 If everyone would like to take a seat, we'll get started. My name is Jim Provenza. I'm the county supervisor from the fourth district. You're in the fourth district. It's a very rare that we actually have an event in the fourth district because I don't have downtown. I have North Davis, South Davis, and East Davis. But this is becoming an innovation hub with DMG Mori here and with a new innovation park that is likely and hopefully to go in. Covel, this will be where economic innovation happens. But I'm welcoming all of you because we are so excited to talk about innovation in Yolo County. We talk about the Yolo way, whether it's water, developing collaborative approaches to our state water issues, protecting agriculture at the same time we take care of habitat or whether it's addressing the issues of homelessness. The Yolo way is to get people together, consider everyone's interests, and develop creative approaches to issues and problems. And there really is no such thing as a problem. It's just an opportunity to work for a solution. So I wanna thank the city of Davis for sponsoring this and a supervisor sailor for MCing this program and welcome you all again to the fourth district and thank you for coming. And I hope everyone learns a lot today, but also that we will further the collaborative approach. So thank you very much and introduce Don Sailor. Hey, thanks a lot, Jim, for welcoming us all to district four. And I also wanna thank DMG Mori for allowing us the use of this space. When you think about this space, there's really no better place for us to be talking about innovation. Here we've got a company that launched from UC Davis about six or eight years ago with a handful of graduate students, four graduate students became affiliated with a large company out of Japan. They started a small operation. Their first stop was West Sacramento. They had a small site there as they grew. They wanted to relocate within Yolo County, closer to UC Davis. They did that about four years ago, I guess, or about five years ago, they came here. And when they came here, it was first just this building, it was a research and design facility, but as they began to grow and become more and more linked to their international operations, the company realized that they wanted to reduce their shipping costs from Japan to the United States. So they wanted a manufacturing facility that would accompany the research and design facility. And so they located that building here as well. It's right across the parking lot. So here you've got several aspects of what can happen where you have an innovative culture. You have the university as the home of the, it was a launching pad. West Sacramento provided a second stage and then the company managed to grow itself and continue to build. That's kind of the way that we're seeing innovation happen. With innovation is putting one piece together, maybe creating something wholly new or maybe thinking of a problem in a different way and arriving at a different kind of solution than others had previously applied. Their innovation is happening everywhere. In our county and in our culture today, we're seeing innovation in all of the arenas that we work within, whether you're in winters looking at new ways to have the creek work or you're in Woodland and you're thinking of how do we address issues of literacy, issues of community development or you're in Davis looking at how you capitalize and leverage the university's activities, whether you're in education and city government in any of the arenas that we're working within, whether you're in West Sacramento rebuilding that city, rebuilding it and making it a really vibrant part of the core of our region. Innovation is happening all around us and what we have today for YOLO leaders is a series of innovators who will share in rapid fire lightning talks some of the work that they're doing. Now this is, those of you who have been here before as a part of the YOLO leader series, you know that this is not the approach that we take each time. Usually we are focused on a single topic, a theme that we think that the steering committee thinks is going to be interesting and useful for us, for all of us. This is about four years and I guess we've been doing this Cecilia for about four years, at least four years and we try to do it about three times a year and it's a different topic each time. But the steering committee this time wanted to reach out a little bit differently, wanted to put together a program that would, we hope would be exciting for you all, I'm very excited and interested in what we're gonna be doing and this is a new approach for us and because it's a new approach, we've asked David Hosley to come and help us through this process. We've got, you can read this list of people who are gonna be making presentations but they are each of them in their own universe in their own sector, really doing cool stuff and David is also in that arena. David himself has been an innovator in every different endeavor that he's pursued. Many of us knew him first in this region and when he was the executive officer for KVIE, they were a public television station here in the Sacramento area. But he had some 40 years of experience working in public television, working with messaging and working with how to bring people together and how to focus on important work. David left KVIE a few years ago and went to run the Great Valley Center out of Merced and became, they couldn't keep him in one little box and they kept putting him in new roles there and now he's finished that, having worked in the chancellor's office and doing public relations for that university and many other research activities there. And he's back to Davis and he's gonna help us through tonight. I'm gonna just announce to you now so you know the next session is Christine. September 23rd is our next session. The topic that we're working with tentatively with the steering committee is the idea of a, how we do business collectively, the cities and the county primarily, but others will have connection points that they wanna know about around joint powers, authorities and how we can manage our shared service activities together. That's the topic that we're working with. So that's September. September 23rd and Cecilia and her friends will, we hope, it's their turn because we do rotate. That's enough. David would you please come up and kick it off and we'll get out of your way and we're gonna have a really exciting time from now on. Well good afternoon everyone. It's the first time I've been in this building and I wondered so much about what was going on inside that I did some research when we were thinking of coming back to Davis a couple of years ago to find out what they were making here. And it's just an example of the diversity of the kinds of economic development that takes place in our region. I wanna thank my long time friend, Tom Stallard, for suggesting that I might step in and facilitate today. Tom and I can't even list all the ways in which we work together on regional issues here, including Tom's leadership on my board at the Great Valley Center. So it's fun to be with you and to reconnect with some people who I worked with for a number of years on regional issues and to meet some new people here. You know, one way that you judge how well you're doing as a place is when people like my wife Gail Yamada and I choose to come back to Davis when we could live anywhere. And this is the place we wanna be and we wanna take advantage of all the assets that we're gonna talk about today. And we're gonna try to do that in the short bursts of TED-like talks. And so we're asking our speakers today to stick to the time limits and we're gonna have actually a timekeeper and if that doesn't work, I'll stand up. And if that doesn't work, I'll come over and touch you. And usually, when the moderator touches somebody, they stop talking. The other thing that we'd like to do is prep your mind for what happens at the end of our afternoon and Rob Davis is going to lead a discussion and talk about what have we learned. So as you're listening to our speakers, you might look at where are the common threads in how Yolo County is teeing up to be innovative and move forward. And we are gonna have a change in one of the speakers whose kids are sick, so Bill Hoppick isn't gonna be here, but he was actually gonna talk a little bit about the innovation atmosphere in Davis and I was gonna start by talking a little bit about what I've observed in the Central Valley when it comes to regions that are ready for innovation. So if you can, you could go forward and get to Bill's slides and I'll talk to a couple of them. But very quickly, here's what I've seen. If a place has a really good idea of what its economic driver is, they're usually in pretty good shape to begin to innovate around that thing. And we can't argue very long that about anything except agriculture is driving our regional economy. There's no question about that. Another thing that often is a catalyst for innovation is an outstanding research university. And we all know, and Mabel is here, representing UC Davis. And in the time that I have been in this community, which goes back to the late 90s, UC Davis has gone from being a fine national university to being a number one international university in agriculture and several other fields. And we know that. Many of us have worked on behalf of the university to foster its relationships with the community here and in other places. And yet it's a distinct advantage that almost nobody else has in the western part of the United States, just a couple of different places in California. So Yolo County is really in great shape with that. You have to have room to grow. If you're very much impacted, and we're seeing this now in the Bay Area, they simply don't have the land to innovate. And we're benefiting from that here in the Central Valley as the logistics industry is moving out from the Bay Area because there's just not enough place to expand. We have, in Yolo County, room to grow. You have to have an educated workforce, and unfortunately the jobs of the future are mostly the ones that are gonna require more education than the average worker has in our region. And so we are an educated county in large part because we have educational institutions here. But as Jonathan London wrote in his column recently in The Enterprise, our educational outcomes in Yolo County are uneven. And as we move from this wonderful Boomer generation with its very high education levels, we're handing it off to the millennial generation, and we have too many of our young people failing to get the education that's gonna be required. And even in healthcare alone, in the Central Valley, by 2025, we'll have over 100,000 vacant jobs in healthcare because we simply don't have people with the educations to take those positions. Do we have the resources that we need going forward, and particularly access to capital? And some of you had worked on this issue of access to capital, but we are not a star yet in this county in access to capital, and work still needs to be done for the entire region in that area. And then finally, in the places that I've seen move forward on innovation, there's wonderful alignment of all those things I just mentioned and other things you probably have thought of that you need to have for innovation to take place. And alignment is a hard thing to bring about, and it's a combination of people who are elected officials and people who are your educational leaders and your business leaders, people working in the nonprofit arena. If you can all get those people singing off the same page of the hymnal, you are much better focused with all the study missions that Marty and Tom and I and others of you have gone on. We see this in the areas in the United States that are excelling. That alignment takes outstanding communication. It takes building trust relationships and other hard work that you have to do every day for it to happen. So, one of the things that Bill wanted to talk about was having a place where innovation can take place, and he particularly wanted to mention Paul and Nate Davis, and when I lived in the San Joaquin Valley in Merced, some of the people in a downtown area had started a place where anybody could come in with an idea to start a business and have a place to sit down in a meeting room, and it was so cheap, it was a couple of hundred dollars a month, and anybody could get those startup costs together to start a business and then get access to the kind of advice that you need to excel. And so he felt that here was something that is a collaborative space that is underway now that is an asset that we have in our community. He also said that you should fail often in your attempts to innovate, and this is apparently a picture of a young woman who had this great idea that you could combine for homeless people the sleeping bag with the coat. So, we all know about the coat drives and the sleeping bag drives, and she put this together. And before Gail and I decided to throw our lot in with the Parkview Place people at 4th and D, we started to look at tiny houses and we were reading about all these tiny houses. It's kind of a coat-like following, but these tiny houses are a very serious thing because as Wes Sacramento is proving now, when you take people who are living at risk, homeless people, people with mental illness, people with addictive problems, and you put them in safe housing, their behavior tends to moderate, and they use less and act out less, and you can begin to match them up with the social services that they need. You can help them get back and be productive people, and tiny little houses like that are one way to do it. And then finally he wanted to let everybody know about this upcoming event, and I think it's great that these kinds of things are taking place and that there's so many people here in Yolo County who are working on these kinds of things and having meetings like this where you're sharing ideas. This isn't a question as Don and Jim both said of innovation taking place. It's happening, and it has been happening for a long time. This is a question of how quickly we can accelerate that innovation so that the pace at which we prosper for all people who live in this county quickens. And so that's a little bit of what he had to say and now we're going to go back and we're going to start out, and I'll introduce Lisa a little bit. So Lisa Baker is a member of the California Association of Housing Authorities Legislative Committee. She is the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials Homeless Subcommittee Chair. So she's working already in some of the fields that I had talked about. She is also the 2012 Breathe California Clean Air Championship for her work on air quality impacts to low income people, really the hardest target to try to get to change when you talk about environmental change taking place. Lisa leads Yolo Housing which received a 2014 NAHRO National Award of Merit and Program Innovation for its community awareness and support team program. They call it CAST. And this agency is also HUD's 2014 public housing program of the year. In 2014, Yolo Housing was a recipient of a HUD award for a special achievement in innovation. So those are some pretty sweet credentials that go along with her presenting to us today. Please welcome her. Good afternoon, thank you. Okay, we're gonna start early. So we're gonna be talking about bridge to housing and it would be unfair to start it by having it be about me because it really wasn't. And to follow on the theme about being ready for innovation and building on common themes, it really takes pretty much a region to move a village. So I can really only thank all of our partners and to say that I am actually also humbled to be able to present on their behalf, many of whom are much more eloquent than I. So the issues surrounding homelessness are tough, right? Standard ways haven't always proven to be a good solution for many. And encampments aren't a special issue. And that's not just in Yolo, that's a national issue. When the Riverfront property in West Sacramento was sold to new owners, they presented the city and its police department with the daunting task of trying to address the existing encampment. The police chief turned to the partners and challenged us, what else could we try besides traditional policing? If we can go back to the other slide. So if you'd gone out to the river before bridge to housing, this is what you would have seen. A makeshift tent community, trash, no drinking water, no sanitation. And if you were lucky, you would have met Steve. He's right up there in the top middle. And he could have shown you around. And he had been homeless for 17 years and the last eight of them he had spent on the riverbank. Now he would tell you, back in the day, that he was never, ever going to leave the riverbank again no matter what. So what was our solution to this issue? Well it was housing first. And housing first is a different approach. And it's a different approach to solving homelessness through traditional permanent housing. And Yolos joined many other jurisdictions, including the state of Utah and Houston and San Francisco, urban, rural, liberal and conservative in trying something new. But in this we decided to create a time and population limited pilot so that we could test housing first but we could also use the lessons learned in creating new ways to address homelessness in our region. But I have to tell you that to move an entire encampment of long-term homeless is a lot more than standard housing first. It would take something bold, it would take something innovative and it would take a huge leap of faith by all of the partners and their respective political bodies. But of course, YOLO. So what made it bold and innovative? Well there were many innovations and lots of them we're not gonna go into today including the North Levy Cleanup and Moving Day. Today we're just gonna highlight three of them. And the first one was being able to use housing vouchers to provide housing for encampment residents. And to do that we were able to look at the entire universe of rules in a very complex program and create a brand new path which had never existed before that would allow us to work with encampment residents. The second thing we did was to address an entire encampment. This is the first time that we know of where an entire encampment has been moved. And when we did that, we didn't cherry pick the easy to house. We didn't cherry pick those with services. Instead we enrolled everyone who signed up. And unlike most programs, as you can see, we took their dogs and their cats. And the third part is we created bootcamp for housing. Now the average length of homelessness on the river was over four years and some had been on the river for over 20. So they are the most difficult to serve. They don't have income. They don't have identification. They have suffered major trauma in their lives. Many have substance abuse issues. And bootcamp, which you can see right here, gave them an opportunity to work on social reintegration and harm reduction. And they got to relearn what you and I take for granted every day. Stay inside. Change your sheets and towels. Use a cell phone. Work with a property manager and not just a social worker. And so, what did we get for outcomes? And so if you can see, this is our bridge to housing. 71 surveyed, 65 entered the program. 53 graduated. Of that, 23% had no health or substance abuse issue and everybody else did. 49% of them were co-occurring. 75% of them were between the ages of 25 and 54. And there was a pretty good gender split between male and female. And oh yeah, all those bets. So what do we get at the very end? You can see in the second chart, CalFresh pre-enrollment was 47%, 81% post. Health insurance was 47% pre to 89% post. And the income of whopping 11% of those folks had income and 40% at this point have it now. But most telling, 0% had any kind of housing opportunity or voucher as opposed to 92% post program. And as the time of this, 47% of them are now permanently housed. And I understand as of today that two more have found housing. And that's it. Thank you so much. These outcomes are uncommon if you don't track this kind of challenge. I think that this project is and will attract national attention. And it's something that is possibly a breakthrough. And it was done with a group of people collaborating across the spectrum of people providing the services. So now we're gonna stick with the very same part of Yolo County. And we're gonna get a different slice of that same area. John Robinson's, the West Sacramento's deputy city manager. He has played key roles in developing this very special part of our region right across the river from Sacramento with available land. How wonderful. He was involved with the negotiations to bring Rayleigh Field to Yolo County, affordable housing developments along the river, relocation of that cement terminal. And his duties currently include managing the city's governmental relations efforts and also its innovative programs. John. Thank you. In about 23 years of working in local government, I've gotten the opportunity to work on a number of amazing different projects, but I've never been as excited about something that I'm working on as I am right now with the innovation work that we're doing in West Sacramento as a result of the council's 2015 strategic plan direction and specifically the Code for America Fellows program. Code for America is a nonprofit organization that's been around about 10 years and their mission is to help local governments make better use of technology. Their flagship program is the Code for America Fellows program, which is like a Peace Corps for geeks, in essence. It's an opportunity for mid-career tech professionals to take a year off from their normal duties and spend that time working with cities, helping them solve problems using technology. So we competed for that. The cities have to compete and the fellows that participate also have to compete and it's very competitive on both sides. Our application was done in collaboration with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and we were selected. So we have three fellows, if you can put up the first slide. Here they are. You're recognized Mayor Cabaldon on the left and City Manager Martin Tuttle on the right. That's Iminal, Natasha and Grant in the middle. And they've been working with us. They came in February initially and they did a residency phase where they were doing all kinds of outreach and then they've gone back to Code for America Headquarters in San Francisco now where they're working on prototypes for the program. And the policy arena that they're focused on is food, which is relevant from a policy standpoint both to the city and to Saekong. So they're working on prototypes that focus specifically on food access and they've got a number of different ideas for projects in that sphere. So they're working on those and we expect them to be refining their prototypes in the coming weeks and coming up with a final project that they're gonna work on which we expect the final deliverable for in September. And that's good news for West Sacramento because they're gonna come up with, the work product will be a computer program or an app that'll help us deal with food access issues in West Sacramento, but they're gonna design the program from the ground up to be scalable. So with Saekong's help, it'll be something that we can share with the region. So that's something for everyone in this room to also like. But to me, the application or the final work product isn't necessarily the best part of the program. The best part of the program to me is the opportunity to observe the fellows in action and learn from these people, these private sector technologists, folks, how do they attack problems and what do they do and how can we apply that to our work in local government? So if you go to the next slide, this is the fellows at an urban farm in West Sacramento. You'll hear more about urban farms. I could have picked any one of a number of different pictures for this though because the purpose of this picture is to talk about how we didn't know when we started with this project what the work product was gonna be when they're done. Which is a really unusual thing. When you think about we're paying to participate in this program, yet we're committing to do the program without knowing what the work product's gonna be. And I think that's been an interesting ride for those of us that are used in the normal way of doing things where you do know what the work product is at the end. But it shed some interesting light on the question of procurement practices in general. And I wonder when we do an RFP, when we do specifications, when we do a scope, would it not make sense in some instances to give our consultants these experts that we're hiring maybe a couple more degrees of freedom to actually iterate and work like the fellows to come up with the best possible outcome that they could for us. So next slide. Another important idea that we're getting from the fellows is they have a really close adherence to a philosophy called design thinking, which is way too big a topic to talk about in one sitting here. But they really like the idea they sit down with their user groups. This is actually a group of food insecure folks that was put together for us by the Housing Authority. Lisa, thank you. This was a great meeting. You can see the look on the woman's face. There was a lot of engagement, one-on-one conversations. And what the fellows did is they used these kind of interactions to get insights into their user group's needs, and then they go back and build their prototype. They come back and talk to the users again. They sort of induce early and frequent failures in an effort to basically drive towards the most relevant useful work product that they can. So basically rather than running away from failure, they push it and encourage it and use that as an educational tool. I think there's a big takeaway for us there. Next slide. This, the last idea that I wanna share, this is Natasha explaining to city council member Mark Johansson and some others at a Saacog meeting how the project works. And you notice the sticky notes in the front. Another thing that we're taking away from these fellows is their amazing alacrity with ideas. They take ideas and put them on sticky notes. They put them on flip chart paper. Basically, they're using office supplies that you could pick up at office max and using these incredibly sophisticated yet inexpensive techniques to elaborate their ideas. And basically you can count on if you're in an ideation or brainstorming session with these folks and you say something, it is not going to be lost. It's gonna be captured. It's gonna be prioritized, sliced, diced and utilized. So all that user input that they get doesn't get wasted because they utilize these techniques. And to me that's a huge takeaway that we can also use. So in conclusion, we're really excited about the work product that we're gonna be getting at the end with this application. We're also looking forward to taking the lessons that we learned from the fellows themselves and kind of systematizing those, turning them into some training materials or other materials that we can use internally in West Sacramento and then ultimately put in some form that we can share with all of you all. And so we can all hopefully take a little bit of that private sector sort of tech startup DNA implanted in our organizations and use that to make ourselves more efficient, more effective and to deliver better outcomes for our communities. John, it looks like you're gonna be rewarded for being willing to start something without knowing how it's gonna end. And it goes back to Bill's idea of being prepared to fail if you need to fail so that you can advance forward. So we talked earlier about the need to understand what your economic driver is and to be able to align with your strengths. But what happens if the thing that's been your strength is changing? And in our case, changing rapidly. Agriculture is changing so quickly now that there are many people who are concerned about where we're going with it. And I drove up I-5 today from Southern California and watched the water from the canals flowing south but also watched some of the trees that have been pulled up along the West side there because of the drought. And if you're trying to provide a workforce for agriculture in the future, you have to take technology into effect because it's changing agriculture radically. And so I'd like to introduce to you somebody who is doing that. Brandy Asmus has been a driving force in the rapid evolution of Woodland Community College's agricultural department. They have worked hard to update their laboratory equipment and to incorporate student leadership development in the courses that they're offering. That college's agricultural department received a program of the year award from the Yolo County Office of Education just a couple of years ago. And Brandy is working not only in our own region but as we often see from people in leadership positions helping out at the state level and the regional level. So she's serving as a faculty curriculum chair for Woodlands Community College but she also is serving at the community college level on a statewide basis. The other thing that's pretty interesting about Brandy is that her family owns Utopia Dairy in Daener where I used to live in Desto in Stanislaus County and that dairy is marketing sheep cheese across Northern California. And Utopia is spelled, here it is, E-W-E-T-O-P-I-A. Brandy. Good afternoon everyone. Jobs, workforce, local economy, our kids. The unemployment rate nationally and locally changed since 2006. When we look at Yolo County's unemployment rate it peaked in 2011 at about 15%. And today it rests around 8%. When we look at our neighboring counties in Calusa they sit at 21% today. In 2012 the Center of Excellence developed an agriculture value chain report for the state of California. And it indicated that there are currently 2.5 million jobs across four sectors in agriculture and fully anticipate an additional 185,000 jobs requiring some college education over the next five years. And yet when we look at data from the California Department of Education their reports suggest that only half of our high school graduates in Yolo County enter college after high school. So what do we do? The Woodland Community College student engagement and economic development initiative is an answer to these issues. Development of strong K-12 partnerships reaching to our kids early in their education and fostering a direction towards work here in Yolo County. So when we took a look at agriculture-related companies or businesses in Yolo County the work pretty much was done for us by UC Davis. When we look at this graphic here Yolo County houses the greatest number of plant seed companies in the state of California followed by Salines Valley. So what do we do with that? We look at identifying those needs for employment for those businesses that rest in our backyard. The seed initiative will address this issue. So we are looking at identifying those kids early in their education not when they reach us at the community college. So the seed initiative has three simple steps. We're gonna cultivate our kids in the high school. We're going to grow our kids through development of critical skills and knowledge through course completion and then we will allow them multiple points through their educational career to harvest or enter the workforce. Our model is based off of a proven model established at Santa Barbara City College in 2007 titled Get Focus, Stay Focus. The premise of this program involves establishing a career focused course at the ninth grade offering that course through a dual enrollment model and allowing those kids to have college credits while in high school. This is similar to our model. Results suggest data that has decreased suspension rates by 30% and increased GPA and graduation rates by 30% across the nation. And for a family member this is a cost savings of $200 because dual enrollment is free. From that career course they will transition towards a clear pathway leading to either plant science or agriculture business degrees. They can earn 14 additional units for a cost savings of $1,100 and then transition into the community college to complete 19 units. This will allow them to receive a certificate and at which point they can harvest into the workforce with base skills and knowledge to make them a citizen in our county. However, they also have the option to continue on and receive associate degree with 41 additional units and current legislation allows for students who receive an associate degree for transfer guaranteed admission into the CSU system at which they can receive a bachelor degree work. So there are multiple points of harvest and the one thing I wanna leave you with is a quote that says always remember your focus determines your reality and the CEDA initiative is committed to our students to foster that focus and direct them or guide them to the workforce that resides here in Yolo County. Thank you. Thank you so much. And you can see that we're going to be touching about youth preparedness several times in these talks today. It's absolutely essential to a good future for us to do a better job of having our young people prepared to succeed when they both match up with their vocations and then when they start to pursue those vocations. One of the things that I've observed as I've watched regions work on innovation is that it's really helpful to have people working together who come from different perspectives. And oftentimes if they've had different kinds of jobs they can take on the tasks that they currently have and apply what they learned in those other fields to problem solving and how you can bring people together around an idea. And that's something that our next presenter, Patty Rominger has in her background. She's a founding member and president of the Winters Farm to School program. On a daily basis, Patty oversees the safety, regulatory and compliance issues on the Rominger family farm in Winters but she's previously been a social worker. She has been a state legislative aide. She has been a Methodist pastor. And currently she also volunteers in a local program to improve the health and welfare of men and women farm workers and their families. So with that background, please welcome Patty. In America, on average, children consume 35% of their daily calories eating food that's prepared and served at their schools. In some cases it's as high as 50%. Now that's a golden opportunity to make a difference in a kid's life. But because you see kids who are well fed and well nourished perform better in school. They're absent less often. They have fewer disciplinary problems. And they have a lower incidence of childhood diet related disease like obesity and diabetes. So it matters what we put on our kid's cafeteria plates. Healthier foods grow healthier children. With that in mind, concern citizens and winners came together in 2011. And we talked about how we could boost the number of healthy foods that we were serving our school children. After all, winners is surrounded by working farms that grow some of the best food in the world. Couldn't the farmers and the schools come together? Yes, we can and we have. Because from those conversations, we started the Winters Farm to School program. Our mission has three parts. First of all, we fundraise so that we can purchase fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts for our school meal programs. The Winters School District now leads the county with 93% of our purchases locally sourced and almost 50% of those we buy directly from the farmer. Now that's good for our kids, our farmers and our local economy. So how do we fundraise? Little advertisement. We have an annual Bastille Day feast in mid-July at the Historic Wolfskill Ranch in Winters. 200 people sit down to a delicious multi-course meal. All the food and all the drink is donated by Yolo County Farmers from breweries and from wineries. I'm very proud to say that our little organization, all volunteer, just recently gave our school district a check for $50,000. That was the fruit of our first three feasts. The second part of our mission is we educate children about the importance of choosing healthy foods for their long-term health and well-being. One way we do that is we host a kid's farmer's market every week at our elementary school. With food donated by the Yolo Food Bank, over 200 kids go home with 10 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables every week and they go home with a recipe and also nutritional information about the foods they receive. Now we know it's working because parents have told us that their kids are now asking them to buy fruit and vegetables that they're trying at school. The third thing that we do is we're trying to reconnect our children to their rich agricultural history. Unfortunately, many of our children have lost their connection to the land, to where their food comes from and to the farmers who grow it. So we started school gardens and then once a month we invite in a local grower who talks to the kids about agriculture. We have had a lot of success but in the midst of all the good things happening we began to notice a whole nother issue and that's hunger. Sadly enough, one in four children in this county are hungry. For some of those kids, the meals that they eat at school are the only meals that they eat all day and in our little town of Winters with a student body of only 1,550 kids, we currently have 26 kids who are homeless and homelessness and hunger often go hand in hand. It was breaking our hearts. So we decided as Winters Farm to School that we would feed hungry kids. Just one example of how we do that is we notice that when parents were bringing in their school-aged kids for the free and reduced breakfast program they'd bring along the younger siblings. Well, those kids are too young to qualify for the program but they're hungry. So we decided to set aside $5,000 of our feast funds and we feed hungry kids. It's the right thing to do. Every kid counts, every meal matters. So come, visit us, see what we're doing. Have lunch with the kids and please buy a ticket to our Bastille Day feast on Saturday, July 11th so you can boost us in what we're doing because together we are making a positive difference in our kids' lives. Well, I think you're ready for the real Ted Talks. That was wonderful. So, we talked earlier about if you're going to have innovation you have to be able to identify the resources that you need to succeed and then you have to have a plan as to how you're going to access those resources. And if Ag is our number one economic driver of our county and we don't have a reliable water supply then we have a real problem about being able to innovate and I know that there are a number of you in the room today who are working on water issues and in some ways now it's really starting to dominate daily life and people who never thought about water before. I was in Los Angeles yesterday and water came up from people in LA. They never thought about where the water was coming from and now they are. And so Tim Bush is the engineer who's responsible for Woodland's drinking water, sanitary sewer, storm drainage utilities and flood management. And prior to coming to Woodland Tim worked at an engineering firm where he did the design and construction for drinking water and sanitary sewer projects and more recently Tim worked on the Tomas Levy Improvement Program. So he's here to talk about water in our future. Hi, good afternoon. Talking about water security is a very good topic during a drought. The city of Woodland has a lot of interesting programs going on right now. The city of Woodland has had some concerns recently with water quality or I guess long term with water quality and also water sustainability using the existing groundwater aquifer and relying solely on groundwater for water supply. So the city of Woodland together with the city of Davis and also UC Davis formed the Woodland Davis Clean Water Agency for the purpose of construction of a new water supply in the Sacramento River. So this is a brief overview of the project. Up on the top right hand of the screen there's the intake pumping station. That is the new joint intake facility with his partnership with RD 2035. That is replacing an existing on-screen diversion of the Sacramento River with the state-of-the-art fish screen to help protect the fish in the river. You can see it driving on I-5 towards Sacramento. It's the two big red cranes right as you go over the bridge. The surface water treatment plant is being constructed in one lead. It's just east of Costco. Right now it looks like a series of concrete structures and two big concrete domes and a series of construction trailers. And there's also about 25 miles of pipeline that tie everything together. So the surface water project as a whole takes care of our water quality issues. It takes care of most of our water supply issues. But it does also present us another problem. And that the Sacramento River in most years has more water in winter than it does in summer. So there's much more supply in winter. This city's water demand is much higher in summer than it is in winter by about twice as much. So we're looking for a way to balance winter supply and summer demand and not be reliant on our existing groundwater wells as much as we can. So to illustrate the problem of storage to try to store enough water, this is a three million gallon tank that the city was constructing about a year ago. I like this picture because it really shows the scale of water storage. You can see there's a crane in the middle of the tank and there's a couple of construction workers up on top working on scaffolding for the roof. So this is a three million. Sorry about that, I didn't quite know what to do. So this three million gallon tank one full is enough to supply the city with water for about four hours in summer or about eight hours in winter. If we were to try to use storage tank to store winter water to use in summer, we would need a few hundred of these. And in addition to being very unsightly and using a lot of land, it's very, very expensive. So we needed a different solution. So the solution that we came up with, working with West Houston Associates was a concept called aquifer storage and recovery. And what that concept is is basically taking treated drinking water and injecting that into the groundwater aquifer to store that over long periods of time to bring back up and use later. At Build Up, we plan to have between five and seven ASR walls. There's a few more shown on this map and that's mainly for permitting purposes. And so no one knows where the walls really actually are. Our goal really is to store between one and a half and two billion with bee gallons every winter to use some of that water in summer. But our main goal is to build a very large reservoir of water to use in the next drop. We can't do anything about the current drop, but we wanna be prepared for the next one. How do we know it works? The city of Woodland partnered with Lawrence Livermore Labs about a year ago to do a full-scale injection testing. We used xenon gas as a tracer, so we knew which water was ours. And we injected into our existing well at well 28, which was the purple one on that map. And ultimately the test was very successful. We were able to recover about 98% of the water that we put into the ground. Next drop, letting that to a full city-wide scale, we feel very confident that we will be able to recover about 90% of the water that we put in. And ASR programs are considered successful if you are between 70 and 90%. So we're definitely in the higher end of that. How it works, I'll give you a quick geology lesson. And that's just pretty simple. On the left side of the graph, color's a little bit hard to tell, but the lighter ones, which are really yellow, show clay, which is generally impermeable. There's no water in those zones. And the blue in the greens are gravel and sand where there is water. So our plan really is to inject into the ground at the bottom blue layer, which is about 480 feet down. We will put all of our water into that zone. And then the testing that we did shows that it does not go vertically, it only goes horizontally. So we can store as much water in there really as we can. It's almost an unlimited reservoir. And then use some of the water in summer as we need it. Another part of the city's plan is recycled water. We are planning a recycled water project to take basically a treated wastewater effluent and use that to supply parks with irrigation and also industrial cooling processes. What that really does is it matches water quality to the appropriate use of that water. It's kind of the term the state uses for that. But basically there's no need for these uses to be on high quality treating drinking water when we can use recycled water. And that's basically a quick summary of city's water system. Thank you very much. Is that the one that didn't work? Oh no, that's your clicker. You know, it's really interesting. At a time of crisis, you get a lot more attention and resources thrown at a problem. When we had that E. coli outbreak with the leafy green vegetables on the coast, what did they do? They came to UC Davis and I think they put a million bucks on the table just like that to solve their problem because it was a life and death matter for that industry. And now that we have water problems, I hope that somebody is looking at the innovative ways in which people are approaching this because my suspicion is that we're going to have a lot more people thinking about it and putting resources to solving these problems. And underground storage is one of the areas where there's a lot of room for growth in the valley and particularly in the south part of the valley where a lot of the water demand is. And so we'll probably see some innovation take place there. Well, several of our previous speakers have spoken eloquently about what happens when young people do not have the nutrition or the education that they need to prosper in their developing years. And so I'm gonna just move right in now to what Paul Navazio wants to talk about and give you a little bit of background for him. Before he took the reins in Woodland as the city manager, Paul served as the assistant city manager and finance director here in Davis. But look at the experience that he has that complements what he's doing now. Previously he was the budget director for the city of Oakland and held that same job in Berkeley. So he's seen how things are treated in a different part of our state. And he actually started his career at Hewlett Packard pretty early on. Did you have HP stock? And then he worked for the legislative analyst's office. So that's some very interesting perspective on how he's approaching some of the issues today. Welcome. That's the next presentation. Quick backdrop, we kind of picked this topic. We think because part of it's pretty neat. The other reason is I think part of the origins of this yellow leaders forum came out of a city schools partnership, which is continuing that we're trying to develop both in the region and certainly in Woodland. We have a very active partnership that we're hoping to continue to build on with the city, the school district and our community college partners. The other backdrop to this is the budget and economic crisis that everyone was dealing with. And some of us are still wrestling with. In Woodland in particular, in 2010, the voters had approved a quarter cent sales tax measure. It was really a one time stop gap measure for a four year term. A, to help some draconian budget cuts on the heels of years and years of cuts. We were seeing more law enforcement officers reduce who had had closures of the city library and just really draconian. So the leaders in Woodland, the community before I arrived had the wherewithal to have a measure adopted that would provide for additional time. I show up in Woodland and part of the task was to help get the city's budget back on an even keel so that this measure could expire without ongoing reliance on it. At the same time we're having our, we have a three by two by two process where the city meets with the school district and the college reps and kind of keep up on what everybody's doing. And about that time, the school district was presenting some data to us. I think this is 2013 test results. First, the state physical fitness test data. And there's always sort of a positive spin on this but what we're seeing is in fifth, seventh and ninth grade students in the Woodland school district falling well below state standards for health and fitness. Couple more months go by, couple more two by twos, three by twos. Oh, here comes the star test where third, fourth and ninth graders. This is the English achievement are lagging and in some cases having a hard time moving up that curve. So it led to a really interesting discussion. The punchline was, you can talk about the school, you can beat up the school's districts all you want. The reality is this is not a school problem, it's a community problem and what is it that the city can do? What is it that a community can do together? Going back to the budget situation, we had that expiring tax, we were doing well on the budget. We said, you know what, going forward, the city budget doesn't need the tax measure but what kind of community do we want to see in Woodland and what would be the priorities to be able to reinvest those dollars in the community? So in not very innovative fashion, oh, we have to form a subcommittee and we get stakeholders together and we start talking about how to reposition this thing. What was innovative, at least for me, that's been doing this for about 15 years is we decided, A, that we weren't gonna come up with a laundry list of programs and a budget to present to the voters. We also weren't gonna try to do another three or four year tax measure, which just leaves you hanging four years out. So we come up with the idea to do an eight year renewal measure targeting on youth and then we'll see, as was said earlier, without a product at the end, we were just to say, let's get a resource, let's get the conversation going. We figured if we can get an eight year tax measure passed, how can we invest in the third and fourth graders of today so that by the time they graduate high school, we can have a positive impact on those indicators? This was kind of the coolest thing. We had a very low under the radar campaign, no opposition. What's important to me is not that we got 68.6% of the vote, but that every precinct in the city supported the measure. And so on the one hand, this was great. On the other hand, we said, shoot, now we actually have to deliver on the promise, but that's actually kind of the cool part and the innovative part. So we've been partnering internally within the city, across departments with the school districts, other community stakeholders, and in the first year of implementing expanded breadth of sports programs, recreation programs, we're bringing the literacy program, we've expanded the hours at the library. The other cool thing for me as city manager is our library director and our community services director are now talking and working together so that we're combining programs, what a concept. We've also brought programs into the school this year in the middle schools on a lunchtime and after school and we're expanding it to the other middle schools. We just allocated some funding for an additional school resource officer who's in the elementary schools doing gang intervention and reduction training. There's a crime prevention element. There's some excitement among our rank and file and police union to restart a police activities league. I said, hey, if you'd need some resources, we have a pot of money that we can do. So we're using this money to seed, to leverage. $2 million is not a lot of money when you're trying to deal with those indicators, but if we find the right places to invest, the right places to leverage, we can make a difference. And finally, one of the things I'll say that is a little bit innovative next year, we hope to establish this youth advisory council of actually youth and teens to help us decide whether we're spending the money in the right place, maybe even allocate some money for them to decide what to do with and that's the youth engagement component. Thank you so much. So when this event was organized, I don't think that as the speakers were lined up that we quite understood exactly how much the things that are being addressed would be at the forefront of the news cycle. And Darren Pytel is working on an issue that's dominating public discourse now and it has been for a while, but currently what's going on in Baltimore, what has happened and we hope doesn't continue in Missouri, the dialogue that started with a BART police shooting Oakland and continued to escalate. Clearly we need some innovation in how the public and law enforcement relate to each other. And Darren has managed every division in the Davis Police Department at some point in more than a quarter century in the department. He also has the perspective of teaching about the thing that he does on a daily basis at Sacramento City College, at a regional police academy and at the Lincoln Law School. Please welcome Darren. So this is timely all over the country right now. We're starting to see a lot of protests involving police and the community. And we're seeing what happens when police departments don't have good relations with their community. And here we wanted to do something a little bit different. And this isn't anything new. For the past 60 years, if you really think about it, most of the major conflict riots, there's always been a flashpoint and it's usually police, innocent interactions that go poorly. All right, so what we did back in 2013, the Human Relations Commission decided that they wanted to start a subcommittee to work with the police department on how we can improve relations. And then also how to deal with some of the profiling and bias issues that have been kind of plaguing our department just like every other police department for some time. All right, so one of the things that we started to focus on was just the lack of trust or the mistrust that people had with our citizen complaint investigation process. So that is what happens when somebody actually does have an encounter with the police and it goes poorly. It doesn't come out the way that they wanted to. People file complaints. And traditionally, police departments have had really kind of formal investigative processes. Quite honestly, we handle them like we would any other criminal investigation. So we call in people, we do formal interviews, we interview officers, we interview witnesses. And then when the investigation is done, we basically say it's a confidential personnel record and we don't tell the public really what happened. It's not a transparent system. Furthermore, the person who complained really all they get at the end of the day is a letter saying we investigated your complaint and here's the disposition. Trust us, we did a good job. Well, people don't trust us and that's what we wanted to fix. So this subcommittee, what we did is we took a look at what's going on out there and the restorative processes and how can we use that in a kind of handling complaints in a different matter. So we really had to work for over a year and we came up with the pilot program and it's an alternative conflict resolution program. We had to get by in from the city attorney, from the police officers association, from their attorneys, from police administration because this is an entirely new way of handling complaints. And really what we did is we took a look at what people really want at the end of the day is some face-to-face interaction with the employee that they had the encounter with. They want to sit in a room with them and tell them this is how I feel, this is how you made me feel and this is what I want you to do about it. And at the end of the day, our employees in a lot of cases, they actually want that face-to-face encounter. They want to explain to them, well, this is the job that I was doing. This is why I did what I did. Here's what I was thinking at the time. Well, the formal complaint process just doesn't lend itself to that face-to-face interaction. So using this model, we can actually move all the bureaucracy out of the way, get the cop in the room with the person who has the complaint, work with trained facilitators to actually have that face-to-face dialogue. Now, the cool thing about this process is the police department, we really do step out of the way. The circle keepers, and we're using a circle process, they're actually trained community members. So we've picked community members who have an interest in the police department, talked them about how to facilitate these meetings, and then the department just kind of steps out of the way and lets this happen. And then at the end of the day, they tell us this process is done. What we're trying to do is work through the conflict and it could be just that everybody gets to talk about how they feel, there could be an agreement, there can be an agreement to disagree, but at the end of the day we're hoping that the parties are kind of restored. All right, and then finally, the types of investigations. We're really trying to get to the core of the matter, which is the bias complaints. People who say that there's racial profiling going on. So primarily we're gonna be focused on complaints dealing with racial profiling, but it can be rude conduct or any other type of complaint. More importantly on the restorative process, there's certain types of investigations that have to be formally investigated. Things like excessive force or more serious allegations, illegal searches, things like that. So we have to do a formal investigation. After the formal investigation though, we will open that up to a restorative process. So we can get the person who filed a complaint in the same room with the officer who is involved and have them work through it in this restorative matter rather than through the other traditional processes. Thank you. We've seen the price that you pay right at our own university when things go wrong in that interaction, and so this will be very exciting to see how this turns out. Best wishes with that. So I think many, if not all of us, are familiar with the Center for Land-Based Learning in Winners, but the Center for Land-Based Learning isn't just in Winners anymore. In fact, it's all over the place. You kind of have to have a map to see all the different places that the Center for Land-Based Learning is operating now because they now have five programs. They're in 18 counties, and I was chatting before we started with Mary about how things are going with her travel because when you expand as rapidly as the Center has, it usually comes out of the shoe leather, or at least the car of the executive director. A little bit about Mary's background. She was raised on a small farm right here in Yolo County, and she is involved with a diverse group of statewide, regional, and local efforts. She has in the last few years been working with others in the community on water conservation, flood management, the role of community colleges in the workforce, and land use and conservation. So that's a lot of good background to go and tackle something which goes right back to our strength in this region, but with a twist. Mary. Thank you, David. Well, it's a lot of pressure being last, I have to say. There's just some incredible, incredible presentations. Already I'm learning so much. So there's been a lot of already focused today on how important agriculture is to this county, to this region, and that is one of the things I'll be talking about. The focus that I want to speak to is on two major issues that we have, the national level, and just so happens also at the local level. A lot of people have heard the statistic about the aging of the farmer. This is a United States aging challenge. And especially here in Yolo County, who are our number one industry is agriculture, how critical this is. But I actually think this statistic is actually more dramatic and more important to really understand the critical nature that we have, not just in the country, but here in Yolo County. For every farmer and rancher, under the age of 25, there are five over the age of 75, Dwayne Chamberlain. Just kidding. I just wanted to see if he was awake back there. But this is the challenge that we have. This is an incredible gap. And I think that our US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, says it very well. When he says, we have an aging farming population, if left unchecked. This could threaten our ability to produce the food we need and also result in the loss of tens of thousands of acres of working lands that rely on, we rely on to clean our air and water. And of course here in Yolo County, nothing is more critical and important to us than this. So the other side of our challenge that I want to speak to is that of hunger. Patty talked to it a bit earlier. So I'm sure most of you in this room are very familiar with the study that was done last year by hunger in America, for hunger in America, and through the Yolo County Food Bank participating. Incredibly horrific numbers, in my opinion, for Yolo County, right? So almost 4,400 people in this county are food insecure. Meaning that at some point in their day, they don't know where the next meal is coming from. And many of those food insecure and food deserts, which are those places where people don't have access to healthy food or have access to food at all, within a 10 minute walk or 10 minute bike ride or public transportation are in West Sacramento. So how do we connect bright eyed folks like this? These are our current class of the California Farm Academy, 20 new beginning farmers from this region that all want to be a part of our incredible agricultural system here in Yolo County and beyond. How do we connect them to places that produce healthy food for our urban areas and our food deserts? Well, it turns out the answer, at least so far, is in West Sacramento, right, Marty? So West Sacramento, as I spoke to, has this issue of food access and food insecurity and food deserts, they also have a lot of vacant lots. The biggest challenge that new farmers face is access to land and access to capital. So land, number one, these kinds of vacant lots like we have, you have in West Sacramento and beyond all around the county in urban areas that many of our beginning farmers want to do urban agriculture are here, are here right in our own communities. In this case, the project that Center for Land-based Learning embarked upon is one where we took the lead to lease these lands from both city properties, public properties, as well as private properties, and then we sub-lease the land to beginning farmers so that they can get their own start. We also raise public money or private money, not public money, private money in order to build the infrastructure at these sites so that these farmers can get their start. They don't have to buy things like the irrigation system. They don't have to buy the structure for storage. They don't have to build a shade structure. All of those things we do for them. So some of our outcomes in literally just one year, we launched this in March of 2014. We now have four farms. We're up to six acres of land that has been converted, obviously, that were unused, some private, some public, and high productive urban farms within this first year. And the other part of this is economic development. We've started six new local businesses. All of these new farms have their own business licenses. They have their own insurance. They have their own farm names. They're going out and selling and, you know, obviously being an integral part of our community. And also very exciting, something that I'm gonna leave you with today is the excitement that we have over creation of a mobile farm stand. And this will be deployed not only in West Sacramento and food deserts, but also in such communities as Knights Landing, which by the way, is one of the other areas within the county that has a major problem from the standpoint of access to healthy food. So I don't know if this is necessarily innovation. I think of it as putting our heads together and working with a whole lot of partners and great communities that can do real things on the ground. But I guess after all that is the yolo way. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Mary. And to all of our presenters today, a big thank you for staying right on time. We had a good timekeeper, but we only had to stand up once and I didn't have to touch anybody. So that worked out pretty well. So let's bring Rob up now and we've got, oh, you're gonna introduce him? Okay, so we're right on time and we're gonna be able to have a nice healthy discussion here. Thank you, folks. Let's give David and all of the presenters another hand. Thank you, everybody. Just to comment, this group of presenters, it could have been 10 other people because there are 10 other topics that could have come in. The way that these individuals were selected in these focus areas, we sent out a call for proposals. We asked everybody on our yolo leaders list, what would you like to hear about or what would you like to present? And the steering committee got, we had actually more proposals than we felt we could accommodate in one day. So there were many, many more stories in our county.