 Looks like we have a quorum if I'm not mistaken. Council Member Watkins, if you are back, please turn on your camera and Council Member Goldersback. Good afternoon and welcome to the 230 session of the January 26, 2021 meeting of the City Council. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsantacruz.com. All council members are participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home today to view the City Council meeting. All council members are participating, excuse me, if you wish to comment on the agenda today, call in at the beginning of the item you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming, so if you continue to speak on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for the public comment, press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once. You have commented on the item of your interest. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Watkins is currently not with us right now. Calentary Johnson. Present. Boulder. Here. Just to note, Council Member Watkins is now here. Vice Mayor Brunner. Present. And Mayor Meyers. I'm present. Okay, we will move on to, we have two presentations this afternoon. Our first is the annual Santa Cruz Metro State of the Union. And I believe that is here. Alex Clifford, the Executive Officer of the Metro Santa Cruz is here to see you. Welcome, Alex. Thank you for coming. Well, thank you so much, Mayor. I appreciate it and Council Members and City Manager. I always look forward to my annual State of Metro presentation. Obviously today's presentation will be a little different than the past ones because the past year has been a little different than past experiences. With that, I'll go ahead and start my shared screen. I think I'm gonna be doing the driving here, as I recall. Okay. And can you see that okay at your end? Yeah, it's on, Alex. Yeah. Great. For some reason it doesn't change slides. Please let me know. I had a problem with that earlier this week in another presentation. So did that change this time? Did you see slides? Yes, it did. Oh, perfect. Then we've got a good thing going on here. All right, so let me just talk a little bit about transit and what we think it might look like both current and in the future. Although the future is real foggy right now. No one really knows exactly what it looks like. We certainly have more questions than answers and we don't have real good history to draw from. We know that associated with this COVID pandemic, there will be some sort of economic crisis. We're experiencing some of that already, but we don't know how long it will last, how long it will take to recover. We have some experience from a prolonged economic downturn and that was the great recession about 2008 to 2014. Then there was the swine flu in 2009. That did reach pandemic, but nothing like this, not even comparable. And then we had, of course, the 2005 avian flu. To the extent that we learned things that we could apply here from that experience, I will tell you that back in that timeframe, we learned a lot about disinfecting. So we were able to start early planning before COVID arrived in this county based on that experience to start planning for disinfecting products and processes. What do we want to do? We want to, of course, always do the right thing. You do as a city, we do as Metro. We want to protect our employees and customers. We want to take great care for the public trust, minimize mistakes. To that end, we have participated in nationwide and California transit agency forums, whether that be webinars, weekly meetings, all sorts of Zoom meetings for transit agencies, both in the state through the CTA and through APTA on our national transit association, to share information when one agency does something that is costly, might be perceived a mistake. We share that information so that nobody else makes that same mistake. When we have success stories, likewise, we share that information. In doing so, we can use the public trust in the ways that the public would want us to use it and be very careful in using it. So at Metro's initial strategy, it's really sort of three phases. One is to restore public and customer confidence and a safe experience with riding a bus, looking at adding value. How can we, what things can we do to attract people back to the bus? And three is that post-COVID transit service. What does that look like? We're spending a lot of time thinking about that. Is it the same? I don't know. Phase one, restoring public and customer confidence in our safe experience. So sometime back, we joined the APTA Health and Safety Pledge. On all of our buses, we have this logo and then in various advertising slots, we have the picture that you see there, which shows what we're doing as an agency and what we expect our customers on the right side of that, what we expect our customers to be doing in order that we both jointly work together to keep the customers and our employees safe. We probably noticed as our buses roll down the street on the sides, maybe some of the backs of the buses we have these ad spaces that we're filling, deliberately disinfecting, seriously sanitizing and serious about safety. Again, we're trying to convey a message to our customers that we take this very serious and we're doing everything possible to help them feel safe when they board our bus and ride it to their destination. If you've boarded a bus, you will notice that we have these plastic between seat row barriers, sneeze barriers if you will. I don't know of anybody else in the nation who has done this. There certainly is no over the counter product. We have some very talented people here in our fleet maintenance shop and they were able to put these together. Every one of these are custom made. No two buses are made alike, unfortunately. And so everyone had to be custom made. And this, what this does is, as you can see, we block off seats to try to keep people physical distancing but we create these sneeze barriers to try to prevent airborne droplets should there be somebody sitting immediately in the seat behind you. And we do capacity constrain our buses. So our 40 foot buses are capacity constrained to 15 and our 35 footers are capacity constrained to 12. So we've been doing that for quite some time. We're still holding fast at those kinds of capacities. And then every night when our bus rolls in to be refueled, we go through a process of cleaning and disinfecting. And on the left, you see one of our vehicle service workers with a sort of a backpack device. This is an electrostatic fogger and that fogger is dispensing disinfected. And that person will disinfect all the different surfaces seat back, stanchions and straps. And then on the right, you can see when the customer boards the bus, they have the opportunity to dispense some hand sanitizer as they board the bus. Every one of our buses have this. And then we sort of took a page out of the rail handbook, if you will. We hired a number of temporary, what we call cleaners. And at all of our transit centers, Watsonville, Capitola, Scots Valley and downtown Santa Cruz, we have these cleaners. And what they do is when the bus pulls through the terminal, these cleaners quickly jump on the bus. They got a rag, they've got a bucket of disinfectant. They dipped it before they jumped on the bus and then they quickly roll through that bus hitting all the seat backs and the stanchions and the hand straps, any high touch surfaces. What's the nice thing about this for our service because it's a linear service across this county and our buses always go through our transit centers, we have the opportunity to disinfect those buses throughout the day. So the bus just doesn't leave in the morning completely disinfected because you know that that can be shortly thereafter meaningless as soon as people start boarding and touching things and spreading germs. So throughout the day, we're constantly disinfecting to help keep those surfaces free from COVID. And then for our bus operators, when COVID first hit we took a step back and we said we got to be really extraordinarily safe. We only let customers board through the back door. We discontinued fares until we could put safety measures in place to protect our bus operators from airborne droplets. So this is what we designed and installed on 100% of our buses. It's a clear curtain, much like a shower curtain. And when the bus operator pulls up to the stop, he or she deploys this curtain so that as people board that bus, now they're within six feet of that bus operator, their airborne droplets are prevented from getting to that operator. So good protection for our bus operators. And then the county required some time back that everybody waiting in a bus stop, boarding a bus, riding a bus or driving a bus must wear a face covering. We followed that order. We immediately crafted things like you see here that are on the buses to notify our customers that face coverings are mandatory. And we have empowered our bus operators to refuse rides that people do not have a face covering. Now, in one of my prior presentations, it was noted that some people have reactions, allergic reactions and other reasons why they shouldn't wear a face covering. So we do require those folks to wear a face shield. So the bus operator will refuse the ride if they don't have one of those two protective measures. So then we finished this process over several months of making our service as safe as we think we possibly can. And in October, we sort of did a relaunch. We said, hey, look at everything that we've done. Come on back. This is a safe service. If your job, if you still need to go to your job, your essential job or otherwise, and you're not riding our bus, please come back and ride our bus. And when your job comes back, please come back and ride our bus. So in the area of added value, the big thing today is contactless, touchless, right? We've always had smart cards where people could load fair media or cash and coin on their smart card and they could walk up to the fair box and put it within a couple of inches of the fair box and it would validate it. We've always had that. So since COVID hit, we've been making an extra push to try to get our customers to migrate off of paper and off of cash and coin onto our plastic smart card. Go contactless, touchless. In addition to that, in October, we launched our new smartphone application, the Splash Pass. We were originally gonna just pilot that on Highway 17, but because of COVID, we are now piloting that across the entire system. So people can go online, they can download that app, they can find it on our website, a link to it, download it, load up value and they can pay their fare through their smartphone now. We're investigating expanding Wi-Fi to all of our buses. We've always had it on our commuter buses that go over the hill on Highway 17. We think it would be added value to consider expanding it to the entire service. And then automatic passenger counters. In transit, we're sort of data geeks and we don't like to do things anecdotally like this agency has for many years. We like data, we like to drive decisions with data. And so we've always sort of yearned to have APCs which are passenger counters that we would get data, GPS data combined with the APC would tell us how many people board in a light at each bus stop. Now in the COVID environment, coupled with a smartphone application, if we put APCs on our buses, the customer will see how many people are on that bus as it approaches. So we've given the customer, if we do this, we'll have given the customer the opportunity to choose. They get to choose whether they wanna ride that bus, whether there are too many people on that bus or their comfort level. So we give them the choice. And so we'll bring that to the board sometime this year and hopefully start the process of adding those to our buses. Our bus, the board approved a redesign of our bus stops. They're gonna be smarter looking, nicer looking. We've added these key offs to our two transit centers, Santa Cruz and Watsonville. They're like the doorbell ring. You customer walks up, presses a button. There's a little camera there and they'll be able to speak directly or they can. It's already there. Speak directly to our customer service reps and have any of their questions answered in real time live. That's important because for the last several months, we closed the customer service window at the two transit centers. So we wanted to keep that closed interface with the customer and the customer service rep but also protect boats from COVID. And then we are in the process of installing and completing the installation of automatic vehicle location. That will really help us, help our customers know when the buses are coming. So three, we're evaluating the implementation of on-demand service. Now we took an item to the board this month. We're doing some more work on that and we'll bring it back to the board next month. But that will allow us, if approved by the board, to establish six districts across the entire county in which they're all within about three-quarter mile of a fixed route in which people can call and have sort of door-to-door Uber-like kind of service. So we hope to launch that next month. And then as much as financially feasible, we wanna try to keep as much service out there as we had pre-COVID. That's important, even though the negative being that we're running oftentimes buses that have few, if any people on it, we need to keep those buses running because as people come back to work, as they need us for their essential travel, work, doctor's appointment, dentists, grocery store, that bus needs to be there. If that bus isn't there, when they come back to use that bus, we risk losing that customer. They may find another way to accomplish their essential needs and they may not come back. We did do some surveying of our customers in the post-COVID environment. And our customers did say that as they come back, they're looking forward to a little bit more frequency on some of our lines. And then we don't have a real good track record with on-time performance because we operate off of very limited sampling and mostly anecdotal information. With the automatic vehicle locators and the APCs I talked about earlier, we'll get better data to plan our service around so that we can make adjustments to the service and help it be much more on-time going forward than it is today. We're rethinking the functionality and layout of our transit centers and we're also rethinking the future of ticket vending machines, paper fare media, cash and coins. And then of course we really look forward in a couple of years to this bus on shoulder project that's integrated into the RTC's Highway 1 auxiliary lanes. We think that will be of great benefit for moving people kind of in a BRT bus rapid transit fashion between North and South and South and North. Not such a pretty picture. It plummeted, you can see on the far left of this slide that it plummeted back in March. For example, March 15th, we were at 25,000 rides in a week and we should have been at 102,000. That was year over year comparison. Good news is it started to actually climb little by little far, far from where it should be, but started to climb and then as the county opened up and then when the county started to close back down again, you can see towards the right side of the slide, we decreased in a significant way with the stay home order. As of, I'm looking at just some real current data as of January 16th that week, we were back up to about 15,000 trips, but really year over year we should have still been at 124,000 trips. So at 80 to 88% down, we have a lot of work to do. And hence the reason that I described earlier about keeping the bus available for when people are ready to return and use it. Gonna move on quickly to the state of Metro's budget. As of December 31st, half of our fiscal year ended. Our total revenues, much like you probably saw in the city, we're down $1.3 million. The good news is we've been managing our budget with a microscope and we've been able to save money. And so we've saved 3.2 million through the first half of the year and that's an overall favorable of 1.8 million. So we're carefully managing the public trust and trying to survive this pandemic. You probably heard about the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, passed by Congress, signed by the president. Omnibus bill, that simply just means that multiple things are going on. You've got a budget, you've got coronavirus relief, you've got all kinds of things going on. In one bill that passes the House, the Senate and is signed by the president, that's Omnibus bill. You have in there two things important to us, coronavirus emergency relief and federal budget appropriations. That coronavirus emergency relief has now migrated into something they call CARISA, which is Coronavirus Response and Release Supplemental Appropriations Act. Congress loves to do these things. So in the stimulus part of that, we were to receive what we thought when I did this slide, it's $12 million, that's actually been updated to about 13 and a half million. So we got emergency relief funding back in about April, May of last year through the CARES Act of about $20 million, coupled with this 13 and a half million. That's really gonna help us try to avoid, we're desperately trying to avoid furloughs and layoffs and try to keep as much of that service out there. Congress said when they put these two bills together they really want us to try hard to keep our bus operators employed. So we're trying, we take that to heart and we're doing our best we can. So what'll happen is as we go through the months to come, fare revenues are still down, sales tax is still down, we'll bridge that monthly deficit with these CARES acts and these CARISA dollars. And our greatest hope is that by the time that those reserves are exhausted, hopefully we will have come out of this pandemic economy in a strong way and we'll be back to sort of normal whatever normal is in the future. Now, if that doesn't pan out and this is one of those long-term economic downturns then it's gonna be important that when this is approaching being exhausted that Congress continues to fund future allotments of coronavirus emergency relief for transit agencies. We're all experiencing the same thing across the nation. We need to survive and we may need future help from them. And then in the budget, so the budget's important to us because we have something called transit authorization. It has a clever little name, it's called the FASTAC. It expired, it was extended for a year but they had to fund it. So they funded it. In there is something called an alternative fuel tax credit. We run compressed natural gas buses. So we get an annual credit through the extender process and that's $300,000 that we use for capital purchases. And then in our formula programs, the programs that keep us operating, they did another year. This is the second year of plus ups. So they took the FASTAC minimum authorization funding level and for the second or third year in a row they said we're gonna give you the minimum plus some additional amount of money. That is 198 million nationwide. We will benefit to the tune of about 205,000. And then in competitive capital programs they plus those up 125 million a piece. That's important to us because we've applied for LONO and been awarded a LONO grant in the past for electric buses. And we plan in a couple of years to apply for another one of those for potentially hydrogen fuel cell buses. And then this year, just in the matter of a month or two we're gonna be applying for a bus and bus facilities grant to build our new paratransit facility. So that plus up will hopefully help us benefit with a grant award here later this year. And then Madam Mayor, I'd just like to close with all Santa Cruz Metro employees, dedicated employees or frontline heroes delivering essential services and I would be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Alex for that presentation. And I would look to the council to see if there are questions from council first. Renee, excuse me, council member Golder. Hi, I don't really have a question, just a comment. I wanna say thank you to Alex and thank you to everyone at the Metro. I know it's been trying times for you as bus operators and with ridership down and everything. And I just wanted to mention that my daughters been using the bus for transportation and her favorite Christmas present was her bus pass. And so I would just wanna encourage the public that has teenage kids that, you know and want to get some place to place, use the bus, it's safe, it's clean and, you know, let's support the Metro. Absolutely, thank you for that. And council member Calentary Johnson. Thank you, yes, I also just wanted to thank you for the presentation and all the work that the Metro does. And I look forward to serving on the Metro board. We're forward to working with you. Any other council members? If not, I will call on myself. Also just wanted to thank you, Alex, for coming today to give us the update. Speaking as a two-year Metro board member, I just want our council to know and our community to know that it's been a really rough time for the Metro. Public transit is just an embedded value in the city of Santa Cruz and our community. And I wanna especially thank Alex for the way that he's led the transit district through this emergency. I think of, you know, both the drivers and the employees of Metro have been amazing through this entire emergency. And so they have gone above and beyond. They are incredibly dedicated to the role of public transit in people's lives. And it has been a rough year and it's been extraordinary to watch how the district has pulled together to really try to continue to do service and also provide safety for passengers as well as continue the various services including para crews and other things. So it's been extraordinary to watch the district make these transformations literally weekly as things have changed with COVID. So Alex just wanna recognize what a rough year it's been just thank you and all your employees and everyone at Metro for keeping people, you know, at least to the extent that you can having public transit available for folks. And thanks for coming today and are extremely busy. So we always appreciate your in your report. Thank you Mary-Maris. Thanks everyone. Okay, thanks so much Alex. Okay, next up we have a presentation on the library mixed use project update. And I have principal management analyst, Amanda Rotella and director of economic development, Bonnie Lipscomb will be doing the presentation today. Thank you so much mayor. Council, great to see you again. I am here with an update on the library mixed use project. We are aspiring to come to you quarterly with some updates to really as part of our communication plan to keep you in the public in the loop of what's going on. We'll have a presentation from our owner's representative Griffin structures. This is the phase one contract that you approved last year for the work that they are now doing. And I have John Hughes who is here with me and it's sort of my counterpart at Griffin as we are leading this project forward. And he's gonna share an update on the work that we've been up to since you last saw us and next steps moving forward. And so with that John on he's gonna share his screen with the presentation. John, are you there? I am here. You know it was locked, so thank you. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you, Mayor Myers and Vice Mayor Brunner and the city council. My name is John Hughes. I am executive vice president of Griffin structures and we're very, very honored and pleased to be part of your team to work with Bonnie and Amanda on this exciting project. And so we have a presentation for you to kind of give you an update. And like Amanda had said, you're gonna be receiving at minimum quarterly updates. And this would be constituted first. So I'm gonna share my screen. And there it is. Can everybody see that? I presume you can. We can, thank you. So this is like I said, our, sorry, I just can't see myself now. Okay, here we go. There you are, I see you, you're shot. So like we said, this is our update for the downtown library mixed use project. Some of the things that we're gonna be going over quickly is we wanted to give you a little introduction to ourselves, our firm, myself and the different members of our team. Give you a summary of the efforts that we have pursued and completed to date, as well as review with you a milestone schedule that shows kind of the way we're going to move forward and has within it certain items of task items that will occur in those phases. And we've spent a considerable amount of time looking at and putting together community outreach tools and plans, communications plans. So we'll be looking at that as well as Amanda will close with an update on the library, reuse, visioning process update who we are. Griffin structures has been in business serving the public sector for 40 years. The owner of our company, Roger Torriero, started it in 1990, 91. And he was originally a developer, but in the 91 recession converted as a development business into public sector program and construction management service. Our primary scope of responsibility, our primary expertise is in vertical construction. So we do a lot, I'd say 90% of our work is working with cities just like Santa Cruz and doing vertical construction projects, buildings, essentially. And in that history, we have developed a considerable portfolio overseeing affordable housing projects, libraries, library projects, mixed use development experience and parking structures. So it's really a great fit for your project because your project is a fusion of all of those. And so when we saw this opportunity come, we were very excited to pursue it and very thrilled to be brought on as part of your team. A little more detail about some of our experience. So in that 40 years, we've done over 400 public sector projects. So that constitutes police stations, fire stations, city halls, community centers, a lot of parks. We've done 25 affordable housing projects. And those are both with public sector and also just nonprofit. So directly working with firms, many of which have worked in the city like Bridge Housing, for example, 20 library projects. Libraries are unique projects. And we find that many people think they're just buildings with a bunch of books. But in fact, they're incredibly complex. And at least as we've come to realize that it requires a certain level of experience in our team, the team that we dedicated to this project has done a number of projects, library projects, just like the one that you're envisioning. 80 design build projects, 40 parking structures and 50 mixed-use development projects. So we have a large portfolio of projects very similar to the downtown library mixed-use project. This is our team. So I'm up there on the left. I'm the project executive for this project. I'm also the executive vice president for Griffin structures. So I oversee the entire portfolio of work that we have under contract. We have about 15 different program and construction managers. And for this project, we have a team that's centered around Justin Dorico. And Justin is with us today, although with the sea of video faces, I don't know if you can see him or not, but he is present. Justin just recently completed a project with group four architecture called the Yorba Linda Library and Entertainment Center. It's basically a very large library and a community center for plays and performances, a performing art center. And so Justin's kind of our in-house expert when it comes to libraries. He's done a few of them now and we're really excited to, you know, seeing what he can do with you on your project. He's going to be leading this project for the entirety of the phase one aspect, which you'll see later. It gets you through the procurement process, the design processing and right up to construction. Once construction begins, we're going to be bringing on Hernan Muneco who lives locally in the area. And he'll be deployed full-time on-site to be our on-site construction manager representing the city, being the eyes and ears of the city. And in addition to that, one of the things that we bring to the table that we're really kind of excited to bring to the city is that we have a very robust public outreach staff that are teaming relationship with Susan Hardin who is part of our team. She's also here today. There she is, at least on my screen I can see her. And we recognize that the city of Santa Cruz takes a great interest and places a high priority on informing, communicating and reaching out to the public. And so as part of our scope and as part of our team, we have a public outreach team member who's dedicated solely to that, that effort and a specialist that's going to be working with Amanda and Bonnie and your entire communication staff to be able to keep the community informed. And we'll be touching on a few of those tools that we'll be using a little bit later. We also have on this org chart the owner, Roger Torriero, before starting this company, he spent 20 years in real estate development. And we also have Corin Crawford who's our affordable housing expert. He has a long history of delivering projects, affordable housing projects. And so when a question arises that I can't answer, we ask Corin. And so this is your team. Some of the things that we've done today. So we started back in December. We met with Bonnie and Amanda and you're the County Librarian, the PIO staff. We're still getting familiar with all the people involved. But we did, we've done a deep dive into your program. What are the, what's the needs assessment? What are the requirements of the project? What are the parameters of the project? What are the limits constraints? What is your, all of the existing documentation that's been performed to date, which you have a lot of? What does it all mean and help, and that helps us to kind of inform our way forward. To that end, we performed a, what we call a deep dive into a delivery analysis. And what we mean by that is a form of delivery is how do you structure the project contractually? You know, who hires the architect? Who hires the builder? Who hires the developer? How do you carve up the pieces of this pie? When you have a project like this with multiple stakeholders and multiple components, it can get tricky. And so we ran a series of different evaluations and analyses, reviewed them with staff and came up with some options that we're now moving forward with in terms of how to progress forward. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. We also had Susan and her team work with the city and your team to put together and build out a communications strategy. So talking about tools, various methods and means of communication. How often, who are the stakeholders? The constituents that are primarily involved. What are their primary concerns? Doing a deep dive into the communication strategy so that we can fulfill the city's commitment of a robust strategy. And then with all that, putting together a schedule and looking at the schedule, we even met with some folks from the bonding advisors about when the money is due and some of the milestones related to that. And so we have a schedule that is a high level milestone schedule. And I'll share it with you now. It's still very high level. So this will get broken down in further detail as the project unfolds. We'll get down to the point where we start having very specific delivery dates for different consultants. But at this stage, to give you just a high level view, we've broken the project up into four phases. We right now are in the team building phase. So that involves the solicitation for, well, initially the program delivery analysis which we spoke of earlier. The solicitation and selection of the master architect, solicitation and selection of the affordable housing developer and establishing the communication strategy. We hope to have all of that done and ready by the end of the second quarter of this year. Once the design team is on board, we anticipate about a year and a half to go through schematic design, design development, construction documents, entitlement and permitting and contractor selection. So that's kind of where we'll be, and those two together constitute phase one overall that Amanda spoke of in terms of our commitment. And then phase two goes into the construction phase. Right now we're anticipating the construction taking a full two years. It could be faster, but at this point, we don't wanna over commit. We wanna be able to meet the requirements that we present. So given the nature of this project and the tight quarters and the multiple components of the project, we anticipated taking that long and involving clearing the site, grading and underground utilities, bringing in all of the offsite improvements for water and power and gas and electric and everything. Shell and core construction, so that's just the structure itself as well as building out the interiors and then all the site work and landscape. And then in the first and second quarter of 2025, we anticipate going through punch list, commissioning, the catalog move. One of the big things with libraries is just moving the books in because usually there's a very robust effort that is concurrent with moving. It's not just picking up books and moving them. The catalog gets revised, it gets enhanced, it gets built out, it expands. And so, and maybe certain elements that get updated to be able to be more user friendly. So there's a lot to just the catalog move and that usually happens concurrent with commissioning. So there's a number of testing and balancing and different systems that get kind of, you work out the bugs and then of course a grand opening, we move into public. So this is the kind of the macro schedule and the high level tasks. And like I said earlier, it will get more refined as we build out the project. Some of the, oh, there we go. Some of the things that we have looked at and worked with staff, specific to community outreach are these tools. We want to and are anticipating performing each of these on some level and we're still working out the timing and the frequency of each, but we're prepared to have community design workshops, stakeholder meetings and presentations, pop-up events, social media posts, project newsletters, eBlast. We'll be producing a fact sheet. We're going to be updating the website content, press releases, updates for officials, updates for you folks, quarterly updates, I should say, updates for the officials and then quarterly updates for council. And one of the things that we really like to do, although it can be so challenging is we like to recommend and post a 24-hour hotline. Once construction starts, as you guys know, that's usually one of the things, people that the constituents often just are most inconvenienced by is just construction stuff, trucks and cranes and concrete and all the things that might hold things up or inconvenience you or you might see something that you have a question about. What we always do is we recommend a signage like you see on most projects, but it has a phone number and we would have a prerecorded outgoing message that allows anyone at any time to leave a voicemail and our construction manager will monitor that on a daily basis and our commitment is to respond to that voicemail within 24 hours. Meeting with staff, meeting with, getting the right answer. We do that primarily because our, based on the 40 years of experience that we've had, we believe that if people are heard, if people just feel like when they call city hall and there's a voice there that responds to them, that that makes all the difference in the world. Even if there's something going on that construction might be noisy or could be challenging in some way, having that one, that direct line of communication goes a long way to demonstrating that the city of Santa Cruz cares about its constituents and is communicating openly with them to the extent possible to get, to deliver this project. So those are some of the tools, again, this will get fleshed out further and we've even gone through some branding and some coloring and see we have a nice little logo down here that we created. So, oh, I changed it. So that's kind of our Outreaching Communications Tools. So for the most part, that is where we are right now on our side and I'll hand it off to Amanda to talk about the library reuse and visioning. Yeah, thank you, John. So this is just a super quick update. Part of the direction that you provided to us was to initiate a community engagement process around reuse of the existing library site and with the direction to look at it as an opportunity site for housing, for a downtown commons and other public uses. And so we released an RFP last year, in the tail end of last year in December. It closed earlier this month and we received four really strong proposals from reputable firms. And we are in the process of reviewing those. We have a multi-departmental staff that is gonna be working on this team. Primarily, Economic Development will be partnering with Parks and Rec to review those proposals and make a final decision later this week. And I'm hoping to launch this process in February, first thing in February and it's anticipated to be a three-month process to include community engagement, engagement with stakeholders, and ultimately returning to you for a study session to review all the different options and recommendations. So more to come on that, but where there's lots of balls in the air and we're kind of moving things forward on concurrent paths. And with that, I'll open it up to any questions. I know we've got only a limited amount of time, so I'll defer to the mayor. Thank you, Amanda and John. I really appreciate you coming, John, to introduce yourself and your firm and everyone that's working on the project. So it's great to meet everybody. And yeah, we're running a little bit late, but I'm happy to see we're only about four minutes late. So if there are questions from council or comments, maybe just a few minutes, I'll look to see if any folks have. And again, today is really a presentation and this was part of our recommendation and motion was that we would get regular updates. So meant to be a presentation. And let's see, I will call on council member Cummings, Colin Tari Johnson, and council member Brown. I think one of the biggest on the funding for the affordable housing component. And I'm just wondering when we might hear back about it. Thank you, Justin. I believe we have Bonnie with him on the line and I'll defer to her to respond to that question. Great. Thanks, Amanda and good afternoon, mayor and members of the council. So our timeline, as John showed in the schedule is that we want to get pretty quickly an affordable housing developer on board. And then we'll be meeting with them right away to look at what grants we're going to apply for, for this project. And that will really set the timeline overall for the budget. So we'll report back to you once we have the affordable housing director and developer. And you'll actually, we'll have another report to you before that point. So we may actually have some updated information on that. We're also looking at specifically different funding mechanisms. We're looking at a couple of legislative, two different efforts, particularly one around affordable housing to maximize the affordable housing that allows us to move forward pre-expeditiously and makes us very competitive for funding. And then of course we have our holding in our affordable housing trust fund, funding for this project. So we're feeling pretty good about our ability to deliver I think on the affordable housing piece. I think what's outstanding is actually the number of units and trying to maximize that within the development footprint. And we'll come back to you once we have the affordable housing developer on board with the potential options for meeting sort of the current zoning and height, additional height, number of units, that type of thing. So those are the areas that we still need to work out but we're feeling pretty confident about the funding at this point. And then I just had one more question and maybe this could either be for Lee or Tony. Well, we can't completely insulate the city from a sequel litigation that I envisioned this project will definitely require an environmental impact report. And in most of the cases in which we've been sued under CEQA in the past, we've used a negative declaration and the standard for a negative declaration is much different than from an environmental impact report. And so long as the city makes the necessary findings and that there is substantial evidence in the record to support the findings and the council's conclusions with respect to environmental impacts associated with the project, it should be theoretically defensible. CEQA litigation, as you know, is complicated and the outcome can't be predicted with certainty but we certainly have to make sure that we dot all of our i's and cross all of our q's as we go through that CEQA process. And next I'll call on Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Thank you and thanks so much for that presentation. I just have one question. It was great to see the outline and bullet points of a robust communication plan and outreach strategy. I was wondering if at a future presentation and update if you can share your specific strategies on how to engage some of the harder-reach population for the design specifically the library but the whole project, in particular Spanish-speaking populations, youth and seniors. So thank you so much. Thank you and I'll just make just a quick comment on that. You know, we'll be working very closely with our architect design team to develop that plan so absolutely more to come. Great. And Council Member Brown. Council Member Cummings and Calantari-Johnson asked the main questions that I was wondering about. So thank you, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody for pulling an update together for us. I guess just to follow up on the questions around outreach and engagement. A lot of the, and I appreciate seeing, you know, all of the different mechanisms that you're thinking about, but many of the elements do seem to be more in terms of the outward-facing approach to be more about transfer of information to the public about what's going on. And so I definitely am interested in learning more about, you know, what your plans are for engagement, you know, in particular of, you know, populations that are underrepresented in many ways and certainly underrepresented in terms of their interaction and kind of voice at the city. Totally. Thank you so much for those comments. And yeah, I agree. And I think a big part is we want to be very intentional about expectations that we set. And so want to be fully prepared when we come forward with that information knowing that we're setting those expectations with the community. So we're working on that. And as I said, we're going to bring on that design team and figure out how to really integrate into their process a community engagement plan. And so absolutely, once we've got them on board, we'll have some key markers about when the community will be engaged. You know, we've had some discussions about listening towards, you know, really opportunities where there is communication coming in and we are taking in input from the community and hearing concerns. So thank you for those comments. Any other comments from council members? I'm not seeing any. Amanda and Bonnie and the team, Slate, thank you very much for being with us today. And we appreciate the presentation and we look forward to more in the next few months. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, John. A few announcements and then we're going to move on to the next parts of our meeting here. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website. CityofSantaCruise.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting. Whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be opened for a public comment during today's meeting are numbers nine through 31 on our agenda today. Move on to statement of disqualifications. I'd like to ask council members if there are any statements of disqualification today. We will bring, we will move on to additions and deletions. I'd like to ask the city clerk administrator to announce any additions or and deletions to the agenda today. There are none today. Next, I would like to make an oral communications announcements announcement. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda item 31 today. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in towards the end of item 31. I'd like to next call on the city attorney to provide a report on closed session. Thank you, Mayor Myers, members of the city council. Council met remotely via Zoom this afternoon, beginning at one o'clock to discuss the following items. The first was a conference with the legal council concerning liability claims, specifically the claim of Sally A. Whitman. That item is also listed as number 13 on your consent agenda this afternoon. The second item was existing litigation. There were two cases discussed in closed session this afternoon. The first, the case Santa Cruz homeless union at all versus the city of Santa Cruz pending in the United States district court. The second, don't morph the wharf at all versus the city of Santa Cruz at all. And that is pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. Lastly, there was one item of potential litigation, specifically significant exposure to litigation. And on those items, there was no reportable action. Thank you, Mr. Kandadi. I'd like to now call on the city manager for his report and updates on the city's business, COVID-19 response and events. Thank you, mayor. Good afternoon. Just kind of provide four items very briefly to update you on. They are just a quick update on the highway one and nine and campment. Generally on the COVID and where we are with respect to the state the status of the shelter in place order. A quick status on the eviction moratoriums and information on that. And then just very briefly just touch upon whether I'll start with just the weather. I think everybody knows that we have a pending large amount of rain and wind that's starting already in the next few days. And that requires, well, first of all, with respect to the impact of the city, we're not anticipating major impact directly to the city, although there is an impact that's expected in the county. And so the county has issued a evacuation warning in the Salarons of Valley and other areas, particularly those that were in the fire debris zones. However, we are planning and prepared to assist if needed and or to respond if needed to activate our emergency operations center if needed. We've also done a lot of work to prepare our public works crews and maintenance crews to clear out storm drains. And we're also going through the river lobby and inform individuals that they need to move and referring them to services where we can so that people don't find themselves in the situation of a dangerous situation. So we're actively preparing on that. And again, the also the Red Cross is establishing some evacuation sites for those in the evacuation zones, which are, as I said earlier, primarily in the Salarons of Valley and not in the city of Santa Cruz, but we're prepared to assist and respond accordingly. I'll move on to COVID really quickly. So the governor just very recently announced a change in the, essentially in the COVID-19 status for the state of California, essentially removing the statewide shelter in order and moving us back to the model that we had before with the various colored tiers. So for the County of Santa Cruz, what that means is that we're in the purple tier and this is effective yesterday. And specifically what that means for most people is that they would want to know is that restaurants on now can now be open back up outdoors only. Retail, the capacity has increased indoors to 25%. Hair salons, bars and barbershops are also now open again with restrictions. The bars are closed but can be open if they're serving food and then fitness clubs can reopen outside only and no indoor gatherings continue to be restricted or in place. So those are the major changes. So some restrictions are going away and also our case counts are down. They went down from 79 to 41 per thousand. So that's a good sign and the ICU capacity has come up as well. The other area of much discussion and interest of course is the vaccines and that's an area where it's been a bit of a challenge to get clarity on that and the rollout has been a challenge from the federal level to the state level. A big part of that is that just the supply is just not sufficient really. And again the way it's been rolled out has been a bit confusing and there's been changes but what I would do is and I'm gonna share my screen here really quickly it's just to direct people to a couple of websites where I think they can get the most accurate information about that and the first one is it's called, as you can see my screen it's the vaccinateca.com, Vaccinate California, abbreviated vaccinateca.com. This is a very helpful website that has been developed by volunteers primarily but you can put in your zip code, you can look up your county and you can find out where you can get vaccinated or if you're qualifying what the court area is. Also the other website that you can go to is if I can get it here. The county website, this is the county health services agency COVID-19 vaccine website you just Google Santa Cruz County vaccination. It'll give you a link to this and this also has information around the various tiers as far as who's eligible as well as information about how to find out where you can get vaccinated and it's all laid out here specifically within our county. So this is really good information. So I direct people to these two websites that I wanna get more informed about getting vaccinated. And then what I'll do now is quickly turn it over to Lee Butler to just give an update on the Highway 1-9 encampment and then after that I'll have Bonnie Lipscomb just give an update on the addiction more at times very briefly. Thanks Martin and good afternoon mayor and council members. I'd like to first before jumping into Highway 1-9 give one quick storm update to supplement what Martin said. We've had crews from police, public works, fire, water and the parks department out moving or encouraging people to move from the areas that look to have potential for flooding. And we believe that everyone is out of harm's way right now along San Lorenzo. And the update that I wanted to provide really was that public works has sent in crews behind the campers who have moved and they've cleared truckloads large multiple large truckloads of trash today. They as of just before this meeting they were bringing a skid steer out to get additional trash out of there. Everyone has seen some of the conditions. And so I just wanna let you all know that we're looking to address both the health and safety components as well as the environmental quality aspects of the encampments that have popped up there. So jumping over to Highway 1-9, public works has placed a series of 96 gallon cans along the highway there. And they are checking those on a daily basis. They're emptying them multiple times per week. We're also coordinating with Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol to do the place to do shoulder closures coupled with the placement of dumpsters out there. So we've had that done previously. And the next one we're trying to schedule for early in February. We're also looking to do that on a bi-weekly basis because we're seeing that there are large items that are accumulating. And even with many 96 gallon bins out there we need that additional trash service. So we are working with our partners on that. The county is assisting with that in terms of outreach to the community and that's there and encouraging them to place their trash in their receptacles. And they're also out there doing regular outreach health related and housing related. We do have the Highway 1-9 widening project that is planned to begin in early spring. And that will require that campers move and relocate before that can come in. So we are in communications with Caltrans regarding that. The biggest challenge that we have right now is that we really don't have a place to send folks. We don't have a definitive place where we can say here is where you can go after you leave this location. So we do have an inquiry into Caltrans about whether or not they can assist us with any state lands and we'll continue to look locally and partner with the county as well to see what options we can identify. And then I'll turn it over to Bonnie. And then after we're all done we're happy to answer any questions you have on any of these items as well. So go ahead, Bonnie. Great, thanks, Martine. And I just wanted to add related to the storm event that we've also been working with our fire department who's been facilitating with us with Cal Fire and our city attorney's office on an emergency agreement for Cal Fire crews to mobilize our Sky Park site for any rescue crews needed. So just wanted you to be aware of that as well. Okay, so I'm just going to give a brief update on eviction protections. And I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. A lot has happened just since yesterday. So it's pretty exciting. And can you all see that? Make sure I'm showing the right thing. So specifically, which we originally were tracking on a couple of bills by 2015 and 16, but we're now actually just because we're really nearing the end, which was January 31st of extending the moratorium on eviction. The legislature switched to a couple of trailer bills. Having trouble moving, there we go. A couple of trailer bills, budget trailer bills. So we have four that we're tracking on two in the assembly, two in the Senate, AB 7980, 80991. I'm just going to sort of reference 80 going forward, but they're all, one is a budget appropriation that actually takes the funding, the 25 million, which California shares actually 10% of the nation share for renter relief funding and appropriates that through the legislature. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. And then the other bill, the second bill is establishing a renter relief program. And I'll go into a little more detail on that as we know it today. Actually, as we're having our meeting, the legislature is having a budget hearing right now on 79 and 80 and they are discussing this. They do need to vote this by Thursday. So we are expecting some potential changes, but this is, I'll give you sort of an overview of what's in the proposed bill language now. And just to clarify, this is an extension of the existing bill, which is the Tenant Relief Act of 2020, better known as AB 3088, that was set to expire on January 31st. So the latest bills that are being discussed today on the floor would extend that through June 30th. There is support in the assembly in the Senate and by the governor. So it is anticipated this will go forward and extend that an additional five months through June 30th, 2021. It's important to note this is for residential tenants only. We currently do have the moratorium on commercial evictions through March 31st. I'll mention that in a few minutes. So no tenants, the basis of under 388, 308 is that no tenants with COVID-19 related hardships may be evicted prior to June 30th. If they pay at least 25% of the rent due from March 2020 through June 30th, 2021, with the key being by the time this funding camp will be released, likely sometime in March would be the beginning of it, that it sort of through March is the funding or the rent in arrears. And then there is actually some prospective payments that tenants would be eligible for from March till June. And there are also some additional protections in their anti-foreclosure protections for small landlords as well. The other exciting element of this is it also contains a 2.6 billion and this is our California share appropriation of federal rent relief funds. And 1.1 billion of that is going to go directly to local jurisdictions 200,000 and above. So our county is eligible to receive a share of this funding. And then additionally, the bill includes statutory changes to implement a state-run 1.5 billion rental assistance program. And this is for all eligible recipients as part of the 2020 Budget Act. So it's through their budget trailer bills that they're making this possible this week in that sort of urgency mode. The county does actually have an option of accepting the funds or declining them. And if they decline them, it just means that the state will actually administer the program on behalf of the county. So HCD is supposed to allocate these funds by February 19th. By the current bill language, 65% of those funds must be obligated by June 2nd of this year. 100% by August of this year. And as I mentioned earlier, if the county elects not to receive the funding, HCD will contract with a vendor to implement the program on behalf of the state in our county. We're not eligible because of the size of our city to receive it directly, but our renters will be the recipients of the funding either through the county or through the vendor that's implementing the program on behalf of the state. Targets for the program round one, the first is targeting assistance for eligible households under 50% of area meeting income. Round two will be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 as determined by HCD. We're waiting to hear a little more detail on that. And then round three will be eligible households, not otherwise prioritized under 80% AMI. And then with funds remaining and they are anticipating from the federal government additional round of stimulus that would supplement this rental relief program for those up to potentially 130% of area meeting income. Eligible uses, as I mentioned, rental arrears, through the program that they're establishing, that'll be limited to 80% of back rent due. And I'll go into that a little bit more, that's for participating landlords. So prospective rent payments as well would be eligible. And that means from March, assuming they get the first round in March from March through the end of June, would be not to exceed 25% of the monthly rent due. And that's an important percentage and I'll explain that in a minute. Can also be used for utilities, back utilities, utilities and arrears, and then other expenses related to housing authorized by federal law. Few options. There can be a landlord participation where the funding goes directly to the landlord. The landlord must agree to forgive remaining debt owed and release any and all claims for non-payment for that specified time period through the end of June, which is great. So a landlord has the ability to get 80% of all back rent and prospective rent through the end of the current period by the end of June, if they opt to participate in this program. And then the tenant is released from any sort of legal liability, which is great. The other option is the landlord decides not to participate, then the tenant can apply directly for funding and they will get up to a maximum of 25% owed for that specified time period. So right now we're just talking about the back rent owed. So April through when they anticipate the funding to come out. And why that's key is because under 3088, the tenant only had to pay up to 25% of back rent owed to not be evicted. So that's what this amount is capped at, is that 25% to make them eligible through the existing law and the extension of it through the end of the period, the end of June. Other provisions that are very helpful, it exempts from income, this revenue that would be received, rent relief for tax purposes and also eligibility for taxable years before January, 2025. So tenant income will not be considered gross income, which is very helpful. It also imposes a moratorium on action seeking to recover rental debt until July 1st, 2021. And it prohibits discrimination by a housing provider of any tenants who may not have paid their rental debt as they're seeking new housing that you cannot discriminate against them if they have not paid, if they have outstanding rental debt. I wanted to just point you to a resource by our California government. It's actually, the site is housingiskey.com and what's on it as you can see is there's resources for tenants, landlords, homeowners and community partners with forms, as well as information, which will be as soon as this is passed into law, updated information on the enacted and actual details of the bills I'm going over today. We had some questions about the federal versus state protection. There is a center of disease control order, a CDC order that's in effect until March, 2021, but it's actually less protective than California. California has the most protective tenant relief and tenant projections around evictions in the country right now. And that certainly would be continued with this legislation if that's enacted into law. And through the federal, additional federal protections, there's some national mortgage settlement and tenant legal defense investments nationally and some strength and foreclosure protection. And then finally, I was asked a little bit and this is, and the city attorney can jump in here if you have specific questions on this, but our council in June did adopt the emergency ordinance extending the moratorium for commercial evictions through August 13th or for so long as authorized by the governor. And the governor did issue executive order in 80-20 which extended the local ability for extending commercial evictions through March 31st. So we do currently have protections for commercial evictions through March. And with that, this information will be available on our website, also on our housing resources page and we'll put some information also in our weekly updates to council. And I'm happy to answer any related questions. Thank you, Bonnie. Martin, is that, do you have additional comments, Martin? No, that concludes our reports and we're happy to answer any questions. I know we're going to the topics and what we went back to having those questions. I think there's a lot going on. So I really appreciate, you know, there's a lot of things that council members were trying to track. And so I kind of loaded you guys up with a large variety of projects but it's a great way to just get information about our community and kind of provide that brief update that some people are seeking. So I saw council member Cummings hand go up and also council member Browns. Presentations and it's good. I did have a couple of questions real quick regarding the, some of the information on eviction protections. It's really good to hear the state stepping up and that one of the questions I had, I was wondering two things, is there any way or is this information available in Spanish speaking residents last year who were reaching out to the city concerned with what might be available for them? So I'm wondering if we can maybe get this information in Spanish and try to reach out to some of those groups and organizations comes considered. Council member Cummings, those are very good questions. I'm sort of thinking through that. You know, typically it's similar to how we do our calculations on AMI but there is that extra complication if there are multiple tenants sharing a space. So we don't have that level of detail in the bill right now. So I think a lot of those questions are going to be part of some facts that the state is going to have to roll out with the program. So we're tracking that really closely. We'll get any fact sheets that we're developing or that the state is, I'm sure they'll be in Spanish but for our local information we can make sure that we work with our city's translator to make sure that that's available. Council member Brown and then council member Bruner. Thank you. Wow, it's really appreciate the updates and it's just amazing to think about all of the work that's happening with the city and a big shout out to our city workers who are out there trying to make sure that things were prepared and able to potentially activate emergency response if necessary. My question is about the eviction, more about the rental assistance portion. I'm so glad to hear that things have moved at the state. They really kept us waiting until the 11th hour. But so I'm just wondering, I know that in general when we get formulae or allocations for various types of funding from the federal and state governments that we are at a disadvantage being considered a rural county. And so just, and then recently news about the governor kind of acknowledging, having to acknowledge that significant portion of CARES Act funding was being directed to big cities. And so that, and we know that and we've been hearing this for a while now that our allocations are lower. I'm just wondering if there's any clarity on, so we're eligible, but is there any clarity on how, is it gonna be per capita across the qualifying communities so that we actually are receiving funding kind of at a level that is comparable to other areas? Yeah, council member Brown, that's my understanding. Although I do think we are at a disadvantage because we're a county just barely over the threshold. So program, you know, larger cities, those that are over 200,000 or 500,000 do get that allocation, but they have that option of running the program themselves. Most of them have the capability to do so. So I think the details when they come out will be really interesting. The breakdown of that 2.6 million is 1.5 million is being kept by the state to administer for all those jurisdictions that are under that 200,000 threshold. And so as a city, if we were a city that had 200,000, we'd be eligible as well. And we have that option of getting directly a block grant, which is in effect what all of those jurisdictions or localities that are 200,000 or above. So the county has that option, our county has that option of accepting a block grant. But what comes with it is that obligation to administer the whole program. So I think they're gonna need to weigh whether or not they can do that. And if they don't, that funding will still come through. It will just be administered by a contractor or vendor on behalf of the state. So the details of how that works in a county like ours, I think is yet to be determined. But we're tracking on it closely and obviously advocating for our community. Great, thank you. And I'm not sure if the community action board directors would or all the other directors would agree, but if that is the direction that Santa Cruz County goes, I hope that having that infrastructure set up that they might be considered a vendor should they... Actually, you just made me remember something that I meant to share. We just found out that we have some available funding that is related to a project that wasn't expended for relocation payments. And we are talking with HCD about being able to administer that funding potentially with CAB to extend their Rental Assistance Program. And it's fairly substantial. It's 300, I think it's like 335, 350,000 in that range. And that would be within the city. So we're working on that. Yeah, we're pretty excited about it. We weren't expecting this. So this is in addition to the additional funding that you actually allocated under COVID for CAB this year. So we're pretty excited. Great, thank you. Thank you, Council Member. And I have Council Member Brunner's hands. Or I'm sorry, Vice Mayor Brunner's hands. Thank you. Thank you, Bonnie Lipscomb. And my question actually is for you as well. And I think Council Member Cummings touched on this as well. But I've been speaking with one of our Spanish-speaking community members and they are volunteering with a lot of our residents in Beach Flats area and Live Oak. And so having the information in Spanish, and I know the housing is a key website on the California site that you gave that they have right at the top to your language. Is that, I haven't gone to two Santa Cruz and paid attention to that. Is that something we have or do you just have it translated and put it out? We have it translated and put it out. One of the things that we have been doing since the pandemic that's actually, I've been one of those positive things coming out of the pandemic is the coordination across the county. And so working with different communities and through the community foundation, actually City of Watsonville, right now we're working on a business survey and the City of Watsonville is translating it for us. So the collaborations have been really helpful and I think we'll be doing more of that going forward. And Vice Mayor Brunner, I would also just note that we do have the translate button on our main website. So any pages you can translate into Spanish, it's just the Google translate option. Okay, and I suppose we'll receive further updates, but my question also related to multiple families in one location or in the case of housemates and how that works. Yeah, and I just don't have more information yet. They don't have that level of detail in the bill language that I, and I didn't look at all four bills, but is there yet, I think that the state as they pull the program together are gonna address some of those details and we'll be giving direction to the localities for implementation. Wonderful, thank you. Okay, it looks like that is the question. Again, I just wanna thank, I express my thanks to our staff is going above and beyond these days trying to manage all these natural emergencies, tracking legislation to make sure that people are protected from eviction. And I just really appreciate they are taking the time out of their already very, very busy work days to prepare these things for us so that hopefully when people watch us on TV, they can learn about what's happening and for any folks who are here from our local press, making sure that you're able to understand and convey to you through the press, the kinds of things that the city are working on regarding some of these things that we do get a lot of questions on from our community. So thank you again, Martine, for that. I really appreciate you taking the mixed bag I threw at you the last two days and getting that information out very timely for us. Our next item is going to be the council meeting calendar. And in this item, the council will review the meeting calendar attached to the agenda and revise it as necessary. I'll call now on the clerk to provide any updates to the calendar. We have no updates to the calendar. Okay, great. The next item is council memberships in city groups and outside agencies. And for those of you who were recently sat, there is a list of those groups and agencies in your packet. Some of you may not have attended a meeting yet, but this is a standing item that we try to have at least every other month. And this is really the time for council members to report out on actions at external boards, committees and joint powers authorities meeting. For future meetings, please come prepared to provide an update on any meetings or actions that occurred since the last council meeting so that the council and public can be informed. So again, this is, if you've attended any of those meetings on commissions or outside boards that you represent the city as a council member on. And I will open it up to any council members who have any reports to provide. I'll look for hands raised. Council member coming. Thank you, mayor. So on central coast community power, one of the things that was mentioned was that there is assistance that they're providing for people whose homes were lost during the city fires that are completely electric. So it'd be worth it for people who would like to know what kind of assistance is available for rebuilding business plan. And this is around highway one. They're working on eight 99 business plans and corridor plans with the goals in addition to an update from I also attended the LAFCO meeting on Leopold's distinguished public service and leadership for the 11 years serving on the LAFCO board. I was elected to become along with Rachel Lather who's become the vice chair of the commission the conflict with our meeting today. So hopefully we can get an update from Tiffany or someone. Thank you, council member Cummings. Council member Brown updates the regional transportation commission had a public hearing on the transit corridor alternative analysis and we had robust input from the public about the plans for the future of our. And so we will be making some decisions at our next meeting on the 6th I believe is the first Thursday in February. And if you want to tune in and see where we're at that would be the time we are we close the public hearing but if folks have not spoken up then I believe you'll have an opportunity to do so. The also the we're on Mayor Myers and council member Cummings and myself are on the UCSC growth task force that was established by the city and county. And we so I just wanted to alert folks to the website that is has been established and it's up it has amazing information about how to get involved. The draft the UCSC draft EIR for the long range development plan has been released and they're we're trying to encourage folks to comment if you go to the website act on UCSC growth.org all one word act on UCSC growth.org there you can find toolkits and amazing information and also links to sign up if you want to be involved in a draft EIR working group around climate sustainability water there you know there's a whole bunch of options and so really encourage people to get involved. It's it's challenging it's not a very you know it's super complex and you know it's not necessarily an exciting task to review EIRs and provide comments but we're trying to make it as user friendly as possible to participate and hopefully you will join us those who are interested. Great thank you council member Brown any other council members with updates on board commissions JPAs that may are members of not seeing any I know beginning of the calendar year so a lot of these committees are just getting up and running again in terms of meetings. I just for the public I am a member of the board of directors of Metro Santa Cruz and I think that our our executive officer CEO did a great job today so I'm not gonna repeat any of those items so with that we will move on to our next item and this will be our consent agenda beginning with and consisting of grab my shoes and these are items nine through 18 on our agenda today for members of the public who are streaming this meeting now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items nine through 18 instructions are on your screen please remember to mute your streaming device press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the queue saying you have been unmuted all items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion are there any council members who wish to pull any items council member Brown yeah I'd like to pull item 10 please okay any other council members wishing to pull any items and seeing oh council member coming I just had a question on item number 16 and Bonnie I'm gonna look for your guidance do we typically do I wanna go out to public comment right now or do I want to have the question for council member coming to dress for item 16 I think he's typically done the questions first and then went to public comment that's what I recall thank you council member Cummings go ahead and address staff on item 16 please thanks I just had a question regarding stays good afternoon mayor council members Christian Eider assistant director of public works we have a grant already submitted and we'll hear back mid February beginning of March to see if we received it for the project for construction and there's another opportunity coming up in April to apply for a grant if we don't get the one that we've already applied for and then there's the possibility of stimulus funding and this project would be shovel ready and so we wanna make sure we're ready to go out to bid even though we're getting authorization we won't actually bid the project until we have the money thank you if there are any members of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda with the exception of items pulled by council members that's item 10 today now is the time to do so please press star nine on your phone to raise your hands when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes the Bonnie do you see anyone I do see anyone okay so the caller with the last three or four digits of your phone is 2316 you'll be notified that you can speak hello this is Peter Bishi how you doing all and here your liaison with the city of Cassana Cruz the community liaison I just had a question I've had several members from Beach Flat who have told me or I know it's a rumor that's part of my job is trying to clarify these rumors and listening the status of the metro and the buses before with the CEO Alex Clifford my question is the rumor is that there were at least a dozen drivers who tested positive and these are those rumors and or is that really have been happening and what's their status thank you thank you Peter I might suggest Peter that we help you find an answer for that outside of this agenda item this is items of our consent agenda but I know Martin Bernal and there would be happy to try to help contact Alex Clifford to provide I will look at it thank you Peter thank you in that there was no member of the public that has pulled an item I will go ahead and look for a motion on the remaining excuse me I'm sorry we're going to move to item number 10 now council member Brown has pulled that item approve the rest of the consent agenda first I'm sorry I'm still in my I'm still in training wheels here I'll go ahead and make that motion that we approve the consent agenda with the exception of item 10. I'll second that okay and can we have a roll call though please who was this second Watkins Watkins yes yep okay council member Watkins Helen Harry Johnson Brown Vice Mayor Brunner and Mayor Myers that motion passes unanimously we will now come back to item number 10 and but I want to start with asking questions and just see if there are members of the public who do want to speak up and or ask if you have questions I can try to ask those as a follow-up I don't know that that will happen but just in case. So I've been getting questions for a while now about why we continue to extend the authority and I understand that we are we continue to be in a public health crisis and there is an emergency declaration on the books but given that the statute that's cited for setting emergency conditions is sudden and unexpected and that was true early on and I think it was important that we maintained that level of authority so we could be nimble given the significant crises that our community has faced that we've all faced but I'm just wondering now that we're not really in an unexpected mode with respect to the COVID pandemic I mean we're in a place where we don't we don't know what's to come but in terms of sudden and unexpected we're kind of past that phase so if you could help me understand that. Yeah great question the statute specifically authorizes or first of all it restricts the duration of an emergency declaration to 60 days that authorizes the declaration to be extended if the emergency conditions still persist and so while I would agree that the onset of the COVID emergency was sudden and that's what the statute is designed to deal with the conditions haven't abated and so from my perspective it's a simple interpretation of the statutory authorization which says that if you renew the declaration within a 60 day period then it's extended 60 days further. Thanks. Differed if there are questions from the public and then I have several comments before we vote. I just want to see if there's I have a council member coming, hand is up. I had a question too because emergency conditions were under. Well I think it's probably more accurate to say that during a state of emergency we qualified for assistance either from FEMA or from the state to deal with the emergency circumstances and I know that the city is carefully tracking the COVID-19 response expenses with the hope of getting some or all of that reimbursed. No because if we work to no longer be under that state of emergency then. Yeah I think it's questionable as to whether or not we and by the way the state of California still has an emergency declaration in effect too. Would we qualify based on the state declaration? The statute is not a model of clarity on that point. So it's become a routine matter. I realize when the council's asked to ratify executive orders that's a little bit different but in terms of the emergency declaration we just monitor the situation and if the conditions persist, which they are or they have then we bring it forward to the council for re-upping it within 60 days. Thank you. It looks like we have a member of the public who would like to speak on this item and I see that your phone number ends in 1-810. You'll be unmuted and when you are please speak. As far as this emergency declaration you should be aware a peer reviewed study at Stanford states that they did not find evidence to support the non-pharmaceutical interventions meeting lockdowns were effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Quote, we fail to find an additional benefit at state of home orders and business closures. Stephen Riley who's professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College in London, cited a react study which shows the prevalence of infection increased after that national lockdown was announced. Quote, it's long enough now that the lockdown working effectively we certainly would have seen a decline and current research certainly doesn't support the conclusion that lockdown is working. Academics from Duke, Harvard and John Hopkins have warned that there could be around a million excess deaths over the next two decades as a result of lockdowns. Recall 500 doctors were alerted at Trump state and their concerns and described the lockdowns as a mass casualty incident. Over 6,000 doctors and scientists signed the Great Barrington Declaration urging that those not in the at risk category should be able to get on with their lives as normal and the lockdown rules in both the US and the UK are causing irreparable damage. Meanwhile, Newsome refraises to release lockdown data to conceal the truth. Given the undeniable mass of economic damage, monetary debasement and debt, mounting scientific evidence and massive expert opinion of a lack of efficacy and considerable harm being caused by the current lockdown measures, what do you have to say for yourselves about the emergency declaration and lockdown enforcement and which careers should be finished? Fauci, Newsome, I say recall Newsome, then jail. Given overwhelming evidence, cloth masks don't protect the wearer at all and virus transmission via asymptomatic people is rare. COVID testing is done using too high CT values giving massive false positive inflated cases and deaths. It seems the government, the press and big pharma are intent on spreading excessive fear of the invisible, a purposeful destruction of small business and committed and unjustified savaging of individual liberty. Teachers don't wanna teach, workers don't wanna work. How do we get the hinky stank off of every aspect of the government lockdown? Thanks. Thank you. Okay. I will look for a motion for item 10. Council Member Brown. Yeah, I actually have a comment or a couple of comments. I wanna be clear that I absolutely support the measures that we are taking to keep our community safe. I'm not saying any of this because I oppose shelter in place orders and other emergency provisions. My concern here is with the executive orders that some of them that have been issued up until now I have supported continuing to declare an emergency that comes with that authority for the city manager and or designate and or the emergency services officer which has been the city manager. I believe that while I have disagreed with some of those executive orders on balance I thought it was important to maintain that authority in order to be nimble in the face of many crises. That said, I have become so concerned in particular about the process for the actions that were taken at the San Lorenzo Park and the fallout from that. I think that I'm just gonna say personally without any discussion of the legal challenge that we now face that the decision ran counter to public health, good practices, best practices. CDC guidelines, I understand they're only guidelines but they make them for a reason. They are public health experts and because of that I'm sorry to say I can't support this today. I believe the state emergency declaration does qualify us to continue to access emergency funds. And I just can't support continuing to say it's okay to make these kinds of decisions without over the holiday right before. It just concerns me enough that I can't, I'm sorry, I can't support that today. And it's not in any way meant to suggest that I don't support doing any and all things we can to ensure public health and safety is maintained. So I won't be making a motion. I imagine there wouldn't be a second but I'll just register my no vote. Thank you, Council Member Brown. Could I, is there a Marchee, excuse me, Council Member Watkins? No, I appreciate Council Member Brown's comments and I understand her concerns and I also understand the importance of having something like this in place. So therefore I'm prepared to go ahead and move this recommendation. And we see a second with Council Member Golder. Yeah, I'll look at that. So I have a motion by Council Member Watkins seconded by Council Member Golder. All those in favor, please say aye. We'll do a roll call. Oh, I'm sorry, roll call, excuse me. Council Member Watkins. Aye. Council Member Johnson. Aye. Brown. No. Cummings, Golder, Vice Mayor Brunner and Mayor Meyers. Aye. So the motion passes with Council Members Cummings, Golder, Watkins, Council Member Johnson and Vice Mayor Brunner and Mayor Meyers voting yes and Council Member Brown voting no. Great, thank you everyone. We'll move on to our public hearing now. And contact for Council Members. We're running just about 15 minutes late. We had a break scheduled, so we're eating into your little dinner break. So just FYI, but of course I want full discussion on all items, but just to let you know kind of where we are for the evening. Next up on our agenda is item number 19, public hearing for 902, 912 and 920 Pacific Avenue and 333 and 423 Front Street. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. This item will be conducted as follows. Staff will present their report. Questions will be received from the Council. We will then receive public comment and then we will return to Council's deliberation and action. If you are interested in commenting on 902, 912 and 920 Pacific Avenue and 333 and 423 Front Street, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. Our presenter today is Ryan Bain, Senior Planner with our Planning Department. Thank you, Ryan. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council members. I'm your Planner Ryan Bain. Can you hear me and see the presentation? Thank you, but we can't see you, Ryan. I don't know if you want to turn on your video and we can't see the presentation. Thank you. My video is on, but you don't want to see me anyway. I talk as long as you hear the presentation, that's all that matters. So thank you. So the proposal we have before the Council is consists of five downtown parcels spanning between Pacific Avenue and Front Street. They currently consist of the Santa Cruz Metro Transit District-owned metro station, which is this right here, probably a lot of you are familiar with, as well as the city-owned parking lot and then also the city-owned NIAC office building. Let's see, shows the extent of the area and the subject site that we're talking about. So the city and the Santa Cruz Metro District have been conducting outreach and planning for redevelopment of this site since 2002. Numerous programs and site layouts have been evaluated through this process with the preferred site plan, locating buildings along Pacific Avenue to re-italize and continue the downtown streetscape along Pacific and have the metro station access mainly from Front Street. So the proposed land use and zoning changes are consistent with this preferred approach and will facilitate redevelopment of the site. The proposal was heard by the Planning Commission in December at a public hearing for the project. There were no members of the public that spoke at the hearing and the Commission recommended approval to the Council on a 7-0 vote. Here we have a very preliminary site plan. Staff has been having meetings and going over the project and this is just a very preliminary, this is nothing in stone here, but this is kind of gives you an idea of what we're looking at in terms of the city and property along Pacific and a building being located along there and then the metro station being accessed off of Front Street. So the city and the metro are now applying as co-applicants for grants. These funding programs are highly competitive and offered on an annual basis. This past fall, the city and the metro issued a request for proposals from a qualified pool of affordable housing developers to like the developer to be a co-applicant for the upcoming HCD funding applications and while the project development plans have yet to be prepared, the city anticipates that there'll be up to 100 affordable rental apartments including a minimum of 25% permanent supportive housing units. So in addition to the formal housing in the city is also planning to provide retail space on the ground floor, running Pacific Avenue and the city will continue to own that land and ground lease the various components of this mixed use development and the metro will continue to own the parcels off of Front Street after the redevelopment. So the proposed project that we're discussing tonight is consists of a general plan amendment, rezoning and a local coastal plan amendment to reconfigure the interface between the regional visitor commercial and community facilities land use designations and reconfiguration of the central business district and public facilities zoning designations for these five parcels along Pacific and Front. So the project also includes a coastal permit and boundary line adjustment to combine and reconfigure those four locks into two. And there's also the additional three, three, three Front Street property that's included in the project but is not proposed as part of the boundary line adjustment. That's via the NYAC building. So here represents the existing partial configuration, parcels one, two and three are owned by the Metro, the NYAC building and parcel four and then the city parking lot, these are the city owned properties currently. As proposed, the parcel A would be the city owned property and parcel B and parcel four would be owned by the Metro. Three of the existing parcels which are about an acre and a half are owned by the Metro that mentioned previously and these parcels are designated community facility in the general plan and LCP and zoned public facility in terms of zoning. The other two parcels, the city owned parcels currently around a half acre are owned by the city of Santa Cruz and are designated regional visitor commercial in the general plan and LCP and then zoned central business district currently. So the proposed boundary line adjustment would reconfigure four of these parcels into two parcels and would generally maintain the existing property sizes as currently exists for the city owned and Metro and parcels, as I mentioned, the city owned parcels with front Pacific and have an RBC and GP designation and a central business district zoning designation. The southern portion of the site already has these designations and the net change and land area for the designation is really nominal. The Metro and parcels would be along front street and would have a community facility, general plan designation and public facility zoning designation. So the proposed general plan zoning map and LCP amendments are found to be consistent with a number of goals, policies and programs contained in our 2030 general plan, our local coastal program and our downtown plan. I've listed a bunch of those in our staff report. I'm not gonna go through all of them but I'll just mention a few highlights in terms of our consistency with our general plan. The project certainly encourages higher intensity residential uses in the downtown area, facilitates the development of affordable housing, collaborates with nonprofit and other interest parties to develop affordable housing and it promotes transit oriented mixed use residential developments that are close to services and reduce dependence on automobile use being in the downtown. In terms of LCP policies, the mixed use residential and commercial development is in the city's downtown central business district that provides for high density development and mixed uses, pedestrian oriented land use to reduce dependence on the auto and support the use of mass transit, certainly being the metro station does that and then also with providing the retail, continual retail along Pacific, it activates those ground level uses. In terms of downtown plan policies, again, housing in the downtown along Pacific provides that enhances the pedestrian bike and transit access to downtown and again, that continuity of active ground level uses along Pacific and then also has housing as a principle upper level use in the downtown. In terms of a coastal permit, the subject site is located just within the coastal zone boundary and staff in reviewing the coastal section of the zoning code that lists a certain exclusion from requiring coastal permits for certain types of projects. It really wasn't clear whether a boundary line adjustment would require a coastal permit. So just out of an abundance of caution, we've included approval of a coastal permit as part of this, so to be safe. And then also the boundary line adjustment, as I mentioned, it's a reconfiguration of four of the five parcels into two parcels. The total lot areas owned by the metro and city would generally remain the same, just reconfigured and the central business district zone district does require a minimum of 5,000 square foot parcel size while the public facility zone district does not indicate a minimum lot size. So certainly the proposed lot sizes meet these minimum requirements. So the project is exempt from CEQA pursuant to section 15305 for minor alterations in land use as well as 15061 for projects that clearly would not result in a significant effect on the environment. So in terms of next steps from tonight, so the proposed zoning map ordinance amendment will require a second reading by the council. I think I've tentatively scheduled for February 9th, the next meeting and if approved, together with the general plan land use designation amendment will also require approval by the California Coastal Commission as an LCP amendment. So one of the resolutions that you have has been included as part of the approval is to authorize staff to submit the LCP amendment to the California Coastal Commission for review and approval. So the proposal is intended to provide flexibility and design for a joint project between the city and the metro redevelopment of the metro station and a potential 100% affordable housing and mixed use project that is being considered by the city for the reconfigured city on site. So therefore staff is recommending that the city council one adopt a resolution acknowledging the environmental determination and approving the general plan amendment, rezoning and local coastal program amendment, coastal permit and boundary line adjustment based on the findings and conditions of approval included in the prepared draft resolution. And then also introduced for publication and ordinance amending the zoning map. And that concludes my presentation. I'm available for any questions. Sorry, my dogs have been barking all afternoon. So I keep muting. I'm sorry about that. Thank you Ryan for the presentation. I'll open it up to questions from the council now and council member coming. One was regarding the NIAC building. My understanding is that I'm not sure which department if it's finance or if it's another department, but I know that that building's being utilized by the city. I might leave that question to Jessica DeWitt or David McCormick in our economic development department available to maybe answer that question. Ryan, this is Bonnie. I can feel that. I mean, we've been into sessions with both finance and water department have offices there. We've been working with them. It's going to be a little bit, a couple of years actually before we break ground on that site. So our hope is that we have some alternative options for staff by that time. We have looked in the downtown for other options. We actually do also have some other city property that we own that we're looking at as well. So we're looking sort of holistically at sort of office needs across the city, obviously during the pandemic. It's kind of an interesting situation in that for the finance department, we have the luxury at the NIAC building, which is so large of spreading folks out, but the reality is post pandemic that will need less space than what they're utilizing now. So we'll definitely be looking at that over the next year. Go ahead, I'm sorry, Jocelyn. Yeah, and then I just had one more question. And Bonnie, I think you touched on it a little bit. So just thinking about the timeline from where we're at to groundbreaking, I guess, what are some of the next steps? So it sounds like the LTPP amendment will go to the Coastal Commission and then I guess, what are the next kind of steps in terms of timeline for when we can see? So some of that will depend on our financing. So we're in the process of, then that's one of the next items as well of going through AB 2162 to be able to expedite some of the permitting timeline. And that will put us in a good position to be able to apply for IIG and ASIC funding. And so once we find out about that round, that really sort of sets our timeline. So if we don't get that funding, we may strategically have to use more of our city funding, affordable housing trust fund. Obviously we wanna leverage that as far as we can go. So we're applying for every grant that's possible and really sort of tearing off that from the timeline. So we have our consultant who specializes in both of these grants working with us. And so we believe we're putting the best competitive projects forward. So we're hopeful on that, but that will really be driving the timeline is the results and responses that we get to our grant application. We also do need to work with Metro and we have been working well together on the overall site design for both the Metro Tarmac, obviously in our project and the number of units as well that we can maximize on this site. So we will have touch points where we come back to you again and sort of determining that sort of complete site program plan, which we're working on now with our consultants and with other departments internally at the city. But I think the earliest expectation for even breaking ground would probably be at least two years out. Okay, thank you. Minimum. Yeah. Great, are there other questions from council members at this point? Not seen any. So I will go ahead and take this out to public comment now. And I am seeing three hands raised. The first person would be Irene Lennox, please. So can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. Yes, Irene Lennox. For some years I've been involved with one of the local food pantries and mainly in dealing with interviews for financial aid. So I'm very aware of the need in the city for affordable housing. So I would like to speak in favor of both this project and the next one, number 20 on the agenda, the Calvary Project. It is so good to see project coming forward with so many units that will be affordable instead of just a tiny percentage of those being built for people who are really in need of affordable housing. So please pass this, push this project forward and also the same with the Calvary Project that follows. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker would be with the phone number ending in 8767. You'll be unmuted and you'll be able to speak. Hi, my name is Jeff Morgan. How are you doing today? So I'm president of First Community. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead, please. Okay, great. No, all I wanted to say is we're thrilled to be working on the affordable housing component in partnership with Nathoon Architects and with Metro and beginning this journey of service to see how we can really help some of the more vulnerable citizens in Santa Cruz. And this is the perfect site and the perfect time to do it. And so I just wanted to let you know we are here and we're of service. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you very much. And the next speaker I have up is with the phone number ending in 3349. You'll be unmuted and then you can speak. Bonnie, did you unmute them? Yeah, I can't unmute them. They have to unmute themselves, but I authorized them to, here we go. Great, there they go. Welcome. Hi, this is Donna Murphy. And I'm calling in support of this item and item 20 as well. I've been involved with the COPA housing team for a number of years. COPA is organizations organized, communities organized for relational power and action, which is actually 26 member institutions. And we have been looking at affordable housing for a long time. We have heard from all of our member institutions about how hard it is on our families. And so we want, and many of those voices can't be heard because of flexibility for these meetings, they can't show up here. So me and some of my other colleagues are calling in to make sure their voices are heard. We strongly support this project and all of the downtown affordable housing projects because they really enable more families to live near transit and vital services. This action is pivotal to realizing a major improvements in our downtown as well, creating affordable housing, improved public transit and a really vibrant walkable, industrious downtown. So we appreciate you moving on this and hope it happens really fast. Thank you. Thank you. I believe that we have heard from everyone that wish to speak from the public. I'll bring it back to the council. So we'll return for council deliberation and action. And I have three council members, council member Cummings-Brown and Watkins. Not sure if I got that in the right order. I'm sorry, I was monitoring the attendees, but I will call on you in that order. And starting with council member Cummings, please. Termination and approving the general line adjustment based on the findings and conditions of approval, including the attached draft resolution and introduced for publication and ordinance amending the zoning map. And I look for a second. Council member Brown. I'll second that wholeheartedly. I just echo council member Cummings comments, just acknowledging the tremendous amount of work that has gone into getting us to this point from our staff, metro board representatives from the council and many, many others, stakeholders in the community. So I'm just thrilled to be taking another step in the direction of more affordable housing in our community. Okay. And is there any other council members' comments? I'll just quickly just state that it's great to be here because I think the very first week that I started as a council member, I met with the staff and we have staff from three different departments working on this project. So it's been an amazing couple of years that this is right here right now. So I really want to recognize Bonnie Lipscomb's work, also Claire Gauce, Calucalie. Claire, I can't use your last name anymore. Can't pronounce it right. And others who have really just been very helpful in helping the council members who are on the metro board understand the project. I want to recognize Lee Butler and the planning department and their work on this. It's just been a huge lift. And I also want to recognize council member Matthews. She served in the two years that I did on the metro board. She was instrumental in helping move this project forward as well. And yeah, it's just been great. And I really want to acknowledge Metro as well. This is a really important project for revitalizing the regional center of our transit, really of our whole entire transit district. And it's exciting to see the reconfiguration and the kinds of access that will provide for electric buses and other things that the district is working on. So it really is a win-win for everyone. And yeah, just extremely excited about this project in Metro South. And I feel like we will be very competitive for funding for this. And so hopefully in a couple of years time, we'll be opening up some new housing for folks in our community who really need it. So thank you to all of our staff and thank you to Metro for everything that you guys have been doing at the staff level. And with that, I will call for a roll call vote. Council Member Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Brown. Aye. Cummings. Golder. Vice Mayor Brunner. And Mayor Meyers. And that motion was by Council Member Cummings seconded by Council Member Brown and that motion passed unanimously. Well, we've all earned a little bit of extra time for our dinner break. So we are going to take a break now. It was scheduled for 5.15. We're a little early. Why don't we come back at 5.50, a little bit 4.6 and get started. We do have an item for general business this evening and also for advisory body appointments and re-appointments. So maybe everybody can come back at 5.50, not 6.50. And we will go on break for now. Thanks, everybody. Two, three, four. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. It's 5.50. Thank you, everyone, for getting back in on time. I'm going to go ahead and start the general business item for this evening. This is item number 20, AB 2162, affordable supportive housing projects. Increase in the number of units allowed as a use by right. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. If you're interested in commenting on AB 2162, affordable supportive housing projects, increase in the number of units allowed as a use by right. Press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will then be set to two minutes. The item number 20 is, again, the AB 2162 affordable supportive housing projects, increase in the number of units allowed as a use by right. We'll have a presentation by Matt VanHua, the principal planner on the project. Hi, Matt. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor and council. Let me bring up the presentation here. Can everyone see that? Okay. So again, this is a... It's a little zoom weird, sorry to interrupt, but it's a little like zoomed in. I don't know if it's just my screen though. Anyone else have anything? It looks okay on my end. Okay, I just went to full screen now. I can see it, sorry for interrupting. So again, this is the AB 2162 affordable supportive housing projects, as a use by right. And just for some brief background again, Assembly Bill 2162 was signed into law in 2018. And it's for supportive housing as a use by right. And supportive housing per this bill is considered a 100% affordable project with a 25% of those units or 12 units, whichever is greater, that are part of supportive housing. And supportive housing specifically is our housing units for a target population, which is either homeless or disabled. And there's a service component to the supportive housing as well on site. And then as far as use by right goes, that's really defined by a more streamlined approval process where a project would go through a ministerial or administrative approval process. And there's no CEQA environmental review for projects that meet the AB 2162 requirements. And given the size of Santa Cruz, the state, the bill already does require that projects 50 units or fewer that are supportive housing be by right. But that limit can be increased with policy and that's what brings us here today. And just as a further background to this, council approved a policy in August of last year for three specified projects over 50 units. And one of those projects ended up using that. One other ended up staying at 50 units so far. And another one continued on with its original approval process and didn't need the additional streamlining after all. As part of the policy as well, it was determined that a design permit was not necessary for projects on public property and that there would be a ministerial process for those. And that's just because projects on public property tend to have additional oversight from the city already and don't need that additional design permit process. Whereas design permit for projects on private property would be required. And so there would be one community meeting and as administrative approval process for the projects on private property. And so the two projects that are coming forward today for the support of housing by right increase are Calvary Church at 538 Cedar Street. It's currently proposed as a three-story project of about 65 units. But we're currently increasing that to 75 units in the policy just to allow for additional design flexibility. And then the second project is Pacific Station North at 928 Pacific and 333 Front Street which you're pretty well versed in now given the previous presentation tonight. So you fairly well understand that site plan already but just for some further information here's a very preliminary site plan for the Calvary Church site just for additional information. You have a commercial space along Cedar Street the residential amenities and services located here and then a public peseo connecting across the site from Cedar Street to Center Street. And so with both of these projects there are some conditions that we that were placed within the policy and those conditions were to ensure the support of housing and inclusionary requirements are met. They were their fairly standard conditions just to show that the projects are meeting the AB 2162 requirements and the city's inclusionary requirements and then for Calvary Church project since it was since it's been such an initial design stage we staff did include additional design conditions on the project and those were largely related to downtown plan language and since it's within the downtown plan area and the downtown plan language really on the design and also public right of way extensions through the project and the extension of Cast Cart as a public right of way in that peseo that I showed earlier. So with that the benefits of this is that support this policy really streamlines and encourages the production of affordable and supportive housing and helps the city achieve lower income affordability housing goals and this new increase is only for the two specified projects with these conditions in place as well. So the effect of this policy is defined. That the resolution I won't read all of this but it is essentially wraps up in that we're allowing one project up to 75 development units for Calvary Church and one project up to 120 units with the Pacific Station North Metro project up to the 120 units and that we would continue following the AB 2162 requirement for projects under 50 units and that all projects that meet AB 2162 requirements regardless of their unit count go through a design permit process if they are not on city-owned property if it's a privately owned project it would go through that design permit and administrative approval process with at least one community meeting held. So with that I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you Matt for the presentation. I'll go ahead and look for council members to have questions. Council member Cummings. The computer is moving a little slow so pardon me if it's taking me a minute to come on. Can you all hear me? Yes. Great thanks for that presentation and it's really exciting again to see some more affordable housing projects come online. The question I have, two questions. One is related to parking. I was just curious how many parking spaces will be coming offline with the Cavalry project? You said coming offline. I'm not sure exactly given that the project is early I believe the project planner Ryan Bain is on the line. Do you have an answer for that Ryan? This is Bonnie, I think Mark Dettles on. I think it's 108 but someone from Public Works or Ryan could confirm that. Yeah I don't know the number. I mean my first thought is to get on the aerial and count but I don't know the actual number sorry. I was saying well we don't know when these projects are coming you know we have plenty of parking and seeing these projects emerge and the loss of parking I think it's gonna be something to really take into consideration especially as we're increasing the density of people staying downtown. And so my second question and a concern but you know when someone who lives in the beach flats which is one of the lower income communities in Santa Cruz and the people really face down you know they're not gonna have parking which is of those projects and getting these projects built and so my question is around you know kind of dealing with the parking issues that come with not providing parking at these two sites. I know that people will be able to potentially park at the garage that will be built with the library project but I guess my question is you know for people who maybe don't have any plan for you know how people will be able to housing so you know because you don't need to move their car every single day and so is there some kind of you know parking permit program that's gonna be established to allow people in these units to be able to keep their cars parked in certain areas for longer durations of time. I just wanted to mention I counted 107 spaces approximately. Thanks. Member Cummings I can speak to the Metro project so I do know that First Community Housing is planning to have Metro passes, Metro bus passes free to the residents or at a deeply discounted rate and that's something that we're working out with Metro. I can also speak to the recently constructed Water Street Apartments project that a lot of the tenants don't have cars and so having access to bus passes is actually more important than a parking space so that's just feedback I have for Metro. Thanks. Great, thank you. Follow up on that too. The Calvary Project is it's so early right now we haven't spoken yet about transportation demand management options or anything like that yet. Certainly an option. I was just thinking of something maybe to keep in mind. It's unclear how many people are gonna have cars who live in these units but population downtown and the impact that that could potentially have on parking I think is something to keep in mind. I would just add and Council Member Cummings that the residents would need to go through the standard parking permit pass program that we have in our downtown. There is a waiting list for that right now and so that would need to be taken into consideration and through the use of these bills given the proximity to the Metro we actually can't require parking for the residential portions but your point is well taken that even if we can't require it as on-site parking there will be people with cars and they'll need to make that choice about whether or not to pursue use of a Metro transit pass whether that's provided or not or to buy into the parking pass program and that'll be something that they need to weigh. So I guess a follow up to that because I think the one concern that I have is just like not disproportionately impacting people who are low income because that's the only housing they can afford and so I wonder too if there might be some kind of special program for this type of housing because it sounds like if not if a ton of people in this type of housing who need cars then can certain exceptions be made so that if somebody's moving in and they need to drive to work every day that they're not penalized by having to get on a wait list for who knows how long that is really that they need in order to get back and forth to their jobs. So there's a number of factors to weigh there and whether or not we can come up with solutions now. Yeah, I mean, I would say that's a conversation that we can have with public works and there are a couple of things that come to mind there. One, I think they've been exploring ideas surrounding a residential parking pass which where people are there or away during the day but then there in the evenings or what I was thinking you might be going towards at one point was sort of like prioritization on a waiting list for individuals within the low income apartments. So I think there are things that can be explored and we would want to loop public works in on those. And next I had council member Bruner then council member Brown and then council member Watkins. Thank you, Mayor Myers. I was also curious how much of all of these developments and the parking aspect will be discussed in the downtown commission since that's the downtown parking district commission with potential modes of parking and rates and fees for some of these new homes coming on to the downtown. Is that Lee or I don't know if Mark Dell's on not sure which that's an interesting question by Mayor Bruner. I think we'll need to look carefully at the state law as it relates to that. That was a question that has arisen. I don't know if anyone here on the line has an answer to that. The question that arose was given that this is receiving the ministerial AV 2162 provisions through this policy and there would be a discretionary there would be a design permit for the heater street but not for the Metro would one or either of those still be required to go to the downtown commission. The answer may be no under the streamlining provisions. We haven't gone through and worked that out entirely and it's legality. And just to give you a quick heads up what happens at the downtown commission for these downtown projects is essentially they're asked whether or not there is sufficient parking supply in the downtown to move forward with a reduced parking ratio and in lieu fees rather than the provision of parking on site. And then that decision would that would be a recommendation that the decision making body that zoning administrator planning commission or council whoever that may be would consider in making their approval. In this instance because that second level of approval process isn't happening I suspect that we would not be going to the downtown commission for this but it is something that we still want to confirm from a legal perspective but that's my take on the question right now. Council member Brown. Yeah, just as a follow up to council member Cummings and vice mayor Bruner's questions. So I agree that I think it would be interesting to try to come and it will important really to try to come up with a way to provide some access for future residents to access parking permits at a lower rate. And I just want to highlight the fact that we our residential parking permit program is very affordable and it is available to residents in this case with a Calvary project literally across the street. So I'm just, it just seems like it would be worth trying to and maybe it is something the downtown commission could take a look at as a broader policy question if it's not so much to legally mandate it but or if it's legally required but just because it could be a useful thing to do to identify opportunities for folks who may need those permits at an affordable rate to be able to access them. And I know we can't differentiate based on income with our parking permit program parking permit costs within a particular parking area but maybe there are ways that we can get creative. So it seems like it would be worth bringing the downtown commission and potentially or just public works and maybe coming back to give us some thoughts on what we might be able to do. Council member Watkins and then council member Cummings. Might have a little bit of a comment and then somewhat of a question or a suggestion but I think one of the things to kind of contextualize this is the hope to have affordable housing in our downtown is really about sustainable communities where you can walk and access all the things that you wanna do without needing a car which is also really in line with our climate goal. So essentially kind of making that part of our vision for the downtown with the downtown plan amendment as well as the shared parking and maximizing parking model. So just kind of contextually that's sort of the hope is that there aren't as much of a need for cars but there are people who need their cars so I definitely follow the logic of wanting to support those individuals or families. And I know that in certain areas you see the shared sort of car model like a zip car type opportunity when you just need a car when you need one. And I'm wondering if that's something that's also gone into sort of the thought around how to support these developments that don't have dedicated parking. I'd say that's certainly a consideration. I would say they need to be in the public parking garages for example or public lots seeing as there aren't any parking spaces being provided on these particular projects. But yes, I do see that as one component and I know we've got some locations downtown already. I don't know to what extent public works is exploring the expansion of that but I think that particularly as projects like this move forward there will be higher demand for those. And so I think it's worth exploring with our public works department and how we're meeting everyone's needs because there may be an instance where you need to rent and pick up for a couch or something of that sort. I have council member Cummings. We received a couple of emails related to this but I was just wondering with the limit on the number of units I guess how is that determined because some folks have written to us and like you should increase it to 100 units and then maximize it to the greatest extent possible. And so I was wondering for members of the community who contacted us with those questions kind of what was the numbers in terms of the number of units? Certainly the numbers are currently set slightly higher than what the proposals have come into us as for instance Calgary has originally proposed 65 units for their projects and that's currently what the developer has proposed and staff felt there should be some leeway and increased that to 75 and we haven't heard we haven't heard anything else whether that needed to be from the developer whether that should have been increased more or not we're really just basing it on that initial proposal and that same with the Metro project as well it's currently at about 100 units and we increase that to 120 for that same flexibility. So it's certainly an option to increase that increase that number allowed but it's not to say whether the developers of those projects will actually hit that number or not. It would be up to them. Yes, thank you. Okay, I've got Council Member Calantari-Johnson and then Council Member Brown. I do just want to let everybody know I was texting with some of our public work staff. Claire Galagely is now available for questions regarding parking as necessary. I know just so you know she joined in Claire I'm so sorry I don't know why I can't get your name your last name pronounced correctly tonight. No problem, it's Galagely. Galagely, there we go. Okay, Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Great, thank you. I think you might have addressed it Matt but just to clarify that if we were to look at increasing that number for the Cedar Street from the buffer of 65 to 75 and increase it to 100 it's not a condition of approval, right? Again, just for us to have that flexibility and have the option to explore. Just want to make sure that's clear, correct? Correct, yep. We would just word it as up to 100. So yeah, not a requirement. And then my other question is really great points and questions around the parking issue, that's not something that we need to address in terms of staff recommendation right now, correct? This is something that we would should the project move forward more for staff to iron out. Okay, thank you. Correct. Yes, Council Member Brown. Yeah, I just wanted to respond to the question about increasing the number for this particular project and I don't want to speak for the developer but having talked with their representatives in just back in December about the project I asked that question, you know it would be great to see more units in a project like this. And at that point they said that because as we know the level of complexity and the layering of financing is very complex that in their estimation that financing wise it didn't make sense for them to build more. But again, I just am putting that out there with the caveat that I'm not speaking for them. I think that it may be worth asking but in terms of making that decision tonight I don't think it would affect their particular plans. And I will say we do have the developer on the line as well, Matt Tooney who might be able to shed light on that as well. Oh good because that's great. Thank you, better than than me. Okay. Yeah, Mr. Tooney if you're on the line and you'd like to respond to that now since we are doing questions from council I'd be happy to have you respond to that question. Welcome. Thank you. I wasn't sure the process here so I just kind of raised my hand there. There you go, that's the process. Better safe than sorry. Yeah, well I mean first thanks to everybody. Staff, Bonnie, Lee, Ryan and Matt I mean a lot of work has been put into this project and it's exciting. It seems to be moving quickly and I think a good direction. I want to just answer that question specifically on the Unicown and council member Browns your answer was exactly point on it is very complex. The financing and the feasibility is going to dictate a lot of this. That said, you know this is still I mean you've seen the site plan that is really the extent of the planning so far. It's still somewhat of a blank slate. We're open to looking at potentially doing more units. I mean at the end of the day, this is I totally have heard in talking to stakeholders and members of the community that comment about why not do more and that's a very valid question and we understand the opportunity and that the site should produce as much housing as it can. That said, it's got to, you know it has to work from a financing standpoint and there's some, you know work through that we need to do in that regard. The height of the building is also of a, you know we need to make sure we're working with the church next door and just by way of a little background there. My partners and I, you know, we were the same developers that did 1010 Pacific which was kind of the reason that we've first identified the parking lot with the church side as an area of opportunity and got into discussions with the church and we're very appreciative of their involvement and their input on this. But the, you know, the height of the building that's going to be a new, you know that's going to be a new neighbor for them. So shading and, you know that has been a consideration. So we're open to looking at it 75 or a hundred where my thought is that it's going to end up being the right amount regardless. So that cap, I think it's up to you guys. While I have the floor, can I just make one comment? Yeah, thanks Matt. And I've been, all the comments and questions have been really helpful. The one, and we're very excited about the project providing this type of housing is obviously super needed. The parking comments have all been well, you know, I appreciated all those. The one condition that we want to make sure that we have a little more discussion on and perhaps have the opportunity to really digest and understand is the condition number four regarding the Paseo. We absolutely view that as a, you know the opportunity to provide a Paseo there with, you know, the access points and supporting the downtown plan with circulation and pedestrian access. All is, you know, makes total sense. It can be a real amenity to the project. You know, 515 kitchen next door with their tent which, you know, provides some outdoor dining. It could be a very nice attractive feature for that part of town. The, getting back to the finances and the complexity were very concerned just on the cost to improve it. Our finance modeling today has not included any cost to improve it. I guess, you know, this is our, our perception or the way we envision the project, that strip of land being a city on land, city on peace. We were thinking and, you know, right wrong or different that that was gonna be, we were saying clear of it and the city would be improving it. We don't have, we haven't included our budget to do that. So that's a real concern to us to work. And at this point, I don't even know what is involved with it as a cost. And is it a, is it a vehicular, is it just pedestrian? You know, there's so many questions that that condition is, is a concern to us. So I'll leave it with that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Tiny. I have Council Member Golder and Council Member Calantari-Johnson. I just have a question regarding what you just said. So Matt, this is for Matt. So does that, I just wonder with that Paseo in place, does that affect whether the project would happen or not if it was there? It's again, tough to tell. I can tell you that the finances right now, we're actually, you know, we've started to relook at them. There's a number of different, you know, call it balancing acts that take into place. The amount of affordability, I mean, the project's 100% affordable. That's a given. The amount of affordability on the, you know, call it the supportive housing component at 20%. You know, there have been, the numbers that we're looking at makes it, it appears difficult to make the project financeable. We've looked at raising the 30 to the, call it the very low or the supportive housing slightly higher. So we're still, and so the short answer is we are still running numbers. Construction costs are coming in higher. In general, the numbers are very challenging. And so in short, putting on, I mean, Paseo could easily be, you know, a half a million dollars. I mean, I know that sounds like a lot, but with drainage and paving and, you know, getting the grading section in there and so forth, the dollars can mount up very quickly. That would make the project definitely unfeasible. Yes. Now, there may be things that we're doing along the Paseo that would qualify as improvements anyways. Landscaping, you know, along the building edge. I've talked to Bonnie who's been very helpful about talking about the, you know, some programs to perhaps have murals, you know, painted on the walls or facades facing the Paseo. So there's things that may be done with the project that in a sense provide some of the improvement, but the ultimate cost is definitely a question. Thank you. Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Yes, thank you. And thank you so much, Mr. Tuning, for being here and responding to questions and bringing up some of your areas of concern. This is a question to your staff around the Paseo. Is there opportunity during the design process to work with the applicants and find some kind of solution that would be agreeable and not be an impactful cost constraint for the developers, for the applicants? Yeah, certainly that's something that would have to be worked out more during the design review process, since what we've received so far is so preliminary and we haven't worked extensively with the applicant on the design or bill with that Paseo condition yet. So that would be worked out further in the process. Do you have anything more to add on that, Lee? Sure, I would just say that, yes, you know, there isn't a design at this point and, you know, we as a city would be cognizant of kind of the several various factors. You know, one, we want to make sure that this is a high quality environment for our downtown. At the same time, we'd be recognizing that, you know, this is an affordable housing project that we want to make happen. And so, you know, as we work through with public works on those design elements, how can we balance those factors along with various other things like public safety and accepted community crime prevention through environmental design principles and, you know, from a security perspective, you know, working with them to understand, working with police and public works to understand, you know, should that be gated or, you know, and, you know, only allow daytime access, you know, there are a lot of different details, but certainly, you know, one of those factors is the cost and understanding how we can get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of, you know, not burdening the project too significantly while also creating a great public space. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Cummings and Jessica DeWitt with staff, did you want to comment on that, Jessica? Add that I'm not sure what the developer's planning in terms of project-based section eight. I know we were in contact with the Housing Authority for the Metro project. I think that this developer has also been in contact with the Housing Authority and if there's a possibility to ask Royal Request more housing vouchers, in which case the developer could essentially ask for a larger mortgage, a conventional mortgage, because they can show more to pay debt. So possibly that's one way to generate a few more bucks to be able to put towards the Paseo. Or again, I don't know what the developer is assuming for paying for impact fees or any of the other fees that are coming for permitting, but if they are requesting a waiver or any kind of a deferral, possibly those funds could be reallocated towards Paseo improvements, just some thoughts out there to throw a file. Thank you. Okay, I had, let's see, I think I'll take Council Member Brown and Cummings questions and then Mr. Tenney, I'll turn back to you for any responses. Yeah, I just wanted to advocate for, or at least express my support for trying to find ways to ensure that the improvements for this particular Paseo not be so onerous as to potentially compromise the project. And I'm not suggesting that's anybody's intention here, but it seems to me this is, we approve many projects and we don't necessarily, we don't necessarily get the same public benefit out of those projects because of the affordability, the deep affordability and the supportive housing in this case. So I guess the question with that is, is there something that the city council could or should do in terms of direction to try to make that happen? Or will we just kind of hear back if there's a problem at some point? I'm just trying to kind of trying to figure out how to proceed to do everything we can to support this. I think we're all on the same page in terms of wanting to help make affordable housing happen. And we want great spaces in our downtown as well. They don't have to be mutually exclusive, but sometimes they can be competing interests. Certainly if you maximize the programming and the materials quality within that Paseo, you could go up substantially higher than $500,000 I would say. But I think there are things that we can do to minimize those costs. And that involves the program or that involves coordination with FIRE, for example, to say, hey, well, does this have to be an EVA or can we just program it as pedestrian access? So the accurate work is less expensive. So I think that we've got that everyone's mutual interest of making the project happen in mind. And I think if there were issues, then there wouldn't be anything that would preclude us from seeking advice later on down the line. But I do think with public works and with planning and with economic development, we'd all be balancing those factors. And I think Jessica chimed in with some ideas that she's got a lot of knowledge around to the extent that the developer wants to work with our economic development department on exploring additional financing options or additional ways to generate additional revenue. I think there are a lot of different ways in which we can work with the applicant to make sure that the project happens. Really quickly, I don't wanna take too much time on this, but I just wanna say, so some of the things that you're raising, Lee and I, and I'm in no way suggesting that the intention here is to make it more difficult for this particular developer, but it's the first time I've heard of the idea of should it be a locked gauge, we've approved developments with Paseo's and never has that been come up. And maybe that's because the DevCon development that was approved, the Riverfront project is taking care of that, or I'm just not sure, it just seems to me that it sounds like there could be a double standard and I know that's not what the intention is, but I just wanna make sure that we're thinking about that because there are similar issues with Paseo's than other parts of the downtown, I guess, and other developments that are happening that are market developments. Sure, well, I'll say that the intent there was actually to help the developer save money in that if they're concerned about long-term maintenance costs, having that kind of infrastructure in place could actually create lower costs over the long term in terms of maintenance if they're not having to deal with vandalism or other issues that could happen when maybe there aren't as many eyes on the Paseo. That was the intent there of mentioning that, not to add costs or make it more challenging, it's actually to make it easier for them. And so, but that was just thrown out of the net yet. Literally, we haven't had discussions about the design of this Paseo. It is early in the process. I mean, you saw the plan that they provided, that is literally all we've got at this point. And so, there haven't been any real conversations about how that Paseo would be designed. And it looks like Bonnie might wanna jump in on it. Yeah, thankfully, I just wanted to add to that, that regarding the Paseo, obviously we have a Paseo between our two affordable housing projects, the Metro, Pact South and Pact North. And there are a variety of grant opportunities for affordable housing that really are more competitive when you include some public elements to them. So we'd be happy to work with Mr. Tooney on, some of the actual grants that we're applying for for our project and really be creative on how to move forward, at least with the draft concept plan. Because I think the reality for us in the downtown, we know that we need to plan for these areas for these Paseos. We can't leave them without some public improvements that really look at the environment and lighting and landscaping. So we wanna work with the developer to really address this in a way that's not cost prohibitive. Great. Council member Cummings, do you have another question? Yeah, question slash comment, because I think you all really helped me clarify kind of what to look for. So I mean, just thinking about the agenda report that we have, you know, really this is a resolution that's establishing this policy to authorize increases in the use by right limits for these two projects, which is supportive housing developments that comply with the requirements set forward in this Assembly Bill 2162. And so it seems like based on conversation that, you know, ultimately the final design of this project hasn't been determined, nor has it been determined from the Metro. And so by approving this tonight, we're really, you know, providing this opportunity for them to create these two projects under this Assembly Bill, increase the number of units, and the staff is gonna be working with the developer to try to figure out, you know, what's the best design that's gonna work for this area. And it sounds like that's also gonna require working with public safety and public work. So is that a correct assumption of kind of where we're at because it seems like we don't really need to get, if that's the case, we don't need to get the details around, you know, conditions of approval around high to say, or what have you, because that's gonna be worked on as the design of the building gets completed. Correctly. We did include the conditions for the design under the policy for the Calvary project, just because it was so early. And we wanted to ensure that, you know, things were being looked on through the process because it will be a more streamlined process if this is approved. So we did include those conditions for that reason, but yeah, essentially there's definitely still time to work with the applicant through these issues. So I guess if that, if for example, that's the case, then if the Paseo condition seems to prohibit the project from moving forward, would that mean it would need to come back to council and we need to remove that? Or how would we be able to make sure that it can continue moving forward that becomes a cost prohibitive feature? That condition would be under this policy currently. So if the project were to continue to use the supportive housing policy, it would have to come back for that condition to be removed. If need be. Yeah, if I might, it sounds like we've got, we've got a little bit of more work to do on the actual project. And this won't be the last time that we see this. Was there any questions, more questions for Mr. Tooney before we move to public comment? I think we've answered everything. Mr. Tooney, thanks for joining us tonight. And as we deliberate, we may have more questions. So just hang on if you would till we're all through. Thanks. Okay, I will take it out the public comment now. I'm showing two people in our queue here who want to comment on the project or on this item, excuse me. The first person will be with the phone number ending in 4892. And you should be unmuted shortly. Hi there, go ahead. Oh yeah, this is Tim Willoughby speaking for Portable Housing Now. And just going to reiterate some of the things in our letter. This is very exciting to see these proposals under 2162, taking advantage of that. It's the streamlining process makes these projects more affordable. And if you're doing 100% affordable housing project, that's really important. The other thing I wanted to point out was that this is possible, 100% affordable housing project like this is a possible because of the Calvary Church. You can build 100% affordable on city land, but otherwise you need someone like the Calvary Church to put up the land to make it affordable. So they should be commended for this very important contribution to making this work for a very important project. So anyway, it sounds like council is all for this. Thank you for moving it forward. Thank you, Tim. The next person is at the last four digits is 1810. And you should be unmuted shortly. Yeah, this is Garrett Phillips. Despite some confusion by proponents that this is an up-down vote on affordable housing, what is before you is the question of whether to greatly enlarge the state's generous 50 unit used by rights zoning law. That housing is called supportive housing, but I call it exclusionary housing, not low cost or affordable housing because many people are excluded as a permanent requirement. Much is made of AB 2162 allowing this under certain conditions, but not so much why AB 2162 can also disallow this. There's a city size limited to $200,000 and homeless census max limited to 1500, which seem to be very dull deciders considering the city size and homeless count can vary by an order of magnitude. Are these limits independent or are they related? More importantly, why are these disqualifier limits there at all? As we know there are the reasons to have some public housing. AB 2162 doesn't convey its thinking, but that reasoning is the same as the answer to the question before you. Logically, I speculate the reasoning was that for small cities that have too many homeless or poor people on assistance, dense use by right welfare projects should be disallowed because it would turn the city into an excessive automatic permanent dense cesspool future slum of government dependence on any relaxation relative to its size. 200,000 and 1500 are somewhat arbitrary numbers. Suppose it was 100,000 and 750, the same ratio. This city would not qualify. Are there really only 1200 homeless in Santa Cruz? You can't be sure. Skid Row and LA isn't there by a random chance. It's where the affordable ghetto flexes and homeless services are. Santa Cruz is pretty much exactly the kind of city AB 2162 intended to exclude from outside UBR permanent welfare housing. Outside welfare, buddy, economy of the poor. Permanent UBR higher density than even asked for, subsidized housing approval is before you. At a minimum 1.9% of the population, there's little doubt Santa Cruz City already has county dump owners for the homeless and also a little doubt it already shoulders more than its county share. The reasons are examined, but I suspect it is because services for the poor, the homeless, the cottage and non-profit industries are codependent on servicing them and have a proliferating alliance with a pro-government dependency run city government only just here. Thanks, bye. The next caller has phone number ending in 2527. You'll be unmuted shortly. You should be able to, do they need to, oh, there you are. Mayor, can I hear me? Yes, I can. Thank you. Hi, my name is Phil Boutel and I just wanted to call out thanks to council member Watkins who highlighted the kind of the future vision for downtown which is a walkable neighborhood where we provided enough amenities that people maybe don't need to own as many cars as they do living in our distant neighborhoods where there's just houses. So I'm glad you brought that into the conversation about parking. And just in general, I encourage council to consider at this level approving a higher level of units, perhaps the 100 or somewhere around there to give the applicant more flexibility so that should they need that, we don't lose the amenities that would come with it such as the Paseo or other things. I think whether it's 75 or 100, I think this is gonna be a great project. And I encourage you to just give them that flexibility early on and if they need to negotiate with the church later about heights or views, let's again give the applicant that flexibility so this project can be better for our downtown. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else on the line that is speaking to comment on the project tonight? I'm seeing no one. So I'm gonna turn it back to council. I see council member Contari Johnson. I'll recognize you. So we're gonna be deliberating and coming to final decision. Yeah, go ahead, Shebra. Great, thank you. Thank you again for staff reading this before us and for Mr. Tooney. And thank you, Mr. Willoughby, for pointing out on the credit due to Calvary Church for their role in making this project a possibility. I'm really excited that this is gonna be one of the first agenda items that I get to vote on, 100% affordable housing in our downtown, creating a culture of walkable communities. I hear and understand the concerns of the applicants and I think there's some great ideas by staff and I think we can really work together to find a way that this condition around the Paseo will not be a burden on the applicants. I also think this is an ideal location and moving it up to 100 units as a buffer for us to have some flexibility to explore and not to make it a condition of approval, but again, just for us to explore. So I think with that, I would like to make a motion to approve staff's recommendation with the increase in the maximum number of units on the Cedar Street project from 75 to 100, noting that this is an option council encourages the applicant to explore, but that it is not a requirement for approval of the project. And also ask that staff work with the applicants on the design for the Paseo that's mutually agreeable to the city and the applicant. And if an agreement can't be reached, the applicant may come back to council before the discussion. Thank you. We have a motion on the floor and council member coming to you. Sorry, I couldn't, you want to second it? Okay. Okay. We have a motion by council member, Contari Johnson, seconded by council member coming to increase the limit of to 100 units for the Cedar Street project and maintaining the staff recommendation for the PAC South project. I'll just look to see if there's any other comments from council members. I do have a comment I'd like to add in. Council member Watkins, I think you do have a comment on the project again or I saw your hand up or read it again. I'm looking to second, but I appreciate this direction and the flexibility and option associated with it. And just also, you know, just reminding the community and those who may be watching about just sort of that holistic picture of our vision for our downtown and how these projects interact with each other. And together, they kind of fit that puzzle piece to make it all really work for a more affordable and sustainable community. So I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing this go through and some more affordable housing in our community. Yeah, and I'll just add in before we take the vote this evening that I really appreciate the applicant coming and Mr. Tune, thanks for being here tonight. Yeah, I think this is a night that many of us sort of imagine may or may not ever come. There's a lot of doubt in our community that we would actually get a project at the end of the year. We actually get a project at the location there near the Calvary Church. A lot of suspicion that maybe we wouldn't get the Metro projects together. I'm really excited that in one night, we're doing a lot of significant affordable housing approvals, which I hope sends a message to everyone in our community that we are committed to this and that we are not just talking, but we are actually doing. So I'm very excited. And I wanna just thank Mr. Tune for investing your resources in our community and also recognize Calvary Church. I've met with those folks off and on over the last couple of years and always suspected that we would have a project coming at some point. So it's exciting to be here tonight. I also, I guess just, I didn't speak much when we were doing questions, but I'm supportive. I understand the need to try to maximize our units, but I'm also very aware of the design aspect to our community. And so I think we will have a signature project also across the street with the new library and providing parking that's gonna be needed in downtown as well as affordable housing on that project as well. I think it's really important. And I do support actually the three story height that Mr. Tune is proposing in his project. I think we have some, the Calvary Church is really a landmark in our community. It's a very, very unique piece of architecture. And then we have all the wonderful little cottages just directly across the street. And I think scale is really important when we're thinking about our downtown. And I really support sort of the variable kinds of outcomes that we can find in this area. So I just kind of put that out personally. And I do think that the sale is a real opportunity and I do support that our staff, thank you for your motion. Council member Contari Johnson, because I do think that that direction provides that continuum of trying to create something that is beneficial and doable by the applicant. So I just wanted to add those comments tonight. And if there's no other comments by council members, I'll go ahead and call for the roll call vote, please. Council member Watkins. Aye. Calentari Johnson. Aye. Brown. Aye. Cummings. Boulder. Vice Mayor Brunner. Aye. And Mayor Meyers. Aye. So that motion was by council member Calentari Johnson. It was seconded by council member Cummings and the motion passed unanimously. So thank you and thank you, Mr. Tooney for being here. And also thank you to our staff and economic development for your work on continued work on Metro South and also to our staff at the planning department to really helping Mr. Tooney bring the project forward as quick as it did. So we appreciate your work, Matt, Lee, our whole team. So you guys are suddenly seeing lots of housing popping up. So thank you, Mr. Tooney. Good night. Okay, we are on to our final item tonight, which is the advisory body appointments and reappointments. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items 21 through 31, the advisory body appointments and reappointments. Instructions are on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the cues saying you have been unmuted. I'd like to call on the city clerk to explain the nomination and appointment process. Thank you, Mayor. You will start on a rotating basis with a council member who will then state their nomination up to the amount of openings to that particular commission. So for example, if one has two openings, you only need to state up to two nominees. If a council member before you has already stated someone that you were going to, you don't need to name them, they're already considered nominated. And that's it. And then we'll do a roll call vote at the end of each one. Okay, thank you. I have a question, just a clarification, Bonnie or Martine Bernal, if you're available. There was one advisory committee, which we received only two applicants for, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And committee, excuse me, I believe that it would be appropriate for us to potentially look to trying to obtain some additional applicants for that. And I'm wondering if a motion's appropriate right now to put that committee, particular committee back out for re-advertisement to try to recruit some more applicants. Is it now the time for that, Bonnie, or should we do that when that committee is actually being voted on? You could do that now, but I would recommend before we move in to do public comment, so that you do public comment on all of them as a whole instead of each one individually. Okay, great. But then you could move into a motion to defer, we can re-advertise for that particular committee. Okay, great. So we will go ahead and take, so we should take public comment now on this item and then we'll start council deliberation. Council member Cummings, did you have a question? I had a quick question. Thank you for a process, because I know in the past, council members for the commission for the prevention of violence against women, individual council members get to make an appointment. And so I'm just kind of curious, is that, does that... That's still the case. Okay, so council member. Yeah, when we get to that, you have, we have four openings. We have, well, yeah, we'll explain that. So we have four appointments to be made. Okay, thank you. Okay. Okay, we'll go ahead and take this item out to public comment. I'm looking at members of the public in our queue. And if you would like to comment on this item, which is advisory body appointments and reappointments, please raise your hand. Okay, I'm not seeing anyone in the public, so we'll go ahead and move on to completing our process in appointing folks this evening. Okay. Go ahead, Mary. I'd like you to entertain a motion if you'd like to have us go back out to seek more applicants for our Equal Employment Opportunity Committee. Thank you for noting that. I'm showing my brain starts to turn off at seven o'clock. Yes, please. Thank you. And member Callentary Johnson, did you want to second that motion? Yes, I'm gonna second. Okay, great. Thank you. And I will go ahead and take a roll call vote on that. So we have a motion on the floor to defer seating anyone on the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee at this time and re-advertising for additional applicants for that committee. And I will have a roll call vote. Okay, council member is Watkins. Aye. Callentary Johnson. Aye. Golder. Vice Mayor Brunner. Aye. And Mayor Myers. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Okay, we'll move on to beginning with the Arts Commission. There is one vacancy with a term expiration of January 1st, 2025. May I please have a nomination starting with council member Golder. And recall if your count, and as we work through everybody, if the person you're nominee was, you don't need to re-nominate them. Council member Golder. Okay, I'm gonna nominate Judy Gunstra. I nominate Bridget Lyons. Okay, I'm gonna look at my notes. Sorry. I too, excuse me, my nominee has been named. Council member Cummings. Council member Brown. Council member Callentary Johnson. Yeah, my nominee's been named as well. And council member Watkins. Thank you. Okay, great. Bonnie, will you lead us through this process? So we have three nominees. We have Christopher Carr, Judy Gunstra, and Bridget Lyons. So I'll just go through and do a roll call vote on the nominees. Okay, great. So, Christopher Carr, sorry. You're gonna do the roll call. Got it. Council member Watkins. It's always so hard. Yes, I'll go ahead and go with Carr. Callentary Johnson. No. You can say who you are voted for. Okay, Bridget Lyons. Judy Gunstra. Holder. Judy Gunstra. But I just, I never got to say this. I just wanted to say how amazed I was with everyone's application. And like, it would like mourn my heart just seeing so many people wanting to be part of our community. I know this isn't the place to say it, but I just thank you, everybody. Thank you. I hope you stay involved. Even if you don't make it onto one of these commissions, we need you. We love you and we appreciate you. On that note, really quick, we do hang on to applications for two years. So even if they don't make it this go around, we'll contact them. Vice Mayor Brunner. Bridget Lyons. And Mayor Meyers. Bridget Lyons. Okay, Bridget Lyons is appointed. Congratulations, Ms. Lyons, and welcome to the Arts Commission. Next up, we have the Board of Building and Fire Appeals. There are two possible appointments and or reappointments, both with term expirations of January 1st, 2025. May I please have a nomination starting with Vice Mayor Brunner. I nominate Peter Bagnell and Miles Corcoran. Next up is my nomination. Mine has been covered. Council Member Cummings. I'm good. Council Member Brown. That might have been covered too. Thanks. Council Member Collentary Johnson. Covered. Council Member Watkins. The same. Council Member Golder. I'm good. Roll call. We don't need to do about, if we get to do a by consensus, everybody has the same nominees. Okay, we have unanimous consensus to reappoint Peter Bagnell and Miles Corcoran to the Board of Building and Fire Appeals. Thank you for serving and welcome back to the Board of Building and Fire Appeals. Okay, next up we have the Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women. There was one vacancy and three possible appointments and or reappointments. Council Members Brown, Council Member Johnson and Watkins and Vice Mayor Brunner all have nominations. The term for each appointed Commissioner would be the same as the nominating Council Member. May I please have nominations starting with Council Member Brown. Anne Simonson and Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Roya Paxa. Council Member Watkins. Delphine Brun and Vice Mayor Brunner. I'm deferring my nomination to the next Council Meeting. That's just a direct appointment, correct? Right. We just need general consensus that everybody approves those nominations and then. We have general consensus, thumbs up. Welcome Council Member Simonson and Delphine to the Commission for Prevention of Violence Against Women. Next up is the Downtown Commission. There are two vacancies, both with terms expiring on January 1st, 2025. I will start by nominating. Is that me? Is that me, right, Bonnie? I mean, Elizabeth Carr. You only have one, yet there's two openings. I'm sorry, Elizabeth Carr and Daniel Nelson. Council Member Cummings. I'm going to nominate Bubba Rader and Karen Simons. Council Member Brown. Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Also that. Council Member Watkins. I'm also sad. Council Member Golder. I'm good. And Vice Mayor Bruder. I'm good. Okay. Bonnie, we have four, we have four nominees. Do we go through each one? Okay. I'll go through the Council Member. And you can tell me who you vote for. You could vote up to two and you have Elizabeth Carr, Daniel Nelson, Bub Rader and Karen Simons. Council Member Watkins. Best Carr and Daniel Nelson. Calantari-Johnson. Elizabeth Carr and Daniel Nelson. Elizabeth Carr and Karen Simons. Karen Simons. Golder. Daniel Nelson and Bub Rader. Vice Mayor Brunner. Daniel Nelson and Elizabeth Carr. And Mayor Myers. Elizabeth Carr and Daniel Nelson. So you have Elizabeth Carr and Daniel Nelson. Welcome to the Downtown Commission, Elizabeth Carr and Daniel Nelson. Thank you for serving. Next up we have the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee which has been deferred by POSHA. Next is the Historic Preservation Commission. There are two possible appointments and or reappointments, both with term expirations of January 1st, 2025. May I please have nomination starting with Council Member Brown. Ross Erick Gibson and Jessica Koos. Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Tim Keverd. Council Member Watkins. David, I don't really know how to pronounce his last name. Subba? I think it's Subba. Yes, yeah. Can you have another? That person has been named already. Okay. Council Member Golder. I'm good. Vice Mayor Brunner. I'm good. I'll nominate Subba and Koos, and Council Member Cummings. I'm good. Bonnie, can we do a roll call vote? Council Member Watkins. Jessica and David. Calantari-Johnson. Gibson and Koos. Cummings. Gibson and Koos. Golder. Koos and Subba. Vice Mayor Brunner. Jessica Koos and David Subba. And Mayor Myers. Jessica Koos and David Subba. So it's Jessica Koos and David Subba. Okay. Welcome to the Commission, Jessica and David, and thank you for serving. The next Parks and Recreation Commission, there are two possible appointments and or reappointments, both with term expirations of January 1st, 2025. May I please have nominations starting with Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Yes, I'd like to nominate Kristina Kincaid-Glavis and Holly Locatelli. Council Member Watkins. I have no new nominate dad. Council Member Golder. I'm good. Vice Mayor Brunner. I'm good. I will nom- I'm good also. Council Member Cummings. I'm good. And Council Member Brown. I'm good. Okay, I think we have a consent on that one. Consensus suit, excuse me. Welcome back, Holly Locatelli and Kristina Kincaid-Glavis to the Parks and Rec Commission. Thank you for your service. Next we have the Planning Commission. There is one possible appointment and or reappointment with a term expiration of January 1st, 2025. May I please have nominations starting with Council Member Watkins. I'd like to nominate Julie Conway. Council Member Golder. I'm good. Vice Mayor Brunner. I'm good. I'm good with my nomination. Council Member Cummings. Good. Council Member Brown and Council Member Calantari-Johnson. I'm good. I believe we have unanimous consensus again. Welcome back Commissioner Conway to the Planning Commission. Thank you for your service. Next up is the Sister Cities Committee. There are two possible appointments and or reappointments both with term expirations of January 1st, 2025. May I please have nominations starting with Council Member Golder. I'm going to nominate Laura and Douglas. That is Laura Caravello and Douglas Hull. Just for public folks. Vice Mayor Brunner. I'm set. I'm also set to Council Member Cummings. Council Member Brown. I'm set. Council Member Calantari-Johnson. I'm set. Council Member Watkins. Me too. Okay, by unanimous consensus. Welcome Laura Caravello to the Sister Cities Committee and congratulations Doug on your re-employment. Thank you for your service. Next is the Transportation and Public Works Commission. There are three possible appointments and or reappointments all with term expirations of January 1st, 2025. May I please have domination starting with Vice Mayor Brunner. Can you repeat that please? There are three possible appointments and or reappointments all with terms expirations of January 1st, 2025. This is for the Transportation and Public Works Commission. Your nominees. Thank you. I nominate Kyle Kelly, Robert Orizzi and Samantha Vrooman. And I am covered. Council Member Cummings. I'm Orgel Olson and Sabrina Lopez. Council Member Brown. I'm covered. Council Member Calantari-Johnson. I'm set, thank you. Council Member Watkins. I too am covered, thank you. And Council Member Golder. I'm covered too. Okay. We have a roll call vote, Bonnie. So your votes are for either Kyle Kelly, Sabrina Lopez, Sean Orgel Olson, Robert Orizzi or Samantha Vrooman. Council Member Watkins. Robert Orizzi, Samantha Vrooman and Kyle Kelly. Calantari-Johnson. Kyle Kelly, Robert Orizzi and Samantha Vrooman. Sabrina Lopez and Robert Orizzi. Orgel Olson and Orizzi. Golder. Samantha Vrooman, Robert Orizzi and Kyle Kelly. Vice Mayor Brunner. Robert Orizzi, Samantha Vrooman and Kyle Kelly. And Mayor Meyers. Kyle Kelly, Samantha Vrooman and Robert Orizzi. Okay, you have Kyle Kelly, Robert Orizzi and Samantha Vrooman. Congratulations, Kyle Kelly, Samantha Vrooman and Robert Orizzi. Robert, thank you again for your service on this commission and welcome to the other two new members. Thanks for your service, everybody. The last is the Water Commission. There is one county elector vacancy and one city elector appointment or reappointment, both with terms of expiration of January 1st, 2025. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, really quick. Your script isn't split up, but we need to split it up by the county position and the city position. So the county position has Tom Burns or Chris DeMeyers. Okay, so I'll do the city, the city one first and then the other. Sure, either way. Or do I do them together? What's the best? You would need to split them separately. Okay. You can start with the city one, that's fine. Okay, great, thank you. I will start by nominating Justin Burks. Council member Cummings, council member Brown. I'm okay. Council member Collin Tari Johnson. I'm set. Council member Watkins, the same. Council member Golder. The nominate Jim Mechick. And council member, excuse me, Vice Mayor Brunner. I nominate, same. I'm set. You're set, okay. Okay, we will need a roll call vote. We have one, this is for the city spot for Justin Burks or James Mechick. Council member Watkins, Collin Tari Johnson. Vice Mayor Brunner. James Mechick. And Mayor Meyers. It's Justin Burks. Welcome, Mr. Burks to the Water Commission. Thank you for your service. Okay, we will now move on to the county elector vacancy for the Water Commission. We have two nominees or two applicants, Tom Burns and Krista Meyers. And I will start by nominating Tom Burns. Council member Cummings. I'll nominate Krista Meyers. Council member Brown. I'm set. We don't have to go through. Both people have been nominated. We could just go right to the vote. Oh, we can. You're right. So you have more than two. Thank you for being my brain after seven o'clock. Okay, Bonnie. Council member Watkins. Collin Tari Johnson. Tom Burns. Boulder. Tom Burns. Vice Mayor Brunner. Tom Burns. And Mayor Meyers. Tom to the Water Commission. Thank you for your service. That concludes item number 31 on our agenda. We'll now move to oral communication. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if you want to comment during oral communications, now is the time to call in. Instructions are on your screen. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda. If you're interested in addressing the council, press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. You will have two minutes to speak. When it is your turn to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. We request that you clearly and slowly state your name before making your comments so that we can accurately capture in the meeting minutes, however it is not required. Please remember, this is a time for council to hear from the public. We are not able to engage in dialogue with each member of the public, but when we are able, we will address the questions raised after oral communications has been completed. And again, I just want to restate, this is for items not on our agenda this evening. And I see currently two members in the public with their hands raised, so I'll start with 1-8, 1-10. Yeah, while the Justice Warriors ignore the American Just Principle with Equal Opportunity, they work on instituting their smeltest failed doctrine called equity, assuming everyone is entitled to an equal life outcome. The supposed justification is concentrated in just a few group identity statistics, which do not prove causation, and they ignore there are millions of reasons why people's lives differ. As a personal example, considered my two-year-old brother and I were raised by the same parents in the same cities, schools, by largely the same teachers, share the same values, the same personalities, and yes, had equal opportunity. One of us graduated third in high school, class of 450, became a semiconductor engineer for 30 years, retired debt-free, comfortably at 52. The other ran away from huge lifelong debt, disappeared, dropped out of society, last known living somewhere off the grid as an aging ranch handyman in the old world wilderness playing jazz saxophone to the squirrels. It's not an injustice. Think harder about that equity weak leg of the three-legged stool of SC's pillars of community. The KGB could not have done a better job of demoralizing the American public into victimhood, selling out individual freedom for an authoritarian ever-bigger interest of government, but it was mostly done from within. What rightfully used to be an apolitical government run educational system was destroyed by partisan un-American political ideology and converted into a leftist children's indoctrination boot camp. So busting the equity myth must be a lot like your parents finally telling you Santa Claus isn't real. Okay then, the leftist concept of equity isn't real fairness, isn't real justice, isn't really more virtuous than any far calling itself any fastest or the anti-racist really pretending they aren't now the racists of today. I've got three new to you colors of community for your consideration. Try mutual respect for everyone's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but which by the way pursuit means the act of striving to gain or accomplish something, not the granting of government privilege, treating different people unequally to try to make their life outcomes identical. Thanks. And our next caller is with the phone number ending in 1705. You're welcome to address us, thank you. Thank you, can you hear me? Yes. Thank you, this is Eric Rodberg. I'm gonna read a few short quotes from the city document. Santa Cruz has one of the highest per capita populations of homeless individuals in the state of California and therefore in the United States. Uncheltered individuals living in encampments are present within the city's limits, have much higher rates than are present within neighboring jurisdictions. Second quotation, same document. Unlike some larger cities within the state, the city of Santa Cruz generally does not receive significant funding from the state or federal governments to provide housing or other services to persons experiencing homelessness. Instead, the county of Santa Cruz received significant funding to provide these services and has been legally tasked with providing these services. This document is a recent legal filing in federal court that the city submitted. I submit to you as a council that if you can make this argument forcefully in federal court and there are others similar in this document, I would like you to stop playing nice with the county and play hardball and get them to live up to their legal obligation, thank you. Thank you. Are there any other callers on the line tonight that would like to address the council during oral communications? I'm not seeing any, so we will go ahead and adjourn our meeting for this evening. I do want to just comment at the end of tonight. I hope everyone in the mountains stay safe over the next few days and please know everybody here in Santa Cruz city is thinking about you all and we will help with whatever happens over the next three to four days and please stay safe. So good night everybody, thank you for a great meeting and now I can go rest my head. Good night everybody, cheers.