 Recording in progress. All right. We'll bring the meeting with San Cruz County Board of Supervisors to order. This is the meeting of February 13th, 2024. First item of business, we'll have the clerk call the roll call. Certainly, Supervisor Koenig. Here. Friend. Here. Hernandez. Here. McPherson. Here. And Chair Cummings. Here. Is there any member of the board who would like to dedicate the moment of silence to anyone? Yes, thank you. Chair, is that on? Yeah. I'd like to adjourn in memory of Robert Brainard III. He was the gentleman 45 years old who was killed on a tree fell on his house in Mola Creek during the storm. Robert Brainard III was able to get out, but he didn't. Is there anyone else we'd like to dedicate this moment of silence to? Seeing none, we'll take a moment of silence for Robert Brainard III. If you could all stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. To the left, states of America, and particularly modeling before we just stand, one nation under God, being visible with liberty and justice for all. Next item on our agenda is consideration of late additions to the agenda, additions and deletions to consent in regular agenda. So I'd like to ask the administrative officer on Carlos Blassoff if there's many additions or deletions. Yes, Chair Cummings, members of the board, we have one correction. This is on the regular agenda, item number seven. There's additional materials that are added, revised attachment D, packet page 66, which is replaced, the scheduled hearing date should read Tuesday, April 9, 2024, at 9 AM. And that concludes the additions and corrections to the agenda. Thank you. At this time, I'd like to ask if there's any board members that would like to remove any items from the consent agenda to the regular agenda. Yes, Mr. Chair. I'd like to remove item 23, which is an item from Supervisor Koenig and myself regarding the AT&T application. My understanding is AT&T would like to also speak to this item. I would think it'd be important for them to address the community. We'll just put it on the regular agenda. OK, sounds good. Are there any other board members that would like to remove an item from the consent agenda to the regular agenda? Seeing none, we will move item number 23 to the regular agenda. And is it possible for us to hear that item first on the regular agenda? Yes, it can be heard in whatever order. OK. So that item will be moved and will be a way, I guess, what number would that? You can make it item 6.1. OK. Item 6.1 on the regular agenda. All right. At this time, I'd like to open it up to public comment. This is an oral communications. This is an opportunity. Members of the public to speak to us on any item that is not on the regular agenda or if there's an item that's on the agenda that you would like to speak to at this time because you may need to leave. Now's an opportunity for you to speak to us on any item on the agenda. And so if you'd like to line up at the podium, you'll be given two minutes. Good morning. My name is Steve McGurk. I'm here representing the Santa Cruz Group of the Sierra Club. I've come to speak in support of consent item number 24, the phasing out of gas powered blowers by the county of Santa Cruz. In 2020, the Sierra Club was approached by Chase. The cons, I'm going to call it the Committee for Health and Safe Environment. Chase approached us with a very compelling PowerPoint presentation on the dangers of using gas powered leaf blowers. A letter went out to the county and the four cities in June of 2023. And hopefully some of you have been able to read these. I won't go into them in depth. In 2022, the state acted to impose Assembly Bill 1346, which last January banned the future sales of all gas powered landscape equipment, including leaf blowers. This ban was a great step to the future. But it did not do some critical things. It did not ban the continued use of gas powered blowers. And again, going back to the letter that we submitted to you, the dangers inherent in doing so. In 2022, also, the California Air Resources Board enacted the core program, a program named at offering rebates for contractors and related retail businesses towards disusing gas powered blowers. Unfortunately, the Achilles' Seal of this whole program has been no recycling endeavors. Then last year, in 2023, November, the Monterey Bay. Excuse me, sir, could you please? The Monterey Bay Air Resources District. If you could please wrap up your comments, your time has expired. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is David Schwartz. I'm running for Supervisor, Replace Jack Zack in the next election. I'd like to ask the board to please remove item 16 from the consent agenda. And the reason I ask that is I think that any changes to the county code should have public input. We need to have the public involved in things like this. One of the things about the Coastal Commission that I find a little bothersome is that this was a commission that was created by the state of California to usurp the authority and ability of local governments to effectively regulate their coastal areas. And we are having nothing but problems with them all the time. So I'm asking you to take this off the consent agenda so that we can talk about this and reach a better understanding of where that commission could play their role and where we should be responsible. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker, please approach the podium. Good morning. There are four of us here together this morning. And we have a prepared statement that we're going to share with you. And first, I'm going to read a disclaimer. The information and opinions that we are about to share do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Santa Cruz County Human Services Department, Management, or Directors. We're not here to represent the county or make requests on behalf of the county. We are here to share independent thoughts, opinions, and experiences as citizens of Santa Cruz County and as social workers who work with local families in the CalWORKS Family Stabilization Program. Our names are Barry Domer, Unipomper, Sarah Voorhees, and Kevin Kilgore, as well as Lissette Gonzalez and Victoria Regan, who are at the office providing coverage for our team. We are the social workers that comprise the CalWORKS Family Stabilization Team. This letter is in direct response to California Governor Newsom's state budget update number one proposed budget for 2024 and 2025. Page nine indicates that to save money in the next fiscal year, the government is proposing to eliminate the Family Stabilization Program. We feel strongly that eliminating this program and the high-intensity work that we do with some of our community's most vulnerable and at-risk members would be a significant disservice and loss and would create an overwhelming detriment and hardship for the families we currently serve and for the future families that would not be able to receive Family Stabilization Services. Thank you. Our team serves CalWORKS Families experiencing personal barriers and crisis situations that impede their ability to participate fully in employment services activities, formerly known as the Welfare to Work Program. We are a highly skilled team of social workers with specialized knowledge in areas such as securing resources to assist with homelessness, mental health crisis, suicidality, domestic violence, substance abuse assessment and treatment, legal issues and child abuse and neglect prevention. The work we do involves providing crisis intervention and intensive case management to help alleviate barriers and stabilize families so that they may ultimately pursue employment and education related activities with the goal of obtaining self-sufficiency. We each are also clinically trained in treating trauma and complex human behavioral issues and often are the singular safety net resource for our families. Losing funding for our program would result in the following negative impacts on families, increased homelessness in our community, increased mental health crisis and suicidality, increased untreated substance use disorder, increased number of victims of domestic violence who are not getting help, increased exposure to childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences, increased referrals to child welfare and increased reliance and time on public assistance. Additionally, the loss of the family stabilization program would result in increased strain on safety net services such as emergency rooms, jails, police, paramedics and the criminal justice system. Our work is heavily focused on prevention and serves to offset the costs the county would otherwise incur. Thank you. It is important to note that this program in Santa Cruz has been serving families since 1998, well before the California state legislator passed AB 74 in 2013. Prior to AB 74, the Santa Cruz County CalWorks social work team was funded via the single allocation and we provided the same services that we do now. AB 74 recognized the important need and unique benefit that the family stabilization program brings to CalWorks families experiencing instability and barriers to employment. Since January 1st, 2014, California has been funding this important work in all counties in recognition that family stabilization can provide families with increased level and intensity of case management by staff who have the training, skills and experience necessary to provide case management to families and individuals in crisis. We as Santa Cruz County citizens are respectfully urging each person in a position of influence on the California and local budget to truly consider the consequences if funding for the family stabilization program is cut. We sincerely believe it would be a step backwards for meeting the needs of the state and county's most vulnerable populations and the trickle down effect would be seen and felt by the whole community. As a team, we are committed to carrying out the mission statement of the California Health and Human Services Department, which is enhancing the health and wellbeing of all Americans. In addition to the mission statement of the Santa Cruz County Human Services Department, which states that we strengthen our community by protecting the vulnerable, promoting self-sufficiency, alleviating poverty and improving the quality of life. We love the work that we do and we care about the families we serve. We as a concerned group of social workers and citizens are hoping that the proposal to eliminate family stabilization will be removed from the May revise. However, if it is not, we are appealing to the board for funding to be reinstated locally through the single allocation or other funding so that the family stabilization program may remain in place in Santa Cruz County. We implore you not to eliminate the CalWorks Family Stabilization Program as you'll be removing essential services that most impoverished and vulnerable families in our community rely on for basic needs and safety. Thank you for your time to hear our concerns. We appreciate your shared commitment to the wellbeing of the families in our community. Thank you so much. Hi, good morning. My name is James Ewing Whitman. I'm addressing the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. What is it? February 13th, 2024. You know, it's really quite interesting. You know, I'm kind of sad to announce that I'm gonna be stopping showing up and publicly speaking. So now there's an example that I at least have something in common with you lying sacks of shit. Is that that you guys are lying sacks of shit? Excuse me, sir. I'd like you to please watch your language. This is something that's been- Oh, I'm being polite. I can be much more direct. So I'm looking at this and I meant what I said. Last week, I voted for all of you guys for life in prison. Once again, I'm being polite. So to stay on topic, you know, I did do some looking up point of order for how I could interject when some of you buffoons after community members talk, try to be little what they're saying. I'm gonna remind the community that Agenda 21 clearly came into this county. It was introduced through the SEEDS project in 1993. And when you guys go over these little murder puppet things, I've taken more people's stuff away. And other people bring up that this has been an agenda that's been in this county for decades. We need to call you guys on your stuff. So just as I copped up to me lying to you guys, I expect some stuff out of you guys because people can change. And I'd like to see it. Thank you. Thank you. Harry Richard Arnold, Chairman, Supervisors. I noticed again that names change, but nothing changes. Mr. Cummins, we're back to two minutes. I think it was brought in by Bruce McPherson who received $30,000 from a red Chinese communist spy, triple spy, according to US News and Rural Report. And we've got five-year plans out there. Where have I heard that before? It's not clarified in there. And I call Mr. Manu, we just dedicated to a lady, a man that got killed by a tree. I've been trying to call this man's office. You all have one receptionist before you used to have your personal receptionist and you'd have one or two of your staff members so you could email too. You've had all that responsibility and you're following the United Nations programs. Agenda 21 is clear. Sam Farr, who lied himself to death and said he had nothing to do with it, signed the formal page at this county adopted. And he says he's pushing it into other areas too. This comes from the British Fabian Socialist Society about regionalization. And they were working with linen to set up Soviets. You have cow cog. There's not a person in this county that knows about cow cog. There's not an elementary kid that they have or high school kid or up in the university or do you ever publicize the ambag meetings such as no more than a Soviet? 13 cities and three counties. It's all backroom stuff for the Panettas, the Packards and the Driscoll's. You guys are to have a backroom-less nuts and you do not even read. I don't know. Make sure the people take a look at that book out there that's hundreds of pages deep. All you do is what the county administrative officer does. I can't get him. We've had eight trees fall last year. This year eight of them fell and four houses are gone. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public who are here in person who would like to speak to us on oral communications? Seeing none, we'll go to online. Please come forward. I also want to just let you know we did pull the AT&T item and we'll be speaking to that as item 6.1, our agenda. Oh, okay. All right, great. Good morning, Betty Saxon, AT&T. And thank you for pulling it and I'll be here to assist their questions. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Well, in user one, your microphone is now available. Hi, Marilyn Garrett. Item 23, your resolution to maintain a landline. It's excellent. I request that you send copies to California elected representatives and the governor as this is a very critical statement. I'd like to talk about COVID shots and quote from the winter 2023 edition of Wise Traditions. This is WestinAPrize.org and page nine. And my question prior to reading this is, do we have similar statistics for our county? The bad news about COVID shots just keeps accumulating. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics published an update on deaths by vaccination status in England, which revealed that the vaccinated population accounted for 95% of the COVID deaths during the 12 months from June 2022 through May 2023. 94% of those deaths were among either the triple or quadruple vaccinated population while the unvaccinated accounted for the lowest number of COVID deaths in the every single month. Exposenews.com from November of last year. And it's not just COVID that is carrying off the vaccinated. Physicians are describing a surge in aggressive rapid on the set cancers following the rollout of the shot in December, 2020. Any other members of the public online? Tim, your microphone is now available. Thank you. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can. Yes, my name is Tim Delaney. And thank you very much for allowing me to speak today. I really appreciate that. I'll just bounce around a number of different topics here. The family stabilization stuff that I heard from all these folks approaching you, I'm highly supportive of them, okay? Just wanna let you know that. At the last meeting, I heard some comments about, you know, about, you know, there should have been enough public participation and whatnot. You know, the general public, I'll be honest with you, they really don't have time for this. That's the sad thing here. So, you know, if you're looking for public participation, you know, in anything that you do, it's a little sketch, okay? The general public is trying to survive, all right? So other comment on COVID shots, you know, I wanna remind everyone that Santa Cruz County did very well during the epidemic, okay, compared to the rest of the country. And a lot of that does have to do with the vaccination. I'm just fine. I had five shots, you know, my heart rate is 48. I surf and ski and I'm old, you know? I'm almost 60 here and good luck trying to ski the Jackson Hole backcountry with me. That's not going to happen, okay? So other comment on Donald Trump, get real folks, a guy that does not like Abraham Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan, are you kidding, fellow Republicans? The writing is on the wall. If you are a person of color, you know, and you're gonna vote for that guy, are you that stupid? So those are my comments. The Republican Party really does not exist today, okay? I'll say a few more things later on. Anyways, thank you very much. Thank you for your time. We have no further speakers here. Okay. Seeing no further speakers, we'll bring it back to the board for action on our consent item with the exception of item number 23 that was pulled and moved to the regular agenda. And so I'll just see if there's any comments from board members, Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. On item 32, which is authorizing candidate departments to phase out gas powered leaf blowers. As the speaker, the member of the public mentioned, I've heard a lot of concern about these devices from the public and particularly from Chase, which is well-organized and has helped to point to a number of different ordinances that have passed in similar jurisdictions. I've been talking with members of the Santa Cruz City Council about how we could take a regional approach to this, but ultimately, you know, this is a fairly modest first step of just working within county departments and then ultimately notifying the public that we're considering this. The fact that there are these rebates available, 72,000 available for homeowners and 290,000 for commercial applicants. I think that we should make sure we get the word out as quickly as possible so that people can take advantage of those rebates while they're still available and have plenty of lead time as we consider a larger phase out of these devices within our community. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Thank you on the item that I brought forward regarding support for Senator Padilla's low-income household water assistance program. This unfortunately has expired in Congress and the Senator is leading an effort to ensure that this water bill and wastewater bill assistance program gets reauthorized. This will provide a pretty essential service as we've seen a pretty significant increase in the costs associated with both wastewater and water rates throughout the country, in particular in our community, whether those in South County or those in general and low-income, this is an important lifeline service. So, work with the Senator's office to requesting support from our county officially in order to help push the delegation toward making this a priority, so I appreciate the support of this board. Thank you. Thank you. So,visor McPherson, any comments? Yeah, a couple of things on item 31. I want to thank the seniors commission and the county staff for bringing this report on the county senior citizens. As the county is restructuring our commissions, I would like to note that the seniors commission is very active and engaged in advocating for senior services as this report shows. The level of activities and associations that the members of the seniors commissions are involved is very impressive. We all know that the county's senior population is growing faster at a higher proportional rate than any other segment of our population in the county. And the attention we make to take care of our seniors and the families and take care of them as well is becoming more critical than ever. The county spends about $86.5 million every year for programs directly for the older adults in our community and our county human services department is steering collaborative work to develop a master plan for aging. And we're ahead of the game of other counties in the state. So it's very impressive. So the county's been and will continue to be committed to serving the wellbeing of our older adults. Also on 32, I wanna thank Supervisor Coney for bringing this phase out on county properties. This is not private. I think it's a good first move and I welcome his bringing this to the Board of Supervisors and we'll be supporting it. So, Mr. Hernandez, just a few comments on 32 and 55 as well, I wanna echo Supervisor Coney's comments about making sure that we get the word out there for the rebates that the Air Board is having. I think the majority of the commercial users are probably from South County. So it's difficult for a lot of people to just purchase new equipment for their entire business. And so I think it's important that we do everything that we can to make sure that business owners, especially in South County, get word of this of these rebates. And on 55, I just wanna thank CDI for diligently moving this forward. I think it's always important to have safe streets and roads for all. You know, I'm excited that we're having this plan. You know, it's really about the engineering of safe roads and education. So thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. I don't have any additional comments. So I just wanna thank my colleagues for the items that they brought to the attention of the board and to our community and staff for their ongoing work on issues that are critical and important to our community. And so with that, I'd like to see if there's somebody who'd like to make a motion on consent with the exception of item number 23. I'll move consent agenda. I'll second. One brief additional comment. I apologize. There was a member of the community that asked us to pull an item regarding our sustainability. I just wanted to know that that's been through, if I calculate it correctly, six, eight or 10 at least public hearings. And we've had a lot of public hearings on that at the, not just the board, the planning commission, other policy committees within the county, coastal commissions heard it more than once. So I understand we had a number of community hearings about this, including in the second district. So I assure you it's been through a very long process of sustainability updates. So I appreciate your interest in the community, participation with the communities so it helps shape the document that we're adopting today. So thank you. And so we have a motion by Supervisor Hernandez, second by Supervisor Friend, to move consent with the exception of item number 23. I'll ask for a roll call vote. Supervisor Koenig? Aye. Friend? Aye. Hernandez? Aye. McPherson? Aye. And Friend? Aye. That passes unanimously. So with that, we'll move on to our regular agenda. We will start with item number 23 that is now 6.1 that was pulled from our agenda, which is the adoption of a resolution requesting that the California Public Utilities Commission and IAT&T's application for release of carrier of last resort and eligible telecommunications carrier designations and take related actions as recommended by Supervisor Koenig and Supervisor Friend. And since Supervisor Friend pulled this item and put it on the regular agenda, I'd like to pass it over to him. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Supervisor Koenig, well, I'm sure I have additional comments on this. We decided to bring this item forward, not just because there's a significant amount of public interest in this item, but also because there's been a significant lack of communication from AT&T regarding what the actual plan is and a number of concerned community members, not just in our community, but throughout the state of California. It's my personal belief that none of the backup systems exist that are adequate yet in order to meet the needs of landline, in particular rural landline residents throughout Santa Cruz County. There are residents though that do have secondary systems or are those that may never actually be able to have an adequate secondary system based on the topography of our area. The reason that I pulled it was because AT&T had graciously agreed to attend today's meeting to speak to the item in order to provide additional context. I'm still, I think that it's important that this board take up this item today because I think that what's being presented to the CPUC is a binary option of whether or not they are allowed out or not. And so I think that given the fact that AT&T, in my opinion, isn't ready to provide this sort of backup service for people that need this as a lifeline, then I think it's very important that we can, that we express this opinion to the CPUC. But I'll pass it to Supervisor Koenig who co-signed this item with me and I'll make sure that we afford an ample opportunity for AT&T to provide opportunity to speak to the community, Supervisor Koenig. Thanks, Supervisor Friend. We hear over and over again from the community that communications is the most essential thing during an emergency. And our mountainous region is a very difficult topography to maintain communications. It's self-service doesn't work in a lot of places. Internet goes out frequently. And so maintaining our copper telephone line system is essential to make sure that real residents can get word out and in during these emergency events and disaster events. I mean, I know this firsthand, growing up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, whenever the power would go out, we'd switch over to the old copper telephone and just to stay in touch with neighbors as well as with everything else that was going on, even to call PG&E and report the fact that power lines were down. So I think that we've heard a lot of concern from the community. People who are frankly terrified at the idea of these lines going away and rightfully so. And actually I'll add, I heard from a number of folks who live in central Ivoke even that said, we're just never felt the need to adopt cell phones and we still rely on our copper landline as a primary mode of communication. So please, whatever you don't take it away. And then I would say we've also seen some of the, I'm interested to hear what AT&T has to say and what their transition plan is. I do have concerns, this idea that we'll transition to new people to manage the old network. I mean, we've seen folks like Frontier not being particularly good stewards, we're just having challenges trying to maintain old internet connections and even Cruz IO, great local internet company ultimately choosing not to provide service over the old infrastructure. So I do think that when people who built a network ultimately leave it, that creates further challenges. So just to see what AT&T has to say, but this is just such a vital service for our community. It's hard to imagine how it could ever be phased out. Thank you, Mr. Chair. One additional point. I think that there's universal recognition that copper lines as a technology are being phased out over time. I think that technology is evolving that this is not the solution for 50 years from now. With that said, in order for it to be phased out and people to have the security that they need of a lifeline service, there needs to be proof that there's an adequate and equal backup service that so far has not been shown to be the case. So I think you can have two things that can be true. One, which is that the application notes that this is a technology that's phasing out. I think that is true. And two, that there's no adequate backup plan for those individuals, so until there is and there's confidence of this board. And I would argue the state and the state CPUC that there should, that there is. I think that it shouldn't be allowed that this application should be allowed. So I think that we can recognize both elements. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Are there any other comments from board members? We hope not. So I'll just make a couple of comments as well. Since joining the board of supervisors, trying to understand communication issues and solve some of the communication issues in my district has been one of my top priorities. It took us about nine months last year to get in touch with AT&T, but I will say that when we did, one thing that was very helpful was that they put us in touch with the folks who were in charge of reinstalling lines that were lost in the fire. And so right now in White House Canyon, they're reinstalling lines for that community. They're putting in about 120 poles. And so I do wanna thank AT&T for their follow-up on that because folks in that area hadn't had reliable telephone service for about three years. The issue that came up for me, I was hoping to have AT&T come and do a presentation on our regular agenda next meeting to address many of these issues. But given the Brown Act, we don't necessarily know what we're all working on at the same point in time. But I wanted to have that presentation because what's been confusing for me is that when I've spoken with some folks at AT&T, they've said, we no longer install copper line lines. And then when this item came forward to the CPUC, one of the things that came up in that was that it said that they are required to provide land lines to anyone who wants them. And when I was in touch with the vice president of external affairs, they said, we don't do DSL anymore, but we will still install copper line lines. And I think that's very confusing for the folks who live in my district because many people want traditional land lines, but we're being told, and they're being told that they can't get that service. And so that's why I was hoping to have this hearing at the next regular meeting so that we can get some clarity on what is the responsibility of AT&T to provide how do people get access to these services. And so I'm really glad that AT&T is here to help answer some of these questions because for a lot of folks in my district as well, this is one of the only things that they can have in terms of reliable communications and reliable phone service. And people are getting very nervous about what could happen if AT&T were to no longer provide these services. So maybe what we'll do is we can start with having the representative from AT&T maybe speak to some of these issues and then we can open up to the public for a public comment. But before that, I'll go to- Yeah, it's my understanding and I support what you're going for. But this proposal before the PUC is the first part of what might be a three year process but I think we're gonna hear more about that. So it's not, in my understanding, we're gonna hear more about it that they're not gonna cut them off next month. It's gonna be a process, but we'll hear more about it. So with that, maybe we'll turn it over to, I know that there's a representative from AT&T who's here today, and maybe you can come up and speak to some of the issues around their last resort, what types of services that you all actually provide and what people can have access to so that we have some clarity on this. Okay, good morning, Supervisor Cummings and all of the other distinguished elected officials representing this county. First I'm gonna start by saying I'm feeling very ill but yet this item is important to us. So what I'd like for the council to do is to wait until that presentation for my vice president, which she has agreed to with county council as well as supervisor Cummings to come and answer more thoroughly all of the questions that you may have. I have in the process have been meeting with individual supervisors trying to answer some of the questions that constituents may have. We want to disclose and show you exactly what the plan is, where we are. But the only thing I'm here to ask today is to allow us to present on the 27th, which is what was agreed upon with County Council and Supervisor Cummings that I would have the additional reinforcement to assist. Thank you. That's it for now. Okay, thank you. Any members of the public who'd like to speak to us on this item? Well, hello, my name is still James Ewing Whitman. The person it seems logical that this will be extended to the 27th. I absolutely have no idea what they're gonna say but maybe I can suggest some things that they could say. You know, I would really like to thank all the utility workers that have helped me in the 28 years I've lived in this county. For 12 years, there were three power poles that only served where I lived. And we had trees come down, so I really thank the workers. Now, I wish I could speak on this subject for hours but it is really important for people to have a hard connection. You know, for so many different reasons. Granted, the wires could come down and people could lose their ability to communicate and that's why people should have other ways to communicate. But some things that are not being discussed that I'd like these people to bring up, let's talk about the lobbyist systems in the United States. If you were to look at the amount of money that the lobbyists get for the medical industry or the telecom community industry, you would think with this COVID scan that the medical industry would actually be getting quite a bit more from the lobbyist. But in actuality, the telecommunications agency gets six to eight times as much. So there's a lot of elephants in the room. You know, I should have a piece of paper to give everyone in the public. I like to talk about the dangers of the alternatives. And I do have a piece of paper somewhere where there's a list of 17 different common ailments to different problems with human health. 17 different ailments. And they're all the same for wireless frequencies, the flu and what is called COVID. So I'm so glad that some other artillery is gonna come back and speak on this subject. And once again, I am concerned about the public workers who work with this, some of this dangerous technology. We need to help them. Thank you. Thank you. Gary, Richard, I think it was important that Mr. Cummings was concerned about the Brown Act. And that's important. People should know that if any three of you get together and are talking, that's a violation. And we also have something I'd like the County Administrative Officer and County Counsel to do is that all of your offices, there's one receptionist, but there's no way to tell who's in there at any one time. At least in the bathroom, you know, whether it's a light or not, I mean, and I think it could be followed up by because what's going on behind there, nobody knows, and it's an invitation to break the Brown Act. Thank you. Good morning, David Schwartz. I'm glad you guys took this off the consent agenda and are speaking about it. I think it's very important. I live in the County out in the unincorporated area. And my wife and I have cell phones and we have internet. We have all that stuff, but you know what? Anytime there's a disaster or a heavy storm, we lose all those forms of communication. So we still have our landline. And we're paying AT&T for two landlines to our house. And I have an old phone that actually plugs into the phone network without being plugged into the wall. We keep that just for a backup and we have used it in the past. This is very important. And I hope AT&T is listening because if they don't accept this responsibility of being the provider of choice, who's going to step up? Some of the people that we talked about that you guys have mentioned, they're not as big as AT&T. They can't keep those lines going. They can't keep this active for us. And I foresee in the future that we are going to have more disasters and we are going to have difficulty communicating. Look what happened in Maui. Their biggest problem in Maui is the power went out. They couldn't even pump water to fight the fires. It's a horrible thing when you have no one thinking about how they're going to keep things going. So AT&T please do not walk away from your responsibility. This county needs that landline. They need those lines, keep them going. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbrunner. I also want to thank you for pulling this item from the consent agenda to have better discussion. And I support continuing it until the 27th time so that we have the vice president of AT&T here to really support the woman that has come here even though she's feeling very ill. So I would like to request to avoid mixups like this that when county council has knowledge, I believe that council can send out notices of such important items on forthcoming agendas so that there maybe are not these mixups. And I appreciate the respect of the Brown Act here very much. Thank you. I appreciate all of you taking action on this because as a rural resident in the most recent storms, our power went out and there were, there were about four of us in this canyon, in the canyon, the Aptos Creek Canyon that have landlines. We were the only ones that had telephone. These went down and blocked the ability of AT&T to bring in generators to supply the backup power boxes that they do have in the community. So people were without except landlines, they were without telephone communication at all. So I also want to add that the existing landlines are very problematic, they're very noisy because the lines have not been maintained. Even though we've paid to maintain them, they have not been maintained. So I would like to suggest that AT&T or whichever carry it is considers working with PG&E as PG&E is moving forward to bury their service lines that perhaps, unless there is an electromagnetic interference that it would cause that the telecom industry also bury their lines concurrently with this work. Thank you. Any other members of the public and person who'd like to speak to us at this time? Seeing none, we'll go to online and I was made aware that the vice president of the AT&T's external affairs is on the line as well in case we have any questions. So, but I'm not sure if there's a way to identify that person specifically. I do have this person prepared to speak. Would you like to take the remaining public comment or would you like to- Sure, let's do public comment person and then let's come back to the VP. Tim, your microphone's now available. Thank you. Thank you so much for hearing me again. Just wanted to say that the gentleman before, one of the earlier on with the foul language that doesn't want to come back and speak anymore, he should keep coming to the meetings. I liked his chicken's comment at the last meeting that we were at. In regards to AT&T, this is just a corporation. I want to remind everybody of that. A lot of corporations these days are not run by the entrepreneurs and creative minds that came up with all these concepts. And they did, they let the lead cable make Tahoe. So it's in court and it's been going on for years here. And so that's their fiduciary responsibility, okay? So I'm not sure what you folks are gonna get out of AT&T. This will be interesting, all right? So, and it's more than just AT&T. Just so you know, okay, on the summit here, a lot of your power can easily be wiped out in the next couple of storms. All you have to do, Manu, is just come to my property and take a look. I have a tension line here that's sitting on the AT&T line and Comcast line that holds the two poles on my property together so the high voltage lines don't snap. So PG&E here was, they're out here a day or yesterday, working on it a little bit, but they need to come back and finish the job. And I hope they do. So you need to look at my property here because there's a lot going on here with PG&E and AT&T. And if power gets knocked out in the community up here, you know where the problem is. It's right next to my house here. I'm looking right at it. So that's my comment I think for right now. Oh, one more little thing. Railroads along the coast, all my surfing buddies, every time I mentioned a rail, they get all angry. We don't like that. Sir, this item's about AT&T. So I just want to toss that in there. Thank you very much. You take. Colin, user one, your microphone is now available. Speaking to you on my landline, which is all I have, cell phones and wireless technology make me sick from radiation. And it's interesting when a corporation requests an item be pulled from the agenda, it happens when a member of the public requests it, rarely happens. I want to refer people to the, it's online with the CPUC protest of Nina Beatty to application 2303 and reading from part of this. Copper landline is the only appropriate voice and internet service for most EMF disabled persons. We need to keep these copper at landlines quoting from the protest throughout its application. AT&T continually talks about voice alternatives, but alternatives must be appropriate, adequate, and equal. Destroying the copper landline system would deprive many AT&T customers of the only service they can use. But far more serious disabled California is injured by electromagnetic fields and radiations. And radio frequency radiation, who or who have other EMF sensitive medical conditions require and rely on copper landlines for the safest, lowest EMF voice service, and which will reliably provide both voice and DSL connection and 911 service during disasters and extended power outages. AT&T does not mention this. We've reached the end of the public comments online and now I'll call on Teddy. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Wonderful. Thank you for giving me a little bit of time this morning to address this item on the agenda. And I appreciate you removing it from the consent agenda so that we can have further dialogue on it. Happy to come next week and do a broader presentation, but I would like to just address a couple of the highlights today. AT&T's copper network is coming to the end of its lifecycle and it will soon become obsolete. It's very difficult to get parts to maintain and installers to train and to dispatch to areas I completely understand that we're not there yet. The notices that went out from the PUC included copper customers and voice customers. And voice is the voice over internet protocol. So when you look at the map that came with that notice and I don't know how many of you have seen that, I would like to be showing it to you right now, but there is blue on the map and there is purple on the map. And the blue areas of California are representative of where there are alternative providers today based on the CPUC information off of their website. The purple on the map indicates that there is no alternative provider today. And much of Santa Cruz County is purple. This isn't even going to pertain to many, many, many, many of the residents who I'm sure are speaking there today and others that aren't, but are concerned that their landline is going away. So I put that out there to say that as I look across the entire state of where we are seeking polar relief, Santa Cruz and the North Coast have the biggest pockets of purple where there are no alternative providers and where there are no alternative providers, we are not able to be released of our polar obligation, plain and simple. Until there is an alternate provider, we will remain the carrier of last resort. So I think it will become clear when we're there and we can talk about the maps and we can look at zones and we can look at districts, but much of Santa Cruz County is purple. So we know that there are not a lot of alternatives and that people rely on their landline phones. I've done an immense amount of work with Betty over 27 years and Davenport and Ben Lohman. I mean, we understand the issues. I don't live them every day, but I certainly understand the connection that people have and the affinity that people have come to rely on their landline phones and I totally get it. The problem with that is that that network is going away eventually. It's not going away tomorrow. It's not going away in two years from now. It's not going away in 10 years from now. It is going to be a phase out and this application process at the PUC is going to establish the rules under which we may be released from that caller obligation. It may come with a timeline. It may come with a commitment. It may come with something. Nobody has asked for caller relief before in California because we've only been the caller forever. So this is all new, this process. And with change, I understand people are worried that they may only have a landline connection into their home and we know the fires, the floods, the earthquakes, I mean, it's all here and understand that people need their landline phones and they want that connection. So part of this noticing, the VoIP customers are not impacted by this. Those, the VoiceOver Internet Protocol customers will remain, they're not even a part of this but we were required to include them in the notice. So we have admittedly a lot of work to do. We need to get out, we need to meet with people, we need to answer questions. I think a lot of the map is, again, it's pretty telling by zip code. It's on the CPUC website. It's on, the address is on the notice. I'm happy to provide it for folks if they would like it. So that is really just what I wanna open with. We have, and many others, as you know, the California under SB 156 has put, the governor has put $6 billion towards building out broadband to Californians to bridge a digital divide with additional approximate $3 billion for bead funding that's coming. We have submitted applications for Santa Cruz County, 22 million to hit 14,000 living units to bring fiber. I know that other companies have as well for Santa Cruz County and I know that the PUC is working through those applications currently. So technology is going to change as we begin to roll through this timeline, whatever the timeline is determined by the CPUC in this proceeding. So I really want to impress that this isn't going to be a decision that's made in two months, six months, 10 months, and then we're gonna just flip a switch. Again, if you're in a purple zone and you have no alternatives, we have to keep our color obligation. And then we're gonna work on a phased in approach that I'm sure will be somehow required mandated by this process at the PUC as we work through what's going to happen. So I'm gonna take a pause there and see if you have any questions. Thank you so much. I'd like to see if there's any more members that may have any questions. Supervisor Friend. Yeah, thank you. And also, I know we also have our ISD director and our director of OR3 who have expressed concerns on this that are here that may want to speak to this as well. But first let me express some gratitude for you taking the time to communicate because there's been no communication. There was no outreach to the county. There was no outreach to elected officials. There was no outreach to the community other than the letter. And I think one of the troubles that we have here and I'm still standing behind this board taking action today in this way is that what I hear you saying on the maps does have a you just need to trust us that it's gonna work out feeling to it. And there's no guarantee that this is gonna work out for residents that have no other option. So because there's no timelines, well, the timeline in your application which I understand that you're sort of disputing us is six months. So what I would ask you is, will there be specific requests from AT&T and before the CPUC to say that you want a longer phase in period, that you want guarantees of communication with local governments, that you want some element of ways that you can ensure that these residents know that until they have an adequate backup this won't happen. And two, that you won't actually so uninvest in what they currently have that it becomes pointless for them to even have copper anyway, which strikes me as one of the things that's happening right now. Do you have thoughts on those? Sure, so the map that I'm referring to is on the CPUC website. So it's not a trust me AT&T website. It's on that, it's the CPUC website. And so you can get to that, you can see it. The purple section is where in our application we have designated there are no alternatives. And if there are no alternatives by definition, we cannot have Kohler really, number one. And number two, we have outreach to many of our nonprofit partners across the state. Could we have done better? Absolutely, did we not do enough? Absolutely, I'm not sure we could ever do enough. This is a situation where people received a notice, they looked at the six months and said, oh, my landline's going away in six months. So I take your comment about working with the PUC and establishing that timeline. And again, that timeline will be worked out in this proceeding. I think you made the comment earlier about alternative viable alternatives that will also get worked out in this proceeding and where there are no viable alternatives, then we will not be able to be relieved of our Kohler obligation. But I will tell you that there are manufacturers that are no longer making parts for this network. And that is one of the critical reasons why we stopped serving DSL. We were buying DSL parts on eBay. And I'm not lying, it sounds stupid and ridiculous, but the fact of the matter is we have manufacturers that are no longer producing parts for this network and it is eventually going to go away. And we would like to be prudent and transparent in how we do this transition. We haven't done Kohler before, like I said, this is the first time anybody's been seeking Kohler relief in California. So the PUC is going to have evidence you're hearing starting, I believe, next month. And that's when we present evidence, the opposition presents evidence, interveners to the proceeding. So it is going to be a process. And that's where we're at right now. Go ahead, sorry. No, were you finished with your comments? I am, thank you. Thank you, we have some staff. You may be able to also speak on this item. I do before we move forward, we didn't want to just check with the board to see part of why we were trying to set up a formal presentation was to be able to have more public involvement, make sure the public knew about this meeting so that they could come in common and speak about their experiences so that TNT could present some of these maps and the different options to us. And so I feel like we can continue to have that conversation today, but if there's interest in potentially continuing this item so we could have AT&T be able to make a formal presentation that might also help the community to be able to participate in this because to supervise a friend's point, I don't think a lot of members of the community were aware that we were gonna have this indefinite discussion on this item today. And by having a presentation, I feel like people can come and speak directly to AT&T about their experiences because that I think is gonna be really helpful for us to understand our position for them to understand what's happening in the community. And for us to really be able to have a more robust discussion on this. And so I was just thinking in the interest of time, if there's a desire to continue this and have a formal presentation with AT&T, we could probably just continue this conversation to the next meeting and then we can move on with the rest of the agenda. But just wanted to check to see how people felt about that. I'm so comfortable. I mean, at the end of the day, this is my position on this issue because we're hearing a lot of stuff from AT&T that I can't cross-reference and I can't verify. There's a binary choice between the CPUC. I think it's important for the board to take this position. So I'm comfortable voting on this today and still bringing them back to have them answer additional questions. But at the end of the day, I didn't mean that it was a trust us about the maps. It's a trust us that all these things will end up happening and the timelines will end up happening because the only person dictating that is AT&T right now, right? So I think that this is where we have the say. This is where the county has the say in staying to the CPUC. And by the way, the timelines are a little compacted. I think it's important for us to get these comments and sooner than later to have an impact with the CPUC. Any other board members want to speak? You know, I prefer to have a more in-depth presentation with the charts that we're referring to. And for also, you know, we had a significant amount of emails from constituents and a couple of them were from South County. I know they're not in the purple, but it'd be a good chance for them to either call in or watch the presentation as well. And for all of us to just make a more informed decision about it. So I'll be willing to wait on this issue. I could too. I think the minds made up, it's too bad that more facts and certainly there's no guarantees. So that's really, and I don't know if they can come up with a guarantee of any type in two weeks. So I'm not sure where I can be changed for what I'm thinking about this. I'd like to hear from our own staff members in regard to this for sure. I could go along with waiting for another two weeks, but boy, I don't know. This was not well presented in advance. I mean, when you see, really it's the North County area and Bonnie Dune is where there wouldn't be any current carrier of last resort. They would keep their lines, but I could go along with waiting, but I'm not gonna leave my constituents out there high and dry without any guarantees. To go as a colleague, do you have any comments? Okay, I'll start with the staff. Do you have mics off? Can you hear me? There we go. Just briefly, I think it goes without saying that OR3 and ISD are deeply engaged in this process. I do want in the effort to be transparent and clear in the diagram that was shared and that some of you have to make clear on the statement that was made by AT&T digitally. There are approximately 1249 residents that are in the purple area on the AT&T maps that are on the CPUC website. So it is not accurate to say that a majority of our residents, especially those most vulnerable in our rural high fire zones are not impacted by the proposed actions. So we welcome further conversation in two weeks and I'm happy to engage at the ISD and OR3 level, but wanted to make that clear since information has a way of getting away from us. Okay, I'm the director of ISD. So I'm very concerned about this issue again, which is why we did bring it to the attention of Supervisor Friend's office. And I share the concerns. One of the roles I have in the county is that when residents and constituents get to go to their supervisor's office when they don't have broadband, when they don't have phone service, and we saw a real significant uptick in this in the last storms. We had residents who were without power for over almost five days. And so some of them did not get their Comcast, which is where they're basically getting their voice over IP phone service restored until then. So it is a real concern. And I am concerned about what the timeline is for AT&T to provide alternative service because right now, as we all know, the Comcast and Spectrum are dependent upon power. Verizon and AT&T's cellular services and also too, while we have coverage within our county, our capacity for cellular service is definitely been exceeded. So we do have some serious issues, even if someone has a cellular service within their community up in the mountains and is able to get a call out, there's no chance it's going to go through during an emergency because of the uptick in cellular. So again, I really support the board going forward with this. We have concerns and we really would like to see a significant plan on how there's going to be a reliable replacement project. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I would propose that we move forward today with this action. And then we also have a non-action item hearing, I'm not hearing the presentation from AT&T that we can make time certain at the next meetings of the community is aware of it. And it's really just a listening session because they haven't really done the outreach. But from a positional standpoint, the board is, this is where I think the board is. I think that all five of us are here. And so I think we should send this item forward to the CPUC. I like the recommendation of Ms. Garrett that we add on our delegation, which was not part of the recommended actions, just to the aware of it. I know that surprised Ms. Garrett that I'm agreeing with her on something, but I think it's good. After 12 years that she feels that way. So, but all the same, I'm prepared to move this forward today and then still have that additional presentation in a couple of weeks. So I'll move the recommended actions with the additional direction that we write, that direct to the chair, right? This position to our delegation, our state delegation. Second. Motion by Supervisor Friend. The second by Supervisor Koenig. Are there any other further comments from board members on this item? Seeing none, I will say that I can kind of go either way on this one because I don't think my position is going to necessarily change. I do think that it's important that we still continue to have this meeting with the AT&T to have this presentation. But I'm kind of in the middle here. And I know that AT&T really wanted to speak to us before we took action, but it's challenging. We can't all talk to each other about how we're trying to bring these items forward. The PUC is going to have its, they're going to cut this through. Oh, you're mic, you're mic-ing my talk. The PUC is going to have its discussion. So if we don't let them know where we are at right now, at least I think we're really shunning our duties. I did have one question for the, the VP of External Affairs who's on the line. So my district encompasses the majority of that kind of purple zone where we're supposed to be provided, the carrier of last resort, even if this does, this application does go through. But one of the problems that we've, the residents there have had is that, and I'm kind of basing this on what I've seen on the CPC's website is that if somebody calls in and wants a landline, they're supposed to get it. People have been reaching out to me since I've been on the board and have been asking why they can't have a landline and that they're told by AT&T they can't have a landline. And so I'd just like to get some clarity on whether or not if someone calls in and wants to get a copper landline, if that's something that AT&T is required to provide. AT&T is required to provide basic service. And however, the technology, whether a copper landline or a void line, as long as they provide basic service, it's technology neutral. So it doesn't, it doesn't say it has to be a copper line. It says it has to be a line that provides basic service. So whether it comes over fiber or whether it comes over copper is up to the carrier, is up to AT&T to install. But anybody who is calling to request basic service will get basic service from AT&T. And if you have anybody who that is not the case, I will give you my cell phone number and they can call me personally because that's not happening. Thank you very much. And then I just wanted to share, I'm sorry. I think that the vice president has said the evidentiary hearing for the PUC is March 24th. I think it's next month, not this month. I stand corrected. So there's a series of public participation hearings happening right now across the state, but the proceeding will begin evidentiary hearing, I believe at the end of sometime in March or April. I'd have to double check that. I don't follow the legal calendar as closely, but the next step in this process is to begin evidentiary proceedings after the conclusion of the public participation hearings across the state. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. So if we do have that extra time, like I said, I'm fine hearing this on the 27th, is it that you said? If we have the PUC meeting till March 24th, I still give us time to put a letter in after we hear the full presentation. Yeah. Given that, I think we've heard all the comment on the board. We'll go ahead with a roll call vote on this item. And my hope is that regardless of the outcome, AT&T would be willing to come back and speak to the community because I think there's still a desire from members of our community to have a further presentation and more information on this item. I really would like to have the community have an opportunity to hear directly from AT&T. And I know that today the presentation was, there was enough time to pull presentation together at the last minute. And so I do think that there's a value and a benefit so people understand what's happening, but it does appear that there are board members who feel really concerned about this and strongly about their position. And so we're gonna continue to move forward with the vote today. And so with that, I'll turn it over to the clerk for a roll call vote. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Hernandez. No. McPherson. And Cummings. Hi. The passes with Supervisors Koenig, friend, McPherson, Cummings voting in favor and Hernandez voting against. And so we'll have that come back. We'll have a presentation come back on the 27th. And hopefully we can get a lot of community questions answered at that time. So the next item on our agenda is item number seven, which is to consider the general fund mid-year budget report updates and estimates for fiscal year 2023-24 and an updated general fund forecast scheduled public hearing on May 14th, 2024 at 9 a.m. or thereafter to consider the issuance of lease revenue bonds by the Santa Cruz County Capital Financing Authority scheduled public hearings for the proposal fiscal year 2024-25 budget beginning on April 9th, 2024, continue to May 21st, 2024 and May 22nd, 2024 and concluding on June 4th, 2024 and scheduled June 4th, 2024 as the date to consider amendments to the county's United V Schedule and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer. And with that, I'll turn it over to Marcus Dementel to kick off the staff report. Good morning. Chair Cummings and Forestry Providers, I am Marcus Dementel, your county budget manager. On behalf of the County Administrator Officer, Carlos Palacios, all the department heads and the staff in the CEO's office, I thank you for this opportunity to provide you an overview of where we're at in this current fiscal year and an updated longer-term forecast for the general fund. This year's annual report is impacted by several things including the recently published state budget with a $37.9 billion state deficit that was proposing to have some impacts on our county. But more importantly, colored by the seven federally declared disasters that have occurred since 2017 that have impacted our county that forced us to pay up front $250 million in costs. And we're waiting on nearly $150 million in unreimbursed costs. That's some of the biggest factors. And then layering on top of that, you'll hear a little bit more. Just the new mandated service levels that we have to provide as an extension of federal state government that are increasing our costs in the out year and throughout the most of our forecast. So I'll dive a little bit deeper into that. In the end, this is a report. It sets the stage as the bridge and reporting between today, February 13th and the release of our proposed budget on April 2nd. We'll have a first of our public hearings on April 9th. They'll continue in May and conclude on June 4th. So with that, you've seen these slides before but it bears repeating and we recognize that a lot of members of our public still are better informed but there's a lot more we can do to make sure people understand the uniqueness that all counties in particular this county plays across government services in our region. Most of our county is an extension of the federal state government where we have mandated services we must do. Then we have local mandated services that we're providing to our direct residents in the unincorporate area. And at their layers, we're delivering services to people in cities such as our libraries, our public defender, road maintenance across most of the county, garbage, water. So we're a complex animal. We provide direct federal services. We provide services as a municipality to the greater unincorporated area and then we provide services to people who live in cities. We in essence are the biggest city in the county and again, we've talked about this before. Another thing that bears repeating is just our funded level. We are systematically underfunded. This chart has us in the bottom right quadrant. Most folks who look in those, you've seen four sector quadrants before, you never want to be in the bottom right. Middles nice, over the left is better. Left up is always good. In this case where we as a percent of population serve half the county is unincorporated. So we have direct services to half the county that's atypical. 20% might be normal, more normal. And then we'll talk about our funding levels, whether it's sales talks that's being distributed, paid locally and going to other counties or property tax that for a lot of reasons, taking back to Prop 13, we have much smaller allocations, one-tenth of what our peer counties have and about a third of what all counties have across the state. So we're severely underfunded in many ways. Factors that are impacting our area that this was covered in a slide late last year regarding Measure K, but it still bears repeating that while we are in probably one of the world's most beautiful locations, we're in a very attractive place to live. Housing is a challenge for us. We have a shortage of homes for many of our families, our frontline service workers. And the cost of housing, as we well know, is a challenge. It takes a person in this area to earn $63 an hour to find an apartment to live. So we just have a lot of challenges in inventory and the cost of living that puts pressure on all of us. In addition, the theme of climate-based disasters adds additional emphasis on us. You can get $250 million that we've paid out in disasters since 2017. As compared to our general total tax revenue base that FARC sees our tax revenue base of $210 million. So we are just not funded well enough to respond to both the need for finding more services in housing as well as the need to pay up front and wait years, years and years for federal reimbursement. And as another data point, we are tasked with a greater need to severely increase our share of housing across our area. So the slide is the allocation of the regional housing needs that was recently released. The county has the biggest need and the biggest obligation to find new homes across our unincorporated area. So moving on to things that we've done well, again, taking a moment to recognize despite our challenges, despite our staff responding to disasters everywhere, despite this board being challenged almost weekly with new things, including the recent issues that you were just discussing, we still find a way to keep moving forward and making amazing accomplishments across our community. And as something near and dear to me is this county stepped forward and was a leading player in saving the Watson Community Hospital, bringing $5.5 million in funding and uncountless resources by many people in this room who without that hospital would not be here serving 33,000 people in the ER annually. We partnered with to build housing on the 7th and Capitol Avenue. That's a combination of medical delivery and housing needs. We've purchased the Westbrook building that I'll talk a little bit more about. We've certainly were instrumental in leading the federal government to find a way to recalculate their formulas for federal funding for the power of River Levy. These are just one of many, many, many examples. And I don't wanna bypass the libraries that we took the lead on funding and building and new libraries just recently we have been opening the Aptos library. If we're not for an atmospheric river, we'd have a lot more fun on that grand opening day. So just, Bear is repeating a couple of our big accomplishments. The South County Service Center, which is equity providing services, it's climate-based, we're reducing traffic miles. There's a lot of great things coming out of this asset that's coming online this calendar year. We hope by the summer, we're expecting by the summer. Not only bringing services to our County but allowing staff to reduce their community times and be closer to where they live. It's a win, win, win providing a lot more services to do others across the entire County. And more importantly, the recently acquired and under construction children's crisis of residential program stabilization unit. We've talked a lot about this. This is adding the 15th, there's only 14 other units like this across the state. The 15th will be here in the County and it's a great asset for some members of our County and children and alike who just need these services. So it's, again, these are really unique accomplishments that I think others in our place wouldn't even try just to do. And yet we keep pushing that envelope. And it certainly bears repeating our investment and step up in our response for office of response recovery and resilience in their efforts with disaster recovery resiliency. This entire County is typically deployed during a disaster event. Public works is on the front lines of repairing roads. You have public safety out there keeping people safe and not just getting ready to respond for a disaster. We're planning ahead with how do we adapt to future disasters? How do we become more resilient community with all of our infrastructure? So this County is doing a lot of great things to keep moving us forward. Despite that we have our challenges and occasionally we'll go out and get a sense of the public where they're at and what their biggest concerns are. And this slide represents six of those biggest concerns whether it's our need to provide wildfire, flood and emergency response. This is just the current top of mind with all of our disasters we're doing. The repairing streets and potholes is always there but I want to give you a little factoid that's interesting. We have 607 miles of roadway that we're responsible for typically two lanes times that by two that's 1,200 miles just a little over 1,200 miles that's from here to Denver, Colorado. We're effectively being asked to pave and maintain and invest in roadways from here to Denver, Colorado. That's just a magnitude again going back to our setup. Most counties don't have that. And if they do they have a much deeper richer of property tax base to fund that from. I want to pause a little bit and just, this is a lot of data slide and it's typically something I wouldn't have gone as to present but I just want to talk about going into the development of our forecast. We've put a lot of energy into improving the accuracy, extending the forecast from two to five to now a seven year forecast. And there's a lot of data points that come into developing this forecast. Our own data points on what we do on our trends, seven year, five year, three year trends, backing up things that happened during COVID because of the one time factors but also looking regionally and nationally and what's going on in other trends that impact us. So here's just an example of various data points and key data points that we're tracking. One is CalPERS rate of return and CalPERS manages all of the investment proceeds, all the proceeds that are held for paying future retirees across the state from all the member agencies. This factor impacts us in that when the investment portfolio is doing well or cost stabilized or actually can go down. The recent trend over the last several decades going back to the Great Recession is CalPERS has had more often losses than gains and when they have gains, they're not reaching their target whether that's the current 6.8% target. The last two years average, they've lost 0.15%. So instead of earning 6.8% in the last two years, they've actually lost ground of 0.15% in the investment portfolio and that impacts us because that's effectively our portfolio being shrunken which increase our costs in the out years. Typically it's a two or three year fiscal year lag but it's an important indicator for us to track to understand where our future costs are gonna be and what we know is we're gonna have some future payments to make up for these investment losses. From a jobs perspective while we have seen payroll jobs in our county decrease and unemployment go up, we're still in a reasonably okay place. Those areas are yellow, they're not a place that we're alarmed with yet but they're just tracking. Certainly if we keep losing payroll jobs, it's an amount of jobs that are available. That's a concern to us, unemployment. We tend to be in around a 5% or 6% rate given so much of our rural nature and the demographics of our community. A factor that is impacting and we're concerned about because of consumer spending. Consumer spending drives the economy. Two thirds of consumer spending makes up our GDP. Consumer spending drives our sales tax revenue to a certain extent, TOT revenue. So we are really concerned about what's happening in the consumer's place. And we've seen as you all know, we've tracked to the last year mortgage rates go up from about 3% this point last year. Now it's about 6.62% and it's likely they're gonna stay in those 6% rates for the next year. So that just increases price points for consumers, reduces their flexibility with moving, reduces their flexibility with taking on equity lines. It's just, it's a factor that we know will reduce the ability for consumers to spend. Another factor to the positive is retail sales keep going along. Despite that high in inflation rates that we've seen last year, despite high mortgage rates, despite our rates for car loans, consumers continue to spend. Will that sustain itself? We think it'll moderate. We don't think it'll decline, but there are some factors to be concerned about. Most importantly, what we talked about last year, the percent of savings that consumers have across the nation as reflected in their disposable income. Consumers last year had about 3.2% of their savings rate. Now it's 4% slight increase up, but that's still just two weeks. Two weeks of their paycheck is in representative of the savings. So consumers have been shrinking down their savings rates. And that's a decline over the decade. So that's just a factor we continue to watch. We know at some point in time, low savings rates, if unemployment goes up, eventually there'll be some pressures on retail sales to impact. Again, I just wanna talk about other external factors that go into our forecast, not just what we see and feel here locally. So what is in our forecast? We went out to 2331, fiscal year 2030, 31, excuse me, and extended our forecast out with credible expectations for revenue growth, but also what we know to be cost growth. And what we're seeing is a period of time where this year we look to be effectively balanced. We're about a half a million short right now in the model based on early estimated actuals. We'll get a new batch of departmental estimated actuals in these coming weeks and we'll revise this trend line with the release of our proposed budget. But our out years, and I'll talk about that in the next slide, driven by the need for disaster financing, driven by the need for new state mandated service levels, driven by the need to increase and start regular investments and across our aging facilities. We're just exposing ourselves to higher deficits in our out years. Those deficits peak in around 2627 at 35 million and then start a gradual decline by 2030, 31 dropping to about 15 million. So this is, we're kind of in a negative arc period where we're gonna, our deficits will peak in a couple of years and then they'll start lessening. And so by the time we get to 2030, 31, they'll be in a place where we think we can effectively manage them. Now as a percent of the general fund, we're still under 5% even at the high point. So as a percent of our entire general fund when deficits are less than 5%, it still gives us a lot of options to try to bridge the bridge out. And that's how if you look back at historically we've been able to balance the years and finish the years close to our projections, are effectively in a good spot. So we'll just have more work to do, more work with this board in the coming budget season and more work with staff to figure out how do we still absorb these cost increases by keeping with static revenues but keeping our service levels intact. It's just a delicate balance. This next slide, and this was discussed in more detail in our mid-year annual report in the board packet. This next slide focuses on that deficit number. So if you go back to that slide and where we were projecting our deficits, 21.6 million projected next year, if we do nothing, if we just let it happen, we'd have a $21 million deficit next year. Now that we're on this budget development cycle, we're gonna do everything we can to get that in balance. But this slide kind of shows what are the drivers of that deficit number? And what you can see here is disaster financing, new state mandates and stepping up increases in our facilities. These are all increased cost pressures across us, not ongoing operations. We have increased cost pressures that are coming online in the next couple of years. Disaster financing, we're looking at nearly about $7 million annually for it to be paying in that interest and principle. That is just to finance a portion of our 2017 response, portions of our CZU fire response and a smaller portion of our 2023 storm response. That's financing work already done or just about complete, but not future work that we still struggling with. We have ordered magnitude 60 or $70 million of future repair work for the 2023 storms alone that we don't have a solution for. So this is financing work we've already done, but those bridges, those roadways, those culverts that are still gonna be a problem. A lot of that, we don't have a funding solution yet, even by issuing new debt. So we'll talk about that in more detail at our May 14th public hearing. New state mandates, these are largely in a space of care courts, increased need to provide more and higher levels of healthcare services for those in our probation or detention jail systems. CalAIM and some potential state budget cuts. These are a factor of some new costs that we're seeing come on board in this next year, things we must do. Again, as a delivery provider extension of the federal state government, we have mandates we must deliver and often with the state of California, they'll put new mandates. We have to increase our costs, but there's no funding behind those mandates, even though they're required to provide funding for mandated services. So that's another area of advocacy that we're gonna continue to work on. So I just wanna talk a little bit about some of the key drivers in those deficits. We've done the work. We know where they're coming from and we have a high credibility that these numbers are real. The other side of our cost factor is what's happening on revenue growth. And the whole point of this slide is we are projecting pretty credible and realistic revenue growth. If you look at our property tax, we're not just banking 3% every year. We have modeled that models outputs that are based on our seven years of historical actions, as well as data we're getting locally from either our assessor's office or our control office or in the region. So we're factoring in growth and property tax for four and a quarter upwards of six, six and a half percent. VLF is vehicle license fees. I'm sorry, VLF vehicle license fees back in 2003. We used to receive that directly and now we receive that through the property tax payments. We're also projecting that to grow up to grow continuously four to 6% range. Sales tax a little bit narrow for growth margin, three and a half percent up to about five and a half percent over the coming years. TOT continues to be a strong revenue stream for us. We see continued interest for people who want to come here and with our new rates that came on board in the last year we're going to see a greater share of TOT growth in our out years. And what we talked about last year, we have a couple of new taxes, cannabis tax, not new but been around for a while. The newness is it drops in half and it's kind of plateaued at about 3 million a year. Our cut tax that we thought we'd have more revenue gain from to be invest in impacts of single use disposable cups. That's still around the 280, 300,000 number that hasn't changed a whole lot. And one area I wanted to focus on, we've talked last year a little bit during the budget season or a lot of it about the property tax allocation and we're getting 13.4 cents on the dollar and the state average is 19 cents. I'll still talk about that. But where do we want to focus on online sales? So as more and more consumers are moving to online sales and away from brick and mortar or local retailers, that's just a nature of it. There's a couple of issues with online sales though. Online sales, when somebody in the unincorporated areas buying from their home or buying at their business and they live in an unincorporated, they're paying a sales tax. So a resident in the unincorporated area or business in the unincorporated areas paying a sales tax to their online retailer. That sales tax either gets distributed and shared amongst cities in this county. It doesn't stay in the unincorporated area and that drops our rate from 19 cents down to five cents or it leaves this county entirely and goes to another county where the fulfillment center is located. So that's a challenge in online sales tax. Again, it's really both we stirred up the entire US retail economy but the distribution of sales tax hasn't caught up to the modern way which people are purchasing things. So we're losing about 5 million a year in general fund taxes from this formula where you buy it online in the unincorporated county and that sales tax either goes to other cities in our area or goes to other counties across the state. So that's a challenge for us. That's in the code and in state administrative regulations but we feel that there's some opportunity to address some of these areas. One thing I should have noted in sales tax on the prior slide with our growth in sales tax that does not include anything in the projected measure K that's on the ballot in March 5th. We're not projecting there's estimated about $10 million annually that's not included in our forecast. The nice thing about locally voted upon district taxes like measure K is that solves for some of the problem. So it solves for when an online purchase happens most of the time that purchase will stay in this area because of the distribution rules are different from the state rate and the locally voter approved. That's an example of why are there two allocation methods? Let's fix one that makes the most sense but that's the nice thing about our current half-cent sales tax and in new half-cent sales taxes that we're looking at, if they do come online we get to keep more of that revenue and protect it and keep it local. We've talked again a lot about the property tax allocation of the state averages counties across the state at 19.3 cents, our counties 13.4 cents what that means is about 36 million less in property tax allocation that we get as if we were at the state average level that's 36 million more we'd have for all of our services to deal with our roadways and everything. So that's just putting it over magnitude of what the impact is for us. And moving into the home stretch just a snapshot of our reserves our reserves are a good point they were closer to 7% years ago and we've bought them up to 10%. So that's a strong number and we're gonna do everything we can to keep that in place. Just as a one thing to note about our reserves within our reserves so it is committed and assigned balances. There's some of it about half of it is can be used for healthcare delivery services or investments in healthcare. So if we were to back that out and use all those health funds we would drop our reserves to about 5% or about two and a half payroll cycles we're not doing that. And despite that we have some of this held up in our reserves we're still able to do things like the Children's Crisis Center and expansion services for health and our Medicaid population. So just of again this is good news our reserves are 10% we plan to keep them there. As a snapshot of where we're at in our budget cycle today's February 13th, mid-year report this is a bridge to what's to come next April 2nd the proposed budget will be released online and then on April 9th we'll be presenting it to this board. Budget hearings start May 21st, 22nd we can include on June 4th moving into year and year on work that brings the adopted budget on September 24th. But just finishing on an area that is to come next and I forgot to mention we have our municipal advisor Suzanne Harrell-Perrill associate I believe she's on the line. And so if there are any questions regarding our debt financing that we're gonna be bringing to the board on May 14th she's available for questions but we know we have to finance some of our disaster debt the roads in order to finish the projects that are out there for still some 2017 projects CZU project as well as several 2023 projects just to finish the ones we've already committed to doing it's gonna take about 85 million at least in new funding that we don't have. So we're gonna go to the debt market with a combination of some internal loans a lot of debt market loans upwards of about $85 million that number is still in refinement that looks like to be our maximum number. And we'll be coming back May 14th that's one of the actions we're doing today. So over the next couple of months we'll be fine tuning that this is gonna be a complicated financing with several internal loans some variable rate debt and long-term debt 20, 30 year debt there'll be a combination of things recognizing that we're in a high interest rate market recognizing that we have made progress with FEMA reimbursements over the last since November actually 15 and a half million that new obligations have come in been done by the federal government and fortunate equation of that is the state's run out of cash. So now the state can't execute those payments typically we'd see payments in 60 to 90 days but some of that will be held at least till September of 2024 because the state is having their own cash challenges. So while it's been good work and we've done some incredible advocacy by this board, my supervisor friend his office chief of staff, Allison Filante and many, many members of this county's team we've done some incredible advocacy to get COVID focused on and get a lot of our claims up. We've seen COVID claims go from a 20% recovery rate to almost half of them have been obligated. CZU claims went from 15% to about 30%. So we're seeing progress. California or the federal government has appointed what I'll call on the COVID czar that's focused on processing COVID claims. So we have seen progress on all of our efforts but nonetheless the 2023 storm damage we just can't recover from that. We don't have the funding to pay for all those recovery roads. So we must issue debt. And that's part of today's action is to set the hearing for May 14th. With that, that concludes an updated report with setting some public hearings for unified fee schedule for June 4th. Debt issuance on May 14th and continuing starting a budget hearings on April 9th and available for any questions you might have. Sure, Cummings, if I could make a few comments just to re-emphasize a few points, you'd allow me. Thank you very much. I just wanted to add a few comments to Mr. Pimentel's presentation. This is actually a profound moment in county history as we deal with the impact of climate change on our total county budget. As you can see, we have been talking about climate change for years and knowing that the impacts were going to hit. But now we are seeing the profound impact on our budget due to the disasters that we have had since 2017. So we have 2017, of course, the big storms in that year and then 2020, the fire as well as COVID. And then 2023, we had two disasters. Just to re-emphasize the point that Mr. Pimentel had on this slide, we incurred $250 million of expenditures in disaster response repairs to roads and other infrastructure. $250 million over that time period. It's shocking to think about that that's bigger than our discretionary general fund. So what we call our net county costs or discretionary general fund is less than that. So we incurred those costs. We still have outstanding $143 million and we've recovered $106 million. So there's two issues. The biggest issue is that we're gonna have to issue that potentially $85 million in debt, which is one of the largest debt issuances that we have made for a capital project in county history. The good news is that we will get reimbursed for that most of it over time by the federal agency. So that's the very, very good news. And we certainly thank our partners at Federal Highways and FEMA and Cal OES for that. The difficulty we're having is the timing of recovery of those funds. It's taking too long for our cash flow to be able to deal with. And then the other issue is because we're gonna issue debt, we're gonna have to think of how to pay for that interest costs, which is not, we're not covering that through this debt issuance, how we're gonna pay for that interest cost. And then the other thing is that there's approximately 20% of the costs that we incur that are ultimately not reimbursed either through required matches of local funds or through unallowed reimbursements. So 20%, we're gonna have to figure out how to pay for that, which is a significant amount of money as well that'll come from local resources. So anyway, I just wanna emphasize that in this presentation, we're bringing to the board one of the profound issues that's gonna continue to affect us in the future, because I can't imagine that this will be the last big storm we're gonna get hit by. And cities and county governments, as you see what's happening in Maui right now and what's happening in Southern California due to the storms just recently, what's happened across the state, across the country, we're all having to recalibrate how we're managing our funds because this is gonna become a bigger and bigger slice of our budget. It's something that we have not faced before. So anyway, I just wanted to re-emphasize that point and re-emphasize that we will be coming. We do have, we feel solutions for how we're gonna deal with this. It's a very difficult problem. The part that we don't have solutions at yet is our local match, the interest costs, we're figuring that out still. And then the other thing is what happens if there's another big disaster? Just how are we gonna respond to that given that we are stretching our cash resources to the limit at this point? So we have to think of the future, hopefully we'll get through this winter. But, and the summer we start worrying about fires again and the next winter we'll worry about storms and so forth. So anyway, that's another question. It's something that as we enter into our next strategic plan, it's interesting when you think of six years ago when we did our strategic plan, we thought of this issue, but the next strategic plan, this is probably gonna be the biggest issue that we're dealing with, in addition to all of the new state mandates, which Mr. Pimentel also disclosed that we're gonna have to figure out how to fund those. So our next strategic plan is gonna look very different because this area of government is gonna grow and grow and it's gonna become something that all local governments are gonna have to wrestle with. Thank you very much for allowing me this time to come. Thank you, Mr. Palacios. And thank you, Mr. Pimentel, for the presentation. I'd like to bring it back to the board to see if there's any comments before we open it up to the public. Supervisor, Mr. Person. Yeah, well, a lot of numbers are not very promising. I just wanna thank a bunch of director, Mark Pimentel and our CAO, Carlos Palacios, for keeping the community up to date on our fiscal health. Then it's been said about every board meeting we've had now for the past several months that can't be overstated that we're in this position because we did the right thing and not the wrong thing. We responded locally to the CZU fire, COVID, winter storms, best resources we could offer, the ranch shelter, fixed roads, provide personnel and deliver the critical health services that are needed. But we need the federal government to help us further to cover these costs. As you've said, it's coming in the future but we need it now. And I understand FEMA, there's been disasters throughout this nation and we're just in line with a lot of other people. Can't wait till we get some of those, but how we can match it is gonna be a critical question, as was mentioned. And when you add the underperforming of the CalPERS and the related costs to the county in addition to our historic property tax rates which are the lowest in the state, I believe, we have a problem that needs to be addressed really structurally and I hope we can do that to the best of our ability, I know we will, but we really can't borrow our way out of this. These challenges, I hope we can avoid major cuts by closing these gaps and meeting or exceeding our revenue targets. I haven't seen anything as dire as this in my 11 years on the county board, but I wanna thank our staff and the board and the community collectively that has come together and most people do understand the situation that we're in. It's a dire one. One thing I think, realizing that the state is in some really significant budget problems itself, but I just wish we could, I hope we can continue and you've heard this from me before that we, please state, don't bury us with more unfunded band-aids. That's, we don't need any more, I know you need, the state's in need of money, but we're not the only county, but we can see the picture here. This is something that we really have to address, but the state, just stop it because they did this before. And I remember Governor Jerry Brown, he said, hey, that's enough. Let's skip some of that back when things were better. Let's some get so deep that we can't come back. We're pretty deep into this anyway. And the state needs to help us by not putting a bigger burden on us. So thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Hernandez. Thank you and thank you for the CEO Carlos, for the comments that he added. You know, you mentioned that we have roads to cover from here to Colorado. And so on that road to Colorado, what parts fails us the most during atmospheric rainstorms and fires? You know, I just want to illustrate to the public, you know, and both of you kind of touched on that as well, but I want to illustrate to the public the dire need that we have, what the impact of roads infrastructure as it pertains to emergency repairs and, you know, the resiliency costs would be your guesstimation of these costs because I know in South County, you know, historically we've always struggled to repave roads and, you know, we just, I was excited that we got this one repair on this one portion of the road. And it turns out that after this last rainstorm, another portion was damaged. And so I actually wasn't even, it was just close to my district, but I get the calls sometimes, you know? So, you know, I think Carlos mentioned that, you know, we are going to have to recalibrate the budget. At some point we're going to have to really restructure how we operate and how we do things because it just keeps happening, right? But what do you think these costs, you know, probably impact us? I'll take the first chance to respond to your question. One of the big challenges is that our county is located in a very difficult geologic area in that most of our land area and then incorporated area is either in flood plains, coastal areas, or mountainous lands. And so that makes it very challenging. In fact, I believe FEMA at one point rated Santa Cruz County as the most prone to landslides in the state of California and 15th and then that entire nation. And so the geology, just where we're located makes it very challenging. And so when we look at the disaster repairs, which when we come back to do the debt issuance, we'll put a map of where all the projects were. There was hundreds of them, where we, most of them landslide, creeks overflowing, all of them, you know, damaging roads, most of them again, either in low-lying lead prone areas and others in the mountainous areas as well. Mr. Reed, maybe you can comment as well. Yeah, it's a great question, Supervisor. I just wanted to bring your attention to a grant program that we are working on in collaboration with the Regional Transportation Commission. So our three CDI and RTC are looking at the climate adaptation and vulnerability assessment of all of our county-maintained roads and the branch rail line corridor. So through that grant program that's a Caltrans grant, we're gonna be trying to identify those most vulnerable areas to all of the impacts that you articulated and making a roadmap forward for how we build more resilience to those most vulnerable areas. So I just wanted to share that in the context of your question. Thank you for your comment. Yes. Any other Supervisors who'd like to make any comments, Supervisor Prem. Thank you and appreciation on the presentation. I just wanna underscore the context which I think is important because post 2008, 2009 recession, the county still has less staff than it had at that time. There tends to some, there's often a narrative about an increase in county cost, but I think that it's important to understand that departments have less staff, I mean, public works about half the staff, planning about half the staff of what they had in 2008, 2009. So there hasn't been a growth in staff. There's been numerous revenue measures and attempts to try and stabilize on the financing side. Significant increase to Supervisor McPherson's point, both state and federal ongoing requirements generally with two, one, two or three budget cycles worth of funding and no 100% ongoing funding but still required in particular in the health and human services fields. So structurally, the county, and I know this is something Supervisor Koenig and I brought forward on the 13 and a half or so cents, reimbursement that we get, not read Marvis, 13 and a half cents. So we got on the property tax dollar structurally there isn't a system that adequately builds us out of this in the next decade or two decades absent a significant shift in how the property tax allocations come back to the county and that is the underpinning of this because what's being asked to this board when we come forward on the debt issuance is to pay for things that have already been incurred. So we're not even looking at what may happen in the future when you already have additional structural issues. So even an asseterous pair of a situation were below zero. And if we have any additional things that get challenged to the county, we have no real plan, no real model that would actually address that. You can go to the debt well or really this one time for frankly and we wouldn't be able to do it moving forward. So there is to supervisor McPherson's point we need to cut off one element of responsibility that's coming forward to state federal level and I agree with that. But there needs to be a fundamental shift on the revenue side of money that people in this community are already paying. I mean, it's just to make sure that it actually stays with the unincorporated county specifically with the county government or it's not going to equalize. By the way, on the FEMA side, they are too also paying back previous disasters. Every time you see a new allocation in Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars is actually just going to pay off 2013, 2014, 2015, 16, 70 people think it's for the disaster that just occurred. That's the emotional component that gets it through Congress. But there's also hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars delayed in this. And so we're fighting against communities across the country in order to just get money that was guaranteed to us from either state or federal sources. It's a very, very, very challenging situation while the community is asking for greater investments. The community wants new parks, new roads that are flood protection. I mean, all very reasonable asks. These are basic tenants of government service that we're unable to structurally provide. So I think the context is really important as to why then the county comes forward with a measure K or why there's these various asks on TOT. It's not that there's a desire to continually go back to that well. There's no, structurally, it's a very challenging situation to do. So otherwise, thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. That was good. Yeah, thank you, Chair. I just wanted to, well, first of all, definitely agree with the comments of my colleague, Supervisor Friend, as far as the need for some structural changes in the way property taxes are allocated and clearly sales taxes as well. I mean, if the state is going to have these mandates that they force upon us, and they, I guess they would help us out with making sure that we can afford them. I went on to pack something you said, budget director Pimentel, about the, I think about $15 million, and FEMA claims that like it sounds like the federal government authorized, but then are held up at the state level. Is that because Cal OES is not in a position to basically contribute their 12 and a half percent. And so the money can't clear, is that? Yeah, it's really in the process of cash flow with the state of California. The federal government obligates it claims, and then they're paid by the state. The federal government provides funding to the state to make those payments. At this point in time, the state doesn't have the cash resources to make these payments that we just got recently obligated. So they're typically, we would have started seeing payments in May and June, and we might see a little bit trickling in June, but it looks like most of it is projected. We're projecting on September. We don't know, but that's the new problem for us that caught us off guard. Got it. Well, then could you pull up the slide that shows general fund projected deficits and kind of the different share of the different disaster financing capital and facility state mandates. I just want to unpack the capital and facility side a little bit. So I understand that with the up to $85 million we'll have to put out for disaster financing. That's just to cover the money we expect to get paid back eventually from the state and federal government. But then is the part that 20% that we are going to have to pay just with local funds? Is that in the capital and facility section there? Or is that just a building is needs a new roof because it's 30 years old and we've been delaying it. Now it's 35 years. We're really better doing it now. Well, we'll see the disaster funding for the, if you think of the whole entire cost, $85 million to pay for the projects. And then we submit claims for reimbursement. We're expecting about 20 maybe as high as 30% that we'll have to pay it on our own. It won't be reimbursed by FEMA or CaliWeas for a lot of different reasons. So there'll be 20, 30% of that $85 million that will just be here. It'll be our costs forever. So that's why May 14th that will probably be the hardest, most complicated debt financing I've ever presented in my career. Or we're doing a combination of long-term debt for that portion of stuff we expect that never get reimbursed for. Short-term debt for stuff we expect to get reimbursed for but it might take five to seven to nine years. And then some immediate lower-term debt and total financing for stuff that might come in next year, next couple of years. So it'll be very complicated financing. But there'll be a portion of that debt that will stay in that blue bar forever. In my career, forever. So we're talking 20, 30 years of long-term debt that will just be our obligation because that it's in state, just don't reimbursing the caracoss. Right, okay, so that's all in the blue section there. Can you unpack the orange section capital facility a little bit? We have not had a sustainable model of funding capital like many government agencies kind of post great recession went into the first place they cut was capital investments. That's why deferred maintenance has become such a big deal. It's not only on roads or infrastructure but it's in our buildings, it's in this building. It's in our healthcare delivery buildings, it's in our jail. A lot of our facilities have not had just minimum investments. So we're starting a program. We have to at least get to 1% of our general fund of committed funding that we can start making investments in our facilities because we know like roadways when it fails, that costs is triple or quadruples. If we can invest now, it'll extend the life and reduce those costs. So this is something we must do. It's not optional. We're seeing failures across our county. Every year we're responding to failures. And very much like we've done with debt financing when we've had failures in the past we've gone out and issued debt to address those failures. So I think it's proactive for us to not wait for things to fail and to start funding them now and make sure they sustain themselves. So that's an ongoing commitment trying to get us to at least 1% of our general fund going towards our investments and facilities across the county. And is that primarily, you know as you said facilities buildings or is there any contemplation of trying to take more proactive approach on culverts or we'll see parks. It'll be anything in the place of so if we roll it back a little bit our general services department is completing a facility condition index. We're doing a lot of great work in these last five years. Strategic plan and now we're understanding from our facilities where are the next five years where the biggest risks at? So it's gonna be a triage of addressing where our biggest challenges to maintain and costs. So it'll be a prioritized based on assessments. So it doesn't have any one particular focus it'll just be how can we keep our facilities going before we have to start either because with this debt issue CO process is correct. I've never done a debt this size. This complicated. And it may be our last debt issuance for several over years. So it, you know, we're at the point where we have to start finding ways to not let things fail. Right, I mean, to that extent what expectations should we set with the public? I mean, I know there was a number of projects for example in my district that were in the planning stage and we basically had to stop that because we realized that we were actively out of funds because when we issue this debt does that put us in the position to continue working on these projects or are those just on the back burner until something structurally changes? I mean, what expectations should we set with people who still are living with storm damage from, you know, certainly 2023 if not 2017? I think it's still complicated to answer to get to right now on a specific project. We know we're trying to finish the work we've already committed to doing. And we know we have some active projects out there. We're trying to use our cobble together financing to finish financing those projects that are active now. Something that's on the books that hasn't started yet. I mean, we don't have an option for that yet. So I wish there was a better answer but just have to be very candid about it right now. We don't have good options. Okay. And then just last couple of questions on the state mandates part. I mean, doesn't our state constitution protect us again? Sun funded state mandates? I mean, is there some way that these are not actually mandates but strong recommendations or something? I mean, what, at what point and when could we actually push back and just say, no, we don't have the funds and you haven't provided them to us and this constitution protects us. It's a complicated answer. Yeah. So there's, there is a process the state mandates commission. So there's actually a commission that makes the determination what is the state mandate and how we're going to be reimbursed. There was actually a lot of activity in this area. And then Governor Brown, when he came in, he either relaxed a lot of the mandates or made them optional. And so, but they were things that, for example, I mean, one of the optional ones I think he did was advertising public meetings like this. So he said, you're strongly advised to do it but we're not gonna, you know, it's not required but who's not going to advertise the public meeting, right? So there's many, many things that Governor Brown did to relax the mandates standard but strongly recommend them and we kept doing them but Governor Newsom has started doing new mandates quite actively again. So now there's going to be a process. So what's going to happen is we have to occur there's expenditure, start doing the program and then counties, cities are going to have to file claims that are going to go to the state mandates commission there's going to be hearing there's going to be evidentiary hearings. It's going to last years and then eventually they'll make a ruling and they'll say, yes, this is a state mandate and then the state then has to fund it. So they, so then what happens is they would, they have to actually appropriate money to fund it and what happened in the past is they would let the bill get very big and for years we wouldn't get funded and then every now and then when there was a surplus that say, okay, we're going to fund this one mandate where you're owed and we have to fill out once there's a mandate, the state mandates commission rules that there's a mandate we actually have to collect a bunch of data file a claim, every jurisdiction has to file a claim and then we have to wait on the state legislature and the governor's actually fund it. So what happens is in reality is it's a multi-year problem and we get funded it could take a decade to get funded. Meanwhile, we're being required to do the service. So there's a bunch of them, we will start doing them and then we'll start filing claims it'll work through the system it could be four or five years easily before we see a check to get to come back. That's a pretty backwards way to do it. Certainly, I mean, what if we just don't have the money to provide the service in the first place? I mean, then we'll force the state to come after us and prove that we do, right? Absolutely and, you know, CSAC and the Liga cities have fought this battle for many years. I know supervisor McPherson for years was in CSAC board and representing that very issue and supervisor Fringe as well has been advocating as a committee chair. It's an issue for all of us that what you just said is true. I mean, we're being required to expand general fund money and usually, and we may not, we're not sure we're gonna get reimbursed and even if we do, it could take easily another five years longer. That's the history of, you know, of this and these new mandates, we imagine that some of the bigger counties are gonna be to file the test claims that go to the commission and because it's a very complicated process, takes a lot of resources. Small counties like us are usually not involved in those test claims because it's too big a fight and it's a lot of expense to do that test claim but we imagine Los Angeles, San Diego, other big counties are gonna file those test claims and then we will start filing. But in the meantime, we're gonna be spending the money and we have no assurance of getting reimbursed. Yeah. Well, it sounds like a big fight, Bruin. The last question is just on property tax growth. 4.5 to 6.5%. I mean, that's great. How much of that is coming just from sales and reassessments versus permit issuances to actually construct new things? And is there any way that we could potentially address some of the shortfall for the coming budget years just by hiring more folks in the assessor's office to speed up the process of making sure when those sales happen, when you're getting the money in in a couple of months versus a year or two? Yeah, that'll be a focus of our budget this cycle. We're already working with the assessor's office to try to find some solutions now that are before the budget season starts. And we recognize that even with Prop 19, there's a lot of our assessments have the ability to increase up. And we just have to get through the work. So we know as a county and as the office, they're just overwhelmed with the nature of assessments. So we are projecting based on their models that there'll be some increases largely driven by those reassessments, largely driven by just normal sales transaction. I think in this next year, well, we won't see a hot real estate market. We'll see it okay market homes are still selling, but they're not selling as fast. Within our out years as mortgage rates drop, we're projecting to see more transfers and that will trigger higher assessments. So it'll be a combination in about a year and a half of starting to see home sales to pick up pace again, and then the ongoing catch up of Prop 19 work. But now we recognize the need to get more support for our assessor's team. Yeah, yeah, seems like if we need more cash than investing in an apartment, it can actually bring that in would be a wise move. And unfortunately, we have similar to Supervisor Friend's point, we have similar stories across the entire County. There's a lot of places that need resources to move things along. Sometimes they're revenue driven and sometimes they're service driven and we're continually have to make tough choices. All right, thank you. Well, I just want to thank everybody for the comments. You want to thank you all again for the presentation and I'll just say that as somebody who's come up in the science community, I mean, the projections that people were saying 20 years ago, what's going to happen with climate change if we don't reduce our CO2 emissions, they're all coming true. And I do want to thank the County for being proactive and trying to make sure that we can protect our resources and community, our infrastructure to the best of our capability. I think one of the things that this presentation highlights is the need for more revenue in our community, which is why this board unanimously voted to put measure K on the ballot because it's just showing that we're going to need to have more revenue coming into our community in order to sustain what we already have, let alone the need for expansion, the need for more staff has been highlighted just with the cost of living going up, making sure that salaries are keeping pace so that people can feel like they can still live in this community and aren't enticed to leave to move to other communities just because it's so expensive to live here. And so I just really want to appreciate everything that went into this presentation and I share a lot of the sentiments that were brought up by other members of this board on property tax and how we can work on increasing revenue within our County. But with that and in the interest of time, I'd like to open it up to the Supervisor McPherson. Maybe I should wait for, well, we don't have a, I just accept it, but I'd like to give an additional direction that we write the governor and our elected representatives, maybe the Speaker as well as Senate President Pro Tem that the bind that we're in and that passing on unfunded mandates greatly exacerbates the problem we're having. I'd like to get that message out and get it to the governor and our elected representatives. But after we hear from the public, I'll bring it back to you so we can incorporate that additional direction. So at this time, we're taking public comment on regular agenda item number seven, which is a consideration of the general fund mid-year budget report with related actions. And so we'll open up to the public, speak on this item, you'll have two minutes and you can please approach the podium. I don't think so. But at the bottom. That voice. It was because he turned it off. How's that? That's better. Great. Wow, nobody wants me to raise my voice or extend my vocabulary. Maybe I'll just read some stuff. And this has to do with the budget. I've been showing up, I think the first time that I suggested some litigation in the city of Santa Cruz was honestly, the first time I can recall being hit by your frequency weapons in the room. But my detox is better. So I have a lot of questions. I don't know why people don't realize the only difference between human blood and plant blood is that humans are iron-based and plants are magnesium-based. The CO2 thing, you guys are basing a lot of information on this and it's just really terrible. So I'm gonna just read some stuff. The founding fathers were not career politicians. They were outlaws. The angry extremists who refused to submit to the ruling elite, never forget. It's a legal definition of mandate. You know, what's going on with the farmers with the legislation that's being passed in Europe? They, their livelihoods are being destroyed in many ways that I could go on to for a long time. You know, climate change, my ass. Anybody trying to outlaw farming wants to kill us. We just haven't gotten to that point yet. So at the end, legacy is not legislation. I'm gonna read something from John Locke, 1632, 1704. But first I'm gonna read this. Wise man once said, hate has four letters, but so does love. Enemies has seven letters, but so does friends. Lying has five letters, but so does truth. Cry has three letters, but so does joy. Negativity has 10 letters, but so does positivity. Life is two-sided and choose the better side. I'll read what John Locke said. Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people or reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves in a state of war with the people who are therefore absolved from any further obedience and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided. Thank you, sir. Thank you for your comments. Appreciate it. Good morning, David Schwartz. Uncertainty abounds. The future is not clear. I think we need to be prepared for the less than optimum. We won't pass these issues. We won't be receiving additional revenue. What will we do then? The mandates, definitely. We need to fight against the mandates unless the state puts up the money first. We shouldn't have to pay for things and then get reimbursed. Look where that's gotten us now. So we need to stop doing this. We need to make some changes. One of the things is we need to change right now is this potential unfunded liability from our payroll where we're paying people benefits for the rest of their life. We've got to stop that now because we don't have the money to pay for it now. We're not gonna have the money to pay for it in the future. And as you know, we're all aging out. That means that a lot of our employees will be retiring and we'll be funding that retirement out of our pockets. We don't have the money now. When will we have the $900 million we're gonna need in 10 years? So we need more funding sources. We need to look at ways to save money. Number one, stop printing in color. Sure, that's not gonna be much, but if you think about the number of payings that we produce, if you can save a penny a page you're gonna start saving money. Change that retirement system now. Anyone hired tomorrow and the next day will be on a defined contribution plan that you will be able to pay for. We'll have it in the budget. So little things make big differences. Let's get started now. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for your public service. It's a thankless job. My name is Ed Lishin. I'm celebrating my 50th year here in Santa Cruz and I've certainly seen a lot of changes over the period of time. I was born and raised in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a town not unlike Santa Cruz, a once great seaside resort that lost its businesses and its tax bases and chose gambling as an option to raise revenue which hasn't worked out. My neighborhood where I was born and raised is now a prairie. There's no been real development there. I see comparisons to what's happening here in my city, in my county, stores are closing. I didn't know I was gonna stumble in on a, the finance and the budget discussion, that wasn't my original agenda for coming here. I did come here was cause I read that government pamphlet about the bond issue for the mental health. It was right on the first page. And of course, to understand what's going on there, take a legal mastermind. But when I saw they were gonna take 5% away from the county, I thought, well, I really don't wanna allocate that money to the state and sacrifice my county. So I'm probably gonna vote no on that. I don't really know the financial ramifications of it all. But dad taught me there's no easy solutions to difficult problems. And certainly in the world today, we face a lot of difficult problems that we need to deal with, at least not for ourselves, for our children and our children's children, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm shocked to see the county is looking at an $85 million deficit, that's shocking. You know, when my family doesn't have money, we don't go out and buy a new car. We don't go out and buy a new house. And yet that is what the county has done. I really protest that, you know, the new South County West Marine thing is a lovely thing. But quite honestly, this county cannot afford that. It not only puts us in debt, but it also takes that real estate out of the property tax revenue that this county would have gotten. There are other examples that the child's crisis center is a good thing. But can we afford it? No, we can't. And I think there are alternatives that you could have been examined. The county owns other properties already that could have been transferred into that use. We have to take care of what we have instead of going out and buying new shiny objects and putting ourselves in debt. We can't do that as personal families and the county shouldn't do it either. That's why I'm voting no and measure K because it's a false promise that these things on the ballot will be funded and they're not. It's simply going into the general fund. I really encourage you also to be transparent about the other $87 parcel tax that you've all endorsed coming up from the Santa Cruz County Land Trust that will be on the November ballot. That's gonna be another drain of the bucket of the people's finances. Our well is running dry and you can't keep coming to us for more and more and more. We are an expensive place to live and making it more expensive makes no sense. So you've got to learn to live under a budget just like the people do. And I urge you to work with CSAC to stop these unfunded mandates. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any members of the public hearing person who'd like to speak to us on this item? Okay, seeing none, we'll go online to see if there's members of the public who are online who'd like to comment on this item. Tim, your microphone's now available. Hello, thank you again for allowing me to speak. And I very much enjoyed the first gentleman's comments. He should still speak. It's always fun to hear him. In regards to a federal and state, they do need to value your county so much more. Same difference up in Tahoe. If you do get money from the federal government and the state, okay? You need to be tight-fisted with it. Don't just go run around and start spending the money. Up in Tahoe, they're running around spending the money and even with all that money, they want to come after me on my property taxes on the Nevada side of the lake. And for what? To build a transportation system so they can pump more people into our region. So then it's more elbow to elbow on the beach and it's elbow to elbow on the ski hill. It's a complete disaster. And the thing is, if we have a fire in our region, we only have three roads out, we're all gonna die up in the Tahoe area. So the thing is, when I look at things like railroads on the coast and whatnot and so on, and all these agendas to pump a lot of folks into your region, all you're gonna do is destroy your environment and you're gonna create more problems and then getting people out of a disaster situation is gonna be horrible and you're gonna end up in a Maui situation. So I think everyone needs to think long and hard about all this. You can't property tax your way out and you just need to think real long and hard about what you're doing with other people's money and you don't want to end up in the same situation that the Tahoe basin is in or in the situation that the people of Maui all ended up in that we all know about, okay? So it's all about water, it's all about climate infrastructure and conserving your cash so you can have a brighter future, all right? Thank you so much, you take it easy. Thank you. Colin, user three, your microphone's now available. Thank you, Harris. I'm looking at a, like a picture of a pie and it shows the Pentagon budget and the wars like presently is real, slaughtering people in Palestine, et cetera. Taking over half of our budget. And Zachran, you talked about how the context is very important and this is a very, very challenging situation. I think it is, it's dire and we need to have those funds not go to Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon and billions of dollars but to provide for services here. Food, not bonds, does it in the title, we could say food and county services and covering disaster costs, not millions, billions going to the military. And you spoke of climate change. It's more than that. If you look at the sky and what's coming out of these geo-engineering planes, they measure dangerous levels of aluminum and barium found in the soil and water samples taken nationwide. Both elements highly toxic. Tree and plant life is rapidly declining and human rates of respiratory and neurological ailments have risen exponentially with asthma at near epidemic levels in children. Aerosol programs are a global covert operation. Check out geoengineeringwatch.org. We need to. Thank you, Ms. Garvin. Brian, your microphone's now available. Hi, this is Brian Peoples with Trail Now. I appreciate the opportunity to speak. I'm really supportive of the county workers and just wanted to, you know, most everybody knows I'm a one subject pony in the way of transportation involved in the transportation for over 25 years for Santa Cruz County. And I think the main point I want to make is not sure if it's really a revenue problem but more of a spending problem. For example, when you're spending $20 million a mile to build a 12 foot wide trail, we know we have a problem. And your reason it's a 12 such an expensive effort is because you're refusing to do the right approach which was given to you by the leading expert in transportation, which was rail banking. So, you know, when you're building a 12 foot wide trail that costs twice as much as per mile than winding the highway, we know we have a problem. And what that transect, what happens then is the trail never gets built. We never get our infrastructure built out when we have plans that are excessively expensive to do. So I encourage you to be more realistic when you're planning in the transportation sector which makes up a big portion of it. Thank you for your time. MILPA collective, your microphone is now available. Yeah, good morning, Chair, Board Supervisors. Thank you for allowing me to speak today. My name is Bernard Gomez. I was born and raised in District 4, currently reside in District 3. I'm just, I think the county needs to start, you know, the saving money, you know, where it can. And just really redefining what public safety means, you know. I believe that there's a lot of money being spent on a half empty jail, right? So I'm looking forward to this budget season, this budget process, you know. I wanna thank Mr. Palacios and Pimentel for the work. But yeah, I encourage the Board to really start thinking about how much money is being spent on this current definition of public safety, which, you know, usually is meant law enforcement or incarceration. The sheriff's budget continues to increase, right? While crime rates continue to decrease, you know, there might have been a spike here and there, but there is a lot of need in that area, right? Where the county can do better and have a more cost-effective way of providing alternatives to actually getting people the help that they need. And I don't know, hopefully, you know, we're leaving some of those millions of dollars, right? Just currently, there is a whole unit that is empty. I'm just wondering how much money is being spent on those empty beds, right? And the electricity and all those things, you know. But those are just my thoughts as of now. And I look forward to this process this year. I hope y'all have a good day. We have no further speakers, Chair. All right, thank you very much and thank you everyone who commented on this item. I'll bring it back to the board for action on this item. I know that Supervisor McPherson expressed, wanting to add some additional direction to this item, so I'll recognize them first. This is just part of, I realize it's just part of filling only a part of the puzzle, but I would ask that we accept the report that was given. And with the added direction that we write the governor of the Senate and Assembly leaders as well as our local representatives, and CSAC as well, about our concern about the onslaught of unfunded mandates and the pressures that puts on our county government. Second. So we have a motion by Supervisor McPherson and a second by Supervisor Koenig. And I think we've covered all the basis with the actions that needed to. Just a clarification, it's for all the recommended, there's a number of other recommended actions beyond the accepting of the report. So it's for all the recommended actions. Okay. So the recommended actions with the additional direction provided by Supervisor McPherson. Is there any further discussion on this item? Seeing none, we'll take it to a roll call vote. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson and Cummings. Aye. That passes unanimously and thank you all for that presentation and for that update on the financial status of the county. With that, we're going to move on to the next item on our agenda, which is item number eight, consider approving agreement with integral consulting and the amount of $690,608 to prepare a sea level rise, vulnerability assessment and local coastal plan amendment and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the deputy CAO direct slash director of community development and infrastructure. And so I'll turn it over to our staff to kick us off in this presentation. Thank you, Chair and Board of Supervisors. So related to the previous discussion, this project is about preparing to get natural housing. Can you check to see if the mic is on? It is. Maybe I need to get closer. Thanks. Okay, yeah, so my name is David Carlson. I'm a resource planner in community development and infrastructure department. And again, related to the previous discussion, this project is about preparing for natural hazards. And I wanted to define a couple of terms on this introductory slide here. First, a sea level rise vulnerability assessment is a study of how sea level rise will further impact development along our coastline. It is already subject to flooding, storm surge and erosion. And a local coastal program or LCP is our local plan certified by the coastal commission that gives the county the authority to issue coastal development permits. And that includes addressing coastal hazards in those permit applications. The LCP needs to be amended because of policy conflicts that have developed with the coastal commission regarding how to address coastal hazards, climate change and sea level rise. And we have to resolve these policy conflicts to improve and streamline the local permit process. So just a quick outline. First, I'll provide some background information. I'll describe the project, the process so far, the contract or the vulnerability assessment and then provide a recommendation. A previous effort to update the coastal bluffs and beaches policies in the part of the LCP that is the general plan safety element resulted in a denial by the coastal commission. The policy and code amendments were intended to address climate change and plan for coastal resilience and the impacts of sea level rise. In their findings for denial, the coastal commission found policy conflicts with the California Coastal Act and recommended an approach based on a vulnerability assessment. The coastal commission has a grant program designed to fund the necessary studies and county staff began talking to them about a grant application. At their meeting in September of 2023, the coastal commission approved our grant, giving us $780,000 to complete the studies and do the LCP amendment. The project will complete a series of technical studies on sea level rise, hazards, economic impacts and adaptation pathways that will culminate in an LCP amendment addressing coastal hazards. There will be a robust community engagement plan and ongoing coordination with coastal commission staff throughout the various stages of the project because the goal of the project is an LCP amendment that can be certified by the coastal commission. Project tasks will be approached through a lens of equity and environmental justice, including outreach to historically marginalized groups and considering the value of the coast as a low-cost recreational, social and cultural resource in the economic analysis. The county conducted a standard procurement process to hire a consultant for the project through a request for proposal or RFP process. I worked with General Services Purchasing Division to prepare the RFP and the RFP states that the grant includes $693,000 for a consultant. So all potential leaders knew about the grant and the available budget. The RFP was advertised in a normal way and it was sent directly to eight consulting firms identified by county staff as having completed similar work. We received one bid in response to the RFP and staff did some follow-up to try to find out why that was the case. I reached out to five of the eight consultants who sent the RFP to and two of them got back to me. One had decided not to submit a proposal and the other apparently didn't receive the RFP because of the problem with contact information on their website. It's apparently not unusual to get one or two responses on RFPs these days. CDI got one response on an RFP that it described elsewhere on this meeting's agenda and staff is aware of other recent similar RFPs that only got one or two responses. There's also another way of looking at this situation. The project is well-known throughout the state to those involved in this kind of work. It's been the subject of two public hearings by the Coastal Commission in 2022 when they denied our last try at an LCP amendment and recommended we do a vulnerability assessment and in 2023 when they approved our grant for the vulnerability assessment. The Coastal Commission LCP grant program is the major source of funding for this kind of work throughout the state. And I would say that if a consultant has not been tracking our project and the grant funding and was unaware of our RFP, that in my mind would be a consultant shortcoming, not a problem with our RFP process. Fortunately, one qualified consultant team did respond to our RFP. Integral Consulting is the lead consultant on the project and they are a team of scientists, engineers and economists that have completed countless similar studies throughout the state. The list in your board member is only a partial list. All the references gave positive feedback. Central Coast Wetlands Group and Groundswell Ecology will assist with the vulnerability assessment and blue point planning will conduct the outreach and stakeholder engagement. A team of highly qualified technical advisors will assist with the various aspect of the project and they're all described in the board member. Most of the team are locals and that keeps the grant funds in the local economy. I laid out the slide this way to emphasize the county's role in the project. This is a really good consulting team and it's gonna do some solid work for the county as an extension of the county. But the local decision making at the end of the day is on the LCPMM is going to happen in this room by the planning commission and the board of supervisors. With this team, staff is confident those decisions will be based on the best available science and on an inclusive process that engages all people equally. So staff's recommendation is that the board of supervisors approve the agreement with integral, make a minor a budget adjustment to align the contract amount and authorize the CDI director to sign the agreement. And that concludes my presentation. Thanks. Thank you so much for that presentation. Are there any questions or comments from board members before we go out to members of the public? Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Mr. Carlson for the more in-depth discussion and presentation on this item from the last time the board heard it, our previous meeting. Since that meeting, did have the opportunity to talk with various members of the community. And I'm certainly, as your slide just outlined, the integral team does include quite a number of experts. I do think that they submitted a good bid that would provide a quality work product. I think my primary concern with this process, I mean, first of all, I have a question for county council. Is there anything in this RFP process that could open us up to liability down the line? I mean, is there anything about this that anyone could argue was improperly conducted? Because I'm concerned that if there were, if we're to uncover anything that ultimately it could invalidate the final product of a new local coastal program amendment. No, I'm not aware of anything. Okay. So that's one component. And then I think the other is just making sure that many of the people who will actually be impacted by this work also feel just confident in the process itself. I mean, that is basically democracy in a nutshell, right? Not always the most efficient process, but ultimately meant to build understanding buy-in and it's not always agreement, at least acceptance of the final outcome. So anyway, those are sort of my position generally. I look forward to hearing what members of the public have to say. Any other member more have any questions or comments? Supervisor Hernandez? Yeah, so you said that there was several consulting firms that were that Scott sent that RFP. How many was that again? Eight. Eight. And with the, has there been any municipalities already or any counties that have submitted an LCP and that they have the same kind of response rate, a low response rate for these RFPs? If you know, I'm not sure if you know that or not. Yes, I am aware of at least two cases where the responses were one or two responses to the RFP for similar type of work. One in Northern California and one in Southern California. That's it. Seeing no further questions or comments we'll open up to the public members of the public. We'll have two minutes to comment on this item before we bring it back to the board for action and deliberation. Good morning. My name is Steve Hurray and I'm president of the Coastal Property Owners Association in Santa Cruz County. CPOA had supported the Coastal Commissions Grant as well as the county's release of the RFP due to the county's limited time and resources available to conduct the vulnerability study. However, CPOA is opposed to the county's recommended contract award with integral consulting in our opinion, the RFP process was flawed. It did not reach some of the major coastal consulting firms, did not provide for any opportunity for public input and would not be in the best interest of the county, the public or the coastal property owners. We therefore urge the board of supervisors to direct staff to reissue the RFP and to ensure it reaches the appropriate contact people in each of the other major coastal consulting firms and extend the deadline for 30 days. Our major concerns are that the RFP process did not allow for public input, even though this will affect billions of dollars of coastal real estate throughout Santa Cruz County. CPOA had requested that county provide a list of respondents to the RFP and our request was declined. CPOA then requested the county provide a list of the consulting teams so that we could vet the qualifications and potential biases of the consulting team, our request was declined. The integral consulting team has potential ties with the coastal commission and surf riders and does not include the coastal engineers. Some of the major consulting firms, including Dudak Woods, Ascent, Smith and Ringcon have all indicated they never received the county's RFP. CPOA contacted Dudak Consulting who was working with other cities such as Santa Barbara, Oxnard, Ventura and then Sanitas and they are very interested in submitting a proposal. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker. Hi, my name is Jenny Dushak. Go right into the mic. Oh, how's this? That's better. My name is Jenny Dushak. I'm a career science writer. I've been working on a book on shipping ports and sea level rise. And I have been going to meetings with the American Geophysical Union for several years. Each year that I go, the projections for sea level rise are worse. I just want to make that point. I would urge the count, I can't speak to the RFP, which somebody just addressed and whether that was done right or whether you need 30 more days or whatever. But I would urge the county to expedite the vulnerability assessment and begin planning for sea level rise as soon as possible and long-term sea level rise. Finally, let's think long-term. Don't fall for short-term thinking or holding actions. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Next speaker. David Schwartz, candidate for district two. I didn't realize you actually had a grant on this when it was very interesting to find out that you've actually gotten this funded by someone else. I think that's great. But I just had an idea about this. We do a lot of studies and plans and things like that. And I wonder why we're not using our brain trust. We're surrounded by colleges, UCSC, Stanford, Monterey Peninsula, even Cabrillo. And all of these have programs that study these times of issues. And we could offer something like a $100,000 scholarship program to the winner of a contest, let's say, where the best program, the best study could garner some group, let's say, an opportunity to extend their education that they might not necessarily have an opportunity for or something like that. So thinking ahead, we want to have more of our kids involved in what's going on, our younger folk involved in our government and such. So why don't we bring them in? We have these opportunities and we might even save some money doing it. So think about that. It might be something in the future that we could definitely do. I appreciate that. Thanks so much. Thank you. County, my name is Drew Lanza. I'm a registered voter in our lovely county on the boards of Smart Coast, the board of the CPOA. And until last month I was on the board of Paradoons. I resigned specifically to focus on the blasphemy LCP process. I'm now sat on 50 boards I'm an expert in fiduciary duty. Look, we all know there are two core fiduciary duties, right? Care and loyalty. Briefly, to do what a prudent person would do in service to the constituencies, they're board SERPs, the citizens of the county here and the people that do business here, I suppose too. What are the consequences of failing to achieve that plain spoken standard? Well, if you can't be sued and the board can't be sued, but multiple legal precedent, your decision can easily be overturned if you've reached your fiduciary duty. There is credible evidence. Maybe it's real evidence, maybe it's not, but there are credible, I've spoken to these people that you only had one responsible RP because it was never sent out. Whatever the heck sent out means. The general rule for government RPs I've served on boards like yours is that you need to get at least three responses. There's actually a law that probably doesn't quite apply to us, but the general principle holds, right? Go get as many as you can. A rule which also as a generally accepted guideline dictates an active outbound effort. I want you to think about your fiduciary duty. Okay, you've kind of broken the general rule of more than one, and why was that? Just ask. Just postpone this decision for a day or two. Finally, your failure to address my challenge given someone in my experience, credibility and history will put you in breach if you don't answer that question. Thank you. I think you guys are doing a great job. Keep it up. Thank you. Welcome, Director Motato. Thank you, and good morning, Chair and Supervisors. Matt Machado, you're Director of CDA. I just want to share a perspective. We work with a lot of consultants on all different types of projects, so we know the process well. And to be successful, we reach out. I mean, we want to be successful. I would say that some of the best project success we have is when we find a consultant that's engaging, that's collaborative, that responds to our requests. And in essence, consultants are really just extensions of our staff. And we together work through that process. And oftentimes, especially in this case, we will have a public community process and we'll work together to bring ideas and recommendations to your board, to the Planning Commission. So there will be plenty of opportunity for public input and direction and decision making. At this step of the process, we're really just trying to bolster our staff so that we can do good work so that you all can give good direction and make good decisions. And so I would defend our process. We did reach out to eight consultants. The consultant that's being recommended today, inaugural consulting, did reach out. They've been very engaging. They've been very collaborative. And we believe that they will be a great extension of our staff so that we can produce good work that can be reviewed by the public, that we can receive adequate input, and that at the end of the day, we have a good product that your board will be happy with. So I just wanted to share that perspective. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker here in public. Hello, board of supervisors. Thank you for letting me speak today. And thank you for all the great work they do here in Santa Cruz County. My name is Sean Burns. I am here on the Santa Cruz World Serving Reserve, a program of Save the Waves Coalition who's based here in Santa Cruz. We have 12 World Serving Reserves around the world. And our main one here in Santa Cruz extends from natural bridges over to capital city limits. And so we have a local stewardship council, and we look for the best ways to manage the world-class waves here in Santa Cruz. And as we know here in Santa Cruz, we have world-class waves, but we also have a very dynamic coastline that requires someone that's very local and members of the community to look after the waves in the coastline. And so how we do that through the World Serving Reserves is not necessarily just through surfers, but it's also through scientists. And one of those consulting groups that we work with, a key component of the World Serving Reserves, integral consulting, I think they're a very local group that has the capabilities to work here in Santa Cruz on that dynamic coast that there is. We've been working with them through multiple projects. One is the surfonomics of Santa Cruz and understanding the revenue that serving brings Santa Cruz. So we have full trust in integral and taking care of this LCP. And I just want to say another thing is, keeping it local, keeping it here in Santa Cruz, how dynamic and however changing this coastline is, I think keeping it to someone that's here in Santa Cruz, understanding how dynamic the coastline is is very important and goes to show as they're the number one consulting group that submitted RFP. So thank you very much. And I hope the board can accept the proposal from integral consulting. Thank you. Good afternoon, Charlie Eadie, planning consultant to Paro Dunes. I'd like to point out that we have participated, Paro Dunes, in the past, in the LCP process. And our main goal is to participate again, actively and collaboratively. We specifically would like to request that we have a seat at the table in the stakeholder advisory group and that you direct staff to ensure that happens. We were disappointed like you and the staff at the coast commission's denial of your LCP previously. However, I think there's four bits of good news that I'd like to share. First of all, the county's innovation of the area of specific policies was initially, was rejected by the local post commission staff, but now is actually an approach being embraced by the new executive director and local government working group who are speaking more positively about flexibility and locally-generated solutions. So we're looking forward to continuing a ground-up process. Secondly, there's new science. Yesterday, Oval Science Ocean Protection Council just updated the sea level rise projections. And they're substantially lower in rate and amount than the previous projections that have been used by coastal. So coastal is gonna be updating their guidance on that. Third, there's gonna be some legal clarity coming out of the Casimir decision on the coast commission assertion that existing development is only pre-1977. You should have an answer to that. And if it goes with the way of the trial court, then one of the major objections for the coast commission would be rejected. And then finally, there's a plethora of new technologies, hybrid technologies. Pajar Dunes is a good example of that. We've got revetments that were built in the 80s that have since then worked to enhance the sand, higher dunes, wider dunes in a sustainable beach. So thank you, sir. Clean comments, appreciate them. Good morning. My name's Carol Turley. I live in the Interlaken area of South County and I'm the general manager of Pajar Dunes Association. Pajar Dunes is a unique coastal community with strong interest in protecting the special natural resources that surround it. With 36% of the 565 residential units available for short-term rental, we provide opportunities for people to enjoy the coast and we provide significant transient occupancy tax. We offer gratis meeting space to non-profits such as Leadership Santa Cruz County and Loves and Fishes. We'd be happy to host one of the LCP meetings if David finds that appropriate and we look forward to participating in the LCP process. Yeah, my name is still James Union Whitman. Really appreciate the public participation. I certainly learned quite a bit about fiduciary trust and it's quite different on the other side of this maritime courtroom. Fiduciary trust malfeasances. It's probably in my top five subjects talking about what's going on. Santa Cruz is not an island just because there's a great deal of evidence to 150 years ago to 500 years ago that Santa Cruz was indeed an island. 2024, 2025, there are some really magical times in our solar system. The whole flatter thing should really be solved by this October. Why? Because we're having an event that supposedly hasn't happened since 79 AD. But we've had other events like that in the last several hundred years. So it's really interesting what's going on. More consulting for what. We talk about the various issues with the weather and the storm damage. But how come human beings are so much weaker and all other life is so much weaker? People aren't talking about the chemtrails. You know, there are some natural things going on that my understanding is the four modern religions talk about it. Why is 2024 so special? So what's really going to happen when we really have some serious issues? How are we working with each other to really help each other? Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbruner. When I saw this, I really wondered why Dudek didn't apply. That was a shock to me. They're local. I mean, they're huge, but they've got a local office just like integral is huge. But it has a local office. They're not a mom and pop shop at all. They've got offices in Mexico all over the place. So they're not a local per se. They're just like Dudek. And Dudek has done a lot of environmental studies and reports for the counties. So I was shocked to see that they weren't, that they had not submitted. And I'm even more shocked now to hear from the gentlemen earlier that they didn't even receive it. So this kind of practice and problem, clouds this whole process. And I think the county would be wise to pause and send them out again, make sure with a phone call that they did receive them, all of them, all of the consultants. And to say that it's the consultants fault if they weren't tracking projects that might need their help. I think that's rather amazing. I wanna make sure that the climate model that is used is consistent with what is being used in other arenas in the county. Within the Mid County Groundwater Agency and the city of Santa Cruz water, they're using different climate change models. And this has to be standardized. We can't be basing information on different models that are completely different. I really would like to see the Pajaro Dunes folks at the table as well as the real estate industry because I am concerned that this will have a huge impact on the real estate industry and people's property rights and people's property values. And they should be at the table. And then finally, just a point of order, Chairman Cummings, I know you are on the Coastal Commission and I would like you to consider whether you should recuse yourself from this decision. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning supervisors. I'm Dr. David Rebel. I'm the principal in charge, putting together that proposal from Integral. I've been working in this field for many years. I received four different inquiries to team on this RFP with teaming partners that I've worked with on and off for decades. I told them I had a local team that's done a lot of work here in the county. And many of them said, thank you, we're probably not gonna go after it. That's common practice in the field with you respect your colleagues and frequent teaming partners. Let's not waste each other's time. There's a lot of this kind of work out on the streets right now. I've done the same thing and declined to go after projects. One of them do deck just one. So I'm very familiar with the field. I'm here mainly today to say that we have a local team. It involves three local professors. So we are using the brain trust here in the county and in the Monterey Bay region. And mainly I'm just here if you have any other specific questions about our proposal. Thank you. Is there any other member of the public here in person who'd like to speak to us on this item? Seeing none will go to see if there's anybody online who'd like to speak to the board on this item. Brian, your microphone's now available. Yes, hi, this is that Brian people through the trail now. First of all, we support this because it will help educate the community on what can really be built along the coastline. It's not real difficult to understand the Coastal Act which is basically beach access and sea level rising, it's as well as other things. Also want to recognize Matt Machado and his team's work. I think providing this expertise and this discipline will help his team be successful and they're doing phenomenal work. So I appreciate the work they're doing. But I want to just step back and remind us that down in Los Angeles and Southern California they're developing plans to relocate the railroad tracks inland. And those railroad tracks are existing passenger rail and freight lines, they're existing. So when a community down South is relocating it, it's pretty straightforward. The direction our community should be heading which is basically you're not going to ever have a future passenger rail that operates along Manorisa Beach along the coastal cliffs over by Capitola and Park Avenue. So hopefully this work from the consultant will help educate the community and I appreciate the time to speak. Thank you. Thank you. Tim, your microphone is now available. Well, thank you very much for allowing me to speak again. Yeah, the train concepts, I'm down on that 100%. And the last gentleman that just spoke about Southern Cal and moving the train and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, Southern Cal, it's ridiculous. It's not very enjoyable when you're staying in a hotel down there and you hear this train just all night long, just going by. It's rough and it pumps all these people in the region and you can tell flat out it's damaged the environment. I remember it when I was a kid back in the 70s and it didn't look like that. It was so much nicer. So you have a lot to lose here. And the thing is, when it comes to corporations, consultants and developers and conflict of interest, good Lord, that's exactly what's going on up in Tahoe. And some of the folks that are on boards and stuff like that and that are in the politics and everything, they're related to the developers and there's all sorts of conflict of interest going down. And the Tahoe basin is epically destroyed. So they have a problem with garbage, not a problem with rising sea levels. And you don't want hordes of people storming your communities and just making life uncomfortable for everybody to the detriment of your local population, your kids, your kids that wanna go surfing and whatnot. So you need to take a hard look at that. SDRs are a disaster in Tahoe. That's another angle that's terrible. So one last comment, just wanted to say, I didn't mean to offend anybody or weaken my position when it comes to Republicans and so on. And I apologize for my failure to articulate. I just don't like Trump because of his positions regarding Lincoln, World War II and Reagan. And as a Republican- So I don't wanna cut you off, but we are speaking about sea level rise. Correct. When it comes to Trump, he's a danger to your community when it comes to that, just so you know. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bill, your microphone is now available. As a reminder, it's star six to mute or unmute yourself. I'm Bill Destler. I've been an owner at Pajaro Divins, shorebirds for almost 50 years. I've been a member of the Commuter and Affairs Committee at Pajaro Divins for 20 plus years. I've watched over the past 50 years, the very consistent beach level over those 50 years. And the sand level varies during the year, but after 50 years, it's about the same or maybe even a little more beach. But I'm sure the next 50 years will be different, but I don't expect any immediate changes. The county LCP is very important to us and that we want an LCP that doesn't force us out of our property just based upon LCP rules. When we leave our property, we stop paying property taxes and we lose our property. We are very disappointed that the current contract has such a controversy and hope that the staff will clear up this any misunderstandings in short over. Yesterday, several of us had a long conversation with our supervisor, Zach Friend, and we respect his opinions and standing on this issue and his position on this issue. We've had a good relationship with the county planning staff in the past and David Carlson's been a big help to us in the past and we hope to continue to be involved in this as this next LCP is written. Thank you. Yeah. Colin, user three, your microphone is now available. Seems like we're rearranging chairs on the Titanic with all the global disasters and sea rise and flooding, et cetera going on. And it seems like we're being massively assaulted by military profiteers and polluters. The crumbs the county had left over after the military siphoned out most of our funds seems poorly prioritized and this item seems like financial waste to me by cats by the phone. And the, and another item on the agenda is the county on item 19 is in financial responsibility for petroleum underground storage tanks. That should be the responsibility of those who own those tanks. What is the county doing with our money that seems so unwisely spent? This doesn't seem like a worthwhile funding for this item. Thank you. Thank you. We have no further speakers, Chair. All right, thank you. So I'd like to see if staff has any comments or follow-up on anything that was said during public comment. And if not, we can bring it back to the board for further discussion and reaction. Well, I mean, I think the most important thing I could say is absolutely we're going to include all groups on the stakeholder advisory group that they're requested to be part of it and the outreach is going to be extended beyond that. Excuse me, is it technical advisory committee? How is that going to be selected? So first, excuse me, Mr. Chair. There are various groups that are outlined in the grant application. So we're going to definitely include all those groups, property owners, recreational groups, surfer groups, other community organizations. So it hasn't been selected yet, but that will be one of the first orders of business to create that group that can work together and that is representative. It's your director, Lachados. Thank you. Thank you, Chair and Supervisors. I just wanted to add that this is a professional services contract and it's quite a bit different than say a construction contract where, you know, like lowest bid and we're looking at pricing and responsiveness. We're looking for qualifications and in the industry and you kind of heard that from the recommended consultant talking about how all the teams are trying to put the best team together. And so this isn't the same thing as construction. This is putting the best team together to be the most responsive to our needs so that we can craft good information so that you can review and consider and that we can all work together on it. So it's quite a bit different. And for the most part, all of our consultants, their hourly rates are almost the same. They're almost identical. And so this is not about that kind of a competition. This is about who can put the best team together to be the most responsive and to be right into the core and the meat of the topics. I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page with that. Thank you. Supervisor Hernandez. Would it be possible to read about that? No, public comment is cut off. I'm sorry you had your time. You're right. Thank you. So I had the opportunity you mentioned today about the previous reading of this in September 20th of 2022. And for me, I think it's with an outcome like that that occurred that all eyes wouldn't be on us even without an RFP. And so I'm gonna go ahead and move the motion to consider the agreement with the integral consulting to prepare C-level rights vulnerability assessment and local coastal plan amendment and take related actions A through B. I would like to add some additional, making sure that we do formally invite the groups that have had interest in this process as part of the process. And I'm not sure if that's already included in that process or we have to make that additional direction. But I think you said there's several forms of them to participate. So I'd like to make sure that we do get that and we get their input as well. That is part of the process for sure. It's in the RFP. Okay, so motion by Supervisor Hernandez. We have a second. Second. Second by Supervisor Friend. Are there any further comments from board members before we move forward on this item? Supervisor Connick. Sure. I'll just say I plan to vote against the motion. I believe that given we have a study here, this better part for million dollars affecting billions of dollars worth of property, taking just another month or two in order to re-advertise the bid. And I did have a chance to speak to some of the other consultants in this space, including Dudek, who said they would be very interested in submitting a bid if the process was reopened. I think ultimately it's just going to make sure that the county gets the best value for its money. I think very well integral could be that, but it always helps to be certain in these situations, especially when it's going to have such a big impact on our community. Thank you. Any other comments? I'll be out forward some of the emails that I've got to you so that make sure that some of those interested parties get the invite. So I think I'm going to be supportive of this, which is different from before, but I think that I've seen the process has gone through. I have the highest respect for Mr. Carlson and appreciative of the grant that we received. I think the contract of what we need to do with a qualified consultant. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Just briefly, I think that the irrespective of who was selected here, I mean, for those of us that were on the board during the process previously and had a lot of meetings, the three of us that were on, it was very challenging to try and find a space where the Coastal Commission looking for a statewide model and local property owners and smart coast looking for, in essence, the opposite could come to a middle ground. And we need to start with the reality that that's where we're starting from and we're kind of projecting onto consultants, a viewpoint when they're not the deciders. So I think that we also need to be balanced in our approach of understanding that the board sends this forward to the Coastal Commission. Staff is actually writing the report. To me, I think what matters is ensuring that there is a sense that voices weren't heard in the first process. I don't actually agree that that's a fair sense, by the way. I think David did an outstanding job. I think a lot of us had a lot of meetings, but because the end result didn't come out the way people liked it, they challenged the process. So to me, and that's common, where you challenge the policy because you didn't like the process, not necessarily always the same thing. In this case, I think that what I would just encourage David and integral to do is you've heard that there's a sense that people want to make sure that their voices are heard. And so lean in pretty heavily to some of those. I thought their comments from Power Doons folks were outstanding today for that purpose. They understand that this is necessary. They also want to make sure that the uniqueness of what they're doing is heard. So that's why I'm supportive of this, but I also want us to be realistic that we could have this process go on, I mean, realistically forever, and you would never actually choose somebody that met everybody's preconceived needs right before we were able to move this forward. So I think that we have a very qualified set of team right here. I mean, you can't, some of, I mean, unimpeachable, quite frankly, on some of these qualifications and some prepared to move forward. Thank you. I guess I'll make some brief comments before we go to the vote on this. I just want to appreciate SAP's work, all the feedback that we received on this item to date. And I do want to comment on something that was said around our fiduciary responsibility around how we move forward with this item. Last year, the Coastal Commission awarded 14 grants throughout the entire state to conduct these kinds of studies. And we were one of those 14 jurisdictions that received that funding. And on the previous conversation that we've been having around the fiscal impacts and the fiscal challenges that we're gonna be facing along with the impacts of climate change that have been driving up some of the debt that we're seeing in our community, we should be very lucky and we should feel very fortunate that we have funding from the Coastal Commission to do this kind of study that's gonna really help us understand as we're being impacted by climate change, where are the most vulnerable areas along our coast? And when it comes time for us to make a decision, it's gonna be up to us as a body to decide what amendments we wanna make to our local coastal plan based on the recommendations that we receive. It's also gonna help us understand do we want to, for example, try to armor certain areas? Do we think about manager cheat? Are there other options we wanna consider? But in order for us to get to a point, we can make that decision. We need to understand what is the baseline of where those vulnerable points are along our coast. And so I think that this is, it's great that we were able to get this grant. I think that we've heard that the community wants to have a strong voice and be involved that's outlined in the agenda report that we have before us. And so I'm very supportive of this and hope that we can continue to engage with integral consulting and have strong engagement with the community. And I do wanna just point out that this project timeline starts now and it goes through 2026. So this isn't gonna be something that's just like overnight we're gonna pull together data and throughout a report. There's gonna be a lot of engagement and a lot of data collection to get to us to a point where we can make a really sound decision that's based in science. And so just wanna echo comments made by supervisor friend I think integral consulting is a highly qualified firm to conduct this work. And I think that the more we delay it also sends a signal to the Coastal Commission that we're not being basically responsible with funds that they've decided to give our community which could jeopardize us trying to apply for grants with them in the future. If they don't see us and following through on what we provided direction on to our staff when applying for these kinds of grants. So with that, I'll turn over to the clerk to call the role on this item. There was a motion by supervisor Hernandez with additional direction to ensure that community members who are concerned will be included in the community engagement process seconded by supervisor friend. And I'm asking for a roll call vote. Supervisor Koenig. No. Friend. All right. Hernandez. Hi. McPherson. And Cummings. Hi. That passes with supervisor McPherson, Hernandez, Cummings and Friend voting in favor and supervisor Koenig voting in opposition. And with that, I'm just gonna check in with the board to see if we wanna take a short break or if we wanna keep powering through. We've got two more items on our open session. Ready to go? Yeah. Okay. Let's keep going then. So the next item on our agenda is item number nine, consider approving in concept ordinance repealing chapters 2.56, 2.60, 2.84, 2.92 and 2.125 of the Santa Cruz County Code to Sunset various advisory commissions, schedule the ordinance for second reading and final adoption on February 27, 2024 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. And with that, I'll turn it over to Randy Morris and Nicole Coburn. Thank you, Chair Cummings and members of the board. And Nicole Coburn, I'm one of the assistant CAOs and Randy Morris, Director of Human Services is here with me today. So at our last meeting on January 30th, the board received a report with initial recommendations on County Commission restructuring. This was following a comprehensive review of our County's advisory bodies, many of which were established more than 45 years ago. Recommendations in that report and presentation addressed various commission consolidations, retirements and transitions to other methods of accomplishing some of the same duties or purpose of those commissions. The board at that time, at that meeting amended the recommendations to remove one of the commissions, the emergency medical care commission from the list of those that we were recommending to be sun-setted. This resulted in five commissions that would be eliminated as of March 31st, 2024, based on the ordinance that's before you. The five commissions are the Environmental Health Appeals Commission, the Hazardous Materials Advisory Commission, the Human Services Commission, the Substance Use Disorder Commission and the Surin Services Program Advisory Commission. I do wanna note and Randy is here to answer any questions that as a follow-up to the January 30th meeting, Human Services has been working with County Council and continues to work with the ad hoc committee of the current Human Services Commission to draft bylaws for the new Department Advisory Group that is being recommended. This ad hoc committee is going to bring forward draft advisory group bylaws to the next and final Human Services Commission meeting which is scheduled for March 20th. The bylaws will include language that offers all current commissioners the opportunity to remain members of the Department Advisory Group. The bylaws will also contain language that aligns with the County Code which speaks to departments ensuring that members are representative of our County demographics. Human Services is also going to continue to post the agendas and minutes on its public-facing website which they're currently in the process of doing a refresh on. And then our office is also looking into the possibility of extending stipends to advisory group members. This is under review. We're in the process of gathering some additional information and then we'll return to the board with an update and any recommended actions. Again, we wish to thank all current and former members of these commissions that were recommending sunset for their dedicated services to the Board of Supervisors in the County of Santa Cruz. And in conclusion, we wanna request that the board approve the recommended actions and we're happy to answer any questions. Thank you for that presentation. Are there any board members who have questions on this item? This is one that's returning to us again for first reading. Seeing none, we'll take it out to the public. Any members of the public would like to speak to us on item number nine which is consider approving a concept in order to repeal the sunset of various advisory commissions. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. I want to again protest the sunsetting of the County's Hazardous Materials Commission. And it seems to be a done deal but where do members of the public go to report problems with underground storage tanks? It was that commission that I went to and it did get action against a Swenson taking out in the middle of the night, a storage tank that had spilled all kinds of we don't know what because they covered it all up. And it was, I had gone to environmental health services staff and nothing happened. It was that commission that made something happen that prompted the district attorney, Ed Brown to take action. So where do we go when things like this happen now? And if this commission has taken away from us. I also want to ask that while commissions are being reviewed, such as what Mr. Morris is doing that there be a standard set of rules of order. I attend a few commission meetings and they're talking about this now. Some are operating under Rosenberg's rules of order. Some are still operating under Sturges which is what your board used to do before you would change to Rosenberg. So that needs to be standardized among all commissions. And finally, I hope that the testimony that I heard when this came before your board before by Mr. Mark Yellen, director of Dominican's ER was taken to heart. It is not often that you have someone of that import calling in to say, don't annihilate this commission. It is a value. Thank you. Thank you. Any other members of the public who are here in person who'd like to speak to us on this item? Seeing none, we'll go to online to see if there's any member of the public who would like to speak to us. Call and user, three-year microphone is now available. What Becky Steinbruner just cited is critical reason to keep some of these commissions hazardous ways and environmental health. One is more important than a healthy environment that isn't loaded with toxins. We are already exposed to so many poisons like the umbilical cords of babies found to have over 200 chemicals in it. That's just one indication. Why would you want to remove these commissions? What is being covered up and why and why are polluters allowed to pollute in the first place? We have a structural problem here and it seems like these commissions are critically important in this environment and it only seems to me that removing them is giving a license to kill basically to these corporations that are doing this damage. And I include the wireless microwave corporations as well. Okay, those are my comments. We need to keep these advisory commissions and thank you. Thank you. Tim, your microphone is now available. Thank you so much again for allowing me to speak. For the last speaker, although I don't totally agree with her on some of these things that she's saying, especially with regards to like Lockheed and our military and whatnot, I do agree with her that we probably shouldn't be banning these commissions because I don't want corporations to be in any more of a powerful position to abuse our communities when it comes to our environment and toxins. So I am concerned about that. And as I mentioned to you before, I contrast between Santa Cruz County and Lake Tahoe and like it or not, that lead cable is still sitting in the lake and you have beautiful landmark salmon that migrates up the Fallen Leaf and Cascade Lake out of the lake, you know, ancient species there. And Lake Tahoe is, it's been horribly compromised. It's not a natural environment and a lot of folks don't understand that. You don't have Lahot and Cutthroat trout in Tahoe. It's over in Pyramid. And all that dirty water from all the tourism and all the development and everything, it flows downstream to Reno and to Pyramid Lake. So the farmers in Pyramid Lake and the citizens of Reno, Sparks, they all drink it. So it's not like what you have here in Santa Cruz County where you have an ocean that could sort of kind of clean it up. But, you know, your environment could be horribly abused by corporations. So I don't think I would get rid of those commissions. I would look at the commissions as something as a stopgap measure to prevent serious wrongdoing to your community. So I would be hesitant to get rid of the commissions, especially if it has anything to do with hazardous waste. Okay? Thank you so much for hearing me. Thank you. We have no further speakers here. Okay, I'll move that. I'll bring it back to the board for any further questions, comments, and action. So go right to MacPherson. Yeah, I think in the name of efficiency and also that the duties of the five commissions be eliminated, I think they're gonna be still covered elsewhere in essence throughout the process, too. So I feel comfortable with what we're doing. I think it's the right thing to do to get more participation, actually, with less commissions. Because some of these commissions had a tough time calling me, getting a meeting together for not just months, but years, it seems. So I'm so far of this. Yep. You know, I think I'll be supportive of this too. You know, I just wanna make sure that we do have equal representation for district four geographic location, making sure it's diverse. Even some of the committees that have been formed, for me, I've seen a lot of just selection committees become echo chambers. So I wanna make sure there's diverse opinions from all over the district, including district four. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. I have a motion by Supervisor Friend. Seconded by Supervisor Coen to move the recommended actions. I'll just say briefly a couple of comments. Similar to the last meeting, I did have some concern with the elimination of the Human Services Commission, and I still share those feelings, or I still have those feelings just largely because of the fact that, you know, one of the things that's been brought up is that, while the current members who've been appointed by this board will be able to shift into that advisory body role, my understanding is that moving forward, the new selection of members of that body will not be selected by board members. And so that's one thing I'm concerned with. I also just have concern with the fact that we've talked a lot about equity, and this is a commission that's been established to really address socioeconomic needs of low income, disabled, disadvantaged, and at-risk people, and they're supposed to be providing us with advice. And I think that before moving on to a different type of body, my preference would be that we would keep that body and we would try to figure out how to improve it and make it better. I talked to my commissioner and he was expressing wanting to stay on and what they felt like it was kind of a done deal. I also did consult with our county council because I am supportive of the other recommendations of the sense of the other four commissions. However, given that this is a single ordinance in order for me to vote in support of eliminating those four, but in opposition to eliminating the Human Services Commission, that would require support from the board and then to have it come back as a first reading. So in efficiency of time, I'm just gonna register no vote on that, but I do appreciate all the work that's been done. And I do think that the other four commissions, I do agree with them in the sun setting. I think to supervise McPherson's point and to some of what we've heard, I think it would be good at some point when the other recommendations come back, that we have an understanding of where these responsibilities are gonna go. You know, I think there has been some concern about Environmental Health Appeals Commission. I think it would be good to have it clearly stated where can people go to make those complaints if we're getting rid of this commission with the Substance Use Disorder Commission. Where are those conversations gonna go? And my understanding is that those will go with the Mental Health Advisory Board, I guess, but I think having it clearly laid out of where some of these responsibilities are gonna be shifted so that it's clear that we're consolidating these responsibilities into other government functions. I think it'll be helpful for the community to understand that we're not just flat out getting rid of all this, that there will be somewhere that these will go. And so with that, I'm happy to see if we can have a roll call vote on this item. All right, Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. Hernandez. Hi. McPherson and Cummings. No. All right, that passes with McPherson, Hernandez, Friend and Koenig voting in favor and Cummings voting opposed. With that, we will continue to power through our meeting onto our, I believe our last item before we go into closed session, which is item number 10, consider resolution ratifying the proclamation of a local emergency for the late January and early February 2024 atmospheric river storms as proclaimed by the County Administrative Officer as the Director of Emergency Services on February 7th, 2024 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. And so I'll turn it over to Dave Reed. Thank you, Chair. I'll be very brief since the moment, this meeting started with your moment of silence through the conversations you've had for most of the agenda items. We've been discussing disaster and climate impacts. So we're here again to ratify the actions by CAO Palacios in declaring this. The only distinction I'll make between this action and the action you took earlier in January is we are working with FEMA starting tomorrow to do our preliminary damage assessment tours. We do think that given the scale and scope of damages across the state that a federal declaration is likely and we will be advocating for the largest window of that declaration and we'll be working with all of your offices and community to try and get both a PA declaration and an IA individual assistance declaration for the County. With that, I'm available for questions if there are any. Thank you. Are there any questions from Board of Members on this item? Hearing none, unfortunately, new normal. Get to it as best we can. I just want to thank Mr. Breed and others for doing such a great job and making an application seven disasters in seven years is hard to realize and probably the most beautiful place to live in the planet but we're on that coast and we're up in the hills. So that's why our work on climate change is so important and I'm glad we're continuing to pursue that and what we've done up to this date. Thank you, Supervisor and I'll just kind of share those same sentiments that were expressed by Supervisor McPherson. I mean, we're just in the beginning of February and I think we're supposed to have another storm event that's going to hit us this weekend and so we're not really out of the rain yet, so to speak and we'll continue to see how these storms develop over the course of the rest of this winter and as we move into the summer and then subsequently the fire season. I guess the one question I do have is at what point will the board get any kind of update on financial impacts from these past storms and sounds like you all are going to be going out with FEMA and doing these assessments? I guess when would we anticipate getting a report back on kind of what the impacts have been during this winter storm season? We can certainly include during our budget presentations some more information. Current estimates are about $6.5 million in damage from these last couple storms for the county and about a million dollars for the city of Santa Cruz. Great, thank you. Supervisor Friend. I want to acknowledge in particular the work of public works during this last storm is remarkable how fast they were able to clear out and which provides for the emergency access provides for PG&E provides for AT&T was given the scope with 90 mile an hour gusts recorded in the hills. Your team's work in those dangerous conditions Mr. Machado is really admirable. And I think that the community throughout a tipping point resiliency has been tested for multiple years and in particularly challenging for those that live either directly on the coast or in the some of the more rural areas in the mountains. I just think that people are at an emotional break too of seeing this play out over and over and over again. And we have not just the property damage we have just the emotional challenges that people face that have been through repeated disasters and obviously supportive of this measure but recognizing that it's just gonna continue on as very challenging. Any other questions, comments? Seeing none, we'll open up to the community to see if there's any member of the public who'd like to speak to us on this item. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. I live in the Santa Cruz mountains on a one way in and one way out road into the woods and it is what it is. When you live out in those areas you just know you have to be prepared and just out one another out you get to know your neighbors very well. So I also would like to think public works through their crews are amazing. And I also wanna just turn to the mix here that when these things happen that it also threatens the insurance that property owners are able to get as well as our property values. Certainly if we can't get the insurance or if we're canceled and that's happening a lot but also just when there are damages and they're not quickly responded to is what we, in certain areas of the county, Bonnie Dune they always seem to be last. So I wanna thank public works for their good work their crews are amazing. And I'll be interested to see how FEMA pays up on this one. Thank you. Thank you. Any members of the public hearing person would like to speak to us on this item? Seeing none, we'll see if there's anyone online who would like to speak to us on this item. Tim, your microphone's now available. Thank you so much again for allowing me to speak. I really appreciate it. All this has been very informative to me. Just so you know, for my property you're the top up here off of Miller Cut-Off Road. On average the cost has gone up to defend my property at a bare minimum with these types of storms I'm spending I think some at these $5,000 every year no problem. Last couple of years somewhere between 30 and 40 so there's a lot of money. So the little bit that was offered to me from the county or whatever it is, I was just laughing about that. I was just like, you know what? I need men with giant trucks and chainsaws and all kinds of equipment to fix the things on my property. From this last storm I have to pull a redwood branch out of the skylight out of my shed on the backside of my house. And as soon as I get off out of this meeting I'll be fixing that so the rain doesn't pour in there and allow raccoons and rats and all kinds of things into my home. PG&E, the power lines. Yes, it's a huge danger during storms to all communication and power in our mountain community up here. The 100 mile an hour winds, 90 mile an hour winds they come right through my house with all the rain and they pound these power poles and they knock out all the power and the communication for our area. And there are also issues, more tree wires should be set up on the power poles in case they get down during the summer season so they don't start a fire. So there's real hazards here and real money and bucks being spent. My home is a little frightening to live in nowadays and the climate I feel has definitely changed. I could see it up in Tahoe, October snows don't happen anymore and the types of storms, the way they're behaving it's starting to become noticeably different. So anyways, thank you so much. You folks have a fine day. Thank you. We have no further shakers here. All right, well then we'll bring it back to the board for further action. All right, second. Motion by Supervisor Friend, second by Supervisor Koenig. We'll do a roll call vote on this item. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Hi. McPherson and Cummings. Hi. That item passes unanimously and that concludes our regular agenda. We have one item that we'll be hearing in closed session. I'd like to ask the County Council if there's anything that will be reported out on that. There may be depending on whether the board takes action. Okay. All right, well then with that we will go into closed session and we may return depending on the outcome of closed session. Recording stopped.