 Okay. Thank you. Good morning. I'd like to call you to order the meeting of the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District to order of November 16, the time being a little after 9.15, but we're ready to go now. Please call the roll. Dr. Bautorf, Dr. Chase, Dr. Kaufman-Gomez, Dr. Dutra, Dr. Hayden, Dr. Leopold, Dr. Lind, Dr. Matthews, Dr. McPherson, Dr. Rothwell, Dr. Rutkin, Ex-officio Director Alton Northcutt, Ex-officio Director Thomas. We have form. Thank you. We would like to announce that Carlos Lafverre is here to help those who need assistance in Spanish. Would you like to just say a few words, sir? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Directors, Buenos Dias, Carlos Landaberri, your interpreter. Para las personas que necesiten traducción al español, tenemos audífolos acá a su mano derecha. Préntalo, estamos en el canal cero. Gracias. Thank you. Thank you. Today's meeting is being broadcast by Community Television of Santa Cruz County. We appreciate that. Any comments from the Board of Directors on items not on the agenda? I might just say one myself. We had a meeting with the Regional Transportation Commission, which many of us were here till 10 o'clock last night, that were from Metro representatives discussing the Unified Corridor Study. No decisions were made. They were not expected to be made. The RTC meets again December 6th, and they will probably make a decision on the Unified Corridor Study, which is January 17th. But that was a long haul, and during that discussion or the period, and it was a long one, of course, we had a lot of public members. This place was full. We were here last night in the Watsonville Council chamber, and there were a lot of people here. They were very interested. The need for Metro and the importance of Metro was stated over and over again, and Mike, I don't know if you or Trina might have something to say about that in general, but it is an important meeting. Our decision is going to be made by the Regional Transportation Commission, and you have any comments at all? We have an item on our agenda where they're going to have a brief report on our staff, and I think that would be the time to make some more comments about it. I agree. Okay. Yes, I would just like to take a moment to thank Angela, Gina, for such a wonderful little repass that was wonderful. We know why Alex is so successful all these years, but thank you for the special care that all of you afford me and my little go card over here. Very good. Thank you. Okay, yeah, I got a little ahead of myself. I know the CEO is going to have a little update on that as well. Any other comments from board members? I've seen none. Any comments from the members of the public for items that are not on the agenda? Here's Mr. Pinkhat, who was there with a lot of hats last night. Yeah, good morning. Brian Peoples with trail now. Yeah, that was a great night last night. We all stayed late and I'm not redoing my hat in description, but you notice I'm wearing the pink hat today because that's what this is all about. Moving us forward with a plan, teamwork and fixing the roads and making Metro a value asset. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments from the public that are not on the for items not on the agenda? Okay. Labor organization communications. Any comments from labor? None from labor? Additional documentation on the existing agenda items. We have one addition, I believe, and we're going to pull one item. Is that correct? Yes, Mr. Chair. Thank you. So item 17, you have exhibit E, which are the pay tables, but you can disregard that because we're requesting to pull seven thing and bring it back to you. In December, we just want to take a little bit more time. We still have some managers that would like to meet with CPS and understand how they came to some of their conclusions. We've had some scheduling difficulties in getting that done. We think we can get that done before your next meeting in December. So we'd like to bring it back to you in December. So if you could pull 17, we would appreciate that. And then item 12, the budget report. If you look at your pages, you might have noticed some printing problems. Our printer copier continues to act up, and so we've given you some substitute pages just in case. It was hit and miss. It wasn't like it happened to everybody, but somewhere scattered in the packets, some of the pages didn't come out right, and we apologize for that. We are looking at replacing that copier, and hopefully that problem will be resolved in the future. And then that, I think that concludes, of course, as usual, we have the news clips for you, and I hope if you have time, I know I give you a lot of news clips that occur over the 30 days since your last meeting, but there's some really cool stuff in there. We try to keep up on the local stuff and some of the nationwide kind of things that are going on. Thank you. Mr. Rockin. I just want to say I appreciate getting those clippings. We really have to understand the context that we're working in, and those are really, really helpful for understanding what's going on with transit around the country. Thanks. Yeah, in that next meeting, the polled item will be December 14th at 9 a.m. in Scotts Valley, which we'll announce again at the end of the meeting. The next item is a consent calendar. Anybody have any comments on the consent agenda? Any comments from the public on the consent calendar? Move approval of the consent agenda. Moving seconded to approve the consent calendar. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Carries unanimously. Now we have a presentation of our Employee Longevity Awards. This is a special one. He's been right in the forefront of everything. Thomas Hiltner has been with us for 20 years, and we can't tell you how much we appreciate what you have done for this metro system. There's been some good times and some bad times, but you've seen us through every time, and we really do appreciate your input and your professionalism in getting the job done when we were able to do it, with sometimes some scarce resources. So thank you very much, Tom, and I'd like to have you come up. Would you like to present that to him? Sure. Is there a proctor? If you'd like to come up, Tom, and we'd love to have here a few comments from you. You're never one to be shy, I don't think, so please let us know what's on your mind. Okay, great. Thank you very much for the recognition. It has been a long road to hoe, as they say. So, yeah, 20 years ago today, we were back in Tennessee loading up the U-Haul truck to make the long cross-country trip to join the metro team. And after five days on the road, we arrived at our small apartment in Live Oak and unloaded the truck. And first thing was to go down to the local store and get one of those canned hams, you know, little triangle armor hams. That was our Thanksgiving dinner in 1998. But I was kind of amazed that there were no sidewalks in the neighborhood that we moved into in Live Oak, although I could cut across a field because there was still the remnants of an old chicken farm, and I could cut across a field and get down to Portola and catch the bus down there near 17th Ave. But anyway, yeah, like I said, a lot of sand through the hourglass since then. And in light of what happened last night, I have to rewrite my long speech that I was going to present today. So I will do that and make some comments in January when I come back. I'll be retiring at the end of December. And whereas there is usually some recognition in January, the month after, I'll save it for then. But let me conclude with a very short story. When I started in 98, there was this very interesting character in procurement. And we ended up palling around a little bit together because we were about the same age. He had just started the year before I did in 97. And we were out in lane four at Metro Center. And he was one of those types that took a lot of ownership in his position and what he did. And he put his hand up on the mirror, side of one of the buses, and he said, yeah, I just bought this bus. He said, I had to write back to a new flyer to get this mirror fixed because it wasn't right. And by God, that bus is still running down there on lane four. 1998 new flyer. Yeah, I'm afraid that's the story. I don't even remember what kind of car I was driving 20 years ago. But we got to think these, you know, the mechanics and the operators that keep these things running, you know, 800,000 miles and 20 years. It's amazing. You're doing a great job. So I'll talk to you again in January. Thank you very much. Very good. Thanks, Tom. Thank you. I'm not sure if the others are here. Robert Krause. 10 years. Okay, Andrew Carney. Nathaniel Brago. We got Nathaniel. Oh, good. Come on up. Nathaniel has been with us for 10 years. Welcome and make it have. You can make a few comments if you wish, please. Let's say 10 years is a long time. I'd never planned on being at this job for 10 years. And it just goes to show how rewarding it is at Paracruz and for bus drivers to see actually experience the hope that we give community to be able to travel from one place to another, get to their work. And in Paracruz case, many times, it's the only trip out they take. The only time a lot of these folks have a chance to get out and see the city that they live in. And it's usually to go to a doctor to get a life saving treatment. And I'm very proud of the work that I do. And I just want to say that these last couple of years have been very difficult, very difficult for the driver, everybody at Paracruz around Metro as a whole. But we have been severely understaffed at Paracruz. Our drivers is not uncommon for our drivers to work 10 plus hours every day to get these people to their life saving treatment, you know, and it's it's stressful. It's exhausting, physically and mentally. It's it's taxing. It's spiritually taxing. I think on a lot of drivers, because we are making choices every day on whether our lunch or our breaks are more important than getting these people to their doctor's appointments on time. It's not uncommon that we don't make it to their appointment. People who've been waiting for to see a specialist for two months, three months, they missed their appointment and they can't see the doctor, doctor won't see them. They have to wait in the more another three months before they can get another appointment. And it's very important for our community that we have this service and we continue to provide quality service that they can trust in. And like I said, I'm very proud of the work I do. And most drivers are. It's it's the reason why we stick around for such a long time. Because it's it's been a great company to work for. And it's it's it's great to see the smiles of the people. It's it's really the passengers. It's really about them. It's passengers like Norm Hagan. I love having them on my on my bus. Thank you. Yeah. Passengers like one Randy, the Poletano, she cooked, bakes me cookies whenever I pick her up. She'll give me some cookies. She's an amazing baker. And she inspires me with stories of when she was in her fifties, she could no longer run anymore. And that was her favorite pastime favorite favorite thing to do. So she took up surfing, you know, at in her fifties. That's amazing. And it's it's amazing. These experiences we have. And, and I'm very happy to do this job. And I want to be able to continue providing a service. And I want to be able to tell our passengers every time they get on our bus, that we will do everything we can to make their lives easier. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for your service. Thank you. I want to say a special thank you. Last week, Nathaniel managed to get me to meeting in Santa Cruz on time, despite the traffic, despite all the other difficulties, a special thank you and another 10 years, maybe. I'm hoping. I'm hoping. Do we have a certificate there? Um, I'm sorry, I was gonna apologize to Mr. Bregel. That's quite all right. Thank you so much for coming in on your day off. Really didn't think you were gonna make it. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, we'll get it to you. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you for excuse me. Ruben Valdez is not here. Okay, we will now move on to item. Oh, excuse me. Public comment on that item. Is that okay? I wanted to it's all good. Okay, I want to recognize Tom, you know, because I worked with him like Brian People's trail now. Eight years ago. And you know, I just want to recognize what a guy Tom is. You know, we worked together eight years ago, and most of the people in this room have felt the pain of of experiencing the the frustration of of dealing with transportation. And I can just say that Tom did a phenomenal job. Working with him is very technical. So I wanted to you know, recognize him. And then I want to also point out Ruben. Ruben takes a lot of guts to come up here on being recognized and expressing the needs of paratransit. And and we support that. So I just wanted to recognize that Ruben did that. And we thank that's a good thing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Chair. Chair may make a comment on this. Yes, I'm just an observation. It might be I'd like to see maybe a little bit of a bio. They've been there 10 years. But let us know because we we see the certificate. And that's all we see in the name. So we only know 10 years and a name and a certificate. Can you share with us a little bit about a bio like what did they do for for Metro? You know, what positions do they hold or that would be helpful for us to know a little bit more about depth of their experience with working with Metro. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, now we will go to item number 11 of the report by CEO Alex Clifford. Thank you, Mr. Chair, directors. Maybe just a last minute add on. I really appreciate the comments of Mr. Abrego. And you should know we we are struggling as we I think we talked about last month struggling with hiring drivers in the per transit area. You saw a presentation last month about some creative things that we're trying to do some advert advertising that we're doing. And I believe it's a local paper called Laganga, but really working hard to try to draw in applicants. It's a struggle. And, you know, usually you get so many applicants that make it finally through the process, but not all of them make it into, you know, through the training and and to become a full employee. And we're just going to keep working at it. But stories like you heard are unfortunately common right now, we'd like it not to be that common where our drivers are having to work such long hours in order to help us meet our federal mandate of providing that complimentary service. Once we get fully staffed, we'll be just fine. But we have to get fully staffed and how many how many do we need? How many in the per transit? Are we short right now, Daniel? For for short or wow, that's big. That is huge. And that leads to the stories that you heard. And I know that we have in our retreat, we were talking about the need to reach out wherever we can. If you if anybody in the general public are here knows if somebody that is looking for a job and they would might be interested in being a driver for Metro. Please let us know we're we're reaching out, have little cards to hand out. In fact, if we can and just let them know that we're in need of drivers. And I gave out all those cards and they actually took it to our city because we're trying to recruit as well. And they just thought that was an excellent idea as far as being creative and giving those little cards. And I handed the whole envelope to different people so we can support you that way and and appreciate that that innovative idea and many others that you're doing. So we're going to try everything. And then and of course, Don is watching out for all of the employment fair so that we attend all of those in the area and make sure that we're we're present there and looking for innovative ways to to advertise those positions. We have great benefits here. And and you know, I would put that out there before even the pay when you look at the kind of retirement and health benefits that we have here. And we just have to make sure that we communicate that accurately to the public. And I mean, it's people sometimes say, Gee, you're not making much more than McDonald's to come to work here. But McDonald's is not paying anywhere near the benefits that we pay for sure. We need to make those points. We need to get a couple of those testimonies that we heard like last last month with gentlemen 30 years. We can a little that maybe and help put that out. And I've shared that in people I've talked to and said, Hey, there are people saying, I never intended to stay. I put my kids through college and I'm here 30 years and it's family and those maybe that will help with recruitment. Absolutely. So moving on to several of the things that I have for you. I did mention Don, I was behind you. I was going to make a real quick comment. So Gary, Chief Operations Officer, just kind of an update on the recruitment process. Thank you everybody for helping us out with the cards and our HR department and Daniel Saragosa for the outreach that they've been getting from our last recruitment, which the class is now in session. There were seven, if I'm not mistaken, seven persons that we were able to interview and out of those two were selected. This most current one, recruitment with all of the added pieces with La Ganga and the cards and everything else, we're up to two weeks into the recruitment process and we're at 13 people that are interested in that applied for a pair of crews. So it's working and we're moving forward. I'm trying to get this resolved. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's really good news. So no excuses. We have a problem. We're trying to work hard to fix it. And I'll keep you informed on that. I did mention Don, Don Cremé. I think you all know Don as our Deputy HR Director. I just want to quickly announce that she has accepted the role of acting HR Director. As you know, for many, many months, since our prior HR Director left, Angela Akin has been performing double duty CFO and HR Director. And we just have so many things coming up here in the near future, including we just got notified by the FTA that our triennial review starts as early as early next year and all the way through August. Angela is always our lead in that. She does a fabulous job. I just had no choice but to pull Angela back into the CFO capacity. And Don was wonderful in stepping up and becoming our acting or interim HR Director. Just a side note, we've gone through one round of recruitment. We had some candidates that made it through to the final round, tried to get into negotiations with actually two of them and our negotiations broke down. And we're back out looking again for more candidates. If the board adopts the management compensation recommendations, which I just delayed until December, that that will surely help us be a little bit more competitive and maybe get a larger group of applicants. So that's a quick update on the HR. On TDA, I just want to let you know that Senator Frazier has asked that the TDA law be reviewed in the last year or so. That's the Transportation Development Act, by the way. And that provides us two resources of funding, STA and LTF funding that come to us that flow through the RTC. And Senator Frazier has indicated that in the last year, there's been several requests by agencies to have waivers of the fare box minimum that's required in TDA. And that has been disconcerting to him. He doesn't like running legislation to allow transit property A to be waived on their fare box recovery. And then transit property B comes in. They've got to run another piece of legislation. So basically what he said is maybe TDA needs to be looked at. Maybe it's just not right or things have changed since the adoption of the Transportation Development Act. And we need to go in and take a second look at that. So to that end, he has worked directly with the CTA, the California Transit Association, which I'm a member of and I'm on the executive team, to formulate a committee, a statewide committee. This is a relatively small committee representing large medium and small transit properties and regional transportation planning agencies slash MPOs metropolitan organizations. And I'm happy to report that I was notified this week that that I've been appointed to that committee. I volunteered for that because this is a big issue for us. This is about I think $7 million of our $50 million operating budget that flows to us through the TDA, both the LTF and the STA. We need to be engaged and interested in this because if the law changes and it goes the wrong way, we get hurt. So I wanted to be very involved in that and I'm fortunate to have been appointed and I'll keep you posted on that as things go along. Additionally, in the last week, the California Air Resources Board has issued their new revision of their regulation, their zero emissions regulation. They call it the ICT. And they really didn't make a lot of changes. We're sort of holding out sort of statewide through the CTA on two really important issues, one being benchmarking and very simplistically, it's a little more complicated than this, but very simplistically, we're looking for the carb board to say at a certain point three to five years out, they take a pause and they look at how zero emission technology has evolved. And is it evolving in the way in which they drafted the regulation to expect like bus range, for example, cost of vehicles, cost of electricity. And if things aren't going in the right direction, we want the California Air Resources Board to take action to say, well, maybe we need to revise the schedule of implementation because the technology is not evolving. They're still resisting that. They want to do it sort of at a staff level and they want to say, gee, if we see there's a problem, we'll take it to the board. We really don't like that approach. We really want to get it in the regulation. And then, of course, HVIP, the heavy duty vehicle vouchers that we will receive each time we take delivery of an electric vehicle, which is about 165,000 per vehicle today. Since an electric vehicle cost over 300,000 more than a conventional compressed natural gas vehicle, we need that money and that helps us. And as I've talked to you about before, we should be able to obtain that voucher all the way up to the delivery of the vehicle, irrespective of whether we do it before a particular mandate in the new regulation, which is tiered over the years, or we do it when we're mandated to do it. The CARB is still taking the precision and even in the revised version taking the position that only if you're an early adopter can you get the HVIP money. We think that's just extremely punitive, especially since this is a big measure being promoted by CARB to mandate that we buy very expensive buses. We're all on board to be fully electric by 2040, but you know, don't hit us in the stomach. Help us out and they can help us out because they have the power to do so to change that regulation and allow that money to be available. So they haven't moved on that. Those are still the two big outstanding issues. They're now saying that maybe they won't take the regulation in January. They may move it up to February, or I'm sorry, move it up to December. We'll see what happens. I'll keep you informed. Next this last week I spent time at the Calac Conference, had a real technology focus. I had an opportunity on the latter subject. I just spoke about to spend about three hours on a wood with a one-on-one with Tony Brazil, who's who's involved in this crafting of this regulation. And so I tugged on his ear for about three hours about the issues that are important to us at that conference. Learned a little bit about electric vehicle inspection, a lot of discussion about mobile technology, and quite a bit of discussion about procuring software or the art of procuring software. So it was a very good technology oriented conference. Last, but certainly not least, as you know from last month, we have this wonderful deal that we struck with the VTA over the Hill, Santa Clara VTA, to buy four retiring articulated buses for a dollar a piece and to basically have some other equipment up to our ten hybrid diesel electric vehicles delivered to us over the next several months for just the cost of decommissioning those. So what a great deal. Norea Fernandez, the CEO, has agreed that she'd like to come over the hill and participate in a joint press release with us. And right now we're targeting your next board meeting, which is in Scotts Valley. And what we'd like to do, if everything works out as planned, a lot of pressure on Eddie and Ciro because they got to get one articulated bus and one hybrid bus repainted in our scheme and ready to go for the backdrop. But if everything goes well at 8 a.m. at your next board meeting, we'll meet at Scotts Valley Transit Center. We'll have a press conference and talk about this wonderful partnership that we have on Highway 17 service with Santa Clara VTA and others. And then when that concludes, we expect that maybe to be about a half hour, we'll then go a short distance over to the Scotts Valley Council Chambers to convene your regular meeting. And Mr. Chair, that concludes my remarks. And I'm going to answer any questions. Mr. Rotkin, have we invited the other partners in the over the health service? Yes. So we have CalTrain, we have Amtrak, Angela, help me out. Capital quarter. Well, sir, the partners, capital corridors. Yeah. It's a really nice partnership. And those others kind of fund the joint partnership in various ways, smaller increments or other in kind kind of things. But our strongest funding partner is Santa Clara VTA, who in the past has provided buses. And as you may recall, relative to conversations over the last couple of years, we were hopeful that they could help us buy some replacement buses. And we were going to be in their measure and then we were not in their measure. And then they said if their measure passes, there'll be some money potentially in this bigger broader category. And that kind of went away. Then they were looking for other ways to help fund buses and they ran into their own structural deficit. And and so they kind of they creatively came up with this idea of as a part of their sort of having to reduce some of their services to address their structural deficit. They're eliminating some service on express routes and and transferring relatively low mileage, not very old buses to us. So not a bad ending. Yeah, not bad at all. Kaufman Gomez should know better on that. We're we're post election. And there were a lot of things that we were subject to that were in discussion. Can you sort of brief us on some of those things about where we are now with planning? I know that there are positions that are being held back that were subject to the proposition six failure. And I just think that maybe there's a little bit of information you can give us up to date on the kinds of change to your make that you've been holding back on. You want to do that now or when we get to 13. Yeah, if we if you want to wait till it comes up with that be okay. Either either sign with me. I just I know that that's a pretty big deal for us that we've held back quite a bit of what our decisions are about based off of that result. Good. Be happy to. Yes, I think we'll wait till I'm 13. 13. Okay. That's right in front of me. A couple of promotions. Okay, so fleet maintenance. We have Edward Cummins. And Edward has been promoted to zero. Do I have this right to lead mechanic facility? Slowly maintenance. Ain't a supervisor. Okay. And then we have Jose Regos. I hope I pronounced that right. Ramirez. Mechanic two. Okay. Just shortlist this month. I look forward to being able to announce, given the good news that Ciro gave us, maybe in another month or so, we can announce some new drivers for para crews. Thank you. That's an informational item. We'll move on to item number 12, to accept and file the year to date monthly report from Angela Aiken, who is this everything to everybody, our chief financial officer. Just CFO, which is great. All right. So our financials as soon as I can see it up there. All good news. There we go. All right. So the financials as of August 31st. First one is for the month of August, only just for the month. We still ended in a good spot with $50,000 to the good for a year to date for the months of July and August. We're about a million one. A lot of this has to do with the sales tax that I talked about last time. The other one that is kind of a negative force and will be for a little while till we get the drivers and other employees employed is our overtime for labor. So we're good on the passenger fairs right now. Sales tax is way over budget because of the way that the state is paying us, which is kind of a roller coaster ride right now. They still haven't ironed out how the money is coming in and how the money is being distributed. So we got a pretty big chunk this past month again. And that's why we're significantly over budget on our other revenues. Let's go to the next slide here. $42,000. That's additional interest and additional ad revenue than we had budgeted for the past two months. And as you can see there, $472,000 in two months more than we thought we were getting from the state. But this is going to ebb and flow over the next few months until the state figures out how they're going to be given the sales tax out. And the passenger fairs, that's highway 17. Onto our expenses. I'm pretty good there except for overtime. Overtime is the only one that is over budget. We have our consistency of our vacant positions are extended unpaid leaves and our lower worker comp insurance between those first three. So we're doing pretty good between those first three for being under budget. On the service side, we have some professional services or contracts that we have not entered into in the first two months of the fiscal year. Mobile materials and supplies, our fuel bills have been pretty good. So we're a little under budget there. And then we have less settlement costs. And we have some payments that we received from other people when they unfortunately run into our bus shelters and things like that. So that's where that money goes. As far as our transfers, our consistent transfers, this is our new slide that we're going to be putting in here that showing you when we move stuff into our reserves every month. We're a little behind right now. You're going to see this come and go every month. Next month we actually put it quite a bit in. But you're going to see this come and go. $19,000 is not a big swing right now. Next month you're going to see that we actually put more in. So we're on on track for putting money into our reserve. For the capital budget, we are 17% through the year. We have a budget of about 17 almost $18 million. We spent $300,000 so far. This is the type of money we've spent so far. This is the funding for the projects we've done. This is the projects that we've done so far. Those projects on the miscellaneous side are TVM pin pads that we had to replace because they were outdated. We have some acoustical panels that are going to be going up in Watsonville to dampen some of the noise that's out there. On the non-revenue vehicles, we have propane tow motor that we bought. And then on the construction related side, we have some metro-based pieces still out there, a mechanical platform that we had to build for the ops building. Cameras on buses and emergency generators that we're starting to incur the cost for. On the revenue vehicles, picture out buses, peri-cruise vans, and then we also have a repainting project that we're doing on that one. Our unemployment rate is significantly down from a year ago. It was 5.4 and this year it's 3.9. I will tell you I looked yesterday and it's 2.6. In Santa Clara County 2.6. Unemployment rates 2.6. Unemployment in Santa Cruz County. In Santa Clara County it's 2.2. At the lowest in history or something? Last I heard it was lowest since 1969. I was here in 1969 so it was quite the gang buster of people getting pretty good jobs back then. Gas lane per gallon is going up. Today it's about $3.45, $3.50 unless of course you go to Costco then it's significantly less. We are seeing that coming back down in the next couple months. Our monthly ridership, we're the same for fixed route and for our total ridership on the left hand side. For Cabrillo we are up by about 4,000 rides and for Highway 17 we're pretty steady. We are a little increased on the money piece but our ridership is pretty steady. Can you give us a brief comment on diesel fuel cost compared to how that's been going? You're looking at gasoline prices in the up the chart before the last item. I can put a chart on here that looks at diesel prices. I have not looked at them. I assume that they don't necessarily automatically track gasoline prices but maybe they do. I don't really know. They do track gasoline and they do track diesel. I just haven't put that chart out here but I can. Our contracts with our for the diesel for our buses, we have a contract so our our costs do not fluctuate up and down. This is just showing you the everyday customer would be paying but I'm happy to add another chart for diesel if that's something that would be helpful. If the cost of it generally tracks gasoline prices it's not necessarily necessary. Okay. Let me look and if it tracks the same I can bring that back. If it doesn't I'll bring a new chart. So moving on to where we think we are at the end of October. This is our preliminary look at our financials. The revenue we think we're going to be about a million six ahead operating expenses about a million five. So right now ending the month of October we think we're going to be about three million dollars to the good. Now there are a lot of things on the expense side that we have not started yet. We have some contracts that will probably be starting in January. So that million dollars will come down. We are hoping that we can fill the vacant positions that we have today. And that will bring some of that personnel expense down from the savings that we have today. But we're still in a really good spot and we're only two months in. So three million dollars and two months in that could fluctuate quite a bit in the next few months. Any questions from the board members? Thank you. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Do you have some comments from the public? Brian, people's from trail now. Unfortunately when I come to a public meeting I like to at least stand up and talk a little bit. And I won't bother you too much. But as an information on your unemployment rate, you know, 10,000 people, more than 10,000 people a day turn 65 right now. The baby boomers. And that's the trend we're in. So but as it relates to the financials for Metro, one of the things that we've been calling out for the RTC is to clarify whether measure D can be bonded. Our ins our sources have told us that legal counsel has told them that they can't go out for bond. And it's pretty clear because they would have had a plan. All they show is 17 million a year in their planning process. So we find that as an agency, your agency that depends on long term planning, we would think you would ask that question. Because we've been told that they can't go out for bond. That's all I got. Yeah. We may barrel. Is there somebody did you want to speak, sir? Hi, I'm Jack Carroll and I've had occasion to see a lot of financial presentations and I want to compliment your CFO. That one was really transparent and it really told you everything you need to give a good oversight. So well done. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else like to address us? Yes. Do I need a motion to accept the report? Oh, excuse me. Move you approve. Accept and file the report. And move the seconded. Accept the financial report for the month. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Sorted unanimously. Item number 13, an oral update on implications of prop six results. And before you start, I just want to thank each and every voter who voted no on proposition six because it helps us. I think it's about a at least at base of two and a half million or so and probably it could be a lot more if we can match some grants and so forth. But please, Mr. Emerson. Good morning, Chair, board members and particularly our new board member, Alta from Cabrillo. We appreciate you being part of the partnership now. I'm going to keep my words pretty short here. I actually want to leave it to Alex and you all to speak to this topic. I had prepared to talk about now that we've won, but per Alex, let's be a little let's be a little low key, let the votes get counted and make sure. So my change in my words, although it looks good, we are waiting to confirm the rejection of prop six by the California voters. 5446 at the moment, but more amazingly in Santa Cruz County, 7327, which tells you, which tells you a little bit about long term strategic funding planning. And we can get back to strategic planning another time. If this follows through and stays the way it is, Metro can now turn its full attention to continuing its efforts to stabilize and grow its fleet and services. As discussed in my report at the 1026 board meeting on the strategic plan process, once we confirm this, Metro would now like to continue its path on developing the strategic plan for the agency with another work session early in the new year, as we told you before. Topics which can now be considered in the context of financial, Metro's financial picture post prop six, including just what you asked about, filling positions, revisiting the fair structure issue, which as you remember, we started and then put on hold in March until we could have a clearer picture. So we'll be discussing where we go with that topic. A development of an ongoing strategy for improving Metro's bus service. In a planning department, we got a million great ideas we'd love to do, but it's got to be grounded in some reality. And lastly, continuing continued number one priority attention to replacing almost 60% of our fleet, which is obsolete. So that's the extent of my words, but I wanted to leave it to you all today on this topic. Mr. Clifford. I think Barrow just renamed the Planning Department, the Dreamers Department. We need those Dreamers, don't we? They help us set that vision for the future. Your CEO has had a lot of sleepless nights leading up to the vote. And I mean, this was, as you all know, we as a team, board and staff struggled through the last about three years trying to resolve a pretty major structural deficit worked very hard. And we got there and we got to a place where when we look out over the horizon down five years, we see balanced budgets. And we haven't been able to do that in a long time. And the threat of Prop 6 was that all of that balance act that we went through and that stabilization would have been disrupted and we would have had to spend a lot of time having those uncomfortable conversations again about how do we trim our service? What do we give up? How many fewer buses do we buy? And so I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to the voters across the state and especially in this county. Isn't that remarkable the number that Barrow read out? I like to think that what that means is that a whole lot of voters in this county helped offset a whole lot of voters down in Orange County, right? So job well done. And as Barrow indicated, I'm being a little conservative. I'm waiting for the victory dance until they formally announce things, I think, which are the middle of December. I think we're fine. But likewise, as Director Kaufman noted, we have some positions in our budget that were budgeted for a half year. We were not going to budget, we were not going to hire them in the beginning of the year. We wanted to be careful and wait until this, we saw the outcome of what happened. So we budgeted them for six months. In the event that Prop 6 failed, then we would hire them theoretically and start the hiring process around January and try to get them aboard as soon as possible. So my staff and HR, we know that we have a lot of needs and are chomping at the bit to get those out there. I've just said, just take a little bit of time. Let's get through that December final final and then we'll start it. And really through the holiday season, it's always not necessarily the best time to do recruitment. So we'll really ramp it up later part of December, early part of January. And I was just trying to recall the positions we had in the budget. And Angela will jump in if I miss any. But we have an additional mechanic that we really desperately need. So we're really happy about that. We have a bus operator that we'll be able to hire. We need that. We have a financial analyst to help us spread out some of the heavy load in the finance department. And then we have a marketing manager or a marketing director that will go out and hire. That one is really exciting for us because I don't know how long it's been since you had something like that in that function in this agency. It obviously predates be potentially by many years. But we have so much to do. Highway 17 has such great potential. We need somebody to focus on that and help us to attract riders out of their cars and into those buses. We just went through this process of kicking out almost all and hopefully by the end of the year all of the tech bus companies from our Scotts Valley Transit Center. We now have capacity. We have places for them to park. We need to go sell that capacity to park and the capacity on the buses. What a great opportunity. We need to figure out how can we get to not just the transit dependent but some of those folks that have a choice. They have one or two cars in their garage. They make a choice for any variety of reasons. Could be environmental reasons. Could be financial reasons. But they have a choice. They can be in the car. They can be on a bus because they live in the right proximity to a major trunk line that we run. How do we get to those people? We need somebody who's smart that way who can help us find those folks. We have an untold amount of revenue potential if we can go from a place where we take orders. That is, if you call us and say you want to advertise on our vehicle, we'll take your money to a place where we reach out and try to convince people that they should advertise on our buses. Proactively go out and do that. There's such potential there. So we look forward to having that marketing person aboard. But those, in my mind, those positions that I talked about, when you think about the importance of Prop 6 failing, the importance of that 2.5 million the chair talked about to this agency, as you all know, the biggest thing is the capital. It's those 60 buses that we need to replace. And each year, more buses come into the mix. And we just can't seem to keep up. And thankfully, with the survival of SB1, we'll have money. And we'll be able, you know, through your budget process annually, we'll be able to program SB1 money and Measure D money to go out and buy equipment, to use that maybe in some cases to rehabilitate a bus and give it another six years' life. So we push it out another six years. In other cases, we might lease some buses. And then we might just gotten by some buses. But we're always trying to leverage the money so that we can take a million and turn it into 4 million or 5 million. So multiple strategies, but it's nice that we have money to be able to engage in those multiple strategies. What a great place we're at. And thank you, again, to the voters for helping us to be a more stable agency. Did you have it? Did you want it? Oh, yes. How could I forget that? As you probably know, we're really struggling with the volume of work in the customer service area. We've been dealing with that through temps in hopes that SB-1 would survive now that it has. We'll be able to hire two additional CSRs full-time. Perfect. Terrific. Good. Mr. Ronken. It may be that at the RTC meeting last night, the crowd was not necessarily representative of the voters in the county. But I'd like to think, in some ways, they kind of were. They were divided on the issue of the evening in many ways. But there seemed to be almost a universal support for the transit district and for the services we provide. And it's one thing to sort of finally be stable and able to sort of slowly inch our way forward, filling in positions we were holding and so forth. But I think we need to be a little bit more, I won't use word aggressive, but more assertive in projecting a future for this agency. And we really could have a quantum leap in our ridership and the impact on the environment if we had additional financial resources. So I think the other thing that we need to begin looking at quite seriously is the possibility of a sales tax just for the transit district and the services that we provide. And I'm thinking about stuff at about the level of a quarter cents. We need to get some analysis of whether we have capacity to do that or whether that would require additional state legislation to allow us to do it. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't want to just be, we're not capriciously going after money. I'm just quite seriously thinking if we could provide university is that, I think, seven-minute service when you get close to campus from the buses coming from all the different directions. But throughout our district, if you wanted people in live oak and even apt us to come to Santa Cruz by bus, now that we're beginning to address the way we might get there quickly enough by changing the quarter situation, we'd still need buses to make that happen. We'd need to actually expand the number of drivers we have and those kinds of issues. And although we're in a good situation, we're stable and we're looking pretty good for the next four or five years, I'd like to think about us aggressively or assertively going after the resources necessary to really make public transit an inviting alternative. Students at UCSE are packed in like sardines standing. I take those buses, you know, not every day, but pretty regularly. And, you know, they're standing and they're crowded in there and stuff. If you want to have discretionary riders, they need a seat, you know, you're not going to put them on there standing up for a ride. We need to have bus stops where people can be out of the rain. I mean, we have lots of stops with no bus stops and the bus stops we have don't necessarily really provide adequate protection from the rain. So I could start our wish list is very extensive. So I really want to sort of look at the Prop 6 failure, the support for SB1 at the state level as something to encourage us to think really assertively about what we could do locally to bring in a new level of funding, not just by raising our fares, which will be an incremental fix. And, you know, we're not going to fix this problem with fare increases. No district in the country does that. So I think that's on our agenda. I think we need to begin investigating that possibility and go into the public and testing whether I'm being overly ambitious or whether that's something this community really would welcome. I mean, the biggest round of applause last night was when somebody said, and we could have free bus service. They were wrong in their analysis of what it would cost to do that. But believe me, the public loves the idea of public transit that's really available, frequent on the important routes and so forth. And I think we're capable of that. And I think this community will support that kind of effort. So I don't want to sort of just sit around on this issue. I think we should quite seriously investigate this possibility, start to move. It won't be happening in the next six weeks or something, but begin moving in that direction. And that's my view about what that sort of tells us about transit. Any other comments? Trina Coffman, Gomez. To concur and to expand on that as well, we'll see this everything open up in terms of the overall transit situation when this UCIS is completed or voted on to move forward on what kind of planning mechanism so that we can have a very cohesive transportation section, the entire component of it, regardless of whatever part of it you're on, whether you're the paratransit or the bus or the corridor itself. So it isn't just to go out. It's a much bigger picture to make sure that we have the consensus and hear from the community about what they're looking to do for our full transportation future. Beggin. Yes, I would like to concur with Mike's statements again, but also looking at the 71, 72, 75, 79, the local ones we have in Watsonville. Too many people, realistically, are sitting in there waiting in my little go-kart behind me. If it's more than 20 minutes to go home, forget it. I'll take my ride 35 minutes to get home. But there are people who can't use something like that. And they're sitting there. And it is a need of not that we don't have it, but the need of consistently more routes, run, excuse me, not routes. More frequency on the routes. Yeah, more frequency. You had the comments from Ms. Lind. Well, I know one of the things that is on the wish list is some of those routes, such as Sennlens Valley and things that have had to be cut or cut back. And one of the things that I know that we will be looking at, and Alex has shared, is where we can restore those. Because I know in Scottsville we lost many of them. And understandably, there were greater needs elsewhere. But those are concerns that I hear such as parents saying that there's not a bus route to the school and the high school and things like that. And I also know that a lot of students weren't taking use of that. So there was reasons for them to be cut. But I know in the future looking at where there are routes, especially with UCSA, locating up, there's more interest in from the UCSA employees working up there, having some availability and more of them interested. And so we may be reevaluating some areas that in the past there wasn't the same ridership. And might there be a little bit better opportunity now with some of the companies and re-establishing in Scottsville and some of them such as UCSC and the dovetail genomics. I think it is. It also just opened with about 400 employees up in that enterprise center. So those are some areas. And I know centerans of Valley 2 that it'll be an opportunity to at least look at that as we start recovering and seeing if there's other opportunities for those areas as well. Any comments from the public? This is a surprise. I don't know if you're going to be talking to the same thing on number 15 as well. But go ahead, Mr. Peebles. This is Brian Peoples from Trail Now. Notice I have my green hat on. There you go. First of all, we supported Prop 6. Didn't really put a great effort into it. But I really liked what Alex was saying. Phenomenal stuff you're doing. Great work with the Highway 17 strategy. I work from home for the most part. My office when I go in is in the Silicon Valley right at Moffitt Field, right? Google, Yahoo, all of them. I work for a high-tech company. And I actually have been in transportation for a while. 30 years ago, I helped set up the shuttles that go to high-tech companies, Ford Aerospace at the time, and some other companies to the Caltrans stations. And so I've been in that loop. So I understand the problem with getting people out of their cars and getting them a part of your program. So I think partnering with corporations over the hill to partner with them somehow, they got the whole buses in the Moffitt Field forum there. I know Alex probably knows. The other thing I want to mention is, you know, Measure D, we originally did not support it. And because too much money was for the train, of course. And Ruben, just so you know, we helped get the money from the train to Paratransit. They would not. They changed the language, went from 19% of the budget for Measure D for train, reduced it, and gave it to Paratransit. Then we came out strong and supported it in Measure D 1. Now, the interesting thing I've learned from Measure L is we were walking the precinct. This is a capitol measure. Yes, thank you. We were out walking it, and it's crazy. We would go up to an apartment building, and an app showed us which people are registered voters and which have already voted and who hasn't. So we wouldn't bother going to the people who aren't registered and aren't voted. So it's unbelievable how the technology is going to help you in the future with that. Now, having said that, I totally disagree about your tax measure. We won't support that. Maybe if you come out with your strategies, that might be a different situation, but hopefully we would find a reason to do it. Thank you for your time. Yes, sir. Hi, I'm Jack Carroll, and I'm the guy who suggested the free bus fare. And I got that number from the 2017 Ordered Financials. I asked for $10 million a year, and I have an operating revenue line here that's under $10 million, and it has a definition of operating revenues as passenger fares. So that's where the number came from. It wasn't a fiction. My point was just so you understand, we would lose about half our federal funding if we didn't have the riders paying something in the range of 20% of the costs of the ride. That's a federal mandate. So if we made free rides for people, we would lose much more money than $10 million. That's what was wrong with your number. OK. But you made a good point last night and today, too. Yeah, but thank you for the comment anyways. I mean, no, I'm not trying to be critical of you. I just do not be aware of how the federal funding, it's getting in the weeds a bit of how we actually get our money and how it works. Thank you for explaining that. Thank you, sir. The law of the month is in representing the bus operators and peritransit folks. You know, one of the, you put it very adequately, Mr. Rock, and we do need to go out to the community to see what potential for the sales tax or a bond measure that would fund, you know, our facilities or buses, because we need to provide better services that we do. I mean, we're losing ridership, slowly bleeding because the connectivity is not there. There's, you know, there once an hour, once every two, three hours. So the community is ripe for services. They want more service. They want to be able to take the bus. You want to get people, you know, that that have cars is we need to provide better services because they're not they're not going to get out their cars if we don't provide their services. If we're stuck in the highway, if we're stuck on Sol Cal, same time as you, they're not going to, we're not going to get them out their cars. Excellent point. Thank you. OK, yes. Mr. Clifford. Chair, maybe just some closing remarks, if you don't mind. You all had your Jared Walker presentation, which was really enlightening and helped us to understand the importance of higher frequency service, especially in more of your core area. We've talked a little bit about what about those folks that we sort of disenfranchised when we cut back service in some of the more rural areas. And director Lynn referred to that and maybe microtransit is something that that takes us down that road as opposed to restoring a fixed route. Barrow's team is looking at microtransit. Of course, that's a big thing these days where you look at sort of geofencing areas of your service region and then you provide an Uber-like on-demand type of a service that's becoming very popular. Across the nation, transit agencies are trying to figure out how do we stop the loss of ridership? What has changed? What is the population expecting of us? And so that's one of those concepts that's come up. We're not willing to just rush and dive on into that. We're really trying to be thoughtful about it. And we might even bring you some recommendations to consider sometime next year. But all of that is really something that I think we've positioned you for a discussion in, which is your strategic plan. You've started that. That one meeting wasn't the start and the end of it. We're going to take you through more of that process. And we hope from a staff perspective that when we get to the end of that process, many of the things that you just talked about will be laid out as priorities for the strategic priorities for this agency. And then hopefully we'll decide what should be the most important things to do sooner rather than later. So we're going to keep giving you that information and working through that strategic plan to get there. Finally, I wanted to know that bonding has come up twice. I just want to address that. Bonding makes a lot of good sense when you're building a facility, something that lasts 30 years or more. Bonding is a little bit more difficult to consider when you're buying a vehicle. Which is about a 12 or 14-year life. The folks that provide the funds for us to bond don't usually like short-term assets like that to bond against. That's not to say it isn't done. It's just not typically a real favorable way to go. We kind of take a hybrid approach. We started here with the three buses that we procured from Boston, the Paul Revere buses, in which we leased them. So kind of a similar approach except we went down the road of a lease to own. So at the end of the six or seven years, we will own that vehicle. The downside to bonding, the downside to leasing, is that is now a commitment of cash every year for that term of the bond or that term of the lease that we have to take off the top of our capital money. So we have a little bit less each time we do that with which to try to leverage and go buy more equipment. So it's just a business decision. Everything has pros and cons. It doesn't mean we won't do it, but we just need to think about it real carefully before we just jump right on into it. Under the circumstances, I feel very confident we've made the right decision. There's uncertainties involved and all, but it's a good decision that we've made. And I applaud the board for moving on as we have. Any other comments from the? Oh, excuse me. Ms. Norriske. Along those lines, I just wanted to chime in here. I know the students at Cabrillo are looking into those GO services. They were working with Zipcar because we're trying to increase the ridership of the Metro, but we want to help those students who are carpooling to be able to get through or who are using the bus. And they have to run an area in between classes. They were looking at the scooters and the Zipcar. So I do want you to know that that's a conversation that's happening at Cabrillo. And I appreciate that it's happening at Metro as well. I appreciate your input. I mean, with students in between classes or something, might have to just go one place and come back soon from another. It's a good point. Those are the types of things we'll really be looking into. And the one thing to note is that, although our overall ridership is dropping, we're gaining ridership both at UCSC and at Cabrillo. And that's students, I think, are committed to often for environmental reasons, but also just because they're in a situation where it saves them money to take the bus rather than owning all the costs of a car. I just want to say that even the investment in technology that this board has approved for you will give us a better picture coming this next year out or so on better methods of planning and approaches of where we're wanting to put the biggest bang for the buck on the dollars that we're investing to help with a lot of the situation of where do we need to put the money and invest the most once we start seeing some of those results from the technology that we've given you, the permission to go ahead and put on these buses. Thank you. I think we all know that every additional body we can put in a bus take off the roadways. It's very helpful, as we heard last night, and we hear regularly here as well. So very important that. Thank you. I think we'll move on to item number 14 now to accept a report on the articulated bus pilot project up at UCSC. We have three of those and have had for some time now. So how's that working, Mr. Barrow? It's working wonderfully. And before I start, I want to note that Larry Pagler is with us, and I'll invite him to say anything or please feel free to question him. Anyway, here to provide you an overview of the last year of the articulated bus pilot project and recommend that articulated buses be part of Metro's UCSC service permanently. As Metro is not in a financial position to provide additional trips to and from campus in terms of operators or vehicles, in August 2017 you authorize us to implement the articulated bus pilot for the winter and the spring quarters of that year. And then you followed it this last August to up the pilot project again for all of this year. Monitoring of the pilot project over the last two quarters of last year and the first quarter years have shown that the three articulated buses operated on the UCSC routes are effectively addressing bus overcrowding and the pass by of students waiting at bus stops by increasing metro capacity to the university at peak periods. Although these issues were completely eliminated last school year, as UCSC enrollment continues to increase, we're starting to see cases of pass bys again. I mean, we're not naive that that wasn't going to happen. But it told us what a clear, quick, implementable, relatively low cost solution is. You chase the seats. Metro staff has concluded that the pilot project has been successful and recommends that articulated buses become a permanent part of our service to UCSC. As the pilot projects has proven the value of articulated buses in meeting this service demand, Metro has taken steps, which I know you're all aware we just discussed it, to acquire four articulated buses from VTA, which allow Metro and UCSC to eliminate the cost of leasing the three vehicles from a third-party private leaser, like a rental car company. It is Metro's intention to use all four of these buses from VTA in the service to proactively address the growing student enrollment. So we know exactly where we want to put the fourth bus in. So we should be able to stay ahead of the curve on this issue. That completes my presentation. Again, Larry, if you had anything to say or you all wanted to speak to Larry. I just want to thank Larry so much for everything you've done. You know more about this than anybody. And we really do appreciate it. And it's because of your input and your statistical input that we were, hey, this is something we should do and we move forward. But we wouldn't have done it without you. So thank you, sir. I just wanted to add to that comment. If it weren't for Larry, UCSC would not be spending the money to pay for this operation. And he's the one that made that happen. And we owe him a lot. The people in the community owe him a lot for that, as well as the students and the staff at UCSC. It would be helpful for us to get an idea at some point of what our additional maintenance costs will be. We don't have maintenance facilities that were designed for our ticks, but we have a way to pull them halfway into the garage where they're being repaired. But are they going to be additional costs? I have no idea. If we start to have a significant three buses, we're not a big deal. But if we start to have more of them, are we going to have issues where we have to change our maintenance facility or something more dramatic? That would be worth not at today's meeting, necessarily. But that'd be useful information for us to get. It's a great question. And if you want to just take a moment, I can have Eddie explain how we're going to maintain those vehicles. Because you are absolutely correct. Our bus maintenance facility, which is not all that old, was not built for articulated buses. We made that decision. We weren't going to have articulated buses. And we were just wrong. And sometimes you don't do it right. Yeah. That will be additional maintenance costs. Those costs will be more or less for lift. We have to purchase additional lifts to lift the bus. There are some special tools that we will need also. So there will be additional costs. But I'll come back with a pricing list of the additional costs. But there'll be some major one-time capital costs. But then that should last for some time. And then it wouldn't be the same after we make those purchases of that equipment. I mean, that is correct. Yeah. So we'll find out in the future how it goes. But yeah, we're going to need some additional capital equipment to do the mechanical work on these. That is correct. Some of it at Crossover, some of the equipment currently have will Crossover. But we'll come back to you with an equipment list in that way to make sure that price would be costing, would you? Do you have a question? I have a, my question isn't going to be technical to the CIP for the buses themselves, but the volume. What are our statistics on how many students are on the bus? I don't know how many trips are taken to UCSC. And where are they originating from? I mean, I'm hearing it's a great success, but I don't know what numbers there are out there. And I think it would be helpful for the public to know a little bit more about that. OK, item 9.6, our quarterly report to you. The first of the two graphics gives an overview of the whole system. But the second graphic, which is probably 906A2, I'm stalling while I find it. You'll note that we have, there we go, it's a landscape item. And it's really good for examine. This is exactly what the planning department does all day sit around and hypothesize about this. But an important thing to remember about UCSC routes, unlike other routes, a 69 leaves Santa Cruz and it goes to Watsonville and that's a trip, one direction. A trip to UCSC runs two services, takes people up and brings them down on the same trip. So of course we have higher ridership, more on and off. But if you look at the top of the thing, the average riders are up to the 70 people per trip on the 15. That's where we have the articulated buses. But even on the regular size buses, we're averaging full loads, 40, 41. So that's the way to read that. And then of course you go, well, who all is riding it? Well, it's 90% people going to UCSC. Yes, as I've said before, a few people living in West Santa Cruz get the benefit of this amazing transit system that's on its way to a college. And then so you can see the weekends over to the side. The weekend loads from the school are still huge, but that's common sense. They got to get down the hill. So we do this quarterly for you and we can dig into any more detailed scenarios. They're obviously better analysis of their, well, first of all, another compliment to Larry. Larry. He's right behind him. There you go. Talk about your stuff. Each route. Just a couple quickly, one of the things I've been looking at is how our ridership across the county concentrates on those routes between downtown and the main campus. And looking at the month of October, which is our very busiest month of the entire year, we had a week, the second week of October, I believe, that averaged over 15 and a half thousand rides per day on Metro. Now, of course, that's one person making a trip up and back, but those are people on your buses. And because of the population demand trying to get to a, what Mike, 838 o'clock class, we get these deep concentrations of 40 or 50 people trying to board at one busy bus stop. Especially on Tuesday and Thursday. The regular bus is 40 seats, and this is 70, or can it get up to 80? Well, we often estimate you've got 60 to 70 when you're traveling across campus and everyone standing as close as they can. Also, keep in mind, some people are riding the buses, say, from the base of campus to the east side. Others are getting on and going to the other side. So you're getting many boardings throughout the trip. I'm interested in the artics being able to accommodate our growing summer session population. We didn't have them this last year. But again, more people trying to move at the same time. A big bus comes by. You can get, what do we estimate, 100, maybe 110 standing onto one trip. That's terrific. Leave it at that. One piece I wanted to note, we've enrollment growth. We're probably up about 300 students this year. But over the course of the school year, we have a huge number in fall. And it declines in winter and spring. So our first two quarters of operating the articulated buses were doing our lower enrollments. And I think at some point I estimated we have something like 1,600 more students now than we did last spring. It's not so much growth. It's the trend over time. But they all want to ride the bus. And we're hearing anecdotally that many of the university routes are, should I say, not full, but more full leaving the metro station downtown on their way to campus. And that may be indicative of more of our students and our staff and faculty riding from mid-county points or maybe San Lorenzo Valley down to get onto those UCSE routes. That's one of the interesting things we want to look into in the data. Just to sort of add to the comment about UCSE students, my goal is to see more of Watsonville students attend UCSE. And I want to be able to see how we can possibly track that. The opportunity of being able to get the transportation out there where we can get them off of one on the parking lot, I want to make sure that we have a very good retention rate for our students that are coming from Watsonville to be able to get to both campuses and not to have transportation be a barrier for that to happen. And it would be really nice to see a little bit more of where increases are for our population from Watsonville being able to attend both of the campuses and be relieved with getting that transportation as one of the hurdles. I offer that the university too is interested in getting more of our commuters from the Watsonville area to the campus by transit. And we actually watch the UCSE ridership route by route time of day, day of the week. So one of the routes we've watched closely is the 91X. How many people are using that to get across to the other end of the county and then ride up to the university? So we do watch that very closely. Great, thank you. I could just make a shameless plug for bus on shoulder. If bus on shoulder comes to be, that certainly could very well help with exactly that point. Almost a BRT like service to helpfully push them through that crazy congestion and get them to campus on time. Thank you. Yeah, just to finish the best point, I was turning to ask Larry to come up and he was standing there was to address your question. And he and I and the rest of the planning team are watching the growth in the use of UCSC passes on all the routes to the south and it's growing every year. So if you remember, there used to be a couple of routes that expressed to UCSC and never went downtown. They got eliminated poor ridership a few years ago. But I don't need to tell you about the demographic shift south. So it becomes a real important part of our service planning over time. So I thank you for bringing that up. And once we have and if we have automatic passenger counters, we can then get a little more clever about the routing and the frequency and where to put stops, i.e. express type services. So we're waiting also for the technology to give us the ability to be smarter service planners. Thank you. That's good to know. We definitely want to make sure that it's an opportunity for the youth in our community here to be able to get to those campuses. Mr. Rockham. Well, great for us. But I'm sorry, great for Larry, but terrible for us. He's about to retire. And his management of the transportation and parking on campus has really played a key role in having students want to take the bus. But when you think about discretionary riders or even my students who some of them live in Watsonville this class I'm teaching this quarter, you want to say, well, public transit, you can sit on the bus and you can do your homework and, you know, not if you're standing shoulder to shoulder. You can't do anything. I mean, we're just short of Japan where they push people into the subways or something. I play that role on the bus. Please back up, please back up, you know, because you're trying to stuff as many people as you can in there. And there's just no way you can even read much less write notes or do something on the bus. You should be able to work when you're on public transit. That's one of the real virtues that I took advantage of when I had a job once a week in San Francisco, taking all public transit. I could do a lot of work on the bus and the train. You can't do that when you're standing up. So that's a real another reason for thinking about how we really we should have people able to sit in a seat. UCS used to provide free passes to the faculty and staff. They don't do that anymore. But again, faculty and staff are not going to stand on a bus. They're just not going to do it. I mean, my colleagues are not maybe they should, you know, do it, but they're not going to do it. And the reality is if you offered them an actual seat and the ability to get to work with a Wi-Fi on the bus and stuff, then we could see a real jump in the discretionary ridership of 3,000 employees at UCSC. 3,000 employees who are not taking the bus for the most part. OK. We'll move on. Any comments from the public? I guess Mr. Peoples says. What hat do we have on now? Stand in for the public. Yeah, right. Different hat. Brian Peoples trail now. This is great. This is an example of great work from your staff. Phenomenal work. I'm excited to hear about the four new buses. I do actually have a question on my second comment. And I'm wondering, do you have it a rom on the cost of one of these buses and the route and operating it for one year? Is it a million a year? I mean, do you have a number that's an easy number that the public can kind of understand? I know there's a lot of depreciation and stuff. I don't think. Finding this at $150,000. How much? $150,000. Is it? UCSC is fine. It's not the exact question. But as we talked with you in the last few years, we said an operator for a year and the bus they drive think about $125,000. That's their salaries and their benefits and the mileage on the vehicle. Now, of course, that one person doesn't work seven days a week and 12 hours a day. So does it take two people to run a route that runs all day and the extra board support? So it's more than $125. Is it double that? I mean, depending on how you frame the question, that's kind of fine. Let's just say, with pension, it's $250 a year. Just to kind of level set us. Last night, it was reported at the RTC meeting that for the last eight years, the RTC has been using $1.2 million to maintain the rail line for freight and excursion trains. So that's kind of level sets us about, where do we really need to focus our dollars? We need to pay those guys to operate those things that you buy. Thank you. Okay. We can accept this report. Take a motion to accept the report and the recommendation. I so move. Second. Moving is seconded. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Oh, so ordered unanimously. Number 15, to accept the unified corridor investment study update, Mr. Emerson, our planning and development director. Yeah, just one last reminder by Mike's comment about Larry, losing Larry and Tom Hiltner in the same year. It's going to be tough. The rest of us are going to have to pick up our game again. I bet Wanamu and the rest of us. So thank you to both of them for all their service to all of us. Alrighty. Moving on. You know, I usually start with my good morning chair board staff, but I particularly want to welcome today the RTC staff Ginger and Grace, and that's really important going into this topic. We're all a bunch of staff people at agencies trying to do our technical work the best we can to provide all you decision makers and executives with information from which to make solid decisions. So we do well together. I just want to make that note going in. So I didn't think there was going to be a bigger decision while I was here than the COA in 2016, but maybe this is it. This is vital to that was an immediate crisis. This is a long range set of choices about being smart and viable for many, many years. I'm here today to provide a series of metro staff recommendations to the board about preferred approaches to the transportation improvements in each of the three corridors being discussed in the UCIS. As we as all of us or many of us know last evening RTC staff made their recommendation to their full commission for their consideration and possible adoption. Now, as we all know, the date of their next consideration in this has moved from December 6th to January 17th. Just wanted for anybody who didn't know that as a fact. The metro staff recommendation is provided to allow you the metro board to provide your input to the RTC when it makes its decision. Now, quickly going back and I'm only paraphrasing, but as a reminder for those who weren't there, the heart of the RTC recommendations was in Highway 1 corridor pursue the bus on shoulders in the early years and pursue the HOV lanes in the later years. In SoCal, freedom, nothing in particular acknowledging the various small things that can be done to improve bus services, et cetera, but not a major financial investment in buses. Obviously, the rail reserve was the heart of the discussion. The current proposal from RTC staff to their commission is to pursue the passenger rail. Although that's good, fine, but I'll go on with where we're going from this. The background context for the forthcoming metro staff recommendations include three things. First of all, these are three distinct corridors serving different populations, different travel sheds, and the mode choice in each of the three corridors are standalone important decisions for the countywide transportation decision. And a decision about what we do in one corridor is not per se provide a solution in the other corridors. So, yes, it is a system, but I don't need to digress into their different travel sheds. Someone in this corridor isn't going to write something in this corridor. So we've got to keep a holistic system view there. Number two, there is a need for a public transit priority facility and service in the railcourt. This is the portion of the county with the most favorable transit demographics, both in the 2016 Metro COA and during the presentation recently by transit planning consultant Jarrah Walker. It was reinforced the demographic features of this area between Capitola and downtown Santa Cruz is the area most supportive in terms of density, origin destination combinations, a grid, road network. Transit services in either the Soquel Freedom corridor or the Highway 1 corridor would not be significantly relevant to this area along the coast in terms of efficient access to that area or from that area. And particularly to this area from the south, those other corridors don't relate. And from this area to downtown, you're not going to go up to Soquel Highway 1 to work your way back to a place that's already closer. So it's really important to keep these as three different things. Third, there is a concern as to the financial capacity of this county to invest in a major new public transit initiative without impacting the current bus system, which as we've noted is currently operating at a minimally acceptable service to all of us and particularly the public. So having said all that, here is the metro staff recommendations at the moment. In the Soquel Freedom corridor, we'd like to pursue some of the features of BRT light. The most valuable features or facilities that could be included in a BRT light improvement package are those which help maintain the reliability of the bus service. You might for the public explain what BRT stands for. Thank you. I meant to say that first. When I say BRT, I want to refer to bus rapid transit. It's not a particular product, as I've told you before. There's a menu of things that you can make a bus service better. Speed and priority, quality of facilities, off vehicle, boarding, transit signal priority. So in any place that you pursue BRT, you implement as many of those features as are physically possible, economically possible, et cetera. BRT light is a reference to not building your own priority lane, but grabbing as many of the other features as possible. So again, traffic signal priority queue jumps. You heard a lot of discussion of that light last night. You don't want to miss two lights in a row. So you get a queue jump. You go to the front of the queue and you get on through in the lead. And as offered by Stanley Sokolow last year, strategic parking management is also really helpful during peaks. You've got to balance that out with the commercial properties adjacent in the business world. But there are little nuances. So we feel that that's the appropriate pursuit in this corridor. And we'll remind a couple of important points about that corridor. It has two of the county's most important trip generators, the Dominican Medical Complex and Cabrillo College. And if you look at a profile of the trips in that corridor, there are lots of short trips. There are homes. There are commercials. There are jobs, et cetera. So end to end speed, that's not the way to get people from Watsonville to downtown Santa Cruz end to end. But there's so many movements in between. So we're comfortable with that general approach in that corridor. Number two, highway one, bus on shoulders. We think that's being realistic about the financial capacity of the county and the willingness to pursue the HOV lane proposal. And given that Metro's level of service that we could provide can't on its own justify a billion dollar HOV lane project. I'd love to have one. But the reality of the volume of service, the demand, Metro service couldn't be of the driver to an HOV lane. Bus on shoulders will meet our needs for reliability of travel time. So that's where we are on that one. All right, the other one, the one everybody wants to talk to, public transit and the rail reserve. One of the better agreements out of last night, hopefully at least in transportation planning staff, is this corridor needs some public transit. Obviously we're on a path to deciding exactly what that is. But it's really important and I was impressed of the strong commitment of the value of that corridor towards the future economy and development patterns of this county. So first, providing a bike and pedestrian facility only in the corridor would not address demand for longer distance and higher capacity mobility. However, with both the rail and the bus scenario, bus, bike and ped facilities are part of the preliminary concepts. So we've we've addressed that demand, which I think allows us to move forward with the high capacity public transit planning. Number two, the scenario-based analysis was an appropriate way to frame the discussion. And this isn't a shortcoming at all, but it was the appropriate way to gather these multiple corridors and put them in context. But what it didn't do and never intended to do was to provide a direct comparison of these two public transit modes in the rail corridor. There was not enough detailed iterative analysis of the most effective BRT service network and or rail with bus feeder network. Again, not a shortcoming. It wasn't the goal per se of that. We're kind of taking the big view. So now we feel it's really important to have an objective alternative analysis to establish which of the high capacity rapid mass transit modes, rail or bus, is the most optimal considering ridership, operating capital costs and the financial capacity of this region. That is the absolutely most important message I want to leave there. We understand that BRT, bus rapid transit has not been the subject of much of the conversation for the last couple years. I get that. There's not much exciting about a bus. People don't tell stories about when they rode with their grandmother on a bus somewhere. They tell about the train trip. So we're not naive about that. But what's really important here is with the technology improvements going on now and particularly in propulsion systems, this decision cannot be about rubber wheels versus steel wheels. It needs to be about what function or mode best meets the mobility needs for the area, which is why we need a deeper iterative transit network operating features analysis. This quick digression, transfers are the killer in public transit. They're inconvenient. They take time, et cetera. So with a typical Californian land use layout, not everybody's going from here to here and back every day. They go 12 places in between. You need operational flexibility. Again, I'm not here to pitch the rail or pitch the bus today. I'm here to pitch digging into that and finding the right answer. Santa Cruz County has to be physically responsible and pragmatic about our limited financial capacity. I do appreciate the comments about maybe the time is hot to strike given the mood of the public relative to transportation improvements. But we can't be too cavalier. Although this quarter is an important one. It's just one of many quarters which Metro service today with 26 different routes, giving over 5 million trips a day. I want to make it clear I'm not angling for BRT at the moment. I've worked in a number of places, pitching light rail or pitching BRT. I'll just say that many of them, as I listened to the public comments over the last year or two, many of the benefits of rail can be accomplished with BRT. People don't say it because BRT is not something people know about. But if you describe the thing you need, I can probably do that with rubber wheels. And possibly less expensive with fewer impacts, but that's what we want to find out. Key features that need to be part of an upcoming alternatives analysis planning a network which connects people with their destinations while minimizing transfers between modes which discourages use and reduces ridership. Really important feature in a number of light rail BRT alternatives analysis I've worked on in Portland and overseas, etc. You make some general assumptions early about the facility and where it can go. But until you dig a little deeper in value engineering it might take cost 4 million to widen a part of the corridor so you can have two-way traffic. If you initially go that's too much, let's go over on street A or B, but we end up costing ourselves three minutes and hurt the ridership. Value engineering is deciding, putting that 4 million in context. What civil engineers love to do is to value engineer that 4 million problem down to solving it for 2 million, which changes the dynamics on the alignment and the travel time and the ridership. So you got to dig deep at this stuff to get it right. I'll wrap up pretty quickly here. Another thing has been a common thing over the years. In many cases historically in the US, BRT was implemented with the goal of it being a stage to evolve towards light rail. You build a facility, you implement the bus service and over the years, you change or densify the land use. All of a sudden 20 years, you're proving your ridership on your bus system has outgrown the capacity or 40 or 60 capacity vehicles, and you build an argument with the federal government for we've evolved, we've built our density, we've earned train level ridership. So that's one way staging is done. A second reason staging is done is segments of your project. Maybe you don't have half a billion dollars or you only have this or this area is ripe for ridership in the next five or 10 years, but the other needs to be developed. So without going into much detail, yeah, maybe Major Ellen Capitola presents a funny little interesting way to look at staging. So you just got to be open to cost-effective steps in this county. We've got to play our few chips very well. We got to do an analysis of the likelihood and the assumptions about funding from various sources taking into consideration the current and future needs of Metro. Yeah, we're running a minimal system. We all just came up with a list that I could spend another million dollars a year. Got to balance that, the cost of that goes up over a year. So this is a really tricky balance. I'm not going to beat that dead horse. We've kind of been there today. So one of the last things about the alternatives analysis is when you come out of it, you should have a relatively clear path near-term to implementation. Don't want to just do a study again and say, wow, someday when we get x, we can do this. We're looking for implementation solutions, and that's what we should be able to do. So let me reiterate, Metro staff and RTSD staff, our staff people planners, we're trying to figure out the facts to pass on to you guys. We look forward to developing a scope of work for an alternatives analysis that meets the needs of all parties, and then going in there, digging in and giving you all good information. During the UCIS, we provided a generic bus network in support of the rail and in the bus. It wasn't deeply thought out. It was there for order of magnitude reasons. So we got a lot of digging to do as to fine-tuning what's the best. We now have the opportunity to iteratively develop bus networks that we can test for their effectiveness, taking into consideration adjacent land uses, future density intensification, and pedestrian access networks. So there you go, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know if Grace, if you might want to just say hello. I just want to recognize you again, and just for all the work that you've done here, and you got through this, both of you, Ginger, excuse me, and Grace, pretty much unwounded last night. So that was an accomplishment in itself. You're still alive. But I don't know if you had any brief comments that you would like to make, but I just want to recognize you, Ginger and Grace, again, about for everything you've done for us and for this cause. Grace and I are happy to be here today, and I'm sorry our management wasn't able to make it. They had other commitments on both George and Louise, but we're here happy to answer any questions. Our staff recommendation would be that we have presented to our commission is to do an environmental review, which would include an alternative analysis, and that would be a step towards, take one baby step towards pursuing transit on the rail right away as part of that analysis. Obviously, bus rapid transit could be looked at, and that would be the way to approach that. So taking that one baby step, there's lots of decision points along the way in the future towards seeing if we can implement some kind of transit service. This is just making one step in the direction to direct staff towards pursuing an environmental review and preliminary design. Thank you, yeah. Comments from the board, Mike? Mr. Rodgers. I'll note to Barrow, and maybe he wants to respond to this. In the written recommendation from our staff that's in front of us, the one thing you did not mention was explicitly the idea that we need to have an agreement with RTC about how people raised this last night, whether the rail would be taking money from bus system, and there were a number of answers to that. George Zanderra, the director, suggested that, I guess the fair characterization of his comment was that it shouldn't require bus money to go into a rail to make it work, but that's not the same as the commitment from the RTC to not take money from us to make it work. And so the written recommendation suggests that we would have some agreement, the language here is that we would maintain percentages of the funding we get from a variety of, I think there's three of them here. Three different, is it three? Different funding sources, it would also be our recommendation back to the RTC for their decision on January 17th. I think that is an important thing to include in the oral comment about the staff recommendation here. Thank you. I was gonna defer to Alex on that one. Thank you, Mike. I think that's a good point. I mean, that's a real concern. There was a move to have some of our funds diverted to other causes that would have hurt Metro if we wouldn't have stepped up and said no, we don't wanna do that. And it was talked about. So I think that it would be proper to have some kind of a motion or addition that we wanna make sure that these funds for Metro are protected as is. And it was stated that, hey, we're not taken away from Metro. It wasn't taken away, but there was an attempt to do that. And I just would like to, I'd feel more secure if we had it in more solid writing or our motion would be say that we wanna have the funds that come to Metro protected. That appears in the written recommendations in front of us. But is that, but I mean, well, I think, but what you would said though, that we just don't wanna have one take away from the other, you know, that type of. Mr. Chair, if I can elaborate on that. So item D really builds off of your page 15.7. So the task that the planning department went through was to identify funds today that are coming to this agency to support the bus system that flow through the RTC that the RTC has control over and potentially does not necessarily have to send those to us. So if you look at those tables, you'll see funds that will flow to us unrestricted, they can't, RTC can't change that. But the highlighted ones, the ones with the dark background are the funds that we identified that in an absolute worst case scenario, if down the road you have, for example, a rail that has been built and you need to support operating costs could be changed by a simple, in some cases just simple stroke of change of the policy. The TDA policy could change. And right there we could lose $7 million. Now, would they ever do that? I don't know. The task here was to identify the worst case scenario. You see STA dollars that would be at risk, the 99313. As you know, we had a discussion about that within the last year. Both of these 99313 categories, the STA and the SGR state of good repair dollars in which it was proposed that those dollars be put into some competitive pot and maybe we would prevail, maybe we wouldn't. And we challenged that. Ultimately, there was a committee of two board members, two commissioners who met and sorted that out into a place in which over the course of three or five years, we progressively lose about 25% of that money. So that was our first hint that this could happen. And we had to put up a pretty big challenge to try to at least mitigate the losses because all of that money was programmed in our five-year plan. Net-net, you're looking at in excess of $9 million that could be at risk. We're only a $50 million budget. So if a day came in which rail needed those dollars, where are you gonna get it from? Simple stroke of the pen, it could happen. Now I will tell you, having worked at LAMTA down south for 11 years, I went through many years in which as they were starting up light rail, the memo would come down from the top saying we've gotta find cuts in bus operations because light rail is very expensive to operate. And with it doesn't necessarily come new money. Now they've been lucky down there. They have numerous, a half cent sales taxes that have been able to pass, but there's never enough money. And inevitably when the pot is fixed, it always seems like rail wins and the money shifts over to that. So we must be mindful of what happens at other places and look out over that horizon and not be willing at this date to accept sort of a simplistic study. This is a simplistic study. It's sort of a feasibility study. The more detailed study is what we're recommending which is a full blown alternatives analysis where you get into those questions. This study says, as Mr. Dondero indicated last night, this study says, hey look on page so and so there's a statement that says we're funding rail without any money that traditionally or that's going to Metro today. Well, those words are worth the paper that they're written on. That is not a policy that protects this agency. And in order to get to that place, you need a full blown alternatives analysis that looks at what is the cost of providing the rail? Where is that money specifically? Where is that money going to come from? Not generally, well, we think so much is going to come from the federal government. We think the state might produce a little bit more. We really think this will be successful and it'll have 40 or 50% fair box recovery. That's no way to run a railroad. You need an alternatives analysis that lays out what those expected costs are. You've got a good current analysis right now with the smart train, relatively similar type of rail setup that they put together up there. Take a look at the dollars in their budget. I mean, they have a huge amount coming from their sales tax measure. A half cent sales tax here produces, I think, 20 to 25 million dollars. Are you going to get a half cent sales tax measure and have it 100% dedicated to rail? I don't know. I think that needs to be thought through. Traditionally, you try to spread that across multiple modes. There's a lot of questions about the funding that need to be asked. And what we're saying is, if rail is going to be the case, and we're not anti-rail, we're pro-mass transit in that quarter. And if rail is going to come to be, then we need to know now if there's going to be an impact on this bus system because the commissioners in making a decision to be in favor of rail need to know what the potential damage is that they're doing to the bus system should they go that route. So that's why we've said here in D, let's make a statement. Let's have a policy, both here and at the RTC, that says, all right, as we proceed, we're going to hold Metro safe. Those percentages of funds that they get today, they're going to continue to get into the future, and we're not going to damage the bus system. Mr. Cleaver, that's what it said. I just, and I appreciate Mr. Rodkin's comments, but so obviously we feel strong enough. I mean, I don't want to have this be a battle between RTC and Metro, and that was pretty clear last night. That's not where we want to go for public transportation. But I don't know, from after hearing the comments last night, I don't know if this is probably strong enough, but are you satisfied with this? If we send this along and say, this is what we would prefer. And I know we don't have some board members here, but I feel pretty confident that they would agree. We are, and I think the more important step is, will the RTC take that step to go there? But we need to get to that place where they do the, I want to make an important distinction about the alternatives analysis that you saw last night versus what we're saying. They may sound similar, they're very different. What happened last night is staff made a recommendation that the preferred approach for the railroad right away is rail, and we're gonna do an alternatives analysis as a part of an environmental process. That's really very different than what we're saying. We were cut off guard. You know, we talked about all this collaboration and whatnot, we collaborated through the process, had great relationships with the staff on talking about SoCal and Highway 1 Corridor and the railroad corridor, but there was no collaboration on the recommendation. The recommendation came out from staff that said it's gonna be rail and we'll do an alternatives analysis. We're saying, don't pick the mode. Do an alternatives analysis. Look at rail, and there's variations of rail that you can put in there. Look at BRT or bus. There may be one or two or three other alternatives that can function as a mass transit in that corridor. Look at all of those, layout very detailed cost analysis of all of those, including potential funding sources, and then make a decision based on a preferred alternative that comes out of the process. So rather than what happened last night in which they identified way prematurely a preferred alternative, goes through a process, a proper alternatives analysis process to get to a preferred alternative. And then along that journey, if it ends up being rail, we need a statement like this to protect us. We're not anti-rail, we're pro mass transit, but we wanna protect the bus at all costs. Yes, Mr. Rafa. So you're saying we should have this policy, but how does that guarantee that it protects us? Policies can be changed. I absolutely agree, and that they could adopt this at their next commission meeting, and the one that follows, they could change it again. I think what I'm hoping for is that at least at the point in which they're making those decisions, which are not now down the road, that they're at least committed in writing and policy to holding us whole. They can always change it. There's always risk of that. But if they're committed that way, then let's say they go rail, they gotta focus on the dollars. Where are those dollars gonna come from? They've got to identify those. What can you reasonably get out of a sales tax measure? How much goes for capital? How much goes for operating? We wanna really force those kinds of thoughtful decisions to take place, and that probably gives us a little bit more assurance. But then they pass a sales tax and then find out it doesn't actually fully fund it, and so then they say, well, I guess we need to cannibalize then Metro. It happened, yeah. Rodkin? Just on that question, I mean, a lot of it will come down to as far as the commissioner's votes. Some of the commissioners believe that there's a lot of rail money that's coming down the pike based on California, California rail plan. Others, a little more skeptical, or maybe believing that that's what it looks like right now, but what if Gavin Newsom wakes up two years from now and decides he doesn't like trains? I mean, it's all over. So I think the commissioners will make their decision based on whether the policy, like you said, could be changed, but people who really wanna make sure the bus system's not harmed might make a decision that they don't wanna go down the rail path because they think the funding is not secure over the long term. Others might think it's secure enough that with that and the policy and goodwill between the two agencies, we shouldn't really have a problem here, but I think that's the form of the discussion. I don't think you can get more of an assurance than a policy at this point because a vote of the people or something is not gonna happen. That would be the only way you can tie hands beyond that, I think is all the only way you could go and that's not, I don't believe, really feasible. So we should at least get this. This is a little more secure than it's just like the rail funding picture looks pretty good so therefore we shouldn't have a problem. It's not quite as strong as this agency, the RTC has a policy that says we will not, we will continue to fund the percentages that the district has been getting today into the future. At least they would have to have a serious discussion about changing policy rather than just in a budget somewhere it appears that the money just drifted away, which did happen to us with one of our funding sources last year. And one might argue that- I don't think this is bad will on the part of the RTC staff or the, you know, the part of the RTC but either the board or the staff. I don't think anybody's angling to get our money. I don't think there's a conspiracy here going on at all but I do think that the pressures of what happens in the uncertainties of the future will leave us somewhat vulnerable no matter what we do but that'll be a judgment that the RTC has to make about how much we are vulnerable or how much it looks promising that there's gonna be a lot of funding for rail if that's the choice that's made for proceeding. Director, one might argue that a policy like this might actually help keep the relationship smooth. When we've had these squabbles over the last couple of years about the dollars, the small, the big, they're painful, they hurt and it'd be nice to have a commitment. Ms. Kaufman, go Miss. Yes, I think that there's still a lot of speculation about the unknown of the relationship and how it moves forward in terms of the bigger picture of transportation and even last evening it was I don't know what I don't know and how did these transitions work in other areas that brought the train back on tracks with that being a complimentary modality of moving people around the corridor and working in relationship with the bus system in those areas. I think we also have the director for RTC that's changing and that moving that way and making sure that this is basically an agenda item that we have with the new director of how do we make sure that we secure what we have for Metro, the funding, the resources, and that it complements what we're doing to any enhancements we're doing with the modalities for transportation as a whole picture. And we're not going to give up, we're not gonna ever overlook what we need for the Metro, the services and the funding we need for those buses in the process of looking for how to complement it with using that corridor to the highest and best of its use, especially when we're looking at, let's say we're gonna be putting the bus on that corridor, we have freight for Watsonville. Does that mean that we have freight for Watsonville and we don't catch a train until you, or we can't even use that corridor until we get to Aptos or beyond that five mile post where the freight is not going to be effective use? So we don't wanna have an island for Watsonville either with changing things around at this point. We wanna make sure that we've had all of these questions flushed out and addressed and making sure that we have a very, very clear picture of what our transportation future would be without any compromise to what we've got with what the Metro services are. It needs to be complementary. If it isn't complementary, we're not gonna have a successful transportation system here. Any comments from board members? I'll just say, I mean, this recommendation is fine. It's obviously just our recommendation in Metro's interest to the RTC. In light of all this conversation, I might just suggest you pull out the last part of D and make that E so it really pops out. So there's D would be supporting the mass transit use in the real corridor, which would run adjacent, et cetera, and then have E support an RTC policy that would commit to, we're really just creating a policy trail here. I think it would point it out more clearly. Yeah, it stands on its own. It's the same thing, but just being separate. It stands on its own, yeah. Okay, so, okay, that'll be a consideration when we... Anybody from the public who'd like dresses? Last, the actual lighting that you came to talk about. Yeah. Nighting, exciting time. I'm gonna put those two hats up there, keep my technical part of the hat. You know, Alex mentioned the smart train. It's sad note today at 536, I know the person was killed by the smart train today, this morning, that's the fifth one. One of them, I don't know the details of what happened today yet, but one of them happened to be a young person with headphones on, walking on the tracks. It's dangerous having these trains going through our communities like that. Our homes are 10 feet away from that corridor. So that's very sad, 536 today. I didn't get the opportunity to actually talk after the report was given. They didn't allow me to do it, but that's okay. I understand that. But I would have talked about the timber trestles, the historical trestles that we forget about, that Hidden Beach, Seascape, Capitola. Those trestles, as you heard, cannot support a train and trail. So essentially, if you move forward with the train plan, those trestles have to be demoed. They're historical. You're gonna get huge backlash. Not gonna happen, never gonna happen. So the idea that we're gonna have trains, we're gonna replace the Hidden Beach trestle with a modern train, we're very skeptical. It's basically comes down to live within your means. Let's have a real plan, a realistic plan that we can live with and include in that is a solution today. You guys, we've been holding on to this corridor for eight years and it's still a vacant lot. We've given you a guidance on how to do it. I divulged our secret magic. You don't need to rail bank it. You can use it today. There is a path forward. I'll talk about that later. The other thing to think about is the day that they approve scenario B, progressive rail loans that, you're done. One of the great things about the failure of Iowa Pacific is we thought we were gonna have to buy them out of their contract for millions of dollars. Well, now we only have to pay 300K to get them out of the corridor, using the corridor. And unfortunately, they get to keep the corridor all the way to Buena Vista Road, mile post seven, progressive rail, no matter what, the RTC has screwed Watsonville. You're not going to be out as long as that contract. Fortunately, we got a secret suit going. Maybe we can renegotiate that and Watsonville can benefit from that section from Lee Road to Buena Vista. I failed at my part of recognizing that till after. And I just want to highlight that you guys are really fortunate. You got the smartest person in transportation leading you. Alex, he's, and his sidekick Baron, of course, but. Anyways, you gotta listen to him. And when he says what he tells you, you gotta listen to him. So he's been through the scar tissue of trying to have a train competing with buses, the realistic efforts. So the CTC meeting's coming up at the end of January, and we've said we're going, and we're hoping that we're going in pink hats and not red hats. We want to go as a community to the California Transportation Commission to a collaborative goal. And I can tell you this, that Trail Now will support e-buses, public transit on the corridor. And I know there's other members of our organizations, not saying who, will come out with a similar support. But we cannot, we need real, hey, the train's not gonna work you guys, but e-buses, hey, let's look at that. Because that, and that's a big change. It's not the trail only. That's a huge change. So that's something to think about. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Board members, chair, my name is Bruce Sawhill. I don't believe I've ever addressed this group before. I'm ex-chair of Friends of the Rail and Trail, currently a board member. And I understand there's discomfort associated with possibly inaugurating a new mode of transportation. That how are we gonna pay for it? It's almost like being told, well, I see you're working hard at your job and you've got too much to do. So we're gonna hire somebody else, but we're gonna pay them out of your salary. And you say, well, thanks for nothing. So we understand that whatever happens on the rail corridor, you're gonna end up carrying a lot more people than you used to. And in general, public transportation is subsidized, so that's gonna cost more money and that's going to have to be addressed. We as an organization, Friends of the Rail and Trail, has long advocated for rail, but if something were to come along that is as efficient, as comfortable, as safe, as rapid, as connected as rail, we're all ears and it's cheaper. We'd like to hear about it. One thing we didn't, there are two things we'd insist on as an organization. One, that whatever runs on the rail line is electric, because rail advocates live by the rail line too and don't wanna be disturbed. The other thing we'd insist on is that Metro runs it all. Some of the conversation here sounds like, well, that maybe there's this shadow new agency that's going to be created that would run the rail and that you and Metro and whatever this new agency would, would be competing for resources. We don't think that's a way to run a railroad at all or anything else. We think that we should have one transportation agency, it should be integrated and efficient. If there's a tram on the rail line, when you get to a stop, there should be a bus waiting for you. And things should work together. And can't imagine who else would run the agency besides Metro. Amtrak runs huge diesel trains. They don't know anything about electric trams. Caltrain, they're busy electrifying and they have huge ridership. Muni Metro, it looks like the kind of vehicles we're interested in, but they're inaugurating new routes and they're overwhelmed with ridership. VTA, whenever I talk to anybody in rail at VTA, they say, yeah, sure, we'll quit VTA and come work for Metro in a heartbeat. So VTA probably isn't it either. So the answer is, it's you guys, it's Metro. We want you to be running whatever happens. We understand that it will change the ridership, whatever it is. We retain a bias toward train, but we are open to hearing about other things. So, forts behind you, thank you. Thank you. Welcome. Hi, Barry Scott, I live in Aptos and I echo Bruce's Mr. Saw Hill's comments. When I think about the two options for the corridor, running buses on what looked like would end at State Park and then go, I guess, to the highway versus rail, I feel even more strongly that we should, you know, not give up the rail line as the mode. When I think about the regulatory hurdles of decommissioning and then the environmental trauma and cost of tearing out rail line and turning it into pavement, I just think I'm gonna need to live another 30 years to see this happen. But so I'm a strong rail advocate with the state rail plan and the connectivity and what's happening in Monterey County. But I was concerned last night from what I heard and I think it's absolutely natural that people would worry about cannibalization of funding and this, you know, that Metro could suffer. And I don't want Metro to suffer, I want more Metro and I want rail to be a part of that network. Transfers would likely happen a lot if it was all buses or if it was rail with buses, you know, because an express bus is not gonna take you to your dry cleaners. So I don't think that transfers are the problem. I think that integration is the challenge and if you integrate it, you're gonna have a wonderful system. My last thought and this has to do with the idea of competition versus cooperation. There's a brilliant man named W. Edwards Deming, have you ever heard of him? Yeah, and in his book, The New Economics, he talks about a case that I love this example. There's an intersection that has two gas stations and both gas stations have tow trucks and they're competing and they're not making any money. They're trying to undercut each other's price and they're also competing for the late night business so they're both of them staying open until two in the morning and they're not making as much money until they agree, let's share the towing business. You can take, you know, you'll take five, the five toes that come in then I'll take the next five toes and you take the next and then we'll stay late open on alternating nights. So they made tons of money. They cut down their expenses greatly and they both were able to thrive because they didn't compete, they looked for ways to cooperate. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome again. I'm still Jack Carroll. The RTC has a goal of equitable access. The UCIAS has defined that as geographic equity. I think it should be economic equity. The train is, as proposed, comes with a $15 round trip from Watsonville to Santa Cruz plus the bus fare to get to the train station at one end and to leave the train station at the other end plus some variety of tax increase to pay for the capital cost of all this. That's $300 plus a month. I'm trying to imagine a Watsonville student using the train to go to UCSC and paying all those fares. I don't think that'll happen. Can we lower the fares and increase the frequency? The train corridor is stated to service only 1% of the county population. I think buses are just more affordable for that. I don't see the capital expense being justified. And if we can't afford to properly run the Metro now, I can't imagine adding the operating losses of a rail system would possibly be a benefit to the county. And there is no money in the California rail plan for our corridor through 2040. The plan is really easy to read. They list clearly every place they're going to spend money and our corridor, Watsonville to Santa Cruz, is not funded. Thank you. Thank you. We have a couple of board members that are gonna have to leave in about five minutes. So I'd like to, unless anybody really has something to say, bring it back to the board for a motion. I'll make the following motion. This is based on the staff recommendation that the Metro Transit District support bus rapid transit BRT light operational improvements. This is a motion about our recommendation to the RTC that we support bus rapid transit. That's BRT light operation improvements in the Soquel Avenue Drive Freedom Boulevard Corridor. There we look at the, I'm adding to the staff recommendation, the comment made by a member of the public that we also make sure we investigate the possibility of parking restrictions and other local traffic adjustments that would make that a more efficient corridor. Secondly, that we support pursuit of a bus on shoulder facility on state route one. Third, that we commit up to a public transit service facility in the rail corridor and begin implementation planning by conducting in the near term a comprehensive alternatives analysis to determine the most appropriate mode of public transit for the rail corridor and to support efforts to secure funding from federal and other sources and adding a full analysis of operations funding sources as part of the alternative analysis. Fourth, that we support mass transit use in the rail corridor, which is in which mass transit would run adjacent to bike and pedestrian facilities but not under the rail banking concept. And fifth, that an RTC policy be created that would permit to funding Metro with, I'm gonna use the initials here, TDA-LFT, TDA-STA, and TDA-SGR at current percentage levels in perpetuity. That's my motion. Second. I'll have Ms. Matthews second. Any other comments from the board? Clarification of the motion. Is that to write a letter and communicate that to the RTC and request? Yes, yes. As our official position as a board. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? So ordered unanimously. We will move on to item number 16, consideration approval of the CPSHR Consulting SEIU classification study and new positions description. I'll try to make this quick. So even though I gave now back to just the CFO I did agree with Alex that I would finish out the SEIU class and comp and finish out the management class and comps. Those are still the two things that you'll hear from me that are not financial. So for SEIU, we started the full class and comp study back in August of 18. It's gonna be split into two things. We did a job analysis where the employees went through and put all their information forward and to what they wanted in the position descriptions as well as their supervisors and managers. And then the second piece that we're hoping to start on in December is the total compensation analysis. This report today is for you to only look at the position descriptions in concept. And the reason I stress in concept is because we are still meeting with SEIU. We're going over the position descriptions. We're having very good talks just about every day with them and we plan on finishing that around the middle of December. So my ask today is for you to approve the classifications and new position descriptions in concept and then we will move on to putting those forward to CPS sometime in December and doing the total compensation phase. Fine. Any public input? Move the staff recommendation. Move and seconded to move the staff recommendation for item number 16. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? So ordered. Thank you. That will conclude our meeting for today. Our next meeting will be Friday, December 14th at Scotts Valley at 9 a.m. But I think at 8 a.m. we may be meeting at the Scotts Valley Transit Center. Yeah. Okay. All right. This meeting is adjourned.