going to be significant expectations from the participants in terms of the oversight and management and and self um and self-management of the camp even though we'll have staff there on a daily basis ensuring people that are meeting are meeting the the milestones and working towards permanent housing solutions thank you if I could just a quick follow-up on that and I promise this is my last question for now um so and I really appreciate that yeah I think that makes a lot of sense uh in terms of the scale and the potential to kind of facilitate a space that is um meets people's needs in a way that um you know just packing people in is does not I and developing community so I really appreciate that and given that and given that we know there's significant need beyond the numbers that we are currently looking at and again with an understanding that the resources to do these kinds of things are substantial um you know I see in the I saw in the slides and in the um written materials um possibly more sites like this to be established in the future and I'm just wondering um um based on what your your research so far and your your efforts so far um I mean is that or what might we see something like that in the coming year a proposal for something like that an additional location are you like where is that at in terms of the I mean it's tba but tba do nor you're just kind of where it's at I guess sure can I can I just say one thing before um maybe want to add something Lee I think this is one of the reasons why it's really important for us to be doing this conversation with the county the 14 million kind of creates the opportunity to to talk about what their plan is which has been very heavily focused on the housing first part right and then what the problem is we're dealing with in our community which has a lot to do with the front end of that pipeline that ends with the housing solution and trying to um and and and using that process so that we can talk about how we're all we're going to both deal with the whole problem and not to say I'm only dealing with this part and we don't know about that part so that's a uh it's it's a ulterior motive that's not hidden I guess you might say for why this is so important to do this collaborative process to engage between the city and the county and thinking about the bigger the bigger picture because it's clear that if the county walks away from any kind of sheltering operation not a good thing for our community and it will not be something that we can just keep writing text to cover thanks for resume that's that's great context and and I just quickly say it's it's a much shorter time frame than that council member brown you know we're looking at hopefully having um an addition at least the next um uh transitional camp um up in the winter so you know the the february march time frame um as larry was mentioning you know we've got a lot of things in the works right now with with the safe parking and with the armory and with 12 20 and just the encampment management that occurs on a regular basis so we are we're starting with 12 20 but as soon as we're getting that up and running we want to um try and get the next one thank you council member brown uh i see council member colin tarry johnson and then council member comings thank you um thanks so much for that presentation larry and rosemary and lee um you know so contrary to some comments that have been made clearly there's a lot of work being done and and i want to thank um lee and larry and all the staff for all the work that you've done and you continue to do and and i want to thank my colleagues who um have voted to support this services oriented approach um and so we are where we are now and i really appreciate all the work that's been done i do have a couple of questions um and and one of them i i know you probably won't be able to answer right now um so you know i a lot of money and a lot of resources have been spent already this last year and in previous years in abatement and response and i think it's important to understand some of these costs as we're moving forward uh so at some point in the future if we could um have an estimate of how much we've spent i mean so the you know hygiene stations that have already been stood up those aren't new costs those are those have been in place but what's that what does that look like and uh for example the tier one safe parking um i know afc runs that and and they pay for that but what are some of the associated costs so so some of the things like that that we have been doing for the last several years um not in a robust way that we are moving towards now but what what have been some of the crude costs and then and then of course there's costs that we can't put our fingers on like uh the lack of response and people ending up in emergency rooms and law enforcement but as much as we can understand how much it has been costing our city in the last year or a couple years i think that would be helpful and again i know that we don't have an answer for that right now um and then i have some questions about the encampment grant um that that i talked to to staff about but i want to ask again here so that community can can get responses to is how much we are requesting and um how this will specifically augment the city's efforts around encampments and um how it will augment the proposed uh three fds that we are asking as part of this package and my last question is there've been there've been a lot of uh concerns and questions about our flood response and i'm wondering if someone could touch on that if and if now's not the appropriate time then then we can say that for another time but those are those are my questions and comments for now i'm sorry council member your last question was the the city's uh response to the floods over the last couple of days okay uh in the interest of time i might see if we can get the first two done and then well if we have time a little bit later we can kind of get an update from staff on that if that's okay that'll hold to you sure thank you i'm not sure who on staff would like to take those questions you want to take it larry or i'm happy to either way um i can at least take a start um on the encampment grant for sure so um again the county's the lead applicant on that uh that application is being drafted uh and we'll be we'll be revealing it uh with the county so we're still waiting for that it's due it is a quick turnaround it's december 31st but really the principal part of the funding for that is really to support these flexible funds for housing scholarships to actually be able to get people on that pathway towards you know whatever array of needs are getting the way of getting to housing including also paying for housing so it's not really intended to augment staff um through the use of these grant funds that the grant requirements are really looking to see how the applicants can leverage what they're already doing so good example is the county itself is already trained to as part of this strategy it's utilizing the outreach workers that they're going to be hiring uh in january to do this outreach work and really the rule of the city uh based on the conversations we've had so far is really having our camp stewards be those connectors with county outreach workers uh to help build uh bridge that gap because they have relationships with the folks in the encampments and that's going to make a more successful connection to the county but that's really the emphasis of the funding and this approach for the encampment grant the one thing i'd add um you'd ask the amounts councilmember carter johnson and it's um 47 million statewide so that's a competitive grant across the state 47 million total um when we spoke with the county they were looking at one million to one point five million that kind of range um for those flexible funds that larry was speaking about thank you councilmember did you okay great okay i've got councilmember Cummings next for the presentation i have a lot of questions i'm sure you probably won't get to answer most of them and i'll like to get cut off but um this is a big item uh for us i mean i think this is you know we're making a huge adjustment to our budget and um i do have some concerns about um what's before us this evening but i'll start with just you know really wanting to get a sense of what's happening with the county because for the the three years that i've been well the previous years that i've been on the city council many of the council members have expressed that you know addressing homelessness is the county's responsibility and we need to work with the county and this year we've been taking a lot of um you know we've been making decisions and it's been seeming like we're making these decisions in the in the absence of the county and we haven't really had the county at many of these meetings and so i'm really wanting to better understand kind of you know where the county is at with their programs because you know we're reaching into what's being proposed is that we reach into funds that were set aside and well i wouldn't say set aside but we received to you know help us with our deficit that was um the result of COVID-19 and now we're putting that towards homelessness and make sense or one would think that you know what's the county doing around that as well you know are they using some of their funds to address some of these issues so i'd like to really just start there with understanding kind of what's going on with the county around the programs i know some of the COVID-19 programs are coming down but prior COVID the county was also helping the city stand up programs and it sounds like they're bailing on on this responsibility and so i'd like to get some clarity around you know what's happening with the county right now and their responsibilities help us with this i mean i'll turn it over to staff but i wouldn't mind answering just as an elected that's also been sitting at the table with the county now for for two years on the homeless on the on the two by two um you know the county took on the burden the primary burden of housing people during the COVID crisis so they were operating all the hotels they've also increased and are taking on the housing week re-wave effort and they have been rehousing people out of the hotels the COVID hotels that were being closed down i can't remember the exact amounts but i think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of six to 12 people a month that might be i'm not sure that's every month but there's a consistent effort effort they've hired at least a dozen people to work or more on those i believe they've also successfully participated in purchasing a hotel for veterans just recently um they were part of a coalition that did that that will house veterans we have about 40 you know a certain amount of folks in our community are veterans and they will be able to be served by that um the county has also um as you know they've come to this city council meeting three times this year one was to ask us to endorse the plan that they created um the second was to validate and endorse the new governance structure which of course is now complete and we've placed two members of our community on that and from a council member vice mayor council member Watkins soon to be vice mayor Watkins and our staff lead butler um they have also um i would say that the the partnership with the county is stronger than ever we're both suffering from an overload of hundreds of people who have nowhere to go um but they have been communicative they've been supportive of the 14 million um they've also engaged um with hcd at the state level through john laird's office seeking clarification and actually sought um ability to bring home home key funds to santa cruz as quickly as possible so my at least as an elected to an elected with um supervisor McPherson and supervisor coonerty been a series of problem solving it's been watching their county staff really create a homeless program all the way from scratch because there never really was one before they've expanded the homeless management information system so i feel like their work has been just um it's been it's been uh very consistent and very forward thinking the whole time this past year year and a half so that's just a report out from an elected prospectively you probably have more details on the nuts and bolts but i wanted to share that and vice mayor pruner has also been involved in a lot of these conversations so she's aware of a lot of what they're doing as well oh i can't see that her rosemary i can also report that the housing re-wave 108 people have been um you know put into permanent housing solutions as a result of that and i think that was a result of particularly during the covid and in the hotels where they were able to provide a lot of case management services working with those folks through that whole time frame and getting a lot of them ready to you know move from a homeless situation into a housing solution and so through a whole series of things we're able to you know put 168 people into permanent housing solutions which is you know really great and some of that's obviously section eight vouchers and finding you know uh landlords who will rent to section eight etc so i know there was a quite a bit of stuff going on with that and i i just repeat with with what donna said i mean a lot it's very difficult when you have the kind of needs that we all see in our community and and some of the challenges we see and then simultaneously we realize we've got you know organizations that are really standing up new functions the the um human services division took the housing for health section partly out of the health services agency in the county and created a brand new division and hired somebody to come in and you know run that division and that's really like a year old um the city has obviously done its own somewhat you know smaller version of that um one of the thing i guess to point out because i know that uh vice mayor bruner has you know talks about this quite consistently in these conversations about concerns about mental health and the provision of you know people who can work with folks in in with dealing with substance abuse and substance um you know kind of dependency and also mental health situations and they fairly recently made a major commitment to um fund a uh you know a significant increase in workers in that behavioral health section i'm sure some of whom are going to be engaged in this work i know that they're talking about another sort of big increment of new staffing here shortly and they are talking as we are you know looking at the possibility of revenue measures and how do you plan for ongoing funding for homelessness in uh as their part of it and so you know i i think that it's not really just be seeing what we're seeing with respect to you know them closing down shelters and what have you but on the other hand i don't know that it's necessarily means that they're gonna you know fold up their shingle and move out of town so to speak i think like us they're in a transition phase yeah and i would i would add um also um i'm not completely clear but but just so everyone knows publicly this was announced almost a month ago now they did receive an eight million dollar grant for mental and behavioral health programs and that's going to include the needs of areas homeless um and that's going to create new and expanded programs to provide what that will provide suicide prevention services direct mental health outreach mobile crisis response units and mental health professionals attached to county ambulance units so um so much of what we talked about is actually happening so it's refreshing to see all the progress that actually happens when there's resources at the state of California that can come to local government any other you said you had a lot of questions i have a number more but that was really helpful um i do want to follow up on something that was stated and uh i think it was the 28.3 report at one point it's mentioned that the county is is more or less kind of tapped in terms of their resources around um providing um case management and so i'm just curious how that's going to be handled because it seems like one of the things that has the biggest outcomes for these kinds of services is case management and i think in the beginning it was saying that the county was only going to work with um individuals already in their system of care within the end um you know it highlights how county wraparound services are required to move individuals out of emergency programs into permanent supportive or rapid rehousing so an ongoing collaboration with the county will help reduce overall cost to ensure program success so those are two conflicting statements and i'm wondering how we can kind of reconcile the fact that the county is not taking on more case management but we know we need case management in order to have effective outcomes yeah maybe i'll um i'll take a first out at that um so um i'm not sure exactly where that reference was to the system of care it may be some of their programs um like the rehousing way for example um they have been focused on individuals in the um the covid shelters you know those individuals that have um been stabilized in the motels or hotels for you know quite some time now um 18 plus months in some cases and um they want to build on that stabilization and they're focusing some of that uh some of that rehousing way of effort on um those individuals and so um version of um outreach services and case management um Mayor Myers mentioned the recent grant that they received the SAMHSA grant the eight million dollars and we do expect that they're going to have a substantial amount of additional resources to dedicate towards um helping individuals move from homelessness and so um you know even with these extra this extra money you know resources are going to be an issue we have so many uh needs in our community that you know with whether it's the 14 million from the state or the eight million from the SAMHSA grant you know we we're still in a very resource constrained constrained situation but um there are some some positive notes there with with those funding opportunities they come with these potential additional resources for um helping individuals but did you have uh I don't know if you wanted to speak to the specific location where the um system of care was referenced I don't know if I answered your question I should say yeah on page uh 28.3.3 that's the second bullet point um and you know it starts with the seat of Santa Cruz in broader region has been challenged to adequately address the growing challenges homelessness due to an array of factors including an ongoing lack of has a number of bullet points or one of them is case management which is the second one and then at the very end for the report the third bullet point on the last page of 28.3.1 zero um it just it says county wraparound services are required to move individuals out of emergency programs as I stated earlier and um ongoing collaboration with the county will help reduce overall cost and ensure program success so um thank you yeah yeah thank you for that clarification and I think I think my points generally spoke to it in that you know currently that is kind of that is the case you know they're very resource constrained but we do that moving forward there's going to be some additional capacity with this uh these these grant funds um part of the challenge is you know those are those are one time funds right so you know when that grant is up you know how is that effort going to be sustained over the long term and so we really do need systemic changes in the funding availability over the long term in order to be able to um adequately resource these issues and to that point there's a lot of items around adding three FTEs at $100,000 a year this and you know kind of to your point this these are one time funds and I'm just kind of curious about you know I know there's been discussion and community um interest around creating the all-term crisis response teams that could kind of perform the same duties but it sounds like these individuals would be doing outreach camp management um I'm not sure what the other item was but that sounds like a really huge lift for three individuals to be taking and also you know we're making a major move by creating three long term positions so I'm just wondering if you could speak to that because we've been expanding almost like the staff around homeless services and it's one of the concerns I've had and I've heard from other people is and where is this going and what are you know what are our goals around you know adding all these positions especially since we've cut positions from any other departments they've also expressed the need to have staffing as well. Thanks Councilmember Cummings that's a that's a great question and the staff there so we we currently have two temporary staff members and temporary staff members are limited in the number of hours that they can commit so this is one of the areas where there is some overlap with our existing expenses and the proposed ones that said the proposed ones would be substantially more you're absolutely correct in that you know they would be a full-time position or at least budgeted at full time and then there would be benefits associated with that to speak to those responsibilities yes that would be a lot that is going to be on these individuals plate in terms of managing the camps and helping with the case management for those individuals that's that's part of the reason why you know it's it's going to be critical that the individuals in the transitional camps are able to have some self-management you know that's it's a it's a light touch management where we've got staff there each day but they're not there 24-7 and you know this is this is one of the areas where we will be evaluating you know what's the effectiveness of this approach this is the expense that we would anticipate for staffing these kinds of programs the the transitional camps you know two three or so transitional camps and we would be assessing that effectiveness because there are you know alternative options that may also be considered as moving forward I guess I'll I have many more questions but I guess I'll try to wrap it up because I know that this is the last meeting of the year and we want to move on and but I guess with the with regards to Salvation Army it was mentioned that there's going to be hiring of staff well two questions one at a previous meeting I brought up unemployment insurance and I'm just wondering if that item has been addressed in the contract and then the second question was a hiring of staff I mean I would imagine that we could probably just hire the same staff that's there currently so I'm just wondering around the idea that we need to retrain and hire new staff is there any opportunity for us to hire some of the folks who have already been doing the work about Salvation Army there you want to take that one yeah so in response to the first part of your question about unemployment insurance that language specifically is in a draft contract that is under consideration so that's been taken care of it was actually original draft to the question that you you pose with respect to the staffing you know how it hits the ground there may be that potential I think the issue is just the timing right now right where our interest is in trying to to get this established and operational as soon as possible whereas the county programs are still ongoing and that's just very recent decision from the county given the change in the state funding for the Pavilion program up there so that's a very fluid and dynamic situation the county is working on determining what the actual end date is so that's sort of the operationally the complicated piece about whether there may be existing staff at other programs in Salvation Army that could be dedicated to this program so what we presented is based off a timeline in terms of having to start that program new while county programs are still up and running great well I'll just leave it there you know thank you Vice Mayor Bruna thank you thank you Larry and Lee for the presentation that last question was one of my questions kind of that overlap of the timeline with up at the Armory and how that that looks so thank you for answering that with the encampment grants and I know there's a lot of moving pieces some immediate some farther out but with the additional funding for outreach that the county has received for encampment approach has there been any further discussion about kind of the the leveraging the resources of outreach workers with a team just kind of that daily contact team of services clean and enforcement or is this all independent the outreach encampment outreach is are they doing their own thing in terms of encampment outreach so so right now and right now they've got HP HP as you know one of their private sorry the homeless person's health project as one of their primary outreach mechanisms and groups there are others the downtown outreach workers and hopes team and so forth we have our team that is primarily you know they they do outreach as they can but they're also you know it's it's two individuals trying to handle a lot of different issues and so they're also you know doing trash removal and dealing with interpersonal challenges there and addressing issues with with rodents and a whole range of other issues that they're working on on a daily basis and so one of the things that we really want to do and one of the things that the grant is proposing is the encampment management grant so I want to separate those things out right the things that the county is doing right now versus the things that the county can do in coordination with us moving forward so one they're getting the additional assistance through the SAMHSA grant and those the hiring of those individuals the encampment management grant would allow for those individuals to have flexible funds to assist on a personalized basis the individuals so right now for example when I say someone might have a rapid rehousing fund where they can say hey I can get you into housing and this is what it's for you've got it you know we can get you into housing well that individual that might not be the best approach for them you know maybe they need some other resource in order to best get them back in permanent housing so that's where that encampment management grant would fit into the additional resources and as part of that we would also be working with them on better integrating our both our outreach and just our response as a city and county to encampments that are forming so I want to I want to ask does that help to answer your question or yes it does I had one more question regarding all the updates and I know things move fast and kind of flow at different speeds but I am and maybe this is a question for Elizabeth Smith but are the updates able to get to the city website on the homelessness page updates or is there another source where the community can track updates I will go ahead and respond I don't see Elizabeth is on here but I will go ahead and respond and I will say that I think that that is one area that that I personally and that others have not done a great job at in terms of all the things that we're doing you know if you look at just what was in your report today for example you know a lot of that information we had the FYI memo you know last month but before that you know there hadn't been as good a communication with the council as there really should be and and that goes for the communication with the community as well and I think part of the challenge is that you know we're so busy we're you know when we tackle one thing we're on to the next thing and we we sometimes forget to take that time and say hey you know what we really need to get that message out there so that people can understand there are a lot of things that we're working on a lot of things that we're trying to do to help folks and I see that as as a consistent personal challenge myself but one that I do want to work on because I think you you hit the nail on the head there Vice Mayor Brunner with some of the some of the challenges that we have are related to the communications about things that we're doing. Thank you Vice Mayor. It looks like we have gotten most all the council member questions so I'll go ahead and take this out the public comment. I just want to thank our staff for putting these reports together. Exciting to see actual that actual resources coming to this problem and I know hopefully we can lean into this and and get some people into a better living situation over time. So I'll go ahead and take this out to folks in the audience now. If you are interested in comment on implementation of homeless response program please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and then the timer will be set to two minutes. Before we take members of the public I'll go ahead and call on Serge Cagno from stepping up Santa Cruz to go ahead and do have his extra time at two minutes. Go ahead Serge. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Okay good evening City Council. I want to applaud the staff who have brought together so many services for our unhoused community members. I have a few concerns relating to the contracts and the services. The armory contract does not allow pets other than service animals inside the premises. This is important because low barrier programming in Santa Cruz has come to include pets property and partners because few people who are unhoused are able to get service animals training or certification and because pets are a part of their family we know people will refuse participation without their pet. These people would then be unfairly subject to the enforcement of the camping ordinance. I appreciate that the Salvation Army contract includes ADA access and hygiene assistance for all participants in need. I do not know a shelter in Santa Cruz which is able to do this. The Salvation Army as far as I know has not been able to offer this previously. I'm confused how this program will be able to offer this support which requires specialized training and is not a skill of shelter staff. I'm very glad to hear from Larry and Wally that unemployment insurance is included in the Salvation Army contract but I did not see it with the in the packet even with a search so if somebody could point out where that is or is that a newer version of the contract that would be appreciated. From the agenda 28.3 the agenda report bottom of page seven it says the RV dump station is approximately $155,000 to build. This confuses me because while I was on the catch committee I spoke with Public Works Director Mark Dettle who said it would cost about $30,000 to install an RV dump station which is just digging down and attaching a t-line. Clarification on that would be appreciated. Lee Butler talked about the encampment management funding's flexible funding which is a wonderful service and I'd like for us to be clear that those funds would also be helping many towing charges when people can't afford their own getting their cars back to work. Thank you Serge. Next I have Garrett. Yeah hey good luck with this no really. It would be responsibly informative if he would disclose both estimates and over some time period the actual running costs of the total city cost for homeless individuals served and the cost per person of homeless reduction that resulted from it if any I hope any instead of a total for each of the services you intend to fund. I think those are important figures to disclose. For example you mentioned the possibility of the armory occupancy could drop below 75 but assuming that was the figure at $1.2 million for six months of Salvation Army oversight plus fees to the state utilities that's going to work out to what? My math says a minimum of $32,000 per individual per year from the Salvation Army fees alone not counting other expenses. That's a pretty sweet benefit for people who don't have to do anything for it. It's actually more than someone working full-time at $15 an hour minimum wage every week grosses not their take on pay. I wonder how you would sell the expense logic of your benefit program to such an individual. Let me help. We're hoping to experience how great the free benefits are of what you're looking for two weeks a year for. Oh that's not too good. Thank you. Next up is Meredith Kodaran. Where'd she go? Can you hear me now? Yes we can. Go ahead please. Just a quick question. I understand that a lot of what helped house folks this past year was additional resources from the county with COVID-19 programs. With that being phased out I wanted to know if the county or the city had any kind of backup plan if we see a second surge in COVID in addition to other infectious diseases like cold, flu, or with the rain parasites like Giardia that happen to hit encampments. And if there is a plan to relaunch some of those programs if we find ourselves in another wave this year. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is Rafa Saunfield. Yes thank you. I just wanted to express my appreciation to the council member Calentari Johnson's comments regarding and conducting an analysis of the current cost of homelessness to our community including the amount of police time that's spent and just all of the robust ways that homelessness costs the city of Santa Cruz. I think it's not an apples to apples comparison if we are looking at these huge budget items that seem expensive on their own but in reality are actually reducing our overall costs and on serving and supporting our housed and unhoused residents. So I encourage the city to really look into the idea of analyzing everything including police cost when it comes to homelessness response. Thank you. Rafa, next I have Carolyn. Hey everybody, good evening. Thank you so much for having me. I just kind of had a comment after listening to the presentation about the youth action network. I felt as though if we were to sub in like unhoused for every time youth was mentioned it could offer like a really neat framework to approach this situation and I heard a lot of language around you know uplifting voices and going to their spaces and consulting them and I guess I'm just curious about how much outreach has been done to really ask the unhoused like what they feel are priorities and what would help them and approaching them with dignity because I feel as though the way that we address them and the way we see a CPD address them feels a little bit dehumanizing. So I just wanted to encourage us to maybe use the same mind or a frame of mind with them as we would are you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, I'll bring it back to the council. Councilmember Calantari-Johnson. Thank you and thanks for everyone who stayed on late and made comments. I have just a couple comments and then I did have a motion that I'm ready to make. Just want to acknowledge that this is a really complex and challenging issue. It's not black and white there. I really do think that it we have to move out of the divisiveness. We have to move away from pointing fingers and we have to start working together and even when we do that we won't be able to solve this issue we'll be able to chip away at it. So I appreciate the work that everyone has done. I appreciate the work of the two by two. I know that it's not easy and I think we've come a long way. I've done a lot of work on homelessness. I've actually been on the county side for most of the work that I've done in the last 15-20 years in this community. So I really do understand the challenges and the complexities that are involved in this. Many systems involved, many constituents involved and it's a process. And this is I think a really remarkable beginning to our work that we've been able to accomplish in a very short amount of time. And I do think that inaction of prior councils not to blame but just inaction of our city has led us to partly and put these recommendations in this work into action. So with that I'm ready to make a motion and it's really going to mirror what we saw on our agenda report. And I wonder Bonnie if you would share your screen. Oh I emailed you. I don't know if you got me. I did get it but I just want to confirm that the intent is to... I was under the impression we were going to have three motions with three votes and the motion that I see that you have it looks like you've combined all of them. I did combine all of them. I guess I'll look to the mayor and maybe Tony. I assume this was one agenda item. So the council it really depends on how you want to frame the motion. You could make a motion to adopt all three recommendations as a single action if that's the pleasure of council. Okay that's that's how I have it now or if we can look at it and see if that makes sense. Yeah maybe let's do that and maybe friendly amendments or amendments we could potentially look at those. Sure yeah if it makes more sense to break it up I'm happy to do that. I assumed it was all under one agenda. So it's accept the resolution authorizing the city manager to accept an appropriate 14 million from the state. I got to put on my glasses because I can't read it. It's 14 million I believe. Yeah I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. Okay 14 million from the state general fund for use in addressing homelessness and to accept the report on the process being used to develop recommendations for how these one-time funds will be used. Accept the resolution amending fiscal year 2022 budget to appropriate 4.243.659 million of the ARPA Act of 2021 funds for homelessness response programs. Receive recommendations regarding council directed homeless response programs and services including but not limited to lease and sub-lease information regarding the National Guard Armory and I've added this piece and relocate individuals from the bench lunch to other locations. I guess I can put other encampment man transitional encampment locations for clarification. Authorize and direct the city manager to execute a six-month contract in a form approved by the city attorney with the Salvation Army for shelter management at the Armory and they mount not to exceed 1.2 million. Accept the resolution supporting the county of Santa Cruz is grant application to the California it looks like that should be one right. The California homeless coordinating and funding council for funding through the encampment resolution funding program and directing staff to collaborate with the county on implementation of the work outlined in the grant so four and five should be one. I think there is second to that motion. Councilman Watkins. I'll second the motion. All right we have a motion on the floor. So this is basically the staff recommendation primarily I don't not noting a whole lot of change in that correct council member. Correct just what's the third motion I added the little the last part about the benchlands. Got it. Okay. Not the third motion the third item in the motion. Okay and I'm gonna I see that someone has raised her hand in the public I will go out just briefly for that one person to make their comment. I your hand came up I think after I close the time but I'm happy to receive your comment. So that is going to be in phone number ending in 1197 and we'll bring it back to council. Daniel all correctly it was mentioned in the very beginning that in the past few days that you had to deal with the crisis in regards to the rain. How is that possible? Don't you get a rather report? Every year the Armory has been open for emergency shelter that usually is full during the rain. You close the emergency shelter for the first time in years. You created this crisis and what you offer instead is a floor of the River Street parking last minute around 1 30 p.m. yesterday a long time after the rain started. I know that you planned this yesterday morning yet you had months to come up with a plan since the rains happen every year. Yesterday the city said they were going to move people with shuttle no one at Felker Street knew about the River Street parking they just got evacuated by the cops all you cared about it was at San Lorenzo Park that the people who did move to the upper part and stay from flooding that they had to move out of there and that's the only people that the city health move a few of our volunteers health from the bottom. So if you're going to be doing any crisis planning for the future like you are a shelter you're just playing musical chairs I don't see how you're going to make a difference but good luck. Now bring it back to council councilmember Cummings do you have a comment or yeah it came up when we when this got brought back around the idea around separating the motions and I would actually I think that would be I would be supportive of that if we were to move in that direction and that can either be each of the motions or it can be based on the different agenda report chapters and I feel like it's important because this was separated out into three different items and I was under the impression that we would be making separate motions on each of these items although we only had public comment on all three of them as a whole so hey Tony I'll look to the maker of the motion it is nine o'clock tonight so um I know many of us have to go to work in the morning and so I don't know how much longer this will take but um the mayor has the discretion to divide the question or it could be divided by a motion otherwise what you have before you is the motion that was articulated by councilmember so let me give may I just to be clear um so if we were to divide it it would be number one item number one right now would be separate item number two would be separate and then items three four and five would be together that I mean if that's the way it's framed then that is fine yes and that would correspond with the sub um the sub numbering of the agenda items yeah I'm I'm I'm okay with with separate that way if the seconder is how is the seconder of the motion okay with that so we'll just take the vote on one and then take a vote on two and so on and so forth and then three four and five will be can will be uh is one motion yeah let's do that I also wanted to follow up I had um I wanted to see if we could get some of the questions from the public answered around the um unemployment insurance language and also the follow-up on the RV dump station so I'm wondering if someone from staff could answer those two questions and pets please and pets yeah sorry I'll start with the RV dump station um the um estimate that we had was actually for um it included a decent amount of paving that would be required at the 1220 river street that would have included basically a new paved pad that goes from entrance to entrance so quite a bit of concrete and that would have substantially increased the costs um we don't know where that ultimate location is going to be or if additional lines are going to need to be extended um you know uh sewer laterals to the location of the dump station we use that as a placeholder because there may also be improvements at another location um and um it you know if it's less that would be great but we also didn't want to underestimate and Larry did you want to attack all the insurance and right so um our view there's a lengthy exhibit D that I haven't had a chance to go through since the question came up that articulates a variety of insurance requirements the intent is to put the unemployment insurance in if it is not in there um there's been a number of drafts and markups since uh we discussed this at the council meeting on the 23rd when this was concept and you first raised the question council member coming so we'll go back and make sure that's included uh with respect to uh pets that is also in the process of negotiation with the salvation well that is actually in the lease agreement with california guard the language in the lease agreement just specifies service animals but our questions back with our markup and request for changes that we submitted to cal guard last week inquired about the ability to have access for pets because again that is a barrier for a lot of individuals and having their pets with them is uh an element of success and need so that question has been posed to cal guard so I guess um kind of following up on that I'm just wondering how we can move forward because there's a number of different items in here as well that kind of point to you know we don't have service providers identified yet you know how we can move forward with you know not making decisions on something that we don't have all the info information on so for example with this salvation army contract it sounds like you know this is something for example I'm supportive of but it sounds like there's still you know questions that are out there with the um with the national guard and around you know whether they can have pets or not there's questions around you know whether I remember um coming maybe in the interests of time I mean if if you're if you're I don't know that we can answer all these questions tonight we we could be going on for several more hours tonight right um did you have a chance to ask the staff these questions prior to the meeting well I'm at my ask at some of these as a response to what we've been hearing from the public comment but I'm also I'm not I'm not trying to get all the answers to the questions tonight I'm seeing if I'm what I'm bringing up is you know it sounds like there may be a need to figure out how some of this can come back to us at a future date before we're making decisions this evening because if we enter into contracts and the contract is what was included in our packet and it doesn't include for example unemployment insurance which is something we brought up and that's still kind of out then we're and that's we're technically approving something with that does not have certain information we want included in it so I'm really trying to get it you know and this is a this is an issue I've had with this whole process is I've been feeling like there are things that come before us that are still being baked and but we have to make a decision on it immediately and I'm trying to figure out it sounds like there's certain things and what's before us that are not you know they've not been fully solidified and it's a number of different things whether it's sites whether it's operators whether it's language and contracts and that's something I'm concerned about in terms of having to make a decision on allocating you know five million close to five million dollars this evening towards these services programs okay and I'll I'd also say I know that it's late but this is probably one of the single most important issues that we address in our community hey let's keep going let's keep going let's go for it next question I'm happy to respond to that um if you'd like mayor I'm I'm fine as long as it takes we'll be here okay um so the the response I would have there is is yes council member Cummings you're absolutely correct we do anticipate having some minor tweaks to the contract um similar to that are specific to some of these issues that have been raised the the authorization that the council would have sets that maximum dollar amount you know we we don't anticipate any changes to the dollar amount but we do anticipate having some of these minor contract changes hey you know can we make it work with pets um or let's make sure that this insurance information is there and um the uh the motion language that we included does identify that it's the the form approved by the city attorney so we would work with the attorneys to finalize those specific issues um you know we we did debate like all right you know this this isn't going to be in its exact final form when it's getting in front of the council um you know we we chose deliberately to bring it to you for a matter of expediency so that um you know we don't have another month before um we can get this up and running with the salvation army needing to hire folks um we wanted to hit we we chose to to bring it to you sooner rather than later even though some of those minor details are are still um in negotiation it's certainly within the purview of the council to continue until those additional items but we are comfortable um finalizing those details if the council is comfortable with us doing that okay uh are we still on uh motion number one i i think you're speaking of motion number two but i'm not really sure yes i mean we can move forward with motion number one that's the case we have a a motion um council member brown do you have the comments on this you know you know no no that we have 14 million dollars or should we know no not on this one no no i don't want to lose i'd like to keep my hand up so that i can comment when we get to the others i did actually have one comment on that item and i just wanted to say that i know there are people in the community who've been interested but one i think that um you know having that money go towards infrastructure and land acquisitions probably the greatest use of the 14 million and then i've been hearing from folks in the community around wanting to expand or create um alternative crisis response so that you know when it's calls for homelessness or mental health are going out that it's not police responding to those calls so i just wanted to put that in the list of um you know recommendations and yeah that's it okay bonnie can we do a roll call vote on motion number one please council members watkins hi calentary johnson hi brown hi comey holder hi nice mayor brunner and mayor mirad hi that motion passes unanimously uh let's move to i it's a motion number two are there any questions or comments council member brown do you have a comment on this one i do um it's more of a general comment but i i feel like this is probably the place to make it um the the information we've been provided um does give us a high level understanding of the costs associated with a number of these programs that um have been at least set into motion uh through council action on um uh punitive and enforcement um focused ordinances i have i i'm very conflicted because i want to support this and i believe that doing things like that we are moving in the right direction by um saying that we're going to invest in these um in this kind of programming as a council member who um doesn't have the ability to um influence the the nature of the um programming the um partnerships that are being established um uh you know questions about the costs you know it makes me nervous to make a commitment that involves spending a lot of money um when we've done we have done this before and um so this idea that we have never taken action that we've we've just been sitting around i mean i just find that very offensive i'm just gonna say that um and um we have and then we spend the money and then the money goes away and the program goes away and i recognize that that is not the intention here and um you know so i want to be supportive and i worry that um given the um you know i'm trying to find a polite way to say this um you know given the priorities of council majority right now um we may not achieve what i want to achieve out of this and you know and what the people i talk with i am out in the community i talk with unhoused people almost every day that i am out in our community i spend one day a week um in one of the encampments helping with cleanup helping to help see how we can get people's immediate needs met um you know i am not uh naive to the problems and i see very different challenges i see the same challenges that are highlighted by my colleagues about nuisance you know um mental health and you know social behaviors um uh you know trash i see all of that and i see people who are just trying to survive and when i when i am sitting here with a body that um has now adopted two punitive ordinances one of which was not um legally you know was not actually used it's directly to um tow and rv a survival vehicle for three generations of people um because they had six outstanding tickets and were a month late on the payment plan at nine o'clock on a friday night on one of the coldest days of the year and now they are sitting um about to probably about to be you know uh some enforcement action against them now because they've got their stuff out on the side of the road i just have a hard time um believing that um you know that we're really going to make progress in that kind of environment i hear um we need to stop with the divisiveness and i agree but expressing my um frustrations my heartbreak um about what is happening to people and the fact that we're we're really what we're doing here is not going to meet those needs um and i worry that it won't in the long term it's very hard for me to have confidence that you know we're we're actually going to be effective with with these efforts i'm sorry to say that and if that sounds divisive i'm sorry but what feels very um you know what i think people get very upset about and i'm i'm upset right now that there are people who are suffering unnecessarily as a result of some of the things that this council has done so action does not always lead to progress and that's just how i feel and i'm sorry if that um angers my colleagues um but i i've just got to say it and so i feel quite conflicted um i guess i'll leave it there um you know i would like more um given that um that i am not on the ad hoc committee that's been established given that i am not involved in any of the conversations that um i mean i i and i recognize i want to say i recognize that staff is available i appreciate you talking with me rosemary larry lee i like i super appreciate it and i know that you're working to try to find solutions that are effective and compassionate at the same time that we have this enforcement framework that just kind of is the cloud over all of it and um so i would like to see um if if these decisions are going to get made behind the scenes with a you know a subcommittee of three council members um like more detailed kind of layout on programming i would like the council to have the opportunity to make decisions and bring this to the public agenda um in a more systematic way in a more detailed way as these programs are being developed so i would like to see more regular reporting to us about what's going on and an ability for those council members who are not invited to those conversations um to be able to weigh in um that would make me feel a lot better about it um so you know i don't even it's like i don't even want to try to make an amendment to the motion because i know i'm going to get shot down here so um i'm just real conflicted about supporting a kind of big broad with an odd a lot of detail um major allocation that's where i'm at i'm just being honest thank you council member brown uh council member comments yeah i also um share concerns around um a number of the things that are being proposed largely because there's for example language that states that you know we haven't identified well service providers yet and the costs can you know vary depending on who those people are and you know and one of the um previous items that we discussed and we were discussing funding you know there was a you know there were some comments made about you know getting ahead of ourselves with you know allocating funds and you know this is a situation where um you know or rather i should say you know prematurely allocating funds towards certain services and certain funding sources and this is a situation where um we're defining how much we're going to spend on things that are still fairly unknown and i guess one of the concerns i have especially around the um safe sleeping programs is that you know we've consistently been kind of scaling back i remember the first time 12 20 river street um was put into effect there were security guards and fencing and all sorts of things that um many people in the community thought was a little excessive we've rolled that back over time but one of the things that that was allowed us to demonstrate effectiveness with a lot of the um sleeping programs we had during covid and that we've continued to use has been the staffing and i'm a little concerned that we're going to move to this model where staff will kind of drop in every once in a while and just check on the camp and how things are going and leave and it kind of reminds me of when the Ross camp was operating when staff was going out there they were engaging with people um they were asking people to be compliant but you know um that wasn't necessarily happening and i know this time there's rules and there's um there's there's funding going towards this so staff will be there in and out but i do have concerns around you know if staff try to kick somebody out and that person comes back and you know what that means and enforcement of the different rules in the camp so i have some concerns around those programs i'm fully supportive of some of the things around infrastructure because i think that is a like a solid investment when it comes to the hygiene bay showers the um RV dump um sites like those are all things that i think many members of the community want to see come forward and also um that i think that we should also you know if we're going to talk about allocating funds and meaning community needs i think we should also be investing in um you know funds towards a feasibility study for alternative crisis response and that's something we discussed last year um and at the time the council said we don't have enough money um and you know and rightfully so because of the fiscal emergency but now we're in a position where we're allocating you know almost 4.5 almost close to five million dollars towards these services using these ARPA funds this would be a great opportunity for us to invest in that feasibility study because many people across many sectors in our community are supportive of that and i think it's something that we should consider personally i'd like to hear from other council members i i'm happy to make friendly amendments but um i you know if if i'm not going to make the friendly amendment if it doesn't sound like that anything's going to go in that direction because oftentimes i'll try to make a friendly amendment and as council brown said we get shut down so i don't want to go through putting a bunch of language out there unless there's you know uh a willingness to want to compromise on this uh council member Watkins i'm not quite sure to jump in here on this other than that i think you know we absent like a perfect solution i think what i feel is really consistent is a council that wants to try to do something and i don't think it's a punitive led approach really it's a programs led approach and we have this funding to use to go towards it if we're not using it towards solutions or programs then we're using it towards cleaning up encampments like the Ross camp right so for me i feel like you know absent the perfect solution and i welcome that to be quite honest with you given the amount of time i feel like we go in circular conversations around this issue it's really hard to just say god okay this is where we made it go so i feel like you know at a certain point i think it's really it's it's really hard to say yes to some solutions even though they're imperfect as opposed to really say they're not perfect enough to move forward and so for me i'm prepared to move forward um in some way given that it's evolving and that we're trying our best to meet the needs of our community and that honestly every homeless population is different i you know i work with the at the county office of education who are working on addressing homeless families and kids day in and day out every single day trying to get them christmas presents and you know getting community support around that and i feel like the community gives them so many ways and we're trying to do our part as well and and it's not perfect and there are different populations that need different interventions we don't have um everything in place and we can't point our fingers at this at the county year after year we have to try to do them and it's evolving and so for me i think i'm just at the point where i feel gosh you know absent a perfect solution an acknowledgement of the work that's done and the proposal before us that i feel comfortable moving forward um in regards to the to the motion before us at this point and i'll chime in here councilmember comings i'm not sure exactly what your amendment would be but i would again just um you know if it's i i i guess what i'm curious about is that again the the county just received eight million dollars um and part of what they will be doing is um a new program with that money called trios tree and transport program which will be pairing behavioral health clinicians with the emergency medical response responders in ambulances uh they're also going to um provide two additional mental health liaisons for the box and build police department um and the sheriff's office and the Santa Cruz police department um and so it sounds like there's a program you want funded but i'm trying to understand how it fits with the funding that just scott came to the county and whether or not you've talked to them about whether or not that's potentially where some of that interest may be satisfied i'm not sure if we need to do a study or if we need to talk with the county to understand how they're going to deploy those those fundings and again this is eight million dollars and it will be focused on behavioral and mental health response and emergency moping and mobile units throughout the county um mobile crisis units response units so if maybe there's a way to get some clarification i'm not clear exactly um if you've been able to talk with the county about this new program or um if you've been working with them on on trying to understand how that money gets deployed and if that's being the objective of again we're trying not to fund everything um you know we're trying to make sure the county funds the things that are sort of in their wheelhouse so i'm just i'm just curious if maybe you've conversations with eric ribera or others over at the county yeah more recently i'll say i'm not in that i'm glad to hear that that funding is coming through and that's um what the funding is going towards um the previous conversations that i've been having with people were that this is the county was going to be looking at that in the coming year and i've been hearing from community members from groups that have been working on the mental health crisis or the alternative crisis response that they've been really wanting to see the city step up and have and create some kind of feasibility study or see if we can get other jurisdictions on board um but that the times that that's been brought up in terms of allocation of money towards those kinds of studies what i've heard from the city council is that we don't have the funds to do that and this i was this was an opportunity when i was going to bring this up because um if we're going to be allocating funds from our general fund to fund these programs or not from our general fund from the ARPA funds that this is also something that the community has been interested in and um this seems like the appropriate time to bring it up that's why i brought that to the council's attention finally maybe my only response is since the county just got eight million dollars to do it sounds like what i heard which i think is the program out of war again or similar to that maybe just getting some clarification since they have eight million dollars um maybe maybe just a first step and then maybe bringing this back um you know as a you know later in another council meeting i'm happy to i mean i won't be in charge i'm like saying that but i'm sure we'd all like to hear but um the county from what i can understand and i've read everything that the county i read the full staff report again this is uh this was awarded a month ago so this is this has been acted on by the county supervisors there was a full staff report available december 16th so maybe that maybe just understanding a little more about what the county wants to do might be helpful um and then i'm sure we can i mean bring some an item forward so that that would be my suggestion i i think that some of these funds are trying to get people um in more stable conditions in the near term um so i've got council member voluntary johnson and then council member boulder thank you i'll um i'll keep a brief just you know i just i just want to note that um you know as as is being pointed out this is multi-layered and very complex um i don't sit by on the two by two and i don't sit on every committee um or many subcommittees for that matter on this but i just i reach out to service providers i reach out to our county partners i reach out to nonprofits i reach out to staff um and i just county office of education child welfare services these are all the systems county mental health behavior health these are all the systems that are involved and i and i try to whether i'm on a subcommittee or not or in those conversations i try to reach out and get the information and put the pieces together and um we we can't solve it all at once and this is our this is our moving forward with bits and pieces of it um so i think i don't know i think i think this this conversation feels like it's just kind of gone way out here um we are talking about the services that we've outlined as part of the council direction in the votes that we've taken in the last six months and what we have from staff are specific response of how to do that and what it would cost to do that let's start with that and there's more to be done and let's bring in our partners and each of us individually go out and do the work and talk to our partners to see what's being done already and where are the gaps and where where do we fit in with our role as a city so um i think with that i'm also um prepared to move to a vote um i see that council member golder has a question but um i'm ready to move to vote call the question tony do we have to vote on the call the question remind me yeah the to call the question is a motion so it has to be made in second it is not a debatable motion so the council would have to take a vote right away so if there's a motion by council member collin tarry johnson and a second you can vote uh to call the question council member golder do you want to second that i'll second that sorry council member collin tarry johnson that was a motion yeah i was confronted that's a motion okay um let's go ahead and do a roll call vote please sponnie so just to confirm tony this vote is to accept the call the question right and then we do another vote yeah on the original it's a motion to call the question right so if this passes then the council can move directly to the recommended action okay council member watkins hi collin tarry johnson hi brown l holder hi nice mayor brunner hi hi mayor myers hi that motion passes unanimously body can you now do a roll call on the uh motion 28.2 up on the screen and i believe this motion was made by council member collin tarry johnson and seconded by council member um watkins council member watkins collin tarry johnson hi i'm going to vote no and what just happened just now is the reason why i'm voting no no ability to discuss further but the record was stated earlier that we could take the time we needed to discuss this and my intention was to try to reach consensus and that's been a problem with this process the whole time so no hi mayor brunner hi that motion passes five four and two against and we'll move on to the next motion which i believe has three parts fine thank you okay um i would look to a um motion uh if if a council member is ready to do that well the council member collin tarry johnson has already placed a motion on the floor so um it was just divided up into three separate into three when you're right sorry tony getting a little tired okay um say uh council member brown leave your um yeah excuse me sorry um i i um i'm going to move an amendment to part two of this motion um to um ensure that amendment or i mean i don't think it's going to be friendly so i'm making this as an amendment we'll have to go through the whole vote um to um authorize and direct the city manager to execute a six-month contract in a form approved by the city attorney with the salvation army for shelter management at the armory in an amount not to exceed 1.2 million dollars and with language with specific language in the contract that unemployment insurance will be provided to salvation army workers on this contract i don't know if there's a second but that's my um amendment council member colder i'm just trying to understand why this is so important what this the unemployment insurance can can um council member brown or comings explain why why you're super passionate about this rosemary too has her yeah go ahead please i'm happy to share um if you're hired for a job on a six-month contract and then you lose your job because the contract is up and you can apply apply for unemployment insurance then you're screwed pardon my french so you're hired for like a six-month job and then the person can collect unemployment after the six months is up if you are if you lose your job you have no you have no ability to and you don't have another job lined up you have i mean we and we expect unemployment insurance is a rule state of california um for employees straight up um this is a temporary contract i believe those workers should have the right to collect unemployment insurance if they lose their jobs because we stop funding a program but do they know going in they're only getting six months at work that may be true but i believe they are entitled to unemployment insurance so if if if you think that because they they know then they then they don't deserve it or we don't it's not a priority that's fine i'm making them i'm just making that amendment as a motion i just i didn't understand what what what thank you ross mary do you have a comment on this i i do i just wanted to suggest that um in the event that you really want this and there was a price tag associated with it you might want to allow for that to um that you know some increment to cover that to be added to this 1.2 million if so are you suggesting language to say and um um uh including and allocate funds for additional funds to the contract if necessary i i mean i would say uh and you know amend then not to exceed amount to include that if needed right and okay yeah i mean i i don't know what the count is going to do on this but i guess what that's what i'm saying is that you put a cap on it and you could be making it impossible to reach out on the contract so could i ask for clarification on this um and forgive me because it's getting late but is the council voting now on item number two because i was we're voting on item number three point two number to authorize the contract i see here under 28.3 item number three point two okay thank you kind of get a point of order my understanding is that it's all three of these items because we broke it out into 28.1 28.2 28.3 and this this is all the language under 28.3 yes right just for clarification so the council then is voting on item 28.3 items one through three council member brown has proposed an amendment to item two that uh requires the provision of unemployment assurance insurance to solve an issue i i'm not heard a second on that second now the council can vote on the amendment the amendment passes you can vote on the main motion with the amendment i have a question yeah council member comings or what question i'm just curious um because i know that with grant funded hires you know which are often the case in my world there's sort of a recognition that it's a temporary or it's a you know it's based on a grant or it's based on a certain timeframe and i'm just wondering how often the city does this in regards to these types of contracts whether it be for you know a grant or a service like this this seems up unusual to me don't know that i and that anyone here tonight can answer that question for you um i think we can answer that question but do you think that you we don't usually do this or do we usually do i mean like in general is this a typical practice for a contract or and in is this a requirement that we're requiring salvation army so we would basically pass through the funds to them and then they would be paying the unemployment insurance i'm a little confused honestly i it would hold with the employer it wouldn't hold with the person with the group that was providing the contract at least that's a good question is is whether or not um an an employee under a temporary contract of the sort uh qualifies under state unemployment insurance law for enrollment in unemployment insurance so uh perhaps if the motion is accepted it should be reframed to say that that employees shall be eligible for uh unemployment insurance if provided for by state law is the maker amenable to that i don't know how we can do i don't start i'm just concerned that we have a contract that might be out of compliance with state law okay so the move in is the seconder can i interject here i think so i'm just trying to understand this so is the is the idea that unemployment insurance will be provided salvation army workers if it's required by state law is this is that the idea well i i'm not not necessarily at least you know for instance under some insurance programs uh temporary employees are not eligible to participate not under the requirement of the employer but under the requirements of the insurer so i can i just don't i don't have the answer to that question does does the state law enable an employer like the salvation army for a temporary contract arrangement like this to enroll its employment employees in unemployment insurance um i don't know so that's why i suggested if if applicable or if available i'm also kind of curious because i mean this is something i brought up at previous meetings and um you know our understanding was that the language was supposed to be supposedly included than a member of the public with the contract and so it wasn't and so i'm just kind of curious about you know if that language was supposed to be included already then you know rosemary do you have an answer on this i've been getting text text from lisa murphy who's telling me that she doesn't think this is a real issue because all temporary employees like our lifeguards can get unemployment insurance once the seasons end and she also says that it's a state fund that every employer pays into the fund so i guess the the intention is having it explicitly stated within the contract um because it sounds like they may have some concerns of employees in the past not receiving that unemployment insurance and so if the city is supportive you know of you know ensuring that the people who were contracting what they're providing their employees with unemployment insurance so that when they're terminated they can qualify for an employee i think that's the intention of what's being proposed here this evening but i don't it sounds as though that according to what lisa is saying that there is a that in fact the unemployment insurance is paid by the employer and then the employee is qualified to receive unemployment benefits that's how it's that's how she's sort of describing it and that that it's a state law that the employer must pay so if there's a problem with people receiving it there's some there's some confusion in there but her virgin is it the state law everybody pays into it and the employer in this case is salvation army it's not the city it could very well be that they have they contract with workers in a way that doesn't make them employees i don't know if that's the case and it might be a different thing but so um maybe we can so i i feel like we're sort of so i'm trying to understand how to get this done um we've now been on this item for almost an hour and a half on on these three motions well actually almost two hours um councilmember brown and and again this we are trying to work through this i just want you to know but i if if you're in a hurry then just vote it down if you or i'm just trying to be respectful to bring in our new mayor while her family's waiting i recognize that you know and our advice are so i'm also trying to be respectful of the people who do this really critical work who then lose their jobs when the funding runs out and then try to get unemployment and are denied so having that kind of language to say this is a responsible contractor issue if we're going to contract with the Salvation Army then they ought to agree that they will not try to deny unemployment to employ to their workers should they need to be laid off that's all i am asking if that's too complicated or you know controversial or whatever it may be then let's just you know we we know how to call the question call the question we'll just vote on it and the amendment and then that's fine with me my position is we should be working with responsible contractors that includes the provision of unemployment insurance and not denying their claims so whatever is going on with the Salvation Army it has been raised as an issue for past laid off employees i want to make sure any new employees or rehired employees do not have that issue and it's just a simple matter of putting that in a contract it happens all the time as part of responsible contractor language in public agency contracts with private sector contractors that's all um oh i am uh if you will unmute uh or bonnie and mute uh three two five nine eight one that is lisa murphy and she can answer this question can you press star nine to there you go unmute there you go r6 there you go oh good good evening council i apologize i've been having technical difficulties um as i'm following your conversation about unemployment insurance every employer in the state is required to play into the state fund it's not that we carry the insurance they we pay into the state fund and then when an employee is either laid off even if they quit the job seasonal temporary they're all entitled to apply for unemployment insurance trying to as an employer trying to deny that process it's virtually impossible i've been through the process before so even the example i was trying to text to uh rosemary was even our lifeguards while they know that they're seasonal and temporary when they come into the position they when the season ends they can still apply and still can obtain unemployment payment i'm hoping that answers your questions i don't think that it's necessary to put it in there because the salvage normally doesn't actually carry unemployment rate funds that they have to pay into okay um uh council member walkins and then council member comie okay council member comies go ahead i would just like to point out because and the reason why i'm making sure i have an opportunity to speak up is because there might be council member we should want to call the question on this item but i really need to point out that um one thing that was brought to my attention and that i got to look up was that um certain religious nonprofits are exempt from unemployment tax and Salvation Army um likely falls under that and so the reason why this is being brought forward is because of the fact that if we're contracting with this nonprofit their employees with the nonprofits not required to pay to save unemployment tax and therefore if their employees get fired they don't qualify so part of this is trying to ensure that under this contract that um the um Salvation Army will pay into the unemployment tax with their employees are eligible for it should they be terminated at any point in time so that's the intention under all this is that we're actually ensuring that the people who we're contracting with are doing the best to take care of the employees who are providing some of the most critical services to our community okay um i have one question i one additional question for staff um so tony i was just curious because i had another um motion for direction that i wanted to include that's not necessarily an approval of anything that's before us but is related to the homeless this topic and so i'm just wondering if or and when should i guess when should would be the appropriate opportunity to make that motion i guess i i really would need more information about what the nature of the motion is and whether or not it's uh you know consistent with the action that's before you yeah i can uh see if body can put it up i sent it to her a couple minutes ago let's um if we could can we get ready i'd like to get resolution on the amendment that's been on the floor um before we go to another item and we still have not finished the existing motion on the floor so why don't we uh martin or sonia do you have any additional comments or questions on this or maybe we can get a vote going here on this amendment let's think let me i guess uh i don't know i'm feeling a little bit confused frankly about this whole conversation in that i don't understand if it's that there's not an adequate response in terms of the state law or if there's a different vendor we're looking for or you know understanding based on what lisa said it sounds like state law does have um you know mechanisms in place to support this type of worker so i i guess i i don't fully understand the challenge or the issue um but it feels like it's sort of under this thing that already maybe state law has in place uh to support workers who are going to file for unemployment so i guess i'm just sort of feeling a little bit like um slightly overwhelmed and a little bit out i'm trying to actually bring forward solutions you know in a way that i feel like we can maybe do so with our community partners and i'm just going to leave it at that okay i've got council member gold i took my hand down but i'm sorry i did i i thought i was going to speak with then council member walkins oh sorry um i have a couple quick questions um i understand the intent as described by council member comings and council member brown and um i appreciate that um thinking and um really trying to incorporate that intention um did this did something happen with salvation army to bring this up or i'm just do you know of any experience where this came up can i yes okay um where employees for salvation army did not were not eligible for um unemployment so i wonder if they were not employees or if salvation army was exempt from paying into the state fund unemployment state fund what do you know which one it is does anybody um we're trying to research that topic as the council discussion is underway um there is an exemption under under federal law or religious organizations and i suspect salvation army might fall under that classification um as it as a way to move the discussion forward i might suggest so uh adopt some some language to the effect that the contract shall include a requirement to provide unemployment insurance if provided for by state or federal law because i i'm concerned about a contract provision that requires the contracting agency to provide insurance that it's exempt from under under state or federal law so does that put the obligation on the city then tony no it puts the obligation on on my office to determine if there's an exemption for this type of work and if so it would not be included in the contract if not it would be included is the maker of the amended motion willing or amenable to that addition so that's fine i get that repeated so i put it in there sorry tony contract shall shall it provided for by state or federal law include the requirement that employees uh are provided unemployment insurance benefits eligible for are eligible for yes thank you instead of it's kind of provided just say eligible for okay i just made okay there were two people talking i didn't care what did you say okay including an environment that employees are eligible for unemployment insurance benefits is the seconder amenable to this language i see it comes up councilmember golder did you have a comment or question you're you're muted sorry i put my hand down instead of unmuted i was going to say what tony said it's just i didn't think we could anyway no that's my little comments i didn't have one quick question um this for the city term my chair's like breaking so apologies for trying to fix that um so if the if the employer or the contractor doesn't is exempt from providing unemployment is there any way the city can require them to provide that insurance or is that something you all look into we will look into it i don't know the answer to that question i would have to research it um my concern would be that the salvation army does a lot of differences um and and and we would need to inquire as to whether or not it can you know participate in a state operated unemployment insurance program for a single contract when it provides a multitude of different types of services in and employees uh people in a lot of different capacities so it's just something that we would need to look into okay i'm just concerned that um it won't be about this so yeah but i'm okay with the matter sorry i didn't i didn't hear your comment there councilmember oh i was just i guess my concern was that you know this might be our only time to visit this topic um because it sounds like the contract's going to move forward and if it can well first off we i think we have to get the see if the amendment's going to be accepted but i'll just say that for now i'm fine with where we're at there's that and i will just um commit to the council that we will provide an update to the council by separate probably by separate memo or email after we've explored this issue we're going to take down like we're ready yes sounds like we're ready to take a vote bonnie can you take a roll call vote please this is on the amendment to the motion yes bonnie you're yep council member what can i i want harry johnson hi nice mayor brunner mayor meyer hi that motion passes unanimously okay um we're gonna let me that was a motion to accept the amendment now we need to do the right motion the motion on that yeah okay so councilmember what can i i want harry johnson hi over hi nice mayor brunner and mayor meyer hi that motion passes unanimously okay so i believe we bonnie can you go back up to the three so remind i believe we are done with this now yeah i have a motion that i'm planning on making and that's why i brought this up with the city attorney but i have an additional motion that i wanted to make with regards to which motion on the floor with you mean to the regards to which item to the item of homelessness that's before us this evening so i sent the text over to bonnie and i was asking about this because and that's why i brought this up with the city attorney a few minutes ago um you know a lot of what i've been hearing from people in the community around this and a lot of what i've been expressing over the course of the past year is the challenges around you know trying to come up with a plan and have goals and how we're going to you know have the community prioritize what we want to address around homelessness identify the you know service providers where our goals and this has been something i've been feeling like throughout the course of the year and i've been hearing this from members of the public you know that we're we have this ordinance on sleep or not on sleeping we have an ordinance on vehicles but what about people who sleep in their cars um what about mental crisis response you know why are we going in this direction versus another and so i think it will be really good if we came up with a plan if we're moving the direction of you know seriously addressing homelessness similar to the county it makes sense that we come up with a plan and so i'm going to move that um we direct staff to bring back an item for future discussion in early 2022 that would create a process for creating a plan to address homelessness which would include identifying goals priorities implementation strategies would include housed and unhoused community members and stakeholder engagement there's a second for that motion okay um we can go ahead and um move to the vote i guess um in the in the council packet there is a long list of well three of the major policy areas that have been completed since 2017 um those of all included lots of people uh and lots of things so um we have the 2017 recommendations we have the 2020 cash recommendations and we have the housing for healthy Santa Cruz um and we actually accepted that plan uh basically signing on to it uh so and that was an extensive outreach effort across the whole county um so i just want to make sure the community is aware of the extensive work prior to all of these the county completed the all-in plan which was done in 2010 um so there's at least five different housing you know homeless plans that have been completed so um i think what's before us is um immediate action and acceptance of millions and millions of dollars that we've never had and um so why don't we if there's any questions on the motion why don't we go ahead and grab those and then we will um take a take a vote on this portion any questions on the motion okay let's do a roll call vote um by councilmember Watkin no and for the record it's because we have a number of plans already in place um calentary donphin no for the same reason and the other plan that wasn't mentioned the youth homeless demonstration program that was a year-long strategic planning process led by youth with lived experience and for the record it's because the vast majority of recommendations and priorities that have been set in those planning processes that did engage the community have been ignored by this council um honey i am for the record as well um it's important that we are taking these plans and identifying goals and implementation of what's been outlined in these plans and that has not been how we've been addressing homelessness thus far with what we've been with the decisions we've been making this year boulder vice mayor brunner hi and mayor meyers that motion fails four to three okay i think that brings us to the end of this item can you go back to that i think yeah i don't know i was gonna say councilmember golder appears both as having voted i and no this is not the final anyway this is just for you guys yeah we've watched the video again i'm lost sorry yeah okay that's this that just needs to be corrected thanks okay okay i believe this item is now completed for the evening is that correct first i'm tracking okay um let's see we will now go on to um last items on our agenda are our ceremonial presentation items as outgoing mayor i would like to say a few words and then i will turn it over our city clerk to swear swear in our new vice mayor and meyer and mayor excuse me i'm losing my voice um i just got a few short quick little comments that i will do very quickly at this late hour okay um i'm losing my voice so let's go uh i just wanted to thank uh the staff of the city of santa cruz um you are the most dedicated group of people i know and you work hard every day to make santa cruz the best city it can be you are as are essential workers and your jobs are hard and trying i want to let you know i appreciate your dedication excuse me to all the residents and visitors to santa cruz i also want to thank my colleagues on the city council and our city manager's office team city manager's office team interim city manager rose rosary minard our city clerk team bonnie bush and julia wood assistant city manager laura schmidt susanne haberman sherry cope and rosemary ballsy elizabeth smith and tiffany weiswest no one can do this work without colleagues that will work hard to make change in their community and to take the hard votes that are needed this year has been a trying year in many ways and it has always really illuminated that santa cruz is a caring community that does want change from the direction we seem to be going we have seen new advocacy for producing housing versus anti-growth sediment we have seen that our community wants change in addressing homelessness we know we have a growing issue with fentanyl meth and heroin and that that is driving so much damage to our young people and is related to rising nuisance crimes throughout town these are the big issues ahead i hope we continue on the pathway to problem solving our hardest issues on the hopeful side which i swear i really tend to want to be i'm very proud of the work we have done on our interim recovery plan implementation and establishing a pathway to encourage a green economy and associated employment opportunities in santa cruz i look forward to continue this work and growing this employment sector this sector provides 10 percent of our jobs in santa cruz and i know we can grow this in the future my colleagues and i have also completed a national search for a new city manager and we are excited to have matt huffaker joining the city on january third i was thrilled to give a give a key to the city to stanford basketball superstar hailey jones and retiring director of visit santa cruz maggie ivy these women represent the best of santa cruz and i was pleased to recognize them i started the mayor's challenge to increase volunteers to join council members on beach cleanups throughout the summer and of course many council members had a blast jumping off the wharf in honor of the junior guards graduating this summer i celebrate my colleagues leadership and thank our voters for establishing the county's tax funded children's fund in our city charter the first in the state of california i also greatly enjoy the work i did with our surf preservation society and save the waves coalition and honoring on honoring santa cruz's surf legacy from keeping the surf museum open during covet ups and downs and celebrating its 35th birthday to helping create the partnership between the save the waves coalition and the city parks department focused on the world surfing reserve and i'm proud to have co-sponsored the efforts of many of my colleagues for the city to participate in to participate in united against hate week in santa cruz and to join the government alliance for racial equity this work will also focus on ways to have our government services and engagement become more inclusive of by pop a teen x and a api community members finally i'm thrilled by the progress we have made to bring to bring affordable housing to our downtown and a beautiful new library soon these residences will be walkable and next to a brand new transit center and new medical facilities these walkable communities are a best practice for climate change planning for the future finally i want to reflect on the hard work that was done during the ongoing covet crisis and in keeping our community safe i want to thank the community of county of santa cruz for its continued guidance on covet especially during the surges and it felt to my fellow mayors in working together on vaccination education and outreach and availability in our communities i want to thank the community all excuse me the county also for establishing and maintaining a covet testing center at the civic auditorium and helping to vaccinate our essential workers i want to recognize kaiser permanente and dignity health for operating two large vaccination centers in our city at a critical time and all the volunteers who helped at these centers to get as many people vaccinated as possible there these are the things that make being mayor a profound experience and i'm so lucky to have had the opportunity to serve this great town to mayor elect bruner and vice mayor elect walkins i could not be more proud to serve next to you both in the year ahead and i want to hope and i hope that you both enjoy and have fun in your new positions for the city congratulations i will now turn it over to our city clerk to swear in incoming vice mayor and vice vice mayor and mayor thank you mayor if i could have everybody but council member watkins turn off your video and if you can raise your right hand it's kind of awkward doing it via zoom i know um i martin martin watkins i martin watkins do solemnly affirm do swap solemnly affirm that i will support and defend that i will support and defend the constitution of the united states the constitution of the united states and the constitution of the state of california and the constitution of the state of california against all enemies against all enemies foreign and domestic foreign and domestic that i will bear that i will bear true faith and allegiance true faith and allegiance to the constitution of the united states to the constitution of the united States in the Constitution of the state of California in the Constitution of the State of California that I will take this obligation freely that I will take this obligation freely without any mental reservation without any mental reservation and that I will and that I will well and faithfully well and unfaithfully. Discharge the duties. Discharge the duties. Upon which I'm about to enter. Upon which I'm about to enter. Thank you. Thank you for doing it slower than my dad did. Mayor, should I take a few minutes to make a few comments at this time or Bonnie, should I do that at this point? Yeah, I think we typically do the swearing in first and then and then you and Sonia can say a word. Vice Mayor Bruner, if I could have you turn on your camera and if I could have you raise your right hand. You're muted. You're gonna need both hands to unmute. Okay. I Sonia Bruner. I Sonia Bruner. Do solemnly affirm. Do solemnly affirm. That I will support and defend. That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state of California and the Constitution of the state of California against all enemies, against all enemies foreign and domestic that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the state of California and the Constitution of the State of California that I take this obligation freely that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion or purpose of evasion and that I will and that I will well and faithfully well and faithfully discharge the duties discharge the duties upon which I'm about to enter upon which I'm about to enter thank you so Bonnie remind me I believe the mayor now takes this over my script is missing that page on what the vice mayor what can can say a few words and then Mayor Brunner can say a few words and then Mayor Brunner can adjourn us I will keep my comments short but I do just want to say thank you and I think every time I take the oath that remember that this is always so much bigger than just this one moment and this one person that it's all part of a democracy and system that we are participating in I want to thank the council and as Mayor Myers had brought up former Mayor Myers have brought up you know I really also want to thank our city workers you know we're going on over 13 hours and so you know I know that all of us are committed to the city and I also know that all of our workers are so committed to the city and they serve our city every day day in and out day in and day out and I thank them for that I think our communities committed to the city right we see that all the time in terms of the constant community input we receive and and then I'm going to also just take a moment to thank Mayor Myers you have been a really wonderful mayor and I have to I mean that truly there's no question to me that you are dedicated dedicated to this community you're dedicated to the city that although maybe not everybody is in agreement with all of the solutions brought forward all the time that there's no question that you're really seeking ways to find solutions to a lot of these complex issues and I've learned from your experience as mayor and I thank you for your service and I thank you for keeping us on track to keep moving a lot of these important policy issues forward I also want to thank and congratulate our incoming mayor and I really look forward to working as your vice mayor and the vice mayor of this community and ensuring that we're all successful and I can't also not thank my family because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them and when I first started on council my little one was not even two yet so she's seven now and it's because I have a huge village so I just I have to acknowledge them I guess I'll just say my priorities have been really pretty consistent I'd say and that's essentially to do the best we can to build healthy equitable resilient communities a resilient community resilient Santa Cruz and continue to make upstream investments and I really try to approach policymaking sometimes I do it as sort of a policymaking nerd in that I really actually love public policy but I also like to think about what is the community you want to build and how do we shift our mindset from one that finds us sort of in these ruts to seeking solutions of what we want to see like where where we want to live and where we value living and how we build those those things right as opposed to trying to fix what we don't like and I was brought up by by Mayor Myers that we've done a lot of really great things as a community measure a is a great example first in the state I think it's first in the nation 83% of our voters said that they want to see us investing in kids amazing the health and all policy ordinance was really similar in that way and those are examples of really inclusive processes that engage our community and just today I think about all the things we touched on in terms of the work right we talked about a green economy we're doing equity youth affordable housing you know trying to just even though it can be divisive and kind of leave us on a bad note at the end of the day I know every single one of my colleagues really care about trying to find solutions to complex homeless issues I really do believe that and you know congratulations to our department on this incredible milestone after 20 years right in terms of infrastructure and climate resilience so I mean just today I think is a really great sampling of all the incredible things that our city does and it's important to recognize how it's all interconnected and part of our our job and so moving forward I'm hopeful that we can continue to try to find ways to work together and and actualize a shared vision and balance process and also balance being in action I know it's really hard and especially with some of these really hard policy choices before us but I'm hopeful that we can move away from really identity politics that I think it's at people's true identities but to recognizing that no matter what we're all committed to this community we're all committed to serve our our our wonderful city and we're really grateful to live in this beautiful place that we get to call home so with that I am very very grateful and I look forward to continuing to serve on the city council and service your vice mayor and I thank you for your time and for this nomination. Thank you vice mayor Watkins. I would just like to start by saying I'm also truly honored to have been nominated as mayor for the city of Santa Cruz for this upcoming year. I would also like to extend my thanks to the outgoing mayor Donna Myers on her year was a difficult year but you stepped up to the challenge and let us through unusual circumstances and you really kept us going and I've learned a lot this year as vice mayor and sitting in on all the meetings with you and I just I want to thank you for the positive year you brought and I hope you enjoy time off with your family. I would really like to congratulate the newly appointed vice mayor Martin Watkins and I look forward to working together in the year ahead especially with your previous experience as mayor and my council colleagues and city staff for their support and trust in this important upcoming year for city and council. We've been in this council meeting since 9 a.m. this morning and you know the job of a city council member is considered a part-time position we receive a small stipend and you know one thing too I've had community members ask in a council manager form of government as Santa Cruz is the mayor is not elected but appointed from within the city council for a one year term so you know I'm I'm really looking forward to this year that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our city in the most fundamental ways it's impacted everyday lives and our interaction with families and friends and workplaces and our schools our businesses our workers frontline services how we even conduct our city council meetings we managed to squeeze in one hybrid in person meeting in November as a test run and all of all have everything's been affected by the challenges that has created and it and it will continue we've been going through the greatest challenge ever but we're getting there we have programs in place we have vaccinations and boosters happening and we're grappling with you know unequal economic recovery and continuing concerns about all of life and how we should move forward and I truly believe we sit here tonight with light at the end of the tunnel after a very challenging year but and I'm hopeful for better times ahead because I know I sit here with a group of of people and a whole unique community spirit and generosity that continues to play an important part in getting us through this we have nonprofits community groups churches neighbors everybody who comes together to support those in need and those on the front line city workers everyday people volunteers you know the scale and effort has been so impressive and I think the testament to you know the true spirit of the people in Santa Cruz and which I which is why I love living here and why I'm happy to serve it demonstrates our resilience and and you know as we take the next steps together for this upcoming year so I just wanted to quickly outline the mayor's responsibilities I know a lot of people have expectations of what that means and it doesn't mean I get to do anything I want or wave your parking ticket. The mayor's responsibilities are primarily to preside at council meetings and to act as the head of the city for ceremonial purposes. I the mayor I vote as a council member and I don't have any veto power and serve you know at city council meetings making appointments. City events serving as an ambassador of the city for state and national agencies are presenting proclamations and keys to the city. During my mayoral year I look forward to meeting with people from across all sections of the community and I will also inherit a budget deficit several million dollars that will require immediate action that we will continue to work towards there will be contracts to negotiate with city workers and you know I look forward to starting the new year with a new city manager and continuing the hard work we've we've really started this year to meet the needs of our community and I plan on really working to root out inefficiencies to support a culture of collaboration inclusion and productivity and we have worked to continue towards racial equity working with our communities of color looking at declaring Juneteenth an official holiday supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community members in May with an acknowledgement day of their history and culture in our city of Santa Cruz. This year's also and in my mind about strengthening partnerships with the county of Santa Cruz departments and we we we heard and talked and discussed a lot of that in today's agenda items earlier and with local nonprofit organizations I mean it will really be the forefront and critical and much of our work with topics already before us racial justice and equity and our county criminal justice system workforce housing and affordable housing across the county countywide homeless response solutions countywide encampment management better mental health and substance use disorder support services and as we heard from the earlier agenda item presentation including our youth voices and in this work and decisions and there have also been previous discussions of exploring a countywide human rights and equity commission as as mayor of the city of Santa Cruz it only makes sense to also continue the collaborator of work that started this year with the mayors of the three other cities in the county the city of Scots Valley the city of Capitola and the city of Watsonville and you know I think through these partnerships with county departments nonprofits the mayors our community members I'm hopeful that we can get everyone on the same page established direction and associated you know priorities lay a path for good decision making and accomplish alignment communicate the same message to everyone and really keep moving forward and in mapping out the 22 2022 calendar year you know already starting from January through December there are topics and city business that our work will include revenue financial stability that California voters right act transitioning to district elections climate action plan work downtown expansion plan and a new Santa Cruz Warriors arena homeless garden project and the Pogan it Nueva Vista and Beach Blats parking impacts and exploring shared outdoor sport court models so that there are options for outdoor roller skating rinks that many of our community members participate in so I'm looking forward to this year and working with you thanks again to everyone for their support to date and I look forward as we work collectively for a better future for the people in the city of Santa Cruz thank you and with that I would like to call this meeting adjourned congrats so again routine much have a great year thank you bye evening thank you everybody tonight