 morning thank you we're going to go ahead and get started with the Santa Cruz metro transit district regular meeting for June 28th and can we begin with the roll call please Dr. Bautowar Kauffman-Gelman present Dr. Gonzales present Dr. Leopold here Dr. Lind Matthew here Dr. Meyers here Dr. McPherson here Dr. Pegler here Dr. Raffa here Dr. Rutkin here Exificio Director Northcutt Exificio Director Preston here great thank you I'd like to announce that our inter Spanish interpreter today is Mindy Esqueda can Mindy come up and give us a little introduction right now thank you good morning I'm Mindy Esqueda I'm the Spanish interpreter today if I can be of assistance please let me know Buenos dias I'm Mindy Esqueda thank you Mindy I'd also like to announce that this meeting is being televised by community television of Santa Cruz County our technician today is Mr. Lynn Dutton with that it's time for Board of Director comments are there any comments by members of the Board of Directors Matthews yes I just want to let the board know that our last city council meeting in Santa Cruz we voted a contract amendment to complete the final 5% of design on the highway 1-9 interchange improvement it's you all know that's the worst interchange in in the city and it also directly affects metro operations in terms of people getting to work buses getting in and out and so forth so I want to let you know that we did approve that final 5% for design but also the as you all know I'm sure this intersection is a controversial issue every single time it comes forward for action so I want to a let you know that we're moving forward on that but also suggest and request that we could perhaps have something come back from staff so there'd be kind of a standing support for the improvements of this intersection from Metro there's a direct correlation CEO got that message in the way we've spoken oh good great that's good news yeah I think I will gonna hear some more from reports from our consultants them from Washington DC and the state today I know but there's one issue that really is having a profound impact on Santa Cruz County roads and that's the federal highway administration usually they gave you extended we suffered half the damages in the 17 storms of the whole state of California in this county and we've got a bill of about 35 million dollars and there was a timeline that you could get your preparations done for this work two years and the policy of the past was that you could extend it for six years this administration now federal administration has cut that said we're not going to go six years you've either got to do it too or you're not going to get it it's impossible with to get everything together in that short amount of time and it could have a cost of 35 million dollars worth of repairs that are needed in this county it's going to have an impact of over five million dollars for Santa Cruz County we are covering that for work that we've already done that we are anticipating getting federal funds from but we it's it's really going to be a severe blow and the reason I mentioned it is of course because our transit our buses go on the county roads all the time and it's going to be have a huge negative impact on our budgeting that we're going to really feel next year we're feeling it this year but it's going to be for 35 million dollars with the repairs that we're going to have to find a way to cover so I just want to let anybody know I I want to let everybody know that but that our Congress members particular eschewed Panetta and many others throughout California have said listen natural disasters we know this administration doesn't like California very much but natural disasters happen everywhere and they hit us really hard and it's going to be a severe blow to us in our budgeting process but I think people should be aware of it and if you can make a contact with any member of Congress or anybody that you know and this is a federal administration please do so because we're going to need all the help we can get to make this be part of it and we'll probably hear a little more about it a little later thank you for that update any other directors comments yeah I just wanted to comment on the mural at the Watsonville Metro Center if it is complete it came out really nice the muralist Paul D and Jaime Sanchez finished it up and they've started on the next section of the mural the new section and we hope to get that going on and complete it too by the end of the year that's great news thanks for that update any other comments okay we'll move on to oral communications this is a time when people from the public are allowed to come up and speak on any item that is not on the agenda is there anybody would like to speak to us today come on up well we'll see okay so Keith Otto 20-year county resident I'm here because I support Metro and I hope to see it flourish and expand for those I wasn't even here to complain about anything okay give me an extra five minutes all right well hey so that gives me the opportunity to state again that I'm here because I support Metro and I hope to see it flourish and expand for those that are in the mid or South County and they want to come to Santa Cruz right that becomes a much more workable service with an express bus situation and a HOV lane I look forward to that coming online I've got some reservations with regards to the shoulder program but we'll see how that that bears yesterday at the RTC meeting many of you were there there was gentlemen that spoke disappointed that there's no longer bus service in La Selva that it was discontinued back in 2016 you know I understand those are tough decisions I have seen those near empty buses at the time the community put forth a suggestion for smaller buses to these lower ridership areas and the idea was to save money and to save the service and in discussions with the county and whatnot it was explained that that's not really a cost savings every time you have to spin something up that's different there's actually additional costs to have something that's different and with regards to the items that are going on with RTC and services and items that they're pondering right I'll share a comment that I stated yesterday this was from the county public works person affiliated with the county public works you know he said if we're not taking care of what we already have but rather creating more stuff that we're not sure how we're going to take care of in the future we think that is the wrong way to go so I would exercise that approach with regards to making the solutions we have more robust and workable and prioritizing that over expanding into other things that might be hard to maintain and take care of in the future thank you thank you for your comments appreciate those morning morning thank you for the opportunity my name is Carl Sigmund I live at 725 Bay Street it's a senior housing and really happy to be a citizen of living here in Santa Cruz I'm using the bus system a great deal now and I have nothing but I mean mostly I have nothing to say but very high compliments for particularly the drivers they have a lot of responsibility they are show a lot of attention to people and they've got I think they're great and I think they do a great job and I'm overall very happy with the system I'm calling I wanted to ask consideration for this matter of the 31-day card which you call it this card might I'll get my bottom line and I hope that you'll have it expire at midnight instead of the way it works when I charge this card and I have the 31 days paid and I may wait a day or two and try and stretch it out I don't know if any of you want to fix income I don't think you are but in any event when you are you'll understand this and the bottom line is I try and stretch it out as much as I can but if I when I go to the bus and use it the first time it's going to print the time that I signed on so where I live if I want to come inbound my first bus is at 8 a.m. if I put this at 8 a.m. it's going to expire 31 days later at 8 a.m. or God forbid if the bus gets a little early at 7.59 and I'm not going to be you know technically the bus driver could say it's expired and I don't want to have that discussion bottom line that's what it is I could give you the details but bottom line is I would hope you'd consider to be able to have this card expire at midnight that way you'd have that whole day and I wouldn't have to wait till like 5 in the evening when I'm able to make it around and then I have that next period of time until 5 o'clock so that's what I was hoping to consider making that change and the other thing I wanted to say is that the clock system downtown is something that you really need to address I look at those clocks and I wonder if they're just not you know they're too old I'm not sure why you don't keep the time right but you don't you got to appreciate how important that is as like the symbol of how you run you run on a schedule and when those clocks are wrong and you don't realize some of the little subtle stuff you can run up there and think you're there on time and the bus left five minutes early and you don't know so in any event that's something that really is important I think to address to have that running right okay thank you for your opportunity thank thank you for those comments I think what you kind of say is that if we're gonna go ahead and do a 31 day pass that can be a 31 and a half day pass and it's really not gonna bother anybody I appreciate your points no I thought about actually the financial impact that it might have here because it but the bottom line is the person that's gonna get have to pay that little extra is gonna be the guy that doesn't have it you know and the fact I mean I'm not saying you have a lot I can only imagine what kind of budgetary issues you have but just it's a small item it's something that I think could be done without a lot of infrastructure changes and so forth I know there's printing and stuff like that but just thank you for the perspective we appreciate it okay great next speaker please morning I just want to get my nervous this away I'm really nervous so take your time speaking is not my okay so you can bear with me with my stuttering and my I'm going blank but I want to address this morning is my name is Morris Minosa I've been in bus fare for 34 years and all the time I've been here I come to work every day I really call it in I can't remember the last time I call him sick I'm here today I'm advocating for my son Cory is you got hired on March 27th only to be terminated 10 weeks later by Anna Gavea our precious manager now I feel that this was discrimination and I'll tell you why my son when he submitted his application he accepted if he went in after that he went on to pass a video test driver's video test that you have to pass before you go to your interview they went to the interview he passed the interview Anna hand picked him and said he was good he got hired from Anna she picked him after that he passed the written test in the written test which is not easy to pass you have to really study asking bus drivers you have to really study for him anyway after that moved on with Leo to train him to pass the driving skills test which you go to a mountain deal and to get your driver's license in order to drive a bus which is all fine. Leo was with my son for eight weeks one-on-one training because four other drivers it was five in his class and four of the drivers in his class called in six it was just one-on-one training and all this time Leo did not say one bad comment about my son and work every day he was he did we was sold not one bad mark and in addition to that he went to line instructing which is a final step before going on to being a bus driver and I have letters here that I hope he can be passed on to you that there's no bad marks on him nothing not one and on top of that on a second day of line instructing he got a recommendation from one pastures because he defused the situation that they could have escalated to something serious because passenger got on the bus with a concealed weapon and my son spotted it and he defused the situation so I have that combination here too if you could please look at it there is no other reason I can think of the only reason that that Anna told them my son that he was fired to call them into the office that one day and told them you were not qualified to be a bus driver it was pretty vague there's no other reason I asked Anna what was the other reason but I thought she said she said talk to HR I went to HR they give me the run around they don't want to talk to me they kept pointing to somebody else so I can't think of a valid reason for my son to be fired to determine he did everything he just wants a fair shot he wants a fair chance this went to second chance he deserves second chance every bus driver here has gotten a second chance and for him to be fired it seems like just on being a good driver thank you and go ahead and finish your story thank you for him he's to me he's being fired for being a good driver come to work every day that's what it is but there is no valid reason there is nothing there if you can please check for the line instructors with the opinion he's a safety coordinator excuse me at work you won't find one bad mark on nobody said anything bad about him his co-workers are here and I want to thank my co-workers for coming to support my son and the union John and and Brandon okay and so hope I'm pleading with you and I'm asking you please you can make this right give my son a second chance we'll obviously take a look at it thank you for coming up and presenting that story appreciate you on board so to touch on Mario's story is I got the run around trying to get some answers for Corey and they couldn't even give him some answers when he called him to ask him directly why did I not qualify and the only thing we saw was that he had a medical emergency that was around a holiday and it was a day after a two couple days after that holiday where he had that medical emergency and and he had a call in sick the very next day he was terminated and he has proof that he was in the emergency room with his emergency receipt our emergency room receipt and when they brought him in they even asked for an explanation nothing and that really concerns us because we're having trouble recruiting and retaining employees you know we're having to pick up the slack of being understaffed and if we actually get those trainees to come through and actually finish training and then we just let them go during line instruction right before they're about to get sent out that's very concerning for us and we have a petition here signed by 143 people that believe Corey Espinoza needs to be returned to work and we just ask you guys to review with review the situation and give us an answer please thank you great thank you for that information is there anybody else would like to speak to us at oral communication okay we'll go ahead and close oral communication have a written communication from the Mac you have a representative from that you know nothing from the Mac today yeah she has a report on the on the on the agenda okay all right that's how that comes later in the agenda that's right okay labor organization communication anybody from labor like to speak to us I don't know who the speaker is okay welcome thank you my name is Olivia Martinez I'm the SCU staff representative and I've been with the union now for 10 years and I'm here today because I have some really concerns about what's going on at the table for SEI you two years ago we were approached by Mr. Clifford to do a compensation study in order for us to extend our contract he wanted the compensation stuff we did the compensation they did the compensation study and you guys all know the issues with the compensation study right we have worked very very hard in good faith with management to come to some agreement with the compensation study and we did this proposal this economic proposal his bargaining team has proposed the same the last three times we have moved drastically at the table while we have proposed 16 proposals they have proposed 60 proposals we have t8 the majority of their proposals in good faith yesterday I told their bargaining team I'm willing to stay here up until 2 a.m. in order to have an agreement we were because we have the majority of the TAs this is really the only pending issue what we saw from his team is that he is not allowing the team to move he is keeping in bad faith this proposal this proposal is a disrespect to our workers it does not give anything to our workers why would he want a compensation study if he was not going to deal with the compensation during negotiations he deals with all his salaries to his benefits when he was moved he was given money to buy a house he has the best life insurance if anything happens to him we have asked them historically not to hire people that do not benefit he's had an issue with the HR she was given money to relocate as well everything for management is okay Cyril got a 35% increase it got a 40% increase Angela got a 35% increase out of the salary study and our members are not getting anything these are the workers that make metro not them it's the workers that make metro and he is insulting them with this his situation is comfortable and you have allowed that for him while our workers are not getting anything one of his proposal was for members to not accrue time while they were on vacation or sick leave how is that possible how will he insult the workers in that way we are asking you to have him return his team to the table and bargain in good faith we have now countered to our self four times lowering our amounts we cannot lower our amounts anymore so we're asking you to please interfere intervene and make these members whole we did not suggest the salary study it was his idea and he doesn't want to address it now when we are done we know that he's gonna get a humongous race because this is what happens every single time so please make this right thank you drive other union representatives morning everybody my name is Nathan Meisenheimer I've been with Metro for almost four and a half years these days it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a living here in Santa Cruz high rent costs increasing fuel prices food bills etc etc we all feel the crunch a lot of us live quite a distance from work to help alleviate the high cost of housing I'm lucky to have found a place to live that is relatively close to Metro but it does has it have its price for my co-workers they might pay less out of their wallets to live further away but they pay a different price by doing so they spend a lot of time sitting on the freeway sitting in commute taking time away from their families their eight-hour workday becomes a ten hour workday sometimes more all in the name of working in a place that can provide for their families we make these sacrifices not out of greed or personal gain but out of necessity why do I stay I do it for my family to provide them a roof over their head food on their table clothes on their back to provide them with assurance that they will have the medical care available to them when needed to provide them with a home in the same town where I work I do it for my co-workers I wake up every morning and come to work where I'm needed I am but one part of a bigger picture I am part of the Metro family this family is responsible for providing transportation to the county of Santa Cruz and I'm proud to be a small part of that together our individual pieces come together to create Santa Cruz Metro and without one piece we would not be able to provide the service that we do we are important we should be treated as such thank you thank you good morning my name is Westgild I'm your it's not easy being a mechanic it's very physically demanding and emotionally taxing we have a lot of young guys that end up with bad backs bad shoulders bad knees all from working on our buses and we have people on graveyard and I've seen a lot of studies showing that you know work shift workers are more likely to have heart disease cancers diabetes and sleep deprivation problems and now the Metro has become a little restrictive with taking time off in our department and we're finding it hard to kind of recharge our batteries you know go see our kids recognitions give our wives a break from you know baby duty but our guys just come to work and they just push themselves to be there every day and then try to do as best they can and to give a hundred percent but at some point I'm afraid you know their bodies are just gonna kind of break down they're gonna get sick not be at work you know everything that kind of falls with that and you know recently they get to hear that the Metro effectively wants to freeze the wages take away the shift differential take away their ability to earn calm time or pay more for the medical it's very difficult to get them to go above and beyond for the Metro and all these things are going on we'll get way more productivity from these guys if we have several mechanics you know recharge and wanting to swan to a bus that's on the side of the road you know top off the oil for a para cruise operator or swap out a radiator whatever it is then to have one grizzled old mechanic that has to kind of hope this made sense and you know thank you for your time thank you for that presentation good morning Joan Jeffries I represent SCA chapter of SCIU I wanted to talk just for a few moments we we have this comp study that the district paid a lot of money for seventy thousand dollars plus just for the SCIU portion of this study and it is a flawed study I I feel bad for certain positions and classifications that I feel were not adequately represented in this study the compensation the comparables that this vendor came back with don't really act accurately reflect the importance or the depth of what certain classifications do and yet this is what we have we put a lot of money and a lot of time into this study we realize we have to move forward with what we have which is why I want to talk about the importance of cost of living increases cost of living increases are you know I think a lot a lot of members are going to see no increase from this comp study basically they're not going to see any significant increase or zero increase and a cost of living increases is their only chance of seeing any type of increase so I want to give this to the board in their records I printed out something that shows the cost of living increase from 2014 up through today it shows each year and the total increase from 2014 to today in our area is over 16% so I'd like to put this in and then I would like to show you a copy of SEI use wages effective June 19th 2014 and I would also like to show you SEI use wages effective June 14th 2018 which are still in effect today and if you look at those two you will see that the increase from 2014 to today is 2% 2% in all this time now there have been a few classifications that have been studied and have been increased and then there are also our yearly step increases but I would like to point out that once a person has worked in Metro for five years they are at the top of their step increases they have nowhere else to go there is one exception to that one exception but for everyone else after five years you're at your top step cost of living increase is your only chance to to get a yearly increase after that we have been bargaining in good faith now for I think over two months and as Olivia pointed out we have repeatedly lowered and lowered and lowered what we have been asking for and the district has budged incrementally small amounts it is it's demoralizing and it's disrespectful to all of our hard-working members and we we all do deserve more than this thank you thank you so here's our situation we sent our letter of intent to negotiate March 29th the district didn't come forward with any dates until mid-May and we have 30 outstanding proposals combined with para crews that have yet to be responded to so all we have seen is that they have been delaying delaying delaying and they have came forward with proposals that especially with economics that are lower than what we should have already had it had we not froze our wages for so long to help the district that's very insulting and and not only that you know we we expected to at least get a compensated what we should have had you know especially when the district right now has over eight million dollars in reserves look I understand that there is a future liability for the OPEB and the UAL but we asked to hold off on any decisions until this contract is ratified you know they're also coming after our medical and our over and trying to prohibit overtime we explain how that's going to detriment the service because currently we're understaffed and the district is relying on us to work overtime and not only that we got a letter from our CEO not too long ago to try to encourage us to work more overtime it was contradicting it's confusing and we don't know what's going on you know all of our proposals were actually mainly to try to reach parity with the rest of the departments here at Metro they were not unreasonable they could have came forward with something but we didn't really see much of any movement so what we did is we actually came forward with their first counter with the wages because it was very important for us to finish this contract by the end of this month under the condition they didn't touch our medical and touch and prohibit us from working overtime because it's very important for us because we don't want to leave the public behind we care about the public and we we need to work overtime it they didn't have any rational explanation behind that and you know our medical is very important for us it's very expensive to live in this county and then when we did that to try to give them a comprehensive package to try to get this contract done they came lower than their initial wage counter without really no movement on the medical or even prohibiting overtime so to us that's regressive bargaining and that's bad faith you know and Metro we had to stand back while we watched all of management get raises and we're done we just ask you guys to intervene now because it looks like Metro you know Metro's bargaining team is not budging so thank you thank you native rago representative of paracruz and on on the smart local 23 bargaining team and I just want to put it out there and I just want to restate it because it's been said before we've already frozen our wages we've put in our time we've dealt with lack of staff for many years and we still are we've paid our dues it's time we get what's fair thank you are there any other speakers I'm Brandon Freeman senior vice chair of smart utu local 23 not gonna repeat too much of what was already said here I think you guys pretty much get the gist I just wanted to touch on a couple more things you look at our schedule today you'll notice we didn't take overtime reset calls you're dropping our routes right now why should we give up ourselves today why did we give you two percent over all these years if you're gonna give us nothing come back to the table give a surreal proposal stop playing games mr. Clifford makes almost the same amount himself as our entire bargaining maybe he should sit at the table with us morning I'm Vicki Trent I'm also on the negotiating committee been a bus driver and in my 18th year though I took a break and became a lawyer during that time I'm glad to be sitting at the table we've got a couple of high priced outrageously expensive lawyers across the table from us I don't know why the district is paying all that money when there are all kinds of people who could be at the table with us I would like to see this come to a close quickly bus drivers work so hard every single day we are the face we are the heart and the soul and the feet and the arms of this agency thank you for please being fair with us solidarity good morning board and thank you for this opportunity my name is Bonnie Moore and I'm also a bus operator I've been here since 1989 I've been currently working directly for the International Union so I'm on a leave but I am also here as a representative with our bus operators my bus operators your bus operators here in in Santa Cruz these folks have been putting in time and time and time continuously to make up for shortfalls of the district not enough employees not enough drivers and therefore they are required to work that overtime and they do come in and they do the do and it is a commitment from every one of these drivers and operators to make sure that the public is being moved to where they need to go and the public depends on us to be there and we are there we're there continuously we're sitting at the table we the the district wanted only non-economic proposals to be dealt with first fine they've got almost 20 articles non-economic that are sitting out of there out there that have not even been responded to at all we're still waiting on that they gave us a proposal you've got the two attorneys that are very smart you've got the director of finance you've got the operations manager you've got human resources they gave us a proposal you know and they talked about oh the district doesn't want to negotiate against themselves well you're the only ones that have that ability to make those movements we've given back we've backed off we've come down we went ahead and took the figures from their financial proposal we wanted our medical to stay the same but we said okay we'll go with that fine and we'll figure out how to deal with the medical and then they came back with a lower proposal a lower proposal you guys know what that does Michael you know what happens when you come back with a lowered proposal without excuses or excuses it doesn't matter but there needs to be some decent movement going forward these guys gave up their raises for four years they did move for four years yet the service go went on at a pristine level because we get compliments from people traveling into this community from all over the world we are always complimented about the service and it isn't because they see your faces or they see the general manager's face it's only because they see the driver's faces and these guys are out there every day all day long their hours their spreads their time that they put in is huge and they cover every piece every piece of service that's open that needs to be covered you're attacking us right now on how we've been functioning you're attacking our medical back to the levels of 2005 what is the point of that everything else is going up they've sat frozen for four years and you think that the minimal raise that you're offering us is going to make a difference it it'll be a wash with the cost of the medical what the hell is that I'm sorry but what is that this needs to start moving forward in a productive manner your team that sits at that table needs to be a little bit more productive let's get these proposals out of the way let's put a little additional on that table let's fix the medical and stop harming your own employees with here to do the job for you and it means a lot to us to be able to do that for you we've been here for an awfully long time you've been here for awfully long time Cynthia you've been here Bruce you've been here for an awfully long time John you've been here for an awfully long time so have we some of the other folks here have not maybe they don't understand Santa Cruz but we're here we're your employees give us that ability to continue working give us the ability to get a decent contract we're not asking for the moon we're asking pretty much to kind of keep what we got and give us some additional wages that's what we need make up for four years of nothing nothing so please I ask of you either give them the authority because they've already haven't had hard as to whether they actually have authority but we need to get this resolved we don't we you know we've got dates set into the middle of July right now and we need to get it resolved all of your employees need their contracts resolved so we can continue working in good faith and harmony thank you thank you are there any other speakers that would like to speak from the union oh good good morning my name is Erlen Osorio representing smart local 23 I've been working for Metro for about 14 years I started with para Cruz for about a year and a half and now I've been a bus driver since then I would like to say it's hard for me to be able to afford to live in Santa Cruz I've come I've been doing this commute for 14 years from Salinas because it's hard to afford to live in Santa Cruz with the wage but you know I'm still hanging in there I would like to say if you guys consider giving us what we're asking and what we deserve you know we are the face of Metro that everybody sees us the public and thank you for your time thank you I'm a little Brego represented I've been in a negotiation table and I just want to put something extra but probably my co-workers escape about it but I'm talking about the overtime overtime I've been noticed that it's been provoked from above from the management has been provoked because every time they bore us Mr. Clifford why we're not hiring more drivers and the answer Mr. Clifford is well we have to be cautious but means while we're working a lot of overtime too much it's because they are under the staff under trying to hire drivers they are probably they are hired drivers outside that one work for Metro but because being being using cautious is what happened right now and they don't care if the people fire and I've been here from management from my are my top supervisors they said it's okay we don't care we don't care so we care about so it's been inflated the overtime so thank you guys thank you my name is Ryan McDonald I'm a fourth generation Santa Cruz resident and I've worked for the Metro for nearly 15 years I'm proud to do so I wrote the bus to go to school I wrote the bus to go to work as a young adult I'd like to continue to be proud to work for the Metro thank you morning morning my name is Elmer Torres I've been a facilities man working for the last 20 years last time I went to a board meeting I went to receive my award for my 20th anniversary and then it's a good job I like my job and I enjoy working for the Metro some years back I was forced to move out of the area well this county because I couldn't afford it anymore so I live in Monterey County and I do that commute every single day probably ten and a half sometimes after the traffic and all that so but I want to speak directly to Mr. Ratkin over there and Mr. Clifford got his steps reset I don't know if you all remember that we remember so he promised us at the board meeting and you say when your time comes you're gonna get your increment don't worry about it remember that that was the advice that's in the records so when I say that thank you my name is Karen Blight and I worked for Metro for 11 years I'm an admin assistant so my face is not out there with everyone else but I am also a face of Metro and I hope you guys will remember this I want to speak to the fact that I love my job I really love it but it is difficult and challenging I started out at a step three so I only got step increases for three more years the only thing I get is a cola and we haven't had one for four years okay so I really really would appreciate if we would get a cola and bring us up with inflation and put us through you know get us through the day that's all I want to say I want to thank you thank you thank you is there anyone else would like to speak to us from the Union okay we're going to close that portion but before you leave I just want to acknowledge a couple things from the board we heard what you said I acknowledged that most people came up here and said they loved their jobs and people said that they want to be fairly compensated for what they do and we heard that message and I also want to commend you on being organized being respectful and coming here and saying the things that you needed to say and we have a closed session today and we'll be dealing with these issues and I appreciate that you come here and stand up what you believe in so thank you for that okay with that do we have any additional documentation or gender items then all right we're gonna go to the consent agenda leader items we normally deal with in one motion is there anybody like to pull anything from the consent agenda chair I think we are pulling or would recommend 9-14 on the being pulled I was gonna pull I suppose if there's anything else anybody had we're gonna give it is there any other items that I have a couple and they're they're not going to be heavy-duty they're minor just questions want to ask or minor corrections okay I want to see if if guy Preston is here is guy Preston here yeah guy come on up we're gonna go ahead and pull item 9-14 but I just want to comment from guy to add some clarification on this item and give the board direction we had an RTC meeting yesterday and this will provide some clarity so mr. Preston thank you for coming thank you for having me chair Botthorpe and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come up and speak regarding this item some of you are aware because you also sit on the RTC board the equivalent item was on the RTC agenda yesterday and we did receive direction and input from the both the public and the RTC can you just wait just a moment because the audience that's here needs a little bit more time so they can hear you as well if we could get someone to close the doors in the back that would be great so we can continue close close I think he's gonna close that door and then we'll be fine go ahead mr. Preston thank you I'll start over a little bit okay regarding this item which was on the RTC Commission agenda yesterday and many of you serve both on that Commission as well as this board the item is related to doing an alternative analysis on the Santa Cruz branch line for high-capacity public transit and at that meeting I was seeking input from from the Commission and also had an opportunity for public to have input regarding this item the direction I received was to make improvements in the RFP and to come back in August so this is I saw this on the consent agenda here for your approval and it's appropriate to not of course approve something that another body is going back in and going to take action on so I am interested in receiving metro input on this item so after it is pulled off consent instead of approving that it if we could receive your input on it additionally any input that you may have regarding how the two bodies should work together and you know provide approval for you know other items coming forward including this you know after the August meeting at the RTC the August meeting here and then as the scope is finalized and then put out two proposals four proposals that when we come back during certain steps of development of the alternatives analysis how you want me to and Alex to present this item and what we should be requesting from this board great director option without foreclosing the possibility of discussion would you have a problem if we simply postpone this till after you the RTC makes a recommendation to us as was originally planned so in other words postpone it till August would that be a problem for you I just want to know I don't mind postponing it and coming back in August but I would like to receive any input that might be different from what I received yesterday at the RTC meeting I think the proposed schedule would be an RTC meeting in early August and then a metro meeting at the end of the month so but if there are directors that have comments they can get those Mr. Clifford and and Metro has any comments they can deliver those to you so that would be a great plan to proceed yeah I think he's interested in hearing if the metro board members who aren't RTC members want to share anything I think he's looking to get that today because you can correct me if I'm wrong Mr. President is as the RTC redraft the alternative analysis RFP what we talked about yesterday he wants to make sure to include everything so nothing comes back later where we have to stall it anymore. Are there any directors that have any input for Mr. Preston and if you don't have it now you can email it to him or contact the office and deliver that so you have time to think about go ahead. I'll just point out that the RFP that we received at the RTC and that's in front of us here actually is pretty good for the economic issues that are essential importance to the district the other issues that the RTC was looking for more augmentation development of the environmental issues and the impacts on underserved communities is something I think we're basically trying to increase in some way and those are issues for the district but I think that the concerns the district has we're pretty well covered in the existing RFP those were not problematic I don't believe it's not to me and so I don't think we're gonna have a whole lot of stuff that we needed that we want to ask for changed in that which otherwise might be the case. I just want to so a little bit of education here on 9-14 to 2 is number 5 alternative is considered and this is from us the Metro is and Metro says Metro cannot participate in the RTCA double alternative analysis process as Metro is the county high capacity public transit provider and has a vested interest in planning that will affect its future commitment as resources staff does not recommend this alternative can I have a little bit more insight on that or clarity or I could try to answer that question or Alex can because I read that too and the way the tell me Alex if I got this wrong but the way I understood that was you were providing an alternative to not participating and and the staff was not recommending that you don't participate it's not that you shouldn't participate if the alternative to participating would be to not participate and staff is recommending that you don't select the option to not participate essentially what they're saying is they would like our input well we can know because the option could be to choose not to participate which is not the recommended choice I get that right I concur although I will not try to repeat what you know in all of your board reports we put alternative and alternatives are things like do nothing or tell work tell staff we're all washed up and come up with a different alternative so this is just one of those sometimes it's a stretch to think of an alternative this is probably a good example so at this point we'd like to I'd like you know if I can get a motion from someone to continue this to the August meeting that's what I'm looking for motion and a second all in favor I oppose this will be carried to our August meeting Mr. Breslin thank you for coming to making that presentation thank you for having me okay so with that Cynthia you have a couple of items that you want yeah and honestly these won't take long one is 9-03 and the other is 9-15 they're they're quite minor and 9-03 it's on page dot-2 reports on the Mac meeting it was confusing and I think these are just language changes that they refer to it one place lift line but it's spelled with a Y so I don't know if that's like but then in the next paragraph they talk about lift with a Y so I don't know what was intended but it should be cleaned up before it we're gonna go to LIFT okay but then at the bottom it says the central California Alliance for Health is using lift that's probably with a Y that's spelling I got added and then yeah on 9-03 C-2 there's a comment quoting me about possible funding sources it says she expect her lack of optimism regarding the availability of additional funding sources generally and what I did was express skepticism about success of another ballot measure in the near future those are different and I remember those comments so yeah those are correct the next page just refers in comments attributed to you chair referring to local politicians and local politicians and I personally prefer the term elected representatives so that's just language so with that if people are agreeable to that I'll move I'll make a motion on the consent agenda and accept that as a friendly thank you is there a second second second by leopold so motion by rock and second by leopold for the consent agenda chair I just wanted to make one comment about one of the items on item number 912 the evolution of the fleet to zero emission buses I really appreciate this report I think it's very thorough good explanation of what we're trying to do in terms of our goal and I appreciate the work of staff but to put that together and I think it's useful especially for the public who's very concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and the progress that we're making in our plan so thank you for those comments and I want to comment I actually see that as a model we have a lot of pressure in the city to immediately buy all electric vehicles and that that is a very logical expression of a longer term commitment but the realities of year-to-year so I agree that's a good model great great comments any other comments on the agenda okay we've got nine dash minutes on three where the correction and then 915 was the comments and that has to do with the eco pass we did pass it at the city council the only difference was that we passed it with a condition that we get a report back at the six month point from the program going into effect it's a very ambitious pilot and we thought it was important that as we have six months experience and at that time we'll be going into budget discussions for the subsequent year that we get a report at six months of the utilization how it's going how effective it is so there again with the board's approval I'd like to move approval of that with the expectation that metro participate in the six month report back to both bodies and with the second okay any other comments all right so one motion on the consent agenda all in favor opposed carries unanimously with the corrections that were mentioned okay brings us to the regular agenda we're going to begin with yes the entire consent agenda with the items that were were corrected or amended okay so we'll take us to the regular agenda we have longevity awards not sure how many did we zero do we have a how many people are here for the longevity awards zero and what about the retirements okay so items 10 is just wanted to acknowledge presentation of longevity awards you read those names yes we have longevity awards for 20 years from Francisco Calderon Patricia Cummings Andre Hart and Lynn Hershey Percy and then the other is a resolution for the retiree of uh who are the two names and it's brown and bill yeah okay so i'll take a motion for the resolution so moved motion by leopold second second by hockoff and gomez all in favor aye opposed that carries unanimously so that'll take us to uh one of our favorite parts of our metro meetings is our legislative updates and we're going to begin with uh state update from joshia welcome josh thanks for joining us okay i can start mr chair good morning uh chairman and board members joshia with chariot or entui your legislative advocacy firm in sacramental the ceo is asking me to do a quick scan of the latest developments at the state level i know you've been back to dc more recently and it's admittedly more exciting in dc but in sacramental there are some decisions being made that affect public transit i'll scan through thank you jina i'll scan through a few different bills for you and there's probably some written handouts in front of you um working with your legal council and the ceo over the last year we've been scanning your enabling statutes as a special transit district as you know the state creates your organizational structure grants through statutes your powers and authorities and legal council has noticed several areas that can be brought up to sort of more modern public transit standards and assembly bill uh 10 89 carried by our assembly member mark stone uh would make several important changes in your enabling statutes i think a committee of the board has talked about those before one of the things we're really trying to bring to the table is some additional best value procurement authority which allows you to really get the best most complex services and and and products on the marketplace and ensure it works for metro that bill is moving very rapidly through the process frankly on consent sometimes best values somewhat controversial in sacramental but we've been able to move it through the assembly it's positioned in the senate to probably be voted out of the legislature next week monday or tuesday uh first week of july and then to the governor so that's going well then a number of other bills that could affect public transit and or the cities and counties that work with public transit districts there aren't too many bills this year sponsored by the transit industry but we're reacting to a number of different bills that could affect you you all are aware that the legislature and uh newly elected governor new some are very focused on housing and housing production and there's different ideas about how to sort of compel or incentivize or even punish cities and counties that in the state's view aren't doing the right thing senate bill 50 is one that would have required ministerial approval of certain housing and for a transit agency it matters because there are definitions of near public transit service or located around transit stations that bill very controversial but but has some dedicated champions in the senate uh particularly has been made a two-year bill so the conversation will continue uh presumably but it's not moving for the rest of this year and by the way this year's uh first year of the two-year session the legislature will work till september 13th take a break in the winter and come back next january um just kind of go into numerical order senate bill 336 by senator dodd is actually sponsored by our our brothers and sisters in labor that would require fully automated transit vehicles to be staffed by a transit employee kind of raising the interesting question of what does it mean to be fully automated versus staffed and that's actually just been made a two-year bill it had gotten out of the senate and our slide says referred to the assembly transportation committee but just i think last night the senator decided to put that on hold for a while because there are some technical issues and some policy issues that he wants to spend more time talking about including with transit agencies like ours so we'll be involved in that uh over the rest of the summer in the fall and he'll probably get it going again in january of next year assembly bill 314 is a bill sponsored by our again our brothers and sisters in labor that makes a number of changes and eight different statutes that govern employee employer relationships across the number of public agency sectors really has to do with release time and number of the associations that represent agencies public agency cities counties special districts transit agencies have concerns with that bill trying to work those out with the author maybe 516 has to do seemingly on the face of it narrowly the city and county rights to tow vehicles that have been parked you know beyond the posted ordinance time there are some transit districts that have towing authority and we're working with ceo cliford and your legal counsel to make sure we understand the impact if any adverse impact on for instance metros towing operations which are a few and far between but could be impacted by this bill ab 752 is sponsored by an assembly member from los angeles who has probably a really great public policy outcome idea that there shall be lactation rooms at transit stations as defined the focus is really on rail stations statutorily in the bill on inner city rail stations but it has a multimodal aspect and to the degree the county obviously has been talking about rail service for years that could have a downstream impact and we're trying to make sure in the short term that applies to the very literally physically largest multimodal rail transit stations in the state maybe the diridon station over the hill right now in this area nothing anytime soon here but we're keeping an eye on that one it also sets an interesting precedent for other public transit infrastructure ab 784 the supervisor mentioned the metro plan to transition to zero emission buses you have a plan in place or you're beginning to develop the transition plan the current technology is more costly this bill actually is the one bill sponsored by folks in the transit in the public transit industry would grant a sales tax exemption from the state's sales tax not local imposed sales taxes for purchase by public transit agencies of new zero emission buses so it just kind of makes a marginal cost increase a little bit more palatable for your already you know stretched public transit agency budgets that bill is moving through the process and we feel good that the legislature will pass it and governor new some hopefully will look favorably upon it maybe 1351 by an assembly member who represents the high desert area in los angeles he had a constituent who has who was certified at his transit agency to ride the service as a disabled individual under the ada had some contra-tomp with a other visit a neighboring transit system who didn't necessarily honor the the certification and so this assembly member has introduced a statewide bill that would would have imposed new restrictions on all transit agencies but really frankly not consistent with the nearly 30 year old well understood robust set of regulations that apply at the federal level to transit agencies under the americans with disabilities act and we're trying to really work with the author to turn that more into a study there are some authorities for our california state transportation agency to ultimately adopt guidelines after doing those studies my view probably not necessary because the federal government is a well settled matter of public transit policy so that's a thorny one but it's receiving a very sympathetic you know hearing in sacramento as you might imagine assembly bill 1568 somewhat like the senate bill 50 notion that i mentioned of the state kind of telling cities and counties more how to do housing production this one had behind it the teeth of threatening transportation funding uh secretary mcpherson talked at the beginning of this morning's hearing about the concern about city and county roads this bill would actually hold back funding for cities and counties in the transportation world to the degree the housing plans aren't in the assembly members definition consistent with where the state wants to go that has been frankly opposed by a wide variety of organizations cities counties transit agencies who all worked hard to pass sp1 in 2017 and you know watch the vote of the people who defeated proposition six which would have sunset our new transit and transportation funding last november and so the assembly member has made this a two-year bill but that precedent yes sir i just wanted to ask a question about this i know that the state identified i think 13 jurisdictions that they consider to be in violation would this bill apply to only those or is it a broader definition so it's a member mccarty started with a broader definition in the last few days literally last night the governor and the legislative leaders working on the state budget for 2019-20 developed a trailer bill that really gets to the point you're asking about the governor's identification of the sort of bad actors in his words cities and counties and they've fashioned a budget trailer bill that gets to the issue it doesn't involve withholding any transportation funds there are penalties on the stick side there are incentives on the you know comply and you get bonuses for grant requests this bill hopefully in a sense because i assume that budget trailer bill will be passed early next week and the governor will sign it he signed the state budget yesterday i think that precedent makes this bill moot but it remains to be seen how hard weather and how hard the assembly member continues to push this sort of broader potentially more injurious perspective so we'll monitor that closely here to for what it's worth bless you the uh this kind of bill has never impinged on public transit funding directly it has been city or county road dollars that actually is changing in his view as well he's looking at other funds because the city and county transportation dollars are actually protected in the constitution but the concept is still out there uh so those that was a race through bills happy to answer any other questions and i will pause and talk less fast at the end but i also want to give you a sense of the nineteen uh the 2019 2020 budget that was just signed into law last night from a transit perspective there was a one-time appropriation of nearly 200 million dollars in cap and trade funds to an air resources board program that does help public transit agencies like us or school schools or others folks in the commercial world uh purchase these new zero mission uh heavy engine heavy duty engine technology with a rebate aspect that money goes to buy down the still current higher costs of the electric uh bus technology and our our in our transit world we pushed hard for a big appropriation there and it's a slight increase over the current year's appropriation and that's something metro could take advantage of over the coming years and we just talked about with the with the supervisor uh the governor's original january call for punishing cities he also said withhold senate bill one streets and roads funding and i just described uh the solution that's referenced up there on the slide that came together late yesterday um the ceo has also asked me to talk about a couple of broader issues spearheaded by the california transit association representing metro and miss clippard and many of your staff members are very active in various committees there including on this ongoing effort to try to create a smoother path for agencies like metro to implement the air resources boards new zero emission bus requirement which requires you to transition your fleet uh by 2040 at the latest and one of the aspects of that is uh uh putting together a task force of professionals throughout our public transit industry now that we have a regulation who will come together to try to develop best practices training technical implementation uh thoughts and ideas including if necessary advocating for additional resources that zero emission bus task force is uh working with a bunch of agencies including metro to figure out the path forward so hopefully those learnings can be replicated on throughout your agency yes sir so um i don't think we've had a problem with the idea of the 2040 deadline for zero emission but there's also currently under the airport structure uh i think it's correct me if i have it wrong but uh prohibition about buying non-electric buses after 26 what's happening with that the the the the regulation that applies to us would essentially be a de facto prohibition after uh 2028 i believe if i'm doing the math because they a bus look useful life is roughly 12 years and the deadline to get full transition is 2040 and that does imply a procurement schedule ahead of that 2040 deadline and that will be a challenging issue uh i think that answer your question but if you didn't like questions are there discussions of modifying that or is that just that's going that's what's happening and nobody's challenging or what's going on so i would right now there are not because that regulation is only six months old for the three to four years during the run-up of that regulation there was a lot of challenge to the milestones and in fact we successfully pushed them off farther 2040 which with that 2028 kind of practical procurement milestone is believe it or not much longer than the air where the air resources board started but at a certain point particularly under governor brown's leadership and the the folks who were then on the air resources board it was pushed as far as possible in my opinion as if agencies like this or others around the state find it you know as a practical matter with full sincere good faith efforts just can't get there we would of course go back and try to revisit that but right now it's not on the table per se and i'm not sure the full implications but the federal government now defines a useful life robust at 14 years right in the state of california share that definition so we put that on the table as well and uh kind of arguing for like 2042 they kind of move the front end goalposts closer to today's time but we're aware of that and will like i say in maybe five or six years as we get closer to 2028 be very clear about the challenges at the time and over the last 20 years there have been successful reopenings of the regulation that has ultimately led to zero mission um no prom no promises but if it's a practical challenge i'm hoping that the you know cooler cooler heads will prevail in sacramento but very much related to this challenge is the cost of electricity there's a regulation that requires us to do certain things but there's no guarantee that our investor owned utilities or other power supply entities like pg&e will be there for us or if they are there for us what are the rates current demand charges are very difficult for for public sector agencies period much less when there's suddenly a whole fleet of electric buses running around is the price of fuel so to speak in a skyrocket and so we're involved in a regulatory issue iou by iou urging new commercial electric vehicle rates that are more friendly to public transit under the auspices of the california public utilities commission there's some traction on that your agency has been involved in providing technical input on that and we'll keep trying to push as hard as we can on providing a fertile ground for more friendly public transit demand charges and then a couple of other sort of future issues but that metro is involved in right now the legislature last year asked the california transit association to open up the transportation development act a 45 plus year old law that provides the basic transit funding from the state a quarter percent of the state sales tax it's billions of dollars a year also the state transit assistance program there are qualification criteria that the state holds you to which are occasionally admittedly difficult for some agencies to meet but the the the back end punitive aspect is funding can be withheld legislature asked us to consider reforms and proposals next year for possible legislative action that keep accountability in place from the legislature's perspective but provide some flexibility for public transit agencies your ceo is vet directly involved personally in the work of trying to come up with the best potential proposal to the state on that issue and then finally there were some issues mentioned about training i think in the zero mission bus space the association miss clifford asked me to mention that the california transit association is developing a leadership california transit association kind of statewide effort to really lift up current staff maybe at the lower management levels or mid-level executives to kind of get even more strongly on that executive track sharpening skill sets developing executive decision making possibly something like leadership santa crews but really with a california transit perspective and your ceo is very involved in the group that's putting together that potential curriculum for transit staff throughout california so i raced through a lot that's going on at the state level stop and breathe and happy to answer any other questions or get out of your hair for the morning mr chair thank you josh any questions for mr shaw i think you were thorough okay and thank you for that always look forward to that presentation hey i know it's more exciting in dc but you guys sometimes go back and visit and walk around with chris i'm happy to host you in the state capital next year we're tired of going back to a really hot dc yeah make us a proposal for when we should go and so for everybody else mr rocky would like to know what restaurants you'll take them to thank you josh hey chris hold on i got a public comment on that first come on up on it thank you thank you josh for your report i appreciate it in a while um i did want to clarify one thing which is on senate bill three three six not all of labor is supporting this bill at all actually our union has been opposing this bill we have been following it and tracking it right now that it's been moved to a two-year bill um i believe it comes up again to the floor where we'll be able to present our opposition mind us what it's about i'm sorry automated vehicles automation it's about automation with no actual driver on board no ability to stop it and it's how quickly do we forget that an automated vehicle actually killed somebody in arizona about a year and a half ago and it's like you wait a long time and everybody seems to forget that those fatalities do happen now companies that are developing this technology and these vehicles are stating things that well we're getting better at it and the cameras view everything and less likely that somebody will be killed again um but there was also a survey that was done and i want to say somewhere between 75 and 80 of the people that were asked i don't know how many people were asked stated that they would not get on a vehicle without a driver on that vehicle and it needs to be something more than just an employee a meet and greet kind of person from that you we know from home depot or walmart you need to have somebody on that vehicle that is actually skilled and trained in transporting folks currently there are two areas where i know that these vehicles are operating they're on private parking lots they're at large campuses where they're bringing employees into like google or or um oracle or one of the larger corporations with multi parking areas um the reason for this is because they want to put these onto public streets um they've sold it to sacramento and sacramento says oh yeah we'll look at a pilot project here our community is not designed for any type of an automated vehicle at all we have hills and we've got mountain roads and you know we've got people that actually have the right of way and we give the right of way um so you know just so you know that there is opposition to this afl cio's position on autonomous vehicles is not the same as the cal feds position so you know there's a little bit of um conflict and confusion that's going on there but that's our position as far as automated vehicles go thank you great thanks for that update mr auto you have a comment yeah so uh keep out of so in the long list of bills there one of the ones that was mentioned uh was uh senate bill 50 senate bill 50 and um i might have missed it but i didn't hear anything about senate bill i believe it's 592 so senate bill 50 was put on a two-year program but through the gut and amend process a bill that initially slated uh dealing with barbers and cosmetology or something is now that has the contents of much of what is in sp 50 and that is uh in process so just wanted to surface that and maybe it was mentioned but i okay great all right we'll close on in the uh state presentation and now mr julio will uh come up and give us a federal legislative update welcome chris thanks mr chair this feels familiar uh for those of you who were here yesterday for the rtc i'll try to do better i even did a little power point again my second year in a row josh is bringing my game up we love the competition so thanks again for having me it's great to it's great to be right i think i'm contractually obligated to mention that the weather here is so beautiful uh compared especially compared to what it's like in dc i think it's like 97 and heat indexes are you know off of my phone all for the last few days so it really is nice to be here so hopefully i can give you kind of a little bit of a federal update with uh you know what's going on transportation wise with a kind of a transit twist um here in dc and we will start with the with the april trip uh thank you again for the directors that came uh it's uh this is not uh and i know the directors on here can can vouch for this this is not a sightseeing trip to dc i call it more of a forced march for two days from office to office to anyone who will listen to us and the ceo of course has sort of directed me in general to look under every racket rock in washington dc for for resources but i think that you guys come and you prevent you present a really strong story and so i think in washington we punch above our weight you know we're a small agency but people listen to to us because you guys present our our challenges our difficulties and the things we do well uh in a really relatable way and so um you know we meet with our congressional delegation and of course they're going to be supportive of the things we do uh and congressman eschew and congressman panetta again really really helpful with the things that we do but when we go and see congressional committees who are who are taking care of the um the policy issues on the federal level uh again i think that we've done a good job of sort of giving them a a piece of what small agencies have to go through on a daily basis and continually you know challenging um with regard to capital uh needs uh etc the other thing that we've been doing recently has been visiting with the members of the house transportation committee uh which again provides these authorizations uh and talking particularly to california members there uh neither congressman eschew or panetta or on that committee and so trying to again sort of talk about santa cruz's uh santa cruz's story with these other california members i think helps uh helps them uh when they when they will get around to to do and then of course at the department transportation uh we go there with with hat in hand uh but again also talking about our story to sell our story to the people who are making those grants again you folks thank you again it makes my job easier when i can come in after you and uh and talk about talk about things they know i'm coming to them uh with with power behind me so of course we've discussed our long-term funding needs uh both um you know sort of in the larger sense of of federal transit funding uh and our individual sense to uh advocated for grant informations and then again uh this fast act which is the uh authorizing legislation that uh that uh authorizes federal highway and transit programs usually on a four to five year basis it's expiring in 2010 and so we're looking for uh 2020 thank you 2010 1913 turned it on you so it's okay you have to bring that up again here's bruce miss bruce miss misspoke at so um so talk a little bit about the budget uh we've got uh a uh an administration right now in the white house that uh each year proposes pretty austere budgets and i will say uh that's not uh completely out of the ordinary um you know even you know previous administrations would come to congress with budgets that are you know less than robust with the understanding that congress is going to increase it the trump administration's budgets have been a little bit more austere than that they've you know recommended cutting lots of programs eliminating agencies um both the department of transportation and uh federal government wide thus far congress is pretty soundly on a really bipartisan way rejected those proposed cuts uh and then in 2018 and 2019 fiscal years we actually got some pretty significant increases to transportation programs we're hopeful uh that that's going to happen again in 2019 and 2020 uh but it's not a guarantee a 2011 deficit reduction package it was approved by congress again 10 years ago almost 10 years ago uh set some very very tight budget limits on uh on spending each year in order to get that that 1.5 trillion dollars in deficit reduction over 10 years so now that we're in the 2020 we're in the last couple of years of it it's really taking its toll and so congress uh for fy18 and 19 increase those budget caps and as a result we got increases in lots of programs uh the president seems less likely to go along with an increase in the caps for 20 and 21 uh easily uh he i think has learned that this is this is kind of leverage for him uh and so we may see some budget battles for fy 2021 kind of go further into the fiscal year than we would prefer each fiscal year fy 2020 begins october 1 2019 i can't imagine we're going to have a budget by then again uh i think that the president and congress are going to be battling over these so if in fact we get you know an increase in the caps it's going to be great we're going to get kind of you know uh increases for our programs once again if not it could be kind of a 10 percent across the board cut for all federal agencies not just not just transportation if we don't get that budget agreement so the good thing about transportation is that uh first at least for the formula programs at dot we have some protection from those across the board cuts the fast act guarantees these funding levels because of the money coming from the uh the highway gas tax into the federal highway trust fund and so those would not be uh unless congress specifically went and tried to cut them uh they would not they wouldn't fall under and across the board cut programs like amtrak new starts rail projects at dndc at at dot the the build slash tiger competitive grant program those would be subject to those cuts the good news too is that in f y 19 uh the the stick program and hopefully uh hopefully you guys are familiar with the stick program it's kind of our baby right it's kind of a bonus pool for for a high performing uh transit agencies under that sort of uh populations under 200 000 uh and we were able to in the 2015 fast act get an increase uh in that program uh it kicked in in f y 19 so that that's now just starting to show up uh in our budgets uh and actually looking to increase it a little bit more in the 2020 fast act reauthorization as a matter of fact in the probably in the next week or so congressman panetta along with uh three other members it's going to be a bipartisan bill to increase uh that stick basically the stick program of the takedown over the larger federal transit formula program it's two percent of that and then it goes into this you know creates this bonus pool uh and we're trying to increase that to three percent of the uh of the entire transit formula program sounds like a small amount but this is you know this is a this is you know a four billion dollar program uh that we're talking about so a one percent increase is not a small potato it's a it's a big this big deal so infrastructure in 2016 uh you know after the president uh was elected there was a lot of talk about a big beautiful trillion dollar infrastructure package something that the democrats and the republicans could work together on and um so i i got a little modlin here but uh essentially essentially an infrastructure package for the rest of this administration is not going to happen and i think that uh unfortunately um the white house i don't know if they were ever completely serious uh about putting together a package uh it it wasn't wasn't one of their priorities uh you know immigration and border security uh as well as trade deals seem to be their legislative priorities and and and infrastructure has been more again uh sort of leveraged so you know you probably saw it in the news but a couple of months ago the president and and democrats in congress got together and said yeah let's do a two trillion dollar plan we'll talk in a month and we'll we'll see what happens uh as to how we put it together they met a month later and the president insisted that uh congress stop investigating him and that congress approved his mexico-canada trade agreement then we can talk infrastructure uh speaker polosi and uh majority minority resumer left the meeting and and i think that's that uh the structure so um which had more impact one of the many national infrastructure weeks or national ice cream day yeah you know it's it's a running joke in dc that every time something kind of blows up in a partisan way everyone's like well there goes infrastructure week and uh because the the white house will often you know have these you know kind of public relations deals with uh call it infrastructure week not not a lot behind it so um so yeah so unfortunately i don't think we're gonna see much with regard to a major infrastructure package but i will say that um the last couple of years we've gotten increases there there have been literally 10 billion dollars per year in fy 18 and 19 that were included in the individual budgets for existing programs for infrastructure so that's there and again if i were if i were in congress i would be sort of counting that as a down payment on infrastructure um we've got the fast act reauthorization coming in 2020 and that's going to be a it's going to be a heavy lift uh in order to keep funding levels the same because you know because uh federal gas taxes are not coming into the highway trust fund at a at a level that they used to just to keep programs the same over the five year period from 2021 to 25 or 26 um congress is going to need to find a hundred billion dollars in additional resources just to keep things the same so you know of course we want growth so that's probably going to need uh you know an increase in the federal gas tax hasn't happened in 30 years the tough political lift uh but you know there congress is kind of running out of other options to to fund these things uh and so so that'll be a battle uh and and we're still we're still battling that out in congress it's uh you know the closer we get to an election the tougher it is to to do again or any tax increase so but but we do feel like that fast act in 2020 is going to be at least for transit it's going to be our infrastructure package so again the fast act expires in 2020 uh i i will also say that 2021 at the earliest is when we'll actually see it uh reauthorized and uh congress tends to again on these funding issues they tend to be pretty slow um the last um the last before the 2015 fast act there was the 2012 uh reauthorization and that was extended for short and long periods of time over 30 times in three years before we got that 2015 fast act so so it's 2021 is the earliest is when we're really going to see it again we're looking for both formula program increases and competitive program increases we tend to do pretty well in these competitive programs at fta and so we want that pot to be uh larger of course when i mentioned the stick program increase um uh throughout this we have been participating in a in a meaningful way in the american public transit association reauthorization process uh we want them to know our story and we want our policies to be included in theirs uh and the ceo is very active in that process i uh on the staff level are as am as well and so uh and we will we will keep that uh and then again like i said you know revenue you know it's all it's all about revenue now and finding that vehicle to really fund uh fund these programs i don't think you know that people talk about oregon and their vehicle miles traveled pilot study and that may be kind of coming someplace i don't think they're quite there yet i don't think for this next reauthorization they will be there yet truthfully the gas tax is really going to be our only way to go unless somebody finds something you know under the cushions to uh to keep this thing going so um i think that was all i had but i also did want to mention a couple of other things that i had not put up in the power point no but one was with regard to uh tax issues of course you guys probably know that we get a rebate hopefully we get a rebate every year from the irs for our uh purchases of compressed natural gas it's called the alternative fuel tax credit unfortunately congress reauthorized or extends that really on an annual basis so we have no certainty with regard to budgeting and angela hates me uh because i can't provide her with certainty uh on this thing um and so we're hopeful that congress that by the end of this year uh will uh will extend that alternative fuel tax credit it'll have to be in a retroactive way uh and we're but we're hoping that it can be kind of retroactive the last year and also push it forward a year uh to provide us just a little bit of certainty uh but that's been a that's been something that we deal with uh every single year and just as an aside this tax credit is included in a big package of you know probably a couple of dozen very granular small tax breaks mostly go to businesses and some of them are kind of goofy like there's a tax break for people who own NASCAR race car tracks and for people who have horse tracks you know it's it and so again some of these are hard to swallow and so congress takes the big package of things like a like good stuff like an alternative fuel tax credit and takes them all up in one package to to make them easier to swallow so uh so that again makes it makes it more difficult for us i think that the ceo and i have talked about talking to congressman panetta about maybe pulling out that alternative tax credit and having it go kind of on its own and seeing if congress would have sort of approved that maybe on a permanent basis uh and that's a that's a political dance as well but again congressman has been been open to that and then finally uh director mcpherson mentioned this in uh this morning but i also wanted to uh to mention with regard to uh receiving fhwa reimbursements for the storm damages and done to the county roads in 2016 and 2017 the ceo asked me if i would be helpful to the county and you know sort of trying to advocate for that on on the federal level and i'm and i'm happy to do it and have been doing that with with county public works it's a you know it's a tough climb partisan gridlock has kind of prevented us from finding a legislative vehicle to get some relief for that congressman woman su and congressman panetta and some other members of the california delegation are pushing fhwa really hard on this uh but again uh it's it's been a it's been a policy change that seems to be aimed just at california and uh and so we're we're we're facing an uphill battle happy to answer any questions thank you again for your time any questions for chris not really a question but we met yesterday about city issues and uh chris brought up one point that was very interesting that was relevant could be relevant to the pacific station project and that had to do with opportunity zones um i could try and repeat what you said but maybe you could do it better sure and again i i've spoken at lake the boat with ceo the 2017 tax bill included a provision and created a new program called opportunity zones and essentially what it does is it allows investors that have capital gains if they they get they get tax uh they get tax breaks if they invest those capital gains into designated opportunity zones uh i think it was last year the state designated some zones and i believe there are two or three in santa cruz county one uh in uh downtown santa cruz uh and so and live up as well right and so um and so looking at that the opportunity zones have become kind of something that this administration is hanging its hat on uh it's it's still in its developmental stages investors have not yet you know jumping into this stuff you're waiting for more um waiting for more guidance from the irs on it but uh they are expressing interest in doing sort of investments and so things like pacific station potentially downtown that's a a potential tool if there is an investor willing to kind of do something there and can get a and can get a tax break from it i will also say that that this administration has made um communities with opportunity zones kind of priority for competitive grant programs so for instance with the bus and bus facilities grant program the build program at dot they are listed as you know a priority will be given to projects in opportunity zones and so uh so i was mentioning to director matthews that if you know anytime you guys are doing a uh an application to the federal government for anything and it might impact opportunity zones i would say cram that in there uh even if they don't ask for it and and that's what i got out of it although the uh irs regs are still so murky that investors don't even know apparently don't have the confidence to use that investment opportunity the signal's been given even to federal agencies that haven't gotten increases in their budget they've been given direction to uh bump to the top of the list projects that are in an opportunity zone so it it puts another star on your application so that that could be helpful to us and we're just we'll get to it later but that that was a really good insight to have good information that's good any other questions like i guess it would also come down to um knowing how cities could see if they qualify for that designation yeah it was uh it was a situation where congress gave the uh power to the states each individual state to designate those i believe uh it was in 2018 yeah that they were designated uh and then again i think they're three in santa cruz county total yeah we had to submit uh to the state department of finance i think uh and then the governor put out the list and then the the fed adopted that list correct but it's totally unclear still what that means yeah except that you get except you get another point i like that yeah um or it's hard to figure out otherwise any other question all right i just want to thank you for a fantastic job representing us in dc he does a really good job for us i mean the money we spend is well worth it thanks very much it's great i'd second that and uh it really when we would gone back i didn't go back this last year but uh or this year but um the way we have approached some things in the district here of being part of the solution having to measure on the ballot and so forth to cover our our deficient our financial deficiencies it was it's recognized up there and it's in their heads of our the representatives back in washington dc so it uh it helps it does super i no remember director we we got a we got a nice lecture from senator feinstein a few years ago about about thing and we did it yep and she's and she's been acknowledged of that she's acknowledged and that that was a selling point for measure d too yeah well thank you chris has a great presentation i got a comment from the public so i'm gonna let them come up here thank you come on up my name is elise casby and i'm just uh really interested in this um i think there's a lot of talk about the green new deal and i know that a lot of uh different you know groups of people in the public interest have been going to dc and lobbying legislature uh about the green new deal and i wonder if uh chris i think i don't know your last name so i'll just call you chris if chris would mind um telling us uh if there's any promise that the green new deal will hold um will have uh transportation funding as a major part of it as i hope it would so i'm just asking if there for an update as far as that goes we'll see if he's got any information i don't know if he's prepared but he might have something off the cuff sure uh no the you know the the green new deal and climate change uh at least on the house side in in congress has been discussed pretty pretty deeply there there are two kind of there's a the green new deal right now is is is more of an idea than legislation there's also a carbon tax legislation that's that that is being floated around the house i think that the house will consider uh something with regard to climate change i believe that there will be some sort of transportation element to it i don't know what that's going to be i don't know if it's going to be direct infusion of funding or some sort of um you know you know or you know on the other hand something like sb 50 i don't i don't know uh what what it's going to take but i know that transit uh and transportation that's is part of that equation um the other side of this sort of politically right now is um as long as republicans are are in charge of the senate uh it won't go any further than the house so uh anything that does come up this year will won't won't won't be enacted it'll uh it won't get to the senate and so the house is moving slowly on it because they've got a lot of new members who were just elected in republican districts and they don't necessarily want to make them take a really hard vote on something that's not going to happen so uh so that's it's kind of where it is right now some dynamics okay well we'll stay tuned on that certainly yeah all right all right thank you for that okay we're going to go ahead and move on to the next item this is uh item 14 of public hearing for the final adoption of the santa cruz metro budget angela morning the essence of time and this will be the sixth time you've seen me up here with this i think i can go to the details of changes versus the whole presentation if that's suffice that would be fine all right so today's presentation is on the f y 20 f y 21 offering budget and f y 20 capital budget we'll be going over the five-year budget plan all the revenues and expenses for 20 and 21 the operating side as well as the capital side and then we have the additional information in here in this final version that we would be producing in our final budget document that would be out to the public so the five-year plan we look like we have about 51 million dollars in the expense side but as you can see from this one our revenues are on on the good side we always want our revenues above our expenses so that's what the bar is going up revenues are above our expenses this is the percentage of the revenues that we're getting in of course our biggest percentage is our sales tax of the total two sales tax and the second one is our passenger fares and that includes the contracts that we have with ucsc cabrillo in highway 17 going on to the expense side as you can see our expenses are lower than our revenues that's the way we want it to be 51 million dollars in expenses versus 56 million dollars in revenue here's the breakup of our expenses um oh my category name that's interesting um okay so the orange is supposed to be labor and fringe benefits for the bus operators at 35 percent labor and fringe benefits other is the blue at 40 percent and the green is non-personnel expenses the red is paratransit going on to the transfers this is the transfers we made this chart a little bit clearer everything that's red on the left hand side is red on the pie chart on the right hand side so now you can more clearly see where the red money is going into the buckets on the right hand side and the blue money is going into the buckets on on the way right hand side oh dear i am so sorry you will have to go to page 14a.8 in your packet to see those uh those changes um apologize uh thought we had this all together but 14a.8 in your packet is the chart that i have up here now so now you can see the different uh names to those um why don't you read those names for the benefit of the audience no no it's okay so the um let's see what's missing up there looks at the chart so the top blue on the right is our biggest area transferred to capital budget this is the sales tax measure and that's 39 percent of what's going into out for the transfers and out of the operating budget the second largest is the left hand side of the red transferred operating capital reserve fund this is the CalPERS UAL and the OPAC and then the third largest one is the top red transfers access to operating capital reserve budget and that's about 18 percent so those are the biggest biggest groups that we're transferring over 2.5 blue i'll just pick that out 2.4 to 2.5 that's the bus uh commitment that the board has made of the three million dollars that we're putting in the capital budget every year that's being transferred out of the operating budget 2.4 and then we have an additional money going into the reserve capital budget for the buses sorry a little confusing moving on to the revenue expense percent change this first one is the chart i've been showing you where it's the budget that we have going the very high 10.3 percent that we had back in 2018 that's where we added measure d and the s t a s b a s d one dollar amounts to keep in mind this is budget now this is what actually happened so the actual if you go over to 2018 you can see where our revenues came in and we were able to fund totally fund our reserves in 2018 and our expenses were kept at 3.5 percent so here's the changes between may and june's presentation uh we are up on revenues by 80 000 in 2020 and about 26 000 in 2021 these are a swap of revenues we had passenger affairs in there for the eco passes and now we have a contract that we're going forward with and we believe we can get additional revenues in those two years from going from the passenger fare to the special transit fares of the eco pass contract as you can see on the slide here it's a one-year pilot program and we're running it from october through september starting this october on the operating expense side our expenses are going up between june and may of what i showed you going up 193 in 2020 and 164 in 2021 the biggest piece of that is we're fully funding a position in the purchasing area for the admin specialist first purchasing for a provisional position additionally we have our new marketing director that came in and she kind of needed some money to do her job so we've added some money in there uh for for marketing starting in 2020-21 so the transfers uh 113 000 less that's going into the transfers because of those at puts and takes on the revenue expense side and about 138 000 less is going into the transfers in 2021 looking at those reserve buckets this is our a guesstimate estimate as of june 14th when this is put together if you go to page 14 j1 you can see where the details are on this we are fully funded in all of our buckets which is a good thing and we now believe that we'll be able to put money into the operating and capital reserve bucket to bring it up to 8.3 million dollars this was at 2.3 in 2008 so these are a non-controval operating budget risk you guys have seen this many many times so i'm not going to go into each one these are revenue risks these are expense risks x ones are the additional information that i've shown to you before this is our board authorized support activities one's pretty small this is our memberships but all these details can be found in our budget more memberships we're still investigating i think jean is hoping for a return call she's left a couple messages i don't understand that you can follow up on that okay thank you yeah all right here's the board member travel nothing's changed there from what i presented to you in may employee incentive program that's what i presented to you may also that's our operating side we'll be on to the capital budget for only 2020 this is our pie chart 79 percent of our capital of the 20 million dollars that we have going forward is for revenue vehicle purchases replacements and the campaigns that we do on them next biggest area is your construction oh no category names again apologize so the blue is revenue vehicle purchase replacement campaigns for 16.2 million dollars the orange is construction related projects at 2.4 million dollars which is 12 percent of our 20.4 million dollar budget and the rest of them are our normal it projects facility upgrades maintenance upgrades and non-revenue vehicles expand just briefly on the construction projects that are in this pie chart so construction projects would be listed on page 14 e1 go to that it will list out all the different capital projects that we have there and go on to the construction um line item see that the details that answer your question okay on the budget side this is the funding that we would be having for the um capital budget again the categories are missing so the orange is federal grants at 6.4 million dollars this is 31 percent of our capital uh funding the next largest one is the green on the top left that's transfers from operating budget this is the measure d money that is coming out of the operating budget to fund um the bus replacements and then the blue is the next largest group which is ptmi sca that's a 3.2 million dollars and that's 16 percent of our capital budget the rest of them are um sta money of 7.7 million local partnership programs at 0.8 low carbon transit operations program which is the lc top money at 1.6 million dollars and we have some grant block money coming in at half a million dollars that's all i had so just as i didn't put a slide in here but if you're interested in our unfunded capital which is above and beyond the 20 million that we have here that's on summary 14 l.1 five years we have 45 million dollars unfunded 10 years we have 209 million dollars unfunded and the details on 14 l2-7 so that is my presentation i just want to say that this presentation was completely done by my staff and i'm just up here presenting it debbie and christina our integral to everything that you see here thank you for that presentation you were just about as fast as josh so i just i just wanted to make sure on which uh or the passenger fares that's 10.4 million and that's steady throughout is that right that was on 14 a4 is that right i just want to make sure that's the right the passenger fares if you go to 14 b1 i'll have you look at our forecast here i'm just looking at 14 a4 when you had it just i don't know what color it is okay 10.4 yeah 10.4 is our total total passenger fares 420 uh 10.4 again in 21 uh looks like that's about what we're sticking out through the next five years for passenger fares any other questions okay we'll go ahead and open up to the public hello again so i just wanted to step in remind you that we are requesting that you hold off on any adoption for any budget especially given with this presentation we got three contracts that need to be ratified first thank you thank you anybody else from the public i i am not able to follow uh with information that i consider like really important um i need to know what the management salaries are i need to know what the consultant salaries are i need to know how much the surveillance cameras that are going in are costing i would like to know why drivers are unable to run from one bus line to another i went to take the 71 yesterday and it was eight minutes late and i was late for my doctor's appointment at dominican um and i don't think it's the drivers i think the problem here is that the drivers are being asked to to do too much we had a bunch of bus lines that were cut to some of the most poorest neighborhoods that are in the mountains i need i really need for for there to be a less kind of bureaucratic business as usual type meeting and i want to see really hard questions being asked obviously we're we're operating in a period where there's very little federal um funding coming in but i feel like there's been this gradual um buildup of of uh management and um it information and slick promotions and i'm just a bus rider and i'm just seeing less and less service since alex clifford came on board as ceo i'm seeing more um presentations by slick consultants and when we do have public information meetings they're usually very one sided where all the information is being sort of presented to the public and we're sort of slotted in to to fill out you know give our comments on it instead of real public dialogue so i just want to say it's it's getting more and more difficult for me to go to all the various meetings that i need to go to just to try to understand public life and government life i was at at something last night night that went late and i would really appreciate it if if we could have a more easy to follow presentation on on what the impacts are for the public and the ridership and not pie charts that have no names on them which to be honest to be honest with you i find this kind of presentation very bureaucratic and not very much in the public interest to begin with i feel like i'm at some kind of bank meeting where what i'm hearing about is all about money money finance money money money money and i i i just don't hear enough about what's happening to the actual buses for the public so i just wanted to say that um i'm somebody who's interested but i'll be honest it gets hard to maintain interest when you come to meetings where you feel it's like you're at some kind of golf club meeting and everybody's friends with each other and the presentations are so like just completely it's like reading somebody's financial statement i realize that's important but i feel like there's a whole dimension that's missing thank you and i do and i do apologize for the pie pie charts and i'm sure that we'll make sure that that doesn't happen again thank you for the comment with all due respect every question that the last speaker from the public at least raised is public information easily accessible on our budget we don't have a complicated hard to read budget and if you want to come to a meeting please you're you're you're three minutes you're done you know excuse me i'll go on with my right to respond which is every one of those questions are very reasonable questions how much does management make i mean i won't repeat them all they're all accessible i'm happy to sit down with any member of the public as is our management staff and present the information so somebody wants to come to a meeting and argue against the way we spend our money they have every right to do so i appreciate people that are interested in that level of engagement and uh perhaps you know more to the point this is our budget discussion sure it sounds like there's lots of numbers and dollars that's what we're doing right now we have other agenda items where we talk about the other issues so i i really respect people who want to understand how to get involved in the public process and make political comments or whatever kinds of comments about the priorities that we're making but you can't come here and attack us i don't you can't give the right to say anything you want but it's not helpful to come and attack us because we're talking about numbers in our budget and asking for information that's easily accessible to the public it'd take 15 minutes to get that information out in the meeting it should happen before the meeting and then and if people want to have that kind of you know specific information they can get it it's not hidden thank you did someone else want to speak here come on hi vicki trant again just real briefly i noticed in the enabling statute for this public agency that the general manager is referred to in those terms very specifically those two words general manager that term comes up again and again and again in the enabling statute in the public utilities code i'm wondering what the perception is of ceo chief executive officer versus general manager it concerns me because the idea of a ceo sounds like an inflated salary each year it sounds almost like taking advantage of the position i think it would be better for everybody to go back to the term general manager to refer to mr clifford thank you very much thank you any other comments from the public okay we'll go ahead and close the public here i did want to make one more comment similar to mike's if i could i'm just going to close the public hearing yeah i'm going to close the public hearing and bring it back for discussion yeah um if all we had to make decisions on was the brief presentations here with some charts and a summary presentation we'd be hard-pressed to do it and um obviously we all have a lot of information uh and very full and complete staff reports for every single item on the agenda and elise is familiar with that she's she comes regularly to the city council so and the the transit metro agenda and all the reports are also equally available to the public so every one of these is is readily researchable just want to state that for the record thanks for the clarification i appreciate that mr clifford mr chair i just wanted to add uh this board a few years back created standing committees and this budget has been through the budget and finance standing committee i think no less than three times that those are public meetings they're publicized on our website and uh we welcome the public to participate in those meetings too and that the standing committees are often the times the place in which the board members take extra time to dig into the details of the budget into s tough questions i can vouch for that thank you for clarifying that yes i'd also like to further emphasize uh vice chair rockins point that um i'm i'm not a politician i am an elected official um i study plants i'm a scientist my interests are in sustainability and transportation happens to be one of my favorite parts of that um in terms of fiscal knowledge budgets finances all that stuff i have no idea but the public accessibility of this information has been a great aid in enabling me to perform my duties in my ex official position so yes it is accessible to the public and certainly if i could do it than anyone could oh that was a very valuable comment thank you thank you rodkin um i i wanted to be before we got started uh in the any detailed discussion the budget uh at least one if not both of the unions asked us to put off the budget because we're still in bargaining i want to say that you know you can always amend the budget during the year it's not done lightly but during the budget gives us an idea of what our variety of needs are across the entire spectrum of possibilities so the whereas um the budget now may or may not provide um sufficient funding for what the unions are hoping to get or what they're bargaining for it's not impossible for us to make amendments if we end up with a bargaining agreement that doesn't quite fit into this budget so i said it wouldn't be done lightly but then we're not going to enter into a contract with three you know with the unions lightly either it's going to be a difficult issue we're in the middle of bargaining so i don't think we need to put off this budget i think we need to have know where we're basically planning to go and if it turns out we make a settlement that requires us to modify one of our items here and stuff we have the legal capacity to do that thank you for that insight we have a uh item on the agenda the budget proposal from staff at this point second i have a motion by rod can approval by math is any other discussion on the budget i'll just say that um this budget hasn't been taken lightly uh the committee has met we have gone through it extensively and done a lot of grilling of the staff and i do appreciate their time in putting up with us on those types of questions i think that we have some real serious issues some fiscal issues that we will be addressing in the near future and we need to be able to protect the right of keeping this agency alive as a result of the fiscal impact that we can expect um our retirement and a lot of things that go into it it isn't just the dollar wage it's the impact exponentially of the benefits along with the dollar wage that we're having a really balanced on a very very fine tipping point of what we can do versus what we're already obligated to do based on history and um costs of living and a cost of the equipment and capital that are needed here so i just want to let you know that it's very complex so just coming up here listening to a presentation and i and saying yes or no on this is it goes well beyond that so we just want to make sure the public is aware that a lot of that uh information uh it's encouraged to show up to some of these committees where there is a lot more conversation dialogue um and and questions that are given that um we don't have quite so much liberty and time at this particular level to um address so just letting you all know that it's important that we all are on the same page about that when it comes to a vote and that again i agree that there's ample opportunity to reach out you've got contact information for the people here um the public is invited or is eligible to attend any of this the information is then put back on the public of what the past history is for items that have come for individual votes so all of that is accessible available and um we're all making sure that we're all um inclusive and getting as much information out there at the level of what the comprehension is of the the person that's in the audience or the the people that are here on our board um that are voting thank you thank you director leopold um i'm going to be supporting the motion i just want to say that our budget this year looks better than it did uh uh several years ago um and everyone in this agency made uh an outstanding effort to get us through a very difficult time our drivers did a lot uh the other employees our management staff uh and the public strongly supported the agency um and we're in the middle of negotiations but we remember all those pieces as we uh as we pass this budget and talk about all the other pieces that have to go in terms of negotiations um we we're never out of the woods as a public agency um and we're gonna we have to continue to think about that but we also remember what makes the agency um successful and it's the employees and our relationship with the public thank you any other comments before i call for the vote i just want to make it clear that every board member that's up here understands and the reason we're here is for the well-being and the sustaining ability of metro that's what we do that's what we're here for so with that i'm gonna call over vote all in favor i opposed that budget carries unanimously okay it takes us to our next item which is the ceo's oral report mr clifford thank you mr chair directors i'll keep this brief just starting off with the new hires we have uh jess martinis that we hired virginia vocaro kasey administrative assistant i'm gonna double back to rufus in a minute um we had promotions uh in this last month from mechanic one to mechanic two miguel vela real and christopher perez and i'd like to just introduce you also to rufus francis i'll read his brief bio and if we can invite him up to the podium maybe he can give a couple of remarks when i'm done rufus joins santa cruz metro effective jill uh june 24th as a safety security and risk director uh rufus has worked in various large metropolitan transit systems in california in a senior management level for over 30 years rufus attended the california state university los angeles and obtained a master's degree in health and science he also has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and an associate degree in civil engineering in addition he's earned several courses in transportation management transportation engineering and safety from uc ervine uc la and cal state los angeles over his career rufus has served on seven major transit cooperative research sponsored programs sponsored by um trb transportation research board he also served on the apta board of directors for two terms in the california transit association subcommittee chair of the rail operations and regulatory committee for two terms it is really a pleasure to introduce you to rufus he was a great find for us i think he'll do great things for us and rufus would you mind coming on up and mind up rufus introducing yourself and maybe saying a couple words quite a resume thank you very much uh mr quick word and i'm so glad and orange over here as you heard i've been in the transit for over 30 years started my career with mta los angeles it used to be rtd then began lc mta metro and Sacramento regional transit and then vta and finally here so i'm very happy and i'll try my best to serve this organization and the safety security and risk management areas thank you very much for your time thank you welcome to metro yeah chair that concludes my presentation any questions okay we'll move on to uh we have a report of the uh uh mac committee from baronica alex were you going to do an update on the specific station at this point yes i i was just going to give a couple of brief remarks i know we chat it just be fair hold on a second we're gonna you want me to double back after the yeah we'll come back to that after we get this mac report thank you welcome baronica thank you you get myself okay ricotta down down yeah you guys didn't get to hear the miss the perfectly placed whining that was going on under my under my seat um good girl um for those of you who don't know me my name is a baronica lz and i am serving as the 2019 chair of your metro advisory committee and i am pleased to have this slot to be able to update you on how we are functioning what we're doing and what we would like to share with you first of all i would like to say that it's been a very well functioning committee attendance continues to be good we have a committee full of thinkers questioners uh already i've got probably three times as many items suggested to me as i will be able to fit on our remaining agendas for 2019 um so it's a very active group and we really take our um positions quite seriously in representing the community and in helping all of you to just maybe share different perspectives and make metro work better so i want to start by talking about the things that we have done um and first i would like to say that our committee did receive an excellent presentation on the budget in april so there is another opportunity for the public to come ask questions um it was in our packet and we had a lot of good questions come from our committee members they do appreciate these opportunities and hopefully our information and our questions come back to you guys and help you draft a better budget we really appreciate the regular service planning updates that we received and i want to take this time to really publicly commend barrel because when we present questions and we discuss why can't metro go here uh we're a little concerned about this part of ucsc not being served or here's what's going on at cabrillo at night honestly the next meeting that we have barrel comes in with our list of questions and he'll say you asked blah blah blah the answer is blah blah blah and we really feel heard respected and feel like our information there has been adequately and wisely used to help work on your service updates in your planning as you go along so i really want to make sure the board understands that because it's been it's been really good um the other area which has probably been mentioned here before but i want to emphasize it again is the participation that we had on the um implementation of your code of conduct that you've been generating we really appreciate that you took our comments and concerns seriously and we saw them reflected in the final version of that code and we really appreciate the fact that you made good use of us as an advisory committee because we really do want to serve that function not just to be a committee that's advised by a committee that advises you just from the wisdom that we have of being writers with slightly different perspectives and we are hoping that we will have continued involvement in the implementation of the code how we inform the public of its existence just so that people know um and that we're looking forward to continuing to do that we've had some effect on covering questions about the Watsonville customer service center where there had been some concerns about making making that work well and we've seen some responses to that also um we i'd already mentioned the the cabrillo and ucsc services some of the things that we are looking forward to working with you on can they're coming up are the um fair restructuring um that might happen soon the continuing progress of the intelligent transportation system we really want to make sure to work with you that to make sure that any apps or anything related to it is accessible to all of your writers um our challenge as a committee is the fact that we only meet quarterly and sometimes we can get surprised by things that happen in between our meetings or by the fact that we set our calendar at the beginning of the year and then something will come up and we're so darn why didn't we have this quarter's meeting in the second month but we were trying to make ourselves available for the budget so one of the things just as an example that got us this year was the um closing of some bus stops and the removal of the benches and the trouble is that when an article comes out in the public hears about it they do kind of know that we exist so we get an earful why didn't you catch it why didn't you catch it and you know we could present you with some things that just maybe hadn't been considered too much like when a bus bench suddenly disappears some of us have you know oh no my dog's gonna end up in therapy find seat find a seat oh wait where is it it's gone find it where is it where you know so um outreach to the public is something where we can really be an asset to you and kind of help organize things to minimize surprises things like the the closure of the information booth at the pacific station we had a lot of comments on that because many of us were quite wait where to go where do we go where to go so so again this is just something that you can really use your um your committee and we have actually had some good comments from members of the public some of them quite similar to what you heard this morning so i'd like to continue to remind any members of the public that our meetings are open our schedule is published and anyone is welcome to attend and and in fact um for the members of the public it's just about to close the next round of recruiting for two new members so if you feel inspired today you still got time to put in your application and it's really nice to have a full committee and i would like to close by thanking the two members who have moved on not because they were displeased with our committee or got bored but only because they moved out of santa cruz one out of state so i would like to thank kevin andrews in cassidy mega for their service and their time on the committee it was great having the perspective of some younger writers and i look forward to how we can assist you as a board please remember that we're here make use of us because we're all trying to get to a metro that does work for everyone and get information out there so that everyone knows exactly what's happening any questions thank you Veronica for that presentation uh dr matthews it's not a question i just want to thank you um it's it's wonderful to hear your report i know you've got a lot of experience on committees and you really do you and the committee fill that valuable function of being truly advisory i read the minutes obviously they're informed dedicated and diverse members on the committee and that's what makes it useful so i just want to thank you collectively and i know um cassidy who moved on going off to graduate school um was was so happy to have that representing cabril that experience she did an excellent job at it too she really did i'm i'm hoping somebody else fills those shoes yeah anyway thank you all i just want to say that any other comments or questions i would just like to i'm a new director a new board member and i just want to thank you so much for such a thorough report it's really helpful for me to really understand the work of the mac and uh i just appreciate your report and uh all your comments today well thank you i'm i'm happy to do it and i will come back in december and you know we we've had nice reports from many of your staff we we took a little study and looked at the um you know how things were going with para cruise for its on time report and just little things like that that we have the time to do that we can assist with so that we can come up with suggestions that might help so thank you very much okay thank you veronica i just want to say from the chair position thank you for your leadership and your commitment we all appreciate it thank you thank you what are you wagging about hey it takes us to our our next item this is an introduction of leadership santa cruise graduates mr cutler oh that's right the pacific station update sure uh mr chair directors this is not on your agenda but i'll cover it under ceo or a report for as long as i can until legal council cuts me off um it's not an action item so just a quick report which is that we have met a couple of times now with uh representatives from the city of santa cruise and talked about the path forward a barrow has designed uh sort of a couple of timelines for us to look at um we're also proceeding with sort of that final look at the bus tarmac concept you might recall when we presented that to you before we said we think this can work from a very high level but now we need to get down to a little bit more detail level and make sure that you can get the right number of bus bays out of the plan but maybe more important to the city um the design of that bus tarmac also heavily influences what's left over for commercial retail housing on pacific avenue and the city's made clear if that results in too narrow of buildings and it just won't be economically feasible to proceed in that direction so this is a really important step to understand what what will fit on that property and what's left over for commercial retail on pacific avenue we're going to try to move in the the next couple of months towards understanding what we need to put together for grant applications which i believe the barrel are doing february there you go what you just heard from barrel so we're trying to get those uh in good order and uh we've also talked to the city about uh other funding opportunities the city has mentioned a cdbg community development block grant program monies maybe the possibility of multi-year funding through that program just conceptually anyway at this point um and and uh we've looked at the opportunity zone we'll continue to explore that and the city brought in a consultant that talked about lease leaseback i won't go into that it's a rather complicated concept but it may also lend itself to some value to this particular project so moving forward lots of good discussions um some targets a timeline that we're hoping to achieve to minimally hit those two grant opportunities and i'll just add donna and i had a long conversation with bonnie yesterday afternoon just to get her update on it um bonnie lipscomb is the head of the city's economic development department which is the lead agency for the city in this partnership um they are actually submitting um a grant application today to um department of toxic substance control uh to do some further um site characterization of the site uh that application's going in if they're successful then that can open up some additional grants so she's working full time on trying to hit these benchmarks for decision making we we realize there's a whole series of them um so uh and i just prepared something that i shared with alex uh if anyone else is interesting interested in but uh beryl i'd like to get your overlay and um it's something it's it's such a critical decision for me personally i think i'd like to have not deep reports but regular updates on on what are we hitting what are the snags etc and i all bonnie also mentioned some of you may didn't know that uh the city um purchased a couple years ago the um building adjacent to metro the nyak building and they are building new offices out on the west side the city owns that building nyak expects to move out of the building in december and it's a good functional building so um that could be available as an interim site i'm just mentioning that i i think maybe you haven't even heard this news but um anyway that's that's just one more um possibility to throw in the mix of how things could be jiggles i'm just i'm just bringing board members up to date um it it is one of these um ambitious projects that uh will take a lot of coordination but um anyway i just want to you sort of cut yourself off interim site that office let's say let's just say hypothetically that we decided to pursue um a new cooperative project but the existing offices are in really bad shape the the uh the existing offices could be mothballed nyak is a perfectly functional building and in fact one of the other partners um in the larger site plan could also occupy another part i mean that's a i'm just trying to get our attorney to look at me like we're getting too far into a non giant and it's all information not asking for a single bit of action but um i do think it deserves uh somewhat regular update reports we can see that i'm done um this is this is a non voting item and whatnot but we had uh the commercial bus service that was coming up from the campuses and using that particular location do you have any is it working is it not working have we've seen them come through and use our station there any any knowledge of anything with that activity the flicks contract so yes i'll let sero speak to that but i think they've been quiet and have not started service there was that correct there hasn't been very much movement oh by the way sero you're a c-o-o um there hasn't been very much movement from flicks uh originally when we went forward and had the presentation in which you authorized the use of specific stations for their stop they indicated to me that they were still in the planning stages for their routing and that it would be some months later they just wanted to ensure that they would have a place to go when they completed that study that's where they're at basically did they give you an idea of coming back or not recently i sent an email to the director i have not heard anything back from her but i intend to refresh that email and we're not receiving any funds until they actually start the activities that correct they're not like taking a block lease even though they're not really actively using it until they've got everything scored away it was agreed to that it would be per stop all right so it's a revenue stream potential that's just not ready yet correct thank you okay yeah oh go ahead yeah um stepping back just a little bit about the pacific station uh business i know that um i wholeheartedly agree with director matthews that the student body would be heavily impacted by any sort of major change or renovation of pacific station that regular public updates i think would be crucial even if small and hey that message has been delivered thank you okay now we'll go ahead and move on to item 17 which is introduction to leadership santa cruz graduates mr cliff yes um as you know uh mr chair and directors annually um we are fortunate to be able to designate to employees i think up to four employees that we can put forward as nominees to the leadership program and uh what i'd like to do is invite a leadership santa cruz program i'd like to invite uh don chromay freddie roca and jena pie maybe up to the front microphone just to acknowledge that they they were our candidates who completed the program this year and maybe they could just share a couple of little nuggets about the program and why it might be of value to continue in that process morning don chromay hr director um i apologize for my jeans i spilled primary just all over my tan slacks on my way over the hill this morning um yeah but i do want to just say that this was an awesome program especially for me um i'm from santa clara county so i knew very little about santa cruz county so just to learn about the agriculture the the um the housing the crime the everything it was just a tremendous gain for myself it also opened up a door for me to meet um several individuals throughout the county that i can connect with um i've done some recruiting efforts with them already um we've kind of hung out outside of class just to get to know each other better so it was very beneficial to me so i'm very thankful for that opportunity thanks i'm kind of the same way it was uh i'm originally from this area i'm actually from uh waltz mill area but uh it was very beneficial to me just the people that i met the people that i was able to talk to uh all these connections that we made personally on my my my point of view it's i'm gonna help me a lot to get a lot of projects or stuff that we have going on in the county because now i know who to hey can you get i i've been trying to get a hold of this guy and he's not answering my call can you help me out there you know you guys know that those are the most helpful things that we get out of it somebody personally that can help push something along so so like i said that for me that was the most helpful and then understanding so much of the county um just it's in tremendously good programs thank you go ahead Gina i think that would be great maybe while she's up there so you can make a few comments this is marketing at work yeah check your background yeah thank you i think that everybody that's going through a leadership class from all of our cities has been a wonderful experience so you all have to share that the networking possibilities are endless endless endless so y'all know i'm kind of like from this area off and on throughout my whole life but it was really interesting to see some of the stuff that i hadn't actually seen in detail like i know the agriculture is there i know the boardwalk is there i know all these things are there but i've never been there like as a person that was really cool i've done without some of the agriculture and some of the allergies that went along with it but yeah and what was really interesting i think was how the agriculture is moving away from using so much water it was so cool the technology that they're employing and the technology that's being used that's good for all of us because we have very little of it so yeah well thank you for the opportunity well thank you all for attending okay that brings us to our last item it's a review of items to be discussed in closed session well it's no surprise we're talking about our labor negotiations and you know we put on the agenda ratification we obviously didn't get there we wanted to be optimistic so when we come out we won't be taking we won't be reporting any action nothing to report out okay great for that okay so make an announcement uh our next meeting will be will be have no meeting in july or meeting will be august 23rd at at 9 a.m at metro offices and prior to that is anybody would like to speak to us on an item in closed session before we go into closed session hello again so i did want to acknowledge the fact that you guys did shut off the timer and to really listen to what we had to say and um when i met with every one of you when i first came on to this position the most consistent message i heard from each and every one of you was you understand it's time to give us what we deserve and if you truly believe that it's time for you to step in and make this right thank you thank you anybody else speak to us okay with that we will adjourn to closed session thank you