 Good morning, we'll now continue the budget hearings for the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Burke, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Tuinardine. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. And Koenig. Here. Thank you, Chair, you have a quorum. Thank you, and for the record, it is Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022 at 9 a.m. We begin with consideration of late additions, provisions, or deletions for the agenda today. Teo Palacios, do we have any additions or deletions? No, we do not. All right, thank you. And now we'll proceed with a budget manager's overview from our county budget manager, Marcus Pimentel, for land use and community services. I believe your mic is off. Thank you, Chair Koenig and Board of Supervisors. Welcome to day two of our budget hearings. Today's consent and regular agenda items are related to our land use and community services categories in all the departments and programs they're in. I will provide you a very brief overview of the department budgets that are within our consent agenda for approval as we set the stage for today's regular departmental presentations that will start where parks, open spaces, and cultural services department. We will conclude the presentations today with our Office of Recovery Response and Resilience as it bridge between today's land use discussions and tomorrow's public safety and justice presentations. So included in today's actions are consent items 33339 that complement today's presentations. Those department budgets on consent are the Agricultural Commission's Office, the Agricultural Extension, Cannabis Licensing, Library Fund, Local Agency Formation Commission, the Monterey Bay Air Resources District, and the Redevelopment Success Agency. Following public comments and board action on consent, you will receive presentations from and consider approval of the following budgets, parks, open spaces, and cultural services, capital projects, community development, and infrastructure that's our new department, including the planning and public works departments, and the Office of Recovery Response and Resilience. Within the land use and community services category, the total budget countywide all funds is $258.5 million. Public works alone is $160.9 million or 62% of that budget. Most of public works are not general fund operations. Again, as mentioned in our budget presentation and over yesterday, public works is funding from a lot of federal state funding for roads, projects, and a lot of our enterprise funds. So when you back out all those operations, there's really left only $34 million are general fund programs within land use and community services. As far as the general funds commitment and financial contribution to this category, the bulk of our funding goes to evenly split between parks, open space, and cultural services and our community development and infrastructure. They respectively receive about 5.2 and total about $5.4 million. In total, $12.1 million is committed from the general fund to this category to help sustain their services. As we talked about a lot yesterday, our general fund contributions help those departments where their fees, donations, grants, fundraising efforts just aren't sufficient to fully fund their programs. The changes in our contribution rate sustained reasonably static. When you look at community development and infrastructure as will be discussed later today, the large investment this year was in standing up the staffing for the Unified Permit Center. So that's where you see the large increase, $1.5 million in the counties and the general funds contribution to that department, almost a 40% increase in general fund contribution. The changes in cannabis, there's a $397,000 increase in cannabis licensing while the revenues decreasing, that is reflecting the enforcement efforts in covering the cost of the full cost of the Sheriff's Lieutenant for that unit. The Agricultural Commissioner and Agricultural Extension are more normalized costs, routine costs that are going up that their resources are unable to cover. Parks and Open Spaces, while it's showing a reduction in commitment, that's not a reduction in the policy commitment of the general fund. That's more reflective of a return to normal in their revenue base. They have $629,000 increase in revenues over last year as we're returning back to normal operations as well as in last year's budget. It was a lot of funding for professional services funded by DARPA program and with those programs on pause and ending. That's reflecting the change in the general fund contribution so that it's not a policy commitment reducing our commitment. That's just a reflection of a return back to normal operations from a revenue perspective. As far as funded positions, there are not a lot of changes outside of those changes for planning for the Unified Permit Center. There are five positions that are being requested in this budget to help fund and staff, client and permit support services for the Unified Permit Center. And there's eight positions for public works. Half of those are for road maintenance projects that are severely backlogged into address, helpful address or deferred capital maintenance. There are some additional positions to help with communications, program management and fiscal management within public works and they'll review those positions later today. The cannabis licensing, while we're adding the cost of a new tenant that is not an FTE impact. In fact, we're reducing the scope of that unit as revenues are reducing. So we're leaning harder into the cost of support sheriffs, participation cannabis licensing, but we just have less licensing activity happening in that unit. Within our capital projects budget, there's a $43 million total capital projects fund. This reflects about a $29 million decrease in the capital projects this year over last year's prior budget. And the impact there was we've, as CAO Palacios mentioned in yesterday, as many of our county successes, we completed a lot of library projects that were in last year's budget. So there are considerable amount, almost $29 million in projects in last year's capital projects budget that the county led as project management for. So with those projects completed, those essentially those projects are not part of this program's activity. The general fund contribution of $4.7 million is a reduction of about $1.2 million. There are two takeaways there. The demand for capital projects and the need for general fund increase contribution is greater than that. And it's unfortunate that we were unable to find the funding to add more funding to this program. So the reduction in general fund contribution is not a policy commitment of reducing our contributions just reflection of our limited resources. We do have increasing demand and our needs in facilities and to support our aging facilities. Later today, I wanna take a moment to again give kudos and appreciation to the CAO's office. They launched kind of an inside baseball thing. We launched a new capital projects request system that's gonna be a pilot project for compiling countywide all capital projects into one unified budgeting system. That'll be an incredible resource for us going forward. It'll help us with project management. And we pilot tested that in January. We're successful with that launch and give our analyst Eric Friedrich who led that project a lot of kudos for the work in there. So that'll help us strengthen our capital projects one of our many tools that we're gonna help to assess really quantify our unfunded liabilities in our need to fund our aging infrastructure our aging facilities or aging parks. So with that, I give me to the last slide. Thank you. With that, it concludes my preview. Your next actions are to move on to the consent engine and consider public comments and to consider all the items in consent to continue the budget hearings and consider the approval of the regular agenda budget presentations to continue the hearings to tomorrow and we'll continue those hearings tomorrow to June 28th where we conclude the budget action for 2022-23. That concludes my overview and I'm available for questions. Otherwise happy to turn the floor over to our next department. Thank you, budget manager Pimentel. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Yeah. Supervisor Caput. Well, thanks a lot, Mark. With the, let's see. Mark, we get the parks get about what 5% of their budget from the cannabis licensing, is that sound about right? It's not a direct contribution. We use cannabis licensing as a resource to help fund departments. It goes out to go out. Okay. And then why was it $1.2 million less proposed for 2022 and 2023 than last year? I might, I'll respond to that but I certainly might recommend as say those questions, parks will be up next and they'll dive deeper into their budget. But some of that is just a reflection of their general fund is not required to make those same level contributions as they have revenues returning back to normal revenues. During the years of COVID, we had to shut down a lot of operations. The parks revenues decreased. So the general fund had to backfill and support the parks department. Now that they're returning back to our normal operation, the revenues are going up. So they're not as dependent on the general fund right now. But they could go up, I guess. Yeah, I mean, they've got a lot of ambitious ideas and so again, I think you'll hear more in a few minutes. And then I guess I have one direct question that deals with South County. That would be the 40 acre park, I don't know. Is there an update on that, Jeff? Something positive happening? I know we have about a two year shot clock. Yeah, the department's coming up to give a presentation. Right, okay. They're gonna give a presentation and they'll be able to answer those questions. So this was just an overview of the two budgets. That's good, good job. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any further questions or comments from members of the board? Seeing none, thank you for the overview. And we'll proceed with action on consent agenda items 33 through 39. And at this time, we'll take public comment on the consent agenda. A little bit empty room, it's nice to be here again. Wow, three days in a row, opportunities to speak. My name is James Ewing Whitman. I'm not gonna say a prayer, but I was thinking about Michael Frante song into the light, it has to do with vampires. There's obviously vampires that can walk around during the day, unfortunately. So I have a comment on the consent agenda number 38, the Monterey Bay Area Resources District. I went and knocked on the door, hoping to find however much information I could read. There's a page and a half, that's it. It's incredibly vague. So I'm not making anything up. GU Engineering became very heavy in this county in 1996. As such, the Monterey Bay inhabitants in all life, including the ocean, are being bombarded with barium and stronium radioactive materials, fluorite, which is a neurotoxin that bonds with mercury and aluminum. So this quote, basically Huey, who controls the weather, controls the world. We've been being sprayed with desiccants for a long time. There's virtually no dew anywhere, even in the redwood trees. These, this weather, these droughts, these are all to schedule. I spoke maybe a year ago, about in 2019, all of the reservoirs were between 104 and 147% full. That is a five year commercial supply and residential supply of water. But last year, they were emptied. So we're headed into some really difficult times. I spoke yesterday about a handbag meeting that I was listening to on January 12th, and at least some citizens and community members that are part of that 23 member board, as I recall, are asking some questions because we ain't seen nothing yet. I wish there was more material to read because I'm actually here and I'm interested. So thanks a lot. Thank you, Mr. Whitman. Good morning, Chair, members of the board, CAO's office, Juan Hidalgo, Agricultural Commissioner, Sealer of Weights and Measures, and Director of Mosquito and Vector Control. I want to take a minute to thank your board and the CAO's office for all your support this past year and moving forward into our next fiscal year. I'm also grateful to my staff for their resilience, flexibility, and determination to support and protect our communities and our local agriculture. Transiting through the wakes created by the pandemic has been challenging as my staff and I navigate through early retirements, colleagues living for new opportunities, and also the loss of institutional knowledge. Change is an opportunity, however, and while we lament losing and seeing old friends go, we look forward to working with new talented individuals to bring new ideas into our work environment. The addition of a new deputy for the upcoming fiscal year is going to make a big difference in helping to train our new employee workforce and also to bring some equity among the programs that support our communities and our local agriculture. So I just want to thank you for your support and it's been challenging for all of us, not just the ad commissioner's office, but many of our departments and my colleagues in other departments. So I appreciate all your support coming into next fiscal year. Thank you, commissioner Hidalga. Do you know further comments here in the chambers? Is there anyone on Zoom that wishes to address us? There are no speakers on Zoom. We should to speak on this item. And thank you. Then I'll return to the board for any additional comments and action. Mr. Chair, I have a comment for us. Item number 35, the cannabis licensee office budget. I'd like to give a thank you to the CEL for the, and the sheriff's office and the CAO itself, for the combined work in this area. The boards, we've really wrestled with this issue for several years and trying to achieve the right policies and incentives and enforcement support that we need to support a strong local industry. What we know to be true though is that despite that, there continues to be a thriving illegal market and not as much licensing as we'd like to see. I think that other counties would say much the same in the situation that we were presented. I noticed that the CLO budget proposes to move a position back into the community development and infrastructure budget with some time held for cannabis licensing should it be needed. I have a question. Are we just right sizing the number of personnel for the demand licensing, which is not as healthy as we'd like it to be? Or is there a larger statement that needs to be made to hear about the industry statewide or our particular regulation impacting the industry in the licensing aspect of it? Good morning, Supervisors, Melody Serino, WDCAO. For the cannabis licensing office, that position that we moved is because we're not seeing an influx of more new licensing activity. So we're in, we have all renewals and our licensing manager has electronified that process to make that process go more efficiently. But it's really the new licenses coming in that require that resource planner and we're just not seeing the work there. And I do think there is something bigger going on in the industry. And I think everybody would say that there's consolidation going on, the price of cannabis has dropped. Lots of people have decided they can't make it in the industry and so they're exiting the industry. So there definitely is a lot of change. And then you have certain counties, the triangle up in the Mendocino area, you have Santa Barbara that are flooding the market with cannabis, that were very positive to the cannabis industry. And so it affects that price. And then that affects who decides to stay in the industry and who decides to go. So there definitely are changes happening in the industry, economic changes, but we are just not seeing the work necessary and the public works department has the work. And so we'd rather have that person be used where their highest skills can be most useful. Good, thank you for that explanation. I also just like to mention I have number 36, the library fund, which isn't really, I just want to say congratulations to everybody who voted for Major S.S. in June of 16 for the library issue, the bomb we had. We've seen great things as a result in Felton and Boulder Creek and my district, Live Oak now ongoing and Aptos. I just, it's not directly related to library fund, but I just want to thank the voters for approving that measure six years ago. And we were seeing the results now, it takes time, but we've seen some great results in that. So I just want to thank the voters for that. We have some great libraries throughout the county now. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Any other comments or questions from members of the board? Yes, Mr. Chair, I just want to briefly compliment the agricultural commissioner and his entire department in all of my experiences. And I know Supervisor Caput as well in regards to South County work they do, and he does in particular outstanding outreach to both the community and the agricultural industry. He's always available for any questions that we have from constituents. I'd also like to personally compliment the mosquito and vector control team whom I had to actually do some personal outreach to in the last couple of weeks and they were unbelievably responsive, very helpful. We have a team of great scientists at our disposal and it's just wonderful to know that for the small investment that's really made both on property tax and elsewhere, the kind of return that we get. Mr. Eldago, you've got a great team and just a lot of appreciation to you for what you're doing. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Any other comments? Seeing none, is there a motion? I move the recommended actions to approve the consent agenda. Second. Motion by Supervisor McPherson. Second by Supervisor Coonerty. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Thank you, Chair. Item passes unanimously. Thank you and then we'll proceed with our regular agenda and item 29 to consider approval of the 22, 23 proposed budgets for parks, open space and cultural services, including any supplemental materials and take related actions is outlined in the reference budget documents and is recommended by the County Administrative Officer. They have with us today the Fabulous Parks Team and I'll hand it over to Director Gaffney for a presentation. Good morning, Chair Koenig and board members and staff, I really appreciate you having us here this morning, looking forward to doing some of those ambitious projects we talked about earlier, I think was mentioned. But before we start, we're going to get to a proper slide here, I think is what we're looking for. And we're gonna go over as you have seen in the past, well, yesterday, I guess. First of all, we're gonna go over the park operations, recreation, cultural services, art and public places and then our CSA 11, County Service Area 11. But before we do that, we're gonna turn it over to our Deputy Director Kim Namba and she's gonna roll through our dashboard and the great new availability for the public, just a great addition to our site. I really appreciate us having that. So I'm gonna turn it over to Kim right now. Thank you. So if you scroll up just a little, the parks mission statement is to provide safe, well-designed and maintained parks in a wide variety of recreational and cultural opportunities for our diverse community. Yep. I would like to let everybody know while we're having this momentary pause that is July will be our Parks and Recreation Month. So go out and enjoy your parks. We'll be doing a resolution in the 28th, meeting on the 28th, but just a reminder. Thank you. So as you can see a high level view of the park's budget, the general fund contribution is significantly reduced as Mark was presented with the end of the ARPA funding. Expenditures for pandemic related programs and projects have been eliminated, but offset by an increase in expenditures as our regular recreational programming, park rentals and special events return, which also leads to an increase or a restoration in the revenues. Funding, funded staffing increased by one FTE to restore park superintendent position eliminated at the beginning of the pandemic. Parks budget is organized in five divisions. Parks operations and recreation together comprise the parks budget. And then we have the cultural services, art and public places and county service area, Laven. Those are further broken down into the services if we look at parks operations and the swim center. Thank you. This is composed of both the maintenance and operation of the pools and the aquatics programming. And if you open it up Melinda, yeah. And that we are facing ongoing issues with staff shortages, lifeguard shortages, which is a nationwide issue, and reduced revenues are included in the budget for the rentals of the community rooms and the pool rentals during the construction of the Live Oak Library Annex. And if you go back, there's also, you can see on this the operational plan objectives, the Simkins pool maintenance was completed successfully and the pools reopened on June 13th. So everything is back to normal there. If we go to the personnel details, you can see that go down a little. On our funding staffing, we, it shows an addition of 0.5, that actually is the aforementioned Park Superintendent position offset by the defunding of a vacant 0.5 clerk one position. If we go to the budget details. That's scary. Thank you. So the budget details page shows the more traditional view of the budget with expenditure revenue and fund contributions, as well as a more detailed description of the changes from last year at the bottom. And under the fund contributions, you can see the general fund reduction of almost a million dollars for the end of the ARPA funding. And you can also, if you go up, you can drill down in expenditures revenues to the various divisions and services. Turn it back over to Jeff. I thank you, Kim. I appreciate that. And as you can see, as everybody has seen over the last 24 hours, actually, and maybe prior to that, it's a great addition to be able to go in and find the details people want about all of our budgets. I'm still learning to use it myself, but it's pretty exciting and fun to use. So moving on to the next slide, we're going to talk about just briefly, budget officer Pimentel also already mentioned that we did see a reduction in almost a million dollars from general fund reliance by the Parks Department. That, as he said, was our revenue coming up and it is always one of our guiding principles is to do as much as we can to not rely on the general fund and to generate as much revenue as we're able to. And so we're going to continue with that trend, I believe, for the coming year. We also had a couple of grants that were mentioned. One was the National Dislocated Worker Grant, which was actually tied to the CZU fire. That was our efforts to employ people who may have been dislocated as a result of the fire. So we went through a two-year process on that and did employ a couple of folks, but it was difficult and we'll be ending that program. So next slide. A couple of our major programs and changes, I wanted to point out that with bringing on our deputy director and also being able to staff our planning division more completely than we have in the recent years, we are going to be providing more environmental stewardship. We'll be doing more, providing more efforts as far as fire suppression and shaded fuel breaks. We're going to be looking at how we can better plan for our native plants and resources to be protected or propagated within our parks. So that'll be a major piece that we're adding and we're fortunate enough to have the staff to be able to do that. I'm also looking at climate resilient programs and projects and as well as some of the larger efforts that you're probably already aware of and one of those that we're really proud of, of course, is the renaming of Willowbrook for in honor of Sergeant Damon Gutsweiler and that'll be an ongoing effort. We'll see other pieces of that throughout the budget process today, but we're really fortunate to get to be a part of that and we'll be mentioning some more changes in our details as I said in the capital projects portion. So outside of that, we are also been able to fund several other projects, especially as a result of some of the park impact fee changes that we made and we're also, as I was asked about earlier, the Whiting Road South County acquisition that we're working towards. I'll be mentioning that a little bit later in the presentation. So next slide. Thank you. As far as park operations and recreation, this is what most people know our department for. This is the forward-facing courses of our organization, whether it's programming for children or summer programs, activities for adults and seniors, or it's just making sure our parks are clean and well-maintained. So some of the major components, of course, is we added the Opal Cliffs Recreation and Park District was dissolved, so we added actually a park unit quietly while that went on. We had been managing that park unit for a couple of years and now it's fully in our responsibility. We anticipate finishing the coastal development permit that went along with that that was started almost five, six years ago now. So that would be one piece that we'll be doing. We're also taking on responsibility for the Watsonville Bets Hall, looking forward to programming it with activities that we used to occur there in the past and bringing programs to South County and working closely with the city of Watsonville. We have been in discussion with them and I anticipate that in the next year or so we'll probably be doing programs collaboratively with them. And then as we mentioned, just through recreation, so many great new programs that we're doing. We actually, as you'll see further into this slide presentation, we will also be adding some funding to continue some of the recreation specialist positions that we've started because they have been so successful, we anticipate that those will return their dollars and generate more revenue for us as well as providing more activities for youth. Next slide. So as you're also probably aware, we have the Cultural Services Programming. One side of it is the larger grants, which are the Arts Council, the Museum of Art and History and the Vets Memorial over in downtown Santa Cruz. So those programs are ongoing and have been included in the budget. Something that we are changing is the smaller grants program. So this grants program is lesser known and really just $37,000 at this point, but what it does is it provides some limited dollars to smaller programming throughout our county, whether it's Pacific Elementary, Community Action Board, YWCA in South County. So some of those programs are able to get five or six or $7,000 to help them with recreation services throughout the summer or times when they need them. We're going to formalize that into a more structured grant program. And so it'll allow some other smaller groups as well to potentially apply for that. We're also looking at options on how we can increase the amount of money that we have in that and bring in grant opportunities of our own to that programming. So I also am looking at bringing this before the Parks Commission and having them make recommendations to your board. So we'll have a very vetted public process for that. Okay, next one. Thank you. Art in public places, as you all know, we have often had call to artists to provide art into our public construction projects or public works projects. We'll be doing the Heart of Soquel phase two. We'll be providing an art piece added to that. That's just a wonderful opportunity even before the art gets out there. If you get out to walk around in the Heart of Soquel it's just a great connection to the earth and to the stream that goes by. And it's also provided a great education forum for the local and elementary schools and for the high school. We'll also be doing the call for artists on the library annex. We'll be updating that. The outside of the box traffic art. So you can see in the picture there actually those are all those utility boxes or traffic boxes you see around the county. Those are our artists going out in there and getting that work done. And it's just a really great way to beautify our community and also embrace the artists that we have. And as CSA 11, as I mentioned we're gonna be increasing some dollars for our rec staff so we can keep those programs going that have been highly successful since the pandemic has been slowing. Thank you. So we're also, I'll mention briefly later on about some of our larger grant opportunities that we've been putting in for but we're looking right now. There's been great success in some of our water protection and watershed protection I should say and drought resilient projects. So we're gonna be looking for areas to apply for grants in there. There's a lot of money out with the state right now. Some of the childcare infrastructure within our facilities needs repair. We're gonna be doing that. And as you may or may not be aware our county park friends partners were very successful in doing an outdoor equity programming grant. They received over $650,000. So we'll be looking to match that. Oftentimes grantors are excited about providing both money to nonprofits and to the government agency that is their partner. So we'll be looking at how we can add even more programming to that. That's a three year program they'll be taking on. And of course always looking for opportunities to add for our arrangement activities after school. All right, next slide. Some of our successes. If you've had a chance at all to get out to the Simpkins Swim Center you'll know how amazing it looks now. It was 35 years ago, it was built. And as everybody knows these things have a shelf life and for a pool to have been pieced together for as long as we have. I felt like we were definitely living on borrowed time but we were fortunate enough to be able to get that done and so many great improvements had so many great compliments. We were on budget and just a week over the time that we said we would, so not too bad. I was really proud of the staff and thanks to General Services of course and especially I have to thank Superintendent Hurley for her efforts to make this happen. Next slide. So agents to discovery. This was incredibly successful. As you can see, we went way beyond 428% more than we ever thought we would with this program. What it is is children and adults but it's primarily geared towards children. It's sort of phased in as a gaming app which I know seems strange to use in the outdoors but we have to get the kids out there somehow. And so what it does is it brings them out into the outdoors introduces them to the floor and fauna describes what floor and fauna they're looking for and what its importance is to the environment around them. So they're already learning about science and they're outdoors doing it. So with the use of an app and as I said, highly successful. Next slide. And in our ongoing efforts to bring ourselves into the 21st century, we're trying to get away from sand in our playgrounds. Although some people think it's great. It's actually got a lot of detractions and there's a lot of reasons why we don't want sand in our playgrounds. So we are looking towards as much as we can what can be called pour and play often times or rubberized surfaces so that people of all abilities are able to access and utilize the playgrounds. In some cases we may be using five bar but for the most part we're looking for that rubberized surfacing. Next slide. So I wanted to talk about a number of successes that we've had and I anticipate we'll be continuing to have. And I think first and foremost, it's important to mention measure F which was something that was passed in 2014 that people forget about and supervisor McPherson mentioned it earlier about measure S and how it takes a while to see the results of these actions. And I think we're now just now beginning to see the results of that measure F and then of course measure G. So some of the items that we really are looking at things like being able to talk about a South County Parkland acquisition which we never anticipated would be a possibility but those are some of the things we're able to look at and in regards to doing simple renovations and deferred maintenance items that need to be done in our parks those are all items that are addressed as a result of something like that. I wanted to also mentioned our AmeriCorps team efforts and some of the things that we've been doing with those partnerships. Those also things like that would not be possible if we hadn't had a few dollars that were available to us to see those opportunities. So now we'll be a sponsor for AmeriCorps. We've worked it out with the land trust. They'll be a sponsor. This is these are young adults for those of you that don't know about an AmeriCorps team or never worked with that. It's just life changing for both the youth for our staff and for the people who interact with them. These are people who are looking for opportunities to make our community or other communities better and work together to do it. So I'm really thrilled that we were able to make something like that. And I think that will be a project an effort that we'll live on for many, many years. I also wanted to thank Ajita Patela and the personnel department for having faith in us and also providing the resources that we needed to do what we call the pop-up hiring event. We're actually able to hire 16 people in one day in county government. I know that just seems shocking to some folks but we were able to do it. And for parks in the seasonal nature in which we operate it's so important for us to be able to do that. And I hear that they're looking at doing it in other areas and other departments. And I think it would benefit us all. Also wanted to mention how the prescription for parks has been working out really well. We've been working with our county park friends, partners and we now have doctors that are actually prescribing parks for health especially for children and how to get them into a healthier environment both physically and mentally. And we're beginning to demonstrate that and develop data sets that can be utilized to understand how we can better operate and what we can do to provide those types of prescriptions. And then also funding has been allocated and has continued to be allocated for that process. And then I did wanna briefly, I know Supervisor Caput you wanted to hear a little bit I'll just take a moment to talk about the South County acquisition. So we are working on the option to buy still. And we have done the, we're working on the scientific study pieces to that. And I can follow up with questions afterwards with you but that does appear to be on track. We do have two grants in process for that. And I look forward to that being a great addition. We also have talked with, especially the fairgrounds has been very interested as well. So I think in our partnerships in South County with the city of Watsonville. And so I know it's going to happen. I don't have any extensive updates today to provide hard details but we're getting the studies and process that we need to do to do our homework to make the acquisition and we have applied for the grants. So I also wanna talk about quickly our special events and lots of activities out there. As I mentioned, July will be Parks and Recreation Month and we're doing movies in the parks again. We're starting to get back to normal and having a lot of outdoor activities. And one last thing I did wanna thank Deputy Director Namba for her efforts on the website. If you haven't had a chance and also RISD staff. I thank you, Tom McCallan for all of your efforts. The website's wonderful and really easy to navigate. And I think it's really changed the ability for our community to be able to get into interested programs that they're interested in and access the events they want to. Next slide. So as I mentioned, we've been working on grants as you can see during the last couple of years as a result of the pandemic primarily we haven't had the ability to put in and there haven't been as many grants to go after but we were successful still in getting grants during that time frame which I'm very proud of. We have put in for 16 million over almost 16 million, $600,000 for the grants. I anticipate we'll be successful for a number of those. Our staff is working hard and done a great job. So next slide. Without much further ado, I would ask for your approval of our budget. Of course, the links are there for the public to follow if they want to. They can go to our website or dashboard of our budget. If they're interested. And I know that there's probably some questions out there. I'd love to answer those questions. Thank you, Director Gaffney and Deputy Director Namba. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Provides a cap. Well, you pretty much answered what I asked earlier. Later on, I'll probably get the combination lock number. Sure, absolutely. I'd love to have you bring folks out there so they can see what we're going to do. And maybe they'll leave a deposit somewhere. And we've got an account set up so they can do that. And then a donation tax ID number, if I can tell people to donate to it. Sure. And who to send it in the air market. Absolutely. I mean, right now they can just reach out to us at County Parks. My email is on the website. They can do that. And I can get back to anybody that wants it. And I think we have $50,000 discretionary in the budget. I'm going to put that my share towards the park. Thank you, Supervisor Katt. And how much do we have in there right now? About 500,000 or so. I'm going to defer to Deputy Director Namba. We had a budget of 650,000. We've spent that down a little bit for the option, but that's our current budget. So we can go towards. Yes, that's good to be our matching funds to the ground applications if they're successful. And then if we add 50,000 to that, we'll get it. We got about a year and a half, right? Absolutely. Yes, that's absolutely correct. I'm hoping, I hope we can do it by the end of this year. But we have a year and a half, yes. I'll just throw this out there too. I was thinking about the Aloni Indians. If we can get them involved, maybe a little bit out there, that would fit in real nice with the cultural. Absolutely. We at the Amamutsan tribe, we've been in conversation with them and how we can provide some historical relationship with how they used to use the land for farming. And so that can be something we might be able to do from an interpret panel standpoint and honor their presence there. Yeah, okay. All right, thanks a lot. Absolutely. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor McPherson. I'd like to make a statement and then have a question, but I really appreciate that the park team, thank you, Director Gaffney and Deputy Hanemba, for all that you do, not just on the operations of the park system and our programs, but to look out for opportunities that you've explained right now that enhance the system and the new sites that we're looking at it as we go on. You're really creative in what you do and it does a great deal for direct service to our County residents. And your cooperative efforts with agencies like AmeriCorps and Linda Scathe up in the Santa Rosa Valley for years has been working with them and what they do for the native plants and to see and get appreciation of that is truly success, a great success story, particularly in the Santa Rosa Valley. And I think the opportunities are sometimes seen as nice to have, but we really learned how much value parks and recreation are to our community with the pandemic and it allowed people to get a release and to get out. And I really appreciate that. I know the people in Santa Cruz County do too. And when looking forward to working with you this year and support parks and issues in the fifth district, and I wanna thank you again for all your hard work of three years to go with the Discovery Park adjacent to the library, which is one of its kind. I still think maybe, well, maybe there's a few others west of the Mississippi, but that was the first, I think, west of the Mississippi where parks was combined with an interpretive center of the Discovery Park and felt really impressive how you worked that out with other departments and other agencies. And lastly, I wanna congratulate my colleague, Supervisor Friend for the designation of the Willowbrook Park in honor of Sergeant Deem and Gutsweiler, what a great way to honor his legacy. And I know there was an event just a week or 10 days ago. And the question I have is this time last year, the board approved a plan to modify how we collect park fees and it was a welcome change. And I'd like to know more about what impacts we have seen as a result of those changes or what you might see in the future. What, oh, how much that might provide for you. Yeah, oh, can't thank enough the board for your efforts and Supervisor McPherson, you were spearheading our efforts on that. We had to go through a Coastal Commission approval process on that. So it took a little while, but come around October, we were able to start to really get the program moving. So at that point, permits would start being brought in for planning for the program. And so that means people are just now beginning to complete their permits and payments are being made. So we're figuring out the numbers in regards to that. So that's just kind of the budget detail aspect of it. But the bigger overarching benefit to that was you're gonna see it in some of the stuff and the items we'll be presenting in the Capra Projects today and some of the other items we talked about today. For example, in your district, we were able to do road work at Quail Hollow because we don't have to handle with $2,000 in this district or $1,000 over here for the development district. So it's much easier for us to move money to projects that need to be successful. Willowbrook, for example, we are able to move money into Willowbrook as a result of the parking pack fee structure being changed. It has been transformative for us as a department to be able to have that ability to say, all right, we have this many dollars, how can we spend them? Instead of having to figure out, we only have $1,000 here, $5,000 there, $2,000 there. And that was very difficult and really actually archaic to be dealing with. So I don't need to expound on it a tremendous amount. I just want to emphasize that there are projects that we're working on today right now and the projects that you're approving today as part of this budget that are a direct result of those changes that we made. And I do wanna thank, of course, Carolyn Burke, Matt Machado, Jocelyn Drake and Kim, of course, for the efforts they put in, this was not an easy, you took the action and then there was a bunch of work that had to be done. And of course we had to go to the Coastal Commission. So there was a ton of work that went on to get us there. And then to now be as of October 2021 to be moving forward with a new process and the ability to do simple projects that we need to get done. The one that really comes to mind, and I'll stop after this, I promise, but at Brommer Street restroom, we had this, we've been making some changes to the park trying to improve things and we had some great volunteers. We have limited staff and so we rely on volunteers. It was amazing volunteer. She went out and just worked so hard to clean it up and cleaned all the weeds away from the bathroom and just dressed up and it looked beautiful. As soon as she pulled the weeds away, you could see all the wood rotting off the bathroom walls. There were holes where you could just put your hand through the wall because the weeds had been hiding that. Unfortunately, I think our staff actually intentionally left the weeds there for that reason, but it was just up against that. And so we were able to quickly move and go for the money to be able to replace that bathroom. So something that probably would have taken two years to figure out, then get a grant for another, five years from now we'd have the bathroom falling down on somebody. And so I can't thank the board enough and you enough for making that happen. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Other questions or comments? Yeah, Mr. Chair, I'll make some comments. Just first, obviously a note of gratitude to the team director Gaffney, Ms. Namba and of course Ms. Hurley as well who over the last year have been on well weekly conversations with myself and my office over this shift at Willowbrook working with a very difficult and emotional situation with the family and the sheriff's office and just absolutely not just advocating but comporting themselves with the most grace that you could possibly have in this situation. And by the way, in an underfunded department really trying to find ways to make this a reality. And to Supervisor McPherson's point when he was mentioning the projects up in Felton I think that sometimes it's important to remind the community that just in the course of this conversation we're talking from Quail Hollow to Pinto the extent of the scope of what the parks department does. I mean, it's about a four, I mean, just like the roads we're talking about a 400 or so square mile area of responsibility with a very small maintenance team and a very small management team to have to oversee and actually for that matter relatively de minimis budget and yet as we didn't just see during the pandemic but as an area that values its open space and recreational opportunities I think that we're doing things with very little that can really showcase our community and just goes to show that if we were to put an additional investment into this area how far it could go as was evidenced in the last couple of years I've been able to add restrooms and upgrade some playgrounds within my district and other locations in the community including like Quail Hollow Ranch up in Bruce's excuse me, Supervisor McPherson's district. And when it comes to Willowbrook and there is a question and I recognize we're gonna be dealing with that we're gonna be having a capital projects discussion but I did wanna ask a question just in general about inflation and increased costs. You know, what's going on in regards to that? Do we have a concern in regards to inflation and costs increases or how are we looking in that regard? No, I think it's an appropriate question and absolutely a deep concern of mine in regards to all levels of inflation for us. Simple things like paying for the water to water our fields for kids to play on, how we maintain every daily activity for us. We are more like a business probably than a lot of the usual County department agencies. And I think that the inflation is gonna impact us disproportionately and it is concerned and we are taking every opportunity we can to build that into our cost, but it's hard and how do we continue to provide free services or services that are provided to our most needy and disadvantaged members of our community and still provide, you know, try not to drain money out of the general fund and generate revenue. So it does keep me up some nights. Appreciate that. I mean, I asked because there are multiple parks projects in process and we've got the initial acquisition phase for Supervisor Caput South County district. The community is generously and for that matter, employees have raised over half of the cost or over $300,000 stored will brook. My concern is that if we don't continue to invest in those right now, even though we have limited resources, we're gonna end up having to pay more in the long run to actually make these projects come to fruition because I mean, if you've got half of something invested, but then we're seeing inflation in double digits over the course of a year, it's very possible that the cost that was estimated at five or 600,000 may become seven or 800,000 or you might not be able to do the project at all. And so I just wanna ensure that as a collective body here for the Board of Supervisors and our administration that we're looking at it, that we're making enough of an investment into these scoped out projects and sure they can actually be completed in the course of time that we're saying that we don't end up coming back in a mid-year or later realizing that we weren't able to do something as a result. I agree. All right, and I just wanna, again, the appreciation to you, Director Gaffney, Ms. Ridley and also Ms. Namba, Ms. Namba, thank you for your exceptionally kind words at Willbrook and during the Memorial event. I look forward to hearing my colleagues as well in this issue. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Other comments or questions? I just wanna make a brief comment, which was I just appreciate the entrepreneurial nature of our Parks Department. The efforts recently on the North Coast to get stakeholders together in order to do good planning as we have faced a variety of projects coming forward all with sort of different property owners, different funding streams and making sure there's a coherence in a way that serves those visitors and the community. And I also wanna appreciate that during the pandemic, Parks Department went out of their way to create after-school programs or programs that allowed kids to be in safely approximated to one another, sort of enjoying each other and our outdoor spaces or different activities and also gave weary parents a much needed break. And it was a very big deal to families during the pandemic and it was because the Parks Department went over and beyond in order to provide those services. Thank you. I just wanna say thanks. And it was, it was its own reward at times. We were able to do that and I do appreciate the recognition for that. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. You have just a few questions for you here, Director Gashmi. She's like the biggest change we're seeing this year is sort of a return to normal. So increase in revenues and a decrease in the contribution from the general fund. I don't wanna make sure I understand those revenues. So actually the largest contribution is from maintenance charges. Seems sort of counterintuitive that maintenance charges would actually be revenue generator. Could you explain what those are exactly? I'm gonna have Deputy Director Nambu explain. So maintenance charges is perhaps a little misleading but that is the object that is used to bring in the CSA funding into the Parks Operating Budget. So that's... From CSA 11? From CSA 11, yeah. So that's a large piece. Okay. And then related to CSA 11, it seemed like it took quite a dip in 2020, 2021 and has since rebounded. Is that what was the reason for that? The revenue in CSA 11 was stable but we, because we had so much of the ARPA funding, we did not need to draw it into the Parks Operating Budget at such a high level. So we had a savings that year. Got it. And of course, as was mentioned, you guys have a particular challenge in terms of hiring because you have so many seasonal workers. It's really great to hear that the pop-up hiring event has worked for you guys. I know you didn't solve all the challenges and continue to face challenges there. Is there anything that we can do from a policy perspective or to make hiring easier for your department? I think we are learning every day how this pandemic is affecting everyone. I honestly have been shocked at how difficult it is to find employees. And I think that's affecting everybody. We have always been fortunate in Parks and Recreation that you have a certain mindset. You have a certain type of workforce that gravitates towards that department, towards Parks and Recreation in general. And even that workforce has diminished. And so I guess continuing to support Ajita and her efforts with personnel and trying to promote good jobs and trying to promote good recruitment efforts and doing everything we can possibly to make it as interesting and exciting to come work for the County of Santa Cruz, which is not always something somebody thinks about. So I wish there was some tangible, you could point to this, make it happen and change, but we're not getting there right now. Okay. And then under expenditures with services and supplies is one of our larger line items is POSCS services. What is POSCS stand for? Parks and Open Space and Cultural Services. I don't know if you want more detail. That's the companion to the maintenance charges. So it's brought into the parks budget as maintenance charges. It comes out of the CSA budget as POSCS services. So is it still, but it's not salaries. And so that's just- It supports the parks budget. Yeah, salaries, supplies for projects, whatever we use it for. And then why are we seeing such a big increase in insurance costs this year, $300,000 increase? Yeah, there was a recent litigation that we've been dealing with. You may be aware of it. And so that's primarily what I know of. It's a great question, Chair Koenig, Marcus Pimentel, County Budget Manager, included in yesterday's general government is our risk management fund. They're seeing increased costs from a lot of claims liabilities. And so when their costs go up, the allocation goes up. The allocation methodology is based on frequency and severity by departments. And parks, unfortunately, hit some of those triggers so their costs went up a little bit more proportionally. It's the basis of our cost allocation plan. We helped provide the funding so that impact was muted and it didn't impact their operations. Got it, that's helpful, thanks. Finally, I was excited to hear about the Live Oak walking program. I want to explain a little bit more about how that will work. Sure. Actually, this is something that Deputy Director Mesmond very involved in. And it's, well, go ahead. So pre-pandemic, the public health had received a grant for a Live Oak walking program as well as I believe in Seascape and partnered with Candy Park Friends and Candy Parks. We had created the maps and the routes and Candy Park Friends was ready to provide the walking leaders, volunteer walking leaders, and then the pandemic hit. So we were finally able to complete it this year. And I believe it's done. They may be one more weekend, but they were able to do it from Simkins and then also from Capitola Mall. They had some start from there, so. And of course, as you are aware, but I will state it here, we are looking at opportunities to connect our communities in every way we can without cars. And so this feeds into that. And we have pathways that currently there are easements and pathways that are not been opened or haven't been maintained and we continue to look for those opportunities. This is part of that same effort. Great. And so the Live Oak walking program will continue into the next fiscal year as well or it's completed at this point or. The grant funding has ended. So public health and we are exploring ways we can possibly extend that. The group has not fallen apart. We are holding the folks together that have pulled this together. And we have been, I have been in conversation with county park friends and I know that we also want to work with public health. But I feel like it will find a path. All right, great. Well, look forward to helping with that. Thank you. That's all my questions. Thank you. All right. We'll open it from now for public comment. So anyone here in the chambers who wants to comment on the parks budget? Seeing none. Is there anyone on Zoom that wishes to comment on parks budget? We do have speakers on Zoom who wish to speak. Jane and Michael, your microphone is available. Hi. Thank you very much. Supervisors and park staff. This is Jane Brockelbank and I'm speaking for myself and my husband Michael Lewis. It's really good to hear park staff will be proactively sharing budget matters with the parks commission. I really look forward to that. We were glad to hear a staff emphasis on natural resource management. It is parks open spaces and cultural services. Last, if we are going to have proper scientific natural resource protection, then the parks department must have park rangers for enforcement of park ordinances, especially keeping dogs leashed at all the parks and at Corcoran Lagoon Beach where dogs chase shorebirds who are trying to rest or feed. And at Scott Creek Beach where dogs are now and have been and are now completely prohibited. So my point is, I guess not for this year's budget but the public really wants park rangers. Not just us, but the general public who is concerned about these problems. So please for next year's budget, please consider park rangers to help with enforcement. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Brockelbank. Terri Corwin, your microphone is available. Terri Corwin, my name is Terri Corwin. So do you think it was clear enough? Absolutely. Ms. Brockelbank, I think you're still unmuted. Good morning, Chair Koenig, hardworking staffers and other supervisors and members of the community. My name is Terri Corwin. I serve as board chair for County Park Friends. If you've heard our name pop up a number of times during this meeting, which I'm happy to get that recognition. We do our work by supporting and partnering with amazing staff of the County Parks Department. Just wanted to point out some of the projects we're working on together with them, some of which you heard we were fortunate to receive a large three-year grant from the state with funding to help deliver community design programs to enhance outdoor equity. And especially with an eye towards developing future outdoor leadership and diversity in that field. Also providing a swim lesson, scholarships for kids who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to learn to swim, rebuilding old parks, including Willowbrook and identifying where new parks are needed. And we are planning to partner with the parks department to update the park strategic plan. As COVID risks linger in our community, there's no safer, more affordable or healthier place to be than the great out of doors and our County Parks system offers that opportunity for all. Please keep this in the front of mind as you allocate our precious tax dollars in your tough deliberations on this budget. Thank you and see you at the park. Thank you, Ms. Corwin. There are no further speakers on soon. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. I'd like to move the recommended actions and congratulate the parks for what it's doing. And thank you, Ms. Corwin for staying active, even with their land trust for many, many years. And you're keeping things open so more people can appreciate the great outdoors. Absolutely. Motion by Supervisor McPherson, second by Supervisor Caput, any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Coonerty. Aye. Item passes unanimously. Thank you to the entire parks team with the parks budget being approved for the coming year. We'll proceed to item 30 to consider approval of the 22-23 proposed budget for capital projects, including any supplemental materials, particularly the actions outlined in the reference budget documents and is recommended by County Administrative Officer for a presentation on this item. By your assistant CAO, Lisa Benson. Good morning, everyone. Lisa Benson for the Record, Assistant CAO, and I'm here before you today as Chair of our Capital Projects Review Committee and have a team around who has been part of that great group. We have Eric Friedrich, our Senior Administrative Analyst. We have Michael Beaton, Director of General Services, Jeff Gaffney, Director of Parks and Open Space, and then we have Travis Carey, Director of Capital Projects from CDI. And we don't have our Vice Chair, Matt, today, but he's next up on your agenda. So I just wanted to acknowledge we have a great team working together. Our presentation today will provide an overview of the proposed CIP for County Facilities Parks and a few key general fund investments in road projects. Eric will present, I will provide a brief overview of really some process improvement work we've done in CIP development through the CPRC. And then Eric is going to talk about the actual overview of the proposed CIP and on the online budget presentation of that information. We'll then move to a quick overview of the major CIP program areas from Travis, Jeff, and Michael. We'll close with some CIP programs, successes and challenges, and that'll inform our work in the coming year. And then last, of course, recommended actions for your consideration today. So with that, I'm going to pass it to, oh my gosh, we have a new one, to Eric Friedrich. Let's see. Oh, it's a ring is over here. Several of these. Thanks, Elise. Thanks, Elise, Ed. Before we begin and dive into the details of the Capital Projects budget, it's important to understand that this budget behaves a little bit differently from the operating budgets presented to the board and to the public during these hearings. Capital projects, by nature, often span several fiscal years at different accounting structures, pull multiple financing sources, and often have expenditures that don't line up nicely with the budget cycle milestones by publishing the proposed budget, often creating peaks and valleys from one fiscal year to the next. Additionally, this year, we've elected to focus the Capital Budget on county-owned facilities like the government center we're in now, our health clinics operated by HSA, or our mosquito and vector control laboratory, as well as projects within our county park system, as you've heard before today, such as the Lincoln Swim Center, Quill Hollow Park, or our Veterans Halls and Santa Cruz in Watsonville. Infrastructure projects like road repairs, bridge repairs, sewers, refuse and recycling projects can be found within the community development and infrastructure department. As those projects are better suited to be embedded within the context of that department. So let's jump in to the Capital Projects budget on the webpage. Scrolling down, you can see capital projects are categorized by division, one for county facilities and the other for parks. Overall, our fiscal year 2022-23 budget includes 43 million in total project costs, balanced against 34 and a half million in revenues, and a $4.7 million contribution from the general fund. These figures are by the snapshot in a longer multi-year project portfolio and is supported by capital projects from years past. We go and now get to the budget dashboard and scroll down to a stack chart. We can see that the proposed investment in our capital program, while receding from a large spike last year is almost doubled from fiscal year 2019. Back on the homepage, I wanna call out a unique feature of the Capital Projects budget, which is a detailed attachment for users to access details of individual projects. Previous year's budgets would only include the recommended revenues and expenditures related to projects within a given year. Now we're able to see carryovers, direct revenues and expenses and any fund balances that give us the full life of project budget for each project. Again, these figures are a current snapshot of projects and have a wide variety of timelines, but this represents a new approach in understanding the full intensity of our capital program and a commitment to better link our budget to our multi-year capital improvement plan, which is adopted each fall. In summary, our capital expenses again are just over $43 million, offset by 34 million in revenues, with the difference being filled by previous year's fund balances and a general fund contribution of 4.7 million. This is a sizable reduction from the previous years because our measure S funded library projects have come closed out. We've completed the acquisition of the West Marine building down in Watsonville and our teams have completed various facilities and park projects throughout the past year, but this is still a sizable increase in our capital project portfolio from just a few years ago. With that, I'd like to pass it back to you Lisa to talk further about our process for selecting recommended projects and the County's Capital Project Review Committee. Thank you, Eric. As I mentioned, this process has been overseen through our Capital Projects Review Committee. This is a new venture for our offices that CEO Palacios asked us to start up. We're a little over a year old and so we're still getting our feet under us and learning as we go, but I just want to extend incredible appreciation and thanks to Matt Machado, to Nicole Coburn, to Marcus Pimentel, Laura Bowers, Brian Howard as key members, when then we have an incredible group that supports it, Travis, Thomas, Carol, Eric and Lana. Oh, and I forgot Michael, Michael Beaton's one of our RCPRC members. And I also want to just extend my appreciation to all the departments that brought their projects before the committee and sort of are learning along the way with us. We are testing new practices and policies and it is a change and as we know sometimes change can be hard. So as mentioned, the administrative committee is really aimed at a comprehensive review of our capital improvement program and how we go about that kind of decision making and we are absolutely a primo project in motion. We are building on past practice and really trying to stabilize and introduce new modern approaches to facilities in capital program management and just Lana and Eric and I have to also acknowledge Trish Daniels before she left for HSD has been so critical in bringing those practices forward. One of the key aspects of our new internal review process that is informed and supported by our OpenGov budget system and Eric did incredible architecture to make this work for us this year is to really evaluate each project proposed by the departments along 10 criteria and these range from equity, health and safety, environmental impact, strategic plan alignment, existing conditions, fiscal and operational impacts if whether it's a requirement or mandate, economic impact, community improvement and project readiness and collaboration. So we're really trying to bring to the forefront specific components that make projects successful. At the same time as we look at those scores we're looking at geographic equity, we're looking at how do we spread these investments to address backlogs, the backlog of facility work that we all are dealing with as well as more publicly facing projects. So again, it's been an incredible year of learning and practice for us and we hope to continue to build on that and make that program stronger and stronger to serve all of you. So we basically developed this, went through the process, developed a set of recommendations for consideration by the CEO and that's that project list that Eric presented. And then that was then folded into the proposed budget for your consideration. With that, we are going to move to highlights of each of the major program areas and I'm gonna pass it to Travis. Great, thank you, Alisa. Good morning, Chair and members of the board. Travis Kerry, Director of Capital Projects, Community Development Infrastructure Department. And I just want to reiterate Alisa's leadership and also our vice leader, I guess, of the CPRC, Matt Machado, and really special thanks to Eric for keeping us organized and creating the infrastructure that allowed us to have a renewed interest in capital projects in a much more efficient way to review projects and get them ranked and hopefully implemented more efficiently. So my role today, I'm just gonna review quickly a handful of projects that have been assigned to the Capital Projects Division in Community Development and Infrastructure. So primary project really is the South County Service Center at 500 Westridge Drive. This project significantly expands the county's investment in facilities in South County and will greatly increase public services in South County. So we're looking at consolidating the Human Services Department out of leases in South County, also moving over the Agricultural Commissioner and the Agricultural Extension Office of Freedom Boulevard to create an egg-centered office and also expanding clerk and election services and creating a voting center that'll operate out of the facility and also adding auditor, treasure, text, collector services in South County to make those services available to South County residents. So this implements several goals that the county, including our desire to consolidate leases and reduce our capital costs and stabilize our long-term capital needs. So in terms of progress on this, the acquisition, as you know, is complete and we're almost done with design and engineering for the project. We actually have two projects going on, the seismic upgrade component, it's actually due tomorrow and so we'll see hopefully construction starting on the facility in August. And then our main tenant improvement project, we're just finalizing construction documents, wrapping up final design and hopeful construction starting in November of this year and we're targeting July 2023 still on our schedule for completion. So on to juvenile hall, a couple of great projects here, both SB 81 projects up at the Graham Hill site, the current site of juvenile hall. We're just about ready to resubmit to the state fire marshal for review and then we'll hopefully returning the board in December for approval to bid finally on this project and hopefully getting that bid out in the first quarter of 2023. So this is an approximately $15 million state-funded investment in the juvenile hall facility. So we're really looking forward to upgrading that facility. And I want to acknowledge Nicole Steele, project manager in community development infrastructure. She's the project manager on both of these projects, the South County service center and juvenile hall and she's just done phenomenal work in addition to her other workload, keeping these two massive projects on schedule. And then freedom Boulevard map campus master plan, this project is well underway. As you know, it's the site for the health services agency. There's a couple of other programs there. We're making really good progress, finalizing the layouts for the master plan. It's also under Sequa review and we're hopeful to complete that entire project by the end of this year, hopefully wrapping that up in December. And then we'll be looking, the goal here is to create an enhanced health service agency facility and enhance access to health services in South County. And that project is a really good example of our master planning efforts. So really looking at enhancing services, maximizing the county's real estate assets and helping us prepare sites for future capital investment and also other beneficial uses that can be made of county property if we determine that that's able to be done. So animal shelter just about done with phase one is about 99% complete. And I wanted to acknowledge Rod Tidmore project manager also in community development and infrastructure really wrangling with this really exciting project and it's just about done. And it's a really good example of investments in sort of a mid-sized project, but really looking at upgrading our older facilities and with a focus on service enhancements and modernizing our facilities so that we can keep up with modern business practices. So next slide, please. So this slide provides a listing of our library projects. So we have, we've had six measure as funded library projects as supervisor McPherson mentioned earlier, really exciting to see these projects coming on board and getting done. Also funding county library funds and some pretty significant friends donations. So we're always very grateful for the involvement of the friends. And I want to acknowledge Damon Adlow, project manager in community development infrastructure who is single-handedly project managers at all six of the library projects. So he's just done a phenomenal job keeping this entire program running. It's really exciting to see. So we have Aptos branch library is the older structure has been demolished and we're well underway with construction. It's a new 12,400 square foot library, currently under construction with completion scheduled for July of 2023. So we're moving ahead on that one. It represents a $14 million capital investment in the Aptos community. A Live Oak Annex Library also under construction. This is a new 21 and 100 square foot addition to the Simkins Family Swim Center. Also a new public plaza and 3,500 square feet of interior renovations to the existing swim swim center facility. Represents a $6.5 million capital investment of construction. And then we're looking at completion of that project February 2023. And moving on to Live Oak branch, it's an existing 12,800 square foot facility. It's getting some fairly modest but really impactful interior renovations. Those are all nearly complete as well. Hopeful to wrap that up in August of this year. And it was about a 600, a little bit over $600,000 investment. Really pleased to announce that Felton, Boulder Creek and the Selvavitch libraries are complete and open to the public. So just really, really successful projects and it's so exciting to see them being open and used combined capital investment of about $16 million in those three facilities. And lastly, Sobering Center, this is the replacement of the facility that was fire damaged on the Water Street footage over at the main jail across the street here, 371 Water Street. We're looking at a new custom modular facility. We're just wrapping up final design with the sheriff's office to their specifications for this really important program. We'll have bidding out within the next month or so and it really depends on the turnaround for the construction of the unit and then installation, hopefully a six to 12 month completion period on that. Get that program back up and running. And we're doing this in partnership with the general services department. We're doing that on several projects now and it's really exciting to be working with the other departments that are involved in capital work and creating partnerships and really sharing the skills and resources across departments. And then I'd include the parks department in that as well. So that's a good segue and I'm gonna turn it over to Michael Beaton, director of general services department. Thank you, Travis. Before I start today talking about the county facilities projects, I first wanna give a big shout out to the general services family that works tirelessly repairing and maintaining our county aging infrastructure. Over the past few years, we have seen an increasing failure to the core infrastructure of several county facilities. Just this last 12 months alone, we have seen mechanical system failures to the 1400 MLM building, 1430 Freedom Campus, Juvenile Hall, 1070 MLM, Round Tree Correctional Facility, Main Jail, Sheriff South County Outpost, just to name a few. In addition, we've had electrical infrastructure failures related to a fused main service panel at the Freedom Campus, which has created a very significant safety concern. Failure of automatic transfer switches at two buildings on the Emeline Campus. Emeline service panel issues continue and backup generator failure at the Blaine Street Jail. In addition, we've had some building envelope failures allowing water intrusion at the Main Jail, Juvenile Hall Star Building, 1040 MLM, 1070 MLM and South County Sheriff Outpost. Even though our aging infrastructure continues to fail with increasing deferred maintenance, over the last three years, your board has continued to increase the investment into these infrastructures. Some of those investments for funding that we've done over the last couple of years include waterproofing the 701 Ocean Street Building, replacement of three generators at various sites, which is currently underway, replacement of boiler systems that have failed. We've funded a lighting control system replacement for 701 Ocean Street, Freedom Campus renovations to various county buildings, completed a district attorney remodel for their facility and starting the Unified Permit Center remodel. In addition, the board also funded a study to examine other critical public infrastructure backup electrical demands. Next slide, please. In the current proposed budget, it continues that investment by providing funding to demolish the MLM Child Care Center that has been dilapidated and would require more repairs than the value of the actual building. Also involves the correction of the significant safety concern at the 1430 Freedom Site, where we have a fused panel where we're not actually able to turn off the power to the building in case of an emergency. The proposal does ask for a refresh or does fund a refresh of the 701 Ocean Street restrooms. On the slide on the right hand side, you can kind of see an example of before and after. We did a demonstration project for the first floor MLM campus, I'm sorry, first floor 701 building to refresh the restrooms. The restrooms that we currently have right now are very antiquated and in some respects, gross. Sorry. The funding also in the plan also includes replacing of the round tree boiler systems that have failed and where we have patch milled together. Adds a water filtration system to the water well at the round tree facility due to potential contaminants. And in addition, the Capital Projects budget also includes funding for an asset management study of our infrastructure so that we may better prioritize future investments and make those recommendations to your board for future repairs and upkeep of our infrastructure. With that, I'll toss it over to Director Gaffney who will continue the presentation for parks and open space improvement projects. Thank you, Director Beaton, I appreciate it. So we just wanted to touch base on a few things in parks. You heard from me earlier about all of our following apart infrastructure and things that we're excited to get moving on. So these are some of those things that we're so thankful for the Capital Projects review committee and the staff that were involved to help us get here. It really is powerful to be sitting here and able to make changes like this that will impact our community directly and have long lasting impacts. Things like replacing roofs don't get a lot of press, don't get a lot of excitement but it makes a building last a lot longer and allows people to continue to use that building and that's what we're in the business of doing. So that said, we'll be able to replace the roof at Simkins which is 35 years old and getting to the point where a lot of leaks are starting to be hard to keep track of. So we're thrilled that that's gonna happen. And Quail Hollow for those that haven't been there a beautiful park and beautiful building, historic building been there for a very long time over a hundred years. And right now the termites are holding hands to hold the building together I think in some places that's obviously concerning and the woodpeckers and flickers really enjoy putting acorns into the walls. So obviously not a way for sustainable operation. So we're really happy about that. And for anybody that's been down to Pinto parking lot, it is in horrible shape and totally appropriate. Lots of use every day and especially on weekends that parking lot is full and this is well utilized money. And of course the Vets Hall in downtown Santa Cruz over here just been there for a long time and a really special building and glad that we're gonna be able to improve some infrastructure there. Excellent, thank you. So to quote Director Beaton, bathroom at Bromer Gross. So if you can see that picture up there on the right actually that was when I was talking about earlier the weeds being cleared away and you can see how bad that is. So just really lucky to be able to do that. And we're all putting a little bit of money towards that to make that happen. And bathrooms that are also going in at Hidden Beach and as I mentioned, and we're doing the work at Floral. And the thing I really wanted to talk about just briefly was thanking again, CAO Palazzo and also Sheriff Jim Hart and of course supervisor friend for the ability to reimagine and develop Willowbrook Park which now be named in honor of the Sergeant Damon Gutswiler. And just a special project very fortunate in my career to be a part of something like this, a legacy project. And thank you for the, as I said, the CPR Capital Projects Review Committee for giving us the money to be able to do this. Thank you. Okay, with that I'm gonna close out our presentation. The team members have talked about some of the key project successes but those are listed here. But I also just wanna put forward the challenges that we'll be working on over experiencing them working on over the next year. There are supply chain and inflation pressures that are affecting both our projects at a budget and a scheduling level. So we're always managing that, talking to the teams about that. One of the things that we will be doing at the CPRC is having regular project updates so we understand what's going on. We can bring those forward as necessary to the CAO and to your board if there do need to be adjustments based on that. We're also thinking within that capital funding how if we need to reprioritize to address higher impact projects, how are we gonna address that in the coming year? Michael mentioned that we have set a small piece of funding in the CIP before you today for facility condition index reporting. This is a process that we have not done regularly here at this county, but many counties, it's a standard apart of facilities management and we wanna move forward and we'll be focusing on our criminal justice facilities first just given the nature of those operations. We need to make sure they can operate it. They have huge operational impacts if things shut down. So that is something we're trying to get ahead of instead of be as we put here behind and have it be surprises to us so we can really prioritize those funds moving forward. There was also just that challenge that I think every department will speak to you about either yesterday, today or tomorrow of just workforce and these kinds of projects are complex, take an incredible level of skill and I think the project managers that work with all of our departments are exceptional and they could get jobs in the private sector in a moment. So we work very diligently to have them be happy and engage and they do incredible work but that's always a risk in doing this work. And then we will build on our review process. We tried a lot of new things in this last go around and we learned a lot and we are just gonna continue to work with our staff to better understand how to articulate the benefits of these projects and so we can make those choices moving forward and present those recommendations to you. With that, I'm gonna take us to our final slide and our request that you approve the proposed 22-23 budget for capital projects including the supplemental materials as recommended by the CAO and those notes are there. We are excited and happy to take any questions. Thank you, capital projects team. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Provides McPherson. Yeah, to begin with, I'm not gonna mention the name but I don't know if I'd wanna be identified as being a vice leader but whatever the title is in the future, we'll let that pass. But anyway, I just wanna say thank you. We have a lot of work to do, catch up work and you're doing a fantastic job with a limited amount of funds that we do have. There comes a time for an upgrade and it seems like a lot of things are coming at the same time here. And thank you for addressing these to the best of your ability especially focusing on the public safety aspects of these that are critical because a shutdown of those as you said would really snowball into really more costly actions. And we're in some difficult times with the recession and who can do what, how you can hire the teams to do it. I just, do we have any guesstimate of the Westridge Center? We have 2,700 employees. How many employees might be housed there? Do we have, what's the guesstimate at this point? It is gonna be a phase project but we're currently targeting about 350 employees. Okay, good. All right, well, I just wanna say thank you. There's a big reach out there in all regions of the county and thank you for reaching out and doing the best you can with what you have. We've got a lot to do and if it's not done today it's gonna cost more tomorrow. So thank you for your efforts. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Mr. Chair, I'll add in some comments. I always like to follow Supervisor McPherson. You always had some good comments on these items. Thank you for the presentation from the team. Director Beaton, some years back you were a strong, well, you've been continued to be this way but a strong advocate on letting us know about the challenges in regards to deferred maintenance on our buildings. And we started that process of setting aside but it really was your leadership and actually Carol who's recently retired's leadership on letting us know that this is something we have to invest in, it's tough because as you know, there really isn't a constituency for investing in, for modeling of government buildings but at the end of the day it saves a lot more money in the long run to do it this way and not just do emergency repairs. There was a slide in here or at the end of the last slide, Ms. Benson noted the inflationary pressures that I brought up during the previous parks item. And so that I did wanna to raise this question again because we have some projects that have a lot of private financing or contributions in particular like this Wilbur project, we've set aside $50,000 of discretionary for it. My concern is just that it's not gonna be enough to get the park over the finish line here. And so I wanted to ask that of Ms. Benson just about what the county commitment would be. I'm a little bit, I feel like now's the time to add the additional money in, like an additional 50,000 or so in order to get the park done as opposed to us finding out in next fiscal that the prices have gone up 25% and we're adding in a significant amount of money. So I just wanted to get a sense of projects that are underway such as projects like that. And it may not be the only project by the way but where we have both private financing and we're underway what the determination is in regards of county investment in order to get them over the top. We have several projects underway that I think we have potential inflationary cost pressures on and I think there's some very, very significant ones as we put them out to bid in the coming months we will be faced with that reality. To your point, I think that's something we have to be prepared for moving forward. As you know, as we approach these budgets going into a new fiscal year, we try and do so from a place of fiscal conservatism. We hope to put more than $4.7 million of general fund into our capital program but just where we were at this point in the fiscal year that was what we felt comfortable moving forward. That said, I'd look to the coming months as we close out this last fiscal year and working with county budget manager Pimentel around what additional funds may be programmable as we close out different projects that could address those shortfalls later in the fiscal year as they come forward. That would be my recommendation is we track very closely and look to see if there's some more, shall I call it, change in the couch that comes forward as we close out the fiscal year and we really do then reinvest those in those priority projects at that time. And that's a reasonable, I appreciate that answer, it's a reasonable approach. In my sense though, when we talk about something like the South County Service Center where the numbers are in the seven figures and inflationary pressures are real, that's very different from an additional say $50,000 that would basically make this project doable now. And so I just wanna, I mean, I feel like we should make this investment now in regards to this park because I'm afraid that it'll get pushed away for the significant inflationary pressures of much larger capital projects that you're mentioning. But I mean, look, it's a, although we read every item and do all this stuff at the end of the day, Mr. Pimentel and Mr. Palacios, know down to the cent what is flexible and what isn't and I'm not trying to put an unreasonable burden on from the dias. I mean, it's not, I mean, quite frankly, it's a 1.15 or whatever billion dollar budget and I'm thinking an additional 50,000 will make the park happen. It's not like it's a huge ask, but I still am, if there's flexibility in it, I think we should add it in for a last day consideration because then it gets it over the top. If it really is where we're at that point where that's just absolutely not possible, then I need a pretty strong commitment from the board that this is something that we are gonna look at. But I would be prepared to try and have that come back on the last day with that consideration at least to have that look at for that additional $50,000 if people are at least comfortable with that additional conversation on the 28th. Supervisor, of course, we will talk with the budget manager about that request and it is clearly at the board's direction. Well, after public, then after there's a public input on this, Mr. Chair, I would like to add that additional direction, recognizing doesn't mean that we're actually allocating it, but it's giving an opportunity for that consideration to come back on the last day for that additional 50,000. So we can just get that park finished this year, this fiscal year, I mean. Thank you, Supervisor Friend, looking forward to that motion. Any further comments or questions? Supervisor Caput? Thanks a lot for all the work you've been doing. Caput, I think you actually turned your microphone off. Check your mic, I believe it's off at the moment. Oh, okay. All right. I wanna thank you for all the work you've been doing. It seems like in this last year or two, it's been one of the busiest years. It seems like just a lot of capital projects coming at once. Yeah, because I know I've been seeing Travis quite a bit. Okay. All right. Anyway, I think it's wonderful. And I wanna thank you on behalf of the people in South County for all the attention they're getting in the last few years. It's really wonderful to see things happening down there. And that Freedom Campus, what does it look like? How many years before it would actually be renovated, I guess? That's a great question. As you know, the master plan is a conceptual master plan. It does not provide construction or funding, but it does set us up with environmental review and looks forward to be able to look for those additional funds knowing that we have a plan and seek additional partners that way. So it will be a phased project. It's likely a multi-year build out. It really depends on resources that we can identify. And I guess possibility, I don't know, I think it's a couple of acres there. I know the expansion and everything like that would take up space, but maybe at a little outdoor, very small playground to be a nice idea. Something to think about. Definitely. Maybe a swing and a slide for kids or something like that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Cabot. I just had a couple of questions. I know the capital improvement, the capital projects budget here always, with all the budgetary pressures we have, people often short change capital projects, as we've seen, and that's why we have, what is it, a $300 million poll or deferred maintenance. So it's good to see that we're making some progress on these. And I know in looking at this, even this year, folks have asked me, well, what about this juvenile haul renovation? I mean, we should really be spending money on $15 million on that. But I mean, it might correct that pretty much all that money has come from state grants or did we make allocations from the general fund in a previous fiscal year? I'm gonna actually lean on Travis to answer that. It is predominantly state, but there is some general fund pieces is my understanding. That's correct. It's predominantly SB 81 to round one and round two, the county was successful with both of those projects. And that provides the bulk of the funding. And then there is a county match that is provided by various bonds that have been, they've been rolled over since the design and review, state review of the project has taken so long, but those are supported through the capital fund as well. I don't have those exact numbers. We're certainly willing to update you on that. I'm not sure if Eric has those, but it's predominantly state funded and we are working on occurring estimates waiting for that new estimate to come in. That project in particular, since it's been around for so long, that that's one of the most significant projects we have that we do need to consider budget impacts. Certainly. So the county match was made in a previous year or we expected in another year? It's been carried forward in the capital project budget. Okay, and presumably if we didn't provide that match, then we'd be disqualified for the funds, the state funding. That's correct. So the state funding allocation is fixed. Unfortunately, it was fixed many years ago. And so the county is responsible to provide the remainder of the funding as we go forward to bidding. All right, thanks. And then of course, I'm also very excited about the South County Service Center. I'm surprised that we don't need to make any general fund allocation this year. Is that also just because we've provided all the money we needed for financing in 2020, 2021? Correct. So there was an initial bond that provided for the acquisition and the portion of the phase one improvements. That project also was the timing of that project was very impacted by budget constraints. And the current budget includes a second bond, which is currently in progress. Okay, but we don't anticipate it coming, having to issue that this year. I believe we're starting to work on that. I'd have to defer to the county budget manager on that. I think Marcus can answer that, but yes, the expectation is there would be an additional bond to cover the TIs for that project. We're doing, as Travis mentioned, we're doing a current analysis on the gap financing and the timeline that's needed from a cash flow perspective. We're anticipating a fall issuance. So this could come back to the board October or November for consideration for some additional bond financing to complete the project and address some opportunities that have come up in the project. Okay, so then we might see something in the mid-year budget adjustment. Got it. It's good that we're doing some work on MLINE. Sounds like we're seeing a lot of emergency fixes necessary there. I also know that when we looked at the long range facilities master plan with Gensler, they were talking about ultimately demolishing many of those buildings. You know, what kind of life, increased life expectancy to expect to see thanks to these improvements? And are they mostly electrical? I think that's what Director Beaton was saying. We were seeing some of the emergency issues, but what's being budgeted here for MLINE is that roof improvements, electrical, something else? I'll have to ask Director Beaton to speak to the specific projects that we've identified for MLINE. We have had a series of, I would say emergency repairs in the lot that had been reviewed through the CPRC that have been funded by either HSD or HSA to maintain the current estate of several buildings. And we'd have to actually look at that building component that was invested in, be it roof, be it electrical systems to understand the extended life we've provided for that system. As we mentioned, by doing facility condition indexing and starting on criminal justice, you do get that much more careful quantification of the deferred maintenance, as well as what would be the projected maintenance in various building systems moving forward. We have not prepared to do that for MLINE yet because we wanna focus on our criminal justice facilities in particular first, but that's where we wanna go in this program that we really have a solid analytical understanding of what it takes to maintain buildings. And then to make that decision, do you keep putting money into an old building that may not be meeting your functional needs anymore or do you not and make some different choices? The other thing I think that is on our horizon is with a conversion to hybrid work. It's giving us an opportunity to potentially approach our space management differently. So we're trying to sort of be mindful of how much we put where when we're gonna be on sort of on the cusp of evaluating how we use our facilities differently. But for the specifics on MLINE, Chair Koenig, I'm gonna have to lean on Michael. Thank you. So it's a very good question. A lot of the building we only replace or repair it if it's actually broken. For example, the roofs of I think three different buildings have been replaced over the last five years, primarily just related to we had leaks or significant issues in the buildings. We've had to replace some of the HVAC equipment at some of the buildings where they have actually failed. We do have a laundry list of items that we can actually send over that we've done over the last five years. We've done some significant electrical work, we're especially with the automatic transfer switches that we've had to replace in order to switch over to backup power at the various buildings we've done. So it's a multitude of projects and it's hard to explain one individual things but extension of timeframe is we are putting band-aids on a lot of the work that we have at a lot of the equipment that we do have. And our last resort is if it ultimately fails and it's gonna cost us more to repair it, then we come forward with a recommendation it's time to replace it, has been our mantra. Okay, thanks. And before you leave, a question about the child care center at Emeline as well. So it sounds, you know, an example of where we let a building go too far, right? And now it's got to come down. Are we gonna do, is it gonna be a dirt patch? We're gonna plant a garden. What's the plans for that space? It's funny so that we've been tossing around different ideas about what to do and what to make it. I know HSA, the health services agency in partnership with HSD, might potentially enjoy that to use as a garden or some sort of treatment site for their population that they do serve. We do anticipate once we do take out the building that we're gonna restore it just to the ultimate dirt and then work with HSD to determine programming on what they may like. And ultimately, if it does become a garden and such forth, we need to involve the parks department as they do maintain the grounds on that site. So. Okay, thank you. And one final question about parks. There was the $250,000 for Farm Park. What was the detail there? Oh, not with the CPR, not with the Capital Projects Review Committee. That was probably one of the other capital project items. As far as I know, I'm gonna go with, I don't see it here. So it would have been our past project that we would have allocated that money that it needs to be. Sorry, I know I misread it, it's a carryover balance. Yep, absolutely. All right, thank you, you're welcome. Any further comments or questions? Seeing none, I'll open it for public comment. No one here in chambers, is there anyone on Zoom? No one on Zoom. I'll return to the board for action. And I believe Supervisor Friend. Yeah, thanks, Mr. Chair, with great appreciation for this team's work, I'll move the recommended actions with the additional direction to come back on last day for consideration of $50 additional $1,000 for completing or functionally completing the Willowbrook Park project this fiscal year. Second. Motion by Supervisor Friend, second by Supervisor McPherson. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Item passes unanimously. All right, thank you to the entire team. I want to take a short break now and we'll begin the CDID budget discussion at exactly 11 o'clock, thank you. We're in recess. We'll now resume the county budget hearings with item 31 to consider approval of the 22-23 proposed budget for community development and infrastructure, including any supplemental materials and take-away of actions is outlined in the referenced budget documents that's recommended by the county administrative officer. And for a presentation, we have Director Matt Machada. Thank you, Chair Koenig and members of the board and good morning, almost good afternoon. The presentation this morning reflects the budgets of our new combined department. Our new department of community development and infrastructure includes the divisions of public works and planning. And as you've seen these department budgets in the county budget overall is a lot of work. So I want to begin by thanking our staff, especially Kim Moore and her team and all of the assistant directors and their staff for this heavy lift. I greatly appreciate our two CAO analysts, both Eric Friedrich and Sven Stafford, our liaisons and provide excellent support. So thanks to them. And then the work we do at the staff level would not be possible without the guidance and support from our CAO, Carlos Palacios and our county budget manager, Marcus Pimentel. So I want to thank you both for that. I would also like to thank the board of supervisors for your continued support. You and your staff are direct links to our community. This helps identify needs and issues that we strive to solve and we are problem solvers. So thank you for that. Next slide, please. Oh, no, that's me, isn't it? Within the division of planning, we have two sections. I'm gonna start by just giving a quick description of our department. I mean, I know we're a bit new. So it seems like it's worth talking about some of our sections so we understand who we are. So within the division of planning, we have two sections. The unified permit center section is led by Assistant Director Carolyn Burke and the policy, housing and code compliance section is led by Assistant Director Stephanie Hansen. Within the division of public works, we have four sections. The transportation section is led by Assistant Director Steve Wiesner. The special services section is led by Assistant Director Kent Edler and the capital projects section is led by Director Travis Kerry and the administration section is led by Assistant Director Kim Moore. With that brief introduction, I'd like to switch to the web presentation. And by the way, today I plan to present 16 slides and this web presentation. I think I'll wrap it up in about 20 minutes. So just bear with us here. So I'll start on this main page. The primary features you see here are our mission, budget overview, links for our budget dashboard, budget details, personnel details, our high-level numbers summary and our operational plan, which I will be highlighting some of our operational plan successes later in the presentation. We're gonna click into the budget dashboard and scroll down to, I do wanna make this visual. One of the things I appreciate the most about the web budget is the ability to visualize our budgets. And so we'll start with the entire department, how it's broken down in this pie chart. I would like to point out that our administrative services includes all staffing for the division of public works, which is why the number stands out like it does. You can see that administrative services at 67 million. Let's click to the bar graph for the overall CDI department. This is a quick view of this year's proposed budget compared to the last four years. Next, I'm going to drill down quickly so that you can better understand the drivers of the difference from the past years. Let's click transportation to begin with. So staying on the bar graph. This fluctuation this year is due to the timing and delivery of infrastructure projects, which I will comment a bit more on this in the next slide. So let's move into the administrative services. So back up and to admin. Thank you. The significant increase in administrative services is due to increased liability charges, which has been discussed quite a bit during these public hearings. And this is also where outside services are budgeted, such as the work we are doing for the RTC on the rail and trail segments 10 and 11. So you can see a significant increase this year. Let's go back and then click into special services staying on the bar graph. I want to point out two areas that are showing increases. They are recycling and solid waste and flood control. I do want to comment that flood control increases are really simply a difference in estimated actuals versus proposed budget. In this particular area, we do carry significant reserves for large future projects and those are not included in estimated actuals. So the comparison shows this difference. With regard to solid waste and recycling, we will be further discussing some of these changes in upcoming slides, but I just want to point that out here to show the difference. I also want to point out the large Freedom Sewer project. And you can see the ledge in there, Freedom Sanitation, the fluctuation. This project was delivered a year or so ago and this type of graphic really does tell our story quickly and that's why I appreciate this visualization. You can see projects coming and going very quickly. Let's go back and click on our community housing to stay in on the bar graph. Lastly, I do want to spend a few minutes on our planning division. This bar graph shows increased spending in the area of the permit center and planning administration. This is due to increased staffing investment, which has been mentioned today already, but I do want to point out that's a main driver of some of our increased investments in this area, but it also shows a reduction in spending and our land use policy due to the anticipated wrapping up of our sustainability update, which is our general plan update. This reduction is actually, and I'll show you in a bit, showing that the overall planning budget is actually going to be down a little bit, even though we're showing new investments in staffing levels. So let's go back to the PowerPoint. We can. Great, thank you. I took a ring on here. So looking further into each of the divisions under the public works division, we can see that expenses are being driven by projects, especially large projects such as the Soquel Drive, Bufford, Bike Lane, and congestion mitigation project. That's a $26 million project and that's built into the proposed expenses. And so you can see just a handful of large projects can really drive that number up. But that said, when you look at all the numbers together, we're actually seeing a lower amount. You can see on the public works division a reduction in expenses this year. The driver there is a reduced amount of our 2017 storm damage projects going to construction. I will take the opportunity to comment on these 2017 storm damage projects. Our highest priority projects are wrapping up, leaving smaller shoulder type projects to do and a handful of very complex permitting projects remaining to be completed. But that said, we're still seeing a reduced spinning level on those projects. We do expect to complete all of these 2017 storm damage projects in the next couple of years. Another thing I'd like to point out on the public works division is the difference on reduced expenses and even further reduced revenue. What's driving the difference there is that in our recycling and solid waste division, we're using fund balance to fund some of our upcoming projects, these large projects that we've been budgeting for for a number of years. And so what that is is a fund balance making up that difference. Additionally, on the public works division side, I want to comment on the staffing. We're showing an increase of two, and this is for our proposed budget. You will see further that additional staff in the supplemental, but I will comment here that the two positions envisioned in the proposed budget will include a new community engagement coordinator and a new civil engineer. And so those will be two new faces that you will see in our public works division this coming year. Switching over to the right side, looking at the planning division, there's an overall reduction in expenses and revenue, which as I described a bit ago is being driven by the sustainability update wrapping up this year. And as you saw on the web presentation, some of our expenses are increasing, such as the investment and additional staffing. And this was mentioned earlier by our budget manager, Marcus Pimentel. Overall, this budget includes seven new positions for our planning division. And I'd like to share those with you. So that would be the permit center manager, another new position. We are a building plan checker, a new office assistant, a new supervising building inspector, a new planner, a new planning technician, and a new code compliance manager. Great investments so that we can primarily undertake the new unified permit center and other great work being done by our planning division. In addition to the proposed budget, we do have a supplemental recommendation. And in our transportation group, it includes four new road maintenance workers. This would be two new staff for additional street sweeping to help manage litter and debris on our roadways and two new staff in our road operations to further our focus on our basic and core roadway maintenance. Also an increase in our recycling and solid waste. You can see that at a little over $2 million due to additional organic processing and the beginning of our transportation design and permitting process for that project development. Third on the list, excuse me, a part of the second bullet is an additional funding, which is actually a two-year CalTrans grant, 186,000. This will actually pay for litter control on highways 1, 9, 129 and 152, just portions of course, we do have those details built into the budget. And then the last two are investments and our website development, our new combined website will be a key feature to providing better customer service and comprehensive information for our new department. So we'll move to the next. So over the next six slides of this presentation, I will be sharing some details of each of our divisions with this operational change and focus in mind. Our focus here is to achieve county goals and attainable housing, reliable transportation and sustainable environment. Our unified permit center is well underway with a customer focus, improved technology and space redesign. The bullets on the left are a list of our overarching efforts with the list on the right, linking recent achievements and efforts by timeline, which is kind of helpful to see it from that perspective. I did want to share an example, our ePortal in the early days of that implementation, it was taking customers a week or more for applicants to successfully upload their documents. Now it is taking a half to one day. This is due to training and assist improvement. So we're continuously improving our processes and our systems to make it easier for our customers, which we hope improves the customer service that everybody feels by coming to our new permit counter. Our current success and expect to continue success will be based upon the motto of being unified. That is a key word. That is unified management decisions, unified website, unified staff and unified contact with customers. That'll be a key to our success as we move forward. Like to spend a bit of time on our new, or not new, but on our Recovery Permit Center. On November 17th of 2020, your board authorized a contract with the private firm Forleaf to establish a Recovery Permit Center. It's been very successful. The RPC, as we refer to it, provides expedited review of building permit applications and they have maintained a 10-day working turnaround for reviews, which I know the public appreciates. The RPC has held a total of 1,036 pre-application appointments and have issued 159 dwelling unit permits, plus 142 have been cleared and ready for building permit applications to middles. So combined, this is approximately one-third of the 911 parcels that lost structures during the CZU fire. I'd like to share a little bit about policies that have been developed to support their rebuilding. The first policy you see on this slide is the CZU rebuild directive. The county did respond to the need for streamline permit issuance by developing a pre-clearance program. This is where applicants can obtain low or no-cost pre-application evaluations. The pre-clearance areas of focus are geology, fire access, and septic. Another policy area was our Atkins Study. This was developed to ease the reporting burden for rebuilders in areas subject to debris flow. We think that that's added a lot of value and appreciate the board's support in developing that policy. And then another policy I'd like to point out is our limited density building code. And to further reduce costs for those rebuilding in more sparsely populated areas, the county launched a pilot program to allow the use of limited density building code requirements to let homeowners use unconventional building materials and methods. And to take a bit of a do-it-yourself approach to their replacement structures, I think that's a policy that's been appreciated by our community. Next, we'll switch to our policy housing and code compliance. Just to share a few updates on some of these key areas of our work, the sustainability update, which is our general plan update. We do anticipate going to the Planning Commission in August or September for public hearings to receive further input and to make a recommendation to the board of supervisors. We expect to be to your board in October or November to certify the EIR, to adopt the amendments into the general plan, to adopt related ordinances and to process map amendments and adopt revised design guidelines. This is a major effort in creating the regulatory stage for our housing needs and our housing crunch. Along those same lines is our regional housing needs allocation, the arena. With the regulatory stage set as part of the general plan update, the sustainability update, we will pursue an updated housing element to address our arena numbers. This will include a CEQA element and an inventory of housing stock. We expect to begin this effort this coming winter. So a next step. With a recent CalTrans grant, we are working with some of our partner cities to develop a Vehicle Miles Travel Mitigation Bank. And so there's a new state legislation, relatively new, that requires us to consider VNT as part of project development. This new mitigation bank will assist new development countywide to be compliant with the state legislation and yet still allow us to develop the needs that we have within our community. Another policy area, it will be our tiny homes ordinance. This will focus on tiny homes on wheels. We expect to bring this ordinance to your board this coming fall. And then with regard to SB9 ordinance, this will be an effort to amend county code to allow for the provisions of state law. We expect to begin on this effort in the new calendar year. So watch for that. SB9, if you don't recall, is the state legislation that allows further densification of single family residential neighborhoods. And then I do wanna highlight our code compliance area. That's a new position that I mentioned earlier. This new code compliance manager will be needed to support our group of only three code compliance officers with heavy caseloads as you all know. And we hear quite a bit about code compliance supports the unified permit sitter, but it also ensures safe living conditions and protects our environmental resources. Many of the items I just discussed in policy are certainly continued to be major emerging issues mostly related to our housing crisis and solutions that we are working toward. So shifting gears to our transportation section. So as described earlier, we're proposing to add four maintenance staff for road operations. We're also planning to fill an existing resource planner position to better manage the environmental permitting requirements of our transportation projects. This actually came up earlier as part of the cannabis shift of a resource planner. That's this discussion on this implementation. And then of course, in our transportation section we continue to face emerging issues with backlog of deferred pavement maintenance, culvert maintenance issues. And of course the recruitment is challenging in some of our areas, especially the engineering side of our requirements. So some of those emerging issues continue to be challenges for us. Looking at our special services group, the real focus here is been on recycling the solid waste. The new SB 1383 kicked off this January in terms of implementation, it's a big lift. We expect that additional staff will be required in the future to enforce the 1383 requirements. And I'll just list a few of those requirements that we're struggling with now, such as the removal of food waste out of the garbage stream and also to make sure businesses are using proper to go wares. There's a lot of education, enforcement, reporting required to fully implement this new state law. But this does align with our department's operational plan objectives regarding waste diversion and organics waste processing. And so we're hopeful that the community will be well served by a cleaner, healthier environment with some of these programs and implementation efforts. Our recycling and solid waste group will be coordinating with other departments and nonprofit food banks and reporting all of this to CalRecycle. So more to come on that, but that's a new program and a bit of a change in our workload. Some good news, of course, is our Pajaro efforts, our flood control, we've heard a lot about that recently. Supervisor Cabot, thank you for your continued support. Supervisor Friend, thank you for your leadership and support. And so with this past year, we did form the new flood control agency and this coming as we go forward, we will be recruiting staff for this new agency and standing this up completely. So that'll be a major program and a bit of a staffing change. Some of our emerging issues here are quite familiar while others are rather recent needs and issues, such as the sewerage of Boulder Creek. And I think that came up earlier in budget discussions, but that continues, or that has become a kind of an emerging issue and a challenge for us all. We've heard quite a bit about our capital infrastructure and capital projects today. Capital projects includes, the division of capital projects includes the real property and project management sections. They are focused on right away acquisition, property management, capital project delivery. They focus on managing scope, cost and schedule. This is their priority to get projects done timely and efficiently. Some of the comprehensive services provided are to all county departments and even external agencies. I mentioned that we do quite a bit of work for the RTC. Also, they are developing new campus master plans. And we've heard quite a bit about the Freedom Project and they're also even working on our sanitation district master planning. So they do some great work for all of us. Some of our state and federal opportunities include some challenges too. And so we expect this coming year, there will be reduced fuel tax revenues. And this is due to reduced consumption due to the high prices. But on a plus side, we do have a new federal transportation bill. President Biden enacted this new bill, November of 21. It's called the bipartisan infrastructure law. It's formerly known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. So you hear it referenced both ways as a bill or IIJA. Some other good news in the governor's May revision, he did include an additional 500 million of general fund for ATP grants. And you may recall at your last board meeting, we submitted a rather large ATP grant for segments 1011. It was about a $70 million grant application. So our fingers are crossed and we're hopeful that the governor's May revision holds through their own budget process. So there's some good news and opportunities. On the housing side of our business, we are seeing success with some funding. And I would like to note that most of this funding actually funnels through us. And we ensure that it is spent correctly and properly and well, but it's really being implemented by other agencies and nonprofits such as the Human Services Department, but we're happy to be administrators and see those funds spent for the benefit of our community. And that runs through our housing side. I mentioned earlier that I would highlight a few of our operational plan successes. I think I'd like to just read through these quickly for those that are on the call today that may not be able to see this slide. It's pretty self-explanatory, but in terms of our operational plan number 123, disaster mitigation, we did complete a local housing mitigation. Our item number 140, campus master plan, the Freedom Boulevard master plan is progressing on schedule. 274 permit dashboard that is complete and available to the public. And that's a great tool. People can see the status and where we are as a rebuild. Under our emergency rental assistance, 16 million in emergency rental funds have been distributed on item 286. We are in progress and on target for road resurfacing. We're in progress and on target for ditch cleaning. We did secure just this past year in our Pajaro flood financing, additional 67 million in federal funds for the Levy Reconstruction Project. On our rail trail front, item 292, our EIR is on schedule and moving forward. That's exciting. That's a segments 10 and 11. You've heard quite a bit about our library construction today and we've started that in Aptos and our live Ocanics. And then our South County Service Center, we've heard quite a bit about that. That was our operational plan number 294 and design is complete and we're moving forward with that first phase. This past year, we saw a lot of other successes. The next two slides is an effort to share some of these successes. And I'd like to read some of these, you know, for those that maybe can't see the screen today that are on our Zoom call. So I mentioned earlier, we did complete the formation of our Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency. We refer to that as PERFMA. We saw the passage of measure C, which is our single use disposable cup rates or sales where we are now going to collect half of those funds for environmental programs. We did see the approval of a new recycling and solid waste charge, which will help fund the closure of our Buena Vista landfill and the construction of a new transfer station and organics processing facility. We saw the completion of a Boulder Creek branch library and animal shelter phase one. We've seen some great advances in our affordable housing with two really key projects that have been funded in the unincorporated area. Those are the Vets Village up in Ben Lohman with 20 units and the Park Haven Plaza project on Park Avenue, which has 36 units. And so those have been successfully funded. We've also, and we've talked about the RPC and how the for-leaf has been able to maintain a 10-day turnaround for rebuild permits. We've also seen that about 300 parcels have been served with permits or cleared for permits for this part of the CZ rebuild. And then the sustainability update, the draft EIR was released this year and is progressing for hopefully approval later this year. Some other successes. We did receive about $6.4 million this past year from the RTC through Consolidate Grant Program. I want to thank this entire board for your support. That was a big lift by all of you and it's much appreciated and did not go unnoticed. Your willingness to get out there and support county needs. We also were awarded a $5 million Clean California Grant for the Green Valley multi-use path, great success in South County. 36 storm damage sites were advertised and awarded. Our county-wide ATP was completed and adopted and we completed new signals at Aptos Creek on Soquel Drive and we did some great signal work in Soquel Village with our adaptive traffic control system. So some really exciting successes and just a few that I wanted to highlight which leads me to a recommended action today. So the recommended action is to approve the proposed 22-23 budget for the community development infrastructure including any supplemental material as recommended by the county administrative officer and I and other staff are available to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you very much, Director Machado. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Sure. Mr. President Cabinet. Okay. Do you want to go first? Okay. Yeah, thanks for the report and I know there's only so much money to go around county-wide. I do want to point out that you've been very fair in allocating money to everybody, you know, all five districts in the county and the freedom sanitation is going along pretty well. And we're going back probably about six or seven years when we first had to go door to door and ask people to vote for it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great project. Yes. Okay. And then I saw there a 10-day building permit processing time. That's incredibly fast. That's, what was normal a few years ago? Well, the key for, this is rather unique to the CZE rebuild as part of our RPC. And so, you know, your board is streamline the process a bit by allowing this rebuild to have a little different process. But the key to it has been the pre-application process, getting people cleared early, making sure we have good applications has allowed us to do that 10-day turnaround in terms of our normal process where we haven't had that pre-application process in play. It varies a lot, but it's certainly been well more than 10 days. But I will say that as part of our new Unified Permit Center, we plan to adopt many of these lessons learned and new strategies and processes. So we hope to get to something very similar for everybody in the near future as part of our process improvement and the new Unified Permit Center. Yeah. And it looks like in about a year and a half, we'll have in South County, the biggest project going on in probably the last 20 years, that's the Pahoa River Flood Control. I am trying to remember when we did the bench excavation, we always had somebody, was it one or two County engineers that were actually out there? What is gonna be their role in this $400 million project? I know it was real important to have somebody that knew the local terrain and problems like that. So yeah. Sure. So a part of our strategy has been to form a new JPA, the PERFMA as we refer to them. And a part of our effort, we're leading that effort these days. Part of our effort is to stand that agency up as a standalone agency with its own staff and they will have their own engineers and their own executive director and they will provide those services as you reference having the proper inspectors in place and so that when construction occurs, it'll be done right. So that'll be the new agency that we as the County are leading to stand up properly with staff and guidelines and all their own contracts. Yeah, because when you get in the Army Corps and all the other outside agencies that are coming in with big equipment, it was really important, I remember with the bench excavation that somebody local with the County and the city actually too of Watsonville, they were out there and things would tend to stop. I remember they were, when the Army Corps was in there, they were gonna rip out all these trees in one area, but there was a problem and the County official being out there just said basically go around it and don't rip them all out, otherwise we're gonna have problems with fishing game and all that. Correct, good oversight's important. I know, so that local, so how many would you say you'd have one engineer out there? So they will, depending on the time in project delivery, it'd be multiple and some of those projects are very large. The first phase is reach five and six and that's a very large project. I suspect they'll have a team of construction management, a group that includes multiple inspectors so they can oversee the project correctly. So it'll be more than one, it'll probably be consulted out most likely. The new Perfume agency will have some of its own staff but it'll be a very small staff and they will consult out as needed for project delivery and each phase will be different size, different scope and require a different level of resources. You bet, okay. And then the $500 million project, what's it called, ATP project grants. That's not a whole lot of money, that's nationally, right? Yeah, so that's a state program. The governor's may revise included an additional 500 million so it's a little over a billion dollar program this year. It's a two year program and I brought it up because we are pursuing, our region actually is pursuing a number of grants through that program area and with additional money, we're all hopeful that our projects will be, will stand a greater chance of funding. And so I thought that was an appropriate item to raise as a state federal opportunity because it is new money. But it's statewide, it is a very competitive grant and if we aren't successful this cycle, I know we will learn a lot to pursue funding for the next cycle, which is every two years. There'll be a lot of competition on that. That's national. No, that's statewide. Just statewide, 500 million. Yeah, and it's over a billion when you put it together with the existing funding. Okay, that's significant. It is significant, yes sir. Thanks a lot. Good to see you, Steve. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Other comments or questions? Yeah, I want to thank our community development infrastructure team, which is inclusive, of course, of planning and public works. Your ability to merge these departments this year, the stand up of the Unified Permitting Center is really commendable. And understandably, it's taken a long time coming, but it's going to result in more predictable and timely service, I think, to our county residents. County public works planning really covers topics that my constituents contact my office more than anything else. Roads, building permits, code enforcement, as you know, and especially Mr. Wiesner with Roads. And I'm glad that we have the Measure D funds for the next several decades to address this on the road aspect of it. And this addition to our storm damage repair dating back to 2016-17. And I think when you need to coordinate these efforts between different agencies that can take a long time, that stretch of Highway 9 between Felton and the Sennereens Valley School Complex, that's got five agencies, Metro County, School, State. It really has a lot of people to get their act together and it takes time to get it all together. And I think it's going to be 2014 or 2024 before that really gets going, maybe. So I just, I know people are anxious for that, but it's coming. And we're never going to have enough funding to address much of our road improvements as we'd like, but we do have important state and local resources that now allow us to proactively address as much as we can. In the area of housing planning area, you're really caught in the middle with this new department. I mean, everybody wants more housing or a lot of people want more housing and the state is demanding we double or triple our amount of building permits that we issue. But then the stress that puts on our roads and water services in particular and our water services are by the cities and the special districts or private agencies, it's going to be really a mix and match issue. I don't, we never reach the state demands for housing, but if we do, it's going to put a lot more pressure on our roads and water and especially water. We don't have a lot of in this drought season that we have, it's going to put a lot of stress on what we do. And I just want to encourage the people of Santa Cruz County, they're always at the top of the list on conservation and we're going to be asked to be there again because we don't see the rains coming, but we see a lot of pressures for more housing and from the state on down and for more roads, which everybody wants in front of their house yesterday. But shifting over to the permitting now, we have a contract in place with Forleaf to conduct our fire recovery and permit center. And you mentioned that a third of our 900 plus have been cleared or pre-cleared. And there are some, should we say, people that aren't really pleased that we haven't gone faster, but comparatively, I think we have gone as fast or faster than those other counties that have faced terrible fires like we have. Is that basically a correct statement? I mean, I don't know, people, there's insurance problems. Do they want to live here still? They want to move. There's some sand hill requirements that hit San Juan's Valley in particular. Are we doing comparatively pretty well in that regard? Yeah, I know we're definitely on par with our peer agencies in California. And I would probably add that we have a higher level of challenge than many of our peer agencies with our topography and our geologic conditions. And so we have a challenge, but we've been able to certainly deliver on par with others. So we feel like we're in a good spot today. Well, it's not an excuse. It's just the reality that we have special circumstances that make it a little more challenging than other places. But that'd be the case. We're staying right up with doing as well as we can under the circumstances. And I want to thank the department for doing that. I'm sure that you've gotten some criticism from it for not doing it faster for several reasons. Like I said, people move, are they insurance? They don't know if they want to rebuild. There's a lot of factors that go into it. And while the original contract will be in place for another year, I suspect we will discuss the possible extension soon. Is that correct? Yeah, that is correct. We expect we will be recommending an extension to that three-year contract, exactly right. Yeah, okay. And the proposed budget indicates that the permit center goal is 60% complete. Can you speak to the progress that has been made to date and the timeline that you think that's going to be operational? Sure, so portions of it are operational today. And as you mentioned, the 60%, we've seen some really spot-on improvements lately with our new appointment schedule that multiple sections are now sharing. We're actually even sharing the front counter. A couple of the sections of public works are serving customers at the shared counter on the planning side. We've been implementing new permit tracking software. I mentioned the E-Plan example of those improvements. And all of that is part of our process improvement and implementation of our unified permit center. We also heard earlier in the GSD presentation that they're starting to work on the space changes. And we're working very closely with general services to start up that phase one, which will create the space we need for the new permit center. And so there is a lot underway. I think the 60% is certainly accurate. And I think there's more in the wings to get even further than that very soon. And the budget calls for a community engagement manager for the department. And what are the primary functions of that position? Good question, absolutely. So this is an effort to help message all that we do really. And we all know that communicating with our community is important to keep them apprised of our schedules, traffic control measures or changes in traffic or even in our efforts in whether it's a project in housing or a sustainability update, messaging and keeping our website updated, helping us with our community outreach. And so this position is really that interface between our technical professionals communicating with our public. And so it's the go-between to help craft those proper messages that are concise, that can be understood and that all the information is updated. It's a real challenge when you're managing 40, 50 projects to communicate clearly where we are and where we're going. And so that's the goal of this new position will be our public facing communicator. Good, okay. And on current code enforcement, if I'd like to certainly advocate for an increase in the number of code enforcement positions, if you ever get that opportunity, especially in my district five and sentiments of Valley District or area, it's really important that we see that that position or as much attention is paid to that position as we can to get this moving along as quickly as we can. Sounds good, thank you. Thank you for a very, really, really exciting cooperative effort here. And I'm really excited about it that I think people are gonna be served better in Santa Cruz County because of it. So thank you. Thank you, Supervisor. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Any other comments or questions? Yes, Mr. Chair, I'll share just some accolades because I think that we need to sometimes take a step back to recognize the successes that occurred this year, although they were highlighted to some degree in the success matrix that Director Machado placed. And by the way, Director Machado, we do recognize we placed a lot on your shoulders this year with this combined department. We did it because we know that you have a really remarkable ability not just to connect internally but externally and have a great vision for ways that we can make improvements in both departments. So a lot of compliments to you, but as was mentioned, the Pajaro River Project, a transformational opportunity for South County. In fact, both counties, I mean, this was 70 years in the making and now we're putting it over the finish line. Just the ability to combine these two departments together and look at these efficiencies, the Unified Permits Center. I mean, as every supervisor knows, I mean, the number one and two inquiries we get are regarding things, regarding public works or planning. And so the degree that which this communication can occur together and things can be streamlined are really important. And on the planning world, just completing the sustainability update and some of the really forward thinking and interesting ideas that are part of that moving forward that this board has discussed historically before, but we'll have some really interesting land use elements moving forward on it are also very important. I just wanna say that in the last 12 months and moving forward to the next 12 months, the amount of innovation and successes that the two departments have had and really rival on the other point in time in history for those two departments. And I think that it's right now is the right time to be bringing them together to ensure that that joint culture can build something. I do wanna just thank some people individually as I like to do. I mean, I feel like he hears from myself in my office too much, but one of your assistant directors, Steve Wiesner, just deserves so much credit. I mean, our office, our district took so much of the storm damage in 2016-17 and he's still working on these projects on top of everything else that's still going on and keeps us up to date, ensures that he's a strong advocate at the state and federal level to ensure that we get over the finish line on these projects and whether it's Measure D or using SB1 for those funds, I really do appreciate everything that Mr. Wiesner does. And when it comes to the Pahua River, I don't want enough people know his name, but Dr. Mark Strudley has done things that when I've sat in the White House with him and I've sat in the halls of Congress with him, we were told in no uncertain terms wouldn't be possible, that this was not a fundable project, this wasn't possible. And we put together a case that obviously was a convincing case, but in no way shape or form could I have done it without his just unbelievable engineering knowledge and innate knowledge about this project and his advocacy behind the scenes as well. So Dr. Strudley, this project is a large reflection of your talents, it was the right time and the right team and I truly do appreciate it. And I know so too to Supervisor Caput. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Cunerty. Thank you. Yeah, I just want to take a moment, one to recognize the breadth and scope of the work being done. And it's both sort of a physical change and creating a one-stop permitting center and a policy changes that we've tried and also a cultural change, right? And doing all three of those things at once are challenging and I just want to take a note to recognize that the Board is very supportive of these efforts and wants to be a partner with you as you move these things forward and also wants you to take risks and accepts that there will be some of these efforts that may not work out, but that we're going to be forward-leaning and try different things. And so I think it's important at these times for all departments, but particularly for our department that's undergoing such tremendous change to make sure we signal that we understand that that change is occurring, we support it and that it'll be an iterative learning process along the way. So I just wanted to take a moment and set the stage for what I hope will be future budget reports and outcomes that are really reflect a new level of service for our community. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Certainly concur, it's incredible the breadth of projects that are underway right now, both in planning with sustainability update. We look forward to reviewing that later this year, but also in public works with projects like the SoCal Drive, Buffered and Protected Bike Lane and Traffic Signal Improvements. I'm particularly excited about the renewed investment in our permitting center and the additional positions we're going to see there so that we can provide a higher level of service. You'd mentioned that more folks are using the E-Plan software. So I know we're trying to transition to Kamino as our portal for online permitting. Where are we in that transition from our, my understanding is we're moving from an in-house portal software to Kamino, which will provide a lot better metrics as far as the process. Where are we in that transition? Sure, that's a good question. So during COVID hard times, the Kamino software contract was actually put on hold for a bit. We've reinvigorated that contract. It's back on cue and it's moving forward and that'll be incorporated as part of also our website update so that all those tools are there, not only to train people, to make it easier for applicants, but it'll provide all the tools to monitor and to see all of these tools at hand. And so it's well underway. I don't have a specific time when it'll be activated, but I can certainly get back to you on that. Those are both great efforts that are all intertwined together. Okay, so folks applying for permits are not yet applying via Kamino. It's still... Correct. Okay, so that's what's happening. And is it only once we make that transition that the performance dashboards will be available? I mean, I think we saw like a preliminary view at the last operational plan review, but when are we gonna have public facing dashboards for things like time to receive a building permit or a number of permits that are submitted complete? So we do have a public facing dashboard now and I suspect it will be modified and improved as time goes forward, but it is a public facing today. I think it was actually shared with your board as part of the... I think Sven even shared some of that out recently. And so it is active today. I suspect it will be improved over time as we adapt it and add more detail to it. All right, I'll follow up with Mr. Stafford about that. It's good to know that we're collecting the metrics now so that we'll be able to see the Delta as we hire these new planners. Good to understand that if I understand what you said correctly, we're seeing a $1.6 million decrease in planning services. Is it fair to say those are pretty much all associated with the sustainability update, rather that it's not related at all to for Lee for other assistance with permitting? That is correct, absolutely correct. Okay, and then I've heard complaints from people saying that the ePortal will sometimes be closed and we're not allowing people to just actually submit applications and that's maybe how we're trying to manage the timeframe that we get back to people. Can you tell me that that's not happening? Well, no, unfortunately that is happening due to our review time requirements and the current backlog. In fact, in addition to adding staff, we're still continuing to use some consulting staff, a consultant to help us with the back load. Over the years, we've just seen a dramatic increase in permit activity. And so due to that, we've had to slow the intake down so that we can manage the output of it on certain timelines that we're required to, which is unfortunate. But we think with the additional staff that this budget approves and the continued use of our consulting firm, we will continue to work down that backlog and then there'll be less need for or hopefully eliminate the complete need of restricting applicants from submitting their projects when they want to. Okay, yeah, that really can't be an ongoing practice. So I hope we'll take any and all measures necessary to make sure that we end that and folks can apply for a building permit when they're ready. Right. You know, finally, I have to agree with Supervisor McPherson about the importance of code compliance. I'm sort of not entirely clear. It seems like we are hiring a new investigator and manager with this budget, but at the same time, the visualization of the expenses by service shows that there's not an increase in code compliance budget. So in the past, we had a code compliance manager that was doing multiple jobs. And so that person has been shifted into a more full-time environmental planning manager, which manages our CEQA compliance and efforts. And so this new position will be a full-time code compliance manager, which will help the workload. It'll still be a small staff and to Supervisor McPherson's point, we are looking at those resources needed to keep up with the demand on the complaint side. But to your point, it'll be a fully dedicated code compliance manager, whereas in the past, it was more of a part-time manager because they had multiple roles and we've been able to now split that and have dedicated staff for this effort. Okay. I mean, just to give a couple of stories from my district. I mean, we've had one property on Branson 40 Drive where there's not one, but two fires break out and just scared the daylights, of course, out of the neighbors. I mean, they'll look over and see 100-foot flames coming off the redwoods. Another up on Laurel Road where another fire broke out because of an illegal RV and I believe some kind of stove hacked into it. And that's also had ongoing issues. I mean, this just gets at people's basic sense of safety and wellbeing. And we absolutely need to have the resources to address this because, I mean, this could be how we see the next big fire in this community, which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So, you know, I think we really need to increase the staffing here. I mean, my understanding is at one point we had that today we have three code compliance staff, including someone doubling both as an investigator and a manager, but then at one time we had five investigators to support staff and a manager. So we're pretty far down from that. And I also understand there's a list of some 80 cases that have sort of fallen off that we don't have the capacity to pursue. And meanwhile, I think the city of Santa Cruz has six investigators. So I'm gonna recommend that we, that you come back at the final day adjustments of figuring out how to find at least one additional position, including what's already being proposed for code compliance investigator. I don't know the best place to take that money from, whether it's the community engagement coordinator, which granted extremely important, but I think we're gonna have a bigger communications crisis on our hands if one of these properties gets out of control or the public maintenance workers. Again, they deeply appreciate their work as well and often get kudos for the response time of public work staff or maintenance workers. But I really think it needs to be a priority and just ask that you provide a way that we could make that happen at the final day adjustments. Sure, loud and clear. I would like to share on that, the comparison to other staff needs. Many of those other positions are funded from different restricted funds, such as the road maintenance workers. And to be honest, the community engagement coordinator will be funded by projects. And so those funds would not be able to be used for this, but we clearly hear the need. And actually our mission has been to rebuild this team. And the first step is to get that co-compliance manager in place so that we could build that team up even further. We will look at it if that's the board's desire today, but we know that that's been an under resourced area that we plan to rebuild in the coming months and years. We'd actually had an internal discussion about monitoring the amount of work we can do with the new co-compliance manager, get that person in position in place, and then re-look at it at mid-year. But if the board's desire is to look at it now, we're certainly willing to do that. So thank you for those comments. Okay, thank you. We'll open it for public comment now. Anyone want to address the board on the community development and infrastructure budget? See no one here in the chambers. No one here in the chambers. Is there anyone on Zoom? No one on Zoom with Sheen to speak on this item. Okay, then I'll return it to the board for action. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions with the direction to see how we might be able to establish a co-compliance manager and what that would be. How would we be able to do that? I mean, basically. Right, an additional investigator, yeah. Yeah. Well, so should. Okay, motion by Supervisor McPherson, second by Supervisor Caput. Any further discussion? Just briefly, Mr. Chair, I'm supportive of coming back to see if an additional investigator is possible. I just want to broaden it beyond, I know you were just enumerating some examples, but I mean, I want to give full license for the director and the CAO, if this is possible to come back with a, with how they feel it would be best effectuated. For example, I mean, I think the communications manager is actually a very important role in communicating out, especially with the work that they're doing, but I just think that a broader set. So I just don't want to put any parameters on them coming back is what I'm saying, just come back and give us a proposal. Fine, that's fine with the, okay, fine with the maker of the motion. All right. And seeing no further discussion, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Item passes unanimously. All right. Thank you very much. We'll now proceed to item 32 to consider approval for the 2022-23 proposed budget of the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience, including any supplemental materials and take related actions as outlined in the reference budget documents and as recommended by the county administrative officer. And with us today for a report on this item, we have our director of OR3, Dave Reed. Good morning, board. Sorry, good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to present our budget today with me, our Tatiana Brennan, our senior analyst in the OR3 office, as well as Eric Friedrich, our senior analyst, supporting the office as well in the CAO's office. So without hesitation, I know that we're, you've had a full morning, but I do want to take a moment just to appreciate that the work of the OR3 could not be done without the support of the county departments. Many of the initiatives that we'll discuss today rely heavily on the support of our county partners in the county family in regards to emergency preparedness and response, as well as some of the efforts that Tatiana will speak to regarding our climate action and adaptation plan update. So with that, we'll go to the next slide. The ring. And I just wanted to share a brief story. This image for those of you who can see it was take, I took this picture on an overflight with Sergeant Steve Ryan from the sheriff's office. And this is of our North Coast area post in the CZU burn. And one of the things that came to mind as I was doing that overflight with the sergeant was that when we change our perspective on the challenges that we face, hopefully we find different ways to address those challenges and find different outcomes and better outcomes. So as an example, just briefly, this image shows building pad cleared and ready for rebuild. It shows some dead and standing trees, but it also shows green recovery in certain areas. And then it also shows some of those ridge lines that are completely denuded of vegetation due to the burn intensity. So depending on where and how we look at the challenges that our three faces, we have different perspectives and our goal is to continue to make improvements to address the needs of the county and the community. With that, we're gonna go to the website briefly. This is a modest budget that we'll be reviewing in relation to the budgets that you've heard from today. So we'll just take a few minutes landing here on the landing page with the mission responsible for emergency planning and readiness, response, recovery and mitigation to build our county's resilience to climate change and future disasters. So just on this landing page under the division section and services, we've got our three Rs that we always talk about. Everybody sometimes forgets what order they're in, but the way we set this up this year, we have emergency services and then under services, we've got disaster response which is both preparedness and response if we have another event. So what you see there is mostly kind of EOC, Emergency Operations Center expenses. And then the staffing is represented under the recovery and resilience services tab where you see our five funded staff. And we'll talk a little bit about how on the presentation where that number has changed year over year. But the other place that I wanted to go to was just to the budget dashboard briefly again, because this is a relatively small budget, we'll go down to the expenses and revenue side and I'll talk about this in a little bit of detail. But as you can see from 2018 to the present, the formation of the office occurred in 2021, in the 2020, 2021 budget year. And then this has been kind of our first full year operating and what we are seeing in some of our changes are related to some existing grants that we manage that are coming off the books and that we'll cycle back on kind of mid-year. And then we have some big contract with Tetra Tech which is a company that is gonna be doing some of our debris removal insurance proceed work. So with that, I think we'll jump back to the board presentation and keep moving forward. And there's a summary slide, oh, we jumped all the way, that's the other, there you go. We'll go next. So as I said, the five positions represent a mid-year addition of one limited term grant funded position are Patty Ciesla who's our Wildfire Resilience Program Manager. We're grateful to have her expertise and experience with us in OR3. So that's where we have five positions that was added mid-year. So we're not proposing any changes. That position right now is limited term grant funded. As I said, we have the debris removal contract that was allocated and appropriated in this current fiscal year, which will be worked on. We're getting the information from the state. So they'll actually be able to begin work in earnest this coming year, but that contract's coming off. And then the revenues changes that you see here are reflecting some of the grants that we're closing out. So we've closed out the fiscal year 19 State Homeland Security Grant Program and the fiscal year 20 Emergency Management Program. Those are some of the just high-level changes. So just to go through our three Rs together with you, I wanna just take an opportunity to express that we are in the process of backfilling to of our Emergency Management staff. So that's in progress. So we're down a little bit, but we're working to fill those positions quickly. We've taken the opportunity to learn from our 2020 CSU Lightning Complex fire through our after-action report that you adopted in December of last year, as well as we've had two events where we've declared disasters. Your board has declared a disaster for the winter storm event in mid-December. We're working closely with Steve Wiesner and Matt Machado in the Community Development and Infrastructure Department on making sure that we can get CDAA funds to help support some of the road damage that was sustained during that storm. And then we've been supporting the Port District in the declaration of the tsunami disaster for them. They sustained north of $6 million in damage. So we declared a disaster there. We performed after-action reviews of both of those incidents and we're gonna be integrating those lessons learned to improve our wildfire activation and response documentation that we're in the process with the consultant to work on. The other update is that we've been working very closely. I wanna give a shout out to Max Omni, who's been working in collaboration through HSD with us on our disaster service worker program. So we have, as you know, three levels of disaster service workers at the County Disaster Service Worker. One are our EOC and county support staff who come in during a disaster to serve and staff our Emergency Operations Center and then disaster service workers. Two is our Continuity of Operations staff and DSW-3s help support other operations during a disaster. So Max Omni has been great in helping to develop a programming and scheduling tool. We're working with Tammy and ISD to make that a county-wide scheduling tool to help us be better prepared so that if we have a disaster, we're able to access our county disaster service workers to serve the community. Couple other things that are emerging out of the emergency response side, we continue to find enhancements and improve the evacuation management tool that we use called Zonehaven. And then as I said, we're using consultant support in light of our staffing shortages right now to supplement some of our emergency management preparedness. So we have a consultant on board working on a wildfire activation guide and annex as well as we'll be working on updating our emergency management plan. With that, I'll go to fire recovery. So as you heard from Deputy Director Machado, the Community Development and Infrastructure Department has been working very hard to support the recovery. I've been working closely with Paya, Levine, and Carolyn Burke in that regard to support our community and identify obstacles and remove obstacles where we can or find resources to support our fire recovery folks. But as Matt Machado mentioned, and as we know, there are lots of challenges to rebuilding in our community. We discussed briefly some of the inflation-related concerns that you expressed around rebuilding or just capital projects that we faced, the inflation issues and those pressures, those costs of lumber, the cost of labor is felt acutely by our recovery folks as well. The cost of construction is well above what they were insured at. So there's a gap in funding. So what we're trying to do in OR3 in collaboration with Carolyn Burke and others in CDI are find opportunities to close those gaps. So one of those places that I'll talk about on the next slide is the long-term recovery group, but there's also some state funding that's coming online. The other thing we've learned through the recovery process is that communication and community communication is critical. We've had multiple, multiple community meetings, both in person and virtually. We've held neighborhood and individual conversations. We've had constituent, constituents calling up. Carolyn and I in particular have been working with folks to identify their challenges, both internal to the county, but also when they're dealing with other outside consultants and try and remove those barriers and solve those issues for them. But everybody's journey is unique. Neighbor to neighbor, it can vary in terms of what you're required to do based on the nature of your site, the challenges of your location. And so it is a very unique journey for everybody. It's hard to summarize and characterize everybody's recovery journey is the same. And everybody is entering that recovery process from different places and different times. So we've had a lot of folks who've been sitting on the sideline determining whether they have the finances or want to rebuild and others who dove in early. So we've had to reiterate communication and process and make sure that everybody kind of understands the steps that need to go, they need to go through to rebuild. In terms of some of the opportunities in support of fire recovery, the state has issued a CDBG community development block grant disaster recovery funding. So this will be one of the first times we've been able to access disaster recovery funding from the state. Suzanne, I say in the housing division is well-versed in CDBG funding and other avenues, but this funding is specifically related to the 2020 disasters statewide. So with that, we identified the state identified north of $1.3 billion in unmet housing rebuild needs. The federal government allocated about $220 million to supporting recovery from the 2020 storms for the state. Of that 220 million, we have the good fortune of having $43 million dedicated solely to the County Santa Cruz for multifamily housing projects. So that will go directly to affordable housing developers in our County to help hopefully close gaps in funding to build multifamily higher density affordable housing. So that helps our housing crisis, but it doesn't directly help our community members that lost their homes. So there is $45 million, but it's statewide and it's competitive based on need and it's income defined, but our hope is that we can help support and identify folks that could access those funds to close their construction gap. The other place that's been doing it, the other support network has been the long-term recovery group and they have an amazing opportunity to give funds that were donated during the fire and just after the fire, the community foundation collected north of $5 million and they have been in the process of finding ways to give that money to community members. So to date or since October, 2021 to the last eight months, they've worked with 56 different households. They've donated over $600,000 to help folks in a myriad of things, water tanks, temporary housing solutions, permit fees and costs. And again, community members can reach out to the long-term recovery group and identify their needs and try and get some funding to help get them back into their homes and through their front doors. The other thing that we're working on and Matt Machado mentioned is the CSA7 expansion, the soaring from the Boulder Creek golf course down into Boulder Creek and into the businesses and that's a remarkable opportunity to address not only in support, not only our fire recovery victims because sanitation in the valleys is particularly complicated on some of these small lots but it also helps address some of our water quality issues as well as it's an economic development opportunity for the businesses downtown that have been constrained due to septic issues. So we're really in our office working collaboratively with Dr. Underwood in environmental health, CR Ryan and environmental health and our public works team to try and find funding to move that project forward. But what we know is that as we approach two years from the fire, there will be folks that need permanent or stable temporary housing. So we'll be working to help support moving folks into temporary housing solutions on their properties as their rental assistance ends from their insurance companies. We also know that the consolidation of some of these small water districts in the valleys particularly challenging and public works in environmental health and OR3 are working to support the big basin water district consolidation. With that, I'm gonna hand over to Tatiana Brennan to speak about our resilience efforts. The CAP is developing, is progressing well and is on target to be completed at the end of this year and we will return to your board in August with a more detailed report back on the status of that. I do want to acknowledge that we're on track and able to meet this deadline because of the dedicated staff time from the departments. Staff are working in three work groups and they're contributing quite a bit of work to this development. We don't have any big ticket items for this CAP and what I mean by that is that for the climate action strategy the current one that we have, we had the closing of the CMEX cement plant in Davenport which resulted in significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions for our county. We also had the launch and implementation of 3CE, Central Coast Community Energy which has also resulted in a significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. So I just wanna bring that to your attention because that means that this CAP is going to be focused on developing an operational framework that will decrease greenhouse gas emissions. So we'll be looking at strategies for building electrification and fleet electrification. I also, I think that's it for this one. Can you go to the next one? I also wanna bring your attention to the collaborations that have been a result of this CAP. There are quite a few listed here. Rinkon Consulting Group is the group that we have hired as the consultant for the CAP development. And we chose them because they're working with the city of Santa Cruz and have done excellent work with them. But also we wanted this to be a regional plan. So we'll be sharing methodology with them as well because of all the work that they've already done. We're also working with the Regional Transportation Commission on a sustainable communities grant. And there is a vulnerability, an adaptation vulnerability and adaptation assessment, vulnerability assessment that will be completed as part of that grant. And so we'll be using that for the CAP. So it'll be a significant collaboration with the CAP. And then EMPG ARPA will be using funds from that grant to fund the Social Vulnerability Index. And then we've supported a collaboration with Ag Extension and they will be working on a Monterey Bay Natural and Working Lands Climate Mitigation and Resilience Study. And then there are three things that I wanna bring your attention to. There's a regional climate collaboration here last and that is a newly formed collaboration amongst the counties of Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey and the cities of Santa Cruz and Watsonville and Ecology Action. And we have come together to pull our resources so that we can apply for a significant state funding to support regional building electrification. Our goal is to expand that to fleet electrification. But right now we're starting with building electrification. So that's something on the horizon that you will probably be hearing more about. And then there are two other things that I wanna highlight. There's a county workgroup that's working on fleet electrification. And I want to acknowledge CAO Senior Analyst, Lana Martinez-Davis for her work on that and also GSD Director Michael Beaton and Carol Johnson who unfortunately is no longer with us and Director David Reed. And then finally, there's a CAP internship group and the purpose of that is to create a ramp into county work. And so we have two students from Watsonville, one from Parle Valley High School, another one going to Cabrillo that are working on projects. One is about helping farm workers, another one is getting solar panels in schools and then we have a student from UCSC Berkeley and then also a CSU Monterey. So we're working to bring students that are passionate about climate into the county. And that's it for my part. Thanks Tatiana. So just in the last couple of slides here, as Tatiana mentioned, our goal, we know that the state is gonna be allocating billions of dollars towards climate, environment, resilience and health related issues. We wanna position ourselves both as OR3 with the support of our staff, but also through this regional collaboration, we wanna position ourselves to access those funds as quickly and effectively as we can. So we know that working regionally will help us get the tens of millions or billions of dollars we need into our region for building electrification. But there's lots of other opportunities and lots of other funding opportunities where we'll work collaboratively with other departments where appropriate or other agencies where appropriate to try and access those funds, bring those resources into our community because we know that addressing climate change in all of its factors is not something we as a county can do by ourselves and certainly not our office individually. So just quickly onto operational plan, objectives and successes. As I had mentioned earlier, we've been working closely with Maximni and HSD on finishing both our emergency operations roster but also our disaster services worker roster and scheduling system. So both of those are ongoing, but we've completed those in terms of who's gonna show up in the EOC in the event of a disaster. We have that roster built now. That was one of the places that we needed to improve post-CZU and then also that roster for staff. And then as Tatiana articulated, we're on track with the aggressive schedule set forth by your board as well as CAO Palacios in terms of updating our climate action and adaptation plan and with the goal of completing that this calendar year. And then with Patty Ciesla on board in OR3, we're working to coordinate our hazardous fuel reduction strategies county-wide with all of the different partner agencies and nonprofits that are in that space. So that's ongoing, but we're making great progress with Patty at the helm there. So with that, the recommended actions are to approve the proposed 2022-23 budget for the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience, including any supplemental materials as recommended by the CAO. Thank you, Director Reed and Ms. Brennan. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Is that on? Yes, it is. First of all, I really want to thank the board again for unanimously supporting my effort along with Supervisor Coonerty in the fall of 2020 to create this Office of Response Recovery and Resilience. We hit the deck running and of course those, we represent the two districts that were really hit very hard by the CZU fire. Two, how's the critical roles we have in a combined effort of emergency management along with climate change planning? And you've mentioned the people, Ms. Brennan, who you're associate, Ms. Underwood, Carolyn Burke, Sarah Ryan, and then the Community Foundation and what it did to help us along and get us moving as quickly as we could. It can be overstated how I really appreciate the cooperative effort and everybody was glad to do it, believe me, and they wanted to do more. But we have some complex challenges with, and I want to especially thank Dave Reed for being the director of the office. His previous experience with the County Board of Supervisors Office as well as Public Works really has been invaluable and really coordinating things. And your outreach to the community to let them know what's happened, what's available. And we've got some really trying circumstances, as you said, with inflation, the cost factor, the geography of our, especially the Santa Rosa Valley and trying to get back the insurance concerns that people have, the property owner's decision of whether they want to build or not that it's a complex situation and it's one hard, difficult to get our arms around. And I think that the communication effort that you've done has been invaluable to let people know where we are, we're going as fast as we can and as safely as we can for the future. So it's been a tremendous effort and really it's been a cooperative effort, as I said, with some agencies, the Santa Rosa Valley Water District, the coordination, as you mentioned, with Big Basin, a private company, 500 hookups customers there. What they, that's an ongoing process and it's going to be one that's really desperately needed to get the more adequate water supply system for people in the Santa Rosa Valley. So there's a lot of moving parts in this recovery system that you're really having to spread your wings to get and there's been a lot of people and a lot of agencies that have helped. I'm just very pleased with how far we've progressed. I know that there are some complaints still that would, I sure wanted to do this yesterday but reality has to check in and the boxes you have to check to make this all work and thank you, not only for the recovery system but in our foresight of how do we do this with the climate change that is upon us that we're all experiencing. So thank you very much, appreciate it. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Supervisor Caput. I want to thank you also and I guess there's a lot that goes in and you also have to, when there's an emergency like happened with the fire, you're talking with the fire departments, you're talking with the police departments, you're talking about how much do you have to also work on helping out with everybody that comes in has to have clothing and food and catered food and all that. So is that all handled by the fire department or how do you balance the whole picture? Sure, I mean, one of the biggest roles we have as a county in a major disaster is the shelter and care branch. So that's really taking care of folks that have to be evacuated or in the event of an earthquake, maybe their home was damaged or their living environment was compromised. So our Human Services Department, HSD, is in charge of our care and shelter branch and they really play an instrumental role in supporting communities. So we stand up shelters, bring people in, we feed them in those locations. Obviously during CZU and the pandemic, it was a slightly different model where we had people in hotels, but we'll probably be returning to a congregate or a larger scale shelter and model. And that's really one of the key roles that we play. The Sheriff's Office does our evacuations and enforces our evacuations with the guidance and direction of our fire agencies that are in play in usually Cal Fire, but shelter and care is the biggest role that we play in supporting community. Where's the command center now? It used to be, I know in so, yeah, so Cal. Yeah, the Emergency Operations Center is on the second floor of the Sheriff's Administrative Building. Okay, I've been there, okay, thanks a lot. Thanks, Supervisor. And we're gonna, I'll make a motion for approval, but I'll have to wait, right? Yeah, yeah, I'll come to you at times, right? Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any other comments or Supervisor Coonerty? Yeah, Mr. Chair, thank you. Thank you for the work, you know, it's clear you're working on all three fronts. One of the things I'd be interested is it seems like there's a lot of resilience money coming down from the state. Each one falls under a different category or seeking different combinations of governments or nonprofits or private sectors. And I just wanna make sure that Santa Cruz County is competing for all these dollars and is, you know, is, I think in many ways we're a model community in that we have, obviously rising, rising oceans and forests and mud debris flows and earthquakes. We have sort of every possible disaster you could have here and a community that's willing to collaborate and coordinate to respond better. So how are we doing and attracting those dollars? And are there any tools or additional initiatives we need to be more competitive? It's a great question, Supervisor. I think just to reiterate and highlight the importance of that regional collaboration that Tatiana talked about, I think we recognize that we will be more competitive as a region for certain pockets of money. So building that collaboration, building the governance structure of that collaboration and building an agenda for what we wanna go for, what funding we wanna go for is a critical next step that Tatiana and I are working with our community partners on, our county, our jurisdictional partners on. And then having a dedicated person like Patty Ciesla as our wildfire resilience coordinate manager, program manager is critical. She's been tremendously successful as a grant writer, both in prior work environments as well as on behalf of the fire safe council. So we'll be looking closely to leverage her experience to find funding and bring funding in there. But as most of the departments you've talked that have spoken today, we're working collaboratively with the community development and infrastructure department with the regional transportation commission and other agencies to figure out the best way to package our needs and be as competitive as possible. So it's really a collaborative effort across all of the county, not just OR3 in trying to access these funds because some of them will be transportation infrastructure related, similar to the RTC grant that we were partnering with, with the RTC and public works. So- The more jurisdictional or regional partners have the capacity to, I mean, we've created the capacity here. Do other people have the capacity so that we can move quickly and effectively to get these dollars? I think what we're trying to do is what we recognize is that each jurisdiction is probably under resourced, but if we work together, the intention is to become and to leverage our collective dollars together to hire some consultants to work towards grant applications, really getting grant applications out the door through this pooling of resources since we're all working individually, but I think more competitive collectively. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Supervisor Coonerty. Any other comments or questions? I just had a couple, first on the $43 million from the state for multifamily housing projects from CDBGDR. Is there, are there any particular requirements around that? I mean, like similar to Holmkey that we accelerate the construction of those projects? I will be, I would be out of my depth to describe some of the limitations. Suzanne, I say in our housing division are well-versed in the CDBG process and the notice of funding opportunity will go directly to developers in the county. So those developers working in that space are well-versed in the constraints and challenges of that funding stream. So I'm confident we're gonna make sure that everybody knows about it when that funding opportunity is noticed. And we wanna make sure every dollar is spent here locally, but I don't wanna get outside of my scope of expertise and I don't wanna put Suzanne on the spot. She's probably not listening. Sure, yeah, all right, I'll follow up with Suzanne, I say. And then on the collaboration to pay for building electrification, is that for electrification of county buildings or some kind of program to help new homeowners electrify a building? What can you provide a little more detail? That regional collaboration you mentioned. Sorry, yeah, Mike. Can you hear me now? Yeah. So that's, it's a regional effort. So we're looking at applying for the funding that Supervisor Coonerty was referencing. We're looking at applying for grants connected to that funding for regional building electrification. Of public buildings, or would we then grant it out to? You know what's real nice is that we haven't gotten there yet. And so that was part of the reason that we wanted to highlight this effort for the board is that this is in the nascent stages of development. So there's room for building out that goal. Okay, great, yeah, I know it was highlighted in the previous cap, focusing on building electrification and it could be a possibility going forward, both as far as requirements for new buildings, as well as helping convert the existing stock. So all right, good to know. Well, just thank you very much. You guys are working on some pretty essential projects. I know the public thinks especially on these hot days, what are we doing? The work you guys are doing is the response to that. And I really appreciate it. Yeah, Mr. Chair, I think that in, hello, is that Central Coast Community Energy does have some opportunities for grants for electrical services. So that's a good, there's another good place to go. They're pretty much allocated. It's in the millions of dollars that they allocate. And I think our CEO, who is the chair of the operational committee for CCE, triple CEE, there's some opportunities there possibly. Yeah, good. Yeah, we've started implementing a number of local programs like that and it's a great opportunity right now to apply for many of these grants. So, and we hope to do more in the future. Great, thank you. And I'm sorry, can I just add that CCE is supporting the regional collaboration. So they have provided the collaboration with a thousand, a hundred thousand dollar grant. Fantastic, that's great to hear. All right, if there are no further comments or questions from members of the board, is there any member of the public wish to address us on this item? I think not here in the chambers, is there anyone on Zoom? No one on Zoom wishing to speak. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. I'll move to approve. Motion by Supervisor Caput, seconded by Supervisor McPherson to approve the budget for the Office of Response Recovery and Resilience. Any further discussion? I think none, quick roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Unity. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Item passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Thank you to the OR3 team for presenting today. That brings us to the end of our regular agenda for today's budget hearings. We will recess until tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. when we will hear public safety and justice. Thank you.