 Good morning everybody and welcome to the March 12, 2019 Board of Supervisors meeting. I'm going to call the meeting to order and ask the clerk to call the roll. Good morning. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Brent. Here. Abbott. Fierce. Here. And Chair Coonerty. Here. Thank you. So now is the opportunity we're going to have a moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance. All right, Mr. Palacios, do we have any late additions or deletions to the agenda? Yes, we have a number, we have a late addition and a number of corrections to the agenda. So the first thing we'd like to ask is for the board to consider a late addition of item file ID 6850 to the regular agenda relating to a proposed cannabis equity ordinance in order to remain eligible for the board of cannabis controls local equity grant program as outlined in the memorandum of Supervisor Leopold and Supervisor Coonerty. There's a memo of Supervisors Leopold and Coonerty attached and this will require a four-fifth vote of the board to place it on today's agenda. Okay, so why don't we do that right now? So this is a just by way of background, this is an opportunity at the state level to access funds to help communities that were disproportionately impacted by the criminalization of marijuana to now be able to access trainings and fee waivers to participate in the emerging legal cannabis opportunities. It comes at no cost to the county and in fact would provide us a potentially additional funding to assist these businesses. So right now we would need a motion and a second and then a four-fifth vote to add it to the agenda today. I would make that motion. So we've got a motion by Leopold, a second by McPherson. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? So that passes unanimously. That will now become item 10, sorry, 10.2 on our agenda later today. Okay, so that, with that vote, item 10.2 is added, which is to consider a proposed ordinance amending the Santa Cruz County Code by adding chapter 7.136 relating to cannabis equity and schedule final adoption for March 26, 2019 as outlined in the memorandum of Supervisor Leopold and Supervisor Coonerty. There's a memo attached as well as the draft ordinance and the local equity program grant guidelines. There's also a request to add an addenda to the regular agenda. This is item 10.1. This is to consider final reappointment of Andy Schifrin to the Housing Board of Authority commissioners as an at-large representative for a term to expire March 17, 2023. On the consent agenda, item 28, there's a correction. The item should read to return in June 2019 for award of contract as recommended by the Planning Director. And then there's an addenda to the consent agenda, item 40.1, which is adopt resolution in support of Assembly Bill AB705 stone to protect the county's mobile home park conversion ordinance and direct the chair of the board to send a letter to our legislative delegation indicating our position as recommended by Supervisor Leopold. That concludes our additions and corrections to the agenda. Thank you very much. Now is an opportunity for board members to remove an item from the consent agenda and put it on to the regular agenda. Supervisor Caput? I won't remove anything. Well, Supervisor, that'll be, that'll be, we'll do that under item 6. This is just after public comment. Supervisor McPherson? Yeah. I'd like to pull item number 35, the request for proposals for recycling center operation services. Okay. So item number 35 will become item 9.1 on our agenda. Supervisor Friend? Supervisor Leopold? I have nothing to pull. Okay. Now is an opportunity for members of the public to speak to us about items that are on our consent agenda or in closed session or are not on today's agenda, but are within the purview of the board. This is, and so I'll ask those who want to to step up and we'll have three minutes per person. Good morning, Chair Coonerty, members of the board. I'm speaking today as Jillian Ritter, co-chair of the Santa Cruz County Holiday Food Drive from 2018. I want to share with you that last Wednesday at the Second Harvest Food Drive Awards Dinner, the county regained the President's Cup for the past two years. Thank you. For the past two years, Dignity Health has won the President's Cup and we're happy to report that it has returned home and we raised over 300,000 meals in order to win this back. So thank you for your support. Thank you to all the members of the county for helping us get this back. Thank you very much and the rest of your crew with your outfits on, you know, really. We weren't dressing up today. Okay. Low key, huh? All right. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Michelle Avril and I am the CEO for the Central Coast Chapter of the American Red Cross and I wanted to thank you for recognizing us for March being Red Cross Month. I am proud to lead a wonderful group of volunteers in doing many great things throughout our community. Zach and Rick, thank you for all of your support and Rick's going to say a little bit about what we do out in the community. Thank you, Michelle. Rick Martinez, board member, past board chair for the Central Coast Chapter of the American Red Cross. Thank you for the recognition. The Red Cross has been there for our county, whether it's earthquakes, floodland fires, home fires, floods, and even tsunamis. The Red Cross has been there for our county. So thank you for taking time on your busy agenda to recognize the Central Coast Chapter and the great work that the volunteers do. And then closing, I'd really like to thank you for allowing me to participate in an event or a meeting that Zach Friend is not emceeing or the chair of. So thank you. We're thankful for you. We know your feeling. Good morning, Chair Kennedy and supervisors, Karen Delaney with the Volunteer Center, and I'm here with some colleagues to help us celebrate AmeriCorps Week. AmeriCorps, as you may know, is often called the domestic Peace Corps. It's where wonderful people agree to take a year or two out of their lives and dedicate it to full-time service to making our communities better and stronger. There are hundreds of thousands of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps alums throughout our community. I believe there's four AmeriCorps programs in Santa Cruz County. We're blessed to have the work of many AmeriCorps members. Some of them are in the room. If you're an AmeriCorps member, you want to stand up. And we believe it's really important, even on the busiest of agendas, to take time and recognize when people step up and show their appreciation for our communities with rolling up their sleeves and making good things happen, that is a precious thing. It's the bedrock of a healthy community. It's the bedrock of democracy. So thank you for helping us recognize these wonderful AmeriCorps members. And we have some other, some, we're going to hear a little bit more about AmeriCorps. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Alana Sanford, and I am an AmeriCorps fellow at the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County. I just wanted to thank you again for honoring us with this week for AmeriCorps week. I serve at the Volunteer Center. We have had AmeriCorps fellows for 11 years. And in the last 11 years, we've recruited 15,000 volunteers. And those volunteers have contributed 207,000 hours to our community, which amounts to just over $5 million in donated labor. So we're really proud of the work we're doing. And we really thank you for recognizing us. Yeah. Thank you. Good morning. And thank you again for showing appreciation for the AmeriCorps. How's that? Better. Thank you. My name is Linda Skeff. I'm the program director for the San Lorenzo Valley Native Habitat Restoration Program. And since 2016, the Valley Women's Club Habitat Restoration Program, along with Santa Cruz County Parks, has cosponsored NCCC AmeriCorps teams of young adults from all over the country. And they have been here, and they have contributed to the Habitat Restoration in the San Lorenzo Valley while learning the principles of environmental preservation. Teams have spent between seven and 14 weeks working full time, seven days a week, five days a week, eight hours a day. And they work in rain or shine at one of 11 restoration project sites that we have. These project sites are located predominantly within the Santa Cruz County Park System and the 501c3 nonprofits that we have in our communities, such as Mountain Community Resources. The 2019 AmeriCorps team will bring to our community efforts valued at over $175,000. All told, for 2016, 17, 18, and 19, these young adults will have contributed 20,760 hours to our community valued at over $500,000 alone. We have also received grants to support the last four years in the community foundation Santa Cruz County. Although I have the honor and the opportunity to direct this program, it is a perfect example of the amalgamation of federal, state, county, and local and nonprofit organizations coming together for the greater good of the community. And my time is up, so I would just like to say. You have another minute. Oh, I have another minute. I would like to thank Supervisor McPherson. I would like to thank the Valley Women's Club Board and Nancy Macy, Jeff Gaffney of County Parks, who he is the Parks Director, Eric Strum, who is the Park Superintendent, and all the community members who have made this program the success it is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody who participates in the AmeriCorps. It's phenomenal. The students from throughout the nation come. They're just energized. It really gives you faith in the future when you see these people working and what they're doing for our community and throughout the United States, as a matter of fact. Gary Richard Arnold, I think a lot of people don't know that there's a parallel government that's been in progress for some time in the community. I'd like to put forward here the regional plan by the Fabian Socialist Party in England, the very school that Neil Coonerty went to. I want to tell you what they think about regional government and how they're putting it over on you. It says that the striking illustration in the manner necessary for social and political change is to force their way through the back entrance, meaning regional government. Thus, in effect, evading opposition. People don't know that the AMBAG meets monthly and the last time myself and one other person attended, there was only five agendas available for some 12 cities in three counties. It says, in effect, it leaves some people stranded. This is a value of regional government which you advocate. It says, at one stroke, there has been installed a system of regional government which, while leaving the local authorities untouched, offers a formidable challenge to the future of their existence and status. You're betraying the people that you represent here by continually playing that. We also find the coincidence. This is Zignu Brzezinski, a co-founder with Rockefeller, Feinstein, Allen Cranston of the Trilateral Commission. The regionalization is in keeping with the trilateral pan which calls for convergence of the East and West, ultimately leading to a goal of world government. National sovereignty is no longer viable. That is your intent, and that is the intent of Leon Panetta, who is funded by various foundations. His co-chair, Lanny Mendoca, advocates getting rid of 80% of local government, and you're part of that and you're not allowed, and our council and our county administrative officer are part of that. We find a proclamation in honor of communist Chinese agent Hugh Delacy. We find that the person that attended this proclamation over the Loudon Elson Center that all supported communist China includes Gary Patton, who supported the communist takeover of Grenada, building airports and Soviet ships, and MiGs were being uncrated at that particular time. The California Dynasty of Communism refers to Allen Cranston. In the war office, he had a man, supposedly a foreign language person, David Carr. He did not read or speak a foreign language. Cranston wrote many articles that ended up in the communist newspapers. Goldwater says, there's not enough time, the trilateral commission is intended as a vehicle for multinational consolidation. The so-called socialism that you're preaching is to control and concentrate power and put these rich people in charge. Hi, my name's Bob Polaris, and I operate a dispensary here in Santa Cruz, a cannabis dispensary, and I'm asking that the board do something to help us be able to move our businesses a little easier. We have a situation where we found a spot to move, but it's a dual, there's a dual zoned lot with a commercial and a residential on it, where the residential section of the lot is over 800 feet from our parcel, but it's being deemed not acceptable, and it's basically the only place we could find in the county to move our shop, because in our current situation, our landlord is looking to quadruple our rent when our lease is over, which will essentially put us out of business. And we're asking that the board of supervisors take a look at this or empower the cannabis authority here to help us move forward with this move so we don't have to be subject to ridiculous rents. We can grow our business and be successful and help the community, and we really want to, but in our situation right now, if what's being proposed by our landlord, we would have to close our shop and not be able to provide for our families. So we ask that the board consider this and talk to the powers that be over in the cannabis to help us make this move, because this residential section isn't even residential, it's zoned residential, but it's currently a loading dock, so it's not being used that way, and it's over 800 feet from the parcel. So in the spirit of the law, the 300 foot setback for residential, I think we meet that requirement and ask that the board consider this. Thank you. Good morning, my name is Becky Steinbruner. I arrived late, I apologize. I want to ask if item 28 has been pulled from the consent agenda? No, it hasn't. Pardon? No, it hasn't. All right, thank you. Then I will speak to that. Item 28 is to authorize a request for proposal for a consultant to do an environmental impact report for the sustainable San Cruz County plan and changes in the general plan. I looked yesterday in the binder at the desk and I couldn't really find much information about what that contract should include, but by going online at the library, I did find some information and I did contact Supervisor Leopold with my questions, but I have great concern that only five community meetings would be allowed or specified in this contract and I think something of this magnitude needs to have more. It's not clear to me at what point these community meetings would occur. If they would be during the scoping process, if they would be during the draft DIR, it concerns, may I only see an administrative draft DIR being included in the contract and I wonder how transparent this process will be to the public. I wondered if these community meetings will be held in every district. If that's true, then that takes up the five community meetings that are specified. So I'm not comfortable with the level of public outreach and interaction that's being specified in this contract proposal and I would like more. I would also like to see Spanish translation included in all of these meetings. So that's my request regarding that and I also have on Consent Agenda Item 33 regarding contracts for hazardous waste transportation. I would like your board to make sure that you coordinate with Public Works regarding the results of that Nero audit that was presented to your board by Department of Public Works last year, the two largest haulers in the county were in violation. I've been asking for a copy of that report. It has not become publicly available yet, but I want to make sure that the two largest haulers that have been shown in violation are either required to bring their requirements current or not be considered for any contracts that could be part of Item 33. And finally, I wanna make it clear to you again that I am still proceeding with the CEQA litigation against SoCal Creek Water District for the Pure Water SoCal Plan. They are moving quickly to secure site in Shanticle area with many violations. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Tony Crane representing a neighborhood in Aptos regarding the second story peer respite program, which for the crowd is an peer run, unlicensed, unregulated crisis mental health facility with a short stay that serves over, well, it serves hundreds of people per year that was put in our neighborhood without coming to us at all in any way until we found out about it. Could you just pause the time for a second? Ms. Victoria, people need to be able to speak without you having their camera in their face. So thank you. But I want to say they're not complaining, only you are. We're gonna make this a comfortable place and so I'm gonna ask you not to do that. Please, thank you. So they did not consult us. In fact, we found out about it after the fact they had not even told Zach about it. And then not only did they not consult us but when they were confronted, they lied to us directly to us in a public meeting and we have internal emails that we got through a public request of information that proves irrefutably that they did lie and that they had a directive to lie to the public. Clear as day. Zach, you received an email the other day, a child, while the parents are waiting for them to get out of the school that is right there, just a few hundred feet away, was nearly hit by a car that was driving erratically, honking their horn. Little girl panicked, ran into and almost was hit by another car. That car was identified and the description of that car was then traced back to a car sitting in the parking lot of second story. This is the third incident where somebody was nearly hit by somebody driving erratically in the neighborhood. The neighborhood has no safety infrastructure, no sidewalks, no street lights, windy roads. The facility is right on a blind corner. It is ridiculous that you guys are allowing this place to stay where it is. That's the third incident if you don't include the person that was arrested in front of my house on six felony warrants under the influence of heroin. That was then directly connected to the program as well. Who knows what would have happened if that person drove out of there, took their dirty needles and threw them into the bushes in front of my house. Who knows? This is ridiculous and we don't understand why you've relinquished your power to the service organization that runs it. You have stumbled through this thing and now the gloves are off. You guys have just disregarded our concerns for a year and a half or more. And so now we're forced to do the things that we didn't want to do. We've been nice. We've followed all the rules and we've got nothing. We still have this program servicing people in our neighborhood and it shouldn't be there, shouldn't be in any residential neighborhood for that matter. Thank you. Good morning. Jim Coffas from Ben Lohman. I'm here speaking on behalf of Green Trade Santa Cruz, the coalition of cannabis businesses locally. I wanna thank the board for directing the chair to write a letter in support of, for item number 17, writing a letter in support of the cannabis tax initiative at the state level and just remind the board that recognizing that reducing the tax rate is an important step and that we should also consider doing that locally. I'd also like to ask that either individually or as a direction that you also support state bill 34, which will establish a compassionate use program in the state and state bill 67, which is a critical bill to extend the temporary licensing. Both of these bills are critically important to the local community and to the health of the cannabis trade going forward. So thank you for your consideration. Thank you. Chair Coonerty and honorable members of the board, my name is Dan Terby-Phil. I reside at 2055 Summit Drive. I'm here today to speak on behalf of a cannabis farmer that owns the property. I previously successfully licensed five farms in Mendocino County and I serve an alliance of 60 farmers through Mendocino Generations and I'm here to thank you for consent agenda item number 17 for looking to reduce the tax and I would also encourage you to do that locally because the farmers are overtaxed and over burdened with fees and charges. I just got done paying $1,500 to get into pre-application here and it's just really appreciated that you're considering it for the state and just as an example, the farmer that I represent, he has a family of three young daughters, his wife is battling breast cancer and he's really struggling and so any help or assistance you can provide these farmers is really appreciated and we're here with gratitude and thank you for addressing these complex issues related to cannabis regulation and look forward to seeing you more often. Thank you. Good morning, honorable Board of Supervisors. Thank you so much for decades, really decades long support of medical cannabis and in moving forward with cannabis, observing the cannabis taxes and I wanna just speak briefly in support of reducing taxes of looking deeply at that because there's an illusion of great wealth, at least, the great wealth is not something that's coming from the bottom up from small business people and secondly, I would like to echo the support of a letter for SB 34, Senator Wiener's second bill, his first one which he supported or wrote a letter of support was SB 829, which Governor Brown vetoed. We do not expect a veto from Governor Newsom and we hope not and we really would like your support on SB 34, which is the reduction of cannabis taxes for compassionate access, thanks again. And this community has been echoing and applauding compassionate access for more than two and a half decades and I really thank you for doing that, it's brave. Thanks. I just wanna remind members of the public what it is to be a good historical flag waving an American. Today's my birthday, March 12th. Thank you and I wanna be able to share with Santa Cruz County residents because you guys deserve a lot and I wanna be able to say this, you know, I come in here and I don't come in here just for the giggles. I really want us to be able to reconcile our political differences. The tyranny of the status quo is getting a little out of whack, right? Government all has limits, right? And the threat from down below is real. I'm telling you guys right now, you know, I don't need the public in punishment. Don't be hostile to modern technology. I have to veto record this because the Santa Cruz County community television wanna blotch Gary's public comment, which I do appreciate your leadership, Gary. Coming into this chamber, having the moral courage to be able to pontificate on the deep state analysis, okay? And not only that, but help illuminate members of the public and connect that dots. And I do appreciate that, right? And I wanna be able to share with members of the public my latest book that I'm reading is called None Dare Call It Treason. But Gary Arnault will straight up call it treason, right? And Victoria Salaxander and his constituents are gonna support that, all right? I wanna be able to share with members of the public that I attended the Watsonville City Council meeting. And Carlos Palacio resides in Watsonville. And they're a wonderful political community that welcome members of the public to participate. And on their consent agenda, they allow members of the public, you're going a little fast on that time, all right? So they got stupid little language and I wanna share with members of the public. They can go online and watch that. That was, I believe that was the date, February 12th, the Capitola, February 14th. I did the public comment in the consent agenda. They have stipulated language, Chairman Friend. They have stipulated language in your district allow members of the public to weigh on the consent agenda. I went to the Gilroy City Council meeting, March 4th, people can watch the public comment there. It's a great public comment, right? There's three realms I can dominate in. The political arena, the public square, because I'm not ashamed of my humanity and my creativeness with my YouTube videos that I'm gonna be producing and my graphics, right? I gave this package to Carlos Palacio, Dana, and also to Zach Friend. Thank you, time's up. And I wanna be able to say that now. Thank you, thank you, your time's up. Mr. Alexander, thank you. Hi, good morning. Paulina Moreno with Community Action Board. I'm also here representing the County Census Committee, and I'd like to invite you all and the public to please join us. Tomorrow we have our second complete count committee meeting. We're gearing up for the census. And so I'd like to extend an invitation to everyone to please join us. It will take place at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning at Cabrillo-Sesnan House. And for all of you, we're working towards developing an outreach and implementation plan for Santa Cruz County, and we really need the voices of all organizations and folks in order to ensure an accurate and complete count for the 2020 census. So again, please join us tomorrow at 10 a.m. at Cabrillo-Sesnan House for our second complete count committee meeting. Thank you. Thank you, and it's critical that we count every person for the census. That concludes public comment. I'm now gonna bring it back for the board for action on the consent agenda. These are items 12 through 40, with the exception of item number 35. Do we have a motion? There was a comment. Oh, okay. Oh, sorry, comments now. Yeah, so we'll get that. You bet. Item 17, I've heard people say that for the compassionate use of the lowering the tax and actually eliminating, I guess they're proposing for three to four years, the state tax on marijuana. I don't see where it's just for compassionate use, medical use. I believe it's straight across the board. Am I correct on that? This particular bill is just about across the board. There's another bill that has to do with compassionate use. So this bill is across the board, though. Correct, yes. Okay. The concern I have is we're reacting to the black market. It's like the black market is telling us what to do. And no matter how we shift, we've shifted in the past in order to try to lower the black market. Now, if we eliminate the tax, if I'm not mistaken, that's taking money away from law enforcement that would be able to enforce the laws that we do have concerning cannabis. And then the other would be, the analysis before was when they did a study on how tax money would be used to enforce this and actually get around the black market, they're using now the same argument to eliminate the tax. So what I'm getting at, the point I'm getting at here is, I mean, how far are we gonna go? And how low are we gonna go on the taxes in order to accommodate the proposed cannabis rules that we had from the state in the beginning and now it's changing. So I'll be voting no on 17. If it was for compassionate use or medical use exceptions, I would go for that, but this is across the board. So anyway, on 17, I'll be voting no. And then on item 26, that's with the set aside money. I've noticed that the amount of time would actually begin from today, it started already, I guess at eight o'clock today or would start after our vote. And then they only have for the set aside money until April the 7th in order to get their request in. For some of these organizations, especially the smaller ones, I think we're making that amount of time too short. They don't have staff in order to write up the hard copy that's required by five o'clock on April 7th. So I'm offering a friendly amendment just to extend that time until April the 10th, which would be a Tuesday rather than the Friday. So anyway, I'm just asking to extend it a little bit for people and good organizations that do not have a lot of staff in order to do all this paperwork that they're given three more days. Sure, and I'm getting us head nod from the director of HSD that that would be okay with her. Okay, do we need to have a vote on an amendment? Yeah, I think it's additional direction that'll be incorporated into the motion. Okay, so it would be April 10th. That's fine, okay. And then the last one is just a question on, I believe, let me see here. Item 35, that's with the Buena Vista landfill and the Ben Lomond transfer station. That got pulled and it'll be on our regular agenda. Okay, then that's fine. Okay. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. And not to be confrontational, but I am in strong support of item 17. When this whole cannabis industry became somewhat, what's called legalized in California, that the taxing structure was a key part of that. I think the state really overreached in setting a 15% tax, excise tax. And I strongly agree that we should support lowering, having the state lower that to 11%. I think it has had it. We want to reduce the strength of the black market. I'm not sure that the tax structure is gonna be the thing that does this, but coupled with the taxes that we as a county put on, which I know you remembered that, I thought we should have started lower, but overall the income from the cannabis tax has not been what the state nor the county projected. And I've asked the California State Association of counties to look at has the high tax structure in some regions lowered the tax revenue that we might have anticipated. I don't know that answer right now. I suspect it might be right, but I think a high tax structure, the combination of the state and county of being over 30% is extremely high and does nothing to weaken the black market element of this whole subject matter. So I am in strong support of reducing that tax and I've always been in support of the compassion attacks element of that. As we know, Ms. Corral knows through the years, she's done a fantastic job and it's a model of what others should be doing for compassionate use. So I just strongly support item 17 and I think that we might be taking a, I hope we might be taking a look at that if I have more evidence to see or the county or the state does that high taxes are put in a stymie in the effort to reduce the strength of the black market. And also a number, item number 26, the core base, the collective of results and evidence-based programs. We're just asking for people to submit applications. We as a county allocated more than $4 million for community service programs. Really a great effort. I think this is shown to be an efficient and effective use of way we should distribute those funds in core. There is this element of set aside of funds of $150,000. There's much more need than that. We know that. As a matter of fact, last year, I think 39 agencies submitted proposals for almost $800,000. We were able to give 15 agencies a total of $150,000, ranging from 3,000 to 23,000. I just like to really try to encourage those community nonprofit agencies to make their applications if they wish. The fund is limited to $150,000, but I do think we're putting it to good use and I appreciate everything that these community organizations have done for Santa Cruz County. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. Just a couple of items to comment on and one additional direction. I will echo my colleagues' comments on item number 17 about reducing taxes. We have a weird, what we are seeing across the state is that it's hard to move people into a legal structure if we place so many hurdles in front of them. Over 30% of taxes is one of those hurdles and we should work to reduce that and the state seems to be taking some leadership and at least trying it for a three-year period to reduce a portion of the taxes for the state taxes. Also, I'd just like to comment on item number 22, which is the Probations Department Prop 47 grant application. This seems like a very powerful application that will do a lot of good in our community to address mental health and substance use disorder services and building on an effort that the community is increasingly interested is some restorative justice pieces and I'm hopeful that we will be able to access these grants. The amount of money that would come in would be significant and would really make a big difference in our community and I applaud the Probation Department for seeking these funds and working with so many other partners in the community to help make this application competitive. On item number 23, I just want to recognize the Sheriff Department for its ongoing commitment for gender-specific in-custody treatment programming. The Sheriff and his office has been very supportive of an effort which this board has supported looking at the issues of women in our criminal justice system and this grant will help with a program at Blaine Street and I appreciate their leadership in seeking out these funds. On item number 28, which is the RFP for the EIR on our sustainable Santa Cruz County plan. This has been long discussed and I'm glad to see this moving forward. I held off this item last week because I wanted to talk with staff because in the initial draft of that RFP there were some items that were unfamiliar to me and after spending some time with some staff, I learned a lot. They also reminded me of some elements that we approved back in 2015 and I want to add an additional direction to direct the staff to return on or before June 11th with a sustainability policy and regulatory update study session to provide information to the board on the scope and elements of the sustainable update that have either changed or been added since the original adoption of sustainable Santa Cruz County plan. Additional information on how the state and local land uses with respect to the accessory dwelling units and bonus density ordinance will interface with the proposed changes. I have this written down so I'll give it to you. But one of the things that's become clear is that through state law changes and increasing level sophistication by the staff and understanding about what we could do in order to meet the goals of the sustainable Santa Cruz County plan, they're suggesting some additional changes and I thought it'd be helpful before we hire the EIR consultant that we at least get a review of what those pieces were so we're aware of what it is we're hiring and gonna be studying and I've talked with Planning Department and their support of that and so they would work with the CAO to study that session. I hope that would be supported by the board. And lastly, I just wanna urge the support of my colleagues on item 40.1 which is the support of AB 705. This bill by our local assembly member Mark Stone will add some important protections to mobile home law to cut off the practice that has been used in other communities to get around the conversion, mobile home conversion law by instigating a closure and then coming back later with a project. There is some crafty ways in which mobile home park owners have tried to get around conversion laws and this bill will be an important way to stop that and I hope the board will support it. Thank you. Let me just say Supervisor Caput, I share your concerns and the reason that I'm supporting item number 17 today is the state seems set an incredibly high tax. Does none of the work puts all the work on us and puts pressure on us for us to lower our taxes because of the black market pressures. So the reason I'm supportive of this is I think the state should lower their taxes, hopefully do more work and leave us with the resources to implement this program. So that's why I'm coming to it from that perspective. But I will take a motion with the additional direction. I would move the consent agenda as amended. Okay, motion by Leopold. Second by McPherson. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Set for 17. Okay, so that passes unanimously with exception of 17. We are now on to our regular agenda and the first item up is one of our favorite days of the year here at the Board of Supervisors because it's the presentation of the 2018 Employee Recognition Awards as outlined in the memorandum of the CAO and it's just an extraordinary opportunity for us to hear about and recognize the thousands of people who come to work every day for the County of Santa Cruz to serve our community and make our community a better place. And so we're grateful to have this opportunity and I'm gonna ask the CAO to introduce this item. Yes, Chair Coonerty and members of the Board. This program is a special effort that the Board established a number of years ago to recognize and show appreciation to our employees for their outstanding accomplishments during the past year. Some of the criteria that we use in evaluating these awards is an employee or a group of employees who solve an extraordinary problem for the County, an employee or a group of employees who successfully implement an innovative idea, a group of employees or employee who does an outstanding act which brings deserves recognition to the County and an employee or a group of employee who performs their work in a way that deserves special recognition. With that, today's ceremony, what we'll have as each Board member will present an award in one of the five categories of government. Board members will come down and stand at the microphone as employees hear their name. They should come up to the front and join the supervisor and at the conclusion of the awards event, there will be a reception in the hall adjacent to the Board Chambers. Everyone is invited to stay through the entirety of the presentation of the awards and for the reception. Supervisor Coonerty will be presenting our first awards in the category of general government. All right, so our first category is in the bronze, the Bronze Award and it's shared by members of the Countywide Solar Installation Team. And including, and I'm gonna ask you to come up, William Kirsten, Al Galvan, Ben Winkleback, Black, Kevin Fitzgerald, Robert Calesiano, and Lieutenant Fred Playsman. So this Countywide Solar Installation Team was a cross-departmental collaborative effort to install solar panels at eight county locations, including the main building, our Emeline Campus, Animal Services, Brommer Maintenance Yard, the Center for Public Safety, Simpkins, and the Men's Detention Center. They met with contractors, identifying and mitigated parking and building access issues, participated in weekly meetings related projects. Their assistance with the duties kept the project on schedule with minimum impacts to operations. This team is being celebrated today for bringing significant benefits to the county. And let me just say, essentially what it did was reduce our energy usage by half and will save taxpayers about $20 million over the next 20 years by providing a more green approach to our energy and being responsive for demands for alternative energy sources. I commend and thank the County Solarwide Installation Team for their hard work on this important project. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Fred. All right, our Silver Award winner is the General Services Fleet Division. And I'm gonna ask Jose Rocha, Robert Sandoval, Randall Matijsic, and Jonathan Rector to come forward. So wait till, you're already applauding, but wait till you hear what they did. During a routine stop made by a sheriff deputy in May of 2018, a person was able to gain access to the vehicle's driver's side and drive the vehicle into the deputy. This incident exposed a vulnerability in the rear window security bars. As a result, the fleet services team quickly designed a security screen to reinforce the rear windows of the detainee area of the vehicle. This design was installed in more than 30 vehicles in less than two months. This innovative design and efficient installation led to better security and safety for deputies and the public. The team has gone above and beyond to prevent a circumstance in which a high risk and high harm events might occur. I'm delighted to present fleet services with the silver award today in general government. Finally, our goal to winners today are the benefits team. So Michelle, personnel is always ready to cheer folks on. All right, Michelle, Rosendez, Robert Eurek, Leticia Preciado, Francesca Diaz and Tom Melokian. Melokian, sorry, thank you, Tom. So this was a departmental collaborative effort between personnel benefits team and information services staff to overhaul and transform the way the benefits team was providing services to employees. Some of these services include providing information about employee health, dental and vision and life insurance as well as initial and annual employee health insurance enrollment. Benefits information services work together to transform the benefits webpage and elevate the open enrollment process by allowing forms to be completed, signed and submitted electronically. This team has also tested these new processes extensively in order to ensure their success. I'm proud to present the benefits team with the gold award in general government and thank you for your work. Thank you so much. Supervisor Leopold will now be presenting awards in the category of health services. I don't think those applause were for me. Before I start, I just want to acknowledge that the entire board recognizes that we are very fortunate to have a talented county family with many dedicated and hardworking individuals who make county government possible. Today, we recognize some of them, but we appreciate the work that all of our employees do every day. In the health services category and the bronze award, this award is being awarded to the Jail Behavioral Health Team. That includes Rob Vickers, Malka Friedman, Jeffrey Goodyear, James Russell, Brenda Campbell, Robert Anon, Dr. Oya Soizel, Dr. Karsten Heal and James Reggio. Members of the Jail Behavioral Health Team are regularly faced with jail overcrowding and a high number of individuals with mental illness who are in custody. The team displays collaboration, respect, support and trust while working under incredibly challenging and stressful conditions. Participating in daily multidisciplinary team meetings to review the cases and needs of inmates with a variety of treatment needs. Members of this team provide quality services while supporting individuals in their stabilization, recovery and successful reentry and linkage to supports in the community. Please join me in congratulating the Jail Behavioral Health Team on their bronze award in the health services category. Next, we have our silver award winner, Kim Chavez. She may only be one person, but she has very loud fans. Kim has worked for the county in juvenile hall for over 23 years, and she consistently demonstrates her commitment to inclusive and exemplary care and services to an often underserved population. Kim has been one of the primary providers coordinating and providing medical services at juvenile hall, and she ensures that every youth receives individualized and high level care. She has always gone above and beyond and has stepped up, especially in the past couple of years, to work many overtime shifts in order to meet medical requirements and always with a smile on her face. Kim is a model county employee and I'm proud to present her with the silver award today. The competition is tough at the health services category, but we have a two-way tie for gold. So the first gold award winner in health services is an individual, Shannon Shakespeare Leon. In her role as a medical assistant, Shannon supports the work of the Integrated Behavioral Health Team in Emmeline, comprised of 10 licensed direct service providers. Shannon has an extraordinary workload due to the support she was required to provide, but she approaches everything that she does with immense patience and caring towards the people her team serves and goes above and beyond in her role, acting as a coordinator of sorts. Shannon truly embodies operational excellence, specifically providing patients with outstanding and culturally responsive services and playing an essential role in increasing access to integrated mental health, substance use disorder, and healthcare services. I am happy to present Shannon with the gold award in the health services category. Gold award tie award winner is another person, Yvette Tvera. As a medical assistant, Yvette is the Integrated Behavioral Health Star of the Watsonville team. As the program has grown exponentially with a corresponding workload, often she is the first line of contact for patients and non-clinic employees, performing numerous duties outside of her medical assistant role. Due to the nature of her position, Yvette is often the recipient of complaints and disgruntled patients and other providers, but her caring and compassionate attitude lead to a smooth resolution of any and all issues that come her way. Yvette ensures that all patients receive the highest quality of service while making them feel that they're the top priority of the clinic. Thank you for that. Please join me in congratulating Yvette on her accomplishment and her gold award in the health services category. Supervisor McPherson will be presenting awards in the category of human services. We don't have any teams up here to award in human services, but we have three outstanding individuals in a department of hundreds, and they're all worthy of some recognition. As Supervisor Leopold said, we have 2,500 employees in Santa Cruz County. They're outstanding. They really do tremendous, efficient work in serving the people of Santa Cruz County. I wanna thank them all. For their human services category and the bronze award, Thomas Salem. As a social worker for adult and long-term care services, Thomas is recognized as an employee that goes above and beyond when working with clients. Thomas works with clients to help them overcome their fear so they may live a fuller life outside of the boundaries of their home. In doing so, Thomas exemplified dedication to community and the personalized care vulnerable adults need in order to feel supported. Fellow employees and families of those Thomas has worked with say that Thomas provides kind, professional, and warm support. Every day, Thomas demonstrates a commitment to the mission of the Human Services Department. Please join me in congratulating Thomas on his bronze award in the Human Services category. Thank you so much, Mike. Let's go ahead, give him 30 seconds, I'll cut it short. Okay. Did you hear about the Scarecrow that won an award? Apparently he was outstanding in his field. Scarecrow field. I'm extremely honored to win the Bronze Employee Recognition Award for Excellence. I am earnestly grateful for the appreciation and recognition I have received from my work because I am very sure that every nominee for this award was as capable, if not more, of winning this award. I would like to thank my division director, Mike McConnell, my program manager, Sandy Schiezas, my supervisor, Jessica Kirxina, my previous supervisor, Michelle Egan-Cruz, who took a shot on me and hired me, Lisa Stanford, who was willing to volunteer and had patience to train me. I was very, very green. I'd like to thank my co-workers for their support and friendship, especially Nora Vasquez, my next door neighbor, partner in crime, who helped me through my probationary period. I'd like to thank my family for putting up with me, my mommy, and God. I dedicated to making a difference. Thank you very much, Thomas. The Human Services Silver Award goes to Emily Simone. Emily stepped in and filled a gap that was created when an outside vendor was no longer able to provide supervised clinical licensing hours to employees of the family and children's services with a master's in social work, working toward her license at the same time. Emily really went above and beyond to provide support when it was urgently, urgently, urgently needed. Do you want to come up and speak for me? Emily had, she not stepped up, there was a risk that employees would have lost the opportunity to complete their licensing hours and the department would lose the tool for recruitment and retention of a vital service. Emily's commitment to her department and the county is impressive as she helped to solve the extraordinary problem by providing the specialized support she was able to give. In turn, staff were able to continue to provide critical services for vulnerable youth in our community. I commend Emily for her hard work and I'm happy to present her with the Civil Award in the Human Services category. I smile on that face, it'd make anybody happy, so congratulations. The Human Services category Gold Award goes to Jessica Scheiner. Jessica has been a champion for addressing issues of homelessness in our county through the Human Services Department-supported programs. She has helped to bring the $1.3 million in state grants and design and implement housing support and homelessness prevention programs. Working with the other community stakeholders, she has also played a leadership role in helping to develop and implement SmartPath. Santa Cruz County's coordinated entry system for homeless individuals and families seeking housing support. Supporting people in need of housing is a complex, a critical issue in the county and Jessica has been a key in developing and innovative ideas, implementing the systems that enable the department and the county to make an impact on homelessness. I am pleased to present Jessica with the Gold Award in the Human Services category. Supervisor Friend will now present the awards in the category of justice. All right, we're gonna get started off with the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter and the Bronze Award goes to Linda Puzafaro. As is normally the case of the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter, there's about a 16 page nomination form here. So Linda is a proven leader and dedicated county employee who lists the spirits of her colleagues and supports customers of the animal shelter without fail every day. Her focus on the safety of animals and improving workflow is evident in her efforts to improve services. She regularly contributes ideas to process improvement in customer service. She consistently displays a calm, patient and compassionate approach with everyone she comes into contact with and has committed herself. Why was that funny? And has committed herself to a career of service with the animal shelter. Identified as a staff member who regularly makes a difference in everyone's day in a highly charged and active environment is no easy feat. It's very true. Yeah, you make it seem effortless. Linda exemplifies the type of employee the county seeks to recruit and retain and I'm pleased to present Linda with the Bronze Award in the justice category for your work in the community and for the county of Santa Cruz. Congratulations. I just want to really thank my fellow co-workers, my boss, who is the biggest support anyone could ever have and my lovely family for being here today. And Linda and I really struggled with it. And Linda was so kind and so compassionate that made that day a very difficult day for us. So much better. Thank you, Linda, congratulations. So we have a two-way tie for the Silver Award. The first is shared by members of the Rehabilitation and Reentry Facility Team. Come on forward when we call your name. We've got Elizabeth Lindbergh, Paul Ramos, Kathy Sams, Travis Carey, Karen Wells, Alex Gonzalez, Sheila McDaniel, Laura Hagan, Cynthia Chase, Kurt Corum, Ryan Fisher, Brandon Skiana, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jeanette Hicks. The Rehabilitation and Reentry Facility is a newly redesigned and renovated facility with the purpose of providing rehabilitative services that target the root causes of behavior and reduces criminogenic risk factors and recidivism to enable incarcerated individuals to return to the community. By providing an array of services that include educational and vocational training, counseling, and recreation programs, the facility has a strong focus on building capacity and incarcerated individuals that supports goals of improving victim empathy, healthy, and safe communities. The team which represents the Sheriff's Department Public Works and the Planning Department exemplifies cross-sector collaboration and partnership, and I'm proud to present the Justice Silver Award to the Rehabilitation and Reentry Facility Team. Thank you for your work on that. That's it, Cynthia, that's very good. Yes. On behalf of this really dynamic team, we just want to thank everyone who, those who nominated us for the award, and we're so proud to be involved in a system that is focused on rehabilitation and public safety, and we're really proud of the efforts that we did together as a team. Nice try. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you. All right, it was a two-way tie, and so the other winners of the Silver Award in the Justice category are shared by the members of the Cold Case Investigations Team, including Morgan Chapelle, Henry Montez, Ed Delfin, and Tom Corral. You guys so look the part. It's unbelievable. It's like, I mean, it's good. It's good, I just... All right, so Cold Case Investigations is an integral service provided by the district attorney's office. In 2018, a core team of investigators worked diligently to bring the trial, two trials, several cold cases that resulted in closure and healing for victims and their families and ensured community safety. The team also solved several murder cases committed by one person and was able to share a confession with the victim's family to facilitate their healing process. The Cold Case Team exemplifies strong investigative and interviewing skills, especially given the challenges of sifting through evidence and witness accounts that can be many years old. And I'm happy to present this cold case to the Cold Case Investigations Team, the Silver Award in the Justice category. Thank you very much, Board of Supervisors for this award, appreciate it. As you know, this is obviously a team effort. So there's other people that were very instrumental in this case. And we'd like to thank them. First of all, district attorney, Jeff Rosell, Deputy DA, Tara George, and formal Deputy DA, Rob Wade were very instrumental as well as our Chief, Ken Slumbrick and our Supervisor Katrina Rogers. Thank you guys very much for giving us the tools and support to work on these cases. As you know, some of these cases that were solved occurred over 40 years ago. Before my time in law enforcement, definitely before their time in law enforcement. But yet we still work those cases. We work those cases simultaneously. We're working our current cases. And we do that, and we do that for the community, the community and Santa Cruz. Just keep in mind that District Attorney's Office Bureau of Investigation will continue to work those cases. We are motivated for several reasons. One is for the voices that are not heard, for those people that you don't hear anymore, for their family members that always want closure. They want closure. They want justice. We'll continue to work those cases. And if there's something that we can't do today, rest assured that the inspectors of tomorrow will continue to work those cases. And as far as those that flee the country to avoid prosecution, there's no border or passage of time that's gonna stop us from going after them. We will continue to do that. We'll do that for once again, the victims, the family, and for this community that we work hard for. So thank you very much. And in the gold, for the gold award winners is shared by the members of the District Attorney's Sexual Assault Unit, including Stephen Moore, Kelly Freitas, Erica Ziegenhorn, Jason Gill, and Connor McCormick. It's got a name. It's got a nice. This collaborative team in the District Attorney's Office has worked to refine and improve the effectiveness of the Multidisciplinary Interview Center known as the Safe Kids and Youth Force Sky Center. The Sky Center serves to ensure a safe environment for child and youth victims of sexual and physical abuse to be interviewed and is the first of its kind in this county. The team was innovative in growing the capacity of the Sky Center to include training across agencies and interviews conducted in Spanish. The team's focus on our most vulnerable population, our children, allows law enforcement agencies across the county to work together to prevent further trauma along creasing public safety. For their innovative, culturally responsive and trauma focused approach to serving young victims, I'm proud to present this team with the Gold Award in the Justice category. Please join me in thanking and congratulating them. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we want to thank everyone and especially the board for this award. We'd like to thank the District Attorney, Mr. Roselle, for the opportunity. The Sky Center has been an important addition to our county. It's a resource that we didn't have available before and now we're able to serve the children of our community much better in an environment where they're much freer to talk about the kind of assaults that have happened. And so this kind of resource and this ability that our county now has is an important pickup and an important service that we're able to provide. On behalf of the team, I just want to say it's an honor and a privilege, of course, working with them. It's an honor and a privilege to work for the county doing sexual assault and bringing those individuals who do those kinds of crimes to justice. Thank you. Supervisor Caput will now present the awards in the category of land use. It's always a pleasure to be a part of the award ceremony for recognizing outstanding employees. And we do have, what, nearly 2,500 employees and this is recognizing a few of them that make everything work. Anyway, the bronze award on land use category, the individual Michael Sotero with the planning department. Michael has embraced and implemented new technology to improve the permit review process in the planning department. During 2018, Michael revamped and expanded the electronic plan check process. Previously, paper plans were required for all permits, which wasted paper, created manual document control and added considerable cost to the applicants. The electronic plan check process that Michael developed has addressed these issues while increasing collaboration among reviewers. Additionally, Michael developed website materials, user manuals, and how-to videos. He has really gone out of his way to assist the public with questions regarding electronic plan check. Thank you, Michael, for your service and leadership. What's a pleasure to be able to receive this kind of recognition. It comes with a lot of support. The supervisors, my immediate supervisor providing the flexibility and the schedule to address various kinds of things. The plan check team that I'm a part of, the increased workload that they share because of my shared interest in this and of course the plan check, rather the building counter team because they helped me understand better the customer experience. So I think we all work together having this bigger picture of our goal in mind and it's a shared cooperation. So thanks to everyone. Thanks, Jillian. Keeping all this straight. Now we have the silver award. That would be Marty Haney. Did I pronounce that right? Marty is an innovative and dedicated employee who envisioned, planned and created a comprehensive safe structure program for existing unpermitted structures to ensure they are safe, healthy, and habitable. Prior to establishment of the program, many homeowners were prohibited from obtaining county permits for maintenance and upgrades and were unable to obtain financing through conventional institutions. Marty worked to ensure that residents would be able to complete work or obtain required permits in order to apply for financing. Marty helped to protect 19 homes from the hazards associated with improper construction techniques or unsafe living condition. And several dozen additional homes are currently pending approval through the program. Due to Marty's direct involvement, residents were not displaced from their homes and no longer live in unsafe living. I am proud to present Marty with the silver award in the land use category. Okay, I'll say something. Just thanks to everybody I work with. It's a great team and thanks to Wanda Williams for nominating me for this. Appreciate it. Anybody who's gone through trying to refinance or financing knows that time is money and we're recognizing that. Now we go to the gold award. Amanda Polson. Amanda is a truly exceptional employee who is highly engaged and may be found helping with and problem solving any issue in the Agriculture Commissioner's Office. Anticipating the arrival of an invasive mosquito species, we can almost make a movie maybe out of that, huh? She applied for and successfully received a grant for the Center for Disease Control which funded seasonal employees to perform surveillance. Amanda also orchestrated the design and execution of protocol for mosquito and tick surveillance and trapping and developed much of the visual information for the Agricultural Commission's Earth Day booth, which won best commercial booth. Amanda epitomizes the spirit of county operational excellence and continuous process improvement through her motivational approaches. Her adoption of innovative technologies and strategies and her eagerness to move her division towards operational excellence and improved customer service. I'd like to thank and commend Amanda for her outstanding efforts and I'm happy to present this gold award on behalf of everyone here. Thank you. Real quick, I just wanted to say thank you to my managers, Paul Binding and Juan Hidalgo for giving me the freedom and the trust to try new things. And thanks for my awesome team of coworkers for always supporting me. All the things I was nominated for were things that couldn't have been done without you all. So thank you very much. Well done. What kind of mosquito was this, by the way? Thank you. So I just want to take a moment again and thank all the employees every day who show up and do their work. I thought it was pretty telling that everyone who spoke wanted to thank more people in their departments who they get to work collaboratively. It's that sort of spirit that makes Santa Cruz County a special place both as an institution and as a community and we're really grateful. We're now gonna recess until 1040 so we can join you in the hallway and thank you over some treats. So please join us. Oh yeah, absolutely. Can we get up to order and move on to the next item, which is item number eight. This is a presentation by the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County regarding their Immigration Services Grant has outlined in the memo that I provided. I think this is just an opportunity for the board members and the community to find out about these resources that are now available in this community. So hopefully we can get the word out to communities that are being very much impacted by federal policies right now. Thanks for the introduction. Hi, good morning. Thank you to Supervisor Coonerty for the invitation to be here this morning and talk to you a little bit about some of the work that we're doing around immigration and oh, it's over here. I was like looking for the presentation. But I just, my name is Paulina Moreno. I'm one of the project directors at Community Action Board and today I'm joined by... I'm Hannah Rogers. I'm one of the assistant project directors at CAB as well. Thank you. And so we wanted to just, before we talk about the grant and some of the services that have, that will be a result of this grant, we wanted to just very briefly talk about the bigger picture around immigration. And so currently with CAB in alignment with the county and service delivery partners, we're holding a vision to create a county wide response strategy to support immigrants both documented and undocumented to thrive in our community. As you all know, and I believe we've been here to share that the Packard Foundation brought together a group of us and created the Thriving Immigrants Collaborative who were initiating and augmenting immigrant services based on community needs. We're a cross sector collaborative of local organizations committed to supporting immigrant quality of life in our community. And while we understand the importance and need to provide low cost to free immigration legal services, we also recognize the importance of serving a family holistically. So one of the things that we've added in terms of providing services is intense case management to some of our most vulnerable families who are impacted by detention. We are ensuring that we are connecting them to legal services, but in addition, providing them with mental health support through some of our partners, ensuring that they have access to and completing the childcare safety plan and that they're connected to services such as food, transportation or rental assistance. We're thankful to the Packard Foundation, to the supervisors and the county staff for supporting this work and our vision to develop a cross sector plan that is responsive to the needs of the immigrant community. We're working towards creating a strategic plan and we're hoping to align our systems to be more responsive. And so we just wanna share a little bit about that and thank you for the opportunity to be here. And I'll just pass it over to Hannah who'll talk a little bit more about what those legal services mean. Yeah, so with this grant, which was made possible by the California Department of Social Services, we're able to expand on already existing organizations in our community that have been helping our low income communities and our immigrant communities for quite some time. But with this, we're able to expand not only into North County, but also expand a little bit beyond what legal services we're providing. So all of our subcontractors, all of our partners are working on education and outreach to make sure that everybody in the community knows what services we're actually have, since we have quite a few. We support people in naturalization, total application process. We support people renewing their DACA, so the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. We also work with other immigration remedies, so a catch-all for everything else and includes family-based petitions, temporary protected status, UVSAs, which are for people who are survivors of victims of violent crimes who cooperate with law enforcement in order to catch the perpetrator. We also support people with TVSAS, which are survivors of human trafficking. Adjustments of status, we also do, and then we support people seeking immigration remedies under the Violence Against Women Act, which is mostly around domestic violence issues. And these are our partners. It's a cab-run initiative, so at Community Action Board, we have the Santa Cruz County Immigration Project, which serves most of our residents in South County, but through Community Action Board as well, we are now able, through this grant, to provide legal services out of the Dayworker Center, which is one of our programs over on 7th Avenue, so in Live Oak, as well as legal services out of the Davenport Resource Service Center. We're also partnering with Pajaro Valley Rapid Response, which is a totally volunteer-based organization working to provide assistance and accountability for if there's ever any raids in our county, and also promoting know-your-rights and all of that. We work with Monarch Services, which provides services to victims, or sorry, survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence, et cetera. We also work with Community Bridges, which is another big direct service provider in the county, working with our low-income population. And lastly, with the Community Center, sorry, SEMA, which is Community Immigration Center for Migrant Assistance, so they provide information, consultations, tutorials, and referrals for this same population. Great, thank you so much. Do you have anything to add? Sorry, Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate the leadership of our chair and having you come make the presentation. And I'm glad that the county was able to support it through our funding as well. You know, what we see at the federal level is not only a crackdown on those who are undocumented, but even those who are here legally who are going through the process. And so having advocates like yourself who are partnering with others to be able to support people in our community who are faced with lots of difficult questions to be able to participate, be here, provide for their families is critically important. And I just wanna recognize you for your work and thank you for the presentation today. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. It's just, I think it's really important we get the word out to let people know that one level of government's policies is not reflective of all of our policies and that our values are very different and we wanna help people be in this community, work in this community, be with their families in the community. And this is a really big opportunity through CAB's leadership to provide those services. And I just wanna appreciate your efforts. So thank you so much. Oh, sorry, Senator Caput. You bet. Well, congratulations on exactly about how much money are we talking about? We're talking about almost $731,000 which translate to approximately over, a little bit over 3,000 people that we can now expand services to in our county. That's great. And I make this comment, we can go back all the way to maybe the Clinton administration, then Bush and then Obama and now. What I can understand, I have friends that are Democrat, Republican, Independent. I don't know any of them that are against the Dreamers, the DACA program and why this has taken so long that it should be a slam dunk where they make the people that came here when they were kids. Some have gone to elementary school, junior high school, high school and then they're going to college and they still don't have legal status. So how is that going as far as helping them out? Well, we continue to work with, part of our effort is to do a lot of the education and outreach and working directly with the schools. We provide trainings for some of the counselors. We also work directly with some of the students that are both Dreamers but are also advocates of Dreamers to ensure that luckily in California we have access to things beyond what other states have. So for example, in California, we wanna make sure that students recognize that we have the California Dream Act and they can apply for scholarships if they want to continue to higher education. And so we're actively making sure that people understand what are the different paths but we're also working to write letters to our legislators in support of allowing the DACA program to reopen again. We have a lot of eligible young kids that are just turned 15 that would potentially benefit from DACA had we allowed it to continue. Yeah, and how much will this help out the immigration legal advice that comes through, I guess Doug Keegan and through the office in South County and I'm glad to see it expanded. So yeah, how is that gonna help? Well, we've been able to expand our hours so that has been one key element. We have been able to hire additional staff. Now we went through an entire accreditation process through the Department of Justice to be able to provide immigration services out of the day worker center than Davenport Resource Service Center. And so it potentially allows us to have a bigger reach and for people to understand that they have a trusted organization that they can go to for referrals, for consultations. One of our biggest obstacles is in fighting the folks who are claiming that they can help someone through their immigration process. And so we wanna make sure that people know where to go to, where to ask for help. And luckily now we have a whole network of partners that are helping us get the word out in all you supervisors and community for allowing us to be here and share that information so that people know where to go to. I think you mentioned right there what's so important about the immigration legal advice that they get, some people and they still are, they get a promise from a lawyer that's referred to them by a friend or whatever and they spend thousands of dollars and they get nothing because they are undocumented and they feel like they're afraid to go to court to get their money back or whatever. Are they able to get their money back or are they lost it if they go to some of these, you know? Well, I know through the immigration project and I know through the Watson-Ballat Center there's a way to actually be able to report folks. Unfortunately, oftentimes I don't know the status of what those cases look like if people are able to get their money back. So I don't know the answer to that. I could get back to you on that, but I know that there are ways for us and we need those voices. We need to know because unless we know and people tell us about fraudulent organizations or so-called notaries who claim to be attorneys, then it's very difficult for us to know and advocate for them. And getting the word out so that people know that they can go somewhere and not to be taken advantage of monetarily. Correct. So how will you do that? Will you add to the outreach out, add to the advertising? Yeah, do you want to speak on that or you want me to? Yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do with this grant money. As I mentioned, every single partner here is tasked with deliverables around education and outreach primarily and then there's a few that deal specifically with legal services. Are you wanting an answer about strategy or? Sure. Why don't, well, I think why don't we save that and that you can get back to Supervisor Caput as it goes forward? Because the purpose of this was really just to give a broad overview of this program, let the communities know it's out there, then each of us can go and reach out to communities. And just- I'll give you a quick, I'll wrap it up here. But yeah, that's really important to go out to the labor camps and talk to them. This is quickly related to both the legal process and also monarch services. Is that for the violence against women? Okay, because we've heard in the past some women don't want to report. Maybe they're being abused terribly, but they're afraid if their spouse or whatever, a husband or a boyfriend gets deported, they don't want to go forward. And then they're losing their income or whatever. So how are we going to help out monarch and help out through that process real quick? Yeah, so definitely we're, this is only one component of, we wanted to make sure people understood about the services, but we're part of a broader network of immigration collaborative work. In fact, we have our local police department involved. So in order to help us think about what are the types of messages that we need to get across to the community where people feel safe to report crimes, not just about domestic violence, which is hugely unreported, but also feel safe to report other crimes. And so we're in the process of part of our strategic plan and coming together with cross sector agencies and grass root organizers is to address some of those key challenges. And so I'd be happy to give you more information about that, definitely. And quickly, if you could just remark on Pajaro Valley rapid response, what is that? So soon after the election, there were several counties, cities that developed their rapid response networks in response to increased immigration ice presence in their communities. And so one of those efforts led, there's a Northern California North County rapid response network as well. And then there's a South County one as well. I don't know if in the community you will all seen the red cards. There's a number that people can call that someone will answer no matter what time of the day they call. And they can get more information and referrals in terms of immigration legal services. We're working with PBRR to do know your rights presentations, to train people to be legal observers and document cases of abuse. Thank you, Chairman Coonerty. I could go on for hours to actually ask you questions, but you're one of my favorite programs because you're helping out people that really need assistance right now. Thank you. Well, we thank you all for your support. Thank you. Thank you so much. We're now moving on to item number nine. This is to consider a proposed ordinance amending Chapter 7.130, Cannabis Dispense Race of Santa Cruz to the Santa Cruz County Code. Place an ordinance on the next available agenda for final adoption. Schedule a hearing on March 26, 2019, beginning at 9 a.m. or thereafter to consider proposed amendments to the unified fee schedule related to cannabis licensing fees and direct the clerk of the board to publish the notice of the hearing that was outlined in the memo of the CAO. And I should note, I plan on hearing item number nine and item number 10.2 right after this since they're in the same of the same subject matter and then we'll get on to item number 9.1. Thank you. Go ahead. The proposed amendments to Santa Cruz County Code 7.130, the Cannabis Dispensory Ordinance are updates to reflect the current state of the retail cannabis industry. Since the original passage of 7.130 in June, 2016, the state has proposed or the state has developed regulations for medical and adult use retail, oh, sorry. Retail Cannabis Businesses, the proposed amendments to Chapter 7.130 are intended to improve clarity, remove language that's no longer relevant to our local industry and improve the county's operational insight to retailers through the license renewal process by requiring retailers to submit additional data required by the state. The modifications to the code include removal of local advertising restrictions. Prior to this meeting, the Cannabis Licensing Office has worked with various stakeholder groups including the community prevention partners. Through this outreach and review of the state regulations, staff believe the current state regulations adequately address youth prevention through restricted advertisement, marketing, and signage. And additionally, various out-of-jurisdiction cannabis companies are following the state guidelines and advertising their products locally. These advertisements are in violation of our current ordinance, but the county has no enforcement authority as the advertisements are being made by companies out of our jurisdictional area. And this has led to confusion on businesses and the public. It's problematic to enforce and is create an uneven playing field for our local retailers. The state regulations address advertising and marketing and these regulations include displays of advertising and marketing materials may only be displayed after a state licensee has obtained up to the date audience composition data demonstrating at least 71.6% of the audience is 21 or older. They cannot display minors in depictions or images and they cannot include images designed to be appealing to minors. Great. Any other questions? Any questions by board members? Supervisor Friend. So I just have a couple of brief questions regarding the advertising. We did get a letter from the community prevention partners in regards to billboards that struck me as pretty reasonable. So if we make this change, you said that it's not enforceable in essence now. Does that mean we're gonna actually be making any kind of enforcement on people that are in violation of what the state slash county ordinance would be moving forward? We've currently been enforcing the county ordinance and we will continue to enforce the ordinance, which does include a catch all for any issues associated with malcursa. So if there are advertising in violation of state law, they will be subject to county enforcement measures if they're within our local jurisdiction. Would it be safe to characterize the state law as weaker than the county's current ordinance? It is, I wouldn't classify it as weaker because there is stronger audience data composition and as discussed with community prevention partners, the majority of this advertising is occurring in the good times, which has the audience composition requirements that the state has. Can I ask why signage was included in addition to advertising since they're distinct elements, why we would also try and toss in the signage change? The state law covers advertising and marketing, which includes the signage requirements. So no displays of cannabis goods or anything that could be conceived as cannabis related would effectively be permissible under state law on the exterior of a building such as signage. As such, if a company were to proceed down that path, they would be in direct violation of state law and under our enforcement authority. And by violating malcursa in any way, any retailer at that point faces the potential for license revocation. So it's a serious consequence to violate any part of state law and we have been, had a fairly robust enforcement mechanism, I believe in the past few months. Thanks for that. So the county, I mean, we had a pretty robust discussion at the board about advertising and signage at the beginning of this process and we wanted it to be as restrictive as possible to ensure that it wasn't from a visual standpoint. In essence, youth didn't see it as well. So can you tell me what, with this signage change, what I might see differently at a dispensary? If I was driving down Soquel, for example, my district where there's a dispensary, currently they're allowed to have an essence of green cross with an open sign and really nothing else under our current construct or what would change or what would be permissible to be changed? They wouldn't be able to display any cannabis or cannabis goods on the exterior of the building in any way because they wouldn't have adequate composition data to say that they were at their advertising marketing signage was 71.6% or greater for folks greater than 21. So those displays would not be in any way allowed. The green cross effectively doesn't have any direct cannabis associated with it. It's a sign of the industry and could effectively be roped into the regulations if you looked at it very tightly. That would be, there'd probably be some discretion about allowing the green crosses to still be there. So I'm not concerned with the current construct. I'm concerned about what's possible with changing the construct, right? So what I'm concerned about is, I just wanna know what it is I'm voting on in this regard, will allowing a signage change mean that I'm gonna see things fundamentally different at dispensaries driving through the county than what I currently see? That's the signage component that has me hung up on the changes of this ordinance. I'm actually not even, I can make an argument. I'm not even sure why majority of these things are even coming to the board. I didn't know how necessary some of them were. Some of them are cleanup that's reasonable but some of them on the advertising and signage, I wasn't fully there on the signage. I'm definitely not there unless I can be convinced that there isn't gonna be a fundamental shift for people in our community on what they're gonna see on the outside. So maybe I could help Jason Heath from County Council's office. The signage and the advertising is a different issue. And I think that a compromise, a clean compromise position could be to leave the signage regulation as it is and go with the state law on the advertising. It's hard for me to argue that to remove the language in its entirety is not weakening it because we are taking what is direct language in the code now and substituting it with something that is more broad under state law. That doesn't mean that we can't enforce the broad language under state law. And I think that's what Mr. LaFordie is trying to communicate is that we still have all of our enforcement mechanisms available. It's just that we're not enforcing local law anymore. We're enforcing state law. But if the board wanted to keep the signage restrictions in place, it's possible to do that. We could come back in a couple of weeks with something that on that subsection 11 on the advertising piece where we've taken everything out down to the signage regulations that they have to comply with the signage regulations. We could state in there that the signage, that included in the signage regulations that one cannot use cannabis imagery, detail, pricing, structure, something like that. I appreciate that because to me that's always been the intent of the board. One of my concerns has been is that we've been through a lot on these ordinances from dispensing to cultivation to manufacturing to taxation and it sort of, and I recognize it's an evolutionary process and we'd always committed that it would be an evolutionary process. But I don't want to sort of these episodic one-off weakening of ordinances along the way, even if the state has made changes, we had fought for local control on everything, on all of these elements to do what was best for our community. So I have concerns about what the sort of, what I don't want is to weaken it, find out it's an issue and then come back to have to strengthen it. We failed on that on cultivation. So how do we ensure that we're not doing that is what my concerns are. They seem like that there might be minor changes or there might actually not be minor changes and that's where I'm at with that. What I want is also an insurance, sounds like we're getting an insurance that there will actually be enforcement. I don't think that's been the case in regards to some of the elements of the ordinance. So if this cleanup on the, or adhering to the state component means that there would be something more clear and more enforceable, then that's actually good as far as the advertising goes. But I think that the compromise, so to speak, that you present on the signage because I felt like that was the board's intent all long makes more sense to me, which is having something very clear about what is permitted or isn't permitted on signage throughout the county on that element. Supervisor Leal. Thank you, Chair. I think the questions you asked are good because we did have concerns about signage right from the get-go on retail establishments. We needed to have those in part because there were no state regulations. We were operating in a system in which there was no, the regulatory environment was non-existent except what we created. And so as the state has developed a regulatory infrastructure, it becomes a lot more clear what it is you can and cannot do. And I don't think you actually answered the question as to what would signage be looked like because I share the concerns, right? We don't want cartoon characters and big leafs and pictures. But the way I read this is gonna be about the size of signs and everything. The state law would still prevent all those things from happening. It literally would. The signage to answer the question directly, the sign should look no different than they are today. And if they look different than they do today, then they can be enforced against. But what we're enforcing against is state law, not something that's very specific in local law that we can point to that says, you're violating 7.130 subsection 11. Instead, what we would be doing is we'd be asking them a question. For instance, do you have data to demonstrate that your signs are only viewable by adults up to 71.2% and if you don't have that data, then we're gonna cite you. So that's kind of the short answer to your question is the signs that the actual billboards and the signs outside should look no different from a content perspective than they do today. Yeah, and I think that's important. And I respect the interest of both my colleague and potentially members of the public who think that we need to replicate pieces of state law in our local ordinances, you know, that's, I get that. I wouldn't stand in the way of that, but this is now that we have a state regulatory framework, there is clear rules about this and other pieces around advertising and having ours sync up with them makes perfect sense and whether we need to have something additional to them, if it's not being addressed by the state regulations, that's what I think would be helpful, the most helpful in our ordinance. And I'm not sure that there's anything that we're looking to do that be more restrictive than the state. We just wanna, it sounds like the interest is reinforcing what we've always talked about. But additionally, it sounds, let's think about this from an enforcement standpoint. To me, it strikes me as a lot easier to just say that's in violation of a county code. It's cut and dry and it's clear than to have to create an additional step for county staff that already doesn't have any, basically enforcement staff really dedicated this, at least I constantly hear there isn't enough, to say, can you demonstrate that you're not in violation of state law? That's a, in essence, it's an additional proactive step that seems unnecessary if we had a code that was already addressing it. So I just wanna, while maybe the end result is ultimately the same, the mechanism to get there isn't, and is there an advantage or any advantage to the county having an additional tool to a violation of a county ordinance on top of what the state regs are for anything else that we happen to do moving forward on renewal licenses or whatever, maybe from a local standpoint. So our county code actually has a catch-all for enforcement of all aspects of Mount Cursa, the state law. So that is what we will cite people for if there's an advertising violation of any kind. And we've utilized that catch-all to increase the compliance aspects that we're currently looking at for all licenses, not just retailers within the county. Those compliance inspections are occurring regularly right now and our code enforcement staff, in addition to public input, have been very active in enforcement. We've received three complaints total for advertising since I've been here in December. Two of the complaints were from community prevention partners and all three of the enforcement actions that took place based on those complaints were done before either of the complaints from community prevention partners were issued. So we have been proactive and we have been issuing enforcement or utilizing our enforcement tools as appropriately and as quickly as possible. And if state law were to change and to weaken on this component, say they allowed cartoon advertising, but we're now adhering to state law, how is that? So we would, yeah, we would have a lot of lead time on that because they have to go through the regulatory process of the state. We would be aware of what they were doing. He has the time, Sam has the timelines on it, but we would have plenty of time to bring your board something that put in place something more restrictive. One of the tensions that we're trying to deal with here and it actually kind of dovetails with a later item on your agenda today is the redundancy of putting state law in the county code. And one of the problems with doing that is that time goes by, the laws change. We don't keep up with things and then we have conflicts going on between the state law and the county code. The tension on the other side is what you're bringing up, Supervisor, of trying to be very specific with what the community standards are with regard to this and not having to force someone to go to state law to look it up, to figure it out. Your board is the one who's gonna have to assess through those things, but both of the points that you're raising are well taken. I've had an additional question. So we have dispensaries that are now going through the renewal process. And so this is one of the things that you look at. We have an annual renewal process for dispensary license and we can deny for violations of signage right then and there, right? That's an annual process that we have going on. Thank you. Have we had any problems with signage and any of the renewal processes so far? We had three violations of signage requirements last year that were remedied immediately by all of the current licensees. And we've had one violation of signage from a non-retail facility that was also remedied immediately, but there were notice of violations issued. So there's permanent record of those and we keep them in our paper files and within our electronic reporting system. Okay, thank you. Supervisor McPherson? I agree with the concern. I mean, this whole subject matter that we've been talking about for three years, one of the key phrases is much local control as we can have. And I think if we can strengthen that, it seems it's been suggested by Supervisor Friend. I'd be supportive of that, but like you said, I want to get it intermixed with state so much that it's just confusing. Every time they change something, we have to react. I'm just trying to figure out the best avenue to do that, to make a change now or suggest something. I'm not sure, but Supervisor Friend might have in mind, but I'm just concerned about that. Are you asking that question? Yes. The answer to that question is you would be to ask staff to come back at your next board meeting with some revisions to the advertising language, taking into account what your board has mentioned with regard to signage. If you come up with a motion that is voted on successfully that includes revision of the signage restrictions, then we would bring this whole package back on the 26th and ask and recommend language at that time. Supervisor Caput. You've answered almost all the questions that I had. The concern I had was the future of the state changing this or becoming more accepting of bigger signs and all that. Kind of like, we're only talking about dispensaries and we're not talking about cultivators and out in the field. We're talking about all commercial cannabis businesses. I mean, there are different restrictions on state law that the state law has, but I mean, within this discussion, we're not just talking about retailers, we're talking about all commercial cannabis businesses. Okay, so a cultivator, let's say I'm driving by strawberry fields or whatever, and you've seen some of those signs where they have a couple of farmers standing out by a tractor and it's a big cutout. Is that allowed in state law? That would not. With cannabis. That would not be allowed if it's signed directly. There are separate signs for billboards, which we in the county only have two billboards, I believe, one on Highway 17 and one in the Watsonville area. But if somebody puts a big cannabis leaf up on a farm, that's gonna be enforced against. Yeah, that would not be allowed by state law and that would not be allowed within our county code. And to elaborate on changes to state law, the state has to follow the APA, the Administrative Procedures Act, where they issue the proposed regulation. That regulation is out for a 45 day public comment period at which time they address the public comments. Once it's finalized, it goes to the Office of OAL, where the Office of Administrative Law has 30 days to review and publicize it. Now, in that time period, I think the county moves much more nimbly and can address any potential changes rapidly that way. And there's no Assembly Bill or Senate Bill, kind of like AB 286 that is changing one thing, but there's not something pending that would change the state law for advertising. Nothing at this time. At this time. And then the only other thing would be, what is Monterey, San Benito and Santa Clara doing? Are they conforming just the state law? Are we the only one that has more restrictive rules? For Monterey and San Benito, I believe they are utilizing state law. I can't speak to the other regulatory bodies. Okay. Okay. Chair. Just a clarification question. Mr. Heath mentioned all cannabis business, but this regulation is for the cannabis dispensary license. That's what we're talking about today. That's correct. That's correct. It's correct that we're talking about cannabis business. The discussion got a little broader because we were discussing a lot of hypotheticals about generally advertising versus signage and the like. So it's straight a little bit. And I appreciate that. And just to be clear, adding in, let's say keeping what we have in our regulations now or adding the language from the state regulations does not make our ordinance stronger. It just makes it more clear, right? I mean, there's nothing. There's no additional power to adding that language in there other than making it as clear as possible. That's a fair statement. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Now we'll open it up to the public. Any members of the public like to speak to us about this item, please come forward. Good afternoon. Colleo Mutawakia with kind peoples. I missed you all. It's been far too long. I'll read a prepared statement I have here. I do thank and commend the pragmatism from our board and the cannabis license office as well as the administrative office and the CPP who's here today. After more than five years of operation, I'm still proud to be in business and I'm proud of this board for taking strong measures to both allow and sensibly regulate the cannabis dispensaries. I strongly support local control when possible, but we also must remember that we are now operating in a statewide marketplace and we want consistency with our competition. In order to have an equal playing field, we must leverage new California law and state enforcement dollars wherever possible. The state has more funding and economies of scale to regulate our industry. That's relieving strain at the local level and while dispensaries are imperfect, we have very little beyond the state regulations that require an additional layer of local complexity. Perhaps signage is one of them, I would not argue with that. Thank you, Supervisors Coonerty and Leopold for the letter supporting state excise tax reduction. The arguments to do so are extremely relevant for both reducing taxes at the state and the local level right here at home. For nearly five years, county retailers have funded the formation of the cannabis licensing department and the ability to tax and regulate the local supply chain. The Santa Cruz County retail market has drastically shifted since the taxes inception. State licenses alone are $100,000 annually for our single location in the county. County tax collections are roughly flat since 2015. The legal market is not winning, it is not growing. State and local taxes are crushing our industry. Let's please look to our communities that do have it right. In Monterey, retailers pay 4% of gross sales. Oakland slashed their tax rate in half last year. Santa Rosa's retail tax rate is 3%. And in San Francisco, the tax will not take effect at all until 2021 to give the industry the opportunity to grow. And now, more challenges lie ahead. It's five more retailers open in the city of Santa Cruz and Capitola, that's in total, while new state law allows any out of county business to make customer deliveries into Santa Cruz. So thank you for the continued support to modernize our ordinance, but 2019 is the year that an oversaturation of retailers and over taxation will have irreversible effects on our local businesses that cannot be undone. So please consider taking action soon with respect to taxation, as the city of Santa Cruz will be meeting next month to reevaluate their tax strategies. So in summary, I think we have a very reasonable and cohesive ordinance supporting the highest per capita density of retailers in the state here in Santa Cruz. And while I'm grateful for the progress we've made, we must consider taxation and carefully consider any future changes that may further disrupt the ecosystem of our strong local marketplace. Thank you. Good morning, thank you very much. My name is Janice Shankman and I'm here representing Community Prevention Partners as was discussed before. So thanks to the letter, a lot of the points were already brought up, but just to kind of reinforce a couple of things. So Community Prevention Partners has continuously advised the inclusion of local advertising restrictions to prevent a proliferation of cannabis advertising to youth who research show are especially susceptible to marketing. At a February 28th CPP Cannabis Initiative meeting, members met and discussed what is working and what is not working with cannabis advertising with the Cannabis Licensing Average Manager there. Given the increase in state advertising regulations that disallows cannabis design in any manner likely to be appealing to minors or anyone under 21 years of age with specific examples for I believe the first time including toys, inflatables, movie characters and cartoons and that there is an age threshold for the audience of 71.6% over 21. The group assessed that there was a lot of protections at the state level, but specifically in that current iteration of state advertising regulations and we kind of left it off of the caveat that this alignment was something that we felt comfortable with as long as the strong state advertising language was specifically named and protected in our ordinance. For instance, one possibility we're wondering about is through reference to the state code with the date. So having some sort of prevention of cannabis advertising to youth embedded in local policy is very important in Community Prevention Partners based on past experience and research on alcohol and tobacco advertising's impact on youth. Really a lot of that research has linked to that influence on behavior and we feel like there's a really rich opportunity here to do something different and we know that with alcohol there was a lot of lobbying pressures that lessened those restrictions of the state over time. And additionally, local control has really been a core tenant of youth substance use prevention to allow greater monitoring and enforcement. Although I know that that's something being worked on by the licensing office. And one other area where we mentioned that we would diverge from the state slightly is having a clear ban on cannabis advertising billboards. As mentioned, there's two billboards but we wanna be diligent to prevent cannabis advertising from being prominently visible to youth at both gateways of our community and Highway 17 and in South County. And then I don't know if this is the item for now and we haven't had an opportunity to talk about it specifically but I know something about the equity program is coming up and that is something that individual members have discussed previously and equity is one of our core kind of guiding principles that we do this coalition work for. So yes, thank you for your time. Hi, Jim Coffes from Ben Lomond Green Trade. I wanna thank cannabis licensing office for staying on top of these regulations and as Supervisor Friend said, it is evolutionary. It's happening at warp speed at the state and we need to make sure that we keep up and so I appreciate the attention to the trying to clarify the language and the local ordinance. Green Trade is also a partner of the Community Prevention Partners Group and we are very careful to align ourselves with their positions and we do so in this regard with regards to advertising. We think it is important that there be local control over what kinds of advertisements cannabis businesses can have and we think it's important that that language be reflected in the ordinance. Finally, I think because this much of the changes to this ordinance dealt with clarity, one thing that is a personal peeve of mine and I was appreciated to hear Sam speak to it obliquely which is that this ordinance is really about retail sales and the use of the word dispensary is kind of arcane and perhaps at the next iteration you could take a look at bringing this language into the 2020 era. So thank you. Hi, Pat Malo. First I wanna thank all you guys for dealing with this issue yet again and I wanna thank Sam for bringing these issues up to you guys and I think that there's, although it might be painful, there's a lot of tweaks we need to make, a lot of large changes we might need to make and so this start with kind of aligning with the state on these issues, I think is a really good idea, mostly because we want our local businesses to be able to survive and to not put them at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the state, I think is essential. Also as a CPP member, I do agree in the discussion that we had at the last meeting was that CPP saw this parity issue as that we need to let local businesses compete equally but that also we wanted to retain the local control and if we thought at this moment that the state had adequate prevention measures in that we would wanna lock that into our local ordinance by mirroring the state just in case the state changes things and the 45 day window is not enough time for us to act that we still have stuff in place and I thought that was a good compromise position with still accomplishing that parity at state level that we need and just in general, I think that all of you are becoming aware that for this moment in time at cannabis is very critical if we wanna retain local businesses, if we wanna retain local ownership of those businesses and most importantly, if we wanna give this experiment called regulated cannabis a chance to out-compete the traditional unregulated system, I think that we really need to be light on our feet and so thank you, Sam, for bringing this stuff up. I think there's a lot of other changes in 7.128 we need to get to but this is a good first start so thank you guys. My name is Valerie Corell and I wanna echo what you've heard here from my constituents, my partners in this process and when we all began in a vacuum many decades ago and it often leads to revisiting legislation, we didn't really know what that broad stroke would be so we made something incredible happen in this community and it's difficult to look back on revisiting and revisiting the same things but social change requires that because in the beginning it is not the way that people think it is not normal but now this is a new kind of normalcy so we have to look at it and revisit it and we have to open the possibilities for us to have input and to look at the way that it's coming about. The competition is fierce and it's not only the alcohol lobbyists that we're facing, we're facing investors with huge money that, I mean it's called Canadian money I have no idea really what that means if you follow the money though, as I've been doing it's some of the people who've come to ask to invest in WAM which is not possible to do, the money is often linked to pharmaceutical companies, it's linked to alcohol, it's linked to tobacco in the various ways but it has these links and these ties and that is really who we're up against so if we cannot afford to pay the taxes and if we cannot afford the fees, if we cannot afford to stay in business as small business people in this community I'm afraid that you'll be looking at partners in your own community that are not really your neighbors and really don't have the best interest of this town and this county and our small community at heart so I know it's a pain and we'll probably be back here asking you for a lot more things and really appreciate that you've given us the time and also the input because I know that it's a lot of work. You can always ask me for anything that way that I can help but you guys are more adept at that lawmaking stuff so I'll just keep pushing. Thanks so much, thanks. Thanks, Sam. So that concludes public comment, I'll bring it back to the board for action. Real quick, I'll try to construct a motion here and you can let me know if it meets the needs so I'll move the recommended actions with additional direction for staff to return at our next board meeting with modifications that include a ban on billboard advertising and maintaining local control over signage restrictions as exists in the current ordinance. I'll second that. Okay, we got a motion, a second? Supervisor Gippel. I support the motion but I just wanted to ask a question. Maybe council knows, there are restrictions I think in place over tobacco advertising with cartoon characters and everything else. Are you aware of that? I'm mildly aware of it. Yeah, I don't think that's reflected in our tobacco ordinance, right? I mean, so I make that point because we are just trying to highlight these issues but we aren't actually making the ordinance stronger. We're just saying these are important enough to us and I understand the value in that. Banning it from billboards, I think that's a great idea and I appreciate that we're that over time we're gonna be looking at our ordinances just like we have another item on here about something non-cannabis related but also looking at our ordinances. It's healthy for us to take a look at things every once in a while and see whether they match up with state law, whether there are items that were important at one time but no longer as important or things that we wanna highlight as part of our own ordinances. But I think that giving the changing nature of some regulations around this particular area around cannabis, these will come back to us on a regular basis and I think you've done an admirable job of trying to give us a cleanup ordinance and we're giving you direction that recognizes that effort and just trying to highlight those things that are important. Can I ask for clarification on the motion? The motion was to accept staff recommendation which would be to adopt this ordinance on first read. And that means it will be on for March 26th as full adoption. Are you wanting us to come back with another revision to that one section or are you asking us to, are you basically wanting us to postpone adoption of the complete package until we line it up with the signage regulations that you're talking about? So let me say this, the current ordinance if I didn't modify it already has the signage components. So if it was stricken from what you're, not what you're recommending, but what's in the staff recommendation, to me I don't consider that a change that requires another reading of the ordinance that's maintaining the ordinance as is. So to me the only addition would be the ban on billboard advertising. I have to make some substantive changes that would require re-noticing of those provisions. So the two options that we have are either to accept staff recommendation completely today with the additional direction that your board wants us to come back on the 26th with an additional ordinance. And that additional ordinance would just address this one item or number two. Okay, you've got it. I understand. So then it wouldn't be the motion would be incorrect to make it for the recommended action. Okay. Okay, so then help guide me through what I'm trying to do. Okay. What, what, what, I think, I... Which is, I mean, everybody in the room knows what I'm trying to do. So we're, we want to hear this and I guess anew on the 26th, correct? With these, with the direction that the board's making on these two elements. Yeah, if I understand what you're asking us to do is the motion would be to not accept staff's recommendation with regard to the ordinance. Because remember, there are two things here. We're also asking you to notice a public hearing for, so we'll get to that in a second. But we request that you, that you adopt staff's recommendation to set the public hearing on the unified fee schedule changes for March 26. But with regard to the ordinance, have staff return to address the, not the advertising, but the signage billboard issue that your board has discussed today? Okay, so, so I believe my motion then will be to accept items three and four of the recommended actions. And to come back on March 26th with changes to item one, which is the attached ordinance in regards to signage and the ban on billboards and to schedule the first reading of that ordinance on March 26th. Item one is also chapter 7.130. Other recommended actions. I think I understand it correctly. So we're accepting some, but not. Yeah, what you're accepting today is just the staff recommendation on setting the public hearing for the unified fee schedule changes on March 26th. And essentially you're asking us to return with Exhibit A. Again, you're not adopting Exhibit A today, the ordinance. You're asking us to come back with some changes to I think it's packet page 45. I believe it is that references the signage regulations. So it's a point of clarification. I'll withdraw my original motion. Okay. And I would like to introduce a substitute motion to that original motion that has item, accepts the recommended actions of item three and four, which is the schedule of public hearing on the unified fee schedule, as well as directing the clerk of when to schedule set or the notice set. And two on items one and two, which is regarding chapter 1.7.130, to come back on March 26th with the inclusion of the billboard ban and the signage changes that we discussed today. I'm okay with the second on that and real quick. So there's more than just advertising in chapter 7.130, right? We're gonna conform with the employee's consumption of cannabis. Yes, that's right. We're gonna bring those changes back on March 26th, so your board can review them as one package. Sure. So not to comp... So we have a motion and a second. Motion by Friend, second by Caput. It seems to me that we have broad agreement on this advertising and that we have this very small billboard issue that is essentially not existent. So do we have to hold up everything in order to fix this billboard and signage issue, which is the tail wagging the dog? That was the option two that I didn't get to because Supervisor Friend understood, but the option two would be to go ahead and accept staff recommendation to change the ordinance, but instruct us to come back with an additional new ordinance on the 26th that just addresses that one small item on the billboard and advertising. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it's... You have to do it. You have to add the billboard piece separately because it wasn't noticed and so it has to... So it'll have to... I get it, but wouldn't that, that would get us through the first reading of all the advertising piece and then we'd have a second ordinance coming now. Well remember, we're not actually making any changes to our sign ordinance, right? I mean, in the end, whatever version of the language, there's actually practically no change to our sign ordinance, so we aren't holding anything up for the two weeks before we hear this again in total. Okay, so we have a motion and we have a second. Let me just briefly state that I appreciate that what was brought to us today, I think we wanna make sure we should almost never have laws that put our local businesses at a disadvantage to businesses outside the county and so supporting our local businesses is crucial. And the second part is I really appreciate that staff is looking through these ordinances because we were on the forefront of trying to create laws and we're gonna need to tweak and improve and we shouldn't be making things in any realm, whether it's cannabis or for someone trying to install a hot water heater or for someone to put solar on the road, we shouldn't be making it more complicated than it needs to be. And so bringing us back the changes to simplify things should always be the inclination of our staff and I wanna thank you for bringing that to us today. So all those in favor, please say aye. Those opposed, that passes unanimously. We're now gonna hear item 10.2, which is to consider a proposed ordinance amending Santa Cruz County Code by adding 7.136 relating to cannabis equity and a schedule for final adoption on March 26, 2019 as outlined in the memorandum by Supervisor Leopold and myself. Chair, let me just present and first of all, I will acknowledge at the beginning that it's unusual to come up with something that's a late addition. The state issued their guidelines for this local grants program on Friday, March 1st. On Monday, March 4th, Ms. Corral sent me and I think all of us a email alerting us to this. On Tuesday, I reached out to Mr. Laforte to find out what it is we would need to do about this and at the time after reading SB 1294, it seemed like we didn't need an ordinance that we actually just needed a resolution. And that was not a crisis situation because resolution is a, we could do that on March 26, but in the abundance of caution, I asked Mr. Laforte to check that the Board of Cannabis Control to ensure because the application clearly states that you need to include your ordinance. They don't provide a phone number to figure out how you do, so Mr. Laforte had to be like everybody else and write an email. He received that email at 8.45 p.m. on Friday night, informing him that we needed to include an ordinance. And on Monday morning, I reached out to Mr. Heath at approximately 11 a.m. and between all the other things going on on Monday, we finally completed this with moments to spare. So this is not normal. And one might argue that the State Board of Cannabis Control did this to make it hard for more communities to have a local equity ordinance. There were only five jurisdictions that had a local equity ordinance as of last week. There's a couple more who are trying to get in. There are lots of communities who are not gonna be able to move as nimbly as we might be able to here today. This ordinance is something that we've discussed. Supervisor Coonerty brought it to our attention and we really didn't have a way in which to make this a reality. With this local grants program, we have an opportunity to get some money and there's $10 million worth of funds with no grants being less than $100,000 to be able to have a program to reach communities who have been disproportionately affected by the criminalization of cannabis and others who are offering compassionate services and when Ms. Corral made it of me aware of it, you know, Shia has been declared in court filings of the gold standard of cannabis distribution or something akin to that. And so to the extent that we might be able to attract some fund to fund our operation and to help out others who have been affected so we could reach this equity, it seemed worthwhile to bring that to the board for consideration. So I share that and Mr. Laforte played a, and Mr. Heath played a great role in assembling this quickly and they can answer technical questions on it, but hopefully we would get this money and be able to help out others in our community. Is there any questions from board members? I'll open it up to public comment. Hi Pat Malo, I'm so, so happy about this. I'm also pleasure to have served on the WAM board for a few years now and this is a really big deal and hopefully, you know, other groups in the community can get some of this money too. So I just want to say thank you so much. Good job. This is really quite extraordinary and it's actually something we've been waiting for for decades. I want to, the utilization of these grant moneys in a successful program could perhaps encourage not only other organizations in our community and throughout the state of California to employ more compassionate access and philanthropy toward people who are sick and dying and therefore financially disenfranchised. Again, this is our community on the cutting edge of service and really getting what cannabis, the legalization of it today of recreational use was built on the backs of people who are sick and dying and those are the people that are now forced into the black market because of high costs over taxation and the inability to access compassionate cannabis from people. So that's really one of the great problems that we're facing. I know this firsthand because I deal with these people and would otherwise be one myself if I didn't grow it. So thank you, appreciate your help. And I echo the appreciation that Valerie and Pat expressed and we'd like to make jokes about government time but I think that you demonstrated here that government can't work for the people and you did an extraordinary job and I appreciate it. I'd also like to point out that this is perhaps the first time that the board has taken an action that is less regulatory and more focused on economic development and that's something that I've been kind of begging you to do for several years now and I'm glad to see that we've kind of moved on that road. It's not over, this is a big first step but now we need to get applicants and proposals into the state and compete with Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland and Diego is looking to pass an ordinance today, Long Beach has one. So it will not be a slam dunk but I'm hopeful that we can make this work for the county. Thank you. Good morning, my name is Seth Smith. I'm a partner with Santa Cruz Veterans Alliance and a resident of Santa Cruz County. I'd like to thank the board, Supervisor Coonerty, Supervisor Leopold especially for bringing this issue forward. The equity grant program would be relatively significant assistance for some of the businesses here in Santa Cruz County and not just our own in WAM but as many of you know, Santa Cruz Veterans Alliance has maintained our compassionate care program since Prop 64 to effect last January. We were one of the only licensed groups in the state to do so primarily just because WAM has been still working on getting their doors open once they are, they'll be back on board with that. In the time being, we've been working very closely with the state to ensure that we were able to continue to do this. We've been audited by CDTFA several times. We even hit us up for back taxes for cannabis that we gave away for free to medical patients under Prop 215. We still pay cultivation tax on all the cannabis that we gave away for free at the state level. So with regard to letters of support, if you guys wouldn't mind also supporting SB 34 which would allow us the opportunity to recoup those taxes on the cannabis that we donate for free, that would be great as well. Also, other organizations like Big Pete's Treats which is a local Santa Cruz County manufacturer, one of the first manufacturing licenses awarded by the state has begun to recommit a portion of the products that they make to our compassion program as well. So they're not just the dispensaries but some of the local manufacturers here in Santa Cruz County who have been very committed to compassion since the beginning and are now finding their way back to it would potentially be able to benefit as well. So thank you very much for taking this on. We look forward to working with you on that. And if there's any questions about what a proposal might look like from an organization going to the state through the county, we'd be happy to help answer those questions. Thank you. Thank you. So that'll close public comment and I'll bring it back to the board for discussion and action. Mr. Vice President. Thank you, Chair. And thank you for bringing this item forward. I'm in support of the item. I do have some concerns about some of the language to ensure that we're actually accomplishing what we want. The eligibility criteria under 7.136070 seems exceedingly vague to me. And I feel like that the board has always wanted to advantage those that are actually giving things away as opposed to those that are selling things and a small percentage of what they do is give things away. But under this construct, while compassionate care is actually the only enumerated item, it would leave a significant amount of interpretation into the CLO about what would constitute somebody meeting the eligibility criteria here. So I wanted to see that in regards to the vets or in regards to WAM, which have a demonstrated history of giving, of doing compassionate care and obviously their business model is not focused on monetization, but rather on compassionate care. Why we're not defining as a percentage of business or something more specific that would ensure that these, that the only people that are actually really eligible for this are people that this is what they're doing within our community, and not those that are in essence benefiting financially. Since you two drafted it, maybe you could answer that or if you... Yeah, I think a supervisor, Leopold, referenced the state didn't do us any favors on this by giving us a month and then a two week turnaround to get an ordinance on file. And what I view this as a very bare bones ordinance, it's not the kind of ordinance that we would typically bring to your board after months of well thought study and drafting. We were put in a position to put ourselves in eligibility for this grant program. But in order to do it, we had to get an ordinance on file. And what I would suggest, and I think that's what staff plans to do is come back to your board with changes to this ordinance that would put more metrics around the eligibility criteria and some other things in place to make less problematic that vague language that you're talking about and clean it up in some other areas as well. Thank you. I mean, that's my interest. I mean, my interest is that we want to advantage the compassionate care programs, not just people that are making a lot of money off the backs of patients. And currently the language doesn't do that. And so that would be how I would support it if I knew that it was coming back with that kind of language. Yeah, let me just say, so when I first brought up the equity ordinance, it actually had nothing in the context of our creation of other ordinances, it actually had nothing to do with compassionate care. It was about expanding opportunity to especially minority communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the criminalization and giving them now the opportunity to succeed in the commercial market. So, and the state seems to have married the two of those concepts. And so, which I think is great and that's the overall vision we want to go to, but I am interested in the businesses that could show that they've been, especially minority communities, that haven't had the same access and in fact suffered the negative consequences of criminalization and now want to participate in a legal market. That's an important value for this community as well. I think once we get a chance to sit down when it's not kind of a fire sale, like we will have an opportunity to think about all those things and bring you back kind of a more robust program than what is set forth here right now. But we recommend that if your board is interested in being eligible for these grants that you adopt the staff recommendation today, get this on the books to allow us to check the right box when those applications are submitted on April 1st. Absolutely. I'd like to compliment Supervisors Leopold and Coonerty for bringing this to us and thank the staff for its quick criteria in getting this together. How long did, if we wanted to come back and review what has been discussed, how long would you like a lead time? It would be great to maybe have come back in three months or I don't know how long it might take. I'd hope we could come back sooner than that. My intention would be like 45 days, something like that. I'd like to set a date, a time specific and that you could come back within 45 days and whatever that next, that board meeting falls, however that falls. It would be your May 14th meeting. May 14th, thank you. If you accept that and I just want to thank, I think we have tremendous examples, an example here really, thanks to Valerie Corallen and WAM. I think this puts in great positions. We know how to do it and our VFW2 has also done, veterans have done so much for this too. I think we're gonna be in a great position to provide some compassionate services that are much needed in this area. So I appreciate board members, the staff and those who've led us by example. So we have, we can show them, this is how we should do it and it's how successful it's been. So I want to thank them. Motion? Yeah. So I'd be prepared to move the recommended actions, ask that our staff come back on at our May 14th meeting with more specific criteria, both around compassionate care and the inclusion of minorities or disproportionately affected communities Motion? We got a motion by Leopold and a second by Friend. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. So now, now we are moving on to item, formerly item 35, which was pulled by Supervisor McPherson to approve the release of the RFP, request for proposals for a transfer, recycling center operation services at the point of us to landfill and the Ben Lohman Transfer Station and direct public works to return on or before June 25th, 2019 with a recommendation for award of contract and take related actions as recommended by the deputy CAO and the director of public works. And so I think, Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, I think I have some comments that I do want to make that I know some folks from Valley Women's Club that has been operating these recycling centers up in the center of Valley. I'd like to hear from them first if we could and then move from there. Sounds great. So now we will open public comment. Thank you, Bruce. We want to hear the whole thing now. Good morning, I'm Nancy Macy. I live in Boulder Creek and I was among the Valley Women's Club members who helped found the very, very, very first recycling centers in the center, a drop off once a month in Boulder Creek in 1978. And I was honored to be founding director of the SLV Redemption Recycling Centers, a service of the Valley Women's Club in three locations in the San Lorenzo Valley. The job has been, was and has been an exciting challenge because everything was new, everything kept changing and it grew very fast. For a time we were proud to help the county in meeting its state required diversion goals by providing convenient round the clock drop off opportunities coupled with the chance for locals to cash in their CRV beverage containers. We were really grateful to all the markets who agreed to cash the script and hang on to it for a month and send us a monthly bill so we didn't have to have cash at the sites. What a benefit that has been. They've been doing it for 30 years. We were happy to accept when asked by the county to accept more materials because it met our own environmental goals. We were grateful when offered a contract to help with costs of handling and transporting those additional materials because they had low or negative value. We were excited to take on the challenge of operating the much larger recycling operations for the Ben Loma Transfer Station when the county asked us to do so. We were happy to hire more men and women to operate the sites providing training in both basic skills like operating a calculator and more advanced skills like operating a forklift making repairs and handling challenging materials using complex processing equipment from bailers to free on extraction systems. We were especially glad to provide jobs that became careers for many of our team of employees. Now I am retired. I'm honored and proud that the SLV Redemption Recycling Centers have continued to serve the community in three sites with 24 hour drop off. And I wanna honor the employees whose loyalty and dedication their willingness to whether cuts in hours when needed or being required to move from site to site their ability to perform the complex requirements of the CRSV system and handle and process dangerous materials while providing good service to the community. We are very proud of the monumental amount of materials that have been recycled, thousands and thousands of tons. And we are very proud that we have offered an extraordinary value to the county in providing the services required under our contract. I'm deeply saddened that our team members are facing the loss of their careers and that so many locals will be forced to travel to Santa Cruz or Capitola to redeem their bottles and cans if they can even get there. Thank you. Next speaker. Good afternoon, thanks for having us. My name's Matt Harris. I'm the current director of the SLV Redemption Recycling Centers. I'm here just to speak briefly about the citizenship of the San Lorenzo Valley. Once if we're not able to keep the CRV component in this particular contract coming up, there's roughly 20,000 people that will no longer be able to take their CRV and actually have it cashed. So there's gonna be a huge deficit up in North County and it's actually gonna fall squarely on Costco. They're the next defense line. Also to kind of harken back, I've been with the Valley Women's Club for 25 years. I started out at 25 years old at $5 an hour. The Valley Women's Club takes chance on people like me that have learning disabilities that are dyslexic. And it's really nice to be able to bring other like-minded people together, give them a skill, give them a place to work, and give them a voice in the community. And I really can't put too strong of an emphasis on that because before Nancy took me on board, I didn't really feel like I was worth much in the workplace because I didn't know how to spell very well or I couldn't add very well. So it was a great place for us to grow and we continue to reach out to folks like that that face the significant challenges like I did and still do and give them a voice and a place to work. So we understand that the state isn't gonna come to our rescue for the CRV, we know that. They're sitting on $320 million that I have desperately tried to reach through legislation, I helped write bills, I've done everything I could possibly do to try to get that money to come down to Santa Cruz County and I have failed. So I say this with the greatest humility, I do urge you all to revisit this and look at the impact that it will have once we close and once we do close, we will be gone. It took 25 years to build this company and it's gonna take a significant amount of time to take it apart. Thank you very much for your time and I really appreciate your consideration. Thank you. Thanks. All right, good afternoon, my name is Wendy Harris-Gewin. I am a resident of Felton and I'm also a board member for the board of directors of the Valley Women's Club which has been operating the recycling centers in Felton, Ben Lohman and Boulder Creek for 30 years. Our board has voted to bid on the new RFP but we're extremely pessimistic about the possibility of continued involvement with the RFP in its current form. Processing recyclables with a CRV or cash redemption is an integral part of the services that we bring people that brings people to our recycling centers. By providing the service, we incentivize people to bring us not only their CRV items but other recyclables that may have otherwise ended up in a landfill or were stumped on the side of our forest roads like we really too often already see. Due to the economics of the recycling market, the standalone CRV center is not currently a viable financial option. It's not a financially viable business model. Therefore, with the likely closing of our recycling centers, there will be no CRV operations anywhere in the San Lorenzo Valley after June 30th, reducing overall CRV redemption locations in Santa Cruz County by almost half from seven centers to four. The majority of those our centers serve our San Lorenzo Valley residents, redeeming their lawful CRV refund and dropping off their recyclables. Many of our residents are low income disabled and we are extremely concerned that these vulnerable members of our community will be unable to obtain the often crucial income they receive from CRV redemption. For many of these community members, getting to Santa Cruz, carrying bags of containers is an insurmountable barrier and loss of these recycling centers will have a drastic impact on their ability to provide for themselves. The Valley Women's Club remains dedicated to our mission of protecting and preserving our environment in the San Lorenzo Valley and beyond. We regret the potential loss of this partnership with the county that has allowed us to provide such an important service. We intend to continue to push for improvements to the current CRV system and to encourage our state legislators to provide new incentives, allowing in-state plastic glass and aluminum processing plants to improve recycling services beyond the CRV system. Hopefully there will be more opportunities in the future for the Valley Women's Club to collaborate with the county around this and other important issues. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning supervisors, Tim Bratt and Gray Bears. Just heard all that. And so we've been doing it for 30 years also with your as your partner at ChanteClear. If you threw a bullseye in the center of the county you'd land about 50 feet from our property. So we're strategically located to provide recycling services. Pound for pound Gray Bears takes in more material than either of the two other facilities in the county. And we do that through both curbside materials and large quantities. We, I think one advantage that centers have is source separation. You get the highest value for what people bring us but also for what you can't put in curbside, which is computers, TVs, right? Electronics, printers. Last year, this year we'll do 190,000 pounds of printers. You can't put those really realistically in a bin. Styrofoam is something that I know is championed by Supervisor Friend. A few years ago we were begged to take it on a grant actually with the Valley Women's Club. Originally we weren't able to put it into operation but we were with help from the community foundation. And this year we'll do 35,000 pounds of this material. Now just to visualize what this material is, it's almost a third of a mile, eight feet by eight feet cube of material that we will densify this year. It densifies it 90 to one. It doesn't biodegrade. It's 500 year life capacity lifespan. And it gets in the ocean really easily. Curbside, you can cram it in your curbside container and it spills out, it gets in the gutters and it goes in the ocean and fish eat it. Now it's in the food chain. It's one plastic that we're able to really provide a really great service for. That is in question now with this decision to defund gray bears. It's not a big grant, it's a critical grant. And I think that when you recognize the value of that in addition in that tonnage figure what's not shown in that recycling is things that we refurbish and resell to mostly predominantly to low income residents. And our thrift are 600 square feet, 150 tons of material goes through there. Very low cost to low income seniors and school age children. So I urge you to reconsider your decision on this or the staff decision and know that all of this work we do sends food out to 4,000 seniors a week in the county and a program also in meals and donated hours of 1,000 volunteers, $89,000 of service to make our programs work. Thanks a lot. Thank you. That concludes public comment. I'll bring it back to the board. President Mofferson. Thank you for allowing me to pull this from the agenda. And I want to thank in particular the Valley Women's Club which is in my district for helping Santa Cruz County meet its recycling goals for many, many years. And I want to thank Public Works through facing somewhat from realism and bringing this to the board and a lot has changed and the recycling world as we know and it's certainly not all for the good. The marketplace is really collapsed and the measure in strong measure because China has quit accepting plastics from the United States. We all know that we need to change our recycling programs to adjust to this new reality and recently along with supervisor friend, I supported a resolution to the state supporting the formation of a recycling commission to figure out some solutions. And I think the state could help us out and not put us in this predicament that we're in today but it is what it is. And we have to realize that for many years the Valley Women's Club has offered fantastic public service to the residents of the sentiments of Valley and Felton and Ben Lohman and Boulder Creek with some recycling centers and as well as Gray Bears who we really appreciate the amazing service that they have done and supporting the meals for seniors. Meanwhile, our Public Works Department which has helped to supplement these local operations for many years is already challenged by limited state and federal funding to address other facets of its duties particularly on roads and other priorities. And while this is an opportunity for realizing, to rethink these ideas, I think we do have, I do have a few concerns on how we're gonna try to solve them here. And they're really in three different segments and the first one is environmental. And I'm speaking particularly to the Santa Rosa Valley. Losing Felton and Boulder Creek drop off sites could lead to more illegal dumping and litter and we have discussed that at the board and tried to meet that challenge as best we can. But I'm afraid that this could even more, could cost even more to our county for abatement and code enforcement. So environmental is one of them. Economic, which has been mentioned already. We have several low income families in the valleys that rely on CRV. And if the county is no longer going to support that service, what are the options of these folks to obtain that? And what will happen to local retailers if the CRV goes away? I'm also worried about the people losing their jobs as was mentioned. If the current organizations do not receive the contracts that are proposed today. And data, we need some data about the amount of material recycled at the satellite sites because if those centers close, we'll have much more recycled material that to point of us to Ben Lohman. So I would like to, I'm gonna support moving ahead with this because our recycling centers are expiring and contracts are expiring on June 30th. And we have some purchasing guidelines that we must follow if we want to provide the services that we desire in the future. But I'd like to make three recommendations. And I've given the clerk a copy of this proposal. Number one, when a contract comes to the board for adoption, I'd like to see an analysis of the potential impacts to the environment of removing two recycling sites in the Santa Rosa Valley, Felton and Boulder Creek, as well as an analysis of the potential impact in the local community of losing CRV. Two, I'd also like data to be made available to the board about the tonnage of recycled materials collected at Felton, Boulder Creek and Chanticleer, which are the three sites that could close as a result of this request for proposal. And finally, number three, I'd also like the evaluation criteria for awarding the contract to include a scoring preference for proposals that agree to offer employment to all qualified displaced workers. The people that have worked at these sites are phenomenal. They have provided a tremendous public service. They love what they do. They see it as a public service and really having a really positive impact on protecting our environment. So with that direction, I would like to move adoption of, I'd like to move this recommendation with the additional directives that I have mentioned in this. Second. So you got a motion by McPherson and a second by Leopold. I get clarification on what you've given the clerk of the board, Supervisor McPherson. You have three, closing three of them. Just to restate, it's my understanding that you have a, move the staff recommendation. I understand, but he wrote what he said where it's slightly different. He said what you read into it was slightly different. I thought it was delivered to you. Okay, so it's actually three. The three satellite centers in the San Lorenzo Valley in the mid-county. Okay, thank you for clarification. And that's okay with the second. Okay, so we got a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson for adding these additional pieces on here. I think they're critically important. We, the community has led the county when it comes to recycling. The county has a great, robust program, but it was programs like Value Women's Club and Shana Clear who have been on the front end of this movement about recycle and reuse. And they've been great partners. And in addition to their work in terms of diverting material from our landfill, they also provide additional public benefit. I'm less familiar with Value Women's Club although I know their environmental work in the valley is extraordinary, but I know that Gray Bears provides critical resources to seniors who live in our county, throughout the county. And their model of recycle and reuse has been core to not only their environmental ethos, but their economic model to be able to support all the good work that's going on. I'm also concerned about the possibility of losing the recycling center at the Shana Clear site. This board has been supportive of lots of different things to address congestion in our community. But anybody knows, if you can't go to Shana Clear and now you have to drive down to South County to deliver your materials and much worse even from other parts of the county, you're committing a significant amount of time and adding to the congestion on our roads. And so a mid-county transfer site actually works out very well for many different people. I appreciate the work that the department has done to meet with Gray Bears to talk about the RFP to encourage creativity in the response to that RFP and their willingness to look at what we talked about as a holistic program rather than just these couple of different elements. We wanna be very careful as we make changes to these contracts because as was pointed out by the speakers, once you lose these kind of community-based programs, they don't just spring up on their own. It's taken years for these programs to be successful and to have the different pieces in there. So looking at these, both environmental impacts and other impacts to the community will be critically important. Lastly, should there be a change of vendors at any of these sites, trying to make sure that qualified workers who are already working there have positions with the new vendor is also important. I know that we included that as part of our look when we looked at our waste services contract. That's common and I think it's important to be able to assure that people who've made a lifelong commitment and that are qualified might be able to keep their jobs. So I strongly support this and I encourage my colleagues to join us. Any other comments? I'll just, I'll make it quick. Yeah, thank you. Shanta Claire is another, it's a term, that's the gray bears run that. And they're doing a great program. I think it's actually bringing in more money than it actually costs to operate, am I correct? It's bringing in, but I mean, it's not, how much is it? Sorry, Tim. Yeah, I ask, yeah. So are you referring to the recycling operation? We're currently, it's been a rough year and it was even rougher in 2008 when cardboard was even half of what it is now. We were all doing the same way, but today we're gonna lose probably somewhere in the vicinity north of about 90 to $100,000 in the recycling operation alone at Shanta Claire. Not included in the RFP is the two items I discussed earlier, electronics and styrofoam. And those are, they take up a lot of space, especially styrofoam. It's turned out that it's a whole thing on its own. And so it's been a cost center for us. It loses a lot in that equation. Okay. So. Let's see your point. Okay, what about the Valley, the Valley women's as far as? Sorry, it wasn't able to hear. Once we crunched our numbers, about 40,000 that we lost. And largely in part that's due to the new imposed tariffs China backing out, even some CRB components we're actually having to pay a bit for. So it's, you know, I have to kind of touch upon this that this is not a money making endeavor. We look at it as a nonprofit side, as long as we're self-sustaining with our partners, the County of Santa Cruz and others. You know, it's worth doing. So does that answer your question? Yes, that's fine. Thanks very much. I appreciate all the work you're doing. Thank you. So we have a motion and we have a second. I'll ask all those in favor. Please say aye. Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Thank you for coming out today and thank you for your patience in waiting to testify. I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. So now we're moving on to item number 10, which is to consider ordinance repealing chapter 4.12 of the Santa Cruz County Code and amending chapters 1.05, 2.16, 2.46, 2.22, 2.84, 4.16, 4.27, 4.28, 4.36, 4.40, 4.50, 4.60, 5.40, 5.41, 5.48 and 5.62 of the Santa Cruz County Code to correct typographic errors, address organizational issues, align the code with changes to state law and delete unnecessary materials to make additional miscellaneous changes as outlined in the memorandum of the County Council. And just for those who may be watching at home, this is a cleanup exercise we're doing to ensure that our County Code reflects current law and practices and Jason Heath is here to answer any questions that we might have. Good afternoon. Jason Heath of County Council's office. This is the sixth iteration of the County Code update ordinances. We are trying to remove superfluous language from the County Code and update it to comply with changes that have been made to state law and the like. This time we are asking for repeal of chapter 4.12, is that duplicate state law? And we are also asking for some miscellaneous changes to settlement authority. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Any questions? Just one quick question. I know that we've gotten rid of some pieces that are superfluous on the bag ordinance, plastic bag ordinance 5.48. We still have what people were charged for bags in the initial startup of the ordinance. I don't know if there was a reason or just to show that as a model or it's in 5.48.020. Give me just one second to get there. So I'm at 5.48.020, I'm at packet page 141. Can you direct me to where you are? Now the revised B, during the period of time starting on the date of the ordinance codified in this chapter takes effect. And continuing for one year thereafter. That language staff did not impart to me that they had any changes to the amount that we're charging for the bags. If you have, if your board is interested in changing the amount. No, that's not what I was suggesting. I apologize for not being clear. The what we did when we instituted an ordinance and what it says here is in that, in the first year we're only gonna charge 10 cents for someone needing a bag. And then after that we're gonna charge 25 cents. And so the question I had is why do we keep the first part in there? And my answer is that there's no good reason to do that. And so what I'll do is I will, in the seventh county code ordinance, which I know you're waiting patiently for, I will include that. Okay, I just noticed that when I'm reading it out, I'm fascinated by reading all these ordinances. Thank you. That makes one of us. Yeah. So, okay. Some of us are wonks. Are there any public comments on this? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the board. I would move the recommended actions. Motion by Leopold, second by Caput. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed, that passes unanimously. Moving on, we're on item number 10.1 to consider the final reappointment of Andy Schifrin to the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners as an out-large representative for a term to expire March 17th, 2023. I move approval. Got a motion by Leopold and a second by Friend. Any public comments? Seeing none, bring it back to the board. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, that passes unanimously. We'll now be moving into closed session. Will there be any reportable action? No. All right, thank you.