 Good morning. It's 9 a.m. May 10th, 2022, and I want to officially call to order the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors regular meeting. Clerk, can we have a roll call please? Supervisor Friend. Here. Supervisor Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. And Koenig. Here. Thank you. You have a quorum. Thank you. We'll now have a moment of silence and pledge of allegiance. Does any board member wish to dedicate this moment to anyone or anything? Yes, Mr. Chair. This is sorry. This is Ryan Coonerty. I want to take a moment to recognize the passing of Gwen Markham. She owned Capitola Book Cafe, was very active in virtually every kind of community activity you could be involved in, cared deeply about this community, and will be deeply missed. Thank you. And I'll remember just to Sarah here in Watsonville, he was a great leader of the Filipino community and historian of the Filipino community at Watsonville. Thank you. Thank you. Moment of silence. I pledge allegiance due to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, for the nation, for God, and the visible, with liberty and with justice for all. We proceed to item three. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda today? Yes. So, Chair Coonerty and members of the board, on the regular agenda, there's a revision to item number 13. Attachment B, page 87, remove the words any of, which now reads, the cannabis licensing official may set a larger cannabis cultivation area in CA zone districts, subject to the following criteria. On item 14, attachment B, page 169, and attachment D, page 225. Section F5 changed the wording to read supporting equipment such as equipment shelters may be required to be placed underground if required by the director. Section G, point one, changed wording to read, all towers shall be designed to be the shortest height technically feasible. That concludes the corrections to today's agenda. Thank you. Proceed to item four. Are there any board members that would like wish to remove something from the consent agenda to the regular agenda? I have nothing to remove. I'll just make a comment. I want to welcome on item 30. Supervisor Cabot, we'll take comment on the consent agenda after public comment. If you don't mind, item six. All right, thank you. We'll now proceed to item five, public comment. Any person may address the board. Speakers must not exceed two minutes in length and individuals may speak only once during public comment. All public comments must be directed to an item listed on today's consent agenda. Closed session agenda yet to be heard on regular agenda or a topic not on the agenda, which is within the jurisdiction of the board. Board members will not take actions or respond immediately to any public communication presented regarding topics not on the agenda, but may choose to follow up later either individually or at subsequent board of supervisors agenda. Please go ahead. Good morning. It's Santa Cruz County, California. It is May 10th, 2020. It's nice to have the Civilization Abliteration Assistance eye contact, but I won't hold my breath on that. So I'm holding an interesting document. It's called Your City Government. This one was made by a city council member in Santa Cruz. It just goes into a fair amount of detail that our people that were publicly elected are city council members and also our supervisors are all under the control of the city and county managers. So much so that if they deviate from what they're doing, they can be charged with a misdemeanor removed from our office or put in prison for six months. Just some interesting information. How about some humor? You know, a little girl comes to her mom and says, you know, mom, how are politicians made? She said, well, sweetie, when a circus clown and a serial killer meet and fall in love, you can make up the rest. So we've got a bunch of stuff going on with the World Economic Forum. Stuff that's been planned since 1992, where 179 countries came into this agreement with this agenda 21, agenda 30, and agenda 2050. It's an attempted power grab. So at 41 seconds, that's good. So I love to be proved wrong. I brought up a subject with a very close friend where 50 other people that were knowledgeable didn't dispute what I was saying. Treaties do not supersede the U.S. Constitution. And there's a lot of information about that. So unfortunately, most of our political leaders are captured. You know, I get that 14 seconds. You know, where are there the most Zionist IBM Nazis on the planet? I would say Washington, D.C. You know, I'd say that Israel is a close is a is a close second. Thank you. And then I would say Silicon Valley. Good morning. My name is Salah Cabanus and I love Santa Cruz and I have the privilege of being chair of the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Advisory Board. I want to thank the supervisors for their service and cap it. He attends every meeting. He provides valuable leadership and insights. Very awesome. I want to thank Cassandra Salimi for all her work for supporting our community and wish her well as she becomes the director of behavioral health for Napa County. I want to support agenda item number 37. Currently, we don't have and we really need a youth crisis stabilization residential program. Youth currently are sent away from their families, loved ones, community and friends. We need to keep them here so that they can recover from behavioral health needs. Please accept the grant for 7.5 million dollars towards this residential stabilization program for youth. And finally, we submitted a letter in correspondence. We need a 24 hour seven mobile crisis response in Santa Cruz County, the addition of which would compliment current resources. Mental Health Advisory Board strongly recommends that the board of supervisors consider the criminal justice council report of 2021 and other past grand jury recommendations to take action to create a 24 hour seven non law enforcement crisis response, which could compliment the federal rollout of 988. Thank you very much. And again, thank you for your service. I love Santa Cruz. Thank you, Sherlock. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for your service to our beloved community. I'm Jeffrey R out. I'm a member of the Mental Health Advisory Board for District five. The mental health of our community is fundamental to the decisions we make in this room. This letter has to do with the correspondence, why on the agenda, the letter of recommendation that can help reduce suffering and save lives. This letter of recommendation has to do with the taking meaningful action on the criminal justice council report 2021 that Sherlock just mentioned, which says among the jurisdictions that don't already have dedicated unit with sworn officers responding to behavioral slash mental health calls. 100% are supportive of the creation of independent independent agency that would respond to these calls. Mental Health Advisory Board of Santa Cruz County strongly recommends that Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in consideration of the criminal justice council report and past recommendations, including Santa Cruz County grand jury reports take meaningful action to create a 24 by seven non law enforcement crisis response service that provides but not limited to mental health crisis related crisis response, conflict resolution, welfare checks, suicide threats and more. The federal legislation HR 1319 American Recovery Plan Act passed in 2021 California AB 118 and the pending California AB 988 recommended include funding for the 24 seven non law enforcement response. Mental Health Advisory Board strongly recommends that you take action on this. Again, thank you for your service. Thank you, Mr. Good morning. Good morning. You just pull the mic down close to your mouth so you can hear you. Good morning. My name is Stacy Smith. I'm here to advocate for creating a cahoots type program in Santa Cruz County. And I'm grateful to be speaking to you during Mental Health Awareness Month on Sunday. On a Sunday at 3 30 am on October 16 2016. Our son was shot to death by Santa Cruz law enforcement while he was in the midst of the mental health crisis. Individuals and families throughout our county would greatly benefit from the scope of services just mentioned by Jeffrey that the cahoots model provides pressure can be taken off our first responders lives can be saved. Many communities throughout the state and country have or are developing this well proven best practices model for early intervention and crisis response. What is needed now is the will and commitment for allocating the funding to make these services available in our community. The time has come and the resources are available. The new 90 day call line becomes live in nine weeks on July 16. It's critical that we have a 24 seven non law enforcement that we have mobile teams of trained crisis interventionists available for our community members. I urge you to open your hearts and minds and please allocate funding and begin working with those who have the knowledge and plans to make this program happen for Santa Cruz County individuals families which will promote safety for all. I believe it is very likely that Sean would be alive today if a cahoots type program had existed in our community in 2016 when he suffered a mental health crisis and neither he nor our family were able to get the help we so desperately needed when we needed it. Thank you for your service to our community. Thank you Miss Smith. Hi good morning. My name is Alexander Robertson. I'd like to start off with a prayer. Father God give us strength and guidance and discernment. Let our walls come down so that we may receive your message clearly. I'm a Santa Cruz County resident of 34 years and a father of four. This is our home much like most of us I care deeply about its future. My show of hands how many of you have taken the oath of office to be in a position where you are now? Good both of you. In that oath was a pledge to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the California Constitution also to represent we the people to the best of your ability. In assuming a leadership role you are the guardians of the constituents who have elected you. The last two years have awakened us and we are now paying attention more than ever. We're examining those we have elected to serve us and protect our natural rights enshrined in the Constitution. As a whole this board of supervisors has allowed trespass upon the rights of we the people. We have seen zero pushback from our elected leaders no questioning no curiosity and a lot of just following orders. Just following orders is not going to be acceptable is not going to be acceptable any longer. We the people will hold our elective representatives accountable. We expect independent studies scientific data and open debate of information in regards to decisions that are made that affect us all. I'll tell you I've done the freedom of information act request for this information from the county and from the health officer Gail Newell and the response is we have no data. We have no independent study. We're just following orders. The good news is is that today is a new day. We have the opportunity to correct our course and safeguard our future. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Robertson. Well I can't say it much better than Mr. Robertson did. My name is Elisa Dequewog also a resident of Santa Cruz County mother of three. I also work in the mental health field and to me that's the most important thing and I've just seen over the last two years suicides and overdoses and just poor handling of the last two years and I honestly hold you guys as co centers to that. So I've according to California law you're required to be bonded as Alex said to hold public office and in case in case you cause any harm while executing your duties this is a notice of my intent to file a claim against your bond. If you do not resign in the next seven days the paperwork I'm giving you will have all the details. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Pirov. Nice coach you have. Anyway Gary Richard Arnold. I know that this county has been really stasiied and you can tell by locks on every door this is basically a fortress. People can't get information. The person mentioned before you've signed the United Nations Agenda 21 packet that was also signed by Sam Farr. It was Bruce McPherson and Sam Farr that had a futures conference in Monterey in which both the Pajaronian and the the Times and Aptos labeled the meeting basically a fascist Nazi like operation. They were taking brochures out of people's hands. They had the Delphi technique by breaking up the meeting and having so-called leaderships from various tables. This was developed by Tavistock and the Rand Corporation. This is an intelligence operation to convert and change the self-government to a Soviet. That's what AMBAG is. Why is in community TV representing the 13 cities in three counties called AMBAG. Calcog there's not a square inch in the state of California that is uncovered by a cog a council of government which is no more than a Soviet and we don't know which one of you are supposed to be. You don't come back and report from those meetings either. This is the most unrepresentative government the most strong pro communist government. We got two plaques out there and the courthouse steps dedicated to Hugh DeLacy, Chinese Communist spy, four different spy rings. Leon Panetta gave him military and policy information. You won't even take that down. It's outrageous. You're the enemy of the people and the sooner they find out the better. You need to be replaced. No incumbent. What's happening in the schools and in the city councils is under the Panetta machine. Thank you, Mr. Arnold. Good morning, Chair Koenig, board members. My name is Matt Machado. I'm Deputy CAO and Director of Community Development Infrastructure. This morning I'd like to thank you for your proclamation. This is declaring the week of May 15th through May 21st as public works week in Santa Cruz County. This is also a national event and this year's poster is here and the theme this year is ready and resilient. It does portray our public works professionals as heroes. Public works professionals are always ready to serve their communities and resilience is ever in their abilities to pick themselves up when encountering challenges and we have plenty of challenges here in our county. So I greatly appreciate your proclamation and awareness this week. I'd like to end by thanking our public work staff for their caring, their compassion, and their perseverance to do all the good work that they do. Thank you. Thank you, Director Machado and to all our public works heroes. All right, seeing no one else here in the chambers. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to comment? Yes, we do have speakers online. As a reminder, it's star nine to raise your hand and star six to mute or unmute yourself and bbm at cruzio.com. Your microphone is available. Good morning. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Thank you. I'm Nancy Macy. I live in Boulder Creek where our children grew up as avid visitors and volunteers at the Boulder Creek Library. I was honored to be among the many participants who shared ideas and vision brought the library into being. Julie Mackie's ceramic art was recognized universally as remarkable, creative, and beautifully realized. She was among those artists chosen to provide lasting creations to grace the new Boulder Creek library. I shared vision of the community that was intimately involved in its design. Her six faces originally among those sketched over weeks of watching people walking, talking, running errands, enjoying a stroll in downtown Boulder Creek. Julie loved people, honored humanities, varied colors, shapes, and cultures. She presented a young woman proud to wear her handwoven detail as they had dressed, not hiding that she was from Guatemala and not seeking to blend in. A black man confident in his work smiling with his cigar, symbolizing that he celebrated life. A young girl adorned in pigtails dressed for a party or her picture day at school. A happy man with the large mustache eyes crinkled from his smile. An elderly man perhaps shinto expressing wisdom and thought. A smiling grandma in her blue cap. Julie's art was created as a display for the library and has been removed after being put there in February, being restored to its place. It would still be there had the building been constructed well and not needed renovations. It is wonderful, however, having a library back remodeled with fresh and new spaces. Please return Julie's art, a rendering of the various faces and cultures of those living in our mountain community. A unified work of art made just for that place, the Boulder Creek Community Library. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you, Ms. Macy. Jen Herrera, your microphone is available. Good morning. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Great. Thank you. My name is Jen Herrera. I'm one of the assistant directors at HSA. I'm here to thank you for the county's proclamation celebrating National Nurses Week, which is officially from May 6th through 12th. This year's theme is nurses make a difference. As a fellow nurse specializing in public health today, I am representing the nurse leadership team at the Health Services Agency. In particular, our directors of nursing and a satin anxiety butters in road of blanket ship. I do want to do a special shout out to our amazing nurses at Health Services Agency, Human Services Department, our awesome volunteer medical reserve corps and our well path partners. As a nurse, I remember when I was a nurse in school, my professor shared a patient survey with us asking the patients what is their top quality that they want in a nurse. And at the time as a nursing student, we all expected, oh, patients want us to be compassionate. But actually the number one quality was competence. Patients want a competent nurse. And what I found over my career as a nurse is that competence and compassion go hand in hand. And when I think about this past year, all the nurses in our community have done an amazing job providing direct care, competent and compassionate care in our vaccine clinics, home visits, hospitals, doing quality assurance administration and working even at the policy level. And through that work, they really have made a difference. Also during nurses week, it's also a great time to celebrate that we are one part of an amazing healthcare team. Also want to appreciate all of the multidisciplinary team members like social workers, health educators, our own patients that we partner with to do this work. So in closing, thank you so much for this recognition. Thank you to our colleagues who support nursing care and thank you to all the nurses in Santa Cruz County. Thank you, Ms. Herrera and all of the competent and compassionate nurses working for the county. Elden Charles, your microphone is available. Good morning. Am I being heard? Yes. Hello, my name is Elden Charles. I used to be a resident of Santa Cruz County. I moved a few years ago. I do have children, though, that live in that county, at least the key one of the residents that spoke earlier. And I have children that attend school in that county. In 1998, I moved from the Caribbean, a very small island to the U.S. And served in the military for 11 years. And as far as, you know, countries go, I thought that the United States was the greatest country on earth at that time. I'm starting to second guess those feelings because of what I've seen occur in this place over the last two years. This COVID mania and the response of otherwise rational people has made me very, very concerned for the future of my children. I reached out to the board of supervisors to express my concerns in an email with some demands of some things that I wanted to see with some other parents, masking of our children and so on, got no response, followed up, got no response. So it seems like the only thing that is understood is force and litigious action. So this is a notice that you have seven days, all of you, including the health czar over there, Gail Newell, to resign on going to be taking action and filing a claim against your bond. Let's see how it goes from there. And I'm going to be filing a civil lawsuit as well. Good day. Thank you, Mr. Charles. Sheila, your microphone is available. Thank you. Sheila Delaney. I live in Bonnie Dune, former resident of the San Lorenzo Valley. When the Boulder Creek Library was designed through a community process nearly 40 years ago, part of the design included works by local artists. The feature of our library has always been the six faces that welcome you from over the fireplace in the main room. The faces were created from composite images of people observed in downtown Boulder Creek and made into ceramic masks by Julie Mackie, the artist. The masks are members of our community. They should remain. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Delaney. Helen Ian Story, your microphone is available. Good morning. I hope you all can hear me. Good morning, Chair and Supervisors. I'm Helen Ian Story from the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County. As you know, CAB is the county's designated community action agency tasked with eliminating poverty and creating social change through advocacy and essential services since 1965. We're also part of the national network of over a thousand community action agencies across the country who are celebrating Community Action Month this month in May. Community Action Month is a time for us to reflect on our mission, our partnerships, our values of equity and inclusion, and the difference we make in the community. In 2021, this included serving over 10,000 low-income people, including providing rent assistance to nearly 2,000 people to avoid evictions, food assistance to over 1,000, job readiness support and placement assistance to over 500 youth and adults, COVID information to over 1,300 people, including Indigenous language speakers, and impacting over 7,800 immigrants and their families with immigration, legal education and advocacy services. We sincerely thank the county for its partnership and its funding support in helping CAB have this kind of impact in the community. To celebrate and raise awareness of Community Action Month, CAB is co-sponsoring events highlighting housing issues, immigrant voices and experiences, and climate resilience in May. CAB will also post highlight of its work on social media on Impact Wednesdays weekly during this month. For more information, we encourage everyone to follow CAB on social media, check out our website at cabing.org. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ms. Delilah Epperson. Your microphone is available. Hi, thank you. I am Delilah Epperson and I'm a constitutionalist and anybody who has looked even scanned the constitution can see that the mandates that have been occurring for the past two years are unlawful. There are no laws for mandates, mask mandates, vaccination mandates. That's why these progressive policies, this legislation like SB 866 is trying to get pushed through so hard, especially this year, when we all know that there's a red, white and blue wave coming your way. I love the other speakers who spoke to the bonds which you guys are under. I really am looking forward to that because none of the incumbents, none of our representatives stepped forward and said no, the mandates are not right. So I want to let you know and I'm actually talking to the people who are listening, not the board, because I don't believe the board represents us or is listening to the people anymore. I want to let you know that I am running also for Congress District 19 and I am a constitutionalist and I love what you guys have been saying against the mandates against 871 and against AB 2223, which I was in Sacramento to oppose that. So God bless you and I hope to hear from everybody soon. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Everson. Joe, your microphone is available. Good morning. I'm Joseph Kuchera, a former member of your board. I was the board's representative to the library JPA when the Boulder Creek Library was designed by the community and also selected the local artwork to be permanently integrated into the building. One of the artists selected was Julie Mackie who created six ceramic sculptures of local Boulder Creek residents that have been installed since 1984 and then reinstalled this February as part of the recent renovation. I'm here today representing the Mackie family and local community to inform you of the unilateral and precipitous actions of the newly hired Santa Cruz Library's director to censor and remove the Mackie sculptures just four days before the library's grand reopening. They solely on her representation of a supposed anonymous comment by library staff that the sculptures were cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping, and offensive. Therefore, I urge you to take action to have the Mackie sculptures reinstalled in their home of 37 years for the following reasons. The censorship is a slippery slope. Your district's libraries and other public facilities may be next to suffer the acts of unaccountable censorship. The county is exposed to liability for damages incurred by this censorship without any due process or public awareness. And lastly, to investigate the unprofessional conduct of the library director's actions done in the shadows to unilaterally censor and remove artwork from public places. Thank you for this opportunity to address you today. Thank you, Mr. Conchero. Call in user three. Your microphone is available. In the scenic Santa Cruz by the ocean. And I'm going to read something called cell towers on the ocean floor. This is by Arthur Fersenberg of cell phone taskforce.org and the author of the book, The Invisible Rainbow, a history of electricity and life. It starts out one blue sky above us, one ocean lapping all our shores, one earth so green and round. Who could ask for more? That's from Pete Seeger. In 2018, on land and in space, preparations to deploy millions of antennas were very publicly being made and advertised for 5G smart cities and the Internet of Things. At the same time and without any publicity, governments, research laboratories and commercial and military interests were collaborating on plans to create smart oceans and the Internet of Underwater Things. They did not consult the fishes, whales, dolphins, octopuses, and other inhabitants at those depths. Life in the oceans today is hanging by a thread. If the rate of population declines, continues, there will be almost no fish left in the oceans by 2048. Diatoms, the type of algae at the base of the ocean's food chain that is also the source of a third of the world's oxygen production, has been burning by more than 1%. There are no further speakers. All right, then we'll move on to item 6, action on the consent agenda. Is any member of the board wish to speak to any member on the or any item on the consent agenda? Yes, Mr. Chair, I'll be very brief. Thank you. Just on three quick items on item 28, just a welcome to Samantha Hart-Farron, an outstanding local community member who's going to be joining us on the Women's Commission Appreciate for Willingness to serve. On item 37, as was brought up by the Speaker on the Chaffa Grant, an enormous need and an enormous opportunity for this county to start investing in exactly this. So appreciation for those that sought the grant and appreciation for the board for moving that item forward. And the last is on item 48, something, an area, Green Valley that I share with Supervisor Caput, an area that both Supervisor Caput and I have prioritized for pedestrian safety over the last few years, including using some of our measure D and other funding in order to improve some of the walkways down there. It's used by disadvantaged community members, used by farm workers from as a transport and recreational standpoint, and to have public works apply for and successfully obtain a competitive grant to improve pedestrian access. And that area for that community is really outstanding and appreciation for the CAO's office for their willingness to help on the local match that's required as part of this. But this is a improving pedestrian safety in the South County, well, throughout the county is obviously a priority, but to have this access point in Green Valley moving forward is really wonderful. So thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thank you. Item 30, I'd like to welcome Cesar De Santos as an appointee to the Latino Affairs Commission. And also on item 31, recognize the great work of the Aztecas Youth Soccer Academy that is helping a lot of youth in the South County. Lastly, it was already mentioned, item 37, the grant for $7.6 million for the health facility on Freedom Boulevard in Watsonville. It's going to be a great project and I'm looking forward to seeing the work begin. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor Coonerty. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chair. On item number 29, I want to thank the Chair for joining me and for staff for their work and applying for the putting access to work incubator. I think it's an exciting opportunity for us to build on some of the work we've already done and figure out a way to meet the needs of this community and generate more resources for the county as institution. Item number 31, I want to also thank the Santa Cruz Community Foundation for their support of the Azteca Soccer Program. It's a tremendous program and it's a great partnership. On item number 36, which is providing and creating an evaluation of integrated behavior health services and their effectiveness, I just want to add additional direction that whatever the evaluation is that it should come back to the board so that we can see the evaluation for ourselves and set policy accordingly. And finally on item number 39, I want to thank the Health Services Agency for applying for additional funds for Medicaid and assisted treatment that is just critical in addressing the crises that we're seeing on our streets every day. And I want to appreciate the efforts to grow and expand the program that this important program that we've provided in our community. Thank you, Supervisor Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I wanted to address a couple of issues. Item number 27, the traffic demand management issue. This is a good step toward providing additional incentives for billage to do small and medium-sized housing projects along transit corridors. I look forward to seeing the next iteration in the Sustainable Santa Cruz County plan and have a deeper discussion on about the TDM measures included in the draft plan. And I always want to address what some of our speakers did on items 36-7, the behavioral health investments. Thank you for the staff for both of these items for consideration. They really do represent a better critical effort to provide behavioral health services and track our outcomes to a higher degree, better addressing behavioral health in this county as a critical component to addressing homelessness in our community. And I'd like a question, I don't know if it could be answered right now, but I'd like more information about the nexus between these two items and our overall housing for health strategic plan. Specifically, could somebody say some more about the outreach and how the outreach will work for us to reach our participation goals? I think that's going to be important. I don't know that it could be answered right now, but I would like to take a deeper dive into that. In the same vein, item 39, as the behavioral health pieces, I'd like this important issue to address one of the most difficult challenges we're facing in Santa Cruz County and really statewide. I'm very supportive of doing what we can to expand our treatment options for those folks who are struggling with opioid and other addictions. Again, this is a major contributing factor on our homeless problem here and especially throughout the state. And it's really co-occurring with the mental health issues that we're facing as well. On item 41, the encampment management item, I want to acknowledge the county's role in trying to address better sheltering options for people experiencing homelessness in our community. There are real public health and safety issues that risks that are posed by the benchlands encampment just outside the county center here as well as environmental damage next to the critical natural resource of the Santa Cruz River. I want to thank the city and county staff who have been working on resolving encampments along the river and still there's a lot of work to do as we all know. One question that I do have on that as well as the report says the grant is expected to help at least 65 individuals and I just wonder how do you arrive at that number and is it based on an average cost per person for assistance? This is a very costly item that we're going to have to address if we want to help resolve the critical issue that's before us. I don't know if the CAO may have an answer on some of that. Yes. We do have staff available to respond to the questions if you'd like to do that right now. I think that if that's okay with the chair. It's fine with me. Yes. The first one on three, so the behavioral health investments, the nexus, the overall housing for health strategic plan, is there anybody that could answer some questions on that question? Yeah, we have Dr. Ratner, Robert Ratner, if you could elevate him so that he can respond. He's on line. Great. He's been promoted. Good morning supervisors and supervisor Rick Pearson. Thank you for your question. My name is Robert Ratner. I'm the director of the Housing for Health Division in the Human Services Department in the county and I think your first question was around how the behavioral health related interventions fit in with our overall approach to addressing homelessness in the county. Correct. And our strategic framework really outlines a couple of things that are related to what's before the board today. One is that we identify health as a major and health challenges as a major contributor to housing instability and challenges that people have getting back into housing. So substance use and mental health issues can really interfere with people's ability to manage the tasks that are required to get into and keep housing. So paying your bills, being a good neighbor, managing utilities, keeping your room safe and clean. Those are all things that require people to have the kind of health supports to be successful. So from our perspective in housing for health, the housing plus the health care services are really critical and the behavioral health supports are outlined and some of the measures today are part of that process. For example, some of the crisis intervention resources, when someone has a crisis and they may need to temporarily relocate from housing, if there's a facility they can go to and get more stability, it makes it much more likely that they would be able to keep their housing in the absence of those kinds of facilities and people are struggling. We see people who lose their housing as a result of being unable to pay rent or behavioral issues that can interfere with their tendency. And then I think your second question was related to the cost of the interventions and I think it is surprising to a lot of members of the public how expensive some of the housing related interventions are for folks experiencing homelessness in California. And that's really a byproduct of how expensive it is to live in our communities. So the fair market rent for a studio apartment in Santa Cruz County, which is a highly established standard, is over $2,000 a month. So when you're trying to help people get back into housing with temporary subsidies or ongoing subsidies, just eight months of rental support in the studio could be up to $16,000. And then that cost of services is also something that I think a lot of people are not aware of. So I appreciate you raising it. But to have integrated field-based services where we're paying staff reasonable wages so they can afford to live in our community and as well be really effective and supported in their work with folks who are struggling with behavioral issues, we need to pay people adequately. So I think the overall cost and the proposal reflects that doing this work requires deep ongoing investments to really make changes. One thing I would say is that we're partnering with the Behavioral Health Department, I work in the Human Services Department on their Healing the Streets grant as well as with the Central California Alliance for Health on their MediCal Reform. So I think with our encampment resolution proposal, I'm hoping we can direct more of the money towards some of those housing related costs that will help people get back into housing and we can use some of those other sources for some of the services costs. And I don't know if that answers your question, but happy to clarify a few. Yeah, I think it does. Just the complexity and the costly nature of trying to resolve the homeless problem here and throughout the state and throughout the nation is just unbelievable in some the eyes of many and myself included. But I think that the fact that we do have a strategic plan and we're trying to get there as quickly as we can to address the homeless situation in our county. I do thank you for your explanation. It's a tough problem to resolve very quickly and it's going to be very costly. And I think that that gives a better explanation of just how we're moving on it and how costly it really is in Santa Cruz County in particular. So thank you, Mr. Ratner. Thank you. Are you finished? Sorry, thank you, Supervisor McPherson. All right, well, I'll just make a couple brief comments on item 27. I want to thank Supervisor McPherson and the Planning Department for discussing potential additional amendments for the Transportation Demand Management Program and the Sustainability Update. The Environmental Impact Report, the draft that has come out identified vehicle miles travel is the most significant potential impact of the Sustainability Update. And hopefully these improvements to the Transportation Demand Management Program, adding additional incentives and creating a funding program for Metro will help to address that. So I look forward to the next draft on that. On item 29, I also want to thank Supervisor Coonerty for bringing this to my attention and I think this application for putting assets to work, the Incubator Program will really help us leverage our county real estate assets to build the housing that is so desperately needed in our community, as Dr. Ratner was just saying. And I think we're well positioned to receive, to be accepted into the program, thanks to the Long Range Facilities Plan that we prepared with Gensler and approved last year. I certainly agree with item 37 that this 7.6 million for construction of the Children's Crisis Stabilization Program at the Freedom Health Campus is going to be a huge win for our community. I'm aware that they recently did this in Monterey and it's working incredibly well. The challenge is that they still don't have enough room and hopefully also the support of an Adult Crisis Center at Harbor Vet Building will help to address the issue as well. On item 41, I want to thank the Human Services Department and Housing for Health Division for quickly applying for the state resources and it's fantastic that we've received 2.37 million dollars for a camp and cleanup. Hopefully working with the City of Santa Cruz, we can be good partners on this and leveraging all the funds for various parts of addressing homelessness and encampment cleanup as Dr. Ratner just explained. Also item 43 approving $350,000 for new modular building for the Sobering Center. This is a much needed resource in our community and it'll be good to get that back. And finally on item 51, approving road closure for the Pleasure Point Street Fair on June 25th. It's just great to see more in-person events coming back and hope to see you all at the Street Fair on June 25th. Thank you. Is there a motion on the consent agenda? I move we approve the consent agenda. And that's as amended. Correct. Correct, yes. A motion by Supervisor McPherson to accept the consent agenda with amendments proposed by Supervisor Coonerty and seconded by Supervisor Caput. Any further discussion? Seeing none, roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. That item passes unanimously. All right. The consent agenda being passed with amendments will proceed to item 7, presentation by Brian Largay, the Land Trust Director of Conservation on plans for community harvest trails at Watsonville Flu Farm as outlined in the Memorand with the County Administrative Officer. Mr. Largay. Thank you very much, Chair Koenig, and thank you Board of Supervisors for allowing me to speak with you today. I just do you want to remark that I am so grateful for your service. Seeing the consent agenda reminds me what critical matters you're dressing. And I'm grateful for your leadership. So thank you. I'm here today to speak about the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County and some of our programs. And I have a slide presentation and I'll just say next slide is we make our way through it, if that sounds good. Thank you. Next slide. The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County was established in 1978. We're a non-profit organization serving all of Santa Cruz County. And our mission is to protect, care for, and connect people with the places that make this area special. And Santa Cruz County is a spectacular area. We are so blessed to live here. We'll be talking today about the Watsonville Flu Farms down in the Paco Valley, which is the top left picture here. Bottom left is from the Glenwood Preserve, where in Scotts Valley we manage endangered species habitat, cattle grazing, and recreational trails. The bottom center image is of the Santa Cruz Sandhills, which we manage for groundwater recharge, endangered species habitat, and sustainable fire management projects. And the bottom right is our Byrne Mill-Iron Forest in Coralitos, where we manage watershed protection, sustainable timber harvest, and recreational trails. Next slide, please. Our toolkit is that we protect and manage land, and by protect that means we engage in real estate transactions and put encumbrances such as conservation easements on land that prevent further development. We're involved in about 16,000 acres around Santa Cruz County and a couple neighboring counties. And we also accomplish what we do through partnerships. We collaborate extensively with agencies at the state, federal, and local level, regional level, as well as other nonprofits and businesses in the area. Next slide. Recently, some of our work is included the Highway 17 tunnel. Construction of that just got underway a couple weeks ago. We're building trails at San Vicente Redwoods, which should open this fall up in Bonnie Dune. Our trails at Glenwood are full of recreational visitors. We have about 100,000 people a year hiking on those trails. The wildflowers are still blooming if you need some exercise up there. And we're a fundraising champion for the rail trail, trying to get that built as soon as possible. And we're launching a new initiative down along Highway 101 to connect the Santa Cruz Mountains with the rest of the state of California with a wildlife crossing over Highway 101. Next slide. So today I'm here to introduce a new project to you at the Watsonville Slough Farm. We're calling the project Community Harvest. And this is an invitation to the community to harvest and enjoy healthy food together while learning about agriculture and nature thriving side by side. And this gets at one of our key themes where we try to make land, manage land, protect land to achieve multiple benefits. And in this case, it's a vibrant habitat and healthy food next to each other. Next slide. So this property is located off Highway 1 between the city of Watsonville and Monterey Bay. It's quite close to the Paco Valley High School. Here in the slide, it's encompassed in a white line encircling where you can see are some farm fields and then some wetlands winding through the middle of the property. Next slide. Next slide. This property produces vegetables and berries on 240 acres. The Paco Valley farmland is astonishingly productive. This one property produces 90,000 servings of vegetables and berries a day. That's sinking a little bit. The value of that produce is $3 million a year. It supports about 100 jobs. It also has extensive habitat areas. 240 acres of wetlands and grasslands, 200 species of birds have been observed there, listed that is special status, frogs and turtles occur on the property. And one of the exciting things is that this property does both together. It's not one or the other. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. The project was the result of an extensive partnership involving 11 different agencies and organizations shown here. In 2011, it received a Presidential Award for Coastal Partnerships and we're grateful to all of our partners. We collaborate with them still to get the work done there. Next slide. The community harvest project is the result of extensive outreach to the community. We had about 24 different tours of the property, several webinars. We posted flyers and notices in all the local grocery stores and beauty salons and neighborhood churches around the project area. We reached out to Pocro Valley High School and surrounding areas. And we are focused on food because what we discovered is a great interest in the farm production there and access to healthy food. About 90% of Pocro Valley high school families suffer from food insecurity. And with the upcoming construction of the Lee Road Trail, there's exceptional opportunity to have walking access from town to this property. It's about a half mile from the city. Next slide, please. So the goals are to provide public access to healthy food at Watsonville Slough Farm to protect the vibrant agricultural operations there and the natural resources and involve the community in planning. Next slide, please. Here's a close up of the Lee Road entrance that's Lee Road in the foreground. And you can see a finger of the slough surrounded by these are wood chips we laid down to suppress weeds. This photo was taken about a year ago. And the idea is to have a gateway at this entrance that will provide consumer harvest facilities and demonstration of sustainable agriculture in action. Next slide. By community harvest, we need food. There'll be harvest areas where people can pick produce. It'll be free. We anticipate partnerships and subsidies from our lease revenue to pay for the production. There'll be picnic areas and restrooms to enjoy the food, stations to wash and prep produce. We're currently collaborating with Esperanza Community Farms, a prominent local nonprofit that produces CSA community supported agriculture boxes for limited resource families in the area. They operate land on site. And this is an example of their recent harvest. We'll also have a farm stand where growers who operate on our property could sell their produce if they so choose. Next slide. We're also looking at demonstrating thriving nature side by side with agriculture, including trails, boardwalks and platforms and remodel of our barn, which we just started looking at recently. Next slide, please. The current status of the project is we're still in the design phase. We haven't yet submitted to the county. The property is zoned commercial agriculture. The regulatory compliance approach with regard to that zoning will be that consumer harvest is a principle permitted use. And the goal is to establish a concept design of the next couple of months and submit for regulatory review this summer. Next slide, please. The timeline is that we hope to go into construction next year in 2023, open to the public in 2024. We anticipate operating costs of about $100,000 a year. The land trust secures about $300,000 a year from the least revenue of the agricultural operations on the property. And so achieving that operating cost is that should be within our means. We hope to add boardwalks and extra wildlife engagement, viewing platforms and whatnot in 2025, and then perhaps the barn remodel if we go there in 2028. Next slide. So our next steps are to finalize the concept design, launch county review, continue to advocate and support as far as we can by securing funding for the Lee Road Trail, which is this connection between the city of Watsonville and goes right by the property. We hope the bridge part of the Lee Road Trail may eventually be supported. That would connect the property in Popper Valley High School all the way to downtown, which would be fantastic. And we are doing an awful lot of grant writing. We actually have a tour in just two weeks with the state parks. We've made the next round for a $3 million grant for funding, which we're optimistic about. Next slide, please. Oh, excuse me, that's it. Yes, your questions and any comments that you have, we're open to suggestions. Love to get insight into how to do this better. But we're also happy to answer questions. Thank you, Director Largae. Are there questions or comments from members of the board? Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. And I appreciate the board's willingness to have this presentation. I'd ask the land trust to daylight this because I mean, let me first say that if you haven't been to the property, it is one of the most stunning properties in all of Santa Cruz County and absolute hidden gem in South County to be able to open it up for access for the South County community, both with its heritage on the agricultural side, but to have nature within walking distance, to have that extent of open space and unspoiled open space, this will quickly become a real treasure in South County, especially given the lack of accessible parks and open spaces throughout the South County area. I think that this is going to fill an enormous need and also present a life lab and learning opportunity for members of the community. I had the privilege of touring it last year with Mr. Palacios as well and members of my staff. We are fully supportive of the application as it comes forward to the county. And I know that Mr. Palacios has also been working on this all the way since Measure U and of 20 years ago. So Mr. Palacios, I imagine you have a few words you'd like to say as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Larga. This is a very, very exciting project. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Yes, thank you, Chair Koenig, members of the board. Just want to give a little bit of history on this project. This project is a famous Thai property. Of course, if you go back, it was actually slated for development in the 1994 Watsonville general plan. And there were, it was proposed for housing and other things. And there was a big lots of fighting over that. The fighting was resolved in 2002 with the passage of Measure U and other negotiations regarding the establishment of Paro Valley High School. So at that time, the city of Watsonville, the county of Santa Cruz, and the Coastal Commission entered into a historic agreement to set aside this property from development, to protect it from development as open space. So that is 2002 and the promise was made at that time to the city and the county that the land would be made available to the public for open space and for recreation and other things. So this is a great moment for us. And we really appreciate it. Thank you to the Land Trust. And we really want to be supportive because I know the community needs open space in the whole county, but especially in South County, there's a lack of open space, a lack of trails, a lack of recreation areas. And so the ability to see this and stunning and beautiful property that has been preserved for future generations, but to take advantage of it for hiking and learning about environmental issues is all very, very important. And so we really support it. And thank you for the Land Trust. And we are here to support you in any way to make this happen. Thank you very much. Thank you, CAO Palacios. Supervisor Caput. Thank you. I want to thank you, Brian, for your presentation. And thank Carlos Palacios and Supervisor Friend for all the work they've done. It's exciting to see more open space and the public able to go in there and use it for South County. It's just a wonderful project. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor McPherson. I just want to acknowledge and I agree with everything that Supervisor Friend and Caput have said. I just want to say to the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, thank heavens you got here 44 years ago. Because what you have done in the past 44 years is amazing. Not the least of which recently was just participating very heavily in the wildlife crossing the Highway 17 at the Laurel Curve. What you have done throughout this county is, it makes it better for everyone and every segment of this county. So thank you for everything you've done in the past. And as you can see in your presentation that the public can see these things take time. And you have years of 25 and 28 and all, but that's what's needed to get these things done. It takes time, but you've had tremendous success in the past and you have a great vision for the future. So I really thanks the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. Thank you. And I just want to add my voice to the support of the Land Trust and Mr. Largae and specifically in their ability to work with communities and make sure that they're good neighbors in building these projects. All the projects that the Land Trust and Mr. Largae have been involved with in my district. It's done a fantastic job of reaching out and hearing concerns, addressing them, building them into the park process and making sure that we keep accessibility and preservation of our environment at the forefront. And so this is just another example of that. And I want to just take a moment to appreciate that particular skill, which is often not recognized, but incredibly important on projects like this. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. I'll just add that I had one opportunity to go out to the Slew Farm property. It is truly breathtaking. And yet I still had no idea that it was as large as it is. So I'm looking forward to it being open to the general public and to being explore. It's not all 480 acres, because I know a lot of that is slew, at least more of it. So thank you very much. I'll open it to members of the public. Is there anyone here in the chambers who would wish to address us on this item? Seeing none. Is there anyone on Zoom who wishes to address this item? We do have one speaker. Call in user three. Your microphone is available. Presentation. Having lived in the county for 40 years and 20 of those years being a public school teacher in Watsonville, farming is very near to my heart, especially organic farming and ecological farming. And I'll make a brief statement and then I have a question. We had a group of teachers and community members, parents called Farm Without Harm, because we advocated for organic farming next to the schools. And actually everywhere I do, I think it should be required that pesticides are not used and there's organic and ecological farming. I would have to take my children in from the playground at a messy school a number of times when there was spraying of the fields next to the school and their coughing and their eyes are watering. So you talk about we can make things better. This does sound like something we really need and about being good neighbors and preservation of our environment. We can enhance that by seeing that we are not poisoning the environment or allowing it to be poisoned and requiring organic and ecological farming. My question is, are the tour you mentioned, is that open to the public? Because that would be very worthwhile. And what number, how many of these? We have no further speakers for this item. All right, thank you. Then I'll return to the board. This is an informational item only. So if there's no further comments, I'll one more. Thank you, Director Larga for the presentation today. And right. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to present before you and thank you for all the kind words. In case it wasn't clear that the farm in question, the Watsonville slew farm is an organic farm and as long as people stay away from the tractors, it should be quite safe for visitors. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you very much. We'll now proceed to item eight, a presentation on the county's online budget platform to accept and file the 2022-2023 county proposed budget to be considered during budget hearings, accept the tentative budget hearings schedule, schedule June 21st, 2022 as the date of the budget hearings will begin. Schedule a public hearing on June 28th, 2022 to consider amendments to the county's unified fee schedule and take related actions as outlined in a memorandum of the county administrative officer. And for a presentation, we have our county budget director, Marcus Pimentel and Sven Stafford. I believe your microphone is off there, Mr. Pimentel. I think you're the first presenter. Good morning, Chair Cohen, and good morning to supervisors. Annually, my error. I'm proud to present to you today our new online budget for the county Santa Cruz for our proposed 22-23 budget. Before I jump into that, today's presentation is about navigating through the budget itself. Included in the board packet are more details about the proposed budget that will be conducted in deep and spirited budget hearings in later in June. So today, we just want to navigate you and orientate the public about our online budget. Before jumping into that, I am here with our principal administrative analyst, Sven Stafford, who really led this project and did a beautiful job in visioning how we can integrate the county's budget with our strategic plan to align our decision making and what we fund to how we get it done. This project wouldn't have been as successful as it already is, also without the partnership of many county players, county council, many members of our CAO team, but in particular our RISD department, Tammy Weigel, who's here today is our RISD director and two of their staff, Tom Meltonian and Jan Jong, were instrumental in designing this, custom designing this to fit our needs. And when we envision what an online budget could be, we far surpass that already in year one of this first version. So we're really excited about that. The goal of this project was to unite our budget policy, how we fund things to our strategic plan, but it's also to build trust, confidence and accountability into the budget process, being able to see within a department's budget their emerging issues, their links to their strategic plan, their commitments to the operational objectives, and to simplify the county's budget process, moving from a proposed document to a supplemental document to a concluding document to a adopted document that really does, does injustice into having a process that's clear and articulate in one space. You can see the whole decision process. So this year we do have a small printed version. We have our budget in brief that is meant to be a transitional document. It's a downloaded PDF 318 pages that offers the ability to see the key components of the budget in a printable downloadable form. With that, I want to jump over to our website. Thank you. And this is our proposed 2223 budget website. It lives within this strategic plan, this vision Santa Cruz County. And within the budget website, it begins with, how do I use this website? So we thought we'd put prominently right below the header, some navigation tips, including an instructional video on key elements to better understand and move quickly around the website and get the key content our community needs. We also have navigation tips. We have reference manuals. We have glossaries. Government is fearful of a lot of large words and often complicated information. So we have a very in depth glossary to help orientate any of our users to that. I want to move over into our economic outlook and financial summary section of the website. The website's grouped into some main components. And this is a great starting spot for anybody in our community. We've offered a more robust economic outlook for our, that recaps our national economy or state economy and what's going on here locally. We've, where we've been able to, we referred to our data share Santa Cruz content that's also rich out there in the community. So we're trying to bring in all these data sources and resources into one site and allow them to be interconnected. Within this section is also our financial summary. This is specific to the County Santa Cruz. This is about our proposed budget and it offers the users a glimpse of our forecast for the coming year. Some major highlights of our funding status by funds and more resources about our spending trends, our revenue trends. It's just meant to be a really nice, condensed way to get a quick summary of what's going on in our budget. There's also much more information in there about our personnel. You can see our line out in detail of our proposed budget and a very interactive debt server schedule where you can click a particular debt issue and understand how long it is and when it, when it will be paid off. There's also a wonderful section we're very excited about in what the County does. So within this section, there's five different options and one of them is your tax dollars at work. Thank you, Sven. So we begin with this section illustrating a narrative of when we drill down late into 2021 and really look at our funding structure. We noticed a trend in that our particular County is very unique and in the sense that we're systematically underfunded as compared to our County peers and peers across the state. What this chart illustrates is in the top left quadrant is Santa Clara County. They receive the highest per capita sales tax and property tax in the state and serve the lowest population in the state. They serve about 4% of their County population. Contrast that with the Santa Cruz County, we serve half of our population, 50% and at a much reduced rate. When we look at our peers, we're about 10, one tenth of our funding on property tax with our peers and about half of our property tax, our sales tax with our peers. So we are just systematically underfunded. It's a nature of how property taxes were allocated in 1978, Prop 13 and many of the changes that have happened over the last five decades. There's also a tool on how to see property tax. We've often thought about or talked about how few dollars we get out of property tax. We get about 13% of every property tax dollar paid. What we now have is ability to drill deeper into that. And for one example, you can look in this chart and you see of every thousand dollars in property tax, 568 goes to our local County schools, which is fantastic. Now you have the ability to drill into that and see those allocations within those schools and to see how it's spread throughout the county by schools. It's just we're trying to offer more rich content wherever we can in this very first online website. With that, I want to turn it over to Sven who will talk a little bit about county services. And then I'll come back with some concluding comments and we'll be available for questions. Thank you, Marcus. Good morning, board. As Marcus said, we provide some educational tools, some narratives for how to start thinking about and how we spend a billion dollars every year at the county. One of the nice features in this website is our new county services page again in partnership with ISD and specifically our GIS team. We were able to build this county services page so users can search for their address if they can use our current location. Julia, would you mind typing in 701 Ocean Street? We can use our current location and it will bring up a link to the supervisor, which will be Supervisor Coonerty, and also a link to the jurisdiction that provides municipal services. So in this case, it would be the city of Santa Cruz. And so we provide that information. There are other links and access to services that are provided on that view. And so there are just a lot of different things that people can look up and find out about how services are provided where they live. And so the other piece that we've tried to do is we provide a narrative, but if people want to find out the specific things that they care about, they can find that within the department budgets. And I'll just provide a brief example of how we've done this by looking at our newly combined community development and infrastructure department. And so as Marcus said, one of the things we were really trying to do with this new website was link the budget and the strategic and operational plans, which really means connecting the budget to the county's major work and connecting the budget to the impact that we're trying to have in people's lives to make them better. And so for each department, we've provided a mission statement department. In this case, we've provided an overview for the new department and org chart. It has general information about the total expenses, revenues, general fund contribution, and staffing. And then it provides a basic sort of organizational chart of how the department is organized. So we can see we have transportation. And I'm going to focus a little on community planning. I apologize for that. So within our permit center, you can see we have expenses of $7.8 million, funded staffing of 47.5 staff, and then operational plan objectives related to the creation of a permit dashboard, the creation of a greenlining pilot, and then the creation of the unified permit center. So all really important objectives designed to improve people's experience in the planning permit center. You can see if you click into the service, it provides a brief overview of what it does and some of the emerging issues around the creation of the permit center, staff support to improve services. And then again, a link to the planning dashboard that was created and presented to the board in January. You can also click into these objectives and see their progress. They're linked from the operational plan site. And so as you flip through the different services, the objectives come in and out and you get different views of each service. For those that want to dive even deeper, there are options up here in budget dashboards, budget details, and personnel details. In the budget dashboards, you can see that we've provided a view of expenses by service. So again, if we wanted to look at within community planning, which is about 7.8% of the total department, we can see that here the permit center is about 47% of that department of that services or that division's expenditures. So it gives you a little bit of a view into how that money is allocated. You can also see those views over time by switching to a bar graph or to a line graph. However you want to see it. And in our transparency portal, you can create all these views or all the way down to the object code of our budget. For folks who are a little more traditional and want just the numbers, we do provide that as well in the budget detail. Here again, you can sort by division. So if we wanted to look at community planning and then just the permit center, we can do that. We can see the expenditures in a traditional three-year layout with actuals, the current year budget and the proposed budget, and then also the changes. And so you can see that there are expenditures, revenues, the fund contributions, and then at the bottom the description of changes where we talk about staffing changes, changes to contracts, changes to fees, etc. Finally, we also provide personnel details for each department. And here again, you can see the staffing. And so if we click just into the permit center, we can see that 47.5 proposed and funded staffing. And you can see exactly what those classifications are and so what people are doing and what staff are actually providing this service. And so that's a brief tour. I would encourage folks to use the help pages. There's also an option to email us at budget at Santa Cruz County.us for folks that want to provide additional feedback and help us make the site better. We're really open to that, as Marcus said, this is our first attempt at doing a really developed online budget. And so we hope to be able to build off this and improve as we go forward. Turn it back to Marcus. Thank you. I'll conclude with, I showed before our prior versions of the budget, our downloadable PDF of our budget in brief. This website is now interactive across all devices, all platforms. So you can view it on your mobile phone. It navigates very seamlessly, easily would drop down menus. As Finn mentioned, there's a contact us on the website or any mobile device or any device at all. And you can enter your information, your name, and that comes to us to a routing tree. So we're creating more ways to interact with the public and really understand the questions that they have. We plan to do some community outreach in the summer and fall and prep for next year's proposed 2324 budget. And so we can consider the revisions and updates we might do to the website based on community feedback. And I want to come back to a couple points. It was nice not having to think about printing documents that are stored in storage lockers and cabinets all throughout the county. I don't know how many years go back in different departments or different offices, but if we stacked up every county budget that is on the county's property right now somewhere, probably be pretty high. So we're pretty excited about not being no longer producing that level of content that's really not very used from a historical perspective. We're reducing our environmental impact, which we're really excited about. And we're creating a dynamic tool that we hope can really go beyond the power users that have used the budget in the class and be able to make this a communication device. And I want to come back to thanking Carlos Plosius, our CAO, who really had a vision and pushed to say we can do better and we should do better. And we start thinking about how we link this to our strategic plan. Thanks to the board yourselves for your support and feedback through this process. I think a lot of county staff who we had focus groups, your board yourselves, your board analysts who gave us a lot of feedback from December through our launch on April 29th. And we were literally making changes the week before based on that feedback. And I really appreciate that. And I want to come back to thanking our ASD team. They were phenomenal in the work that they've done and the creativity spent leading the project. We had a lot of staff in the CAO's office, Eric Friedrich, who's here with us today, who had a CAPR project element of this. And we're just, we built a really strong platform that we're seeing a lot of possibilities in the future of using this, this new platform. And I think open up for their partnership. They're a really great company to work with and provide us a really rich, diverse content that we can now play around with and really do some wonderful data analysis. So with that, I conclude my comments and I, and I go back to our recommended actions. Again, this is not a budget hearing. This is setting in place the, to accept and file the 22-23 budget to accept the tentative budget hearing scheduled for June 21st through 23rd and our last day on June 28th to set the June 21st budget hearings of the first day of our budget hearings and set June 28, 2022 as a day to hold our public hearing on Unified Peace Schedule and direct the clerk of the board to publish all the official notices. So with that, it concludes our report. Thank you very much, Marcus. And Sven, are there questions or comments from members of the board? Yes, Mr. Chair. I'll just briefly say it's really great to see this come full circle from some years back. Supervisor Coonerty had me sit in his small Prius at the time. We drove all around the state when we were going county to county before we hired CAO Plosius to look at the ways that other counties were doing various things, whether the CAOs interacted the way that they provided transparent information to the community. We learned a lot of best practices, which I know that Supervisor Coonerty continues actually with the work that he does now. And this type of idea was one that was brought back at the time from that, but it was not as extensive or clear or transparent as what you have accomplished here. This is a really remarkable tool for the community to learn about the budget. County budgets, government budgets, although always available to the community always seem opaque to the community. And this really takes away that opaqueness and provides a clarity and transparency and the ability to drill down in a way that we've never been able to provide in this community before. And no other city or no other county within our region is doing. And so it's a great, it's a testament to the innovation of the leadership here in the county. But most importantly, it's a legacy moving forward in an expectation of transparency and availability of information in particular about the most important thing we do, which is the budget. And I appreciate that this is an iterative process. I know that there'll be that the feedback from the community now that this is out and from the county staff will make it continue to evolve. I know that as we continue to drill down, I'm sure there'll be things that we'll discover that need to be modified. But just having this opportunity is a significant shift in appreciation to you, Mr. Primitel, and also Mr. Stafford on your work on this project. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Coonerty? Sure, yeah. To echo Supervisor Friend's comments, you know, I think when we towards what we've heard were the best operating counties around California, we saw that there were some areas that our county was excelling in, but there were a bunch of areas and transparency and setting of outcomes, strategic plans, online documents was an area that we were pretty far behind. And I want to commend the staff for developing this. This is actually, yeah, as far exceeds any expectation I have. And the fact that you were able to do it in-house with the existing talent we have in the county is really great. I think it is a great communication tool. It's great for transparency. My one question was within the county, how are we planning to deploy this so that your average line level staff, your mid managers and managers are using this tool as a way to focus on, you know, when we have a lot of competing needs and demands on people's times, how are they focusing on using this tool as a way to set those needs and priority and expectations within their departments? The wonderful question. It's something we've been given a lot of thought to. One thing I didn't mention, we're phase two of a three prong project here. We've done a sprint project where we went live with capital projects. We've now gone live with our online budget. And in the fall, we started our last component of that, which is actually integrating this whole system into an operational budget. So what we're going to see next is giving our departments more tools. We started with a, let's satisfy the public demand and then come into the fall with providing those resources for the, for our county operations. So what we expect is in the development of next year's budget, staff will have more capability and a lot more efficiency in the development of next year's budget cycle. And once we're live with the fully integrated system, there'll be a lot more, I mentioned the word opportunity. There's a lot of opportunity. We've already started sketching out the vision plan of many different ways we can use this system. None of the website, but the power behind it. So we're really excited about that. So allow us to still be in the iterative process to try to listen and see what the needs are from an operational perspective and try to really understand how we can use this to better see those, suit those needs. Great. Thank you. I look forward to hearing about it. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Supervisor Caput. You're on mute. Supervisor Caput. There we go. Thank you very much for the report. I guess what I like about it, it's clear, it's readable, it's concise, and it's transparent. And I'm looking forward, actually, to seeing how it works and when we get together on the end of June, and we look at the budget. And hopefully, we're able to balance everything. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Supervisor Coonerty. I'll reiterate the comments and thank Supervisor's friend and Coonerty for taking the state to the state trail and finding out how we could improve our budget processes. But at that time, I think we saw that we were doing a pretty good job at when they were making that tour a couple of years, several years ago. I want to thank the CAO and Mr. Pintel, Stafford and Friedlick. But just to get down to some of the things we face, like no other county, in essence, in the past two years, of course, COVID's been with us all but the CZU fire. And this will allow us transparency to see how we can react to this. And we need to go into this budget session realizing we'd like to have more from some other agencies, if we could, we have a great many COVID expenses that we may not be reimbursed for. The road challenges going back to 2016-17 and the recent fires that we've had, and both of these are really disappointing. And collectively, they represent about 20 to 25 million dollars. And we're trying to see how a budget can work. It's not, they can't fix that without the money, those issues. And it's also worth noting that, as was stated, our county receives a very low share of property and sales tax revenues comparatively. And as Santa Clara County has 4% of its population in the unincorporated area, we have about half of our population in the unincorporated area. And that's a structural challenge to not, to those who presented the budget to us, but what we can do with what we have. And it requires a great deal of thoughtful planning and a request. And I think this really pinpoints what we're doing to make that transparent to the general public. And we're planning requests because of some of those limitations of what's coming in and what we have as a population to serve in this county. And so we're going to go for some more locally generated tax revenues that are needed. The proposed transit occupancy tax increase that'll still put us at or below those of many other counties throughout the state and the single use cup fee. One thing that is a concern too, our reserves that we did such a tremendous job in getting up to 10% are now down about the 7% level. And that's a concern if we should have another disaster of how we can accommodate something immediately. So I'm, with all that said, we face challenges that are just part of our budget that we have, that we have with the sales tax, the revenues we get. And I just think this is going to help us a lot and letting the public know what we're doing with the limited resources we have and the declining resources we have in some instances. This is a great presentation. And I think the public will be very appreciative of their ability to wind through this budget process as we go into it at the end of June. So thank you very much. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I'll just add, yes, this is a really fantastic win, both in terms of transparency and efficiency. I won't have to continue building a tower of budget books to the moon. And hopefully it'll be a lot easier to continue to prepare the budget going forward. And certainly, it's easier for my office to field questions about the budget. And it's really a pleasure to explore this tool. So thank you to you, both, and the whole project team. Are there questions from members of, or sorry, comments from members of the public? I think none here in chambers. Is there anyone on Zoom who would like to comment on this item? We do have one speaker. Monica Morales, your microphone is available. Apologies, folks. I was in there. Thank you, Monica. All right. Well, if there are no other members of the public wish to come in, I'll turn it to the board for action. Move the recommended actions. Second. The motion by Supervisor Coonerty, second by Supervisor Friend to adopt the recommended actions. Any further discussion? Seeing none. Clerk, roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. That item passes unanimously. Thank you. That the proposed budget being accepted and the tentative budget hearing being scheduled for June 21st, 23rd and June 28th, we will now proceed to item nine, which is a public hearing to consider resolution confirming proposed fiscal year 2022-2023 benefit assessment rate and service charge reports for county service areas number 53, number 53N, and number 53S for mosquito abatement and disease control as outlined in the memorandum of the Agricultural Commissioner. And for a presentation, we have Amanda Paulson and Juan Hidalgo. Good morning, Chair, members of the board. It's a pleasure to be here. And today with me is our Assistant Vector Control Manager, and she's going to be introducing today's item. Good morning. I'm Amanda Paulson, the Assistant Manager for the Mosquito and Vector Control Division of the Agricultural Commissioner's Office. The county service area CSA 53 was established in 1993 and then expanded in 2004 and 2005 for South and North County respectively to provide mosquito control and public health services to Santa Cruz County. These services are funded by a benefits assessment and rates are adjusted each year to account for inflation. On April 12th, 2022, the board set today May 10th as the public hearing date on the proposed benefit assessment and rate reports that will provide operational funding for mosquito and vector control in 2023. The CSA rates presented have previously been approved by the board and are outlined in the rates attachment and either remain at the same level as in 2021 and 2022 or have rates and a consumer price index increase of 3% as approved in previous elections. These rates have been posted in the local newspaper and have made available to the public at the clerk of the board and Mosquito and Vector Control website prior to today's hearing. If approved, rate reports will be forwarded to the auditor controller by August 10th to be included in the 22-23 property tax assessment role. We recommend that the board open the public hearing to hear objections or protests to the proposed three assessment rate reports for CSA 53, which include the north and the south in the original. Then please close the public hearing and consider adoption of resolution confirming the benefit assessment rate reports for the fiscal year 2022-2023. Thank you for your support. Thank you. I'll officially open the public hearing. Are there any comments or questions from members of the board? Seeing none, we'll open it to the public. Is there anyone here in the chambers who wish to comment on this item? Seeing none, is there anyone on Zoom that wish to comment? We do not have any speakers for this item. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. You know, Mr. Chair, just one brief comment of appreciation. I know that we try in every year to acknowledge that this we're very fortunate in our community to have those that are working on this issue work on this issue. It's a very small cost for each community member to really prevent what could be a very serious outbreaks, which we've seen across the world in other situations. And so I just want to appreciate the staff that they do this work behind the scenes and I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Thank you. So we have a motion by Supervisor Friend and a second by Supervisor McPherson. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend? All right. Coonerty? All right. Caput? Supervisor Caput? All right. McPherson? All right. And Koenig? All right. Thank you. That passes unanimously. Thank you. We have that resolution being adopted for the benefit assessment rate reports for county service areas. We will now close the public hearing and proceed to item 10 to consider adopting resolution approving the Santa Cruz County Active Transportation Plan, which identifies projects to reduce barriers to walking and biking as outlined in the memorandum of the Deputy CAO Director of Community Development and Infrastructure. For a presentation on this item, we have Russell Chen and Amelia Conlon. Welcome. I don't think so. Go ahead and press the gray button on the base of the microphone. Thank you. Slide presentation that you pulled up for us. Good morning, Chair Koenig and members of the board. My name is Russell Chen. I'm with Community Development and Infrastructure and I'm here with me, Amelia Conlon with Ecology Action. And we're here to present the Santa Cruz County Active Transportation Plan. Next slide, please. This is what we'll cover. We'll go over the plan overview and timeline, public outreach process and findings, recommendation process and overview, project evaluation, and plan implementation. Before we get into the plan, I'd like to acknowledge that this was a collaborative effort. We partnered with Planning Health Service Agency, Ecology Action, bike Santa Cruz County, and we also had a stakeholder committee that was made up of residents, local business owners, and other agencies. And they provided valuable input. Okay, next slide, please. The Active Transportation Plan, the vision is to create a network of biking and walking routes that connect key destinations within the county and are safe, comfortable, and accessible for community members of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. The plan is for the unincorporated county. It doesn't include the cities. The cities have their own plan. The plan is focused on the urbanized areas of the county. It updates the 2011 Bicycle Transportation Plan. It is also the first comprehensive plan for future pedestrian facilities. The plan will help prioritize projects, especially because of limited funding, will help identify most competitive projects for grant funding opportunities. It also includes connections to the coast rail trail, but does not address trail design. With that, I'll turn it over to Amelia. Thank you, Russell. Next slide. So my name is Amelia Conlon. I'm a planner with the College Action, and we were happy to partner with the county on this plan. And I'll talk about the project timeline and the public outreach process. This was about a two-year process to develop the Active Transportation Plan, and our timeline was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We had originally planned on starting public outreach in spring of 2020, but that was pushed to fall 2020. And then we spent most of last year developing the draft recommendations that you see in the plan. We also held two temporary demonstration projects to test out some of the draft recommendations from the plan, and I'll talk a little bit more about those in a few slides. We developed the draft plan in fall of 2021 and released the draft plan for public comment this spring, and we're here before you to present the final plan. Next slide. So here's an overview of the public outreach that was conducted during this planning process. We did again have to shift our outreach strategies due to COVID-19 away from in-person events and towards social media and digital outreach. We held three virtual public meetings, and in shifting away from outreach at in-person events, we ended up doing some in-person tabling in parks and neighborhoods, trying to reach people where they were already walking and biking. And that ended up being an effective strategy and allowed us to reach people in different parts of the county that were not reached through our online outreach. We also held the two temporary demonstration events to test out some of the draft recommendations from the plan. We developed a project website with an interactive map where people could leave comments on the barriers to walking and biking and the types of projects that they would like to see in the future. And we received 342 comments through that mapping tool. We received 600 responses to an online survey and reached about 4,500 people through social media. And we had a great group of partners helping to share those social media posts and get the word out there. As Russell mentioned, we pulled together a stakeholder committee at the beginning of the planning process that included residents from around the county, local business owners, and staff of partner agencies and organizations, and they advised us throughout the planning process. We also held eight neighborhood stakeholder group meetings. And this was a really a way to flesh out the comments that we received during the first phase of public outreach and make sure that we were hearing from folks from across the unincorporated county. And so we held small group meetings with stakeholders from Davenport, from each of the communities in the San Lorenzo Valley, from Santa Cruz Gardens, the Amesti neighborhood, and the College Road neighborhood outside of Watsonville. And that really helped to give us a clear picture about the barriers and constraints to walking and biking in those areas. And then finally, we presented to the Regional Transportation Commission's advisory committees, both the Biscule Advisory Committee and the Elderly and Disabled Transportation Advisory Committee, as well as the Community Traffic Safety Coalition throughout the planning process. Next slide. And here is just a very high level overview of what we heard throughout all that public outreach. We heard from the majority of survey responses that respondents that they would like to be walking or biking more for their daily trips to school to work and for errands. So there was a lot of interest shown in safe walking and biking. We asked people about the top barriers or the top concerns that they have about walking and biking now in the unincorporated county. And the top response, probably not surprisingly, was missing sidewalks followed by unsafe intersections, aggressive drivers and high traffic speeds. And when we asked people at the public meetings what types of projects they would like to see going forward, separation from motor vehicle traffic was a theme that came up. We heard about a desire for more separated bikeways that have a barrier between people walking or people biking and moving traffic. Of course, we heard a lot of support for the coastal rail trail, support for more sidewalks and more off street paths. So really a lot of interest in walking and biking and hearing that more separation is going to help people feel safe doing that. Next slide. We also hosted two temporary installations as part of the planning process. And this is something new for Santa Cruz County. The goal here was to test out some of the draft recommendations from the plan on a temporary basis as a way to get feedback from the community and hear whether they thought that these projects should be made permanent. It's also a way to test how the designs work in practice. So really a trial before the county moves forward with a permanent project. And our first project was a class one separated path on Green Valley Road between a Mestee Road and Pinto Lake Road, connecting a Mestee Elementary and Pinto Lake City Park. And we heard that this stretch was really a priority, especially for the school community. And we heard a lot of positive feedback from the public on this project. And the county has actually moved forward and successfully applied for a clean California grant and been awarded $5 million for a two mile, 10 foot wide separated path, along with bus stop improvements and landscaping and education programming at a Mestee Elementary. So this is exactly what we're hoping to see from this type of project. We want to demonstrate that it works and that it has community support and then move forward with grant applications. Next slide. Our next installation project was on Portola Drive between 41st Avenue and 36th Avenue. And the design for this project was based on the Portola Drive streetscape study that was completed a few years back and had a lot of community input. For this project, we temporarily changed the roadway from two lanes in each direction to one lane in each direction with a center turn lane. And that allowed us to install temporary class four separated bikeways on each side of the street. We also added some intersection improvements. And the feedback on this project was much more mixed. We did hear some support from cyclists who liked the changes. But we heard a lot of frustration from community members about the slower travel times going through this corridor. And so the recommendations for Portola Drive were revised as a result of that feedback from class four separated bikeways to class two enhanced bike lanes. There is some more work that the county is doing to study future changes on Portola Drive and there will be more community process before any major changes are made on this corridor. Next slide. And then the final stage of the public outreach process was releasing the draft plan for public comment. That went live on our project website at the end of February and was up for a month. We received 67 comments from the public and that resulted in 16 new or revised projects in our project list and 42 changes overall to plan content to text or maps within the plan. Next slide. So I'll talk a little bit about how we developed the recommendations in this plan and then turn it over to Russell. We had a two pronged approach here. Our first step to develop these recommendations was working with a consultant Copenhagenized Design Company and they conducted a data analysis of all county roadways based on existing bike and pedestrian facilities, collision data, disadvantaged communities data, and the number of public comments that we received around each corridor. And they used that data analysis to score each roadway in the county and then selected the top 30 top scoring streets to develop corridor recommendations that impacted the entire corridor, entire length of a street. We also added to that list all of the projects or all of the corridors that are prioritized for bike and pedestrian use in the general plan sustainability update. So making sure that all of the streets classified as active connectors and main streets were also included on the list to have corridor recommendations developed. And then Copenhagenized developed a typology system that Russell will go into in a moment and assign each of those top scoring streets a typology recommendation. We also fleshed out that recommendations list by looking at public comments. So all of the public comments that we received during public outreach were reviewed and all of the ones that related to a specific location or that could be addressed through an infrastructure change were reviewed with the project team. And we really took a deep dive into all of these comments and had a conversation about what a possible recommendation could be to address the issue that was brought up in the public comment. And so that process resulted in 136 recommendations for new sidewalks for intersection improvements and other spot treatment recommendations throughout the county. And then finally, we added recommendations from previous planning efforts for new bike and pedestrian projects to this plan in order to give the county a comprehensive list of bike and pedestrian projects going forward. And so recommendations for county roadways from the Highway 9 Complete Streets Corridors plan are in this list. Projects from the Complete Streets to Schools plan, which was completed a few years back. And then the segments of the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail in the unincorporated county are added to the project list as well. And with that, it will turn it over to Dressel. Thanks, Amelia. So I'm going to go over some of the recommendations, next slide, please. I'm going to go over some of the recommendations and the corridor typologies. These recommendations in the plan address entire roadways and long stretches of roadways. The picture on your left there is a long distance rural route, rural roadways that are too narrow for other types of bike infrastructures like on Eureka Canyon, Glenwood Drive. And treatments may include signage, striping, to alert drivers to watch for cyclists. And then the two pictures in the middle there are traffic calm residential streets. These are low volume, low speed residential streets. Treatments may include curb extensions, road bumps, and share arrows. And then the picture to your right is a class two bike lane. These are typically reserved for roads without large number of destinations. These are painted lines along the shoulders with at least five feet width for cyclists. Next slide, please. The two pictures on your left there are class two enhanced bicycle lanes. These are recommended for existing class two bike lanes with large number of destinations. They include striped buffers, green conflict markings, and protected intersection treatments. And then the picture in the middle there is a class one shared use path. These are typically on rural roads that connect important destinations for people walking and biking. They're paved path that is completely separated from the street. And then last we have on your picture on the right is a class four separated bikeway. These are on medium to high volume urban streets such as Soquel Drive. These are on street bike paths that is separated from the motor vehicle by a vertical element. Next slide, please. This map kind of shows an overview of of all the improvements, corridor improvements, recommendations, and these are the short term ones. Next slide, please. Sidewalking intersection recommendations. These are sidewalks and spot treatment type recommendations. There are a number of recommendations in this plan. So I'll just highlight a few of those. We have green conflict markings for bike lanes. These are typically at our intersections where our highest conflicts are. We also have high visibility pedestrian crossings. So our typical crosswalks, standard crosswalks are two parallel lines, and the high visibilities are the ladder and the piano style crosswalks. And then leading pedestrian intervals. This is at the signalized intersection. And when the signals change, this will give the pedestrians a head start. And then to take advantage of some of our routine maintenance, we're already incorporating some of these recommendations as part of our resurfacing projects. Next slide, please. So our general plan update will include a draft vision zero policy. And then planning, we're also planning on design criteria updates to support bike and pedestrian facilities. And as part of our active transportation grants, we have and we will continue to have education encouragement programs associated with infrastructure improvements. And then as part of the plan recommendations, we'll be looking to develop bike parking. With that, I'll turn it over to back over to Amelia. Thank you. So next, I'll talk just a little bit about the evaluation criteria. And so the next step of the planning process was to score each of the infrastructure projects included in the plan based on the criteria that you see on this slide. And I want to provide some context about the purpose of this exercise. We're not trying to determine the order in which the county constructs projects, or say which projects will be constructed and which ones won't. We're really trying to provide a tool here that you as decision makers and county staff can use to match these projects to the best possible grant funding source and to prioritize between projects, knowing that there's never enough funding to go around to construct all of these. So just wanted to provide that context. And so each of the projects was scored based on five criteria, starting with safety. This was the most heavily weighted criteria. And so we're looking at proximity to bike and pedestrian collisions here. This is something that grant funders look at in your grant applications. And we know that this is not a perfect metric. We know that there are some corridors in the unincorporated county where people don't feel safe enough to walk or bike now. And so we don't see bike and pedestrian collisions. But this is the best available data that we have to work with. And it is something that grant funders look at. So this was this was the way that we had to use to create the safety metric. We also awarded points to projects if they close a gap in the existing bicycle or pedestrian network, or if they install new infrastructure for people with disabilities. And so this was primarily new sidewalk projects or new bike facility projects where there are no bike facilities now. We also awarded points to projects that are low in cost or complexity. And the goal here was to provide the county with a list of projects that may be relatively easier to install. So projects that are not the multi-million dollar multi-use path, but projects that involves mainly signage and striping and may be able to be constructed using local funds. We also looked at equity and awarded points to projects that serve disadvantaged communities as defined by the regional transportation plan. And again, this is something that grant funders look for. And finally, we awarded points to projects that were identified in community comments. So if a project came up frequently and had five or more comments around that location, it received five points. If a project was identified by two or more community comments, it received five points. Next slide. And so after we had completed that scoring exercise, we developed a top priority project list for each of the districts. Again, these are not necessarily the only projects that will be constructed in these districts, but this is meant as a tool for you to be able to see which projects score highly using this criteria. And we were aiming for a top five, top priority project list, which ended up being very tricky because many of the projects were tied for the number one or the number two spot. So you can see here the top eight priority project list for district one. I think we have 20 something projects on the district two list. Again, that doesn't mean more projects will be constructed more quickly in district two. It's really meant as a tool. Next slide. And I'll turn it back over to Russell. Thanks really. So plan implementation. We have a large list of projects with limited funding, as you know. So for large projects, we'll need to leverage local funding with grant funding. And then we'll also look to incorporate some of these projects as part of development. And we'll also take advantage of ongoing maintenance projects, as I mentioned earlier, to incorporate bike and pedestrian improvements. We have done this in the past, and we'll continue to do this. Next slide. The recommended action is to adopt the resolution approving the Santa Cruz County Active Transportation Plan. With that, is there any questions? Thank you, Mr. Chan. Thank you, Ms. Conlon. Questions or comments from members of the board? Yeah, I really appreciate this being a board member of the Regional Transportation Commission, as well as Metro. It's really essential. Probably as many comments of any subject I get is on transportation, not only of those two agencies, but throughout my visits in the county. And I just want to congratulate the Public Works team for this effort, especially you, Mr. Chan, and Ecology Action and Ms. Conlon. And for being such a small county, we really have enormous challenges with the topography we have, and so forth, of our transportation systems. And it's terrific that we do have this transportation plan. We really needed, as a footprint, to say which way we want to go. Excuse the pun. But I just really do appreciate you're getting forward, moving forward. You're correct. There's a lot of projects and little funding. We haven't heard of that element before. But in the meantime, if I could just encourage every motorist, as you said, we could make everybody as motorists and drivers. If we just tone it down and not be so aggressive in our driving, and you just slow it down a little, just tone it down. I think we could do that in every part of our society throughout this county. But this is really something we desperately need. And I think it's a good footprint again to get us started and going somewhere. And it's taken a lot of time to get here. It'll take a lot of time to implement this, but it's desperately needed. And people really wanted it in Santa Cruz County. So I appreciate all of your efforts and everybody else who participated in this effort. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Mr. Chair, I'll add on to that appreciation, but also note that our county has one of the highest incidents of vehicle versus pedestrian and vehicle versus bicycle incidents in the state of California, depending upon the year. Sometimes we have some of the highest levels of fatality and injuries associated with it. And it's been that way for quite some time. Having a planning document like this position ourselves for better funding moving through the state, as was evidenced by Ms. Conlon, the work that was recently done on Green Valley Road is the first step of future improvements that will erase that issue within our community from a safety standpoint. It's not just affording people and alternative needs of transportation. It's also affording them a safe method to do alternative methods of transportation. And I think that this document is an important marker to accomplish that because ultimately, we're going to need the funding for these improvements throughout the county. So I just want to add that appreciation and also the recognition as Supervisor McPherson had noted that we have challenges in our community and those challenges are represented yearly in the switters data through California Office of Traffic Safety that do show that we have a disproportionate number of issues here that face pedestrians and bicyclists and hopefully a document like this can position ourselves to make those improvements moving forward. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Yes, certainly we face enormous challenges in terms of safety here on our roads and we know that members of the public, as the plan shows, want to change modes, want to do more walking and biking. And so it's fantastic to have this list of projects that will help them to do that. I know as Supervisor McPherson said, I do receive lots of comments about potential safety improvements on our roads, whether it's more sidewalks or safer intersections. And throughout the course of creating this plan, I've forwarded a lot of those over to you and it's great to see all of those represented in the plan. I've had lots of opportunity to provide comments myself on this plan. Those are also represented here. So I think it's a very comprehensive plan and hopefully we can execute as much of it as possible. And I'll just say also with the pop-up projects, really both of them are incredibly valuable. I don't think we can expect everything that we conceive of on paper to ultimately be successful. And I think that most importantly, we realized just how important this build, measure, learn process is and hopefully we can continue to do more similar projects going forward on some of the more significant changes being reviewed here. So that's a, Supervisor Caput, is there anything that you wanted to add? Just thank you for the report. I think it's great for the county. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I'll open it for public comment. Does anyone add a public to this or comment on this item? We have no one here in the chamber wishing to speak. Is there anyone on Zoom? We do have one speaker, I assume. Apologies, we now have two speakers. Colin, user three, your microphone is now available. Conversation with a friend. I just now silently heard part of this, but I have a question. What is eSign mean? And also we're talking about safety and walking and driving and these radar signs are not safe. They're highly dangerous. We're getting microwave radiation. I have a painful reaction in my body every time I go by one and there are signs that could be put up about crosswalks that just show a person walking across. It's not like you're getting zapped. So my question is what part of this involves wireless microwave radiation technology? Could you respond to that please? Because that is not safe. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Teresa Rodgerson, your microphone is available. Thank you. Hi, this is Teresa Rodgerson from county public health and I just want to say that I was in a lot of meetings over the past year or so with Russell and Amelia and I just wanted to commend them both on their leadership in this project. It was very challenging to do outreach, especially during the pandemic, but we found creative ways to do that and not only connected with the communities in the unincorporated area but also made some connections within our agencies. We were working side by side with the road crews and that sort of thing. So it was really like you were saying earlier, it was a really educational process to go through and we hope it was the same for the community members that were engaged in it with us and just wanted to say thank you to Amelia and Russell for their leadership. Thank you. We have no additional speakers. All right then I'll return to the board for action. Move the recommended actions. Second. Motion by Supervisor McPherson, second by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Seeing none. Clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. All right. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. And Koenig. Hi. Thank you. That item passes unanimously. Thank you. The Santa Cruz County Active Transportation Plan being approved. Thank you. Again, both Mr. Shannon and Ms. Conlon. We will proceed to item 11. Item 11 is the Board of Directors of the Davenport County Sanitation District. We'll have a public hearing to consider ordinance amending Title III of the District Code establishing 2022-2023 water service charges and ordinance amending Title IV of the District Code establishing 2022-2023 sewer service charges for the Davenport County Sanitation District. Direct the clerk of the board to place the ordinance on the May 24, 2022 agenda for final adoption set Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge reports and take related actions as outlined in the Memorandum of the District Engineer. We'll officially open the public hearing. And for a presentation on this item, we have Ashley Trujillo. Thank you. Thank you, Board. So we are here today to talk- We'll just check your microphone, please. Does that work? I think so. Yes, thanks. Good morning, Board of Directors. This is Ashley Trujillo, Senior Engineer for the Davenport County Sanitation District. Today was set as the date for the public hearing to consider the ordinance establishing charges for the sewer service charges for the District that will be effective as of July 1, 2022. These charges have been developed by the District's Revenue Consultant Hornberger Engineering and are set to be in proportion with the cost of service for each customer classification. The water service charge is proposed with a 4.9% increase with a 5.1% individual maximum. The proposed sewer service charges would generate $100,000 to cover the District's share towards approximately $2.8 million in grant-funded projects. The remaining funds generated by this increase are necessary to meet projected operation and maintenance requirements of the water system for the town of Davenport. With the District required to set aside capital to move forward with the grant-funded water projects and taking into account recent completed sewer projects, the capital budget for the sewer system has been reduced to $14,000 for this fiscal year. The reduction results in a proposed sewer service charge decrease of 3.5% overall with a 2.7% individual minimum decrease. Therefore, we recommend that the Board hold the public hearing and, upon its conclusion, consider approval and concept of the ordinances amending District Code Title III, Chapter 3.08, Article III, Section 3.08160 through 3.08180 for water service charges and District Code Title IV, Chapter 4.08, Article III, Section 4.08160 through 4.08180 for sewer service charges for the Davenport County Sanitation District. Also, direct the Clerk of the Board to place the ordinances on the May 24, 2022 agenda for final adoption. Set Tuesday, June 28, 2022 at 9 a.m. or thereafter is the date and time for the public hearing on the sewer service charge reports and direct the Clerk of the Board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week or two weeks before the hearing in a newspaper of general circulation. I'm available for questions. Thank you, Ms. Trujillo. Are there any questions or comments from members of the Board? The only comment I have is, as we all know, the Davenport folks pay some of the highest water and sewer rates in the state and the country because there's a small district and the costs are spread among a small number of users. I want to take a moment to thank Ashley and the public work staff for doing everything they can to keep those rates low, but also ensure that we're meeting the water quality standards and the other requirements and keeping the system functional. And it's always delicate balance, but I appreciate over my time on the Board the work that's got into balance those competing needs. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Kennedy. Any further comments or questions? Seeing none, open it for public comment. Is there anyone on Zoom wishing to comment on this item? We have no speakers via Zoom. All right, then I'll return it to the Board for action. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Motion by Supervisor Coonerty, second by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Seeing none, Clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Chappett. Aye. Big Person. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. Thank you. That item passes unanimously. Thank you. Those ordinances being adopted in concept. The ordinance will be placed on the agenda for final adoption on May 24th and the rate changes we placed on our June 28th agenda for a public hearing. I'll officially close the public hearing on that item. And we will proceed to item 12, which is as the Board of Directors of the Freedom County Sanitation District, public hearing to consider ordinance amending Title III of the District Code, establishing 2022-23 sewer service charges for the Freedom County Sanitation District. Direct the clerk of the Board to place the ordinance on May 24th, 2022, agenda for final adoption set to stage in 28th, 2022 at 9 a.m. or thereafter is the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge reports and take related actions as outlined in the random of the District Engineer. And for a report on this item, we have once again Ashley Triglio. Thank you very much. And I'll officially open the public hearing. On March 8th, 2022, the Board set today is the date for the public hearing to consider the ordinance establishing charges to the sewer service charges for the Freedom County Sanitation District. It will be effective as of July 1st, 2022. The proposed service charges reflect an overall increase of 7.4% with a 9.4% individual maximum. These increases are necessary to adequately fund the District's treatment, maintenance, and operational costs, as well as fund capital improvements for the District's aging sewer system. We therefore recommend that the Board hold the public hearing and upon its conclusion consider approval and concept of the ordinance amending District Code Title III, Chapter 3.08, Article III, Section 3.08, establishing the 2022-23 sewer service charges for the Freedom County Sanitation District. Direct the clerk of the Board to place the ordinance on the May 24th, 2022 agenda for final adoption. Set Tuesday, July 28th, 2022, at 9 a.m. or thereafter, as the date and time for a public hearing on the sewer, on the service charge reports. And direct the clerk of the Board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week for two weeks before the hearing in a newspaper of general circulation available for questions. Thank you, Ms. Trujillo. Any comments or questions from members of the Board? Seeing none, are there any members of the public wishing to comment on this item? I think we have no speakers for this item. Right, then I'll return to the Board for action. I'll move for approval. Second. Motion by Supervisor Caput. Second by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Koenig. Aye. This item passes unanimously. Thank you. That ordinance being adopted in concept will return to for a final hearing on May 24th and the rate charges will return for a public hearing on June 28th. I'll now thank you, Mr. Hew. I'll now proceed to item 13, a public hearing to consider, I'm sorry, I will close the public hearing for item 12. I'll move to item 13, public hearing to consider in concept ordinances of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Santa Cruz Amending Chapter 7.128 and 13.10 of the Santa Cruz County Code for proposed modifications to setbacks for commercial cannabis cultivation in the commercial agricultural zone district and technical amendments and make findings of exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act, schedule the ordinances for second reading and final adoption on May 24th, 2022 and take related actions as recommended by the Planning Commission and as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer and for, I'll officially open the public hearing. And for a report on this item, we have our Cannabis Licensing Officer, Sam Laforte. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Could I have the presentation? Mr. Laforte, just double check that your microphone is on your own item. This is, yeah, 13. One moment, Sam. I just need to share it via Zoom. One moment. Thank you. Good morning, Board Members. I'm here today to present ordinance amendments as recommended by this Board and the Planning Commission. For context, the Board has not been unanimous with regard to these amendments. I just want to give a quick review of how we got here. At the August 24th meeting, a Board Member identified and elevated community concerns surrounding cannabis cultivation in the CA zone adjacent to residential uses. The Board directed staff to evaluate those concerns at a future meeting. On October 19th, staff presented an analysis of those concerns in a variety of options for the Board to consider moving forward. On October 19th, the Board motion that was passed stated, revised setbacks in the CA to align with the original code approved. This includes a 400 foot setback from residences to outdoor grow areas, which is twice the setback then allowed in other agricultural operations. The original code also allowed for setbacks down to 100 feet, subject to a level five use permit, as allowed in all other zone districts, and to further define setbacks for indoor cultivation to be 100 feet from residences to cultivation area and 50 feet from nursery operations to residences. Staff presented the code modifications to the Planning Commission at their February 9th hearing, at which time the Planning Commission recommended the Board approve the proposed amendments and CEQA determination. For clarity, the CEQA determination the Planning Commission reviewed was only applicable to Chapter 1310 modifications, and the CEQA determination presented for the Board has been revised per county council to address changes to both chapters 1310 and 7.128. The proposed setback modifications will align the CA zone with all other zone districts for outdoor cultivation by increasing setbacks to 400 feet from adjacent residential structures. This was the originally approved setback until it was modified in June 2020. Setbacks for indoor cultivation are proposed to remain the same. Setbacks for nursery operations are proposed to decrease to 50 feet. This is due to the nature of nurseries being similar to other commercial agricultural nurseries. The plants at these nurseries cannot flower or there should not be any odor associated with these operations. Additional modifications to code are all minor in nature. They include clarifying some language to meet the original intention of code, removing some redundancy in paperwork, shifting the responsibility to county staff, and allowing the CLO to designate responsibility to staff and formalizing the security plan approval process. Lastly, I'd like to answer any questions the Board may have on the proposed ordinance modifications and say thank you for your time today. Thank you, Officer Laforti. Are there questions or comments from members of the Board? Mr. Chair, I don't have any questions. I do have some brief comments. It won't surprise the Board, obviously. I'm still disappointed in the way that this process has gone over the last few years and it really only impacts two districts within the county. In fact, the Board over time functionally wrote out some zones that would have impacted other districts be yet. Here we are with all the impacts occurring within two districts. Those are the two districts are arguing for greater setbacks and lack of conflict with residential areas but haven't been able to find a board majority in support. I mean, just to put this in perspective, a large part of this discussion over the last few years has been based on what ended up becoming a false premise of a sense of economic windfall and economic development and generation possibilities associated with an industry that's in total freefall and economic collapse right now. None of the tax numbers that were estimated from the CLO's office or the CAO's office over the last few years have come to fruition. Many of the cultivators are seeking to not renew their licenses because of a difficult market but yet the way that this Board is responding is saying the way that we're going to deal with that is by expanding the possibility into a market that isn't even possible to do it in areas that can create conflict as opposed to limiting it in areas that they would never be able to fill anyway in areas that wouldn't create conflict. It doesn't make any policy sense. It doesn't make any reasonable sense and there isn't a board member here that would actually vote to put this next to their house but yet they're doing exactly that right now. And just to give a sense on sort of what these setbacks are, I mean, just to put into perspective, I mean, most of these are smaller. Right now I'm coaching my son's Aptos Little League team and one of the coaches on the team and the T-ball fields are actually larger than the setback proposals that we're having here where somebody's going to be literally living with their bedroom window 100 feet in some situations or 50 feet if it's a nursery such as a pitching mound, a distance. I mean, these are exceptionally small setbacks that are being proposed and we're celebrating them as though that there's some sort of expansion but they're not really an expansion that has any true meaning for any of my constituents or Supervisor Caput's constituents. I still think that since a lot of this was sold on a bill of goods on economic development that didn't end up being reality and I've heard my colleagues on the board bring it up. I mean, Supervisor Koenig, it was a key emphasis point of view at the last meeting because the numbers were provided by the cannabis licensing officer about the quote unquote theoretical tax that would be lost. Should we do the restrictions that were from parcel line that would only allow for 800 parcels to be grown as opposed to 1400 parcels yet none of those numbers are even coming anywhere near reality and so why in the world when we're basing it off of that as a concept would we continue to expand and create these conflicts with residential zone districts? It's just been a disappointing process altogether. It continues to be disappointing and I hope that the board would still consider the opportunity to move back to what we discussed which is to provide greater protection specifically against residential zone parcels. By the way, this still puts nearly all of the growing in my district. It still puts nearly in a small portion in Supervisor Caput's district. It wouldn't extend it into any other district. As you know, there are absolutely no sites within Supervisor Coonerty's district and there are at least as of now as one site in Supervisor McPherson's district. So you'd think that there would be some sort of understanding or deference to those that are representing the area and the things that we believe to be issues still allowing the entire industry to occur within our district but instead trying to find a balance between that and the residential areas. So I'm not going to be supportive of I mean just like I was last time of what's being proposed today. I'd welcome the thoughts of my colleagues on this in regards to whether there's a way to continue to make this better. The Planning Commission was was equally divided on a 3-2 with the exact same concerns and so that's I do have appreciation though for all the work that Mr. Laforte has done over the last few years and Ms. Sereno in particular. I mean it's an evolving and difficult industry with a lot of challenges associated with it. I just think that county staff that we need to challenge ourselves that when we make fact-based statements that help influence public policy. When those statements don't end up bearing fruit over time you need to come back and actually acknowledge to the board in the community that they're wrong because policymakers make decisions based on these estimates and this information. So we have an equal responsibility to come back and say look you passed all these ordinances based on a promise that did end up being true should the board consider maybe revisions as a result of that. I've never seen that happen. Still waiting for it to happen and I think that that's part of what's led us down the path of where we are today. Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you Supervisor Friend. Any other comments? Members of the board? Yeah. Supervisor Cabot. Thank you. I won't repeat. I agree with Supervisor Friend. This directly affects residents and people in District 4 which is my district and also Supervisor Friend's district. I guess what I'm getting out here is I almost always say I can't remember going contrary to something that is very personal to somebody, some other Supervisors district. I figure they know their area better than I do so I usually go along with their recommendation. In this case District 4 and Supervisor Friend's district are we have to deal with the great majority almost of all of the you know kind of the setbacks. So I found it difficult to understand why three out of the five would actually support this change. But anyway if one of the other Supervisors reconsiders and votes along with myself and voting no on this but it's kind of late in the game right? Thank you Supervisor Cabot. All right seeing no further questions or comments. Any members of the public wishing to speak to this item? We do have one speaker via Zoom. Vicki Shepard your microphone is available. Thank you Supervisors. I want to give a special thanks to Supervisor Friend and Supervisor Cabot for again challenging the other three Supervisors to consider how this would feel if it was in your backyard and I am so so disappointed with the way that vote came down at the last Board of Supervisors meeting as I am directly affected to the 110 Crest neighborhood. I've spoken with others across the county in South County that are terrified about the fact that these setbacks are now even smaller to cultivation projects than you would even have at a cannabis shop in downtown Sacramento and downtown Santa Cruz. Now the planning commission voted that these proposed changes are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act CEQA but is our understanding of CEQA that the county has the responsibility to provide evidence to support its claim that these changes are exempt from CEQA and this has not been provided. Common sense would dictate that reducing the setbacks from what was previously proposed for indoor greenhouses and nurseries would more likely negatively impact neighborhoods and the environment as it will ours. And we had so many neighbors show up, so many people from the county show up asking you to take this into consideration and what my perspective and many others was that this was a preordained decision by the other three county members and I am extremely disappointed. Thank you, Ms. Shepherd. Thanks, thank you. We have no further speakers for this item. All right, then I'll return to the board for action. Ms. Cheryl, make the recommended action. Let me just preface because as a supervisor friend asked for input and I'll miss these dialogues that we have had over this issue for all these years. I'm sympathetic and I understand the frustration. I think the big difference is that this is an area that's zoned on for commercial agriculture which means that it's the place where commercial agriculture will occur in our county. My district has a place that's zoned for college and educational use and it has big impacts and sometimes the board has been supportive of trying to mitigate some of those impacts and sometimes they haven't. And we also are the place where almost all the county services, the jail as well as homeless services are provided and I would, I have neighbors every day asking me to move those services out of the city and into the unincorporated areas of the county. So each of us has specific impacts that are felt in our district that are different than other districts and we have to try to make the best policy. I'll point out again that in these greenhouses you could have hemp with no essentially regulations or setbacks that would have the same odor impacts that it would have. You could have flowers being grown using pesticides. You could have all kinds of commercial ag uses if you treat cannabis as a crop. This is the most regulated crop that we allow in our community and we're trying to find a balance between allowing it to be an industry but while also creating setbacks and impacts. Because of some of the market failures you may be seeing many of these greenhouses moving towards industrial hemp where there will be virtually no, will there be no county regulation or setbacks and so you could have similar impacts or more impacts if we don't create a way for the cannabis growers to operate in this county. So I'll move the recommended action. Motion by Supervisor Coonerty, second by Supervisor McPherson. Any further discussion? Supervisor Caput? Yeah, one if county council can explain one more time why this ordinance does not require a four-fifths vote rather than just a simple majority. Because the law allows for this ordinance to be adopted by three-fifths. Zoning ordinance doesn't have to be adopted by four-fifths. Okay. Any further discussion? Oh, Mr. Chair, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Supervisor Coonerty's comments. I think that maybe then this board or future board should consider on future updates that we, since these, it appears as though people feel that this is a well-regulated and non-impactful industry that we expand this into maybe timber production zones or other zones that were within third and fifth districts so that we can at least share that responsibility across the county and give more opportunities for the cannabis industry to be throughout the county. Because historically, we've moved it into one specific area for maybe that would actually be an interesting discussion for this board to have is ways that it can move into other agricultural ancillary zone districts. As you know, those are agricultural zone districts that the board specifically precluded and perhaps moving forward. That would be a discussion to have, but I appreciate Supervisor Coonerty's comments on that. I'll be voting no on the item. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. All right. Seeing no further discussion, clerk will call vote, please. Supervisor Friend? No. Coonerty? Aye. Caput? No. McPherson? Aye. And Koenig? Aye. That item passes three to two. Thank you. That ordinance being approved and concept will return to our May 24th meeting for final adoption. And I'll close the public hearing. Right. We have remaining on our regular agenda today a 130 item. So we will now move into closed session. We'll take a 10-minute break and convene closed session at 11.50. And we'll see you back here for open session at 1.30 p.m. And there are no reportable items from closed session. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. We'll now resume the regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors with our scheduled item, item 14. Before we do that though, clerk, will you please call the roll to make sure we have everyone present? Absolutely. Supervisor Friend? Here. Coonerty? Here. Caput? Here. McPherson? Here. And Koenig? Here. Thank you, Chair. You have a quorum. Thank you. So we'll proceed with item 14, a public hearing to consider in concept ordinance of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Santa Cruz repealing Santa Cruz County Code sections 1310-660 through 1310-668 adopting new sections 1310-660 through 1310-664 and amending sections 1310-312, 1310-322, 1310-332, 1310-342, 1310-352, 1310-362, and 1310-372. Regarding wireless communication facilities, adopt resolution, affirming amendments are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, schedule the ordinance for final adoption on May 24, 2022, and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the Inform Director of Planning. And for a report on this item, we have David Carlson, Senior Resource Planner. Thank you, Chair Koenig. The item would overhaul the county's wireless facilities regulations by repealing and replacing the existing wireless regulations. On December 7th, the Board conducted a study study session on the proposed ordinance and on March 9th of 2022, the Planning Commission held a public hearing on the proposed ordinance and recommended approval by the Board of Supervisors. Could you bring up the slides, please? Okay, thank you. Okay, so I'll start with some background information on regulation of wireless communication facilities and then explain why our local regulations need to be updated. I'll also include some images later in the presentation demonstrating some of the changes. The Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 was intended to promote competition and reduce regulation and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies. The federal law preserves local zoning authority over placement, construction, and modification of wireless facilities, but with certain limitations. The county can't discriminate amongst providers or effectively prohibit personal wireless service. The county must act on permit applications within certain timelines and may not regulate based on the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions. Therefore, our local zoning authority can address issues such as siting, design, and operational impacts of wireless facilities, including designating zone districts where they are allowed, height limits, screening, and camouflaging standards, and address some physical impacts of placement and operation of wireless facilities such as vegetation, modification, grading, lighting, and noise. The county's existing wireless ordinance is over 20 years old, and over that time various additional federal and state regulations and legal rulings have been issued to keep up with technology and streamline the local permit process. The first two limitations on local zoning authority that the county can't discriminate among providers and can't prohibit wireless service have been interpreted by the FCC and the federal courts to mean that the county must allow a wireless service provider to substantially reduce a significant gap in service, even if service is available in the same area by a different provider. However, the county retains the ability to require the gap be reduced in the least intrusive manner, and that has typically been determined through extensive alternatives analysis and on certain applications by applying certain aesthetic requirements. Regarding permit processing timelines, the FCC has mandated shot clocks, which are very aggressive timelines for communities to act on certain types of wireless facility applications, and technological advances in experience with wireless facility installations have led to new definitions and requirements in federal and state law for small wireless facilities, modifications to existing facilities, and installations in the public right away. Comparing the existing and proposed new ordinance is detailed in the crosswalk document attached to the board memo, and some of the major changes are highlighted on this slide. Currently, co-location is only encouraged in the existing ordinance, and in the new ordinance it would be required unless there is no existing facility that would provide substantially similar coverage. The list of prohibited zone districts would remain the same, but there would be some additional exceptions listed, including small cell facilities, co-locations, and modifications of existing facilities. Exceptions to prohibited zone districts would be considered based on an alternative analysis that documents a substantial reduction of a significant gap in the least intrusive manner. The new ordinance includes height standards with a requirement to minimize height and allowance for exceptions to height based on the same exception criteria. Whereas the existing ordinance requires processing all new wireless facilities permits at the zoning administrator level, the new ordinance proposes different permit types based on the type of facility. Basically, a discretionary permit including standard public noticing would continue to be required for new non-co-located wireless facilities, but other common types of facilities would be processes building permits or encroachment permits. And the new ordinance includes new sections addressing facilities in the public right away and modifications of existing facilities. The different shot clock timelines reflect the nature of certain types of wireless facilities, co-location of wireless facilities and eligible modifications of existing wireless facilities, for example, have the shortest timeline for the county to act on the application of 60 days. By definition, these types of facilities can generally be constructed with minimal to no visual or operational impacts subject to certain criteria. The key criteria in the proposed ordinance for co-located facilities is not defeating any concealment elements of the existing wireless facility or adding concealment elements to the co-location that would render the facility completely non-visible or architecturally integrated with the building or surrounding environment using screening or camouflaging techniques. So essentially the facility looks like a normal part of the building or surrounding environment. Additionally, the new ordinance would allow ministerial processing of new wireless facilities on existing commercial, industrial, or public facilities, including schools. The key criteria for these types of wireless communication facilities is either complete concealment so the facility is not visible at all or architecturally integrated like previously described. And by the way, this image is of the Wilson Tire facility structure in downtown Soquel and there's a couple of wire facilities on the roof of this building. The antennas appear to be to look like stove pipes and then the equipment enclosure looks like a normal maybe air conditioning unit enclosure that you would see on the top of a commercial building. And then this is an image of a public storage facility on Portola Drive and there is an existing wireless facility on the roof of this building behind that parapet in the back. So that would be completely concealed. It's also become increasingly common to construct small wireless facilities on existing infrastructure in the public right away and the new ordinance includes a section specifically addressing these types of applications. They would generally be processed as ministerial encroachment permits by the Community Development Infrastructure Department provided they meet definition of a small wireless facility or represent modifications of an existing wireless facility that qualify as an eligible facility's request and that they meet specific criteria and the ordinance request for other types of wireless facilities in the public right away would not be processed as encroachment permits only but would first require discretionary conditional use permit processed by the Community Development and Infrastructure Department prior to obtaining an encroachment permit. The new ordinance includes objective criteria for review of wireless facilities in the public right away that qualify for an encroachment permit only to minimize impacts of these facilities in the right away. The criteria include a list of prohibited locations specific criteria for wood utility poles and metal streetlight poles dimensional criteria including height and volume of antennas and equipment and equipment are the same as the definition in federal law of a small wireless facility. Additional criteria for wood utility poles includes elements designed to minimize the visual clutter on the pole including shrouding the antenna concealing the cabling equipment enclosures flush mounted in no wider than the pole and for metal poles their criteria is meant to achieve the same goal to minimize clutter but they have an advantage in that they are hollow and can house the wireless equipment internally or in separate ground-mounted equipment boxes and here's a couple of images of wireless facilities on wood utility poles in the right away the image on the left is actually a simulation and you can see the wireless equipment near the bottom of the pole below the transmission lines and you can see the antenna on the top of the pole above the transmission lines and then on the right you can see the antenna below the transmission lines and below the streetlight they're on the side of the pole and then you can see the equipment near the bottom of the pole. And then here's an example from a manufacturer's brochure of a metal streetlight pole that is designed to house all the equipment internally to the pole with the antenna above the light standards. And there's an image on Ocean Street with the county building in the background and the Starbucks on the corner and that is a wireless antenna on top of that streetlight pole in the median and the equipment cabinet is in the background to the left under that tree on the side of the road. The new ordinance includes a section specifically addressing modifications of existing wireless facilities to fully and accurately reflect the provisions of federal law, the spectrum act of 2012 that apply to these types of projects. These installations are called eligible facilities requests which is defined as a modification that doesn't represent a substantial change to the tower or base station. There's detailed criteria in the ordinance defining a substantial change. And again, the key criteria is that the proposed modification must be limited in dimension and must not defeat the existing concealment elements of the existing tower or base station. These would be processed as ministerial building permits for encroachment permits depending on their location. And in this image, there is an existing facility in this tower on top of the Ben Lomond fire station. And so an eligible facilities request here that is within that same enclosure, meaning it does not defeat the existing concealment elements would be processed as a building permit only. And I'll show a couple of other examples of eligible facilities requests that can include additional equipment or modifications of equipment on a tower such as this, as long as it meets certain dimensional criteria in terms of height and width. And then I wanted to show finally a couple of images of this is a monopole tree tower in Aptos. And this would be a, you know, this was originally a new wireless facilities. And so that would be processed as a discretionary permit but also an eligible facilities request on this current installation could potentially be processed as the building permit. And then here's another image of a monopole disguised as a tree at the Positiempo exit off of highway 17. And I don't even, I don't know if you can notice it but there is a tree in there that has antennas on it. There's a fake tree in there that has antennas on it. And so overall the changes in the new ordinance generally consist of clarifying language, removal of repetition and overhaul of the overall structure meant to facilitate more efficient administration of the ordinance. There's new provisions for ministerial encroachment permits that'll provide more efficient process to comply with the shot clock timelines and federal law. Certainly there remains many discretionary aspects of some of these types of applications and an effort was made in the new ordinance to provide language that will also facilitate more efficient processing of discretionary applications for wireless facilities. In addition, because the existing ordinance applies both inside and outside the coastal zone, staffers recommending repealing and replacing two identical versions of the ordinance, one inside and one outside the coastal zone. And so in this way, the existing ordinance will remain in effect inside the coastal zone until certification of the new ordinance by the coastal commission. And so staffers recommending that the board of supervisors conduct a public hearing to consider the proposed amendments to the Santa Cruz County Code and local coastal program that modify regulations related to wireless communication facilities, adopt the attached resolution, finding the proposed amendments are consistent with the general plan and local coastal program and exempt from further environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act. And direct staff to file the CEQA notice of exemption and submit the local coastal program amendments to the California Coastal Commission for certification. Approve in concept and ordinance repealing Santa Cruz County Code sections 1310.660 through 1310.668, adding sections 1310.660 through 664, amending sections 1310.312.322.332.342.352.362.372, regarding wireless communications facilities outside the coastal zone, approving concept and ordinance accomplishing the same thing regarding wireless communication facilities inside the coastal zone, schedule both ordinances for second reading and final adoption on May 24th, 2022. And direct staff to implement the amendments outside the coastal zone 30 days after adoption and inside the coastal zone upon final certification by the California Coastal Commission. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Carlson. I'll officially open the public hearing. And are there questions from members of the board for Mr. Carlson? Supervisor Friend. Yeah, thanks, Mr. Chair. I just have more of a comments and questions with appreciation for Mr. Carlson for all of his work that he's done throughout this process, the community outreach, the work with coastal commission, et cetera, leading up to today. There's really no question in my mind, especially given the amount of outreach I've received from the community requesting these modifications over the course of the years or just improvements to sell coverage in general, that this is really one of the most important investments that we can make toward both equity, safety and environmental issues in our community. On the equity side, many, many, many residents in both in my district and some of the other districts that are disadvantaged, young residents, local residents of color disproportionately use and rely on wireless communications for their entire internet access. It is to disadvantage those communities by having poor access just continues to propagate the inequities that we have an ability here to solve. And we also saw highlighted during the pandemic the essential lead on it. On the safety side, there's no question with the tragedy that we had at Aptos High School, many people attempting to call 911 that were unable to. In fact, 80% of calls to our local 911 center come in from cell phones and not landlines in many rural areas where there's car accidents or accidents involving pedestrians or bikes. There's an inability to call for help as you know, every second counts in situations like that. In the tragic fires that occurred in Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Coonerty's districts, we were pushing out alerts to people on phones that they weren't getting as a result of having inadequate cell coverage and people were also trying to call other loved ones that were unable to because of lack of coverage. So from a safety standpoint, there's no question. And even on the environmental side, as we've seen an increase in people working from home and not having to commute, this provides an opportunity on the economic and environmental side to really do though, to help improve those things. I mean, you would think based on the coverage capacity, the coverage and capacity we have in our county that we're living in an exceptionally rural area and we're not, we're right in the shadow of Silicon Valley and one of the greatest economic engine generators in the history of time. And yet we have coverage that would make you think that we were somewhere completely different than that. And so I do support these changes. I think that they're absolutely important for the reasons that I outlined. And I'd like to see our continued investment in equity recognize that many people are relying on these for both the life safety economic component and for just their access to the outside world via the internet and we're not doing enough so far. And I think today will be the first day and starting to change that and ensuring that they have that access. Thanks, Mr. Chair. I thank you, Supervisor Friend. You're the last one. I totally agree with Supervisor Friend. There's two words, safety and equity. Now we just really experienced that and we're able to respond. We did as well as we could. We did very well with what we had. But I think as Mr. Carlson said, this has been a long time in the making. This hasn't been updated to this extent in 20 years. And Lord knows how much our capabilities have increased in that period of time. I just say it's about time. I look forward and I thank the commission staff for submitting its comments. But I look forward to working out the differences that we have with them. But this can't come soon enough under the circumstances and we have another fire season staring us in the face right now. And we can't do this fast enough for the safety and the equity in our community. So thank you for putting so much time into this and a great presentation. It's much needed, has been for a long time and it's about time. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, I've got a question, okay. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. With the status quo of the way it is right now, the change would be making it faster and easier and more streamlined, right? To put in these facilities. So what I'm getting at is technically today with the way we're doing it, we still can put in cell towers if we needed to in certain areas. But what is this big rush to the future right now? As we go forward, is it because we want to streamline it and make it easier and have less input from the public? Or is it because we have some other agenda? Can you answer that? I think that the main answer to your question and one of the main drivers here is the FCC's rulings over time and legal rulings over time that have sort of outrun our ordinance. And we need to keep up with the new shot clocks, the FCC orders on small cell facilities and eligible facilities requests. Those are all putting strict timelines on the county to act on some of these applications. And so we're trying to facilitate that in the updated ordinance. Okay, that's gonna affect the shot clocks will affect the time limit that the public would have for input, is that correct? So for an application that requires a public hearing, there would be no change in the opportunity for the public to have input in those situations. There would be standard public noticing and public hearings to take that input into consideration. Yeah, but the deadline for the public input would be a shorter timeline. No, there would be no shorter timelines applicable to the public. The shorter timelines are applicable to the county to act. And what we have, the way that we've been trying to work around with that, currently is by working with the providers to what's called toll of the shot clocks and come to an agreement with the applicant to actually allow us to go through the public hearing process. But that is, that's not required by federal law. It's something that we have implemented in order to work around the existing shot clocks and our existing ordinance, but we're proposing to fix that in part with the updated ordinance. Yeah, when I hear the words equity and all that, those words, how is that affecting, I guess, a real quick question would be, and then the safety concern. At Aptos High School, do they have a cell tower facility there right now? And they had one before the horrible incident that took place a year ago? To answer that question, no, they don't. And there's one proposed, kind of by highway one, that would help address this issue moving forward for next year. But of course, it's taken a long time to get through the permitting process because of our lengthy permitting process, but no, there's no tower there. And in fact, there's no ability, I mean, functionally, there was no ability for many of the students to be able to call 911 as a result of that. And as you may recollect, Survisor Caput at the last hearing we had on this, there was a parent that had called in to just talk about their inability to get a hold of their own kids at Aptos High as a result of the inability to text or call them during this incident. And that's because of this lack of service and this ordinance, while it doesn't actually create new cell phone facilities, it provides the framework by which the carriers can increase throughout the community so we can anticipate that it'll do that as a result. And that's why we heard from the sheriff last time abdicating for the ordinance and the parents at Aptos High the same thing from a safety perspective. Right, now on the safety perspective, I find it hard to comprehend the fact that they couldn't call 911 from Aptos High School. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It's from a wireless line. There's very limited coverage and capacity. So it's very easy to overwhelm the capacity that's there with so many people having wireless devices. It's very easy to overwhelm and slow down the system and call as a result of it. And by the way, even our own Reverse 911s are done to cell phones, alerts are texted that way. And if you don't receive it, you don't receive it as Supervisor McPherson and Supervisor Coonerty knows that's what happened during the fires. Even some of the PG&E blackouts in advance of them happening, this is how a lot of notices are sent out and without the coverage, people aren't getting it. But yeah, I mean, look, I know that I've seen, I know you drive down freedom, you're well aware of the large gaps in coverage and different parts of freedom. There are some sections that have some distributed antenna systems around there but the area right around Aptos High and up into that hillside does not have coverage. Okay, and then I guess Supervisor McPherson can answer this. When the fires took place, the lightning fires, how many self-towers actually burned down along with fire? Do we have any idea? Because self-towers will burn down also or the poles holding them up or the communications, I'm sure were affected. I don't have the answer to that. Yeah, does anybody have an answer to that? Supervisor Cabot, I don't think there's anything to attempt to answer your- I don't, we don't have, I don't know, I don't know that we have that and he self-towers up there at all. So I just don't, I don't have the answer though. Yeah, Supervisor Cabot to attempt to answer the nature of your question. I think we probably, I don't know the exact, if any self-towers were destroyed during the fire but I think the issue that Supervisor McPherson was raising of many of his constituents not receiving reverse 911 notifications or being unable to text out or call out during the emergency was really in relation to the current conditions, the current level of service in the Santa Cruz Mountains rather than any specific self-towers being destroyed. I think it's just that there's not very many of them out there today. Okay. I guess I'd add from the, in the third district, thousands and thousands of telephone poles burned. And so, so there was no landline coverage and now most of my residents because of changes in state laws can't get landlines. So unless they have adequate access to cell phones, they essentially have no communications ability to call emergency services or to be notified of emergencies. Okay. The other would be under the status quo that we have, we were able to put individual cell towers in those areas so before. So what I'm getting at is the rush to the future here is shorter shot clocks and less restrictions and more streamlining to put in cell towers. So, I mean, we had years of under the status quo putting in cell towers in certain areas. So the big change is a rush to do this, right? No, I think we get conventional rush. Well, the conventional telephone poles and so forth are not part of the future. We're not going to go back to the future on that one. This is, we're going to have to live with the communications network that we're going to have in the future. And this is going to provide it to more people more quickly and it's, I just think it's about time we do it as I stated before. Yeah, but my point is we're able to do it under the status quo that we have now, right? Getting cell towers in those areas. I would say Supervisor Caput that it's not so much a rush to the future is keeping up with what has been happening at the federal level and in the courts. And that's what we're trying to do with these updated regulations is bring them up to date. Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at is too, and it's all the money that is on the side of Verizon and T-Mobile and all that. You know, the little red dots on the map, they're all competing and they have a lot of money. And I'm getting at they're part of this rush also. They're going to benefit from it. And then you have the public, you have certain people that do have concerns with it. And when you have all the money on one side and then you have individual people on the other side, it's like PG&A and what is that? That movie that Brokovich, you know, it's trying to stand up and saying that there is a problem in a certain area or whatever. And then that's what makes me a little leery on when I see a big change coming, money telling us one thing and the other side saying, well, what about my voice in this? Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any further questions or comments from members of the board? Seeing none, I'll open it for public comment. Is there anyone here in the board chambers that wishes to address us on this item? Please approach the podium. Hello, my name is James Ewing Whitman. Wow, two years ago to 16 years ago, this room would be full. Let's see, on today's information page 241, 14D 13.10.664, this number 14, I believe, has only 157 pages, it's a lot of stuff to print up tonight. So this has to do with the indemnification of individuals, members in this community that are making these policy decisions. You know, I guess we have a lot of things to thank Mr. Clinton for besides his 1996 signing and what is it, the FCC 702. So, you know, the military's greatest silent weapons to control their enemies since before 1959 or frequencies. The first through fourth generation, that's only 35 different frequencies, that's generally zero hertz through six hertz, very useful military weapons. When people call the fifth generation, it's over 3000 frequencies. So it should go one, two, three, four, 297, and that's overlap from two gigahertz to over 300 gigahertz. You know, you can do your own research, but in 1994, the Rwandan genocide, that was done through frequencies. There's a lot of information out about that. And I moved into this county, 1993, I never had good cell phone service there. That's probably one of the reasons why I'm so healthy, but or that's questionable anyway. So we used a landline, landlines are virtually disappearing. You can't find a pay phone anywhere. So you guys are really practicing a Hegelian dialect. You're creating a problem in making solutions where I actually wrote down some pretty unpleasant notes here that I'm just not going to say, but I wish this isn't the end of this, it's just the beginning. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wetman. Seeing no one else here in the chambers, we'll take it to Zoom. Is there anyone on Zoom who wishes to comment on this item? Yes, we do have five speakers on Zoom. Ariel Strauss, your microphone is available. Thank you, good afternoon. My name is Ariel Strauss, I'm an attorney with Green Fire Law in Berkeley, California. And I represent a number of residents in unincorporated Santa Cruz County. And I wanted to start by pointing out that I believe in a statement Mr. Carlson made regarding no change to the zones that are subject to the various restrictions and policies of this new ordinance is incorrect. The new ordinance removes the rural residential and the rural agricultural zones in 1310-66-0-C4 from restricted zones. It means that those zones are no longer subject to discretionary zoning process. I also want to point out that the primary motivations for these changes is our changes in federal law that apply to the public right of way and to small cells. However, the changes that you're proposing are also being applied to macro cells that under the ordinance can be 75 feet tall that are generally built on private property. And the visual impacts of those are very significant. And it's very important that you have public input because from my experience representing clients in the Pasadena County through this process, through the public input process, the designs are dramatically improved. And the federal shot clock, and which is also imposed by the state is 150 days, which is a reasonable amount of time to get through with the public process. So I think it's very important that the needful changes and the relevant changes not be pushed through alongside changes that really are not in the benefit of the public. And particularly those are changes to the macro cells on private property. And particularly it changes to eliminate the world with a denture on the royal cultural zones from restricted zones that would subject them to discretionary process. I also want to point out the weakening of the comparison analysis with Mr. Carlson very correctly pointed out as something that the county can demand and in the past has demanded. And the change has been from conclusively demonstrating requiring that applicants conclusively demonstrate. Thank you, Mr. Strauss. Well, to only having substantial evidence. Matthew Kauffman, your microphone is available. I'm coming through. Yes. Yeah, I wanted to address the 1310 660D Exemption section. It currently, as proposed, it's intended solely, it exempts those intended for personal non-commercial uses such as shortwave radio. This is a substantial reduction in the exemptions language that currently exists. And there's a couple of things that concern me particularly. One is the exemption only applies for the first part of this for occupants on the site where facilities are located. So that would prevent things like a business owner from putting a ham radio or business antenna on their facility. It prevents remotely controlled amateur radio stations and it also prevents repeater stations which might be located for use in emergencies, for instance, that might be located on a business building or might be located on private property which is not where the repeater licensee lives. The other part is that the end of this says wireless communications facilities on privately owned property used solely for public or quasi public use or exempt. It's not clear to me whether that used solely is meant to modify property or meant to modify the facilities. If it only modifies property, then that's again a substantial reduction. I think given that these ordinances only get passed every 20 years, we have this opportunity to fix more than just the FCC requirements. So I would put that in there. I would also like to see that exempt facilities like amateur radio and public safety antennas are actually eliminated from all permitting requirements when co-located on other structures. And dear to me is that we have an opportunity here but are not taking it to put in language that allows us to expedite disaster rebuild and in kind of replacement. Right now I'm trying to do a disaster rebuild of a tower and it's very slow and the county's part of that. Thank you, Mr. Kaufman. Call in user five, your microphone is available. Then what we need is reliable safe landlines. This is a depth technology of microwave radiation from beginning to end. The key problem I see is the dictatorship of the corporate state. Big oil, big pharma, big telecom including Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, SpaceX and more. They write the laws, dictate policies and pollute the planet. You didn't include any of the pollution in your report, did you? The result, worst marriage ever when corporations get in bed with government because we all get screwed and we all get poisoned. The consequences we're seeing our ecosystem collapse. The disappearance and death of birds and bees and trees. And I have before me pictures here of dead birds. This article, hundreds of thousands if not millions of birds died during 2020 US Air Force 5G exercise in New Mexico. You have received over the years documentation of the harm of this technology. Also, Dr. Martin Paul. 5G, great risk for the EU, US and international health. Compelling evidence for eight distinct types of great harm caused by electromagnetic field, exposure and the mechanism that causes them. Martin Paul, P-A-L-L-S-W-S-U dot E-D-U. This is a document from 1918. You should have a presentation by a doctor on the adverse health effects from this technology. Thank you, Ms. Darrell. You were sent a letter. And I will just clarify that as explained in this item we don't as a county have jurisdiction to regulate environmental health impacts or other health impacts from wireless communication. So if you have an issue with anyone that does have an issue with those elements of this should really talk to their state representatives or federal representatives. Thank you. Caller ending in 1192, your microphone is now available. Hi, hi, this is Gail. And I just wanna say that any law that is unconstitutional such as threatening the life and health and safety of people is people have a duty to resist that law. So I have a manual here from Rome Laboratory Air Force Base in New York 1994. And it's titled Radio Frequency Microwave Radiation Biological Effects and Safety Standards, a review. One of the title of pathological reports, Soviet investigators claim that the central nervous system is highly sensitive to radio frequency and microwave radiation. The NIOSH technical report summarized the results of a pathological study published by A.A. Letovet and ZV Gordon in 1960. The researchers reported that several CNS related disorders were discovered among 525 workers exposed to RF microwave radiation. The symptoms were listed as hypertension, slower than normal heart rates, an increase in the histamine content of the blood, an increase in the activity of the thyroid gland, disruption of the endocrine hormonal process, alterations in the sensitivity to smell, headaches, irritability, increased fatigue. Other researchers have acknowledged similar biological effects. EMF fields show alterations in the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex and disruption of the activities of neurons. Just skipping around here, exposure to microwave radiation has been observed to cause a disruption in the behavior of animals. Researchers indicate that behavior may be the most sensitive biological component to microwave radiation. This is an equal opportunity destroyer of health. Even if you believe this is safe, these effects are still happening to you. Cataracts in humans is another subject. Exposure to microwave radiation is known to cause cataracts in the inside. Caller ending in 7617, your microphone is now available. This is a winner for Thomas, and I'm so glad that you're so up on FCC regulations that when they tell you to go to Germany and dye in one of the ovens with Auschwitz, that you're gonna be so happy to do that. Because somebody tells you to do something does not mean it's right. Last in the FCC, it has been legally, the court case saying that the FCC, there are no safety limits. The safety limits that they said they had, they are not proven. There are no safety limits. If you really care about those kids at Baptist High School or the black people or anybody, you'll take away their cell phones and put in land lines. Microwaves are unsafe, you know it, and you are aiding to the downfall of humankind. Those kids at Baptist High School, how many of them are on antidepressants and ADD drugs because they can't relate the wireless and they don't even know what's wrong with them? Senator, Supervisor Cabot has a lot of great points and this bit about wireless being more important, wrong. If you look at the history of safety, the fires, the earthquakes, the problems we've had across the nation, it has been good old landlines which are more dependable. Oh, there's so many problems here. There's so many things you said which are just so bad. You should be demanding landlines. Good copper landlines are more dependable, more reliable and they don't hurt people. We got it. Thank you, ma'am. Caller ending in 7887. Your microphone is now available. Hello, this is Andrea Baron. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes, thank you so much. So I've lived in Santa Cruz County 46 years. I'm talking to you on a plugged in copper landline. I could speak all afternoon. I want to address the health issues. I know what you've been talking about. I listened to Mr. Carlson's presentation and everything in present law about it being concealed, architecturally integrated, et cetera, et cetera, disguised as trees, air conditioners. I want to address the health issues and I could speak to you all afternoon. Ms. Baron, this is not a hearing about the health issues. For that, you'll have to go to your state legislators. You know what? I need to talk. I am in Vatrin's district and I've lived here 46 years and was a court reporter my entire life. You folks, please educate yourself about the health issues. I know you're going forward looking at all this, but this is not about equity, safety or environmental issues that Mr. Friend has said have all been covered. So in September, 2019, a few months before we ever heard about COVID, the International EMF Conference was took place in Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County and it was chosen by doctors all over the world that came here to Santa Cruz, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of presenters, doctors, physicists, microbiologists, people that treat people with EMF sensitivity and many doctors came from, and I was there for four days from eight in the morning until 10 at night listening to not only the presenters, the doctors that came from all over the world to understand when their patients are coming in. Brett Woolham, your microphone is available. Hi there, can you hear me? Yes. Great, thanks. I just wanted to, I guess, balance out what we have going on here. I'm not here to complain about health impacts of wireless. I think there's a significant utility for wireless services in our society, and thanks to the supervisors for considering this issue. Anything you can do to make broadband service and cellular service more reliable and readily available is great. One concern I did have was definition number 28, the actual definition for wireless communication facility. I would like clarification from the supervisors as to whether or not the county intends to have other types of systems that are non-cellular fall under this. That is, you know, ham radio systems, as was brought up earlier, business repeater systems, other technologies, or is this ordinance specific to cellular, whether it be macro tower or small cell or other, I would hope it would be the latter and this wouldn't apply to ham radio and other community-based services like that. But that is not clear at this point in the way that the ordinance is written. Something else I'd like to add is I don't necessarily agree with the broad discriminatory nature of the ordinance. I think that it would be great to have, to lean more on encroachment permits and ministerial permits and definitions, allowing carriers to come in and do the work without having to go through long, extensive periods of discretionary review. As a business and as a, you know, telecom company, if I go into a community, I wanna know what the rules are and be able to invest in that community and not have discretionary permit and get in my way because that can really drag out and increase the costs, drag out the install process and increase the costs and make a community not viable for new technologies. That's all I'm gonna add for now. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Willem. David Wachowski, your microphone is available. Thank you. You can hear me okay? Yes. Thank you. So I'd like to thank the supervisors for their work on this topic and also to staff for the time that they've put into this. I know it's a complex topic and I know that there are many moving parts in this. I wanted to talk about the social aspects of this. I'm a resident of district two and speaking specifically about the socioeconomics on this topic, wireless is by far the choice technology for people in 2022. And nationwide, we have over 60% of the population has moved to wireless technology. They've given up their landlines. In speaking nationally, again approximately 82% of renters are wireless only, meaning they do not have landlines. People who live in poverty, seven out of 10 people who live in poverty are likely to be wireless only. And for some of the supervisors in this district that have high Hispanic populations, I would remind you that 77% of Hispanics are wireless only. People under the age of 34 who are just starting out their careers over 86% of them are wireless only. And as Supervisor Friend pointed out, 80% of calls to 911 come from wireless phones. When we put this in the aggregate, we have to remind ourselves that by failing to build these networks, we are putting portions of the population who rely on this technology at risk. Landlines were a technology that were 100 years ago viable. Currently in today's world, they are not viable. And I don't think that it's reasonable to expect people who are in, for example, transitional housing circumstances to constantly relocate their landlines. So let's be thoughtful about what we're doing here today and I'll yield the balance of my time back. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Wachowski. We have no further speakers for this item. Thank you. Then I'll return it to the board for action. Chair, I'm so sorry. One more person just put their hand up. All right. Michael Cintrone. Hi there, can you hear me? Yes. Excellent. Hi, my name is Michael Cintrone. I'm the permitting manager for Crown Castles Small Wireless Facilities in Northern California. Crown Castles is the nation's largest telecommunication infrastructure provider. Owning over 40,000 cellular towers, 80,000 route miles of fiber optic cable and 60,000 small wireless facilities built are under contract to build fast, reliable connectivity everywhere and all the time is essential to modern day life. I applaud the county for its efforts to update and modernize its wireless code to find the right balance in its code to allow for the deployment of these services to the community. However, additional review is needed on this newly proposed code and design guidelines. I'm here today to ask the board to delay the adoption of this code and these design guidelines. As currently written, these guidelines would violate state and federal law as well as the state utility poll standards that govern the placement of equipment on utility polls, general order 95. For example, section 13.10.662C4B4 needs to be changed to be in compliance with GO95 or 194E as the minimum distance from the center line of poll to the maximum. An additional item in non-compliance with state law, section 13.10.662C4C7 and C4B8, which prohibit cooling fans. Crown council will comply with the applicable existing county noise ordinances that are not more restrictive than required of any other entity. Cooling fans cannot be outright prohibited. If this is left in place, it appears to be discriminatory against wireless communication facilities as other utility providers utilize cooling fans for their equipment, a violation of PUC7901.1. This section must be deleted to allow for the best and most recent technology to be deployed in your communities as the most recent generation of radios and equipment have cooling fans. It's a non-exhaust list of items that are in conflict with law that we provided an employee to look at. And we ask you that you delay the adoption of this code and these guidelines to allow for further input discussion, to allow for- Thank you, Mr. Sintron. We have no additional speakers, Chair. All right, thank you. I'll return to the board for action then. Before I entertain a motion, I did a couple of questions came up or I had valid comments during public comment. The first was from Mr. Kaufman and it was echoed by Mr. Willem, I believe about how this ordinance would potentially restrict ham radio use or other amateur radio. I was wondering if Mr. Carlson, you can respond to that if you see that this ordinance would restrict that or if there's opportunities to improve that. Yes, this ordinance is intended to narrowly apply to personal wireless services such as that provided by Crown Castle, Verizon, AT&T, et cetera. And it's narrowly focused on that. And that exception is also narrowly focused on that. And so those other types of facilities are not regulated by this ordinance. Okay, thank you. And then the other point brought up by Mr. Sintron about potential violation of state utility poll standards or allowing for cooling fans. Yeah, I understand what he's saying and those standards are the criteria for qualifying for a ministerial building permit or encroachment permit. It's not a prohibition on those types of facilities that he mentioned. It just means that if you are proposing a facility that does not conform to those criteria, you're into the category of needing a conditional use permit and then an encroachment permit or building permit once you're through that process. So it's not a prohibition. It's just a categorization of different types of facilities based on that criteria. Got it. So they're still allowed to the higher level of review? Yes. Thank you. All right, I'll entertain a motion. Supervisor Cabot? You bet. Let me, one more question. Actually it's going back a few years, but whatever happened to the observation towers that a ranger would be in the tower 24 hours a day. And if they saw a fire break out somewhere in the forest, that they were able to use radio transistor radio and alert the public that way. I mean, what, do we totally don't have that anymore at all? Nobody has the, maybe has an answer to that. Supervisor Cabot, I have a, it's sort of unrelated, but I have spoken with Cal Fire about that kind of a solution about early warning for fires. And I think it's simply become cost prohibitive to man look out towers with folks at this time. So that was the answer I heard from Cal Fire about why we're no longer using people in look out towers. But we do have a number of cameras positioned throughout the county that fulfill very much the same purpose. We have four in our county today, three more being installed, including one at the Watsonville airport with a good view of the mountains that have provided early detection of wildfires. And there's additional, I think it gets up to about 20 cameras when you consider Santa Clara County. Okay. And anyway, my concern is the money on one side. And I think the current process we have now would have worked in the past to prevent what maybe some people had a problem with in the past. And I think the current process is as good as the proposed process. Thank you. So I'll be voting no. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Motion by Supervisor Friend. Second by Supervisor McPherson. Any for the discussion? Seeing none clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Trapit. No. McPherson. Aye. And Friend. I'm so sorry. And Koenig. Aye. This item passes four to one. Thank you. Those ordinances being approved in concept, they'll return to our May 24th agenda for final adoption. That concludes our regular agenda today. Next meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will be 9 a.m. on May 24th. Thank you all. Meeting adjourned. Thank you. We'll see you all then. Bye-bye.