 We'll call to order. And we'll now call the May the 12th, 2020 regular meeting. Your microphone. I think your microphone might not be on. I think it's on. Oh, it's on. You just need to get closer. It's on. OK. OK. Well, please join us in a moment of prayer and silence. Well, first, we need to do roll call. I'm sorry. Excuse me. And followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. Can we do the roll call? Roll call. Oh, roll call. That's correct. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. McPherson. Chair Caput. Here. OK. Should we try for McPherson again? We'll wait until he comes on. Do you see him on that? OK. All right. We don't see him on. He was going to try a new technology today. Right. OK. Please join us in a moment of prayer or silence and a pledge of allegiance. Thank you. United States of America. Mr. Palacios, are there any late items or changes to the agenda? Yes. On the regular agenda, on number eight, on the regular agenda, staff request this item be deleted. On number 13, there's additional materials, revised memo packet page 305, a revised attachment A, package 306. And there's also the CAO 2021 proposed budget presentation as additional materials. That concludes. Thank you. Excuse me, this is Supervisor McPherson. Yeah. Welcome. I'm here. How are you doing? I was on. Oh, yeah. I forgot to unmute, so sorry about that. Got to get used to this better. Thank you. You're welcome. OK. Announcements, do any board members wish to pull consent items to the regular agenda? I'll be asking questions about number 19, but I'm not going to pull the item. OK. Nothing will be pulled, but just comments. OK. I had my presentation. You have a presentation first? Yes. I'm sorry that after the revision sheet, I was supposed to do my weekly or my board meeting update on the public health emergency. So if we could do that, and then we'll go to the items pulled from the agenda. This is item number 3B on the agenda. 3B. OK, so I'd like to now call up Mimi Hall, director of the Health Services Agency, who will give us an update on the public health emergency. Sorry, Christine, you need to unmute Ms. Hall's microphone from the red button. OK. Good morning. Mimi Hall, director of the Health Services Agency, and also incident commander for the Health Services Agency public health response to COVID-19. This morning, I'll start with our usual update regarding the epidemiology of COVID-19 in Santa Cruz County and our case counts. So as of yesterday morning, we don't have our final counts for today. We have a cumulative count of 141 cases of COVID. And 21 of those cases have. Oh, I'm in the wrong. I'm sorry. I'm looking at my computer, and it's different than what I'm seeing here. 21 of those cases have ever been hospitalized. The incredibly good news for us is out of those 141 cumulative cases, 114 have fully recovered. And we hold at having two deaths as a result of COVID. And the last death occurred on April 14th. So actually, April 13th. So it's been quite some time since we've had our last death. You can see that our testing numbers continue to increase by about 500 increase tests a week. And that number is expected to expand. So so far, we've had 4,914 negative cases. When you look at known cases by gender, there are a few more women than men impacted. And known cases by age group, there continue to be more cases in adults 18 to 65 than other age groups. And again, if you have one or more health conditions, you're more at risk for hospitalization. And you can see that in the known cases with additional chronic disease conditions. So this slide right here, the graph on the upper left shows the number of new cases per day. And what you can see is that there's a slight increase earlier in April. And we believe that that was due to an increase in testing. We had a lot of testing come on board all at once and received a lot of tests back after a backlog. What we can also see is that for the last couple of weeks, we've had either steady or declining new cases and some days, no new cases at all. And that's with expanded testing. So what that's telling us is that the measures that we've taken as a community, and I mean a community because the entire community has come together to really comply with social distancing and hygiene and be thoughtful across every sector about how we can keep our community members safe. So this is amazing to me because it shows us that the sacrifices that we have made as government, as businesses, as small businesses and families have had a positive impact. When you look at the epidemic curve, so if you had looked at our case count a month ago, we were doubling our cases about every seven or eight days. And if we had continued on that trajectory without any thoughtfulness in revisiting our shelter in place orders and everything, we would have seen a disease curve that went more straight up. And now we have really, really leveled off and it's possible that our disease curve may stay level. A lot of people say is the surge over or have you reached your peak? Because the actions that we take across healthcare systems and local governments impact the disease curve, it looks like what we're seeing right now is a controlled curve. And we have the ability to keep the line relatively flat. And even if it increases with some of the loosening restrictions that we're seeing coming soon, we believe that we're well-prepared in terms of healthcare system capacity, testing and other things that we need to keep the experience of disease low. So I wanted to talk a little bit about California's resilience roadmap. I'm not sure why there are two different screens showing two different things. I'm gonna go ahead, there we go. I wanted to explain a little bit how the actions that we're taking here in Santa Cruz County and our recovery plans align with the state's roadmap to recovery. So California has something called a resilience roadmap and the resilience roadmap is solely focused on the opening of businesses and workplaces. So where California is right now is in early stage two. Stage one is where we have been for several, several weeks and that's making workplaces safe for our essential workers, ensuring safety and preparedness, basically our shelter in place orders and our statewide stay at home orders. Stage two is the opening of lower risk workplaces. We're not through stage two, but the governor made a statewide order opening low risk retail businesses last Friday for curbside services. So you can see that stage two is going to be a gradual reopening. Later in stage two, there will be an opening of manufacturing and logistics and then at the end of stage two, there'll be relaxed retail restrictions and adapting and reopening schools and childcare. Stage three, according to the governor is months away, not weeks away. In stage three means that we're gonna start opening some places that are very public and will have people in close proximity, movie theaters, religious services, personal and hospitality services. So some of the higher risk. You'll recall that when the pandemic first started, the state started defining workers as essential and non-essential and now they're moving towards risk and rating the risk as either a low risk workplace or a high risk workplace. Stage four is when there's an end to the orders and we're fully open. So how does that relate to what we're doing in Santa Cruz? Save live Santa Cruz. The save is an acronym, which stands for slowing the spread, which is exactly where we are now. We have our shelter in place orders. We've done a lot of work to have the majority of our workforce that our essential workers work from home. A is adapting and adjusting until we have a vaccination or a treatment. And so we are adapting and adjusting so that our county can get through stage two. Vaccination and treatment and elevating readiness, they come after the state has completely opened up. So one of the things that I wanted to let the board know about are the progress at the state in terms of how counties can move through these stages. The state intends to move as a whole through each of those stages. However, they have announced that counties may file for a variance through submitting an attestation of the health officer that's been reviewed by the board. And that attestation, so once a county has met certain criteria, they can increase the pace at which they advance through the end of stage two, not to stage three, but the end of stage two. In order to do this, counties must submit a plan for how they anticipate moving through stage two and clearly indicate how their pace is going to be different from the state. Once the local variance criteria are met and plans for containment are developed, then the health officer submits that plan to the state. It's not an approval process, but actually the first 11 or so counties submitted their attestations for variance this week. And the state has said it's not an approval, but if we have vetted it through our process, you will see your plan online. Nobody has seen their plan online yet. I provide this information to you out of openness and transparency because I know that a lot of our community and our business sector are really, really wanting to get back to work. And I wanted everyone to understand what the parameters are and what health data we have to meet as a county in order to get to that place. So I'm going to go through the variance criteria for all counties and where Santa Cruz is in terms of a measure of are we not there at all, are we almost there, are we there? So one of the measures is run of the criteria as epidemiological stability. In order to submit a variance, a county must have less than one case per 10,000 in the past 14 days and no COVID deaths in the past 14 days. So last week we had met that less than one case per 10,000, but because it's a two-week timeframe, we're actually right at that spot. We're just over, we're right at that one per 10,000. For the next 14 days, that means we have to have less than 28 new cases. The other thing is that we have to have guidance for businesses and supplies for essential workers. And that doesn't mean the county provides the supplies, but the supply chains have eased up enough that in general, business, daycares, everyone has reasonable access to the hygiene, sanitation, cleaning supplies that they need, and also personal protective equipment or personal protective measures. Testing capacity, the goal for a county to be able to apply for a variance is a minimum testing volume of one and a half tests per 1,000 population. So for Santa Cruz County, that's an average of 420 tests per day. And we believe we are at that capacity right now and will probably be well beyond that capacity in the coming weeks. Containment capacity, where required any county submitting an attestation for variance must prove that they have sufficient contact tracing staff. This is defined by the state as 15 contact tracers per 100,000 population. So for us, that means about 41 staff trained to contact trace. We currently have 15 staff trained to contact trace and case investigate. And we have a project manager and other staff at a state pilot training right now for a statewide training for a contact tracing platform. And we have many, many volunteers in the queue supported by the volunteer center at the EOC. And so as soon as that state training goes beyond the pilot, which ends this week, it'll be available and we'll be able to train our standby workforce. I believe we'll have probably more than 41 who desire to be trained. So we'll have to figure out who's best suited. But that training takes two weeks to complete. So in about three weeks, we'll have reached the mark for number of contact tracers trained. Availability of temporary housing, that's another measure. So the state requires that any county submitting a variance attestation be able to have the capacity to house 15% of their unsheltered population based on their last point in time count. So for Santa Cruz County, our last point in time count had about 1,700 unsheltered people counted. And that means that we're shooting for a number of 255 beds or temporary shelter for folks. We believe that, well, we've already exceeded that number. So we have project room key. And in the next week or so they will have with a fourth hotel on board, they will have capacity for 150 individual rooms. And that's not required by the state. And added to our shelter capacity and other measures, we have a capacity of about 580. So we're there in that mark. In terms of hospital capacity, our hospitals must be able to handle a 35% surge from current capacity. They're well above that. And we have to have a robust plan to protect the workforce with PPE with PPE. And we're working on that as well. Finally, for vulnerable populations, each of our skilled nursing facilities have to have evidence of ongoing 14 days personal protective equipment on hand. And they actually have our, every county has received a giant allocation from FEMA. So that is gonna be great to get our seven SNFs on board. And in the County Public Health Department Operations Center, we're also planning on setting aside a cash for surge to help our hospitals and our skilled nursing facilities meet the PPE requirement. So I wanted to talk a little bit about where we are right now. We've been in that slow the spread mode for a very long time. And now that we are opening up a little bit in our community, in our economy, we anticipate having more positive cases, which is exactly why we've been ramping up testing and our contact tracing workforce so that we can squash all the new cases that come up and quickly contain them. So the newest testing site that we have is actually a state sponsored site. The state has contracted with a company called OptumServe to open 80 test sites across California. We were chosen as one of these sites and it's in Ramsey Park in Watsonville. And I wanna thank all of the partners, including the city of Watsonville that work together to identify that site. So it's open to anybody. And you can go online to testing.covid19.ca.gov to register for an appointment. Or if you don't have the ability to go online, you can call 888-634-1123 and get an appointment. There's access for all. And that means anybody can get a test regardless of insurance status. So if you don't have healthcare coverage, the state will cover the cost of your test. If you do have health insurance, your insurance will be billed. So what we're doing this week is we're expanding local testing to all stage one essential workers. Some of you might recall that when there was a lack of availability of testing, we're trying to, as a county wide effort in the healthcare system, limit testing to those who are symptomatic because those are who need it the most. But now that we have increased testing capacity and especially this site that isn't linked to a hospital or a clinic, we're encouraging all essential workers in stage one to go and get tested. The testing capacity is 132 a day. It takes about five to seven minutes. You'll receive, we're working with them on the operations, but so far for the last week, people have received a time to show up, like show up between one and two. And then people show up right before one because they think it's an appointment time and then they all kind of wait because it takes five to seven minutes. So we're working on the operation side of things, but our soft opening last week showed really, really great success. We got a lot of feedback on what wasn't working and we can improve and we've made those changes so that now we're ready for public rollout. I do wanna say that it's open Wednesday to Sunday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. So the work, the test site five day opening will start each Wednesday. And it was important to have Sundays available because for a lot of our folks who work in agriculture, that's their only day off. Today, we're sending a letter as widely as we can to agriculture, to governments, to nonprofits, giving them all of this information, encouraging their staff, whether symptomatic or not because we're allowed to do surveillance testing through this site to go and get tested. The addition of this site now means that countywide, we have eight locations where people can be tested. This is the only public location, which was a very important addition. Our plans in the future are to use a specimen collection site like this or perhaps create one of our own so that in the near future, we can do mobile testing, perhaps testing in congregate settings and maybe even pop-up testing in the fall. So in terms of tracing, I had mentioned that the state is beta testing their tracing platform. Right now, it began last week, it will complete this week. We have a number of folks being trained right now. And when they come back, having been in the first cohort, then we can begin training our own tracing workforce. And then finally, I wanted to talk about what the next steps might be for save lives Santa Cruz. So we are focused squarely on getting our testing and our tracing up. Without those two things, we cannot move forward with our variants. So it's a very important that we get that workforce of at least 41 contact tracers trained and that we have the ability to isolate if necessary all positive cases and do the testing. So I imagine that that work will take a lot of our attention if not most of our attention for the next two to three weeks. But in the meantime, we are also working with the CEO's office and the Santa Cruz Community Foundation as well as the EOC on preparing our community for moving through stage two and then eventually stage three. So there are going to be some special considerations for our businesses. And we will have to have a community wide plan and how we're gonna coordinate and make sure that we engage our community partners in developing that plan. So for example, we're currently working with agriculture because of the nature of the work and the conditions of the work, there are some special considerations. On the other hand, there may be different considerations for manufacturing for a business that's technology. So there are some efforts going on right now to convene a steering committee of business representatives just for the first high level discussions of planning what community input from the business community might look like. The other thing that's important to us as a health services agency is the idea of not only engaging the community, but also equity. So going forward, we know that we have to make plans in readiness for getting us to the end of stage two and opening to stage three to make sure that how we engage the community, what organizations we engage and who we engage are reflective of the racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity of our community. And we also know that we wanna continue our relationship with our jurisdictional partners. The cities are a very, very important piece of planning for reopening. And then finally, one of the things that the state is going to look at on whether or not we'll be able to move beyond stage two are regional considerations. So we don't live in a bubble. We had the California epicenter start one county on our border over Santa Clara County. And so one of the things the state will be looking at is how are our neighbor counties doing in terms of their case counts, the projection of their disease curve, their PPE capacity, their hospital capacity because what happens around us can also impact Santa Cruz County. So those are the things that we're focusing on immediately after contact tracing, but the work and the planning is starting now. And I believe that the first convening of the steering committee convened by Santa Cruz Community Foundation and the CEO's office is, I think it's this week. Is it this week? Yeah. So that's my update for all of you. And I appreciate the opportunity to be serving the county. Thank you for your work and the work of all your staff. Thank you. Now, thank you. I'd like to ask for Sheriff Hart now to give his update. Good morning, Board. Jim Hart, Sheriff Hart. I wanna, there's a lot of background. I wanna echo what Ms. Hall just spoke with you about in terms of testing, the testing capabilities have improved dramatically locally. We had an exposure incident that involved four of our staff members and they were all able to get a test yesterday immediately after the exposure incident and they'll get the results back this morning. So it's a huge improvement from what we haven't been experiencing. So I just wanted to thank Ms. Hall and her staff for their work on that. In terms of the enforcement around the county in light of this virus, as you might recall, several weeks ago, the beaches across the county were being heavily used in violation of the public health officers order. And as you know, the order was modified two weeks ago and those modifications have been very helpful in keeping the large crowds off of the beaches during peak hours. Although there's still a few challenges with parking in neighborhoods and along busy roads, the order as it's written today is working very well while still providing our local residents with the opportunity to access the ocean and beaches and parks. And I do want to commend Dr. Newell and her team as well as county council for putting that word together. I think it is working quite well right now. We've done a lot of mitigation in our jails and then we still have not had a single case of the virus and corrections. In terms of crime trends around the virus, we're seeing crime trends very flat with a small uptick in our mental health related calls for service. We're working with our community members daily on their concerns about what's occurring in their neighborhoods and we'll continue to have that important dialogue as we move forward. We've asked our local residents to do some very difficult things but what we're doing as a county is working and I want to encourage our community members to remain vigilant and listen to and trust our health experts. Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. We really appreciate your work on behalf of the community. We are now gonna go to Elisa Benson, our assistant county administrative officer who will give an update on some of our services, provision of services to the homeless community. Good morning, everyone. Elisa Benson, ACAO and co-lead of the shelter and care doc for addressing COVID in the homeless community. I'll make this very brief. Since our last update, we did open our fill our second IQ hotel and we are holding 10 rooms there for isolation and quarantine needs as they emerge. We are poised to open our third IQV hotel tomorrow and that has a room count of 55. So we'll be able to address additional folks who fit our priority for category. So that would be folks who are 65 and older or medically vulnerable and experiencing homelessness. And right now we have approximately 87 folks who have been referred to us through our new shelter referral system that fit the P4 category. So some of those folks will be able to get into non congregate hotel-based shelter as early as tomorrow. And we'll be moving forward with our fourth hotel in the Watsonville area that would be opening it on May 26th with an additional capacity of 35 rooms. So we're continuing to expand our non congregate hotel-based shelter to address the most at risk people experiencing homelessness in our community. We continue to stabilize our existing shelters and ensure that they are able to implement social distancing and hygiene as appropriate. And we are stabilizing our expanded shelter and we were able to open the second increment of shelter at the Santa Cruz Vets Hall last week and we're trying to work through our referral list to provide additional shelter for folks who've come through that system. As mentioned, we continue to do our hotspot outreach in our four sites currently, our Depot Park, Emmeline Campus, the Pajaro Levy, and then Freedom Campus in Watsonville. There's been some considerable work to address some major encampments on Coral Street and behind this building at the Bench Lines, bringing sort of more order and implementation of safe distancing at those campgrounds, or I'm sorry, at those encampments, and we'll be increasing our outreach and engagement of folks to see if we can help them come into the shelter system. Lastly, I wanna just mention a couple quick items that we're working on is we're moving beyond just sort of that immediate safety and security in terms of 24-7 shelter in place and working with our Behavioral Health Division to try and make sure we have behavioral health supports in place in our expanded shelter and bringing those same things to the existing shelter. And we're starting to really get back to some of the work we were engaged in pre-COVID around housing navigation and case management. Our focus strategies work, as all of you are familiar with, had that as a key improvement strategy for us as a system, and we're starting to pick that back up and try and develop a prototype for implementing in our current emergency to help folks out of shelter and onto a pathway to permanent housing. So that's my update for today. Thank you very much. I'd like to now ask Randy Morris, our director of the Human Services Department to give an update in his area. Good morning, board members and to the public. I only have two quick updates, but I first wanna take the opportunity to recognize this being the month of May. This is CalFresh Awareness Month. And I think that's just a ceremony to act each month throughout the last many years. But I think now during COVID and with the dramatic unemployment and the newly eligible for CalFresh, wanna recognize we need to continue to raise awareness more than ever and appreciate that in this community we have a large increase in applications during getting more people enrolled. May is also national foster care month. And I wanna recognize there's a tremendous amount of work being done in the foster care system with our courts and attorneys and families at a very vulnerable and complicated time in our communities. I wanna recognize the impressive work being done. And finally, month of May across the country is also older Americans month. And we're in a disaster and I wanna recognize the last series of disasters have been fires and older adults are disproportionately impacted. And I think in COVID there's been tremendous work especially in California to recognize the vulnerability of older adults. And just wanna take the moment to recognize May as older Americans act month and how important our older adults in this community are. My two updates. The first is I wanna provide your board an update because I shared this publicly before that for public assistance programs and these programs are needed more than ever in communities given the economic challenges programs like in-home supportive services which is funded by Medi-Cal to help vulnerable older adults and people with disabilities stay in home. Medi-Cal, CalFresh and CalWorks have all benefited during the month of March, April and May in California from a waiver. And that waiver allowed us to stop all renewals throughout California for those who are receiving all of those services. And what that meant is every single person in Santa Cruz County and in California who was on any of those programs did not have a discontinuance of any benefits. They were able to stay on their services but it also allowed for our staff to be redeployed to the front end of the system to manage the high volume of intake and the new growing number of applications for our services. The update I wanna provide that effective June 1st that waiver expires. California is not going to extend that waiver. We are waiting to hear about Medi-Cal. Medi-Cal, the waiver might continue which will help and that's the largest program. But what that means in practice is that we're gonna have to redeploy our staff starting in June to the back end of the system to process renewals and we'll keep your board informed if in the worst case scenarios we could be confronted with the backlog of applications remain high given this waiver expires. So there's nothing today. We are not behind in any application volumes today and we'll work very closely to balance our responsibilities to manage renewals and intake if those applications come forward. But I just wanna let people know that's public information that the waiver is set to expire June 1st. The last update I wanna provide is about this program called Great Plates Delivered. Just as a reminder and then I'll give you an update in case people listening to this haven't heard about this. This was an action of Congress that one of the CARES acts in late March which was an economic stimulus package to help local food providers get paid to deliver food to help them keep in business. California through the governor and the Office of Emergency Services further enabled that by offering some match funding at the end of April to announce this program. And we in Santa Cruz County are greatly supported by the community foundation who's covering the local match requirement financially to help bring this forward and our department human services administering it. So the updates for your board is that there's really two things happening at the same time. One is that local food providers, restaurants, kitchen and caterers can apply to get a contract with us to receive this money to deliver food and concurrently at the same time a very specific group of vulnerable sheltering in place older adults are eligible to receive three meals a day. And so the updates are the county put out a request for interest to make a fair and competitive process given we know a lot of local food providers would be interested in the deadline to apply was 4 p.m. yesterday. We have approximately 30 food providers have applied. Second, we put a large amount of effort in the community to get the word about who is eligible for this program. And as of last evening, we had approximately 200 potentially eligible older adults apply and applications are coming in hourly from people calling our line and community-based organizations working with potentially eligible people who are sending us spreadsheets of people who are eligible. We have a team of people calling all these potentially eligible older adults to screen them. As of last night, we had gotten through about half of the referrals and 60 people have been screened eligible about 22 ineligible. So it's about two thirds of people who are applying are actually eligible. We have a selection committee scheduled for Thursday. We're mindful that it's gonna be hard to pick between 30 food providers applying even if we get up to 100, 150 eligible older adults we're not gonna be able to provide a contract to everybody. So we intentionally have a committee that does not have any county staff on it. We have two community-based organization reps who work in the field and have nothing to do with the application who are gonna be on it who work with older adults and meals. We have two city reps, a Watsonville rep and a Santa Cruz rep. We have two consumers with lived experience who have received free meal delivery to help us. We also have a local farmers market rep and the community foundation. So we have a robust diverse selection committee who's gonna be making those decisions. And our timeline that it's gonna take to put this in place, get purchases orders in place and do all the paperwork behind the scenes is anticipated to be somewhere right before Memorial Day holiday. If we get it right, it will be the end of that week or that weekend where we can actually start getting this program in place. And by the end of this week, I'll have a more refined update as to how many people are actually enrolled and how many restaurants and kitchens we can get a contract with. So that's an update. And please don't hesitate to call me or my office if any of the board offices have any questions I can provide more details. Thank you. Thank you very much. That concludes my update. Chair Caput on, and this concludes item three B. So you are now ready to move up to item four. Thank you. I'd like to comment on three B. It's an agenda item and this is related place. Yes. Thank you. You'll have time under item three B. Marilyn, you're gonna be able to comment, but as it is on the agenda, you'll have to wait. You'll get a chance. I know it's tough for you, but I know, I know. I appreciate that. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Do any board members wish to pull consent items from the regular agenda? Chair, I'm thinking that it would be great to pull item 19 and put it where item eight was. I know we have the speaker in the room for item seven. Just I want to ask some questions and maybe give some additional direction. Okay. So we want to take item 19 and make it eight or 8.1. 8.1. Okay. 8.1. That's the cannabis licensing one. Okay. Okay. So item 19 will become item number 8.1. Is that correct? Any other board members? We, I don't hear anything. So we'll go to public comment. I know it's difficult to do everything in three minutes, but we are asking you to hold to that. And I know I have some comments too, and I'm going to present those and I'm going to hold it to the three minute rule also. Go ahead, Marilyn. Thank you. This is for item 3B that I should have been allowed to comment on during that time. And these scientifically factual newsletters are submitted for inclusion with item 3B report of the County Administrative Officer on COVID-19 titled Choosing Life from April 2020 and the Evidence Mounts May 5th, 2020. Authored by Arthur Furzenberg, info at cellphonetaskforce.org and www.5gspaceappeal.org. Critical data and analysis omitted from your report is publicly presented to you for your examination. The 12 provided copies are for the five members of the Board of Supervisors. Dr. Gail Newell, Public Health Officer, Mimi Hall, Director of Health Services and Agency, ran the, ran, excuse me, what? Excuse me, why am I being, please mute your phone. Why am I being interrupted? I, isn't this older Americans month? And don't you respect a teacher who taught 30 years and donates her time to public health and men respecting women? I really appreciate the respect here from Carlos Palacios. This is all for Randy Morris, Director of Human Services, Nicole Coburn, Assistant County Administrative Officer, Alisa Benson, County Administrative Officer, Assistant Jim Harn, Chair of Corner and Carlos Palacios, CAO, copies for everyone. And I would like these put with this agenda item so people can scan it and kindly distribute to those who are present. And exerpting a little bit from one of these articles. An ocean of viruses. The idea that we can keep from sharing viruses by wearing masks and staying a few feet away from each other is about as realistic as putting a mask on a fish and pretending it is going to protect it from getting wet. In another part of this article, it is not a coincidence that Wuhan China turned on its first 5G communications network just two weeks before the first known person became ill with a disease that has since been known to the world. It is not a coincidence that the diamond cruise ship, similarly, lots of satellites and wifi. You have those articles and it refer members of the public to them and also request an equal time presentation here from this propaganda for profit, for pharmaceutical corporations. Save a video with Dr. Thomas Cowan or Dr. Boutar on this topic. Thank you. Good morning, my name is James Ewing Whitman. Kind of a prolific writer on a couple of media sources. Facebook will probably be taken down pretty soon. So I'm gonna make a bad joke about politicians. Don't watch their mouths, watch their hands. The comment that I heard that somebody who was on here said was kind of, it was just kind of unfortunate. So I'm not gonna repeat anything at what the four people in the county stated, but I just wanna say there seems to be some common sense lacking. And I'll give at least one example. You know, when you raise children, they're running around, they're crawling, they put things in their mouths, they eat them, they touch them. That's how they build up a natural immunity. These masks, these are a joke. These aren't doing anything to stop a virus size. To think that they're doing anything but to train and control people is really kind of foolish. So who am I? You know, I've been a general contractor more than two decades. I've been in the construction trades for more than three decades. And I've had emergency responder training for more than four decades. So I question things and I'm trying to be as polite as possible, but I'm questioning what's going on in Santa Cruz biosphere. Because if you get out and look at some real media, we have some real issues with this shutdown with the global food supply. And it's gonna be coming to Santa Cruz. So I'm here, I'm glad to be a witness and I'm gonna be as polite as I can because I need to be. So thank you for your time. Thank you. Hi. I'm Monica McGuire. I live in Corralitos. I'm a health coach. And I commend Mr. Capich for knowing not to have the mask over his nose because you are all breathing your carbon dioxide, which you all learned in grammar school is terrible for you. It makes no sense whatsoever, especially with all of the incredible evidence that this is useless unless you're actually actively coughing or doing something. And it causes more people to touch their faces if they do have something, which then gets all over everything else. We know this, there are articles about it. I don't appreciate that a health oriented place like Santa Cruz is not acknowledging it. It makes no sense. I also would like to say that the widely shared questions in this county remain unaddressed and there is no good reason for that after two months. You are forcing flawed tests on us and that takes away our medical freedom. That makes no sense. We are, where are the stats about the collateral damages that we are still watching all of this cause that all of you have the chance to do something about? We have people attempting and completing suicide, children all over this state. What are the numbers in this county? I really want to know. I personally meet depressed children all the time these two months because I'm a health coach who knows how to boost my immune system. So I am out in the world doing what I can to boost other people's immune systems and children are depressed in frightening numbers. Why are we not caring about that at least as much? And what about the far larger number of elders? Which yes, they have a very small incidence of this because they are being kept in solitary confinement and they're dying of loneliness. Where's our care for those people? What about the children, teens and 20-somethings who are also already depressed about climate crisis? What are we doing for them to show them that we are more intelligent than how we have acted for years now? There is a sharp rise in domestic violence. Where are the stats on that? The welfare of employees and owners of the 40% of small businesses expected to close, none of us knowing which ones are going to have to close. Which ones of us are not gonna be able to rehire the people who have no income whatsoever and know that they're now facing the worst possible additional homelessness, et cetera. This county has an incredibly low number of people sick. That is not just because of shelter in place. After this much time, we should be acknowledging that. Where is your leadership? The degradation to our immune systems is traceable. You can test people's oxygen in their fingertips and toe tips and find out how much you personally are harming yourself. Not to mention everyone else by keeping this charade up. Dehydration and exhaustion of our police and first responders of all sorts is frightening. I am going to everyone on the street that I can, dressed in black and wearing black masks and saying this is wrong, that we are forcing you to be dehydrated and breathe your own toxins. You know this, you are adults. Okay. I feel so angry because of that horrible comment. Thank you. A moment ago, by one of the people on the microphone, probably a supervisor, specifically named Two Fabulous, who had done their best to come to you with their time, love, energy, et cetera, and he denigrated them on the open air and none of you said a word about it. Thank you, thank you. Speak to what's wrong. Howdy. My name's Tony Crane. I am here to represent my neighborhood in the objection to the second story program that was implemented in our neighborhood. It is going on nearly three years now. I know that right now is not a great time to bring something like this forward. I realize the importance of the need to take care of the mentally ill. But what has occurred in our county is so egregious. I can't sit back and just let it go. There has been corruption at the highest levels of our government. You all know it. I've provided internal emails between county officials and encompass employees, showing that they committed fraud in order to get the money to implement this program. Nobody seems to care. It's extremely obvious. In 2017, September, we requested a code compliance investigation of the property. In that investigation, County Council provided false information regarding the true intent and scope of the project. And somebody from Encompass directly lied to the investigating officer, saying that there was never any intent for it to do what it was mandated to do. And County Council signed off, read, approved every document regarding the program so they knew better than to say what they said, but they said it anyways. And in doing so, they did not give us a public hearing or a level five review as was required. Since then, the director of planning has changed the justification to it is now legal under SB2, which is a housing bill. The Building Homes and Jobs Act is somehow now responsible for a short stay mental health facility where no one lives, can't stay for more than 13 days and it has absolutely nothing to do with housing. They don't report housing information. And when I went to appeal that statement that they made, the action that they took to deny us another public hearing, they refused to accept my letter of appeal and said that they had the right to do that, which they do not. It absolutely says they do not. I have asked for Kathy Malloy's resignation in a letter. She's received it, Zach's received it, and you will be receiving it later today. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to ask for extra time because you have crammed so much into the three minutes that people are given. I know it's difficult, but we- Stop the clock, please. We have to stay at the three minutes right now. But you consolidated the very extensive report. Yeah, but if I do it for one- May I have one extra minute? I'll give you like 10 seconds to wrap up after the three minutes. All right, thank you for not stopping the clock and using up my time in discussion. Go ahead and start. I want to say two, three B. I want to say that and thank you for Ms. McGuire's excellent and passionate speech. The number of DUIs, suicides and domestic violence is up dramatically. We're hearing this from our emergency providers. You've got to stop this shelter in place, Roos. It is not doing anything except destroying the society, destroying the economy. You've got to stop it now and you have the ability. Under the health and safety code, Dr. Newell only had the ability to declare the emergency. You had to ratify it to keep it legal. You are in charge here, not her. And that is the law. She is now citing penal code. What right does a health officer have to cite penal code? Make no mistake about it. This is law enforcement running a muck in our county. Citing people $1,000 for sitting on a park bench is ridiculous. Outlying, picnicking, lying, sightseeing, standing, barbecues, umbrellas, this is not a health code. This is law enforcement and military oppression. And it is nothing to do with stopping this disease. That according to the Stanford research reworked report this morning is not as serious as it was thought. That's Stanford. There are two other studies by major universities backing it up. Now, I want to move on to the encampment at Seventh Day Adventist Church, which was not discussed at all. That is against the law too, because their permits have expired and they have a lot of septic problems. And who's running it? Encompass. The very people that Mr. Crane just told you violated the law. Don't do this. Don't do this to your people, Supervisor Leopold, don't do this. There is a spot in Watsonville that was used in the 1989 earthquake that is probably still set up for those trailers. FEMA brought in trailers. It's a better place than the Seventh Day Adventist Church. You're shaking your head. You've never answered my email about it. I want to say that, I also want to say to item number 24 in my limited time, thank you, that I do not want to see you increase CSA 48. You've already gouged the people with the illegal benefit assessment that was done illegally, and to raise it another 3%, which is over the cost of the CPI. There's conflicting CPI reported, 2.5% in another CSA report. A little more time, please. So that's conflicting. Don't do this to the people at a time when people are struggling. There is ample money that you've gouged the people that will come at least for a short time until my lawsuit has its day in court. And I also want to say on item 34 that the streets team calling job training just picking up needles is not job training. Please expand it to landscaping, irrigation, things that will truly give them job skills. Thank you. Thanks for the extra moment. Okay, and it looks like we do have somebody downstairs ready to speak. Thank you. Hi there. Hi, good morning. My name's Drew Lewis. I'd like to speak on 3B. British scientist Neil Ferguson ignited the world's drastic response to the novel Wuhan coronavirus when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. After both the US and UK governments effectively shut down their citizens and economy, Ferguson is now recanting his doomsday scenarios. It is also noted that after Ferguson initially presented his original doomsday scenario and called for a shelter in place social distancing model, he went off to have an extramarital relation with a woman, not his wife, after being diagnosed with COVID-19, thus exposing her husband and children to the virus. Ferguson's report from Imperial College, which the White House and other officials took seriously, said that if the US and UK did not shut down for 18 months and isolation measures were not taken, quote, we would expect a peak in mortality daily death to occur after approximately three months, unquote. His models showed overflowing hospitals and ICU beds. Ferguson's hypocrisy is stunning. The modeling program has since been thrown out being described by experts as seriously flawed. We now seem to have similar modeling problems here with the projections of fearful outcomes that we are following today, resulting in the complete shutting down of our entire society and economy that is causing massive damage to our economic and social structures. I recently saw a report on the meat, dairy and agriculture industries having to slaughter and bury chickens, pigs, and cattle because none of the meat processing plants are open due to the shutdown. Farmers are now plowing under their crops as well due to the severe restrictions for the coronavirus. We went to the epicenter of the COVID-19 as reported in LA Times at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center a few days later and found COVID-19 tents empty. The staff there said no disease or death higher than normal. They also said that they had only tested 10 the previous day. I think that it is time to realize that we have been deceived by flawed computer modeling and morally challenged scientists. Look at the real data, which we now have to admit that what we are looking at is nothing more than a seasonal flu and not a worldwide pandemic that is threatening the lives of billions of people. Now is the time to reopen our society, restart our economy, and stop this madness. Thank you. We have anybody else? Supervisor, we do have a couple of emails. This is from Larry Andrews. Mr. Michael? Hello, I own and operate an RV park in Santa Cruz County where we are ordered to remain closed. The industry is classified under lodging, yet the RV occupants are in their own primary or secondary residence. We are adjacent to state parks, which are open. We have separation well beyond 15 to 20 feet between campsites. All of our common areas are closed, excluding single occupant bathrooms. We are following all of the county preventative safety measures. I am requesting that RV parks be removed under lodging restrictions and allowed to reopen. Thank you, Larry Andrews. We have another comment from Stephanie Weingarden. Her comment is I'm very concerned with the unfair treatment of those giving public comment. Why does there continue to be interruptions? Why the silencing of a microphone? This is shameful. And I have one more, but actually that's on a different item. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. Chair, I was contacted by a community member who was trying to put a comment and it may come in later. I don't know. I just took a picture of our instructions. It's a little unusual. And I asked your indulgence that if it does come in that we can read it at the appropriate time. That'd be fine. I appreciate all the comments that people have made about COVID and the restrictions. That mine is a little bit more specific about CSA 20. It's a item 10D. We've met with Zach Freund and we've met with other members of the water board. There's a request to increase the rates for our sewer system by 45% as members of the significant increase. So we'd like to, we're not opposed to an increase of some portion but a 45% increase to the residents in this community is a substantial increase. So we'd like the board to take a look at that and to consider not increasing it so drastically and then work with us over time to get to the appropriate fees. And I'm here as a member of the board of that community and we've talked to most of the members in that community. Okay. No, I've sent something in last night. And then Casio can say something in. There's another one from another person. All right. Thank you. That's it. Okay. This concludes item number five, public comment. The next item is action on the consent agenda. And we do later number 19. Which is 8.1. That's correct. After that. Yes. Do that after the consent or? There's item seven after consent and then you'll go to the item 19 after that. Okay. So that's just action on consent agenda. All right. Okay. Mr. Chair, this is Supervisor McPherson. Yes, sir. I just want to comment on a couple items on the consent agenda. I know that 19 has been pulled to 8.1. But on item number 34, I'm glad that our downtown streets team is our partner on this litter cleanup. It looks like the areas where the downtown streets team working is working aligns further well with the syringe hotspots that we've identified in our survey. But it's clear we really need to expand those concentrated areas and have a bigger impact. It's my understanding that the teams will go back to work shortly after stopping during the shelter in place, whenever that may be. But how do we plan for the future, such as in the fall if team members have to begin sheltering in place again? How do we clean up the litter and the needles when they cannot work? I know these can't be answered immediately, but it's just some questions that I have and maybe it's a long time off that I'd like to get some answers as we go into that phase. Then secondly and lastly on items 36, 39 and 40, the road improvements and storm damage repair. These are to continue to be huge items and I'm just gonna thank once again our public works department for bringing these items forward and staying on top of preparing our roads, which is critical at this time and anytime, not just from storm damage, but also the regular wear and tear. A couple of these roads are in my district at Bear Creek Road and Old Bear Creek Road. I just wanna say my, give my appreciation again to the public works department to continuing to do the work that is absolutely essential for the near future. And thank you for doing this as this COVID-19 crisis goes on. Have a good day, public works and thank you again. Coonerty or Fred? No comment. Okay, thank you. Carol does comment on it. Carol, this is Zach. Go ahead. I'll very briefly, just to thank you, as you guys will be able to just briefly speak to item number 38 is to dovetail and Supervisor McPherson's comments. This is regarding the trap goals, road repairs and extension of the engineering contract. I just appreciate the work of public works to get this done. I know that we've been able on the Blencia project. We've already received the bids back and I know that these are next. So I just appreciate their continued work and that this work is continuing even with all the other issues going on. So that's the only item I have to comment on. Thank you, Supervisor Leopold for yielding the floor for a second. I just wanted to comment also on item 34 about the downtown streets team. I appreciate this update. I know we do want to get them back to work. I also appreciate the work of our human services department to identify funding so we can continue to do this work. It's very important for the neighborhoods that are affected and having this information about where our hotspots are, helps us make sure that we're deploying the resources to the best places possible. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Any other comments? I would be prepared to move the consent agenda. Well, let me, I'll make a comment. Then we'll go ahead. Do we, I can get a second now and then when I'm done commenting, we'll go. Does anybody want to? I'll second. Okay, that'll be fine. So, okay, I'm going to try to do this quickly. I want to make a statement here. Thank you to all local residents for your cooperation during this most difficult time. We are following state guidelines and recommendations to protect the most vulnerable in our society. We realized that this is asking everyone to make extraordinary sacrifice and enduring extreme hardship. We as a board and also county department officials are not taking our decisions lightly. We know that many people are out of work and small businesses are closing their doors and some may never open their doors again. Thankfully, we built over the last five years our county reserve fund up to $57 million and up to this date, we've used up around 20 million of that money. We're looking at federal state funds in desperate, we're in desperate need and hopefully we'll be receiving some of that money. And hopefully many residents have or will receive their federal stimulus checks with some much very needed money that you need right now. And we recognize and I recognize after all the taxpayers money pays for everything. Everything we do or have is because of the taxpayer and we wanna be good stewards of that money. A recent poll shows that 12%, which is about one out of nine people missed entirely their rent or mortgage payments in April. And another 12% only made partial payments on their rent or their mortgage payments. We have 11% of renters that indicated that their landlords proactively lowered their April rent which is a surprising number to me and I wanna thank those landlords that have done that. Most banks are deferring loan payments by adding on to the back end of the loan, deferring the loan, extending it. And 7% of renters who asked their landlords for a rent reduction actually were told yes, that they would have a reduction in rent. We don't know what's gonna happen in June. That's what I'm worried about. We have May going on and that's really tough. Noting that small property owners, they also have financial responsibilities and in many cases they're having a tough time making their payments like mortgages, renovations or big upkeep items like a new roof or whatever. So it's tough on the small landlord and it's tough on everybody right now. Two weeks ago I called for the board and department heads to give a two week pay decrease as a sign of solidarity with the general public to show we will share some of the pain that people are currently enduring. The proposals that will be discussed in the budget report will cover proposed cuts or ideas on cuts in pay that will significantly be more than two weeks. So we'll wait until we have the budget report which will be after about 1045. We are between a rock and a hard place in our decisions. What is happening in New York, New Jersey, parts of Florida and Los Angeles is causing fear throughout the entire country. Do we go too long with the restrictions or do we stop too early? We as a board and department heads are not sitting in some ivory tower somewhere making all of our decisions. We're gonna make mistakes whether we are on the side of caution but we have to be very mindful of not opening up too quick or closing or extending too long. We have to weigh the benefit and the burden in all of our decisions and with God's help we will survive and be stronger as a result of all of our sacrifices. So I wanna thank everybody and we'll see what's gonna happen. We're doing the best we can. I want everybody to know that. I have a lot of confidence and my colleagues on the board and all of our department heads and we are looking out for the public in general. Thank you. Chair, Chair, I appreciate your remarks and we all feel the pain as we talk to our neighbors and talk to the businesses in our district. And just to be clear, our County took early action that helped prevent the spread of this virus. But now although we have our own shelter in place order we are under the state shelter in place order and as our health director just shared with us earlier in this meeting is we're moving pretty deliberately to move through those phases that the state has set out to allow us to open. And I'm confident with the information we received today that we are gonna be able to get this done as swiftly as possible and to ensure the safety of our community. We have to follow the state guidelines. We can't make them up on our own. And I feel as though with the plan that was presented here today that we are moving to make that happen. And I look forward to continue updates from our health services agency and the work that they're doing. You bet, thank you. Yeah, and we know we're making progress and we also know we're making mistakes as we're going along because this is a new kind of thing we're dealing with. I just want you to know to air is human and to forgive is divine. So thank you for your cooperation to everybody in the public for everything you're doing. We'll agree to take the two-week pattern. Okay. Okay, we have a first and second. Yes, we have a motion by Supervisor Leopold and a second by Supervisor Friend. I'll do a roll call vote. We'll do that. Okay. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Coonerty. Aye. Supervisor McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. That takes us now to, let's see what we got here. We're turning to the regular agenda item number seven. Consider resolution recommending the governor exercises authority to issue an executive order to conduct the presidential general election on November 3rd, 2020 as an all mail ballot election with in-person voting options as well as provide other tools such as expanded and an accurate, secure, accessible, transparent election under a public health crisis as outlined in the memorandum of the county clerk. Thank you. How are you? Good morning. Thank you. I'm Gail Pellerin, the county clerk registered our voters. Sorry, I'm a little late to the party. Actually that requested a to encourage the governor to issue that executive order. He did it without us asking and he did it on Friday. So we're very excited that that has happened. So I thought I'd still take this opportunity to talk about how we're moving forward under that executive order. So the executive order does allow all the counties to mail ballots to all voters in their county. That provides an easy at home alternative for voters to vote from home rather than going to a traditional polling site. The details of how this is actually gonna happen with the in-person voting is gonna be decided by the end of the month, May 30th. So we're working with our secretary of state's office, the legislature and the governor's office to move forward with all the details. But I'm happy to report that Santa Cruz County is already moving forward with our planning and I feel really confident about being able to hold a successful and secure accessible November election. We've been meeting with our postal reps because of course we're all concerned about mailing the ballots and I'm assured that they can handle the increased workload of that. We're gonna be using ballot tracks which is an intelligent barcodes to track the ballots inbound and outbound. We urge voters to sign up for informed delivery. This is a great service that the Postal Service allows you to sign up for free to get a digital image of all the mail that does show up in your mailbox each day so you'll get an email so you'll know when that ballot's coming to you. Our November ballots are gonna be mailed on October 5th and people need to be looking for that ballot in their mailboxes during that time. We're gonna be adding a bright color to it so people can see it. And of course we will be providing safe in-person voting options. That's a key piece of this for us and where we do provide assistance to voters with disabilities, voters with language barriers, people who did not receive their mail ballot, those who need to register and vote. In March we actually had 10 satellite offices of our operation. We call them voter service centers that were opened Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday before the marked election. And under the current discussion right now they're looking at doing one for 10,000 registered voters. So in our county of 166,000 registered voters that would be 17 of these voter service centers. So we just have to increase our number from 10 to 17 so seven more locations need to be identified. And I hope to be working with the community to identify where those sites should be. We will also need to provide adequate PPE equipment and disinfectant at each of these in-person voting locations as well as adhere to the physical distancing guidelines. In addition to that, we will also have, in March we had 12 of the 24-7 ballot drop boxes for voters to easily return their ballots. 11 of those were actually drive-up drop boxes so you don't need to have to get out of your car. And we plan to add two more drop boxes for November so that will be an easy way for voters to return that ballot that is mailed to them in their homes. Certainly we need to have the facilities. We need to have trained people to staff those facilities. We do not want to risk our vulnerable population. A lot of our poll workers are older and have health concerns so we really don't want to put them in danger. Definitely don't want to put them in danger. So we may need to deploy disaster service workers or go along those lines. But we are getting a lot of good response from poll workers now who are calling us and saying, hey, I'm ready and I want to serve and I'm healthy and I want to help out my fellow community to make sure everyone has access to voting. We're also considering parking lots, possibly having tents where people can drive up in their cars and get a ballot and be able to vote from their cars. So we need to be remained flexible as conditions and public health security measures may change in the fall. So we have a very nimble flexible staff that we're used to things changing and so we'll be ready to take on whatever happens in the fall. We also have a remote accessible vote by mail balloting system that's designed for military and overseas voters as well as voters with disabilities who can vote from the safety of their own home through a ballot that gets emailed to them. And we're looking at expanding that to allow any voter to utilize that as a service to be able to get their ballot. And of course I'm working with Jason Hoppin, communications director on putting together an aggressive public education plan to make sure that voters know what their options are. Voters are also encouraged to check their voter status. They can do that from our website at votescount.com or the secretary state has a voter status look up as well. And just currently our numbers in Santa Cruz County we are like I said at 166,000 registered voters. We have 115,810 who are set up to be a permanent vote by mail ballot voter anyway where they're already used to getting their ballot by mail. So that really leaves 50,256 people who may have wanted to exercise that option to go to a traditional polling site. And in March we had 70,678 people vote by mail where 33,222 actually went to the polls. And then we also had provisional voting where we had over 2,000 people vote provisionally and close to 3,000 people who had a same day voter registration. So I believe with these voter service centers we will really be set up in a really effective safe manner to make sure that voters do have an opportunity to come in, get assistance. We'll have the tablet that provides for a Spanish ballot as well as a ballot for a voter to vote independently and privately and train staff at all these locations. And we'll continue our voter outreach as much as we can. We'll be going into our convalescent facilities. We'll be working with our jail facilities making sure that all voters do have access to voting. So we're full steam ahead. We're excited about this election. We believe it could be conducted in a very safe, secure manner that will give us the same integrity that we've always had an experience here in Santa Cruz County. So, and thanks to the County family too, all of you who help out on election day, I really do appreciate your work. Thank you. So we'll have some questions from the board. Yes, I'll supervise your lead. Okay, I'll do it. Yeah. Let me just say thanks for the work that you have done always. And I know that you've been thinking about this and preparing in some ways, even before this, this is an earlier implementation than something you were thinking about that wasn't gonna happen until 2022. You mentioned about going into facilities that right now are closed off to visitors and we don't know whether they're gonna be open for visitors by then. Are we gonna be doing any kind of other advertising or outreach, especially to get those hard to reach populations? I mean, I think we see with this census that if there are tools that we use there in order to encourage voting, that that's in some ways a dry run, it seems to be important. Yeah, yeah, I'm really looking at the census folks and what they've been doing and utilizing some of those same tools. We might even try to get back to the precinct captain days where we have people in communities talking to neighbors about making sure that they have access to voting and they need assistance that we can count on them to help us. And as far as the convalescent homes, there's people that do go inside. So I think there is ways for us to get the ballots to them. There's ways for us to assist them. There's teleconferencing. There's ways that we can communicate with them, I think effectively, even with maintaining our distance. Okay. I look forward to it. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Other board members. Well, Chair Caput, this is Supervisor McPherson. Thank you. I have a little delayed response, so I want to get in early. I want to thank County Clerk Dale Pellerin for doing an excellent job and working with the County Administrative Office for bringing this item forward. We were learning how to live with work differently during this pandemic and surely voting's not going to be any different, but we already have a lot of voting by mail, two-thirds or more. So I believe we will have a successful transition, but there are a couple of questions I have. How will this impact same-day registration and will an all-mail ballot lead to a quicker certification of the vote? The registration, you can still register to vote online at registertovote.ca.gov. So we'll probably be utilizing that as a tool to get the voter registration. And then, like I said, there will be in-person voting opportunities. In our office as County Clerk, I've been open since we never closed. We put in the sneeze guards. We are wearing masks. We disinfect everything after every customer. So we are still issuing marriage licenses. We are still conducting weddings. We are still doing the fictitious business names because a lot of these businesses need to get those stimulus loans. So we've been continuing to operate and have found a way to do it so it's safe and secure for everyone involved. So we'll do the same thing with voting. We'll do the same thing with candidate filing that begins in July when people start coming in. We're gonna be setting up an appointment-based system where people will have to make an appointment to get their candidate papers. But for voting, we'll just be able to have these centers open and people can show up and keep their six feet away. I'm hoping to work maybe with Kevin and a big shout out to his department. They've been phenomenal in getting our satellite voting centers operating but also in doing our calendar system as well. But even maybe an app where people can go to an app and see what's the wait time. So maybe at the community action board, there's no wait time but over at Simkins, there's a 40 minute wait time. So then they'll be able to know where they can go to get a ballot most efficiently. And just encouraging people to also plan ahead, make a plan to vote. Showing up on Tuesday at three o'clock is probably not your most ideal time. I mean, we will be open Saturday, Sunday, Monday and those days tend to be slower and have a lot more opportunity for people to get in and get out quickly. Your other question was about timing. Yeah, you always want it fast. Okay, so yeah, I mean, elections take time. Will it happen quicker? Probably not. We'll do our best for me. I'd rather do it accurately and securely than quickly. So we do a lot of auditing on the back end. So that's gonna take time to do with our vote by mail ballots. Each of those ballots does get hand-touched where we peel off the tab for the signature. And then we have humans check the signature against the signature on record. We then follow up with people whose signatures don't compare and give them opportunity to correct their signature before we certify. So yeah, you know, the law gives us 30 days and I'm gonna take it. Thank you. Any other board members? Does this require action if you? Yeah, well, I don't know, I mean, because I guess to support the executive order. Yeah. Thanks a lot. We'll open it up now for, I guess, public comment. Okay, please. Okay, come forward. Monica McGuire from Coralitas again. Gail, definitely teach your own horn. I was really amazed learning this year that in March, 111,000 of the 114,000 ballots were mailed out to people. And just by reading her website, although it's difficult to navigate, I learned a lot of great things, including that we really ought to call it vote by drop-off. Because although we receive our ballots in the mail, we have a huge number, as she said, who vote by dropping it off or taking it to a polling place. And that is something we all know. There are people who treasure that. And it's a really important aspect, especially since by November, with any more of this, we can be really certain that lots of elders will be already dead from loneliness and lack of the personal touch needed. We need personal touch. There are countless ways that we see that. And that in science, there are scientific evidence that children and babies are deeply harmed by not being touched. So this whole thing will continue to unravel by November with just what we've got going right now, just the ways that people are harmed. So please account for that and do more, I would think, than 12 drop-off boxes, adding a couple more, as she's saying. How could that be enough if 50,000 people were used to wanting to drop them off? As well, please give the better warning that is really important. If you mail your ballot back by that poor choice of calling it mail, voting by mail, you have the chance that your vote will not be counted. Because if it's more than three days delayed in the mail for any reason, it's not counted, despite that there are other kinds of voters who actually can have their votes counted longer than three days after. That should be really clarified here, please, because that's something people need to understand and know. As well, we have over and over the fear of this being a terribly compromised election. The number of people terrified of seeing something happen out of Washington, D.C. to prevent our ability to vote is something that people need to hear about from you, from every person making 200,000 to 300,000 in this county, of which most of you up here are. And that is a huge, huge difference. And again, I just wanna bring up, Mr. Caput, you had such a beautiful gesture last time to say, could all these people making so much money take a pay cut for only two weeks, despite that we've had two months where we have to face having no income? This is insane that you're not addressing these pieces with us. This is basic to being in a republic. This is basic, basic to our hope that we will pull ourselves through by finally being heard by all of you. Your lack of response when we come to speak to you has been abhorrent for a long time. It's now getting really frightening. Okay, go ahead, Becky. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner from Aptos. Thank you, Ms. Pellerin, for your hard work and all your staff. I have observed many ballot counting sessions, or a few, not many, but a few. And I'm always impressed by the dedication and the integrity of your workers and the real hard work that you do to make sure that everything is fair. So thank you. One fear, well, I don't wanna keep talking fear because there's enough of that out there that's driving the bus. But the governor, it has been declared illegal to harvest ballots. And hearing Ms. Pellerin talk about sending people into the nursing homes to do the ballot distributions and maybe collection, that's one issue that I think we really need to think about if we're going to be doing things like that, ballot harvesting, if a package of ballots, mail-out ballots is handed to a worker going into a nursing home to distribute, how do we know what information is gonna be given with those ballots? Who's gonna fill them out? And will there be an opportunity or risk of ballot harvesting in this county with these new procedures? And I would appreciate that answered here publicly. Thank you very much. Thank you. I also wanna thank Gail Pellerin for her work. You sure got your hands full. I have some comments and then end with a question. When we go to these places, I kinda have to think on the Board of Supervisors agenda it says, please attend meetings fragrance-free because people are chemically injured. And as I walked in this building today or say go to a voting place or anywhere now, there's this chemical smell. So the increase in toxic chemicals by these euphemistically labeled sanitizers and disinfectants is very, very problematic. It's a good business for the industry promoting these. A friend looked up the ingredients of some of these disinfectant sanitizers, same ingredients as pesticides. So how are you going to ensure that the places we go into are actually safe and not contaminated with all these chemicals in an effort to supposedly slow down the coronavirus, not even stop it. So all places should be free of toxic chemicals. And the question I have is with the voting centers, people who vote at polling places are used to going to certain neighborhood polling places. So the voting centers, where will they be located and how will people be informed? Because it seems to me they are not gonna be able to go to the local church or community center that used to vote. I'd like a response to that, please, thank you. So first of all, I guess for Monica's question about the postmark plus three, they're looking at expanding that. So we'll be working with the governor and the legislature secretary state's office on expanding that for voters and drop boxes. Yes, we're gonna get two more additional drive-up drop boxes, but then we're gonna have a number of staffed drop boxes too around the community where people can go up and drop off a ballot. Our city clerk's offices are one, and we're looking at other locations where we'll have somebody staffing a ballot drop box where people can come in and drop off their ballots. And your question was about voting centers. Oh, how do people know? Yeah, so that's where we're working with Jason Hoppin and we're gonna be doing a really great voter education campaign where we're gonna get the information out there. It's May, and we're already talking about this. So I'm hoping that we'll be able to really get the ball rolling and get a lot of people involved. You'll be getting your voter guide that will have a list of all the locations. Our website will have a list of all the locations. We may even do a separate mailing of just all the locations where people can go. So we're open to ideas on how to get the word out. We'll be using social media. We'll be using traditional media. We'll be using our website. And again, our county family and making sure that everyone's getting information out there about what's changed for November so voters are well informed. There was also a question about concerns about ballot harvesting and what... Okay, yeah, so for the nursing homes, it's our staff that goes in there to assist. So, and I think ballot harvesting becomes an issue when people don't have an easy way to return their ballot. But in California and with Santa Cruz, we're gonna have so many drop boxes. We're gonna have the voter service centers and we have postage paid on our ballot. So, and we were one of the first counties in the state to do that thanks to Ryan Coonerty, supervisor Coonerty. And so, you know, this is something that it's easy to return the ballot. So there really should be no reason for people to have to give it to somebody else to get it back to us. So people can take responsibility for their own ballots. And I... Oh yeah, and I'm calling it voting at home, voting from home versus voting in person. But, and we also will have a hotline that will be set up so we're gonna have a lot of people on a hotline to answer voter questions as well, leading up to the election. So probably that's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Okay. So thanks. I really like your idea of going into the rest homes, nursing homes and getting them involved. They get forgotten a lot of times. I have neighborhood meetings, probably twice a year in different rest homes. And they really appreciate that somebody is actually coming in there. They're, a lot of them are lost. And I think the only help that they're really allowed to get with the ballot is family members are, is that correct? Well, you know, a voter can ask anybody for assistance. They just can't ask their employer or union representative, but they can ask a friend. And when we help people vote, voting is not a test. You don't have to vote on every single issue. We'll let them know what their choices are. You can vote for one or leave it blank. And then we just vote the way the ballot, the way the voter tells us to. You bet. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Okay. Thank you. Chair, there was a question about what kind of action we're actually taking here given the executive order. And I think Mr. Heath was gonna answer it. The staff recommendation is for you to adopt the resolution. It sounds to me like the clerk has indicated that it's not necessary, that clerk Pellerin has indicated that it's not necessary to adopt the resolution. So at this point, you can either choose to follow the staff recommendation and take a roll call vote, or you could just accept it as a report and move to the next item. Okay. I guess we had a... I'm sorry, chair. Before you call for a vote or anything, we do have an email that comment that came in. Okay. Thanks. And if we have a first and second, then we'll have to vote. So go ahead. Yeah. Do we have a first and second? No, there's an email comment. There's a web comment that needs to be read. Okay. I'm sorry. I'll go ahead and go. This comes in from Stephanie Weingarden. This is a very big step and I would caution we don't move too quickly on such a large change without due process or further review. I question whether California can get it together in just a few short months when other states have spent years developing their vote by mail systems. Is our local government really prepared for this kind of initiative? I would like to see more open communication and less restriction. And that's the only web comment we have. Well, I appreciate the effort of our clerk of elections and I appreciate the leadership of our governor to help make this happen. So I would move to accept and file this report. Back in. I'll second. All right. We'll have a roll call vote. Okay. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Supervisor McPherson. Aye. All right. And Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. That'll take us over to item number. We're gonna do 8.1 remember. 8.1. I'm not sure if you have to read what is number 19 into the. Aye. Okay. Nice guy. Do you wanna read number 19 into the record? Okay, we'll do that. Do you wanna read it? You go ahead. Sure. Accept and file a quarterly report on the cannabis licensing office operations. Schedule a public hearing on June 2nd, 2020. 9 a.m. or thereafter to consider ordinances amending chapters 7.128 and 13.10 of the Santa Cruz County Code relating to cannabis licensing. Direct staff to return in August 2020 with the next quarterly and final annual report for the fiscal year 2019-20. And take related actions as recommended by the County Administrative Officer. I wanted to pull this item because it seems like this is a spring occurrence where we two years ago we adopted our really our first cultivation ordinance and a year later we came together and we found that we'd actually issued zero licenses and that was a cause of concern and we asked staff to take a look at this. We also gave a directive that we wanted to see 75 licenses even the number of people who were interested. And as I look at this report we fall far short of that. And I'm trying to get a sense of the planning changes that are gonna be happening on June 2nd whether that will help us get closer to where we wanna be. We, as we see in this crisis this industry was deemed essential and it could be one of the industries that are less COVID impacted than others. And so it seems to me that we have lots of different interests in making sure that we could actually follow through and get this done. And I'm trying to figure out what it is that we can do to actually be able to successfully process and reach our goal. So I think that we, the additional code updates that we will be presenting to the board on June 2nd will enable the licensing process to be significantly streamlined for our commercial agricultural operators which I believe was the original intention of the board based on review of past meetings. And we have gone to the planning commission with this item. They've reviewed the changes to the land use code. And as one of them said, they thought these changes were what they originally adopted in terms of streamlining the process for the commercial agricultural zone. So by viewing cannabis cultivation as an agricultural activity versus a commercial development, it streamlines the process significantly for our commercial agricultural operators. And that is where we have the highest interest in cultivation related activities in the county. When we look at all of the use permits, applications or people in routing, it's equivalent to 87 county licenses. And one of the keys to that 87 licenses is those licenses are different from what the county initially envisioned, which was one county license per every state license. And as the programs evolved, it's become clear that we don't need to issue separate licenses for every activity. We need to issue one license for an operator on a site. So multiple times we have one operator with the potential or with several state licenses. For instance, they'll have cultivation and distribution on the same parcel, which could be multiple cultivation licenses at the state level and a distribution license. So I think our original intention of 75 licenses and that one to one ratio, isn't necessarily the reality as the program has evolved. So the changes to streamline the commercial agricultural zone district will put many people to the front of the line in terms of being able to apply for a license without having to get a commercial development use permit as currently required. And it should boost our licensing numbers rather significantly in a fairly short amount of time. And as I previously stated, we have about 87 potential licenses that we foresee from people going down the use permit road. And there's a few additional for people who have not proceeded down the use permit path who have envisioned diversifying their commercial agricultural operations to include cannabis who now may enter the fray because the barriers to entry, the financial barriers will be lifted. Well, it's already been to the planning commission. So it's not on this agenda because why, I mean, why are we waiting until June 2nd, I guess? We, the planning commission materials were related to the land use code, which is chapter 1310. And then additional changes regarding 7.128 include a significant revision to our enforcement and administrative requirements. And those have taken a bit of time as they're very complex as we're wrapping everything from chapter one of county code and we're streamlining it to meet the needs of the cannabis licensing office, which there is a lot of legal back and forth that has to be carefully adopted and carefully processed. So it's taken a bit more time, but we wanna get it right. And I think we'll be positioned to have a better process that streamlines it for the administration of the office and the process as a whole. Cause if the office isn't bogged down on that side, we'll be able to proceed with the licensing faster and spend more of our resources in that direction. Yeah, well, I just wanna reiterate that I think this is something the board has, we've spent hours and hours on and it's something we're interested in doing and it'd be great if the staff took the same priority that we have in it to get it to us and get this done so we can get these businesses legalized, have licenses, get the tax revenue, which will be very important, especially over the next year or two. The other question I had was about the tax information that was included here. It seems as though it increasingly puts us at a disadvantage as I looked at that list, we seem to be on the high side of the taxes. And I'm just wondering what's going on out there in the world that we should be concerned about because I just think that as I look at these taxes, if I was trying to make an economic decision, there's real money that I would be leaving that I could be making someplace else that I wouldn't be making here because of our tax structure. I think one of the important things for the board to consider is the tax, the playing field for taxes in the state evolves fairly rapidly across different areas and is changing constantly. At this time, we included the tax information based on a request by Supervisor McPherson and we don't really have any recommendations or analysis that we've done in terms of taxes to provide the board solid information with where we stand relative to others. The tax information was provided for informational purposes for the board as the tax structure that we currently have in the county provides the board wiggle room to move the rates. But staff, unfortunately, does not have any recommendations or analysis to provide at this time. Would you be willing to make recommendations at a later date? I mean, I look at this and I see us, we're competitively disadvantaged in our businesses as compared to other jurisdictions. Why wouldn't I go to Monterey where I can pay half as much or even less? I think that moving forward, staff could provide the board a significant analysis of the tax code for the board's consideration to move in a direction that they feel appropriate. I have to defer to my supervisors in terms of recommendations, but I think analysis we can provide. I'd appreciate that analysis. I just, I look at this and I would be concerned if I was a local business person about the disadvantage that I had operating in Santa Cruz as compared to another jurisdiction. So I appreciate the work. I know this, it's a constantly changing landscape and the state merging their entities together. Hopefully we'll make things easier on that end too. But it's not a great way to support a growing new business category. Thanks. Okay. I'm not sure if there was any other questions. Any other questions from the board? Then I would move the recommended, oh, let's, we should take public comment. Okay. We have public comment on 8.1. I appreciate what you said, Mr. Leopold, because the questions are really horrendous for the 700 applicants. Anyone can read the Good Times articles. There was a wonderful series of articles over the last couple of years explaining that 700 growers believed in this county and applied for a license and then had the, I think it was $1,500 fee. I'm sorry, I don't recall exactly, but a substantial fee used to shut them down. They were rated as though they were doing something wrong, having let people know that they wanted an official license and they were shut down instead. And that's in the Good Times for anyone to go look up and read. I would really love to hear even stronger statements, Mr. Leopold, about the injustice that caused to so many small businesses who trusted. I think it's really important to bring up that there are medical conditions that people need marijuana for. And we have already sidelined 96% of our population by being fearful for the 4% who could die from this. That we are not seeing those numbers, but 96% of the population is not having their medical conditions addressed. So why are we not caring about that huge number of the population who doesn't have a way to have medical freedom and to address what's going wrong with them right now? The hospitals are empty, despite that people do have other medical needs. So again, a stat I wasn't able to ask for earlier fits in perfectly here. How many more people are dying unnecessarily by lack of medical care, not to mention the pain relief and medicinal qualities needed? Please continue to note what we are saying and start addressing all of these concerns. The law that is most important is do no harm. And harming such huge numbers of us to speciously continue ridiculously overkill measures to protect 0.1% to 4% of us is crazy. Please address this. How many times do we have to ask? Please answer our public questions. Thank you. Many people of course benefit from medical marijuana and I was also disturbed reading the good times articles how small growers of our medical marijuana are being thrown by the wayside where the large corporate growers benefit. And I was also thinking of when we hear of mental health issues related to everything, right? I think it's a lot related to wireless exposure making people ill, but many people will use medical marijuana. And I recently had a friend who was picked up by four sheriff deputies and taken to San Jose behavioral health and forcibly injected and given pharmaceutical drugs. And there was no option there for say other treatments or the choice of the person, you know, like imprisoned at the San Jose medical health like there was no at home. Many people have the legal number of plants and use medical marijuana. So the lack of options for people to access this plant of choice for their health is very disturbing. Thank you. I guess I would ask is the analysis I talked about is that possible by our June 2nd meeting or is that more likely during the later in June? We will work diligently to provide that at the June 2nd meeting for the board to consider. So I would be prepared to move the recommended actions with the addition that the CLO office report back to the board on June 2nd with an analysis about our tax structure comparatively with our surrounding communities. Chair, we do have a web comment. Is there a second? Are we trying to take a second or are we trying to take the web comment? I think we need a second first. So it's on the floor or unless you want to make your motion again after public comment. I'll second it just to continue the process. We're ready for the web comment. Okay, great. This is from Jim Coffes. Please direct staff to return with more information and a proposal to reduce the CBT tax rates prior to adoption of the budget. The current retail tax of the 7% has resulted in six consecutive quarters of no growth in revenues. At the same time, the traditional or illicit market is thriving. We believe that the lower tax rate will result in higher sales for legal retailers. Likewise, the high rates for cultivation and manufacturing are major contributors in a low number of local operators. Any anticipated growth in this sector will continue to be adversely affected as operators will choose to locate other jurisdictions with more favorable tax rates. So there is a motion on the floor. Maybe we should call the question. I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Supervisor Coonerty. Aye. Supervisor McPherson. We should go to smoke signals for him. Chair Kepit. Aye. Supervisor McPherson. Well, maybe we'll just call it a 4-0 with the Supervisor McPherson not voting. Okay, with passes. Aye. Thank you. Before the wire. All right. There we go. Unanimous vote. Okay, thank you. Passes unanimously. We go next to item number nine, public hearing to consider a resolution establishing 2020-2021 sewer service charges for county service area seven. Holder Creek adopted a resolution setting Tuesday, June the 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge report and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the Deputy CAO Director of Public Works. Good morning, Board members. Hi. I'm Kent Edler, Assistant Director of Public Works. So on March 10th, the board set today as the date of the public hearing to consider resolution that establishes the sewer service charges for the CSA seven, Holder Creek, which will become effective on July 1st, 2020. The sewer service charges are being proposed with an overall 4.5% increase. The increases due primarily to increased operations and maintenance costs, as well as to cover infrastructure improvements to the approximately 52 year old sewer treatment plants up in Boulder Creek. There are some recommended actions, which I will read. The first one is to conduct a public hearing to consider objections and protests to the proposed 2021, 2020-2021 sewer service charges for county service area seven, Boulder Creek. Upon conclusion of the public hearing, consider adopting resolution confirming sewer service charge rates. The third one, adopt resolution setting Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. Are there after as the date and time for a public hearing on this service charge report and direct the clerk of the board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week for two weeks prior to the hearing in a newspaper of general circulation. And I'm available for any questions. Why don't we open up the public comment? Any questions from the board? On the phone or in the chamber? Supervisor Caput, I think you, I'm sorry. I think you want to open the public hearing at this point. Okay. Okay. Okay. We'll have public hearing. We'll start with the public here in the chambers. Any comments, questions? Anyone in the community rooms? There are none. On the phone, done. Okay. Open it up to the board. Why don't you close the public hearing? We'll close the public hearing, okay. And I would move the recommended actions. Okay. We have a first from Leopold. Second. I think that was McPherson. We have a motion by Supervisor Leopold and a second by Supervisor Coonerty. Oh, okay. And I'll take a roll call vote. Sorry, Ron. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Chair Caput. Aye. Supervisor McPherson. Aye. Yay, all right. Thank you. Good job. Passes unanimously. We'll go on to item number 10. And public hearing to consider resolution establishing 2020 and 2021 sewer service charges. County service area 20, Tressel Bridge and top resolution setting Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge report and take related action as outlined in the memorandum of the Deputy CAO Director of Public Works. Good morning, Kent Edler again. Yeah. So on March 10th, the board set today as the date for the public hearing to consider resolution, which establishes the sewer service charges for CSA 20, Tressel Beach, which will become effective on July 1st, 2020. The sewer service charges are being proposed with an overall 45% increase. The increase is primarily due to increased operations and maintenance costs, as well to cover infrastructure improvements to the 40 year old treatment plants in Tressel Beach. Additionally, the costs to operate the treatment plant have exceeded the revenues from the CSA since 2013. So the fund balance has been declining over the years. There are 21 Tressel Beach parcels and some of the residents are understandably concerned about the larger increase. Public Works staff has communicated with and met with the CSA reps back in March of 2018, as well as November of 2019 to discuss the capital needs and the needs for the increased rates. We've also shared budget information with them. Last Friday, we met with a dozen or so folks online to discuss various options for them and to answer any questions that they have. In general, the folks that we spoke with did not want to increase. However, the board would need to hear from a simple majority so the board can take appropriate action. For Proposition 218, if a majority of the residents protest or object to the proposed increase, the board cannot increase the charges. For this CSA, it would be 11 residents. There are some recommended actions, which I'll read, but note that if there are a majority of residents who object to the rate increase, the board would not adopt the resolution in the second recommendation. So the recommendations are, conduct a public hearing to hear objections and protests to the proposed 2020-2021 sewer service charges for County Service Area 20, Trussell Beach. Upon conclusion of the public hearing, consider adopting resolution confirming sewer service charge rates. Adopt a resolution setting Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for public hearing on the sewer service charge report and direct the clerk of the board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week for two weeks prior to the board hearing and a newspaper of general circulation and unavailable for any questions. Any questions from the board? Yes, Mr. Chair, this is Supervisor Friend. I have a quick question for Mr. Edler. Thanks for the presentation. Thanks for your work on this. And I know that you've been working closely with our office on this issue, but just for the information for the rest of the board and for the community, can you explain a little bit about what those additional costs are, the delta between how much residents are been charged and how much the costs are and what options might be to the residents, what options could be other than the increase, if elected not to do the increase what sanitation would need to do in order to resolve that. So if we go back to 2013, I'll go over kind of what the revenues were and versus what the operating costs were. So in 2013, 2014, that budget, the service charge revenue was about almost $44,000, while the operating costs were about $55,000. 2014-15, about $45,000 in revenue, $51,000 approximately of expenditures. 2015-16, $46,000 in revenue, pretty close, about $46,500 in expenditures, 2016-17. Now it's muted. So I can communicate on this now, right? Have you done mute? Yeah. So then keep going. So 2016, 2017, there was about a $12,000 difference. 17-18, there was about, what's that, about $8,000 difference? The Supervisor McPherson, you may not know, but we can all hear you speak right now. And then this, in 2018-19, there was about a $1,000 difference between revenue and expenditures. Some of the, as I mentioned in the report, the sewer treatment plant is about 40 years old. It was installed in about 1980. So recently we've had to replace a failing digester wall on the treatment, on the treatment facility, as well as haul off some of the sludge as we were doing the work. There's additional repairs that need to be made as well. And Supervisor Friend, were there additional questions that you had that I missed? Oh, options. So the question was to your options. Yeah, so some of the options are, so if the residents vote this down, they can look to privatizing, rather than using the county, they're not married to the county to do this work, so they can look at hiring a private contractor to do this work. And I think they might need a little bit of time to do that and we're more than willing to work with them and hand over the keys to them. And if that's what they decide to do, if they also, if they vote this down, they could also elect to, if the privatization doesn't work, they could also give money to the CSA through their homeowner's association, which they would prefer. And I recognize we have until the public hearing for the end of the public hearing to the protest, but have we already reached the threshold in advance of the public hearing? I've only seen three written comments. I'd have to defer to the clerk of the board. The clerk of the board's received three low votes, but that's it. I guess my last question would be, what would be as far as the board having flexibility on this, meaning the board of supervisors, not the board of the HOA, what value would it be to move forward today with the rate increase, as opposed to giving them the opportunity at the HOA to just explore the option of the private service? So what the rate increase doesn't pass today, eventually in six to eight months, we're gonna run out of money to in order to do the operations and maintenance of the facility. So I don't know that that answers your question. Well, what I meant to, I suppose, ask is that if, it seems like there's an intermediary time in there that would give the opportunity for their board to both consider the movement into a private order, consider whether they wanna move on with the necessary rate increase. I don't question the rate increase, I recognize it's a lot, but this is actually reflective of a lot of issues we have throughout the county where we don't necessarily raise fees, even though costs go up significantly and then we hit this point where we end up having to do quite a step up in order to adjust for it. And I reckon you've been in your office has been very good at communicating with the board there the last couple of years in our office about the need for it. And I feel like overall, actually, it had seemed as though their board was supportive until very recently, or at least understanding until very recently. But I guess in that intermediary time, why would the board of supervisors move to enact this if we could give them a little bit more time to do the restoration as an HWA board then come back in, let's say, a month and a half or two months to consider it at the same time? Well, per Proposition 218, we can't, this is our chance to increase the service service charges. So if the board decides to not move forward with the rate increase, then it would be up to the homeowners association of Trestle Beach to make up the difference. But that could be done to give them time to work out the details. So either way, there would be an increase coming their way. It's just a question of which way it's done through the sanitation world or through their own HWA to pay back to the CSA? Correct, unless they find it's cheaper to do it privately. And so just for the edification of the board, why is that considered not preferable for us to give that opportunity then in the intermediate time? I guess it would be, well, the rates on the CSA for Prop 218, those are put on the property taxes. So those are guaranteed once those are adopted. So we get those. It's a little bit harder to get the money. I guess the homeowners association would have to vote and all be in agreement that they want to essentially fund the CSA. So it makes the process a bit easier. If the rates are adopted, it's more of a guarantee that they'll continue to have service and funding for the operations and maintenance. So then following on that, if the board voted to do the increase, they would still have the ability to decouple themselves from our system anyway, even with the increase, correct? I don't have any other questions. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. We'll start with- Probably want to open the public hearing. Yeah. We'll open it up for the public hearing. First those in the chamber. Go ahead. So I'm Dan Adler, a member of Trestle Beach or whatever it is, CSA 20. What we'd like to do is figure out if there was a way to have some increases, but over a stepped period of time, I think decoupling from the sewer system is not preferable. I mean, if we have to go out and look at other choices, but we're completely satisfied with the services it provided, it's just a substantial increase in fees over such a short period of time. We understand there's maintenance needs to be done, so there's certainly a capital budget, but there's also significant operating costs that are increasing as well. And it seems to be, and we've worked with Supervisor Friend and others to try and figure out how it is, how to get it set up, but it's just a substantial increase in the fees. So we'd like to see if there's a different way to do this over a period of time without trying to decouple from the county services. Any questions? Monica McGuire, I live in a county service area myself and have, as we know, most of the people in this county do. So this is quite alarming that something like this could be a time bomb dropped on people. I was really curious about the numbers going through the list of a difference of a few thousand per year, and then suddenly in 2017, because Mr. McPherson didn't know he wasn't muted, you suddenly jumped and said there was a $12,000 difference as opposed to giving us the actual amounts of the revenues and operations costs. And I would really like to know what that difference was because that's a much more significant difference than the others right around it. The operations costs looked like they were lowering. And also I would love to hear as a member of the public what's being done to work with the HOA members in order to give them the benefit of what has been brought up here that it's a really good idea to be able to still couple with the county and feel something. So I would really like to hear all of that for the benefit of everyone else in the county, please. It's interesting talking about finances and budgets and taxes when people are losing their livelihoods and bankruptcy is on the horizon for people and governments, I just don't see with this economic structure and the way supposedly to save lives, you have forced people to lose their livelihoods, which down the line will cause disaster. I just, it seems like a disconnect fairy land discussion of like taxes are gonna be normal. I think we're gonna see real huge numbers of homeless people, people desperate. It's very scary and the policies you've instituted that instituted are making matters worse. Who can pay taxes? Are you gonna put people in jail? You have more jail space like debtor's prison. It's very disturbing what's going on. Thank you. Any other comments outside the chamber? All right, we have one more here. Thank you. Mary Sam's Wiley on your sewer system, service charges and everything else. My concerns, there's many people who have outdated old systems leaching, leaking into the area. Drive, driving down Buena Vista. I do see soapy water, everything else running down the hill from certain homes. I don't know if they bypass their septic systems or not to overrun their own and contaminate the waters of Larkin Valley Creek and all of those sorts. So I've mentioned it to the boys in green for the wildlife and such, but they cannot find which house is doing this offensive stuff. But it's important for people to be honorable and check their septic tanks or install or upgrade or everything else. Up in the valley on a rainy day, people will just open up their lines and drain directly into the creek and let it flush out. So that is a better place to put your investigative reporting to find out who these people are, try and find them by putting dies or markers in it to try and test the waters later. And Coralitas on Browns Valley Road, there's a septic tank that's some of, you can see some of the planks on the hillside off the road and such. So none of these have been upgraded or brought to current standards. And that would be a better place to help us, everyone else in the county to maintain clear water for the fish and birds and wildlife and everything else. Any questions? Any email comments? There are no email comments, no web comments for this item. So we could probably close the public hearing. Okay. Close the other comments, questions? Okay, we'll close the public hearing. We have a first or bring it back to the board for action. Mr. Chair, this is Zach again. I do have an additional question, Mr. Edler. One last question, there was the question was raised regarding doing a tiered structure. You had said that there's a six to eight month lead time before it's an underwater situation. So what is the annotation thoughts on doing a two year increase, for example, or what are the disadvantages to that? What are the challenges with that? The disadvantage is that the sewer service charges, the increase is the bare minimum to maintain for this year. So if we were to keep maintaining for the remainder of the year, we would not, we would eventually run out of money for this year and not be able to maintain their system. So that's the real driver. When we set rates, they have to be set to the amounts that it takes to operate and run the system. I mean, am I correct in that under 218 to your last point, we actually have a legal obligation to set the rates to the system. We couldn't in essence subsidize one system by rate payers of other systems. That's absolutely correct. Okay, I'll be prepared to, assuming that we, to this point, have only received the three that the board had been notified of and we have not reached the 11 threshold. I assume that's correct still, Ms. Galway. Yes, that's correct. Okay, then I will move the recommended action. Second. We have a first and second. I will call for the vote. Excuse me, just if I may, Supervisor McPherson, you will need to unmute your mic. And I'll go ahead and do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Coonerty. Aye. Supervisor McPherson. Aye. Chair Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. That'll take us to item number 11, which is the Board of Directors of the Davenport County Sanitation District. Let's see, hold on. We'll just keep going. Should we take a little break or no? What do you think, Jeff? We're fine to keep going if you'd like to. Yes. Or maybe take it five, 10 minutes. Okay. Okay. We're on item number 11, the Board of Directors of the Davenport County Sanitation District Public Hearing. Consider ordinance amending title three of the district code establishing 2021, 2020 to 2021 water service charges and ordinance amending title four of the district code establishing 2020 to 2021 sewer service charges for the Davenport County Sanitation District. Schedule the ordinance for final adoption on May the 19th, 2020, set Tuesday, June the 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing of the service charge reports and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the district engineer. Okay, thank you. Good morning. Kent Edler again, assistant district engineer for the Davenport County Sanitation District. So on March 24th, the board set today as the date of the public hearing to consider an ordinance that which establishes the sewer and water service charges for the Davenport County Sanitation District that will become effective on July 1st, 2020. The sewer service charges are being proposed with an overall 4.7% increase. This increase is primarily due to the increased operations and maintenance due to inflation and the costs for such things as chemicals, electricity and personnel which are associated with running the recycled water portion of the treatment plan. The water service charges are being proposed with a overall 0.4% increase, which is primarily due to increased costs due to inflation. There are some recommended actions, which I will read. They are to hold the public hearing and upon its conclusion, consider approval and concept of ordinances amending district code title three, chapter 3.08, article three, section 3.08.160 through 3.08, 180 article three for water service charges. And district code title four, chapter 4.08, article three, section 4.08, 160, 4.08, 180 for sewer service charges for the Davenport County Sanitation District. Number two, direct the clerk of the board to place the attached ordinances on the next available agenda for final adoption. Set Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge reports. And finally direct the clerk of the board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week for two weeks before the hearing in the newspaper of general circulation and time available for questions. Questions from the board? Questions from the board? No. Anybody on the phone? The public. We'll open up the public hearing. It's not a public, this one's not a public hearing. This one is. It is a public hearing? It is. Apologize. That's okay. We'll open up for public hearing. Any comments from the public? Either here on the chambers below or on the phone. There's nobody in the community room and we have no emails. No one in the community room. Okay. We'll close the public hearing. Do we, I'll bring you back to the board for action. Move the recommended actions. Second. Yes, sir. We have a motion by Leopold, second by Coonerty and I'll do the roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Coonerty. Aye. Supervisor McPherson. Aye. Chairperson Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. Okay. Let me get that last public hearing in at least. Just, I don't know if you want to move on to item 12 from be quick or if you want to take a break. And I'm here for 12. Don't we do this one and we can take a break after that before the budget and finish this one and then take a break after this one. Do it right now. Yeah. Okay, that'll be fine. As the board of directors, item number 12 of the Freedom County and sanitation district public hearing consider the ordinance of ending title three of the district code establishing 2020 to 2021 sewer service charges for the Freedom County Sanitation District schedule the ordinance for final adoption on May the 19th, 2020, set Tuesday, June the 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge reports and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the district engineer. Thank you. Good morning again. Kent Edler assistant district engineer for the Freedom County Sanitation District. So March 10th, the board set today is the date for the public hearing to consider an ordinance which establishes the sewer service charges for the Freedom County Sanitation District which becomes effective on July 1st, 2020. The sewer service charges are being proposed with an overall 8.3% increase with an individual maximum of 12.6%. The increase is necessary to adequately fund maintenance and operations as well as capital improvements for the district. The recommended actions are to hold the public hearing and upon its conclusion, consider approval and concept of the attached ordinance amending district code title three, chapter 3.08, article three, section 3.08, establishing 2020, 2021 sewer service charges for the Freedom County Sanitation District service charges. Number two, direct the clerk of the board to place the attached ordinance on the available agenda for on the next available agenda for final adoption. Three set Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 9 a.m. or thereafter as the date and time for a public hearing on the service charge reports and direct the clerk of the board to publish the notice of public hearing once a week for two weeks before the hearing in a newspaper of general circulation. And again, I'm available for any questions. Okay, thank you. I'll open it up the board for questions. Here any? Okay. Open it up the public hearing. We have any comments here in the chambers or down below or on the phone? No one in the community room. Okay. I don't see any. Don't hear any. Okay. Bring it back to the board for action. You have to close the public hearing. Well, I'm sorry, close the public hearing. I would move the recommended actions. Okay. Second. Second. We have a first and second. Please call the roll. Roll call. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chairman Caput. Aye. Passes unanimously. We'll take about, what, a 10, 11 minute break and we'll come right back. Aye. Aye. Some of the supervisors ready in different places? Supervisors? Okay. Good. Okay, that's all right. We'll wait another minute. He's coming. Mayor. Here too. And we have a quorum. We have everybody, I guess. Okay. We'll open it up. Number 13, consider the 2020-2021 County proposed budget to be considered during budget hearings except the tentative budget hearing schedule. Set a public hearing on June the 16th, 2020. Thank you. That's the date. The budget hearings will begin and take related action as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Mr. Palacios, thank you. Thank you, Chair Caput and members of the board. I am Carlos Palacios, the County Administrative Officer. The documents before you today include the CAO's proposed budget, which includes the accounting line item detail. In addition, the unified fee schedule and the continuing agreements list, which will be provided on June 16th. All of the documents are posted on the County of Santa Cruz website and on the online interactive tool, sccbudget.com, which is updated for the 2021 recommended amounts. This is the outline of today's presentation. I'll be making the opening remarks along with our budget hearing schedule and then the County Budget Officer, Christina Maori, will be going over the 2021 recommended budget overview, the COVID-19 impacts, and then I'll be closing up with the challenges, solutions and opportunities. So I'd like to start my presentation, which actually is with some good news. And the good news is that the Board of Supervisors has prepared us for this crisis by exercising very, very good fiscal stewardship. Over the past years, we have tripled our reserves and met the Board's goal of 10% revenues. It's hard to remember, but back in 2008, when we hit the Great Recession, we only had $10 million of reserves. And now the County enters this new crisis with $56 million of reserve and more than triple of what we had before. And so you've also improved our credit rating. If you remember that before this recession, we actually got to a AAA rated bond rating. Again, due to our Board's very, very careful stewardship, the Board also reduced our pension obligations. If you remember way back, the Board actually implemented a second tier in our retirement system. That is before the state did their retirement reform. And the Board also implemented a vesting schedule for our retiree health benefits as well. And this is all in partnership with our labor partners. We also have reduced our structural imbalance to approximately 1% of expenditures. The Board has controlled employee growth. Even today, before this current emergency, our workforce is still below the pre-recession levels that we had in 2008. In 2008, we had almost 2,600 positions. And even today with expanded services, we still have less positions, about 2,400, 666 positions. So even with expanded services, we still are below our staffing levels that we were in 2008 when we hit the great recession. We have also started to tackle some of our deferred maintenance issues with improvements at the 701 Ocean Building, which included our new solar installations, also at Amaline campus. As well as the expansion in our health clinics. As you remember, we just recently had a ribbon cutting at our new behavioral health building in Watsonville. We've also upgraded our health clinics as well. As I mentioned, the Board has augmented services in the years since the great recession until now. Just to mention a few, although I'm sure many more are familiar to the Board, some of these programs are still in place to the Board. Some of these programs included a nurse family partnership, drive by three, the whole person care. And most importantly, the Medi-Cal drug expansion program that we have been implementing over the last few years. We've also expanded our community health programs. We have responded to the needs of an individual suffering from homelessness by expanding our shelter and working to alleviate homelessness among our youth. We've also provided much more services to those experiencing either behavioral health or homelessness with programs such as our hopes program and most program. We've made significant investments in our public safety with new facilities at Roundtree. Remember just a year ago, we had that ribbon cutting on that great new facility and reentry services. Also we've done improvements at Blaine Street. We also implemented a sobering center. All of these designed to reduce recidivism and transition offenders back into our community in a positive way. So at the same time that we've been recovering from the great recession, we've also been very fiscally prudent and also augmented our services while remaining today with less employees than we had in 2008. I'd like to now get to some of the challenges we face. We're proud of our successes and they represent significant investments in our people and our community. And our work on the strategic plan is still something that we should be very proud of and continue in the years ahead. The strategic plan, you'll remember we adopted in 2018 after a year of community outreach and work. This is a six year planning effort. It includes six focus areas and 24 overarching county goals. In 2019, we adopted the operational plan, which is how we are implementing with concrete programs and goals, our strategic plan. This includes smart goals, which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. And in 2020, we had started work before the crisis hit on our performance measurement program. Unfortunately, that's had to be put on hold to some extent because of the crisis we're under. We also, this year should be very proud of our work on Primo, which is our continuous process improvement. In our community work and in our strategic plan, we noted that we still have more work to do with our community health programs, our park system and deferred maintenance, especially of critical importance as our aging infrastructure, including our roads, storm drains and bridges. As we plan for the future, we hope you will consider opportunities to meet these needs for by examining all of our options from fiscal prudency to opportunities to additional revenues to be invested back in the community in the years they had. This is the budget hearing schedule. You'll note that the 2021 budget, which is what we presented to the board today, has largely been outdated because of the crisis. Therefore, we are recommending an abbreviated board hearing schedule on June 22nd and 23rd, cut down from four days. And we're recommending that these hearings focus on the strategic plan and our operational objectives by department. So the budget itself, because of the crisis, is more of a pro forma budget, which we will ask the board to adopt on June 30th. We will then come back to the board with revisions to the 2021 budget on August 10th through 13th. And we're recommending those be budget hearing days. It's four days of budget hearings. By then we will have more information on how our revenues are doing. Right now there's no data. There's lots of educated guesses, but the data is still on how the crisis has impacted our main revenue sources is still not clear. We know it's not good. We just don't know how bad it is. But by that time, we'll also have information about any potential federal and state aid as well. After those budget hearings, we had asked the board to adopt that revised budget on August 18th. The final adopted budget will be adopted by the board in September 15th. I'd now like to turn it over to our county budget manager, Christina Mallory, who will go over the 2021 budget overview and then get into our first look at the budget with the public health crisis that we are currently facing. Thank you, Carlos. Good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board. Christina Mallory, your county budget manager. I'm gonna give you a brief overview, as Carlos said, of the proposed budget that's before you. And just bear in mind that this was the pro forma budget. This is what we prepared before the pandemic. And then I'll get into sort of our preliminary estimates of the impact from COVID-19. So next slide. So here you'll see just an all funds overview by category of the 2021 budget. I'm sorry, I'm getting some interference. Okay, thank you. So this is primarily a status quo, as Carlos said. The expenditures are about $878.7 million, primarily financed by revenues of 826 million and 52 million in fund balance from various funding sources. The budget was balanced by increases to some fees and charges to offset the increased costs where applicable and increases in tax revenue primarily from our property tax growth and use of fund balance where applicable. You can see here that the largest share of the budget is health and human services at about 41% and followed by land use and community services of 26%. On the next slide, you'll see the County 2021 proposed budget. Next slide. And here you'll see the recommendation shows an increase overall and expenditures of about 107 million, primarily from an increase of about just under 18 million for the general fund. And that's primarily to just maintain operations. There was growth there of about just under 3%. And an increase of about 89.7 million for all other funds primarily from the re-budgeting of incomplete projects within the road fund, housing fund and other capital projects. Those are funded from special revenue sources and or grants. Our staffing overall reflects an increase of just under 11 funded positions. So fairly status quo. Next slide, you'll see here the overview of our County staffing. The chart shows you the proposed funded positions by budget category. The details by department and classification are provided in the budget under the personnel summary in the appendix. So this shows an increase overall, like I said, of about just under 11 positions from the two year projection provided last year. But it's important to note that this reflects 13 positions that your board added during budget hearings last year for 1920. It also reflects the addition of eight positions your board added this year during the mid-year from increased funding from various grants. And overall, when you look at the increases being recommended it reflects a decrease of almost 11 positions. Those are primarily within the general fund departments. They reduce their budgets to live within the financial constraints even prior to COVID-19. We'd asked the departments for reductions of anywhere from two and a half percent to 12 and a half percent. So you can see here that health and human services is again represents almost 50% of our staffing. Next slide. So here you'll see a breakdown of the general fund contribution by category. The general fund contribution is the County's most discretionary funding comes from our general County revenues. We also call this our net County cost and it's the matching funds for the various departments. This represents about a $4.2 million decrease over the original projection provided last year. The decrease was originally projected at a shortfall of seven and a half million. You may recall that number. We were happy to report that due to some increased revenue growth primarily from property taxes that was reduced by the 3.3 million in revenue growth. So we only had to make reductions of about 4.2 million. And there you can see in the chart the comparisons and it shows overall that there were reductions in each of the budget categories from public safety to land use anywhere from 1% to 10%. And then we had some minor increases due to some losses in revenue on the debt service budget and a minor increase in contingencies. Otherwise there's reductions across the board. On the next slide, you'll see our primary revenue assumptions that we relied on before the pandemic occurred. So we are seeing declines in our property tax revenue growth but we're still seeing moderate growth. So originally we were seeing six and 5% growth annually and now it's declining down. We're still seeing good growth of 4%. We expect that also to continue. Cannabis business tax, we're seeing about 5% growth. Sales tax is fairly flat in the unincorporated area with about 1% growth and transient occupancy tax is about 5%. Now these four primary taxes make up about 89% of the county's discretionary revenues that are included in the general fund. Okay, so on the next slide, I just wanna remind the board that even before the pandemic occurred, we were anticipating deficits out into the future. We felt these deficits would be caused by some of the rising costs that we know to be occurring in the future related to health, retirement, just sort of status quo operational increases. And we knew that our revenues would be declining as we approach the next recession which is apparently now here. But we expected to be able to meet those obligations and preserve our reserves because we felt these deficits were manageable anywhere from three to four to five, six, seven million. And now, and here we wanna just note that we knew that was gonna even be difficult and challenging during that time. So now I think I wanna go to the next slide. So we wanna give you sort of very preliminarily sort of our estimates at this time. There's new information every day that we're receiving and we'll be fine tuning these estimates and providing your board an update in June at the beginning of budget hearings or if we receive any new information prior to then. We are expecting the state to release the May revise this week, but preliminarily we don't expect a lot of new information until later. So, I won't go into a lot of details here but we did have a few slides. I know the health director gave you an update this morning but if you go to the next slide just as a reminder of what occurred on March 4th California declared a state of emergency related to the health pandemic outbreak. March 13th, the president declared a national emergency. March 16th, the county health officer issued a shelter in place order which was later extended until further notice. And March 19th, California issued a stay at home order which has been extended until further notice. And then on the next slide, you've seen this slide earlier this morning. I won't spend a lot of time on it. The health director reported that we are in the early stages of stage two. So this is the state's resiliency roadmap and it shows us the various stages that we'll be progressing through and our health officer will be guiding us through that. On the next slide, just as a reminder, we have our county response to the pandemic, save lives, Santa Cruz County. You know, we're phase one, we're slowing the spread. Phase two, we're adapting to a new normal. Phase three, we'll vaccinate and phase four, we'll elevate our readiness. You know, so further business reopenings depend on meeting specific readiness criteria defined by the state, including measures of a community's ability to withstand and inhibit the spread of COVID-19. So we just, we're proud of our partnership with the county and the community foundation and created the Save Lives Santa Cruz County Initiative. So they're working hard to increase our local capacity for testing, contract tracing, quarantine and isolation services, which are essential to reopening our workplaces and our community services and schools until the vaccine is widely available. And this is really important as we moved into the next slide because until we can reopen, we're anticipating losses in our revenues and that's how we arrive at believing we will be facing up to a $20 million deficit in 2019-20 this fiscal year. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about those revenues and what they involve, but here you can see in this chart just a brief overview of our financing for the general fund. So we are anticipating in our general purpose revenues will decline roughly just under $8 million based on our preliminary estimates and the information that's available to us now. Those include everything from reductions in our sales tax, reductions in our transient occupancy tax and our deed transfer tax, interest revenue. So we're seeing some of those declines already a little preliminary data has been in for the first couple of months and our projections are right within that ballpark so far, but we believe May and June data will be more telling. So our total financing is reduced by almost the 7.7 million preliminarily. The department net cost before reserves, you'll see a $12.3 million shift there and that has to do with the loss of revenue in the department budgets. So some of our departments we estimate we'll see a decline in their revenues. We know park and recreation is in offering the same services that they plan to offer due to the pandemic. We know that some of our state revenues that are sales tax based will potentially be reduced this year. That includes proposition 172 public safety revenues, AB 109 and realignment revenues. And we do anticipate our construction and permit revenue to decline and some other charges for services county wide. So between the 12.3 million and the 7.7 million, that's about $20 million revenue loss that we're anticipating. We are monitoring that carefully. And as a result of the emergency, we did issue an immediate hiring and spending freeze with the departments so that we could save as much as possible and reduce that 20 million down to something more manageable. But as Carlos said, we've been very fortunate. The last few years we've increased our reserves greatly. And so we're in a much better position to face that kind of a deficit this year than we've ever been. And so we anticipate worst case that we would have to use some of those reserves to cover the deficit this year. We planned in the budget this year to put $6 million into reserves. And your board adopted that as part of the adopted budget. So one of the first things we would do is probably recommend and we'll have more information in June that we cancel that increase to reserves. And that would leave us if we still have a $20 million deficit with about a $14 million problem. So at most we would take another $14 million out of the reserves up to the 20 million in total. So if we go on to the next slide, here we'll give you a sort of a preliminary look of what some of our thinking is and how we came up with our estimates. These are some of the primary revenues heavily impacted by the shelter in place order. So we've provided here sort of the estimates we used in our revenue assumptions for this year and next year. We mentioned sales tax already. We estimated losing up to a full quarter but we knew we would still receive some sales tax revenue from our online sales. And we're seeing so far about a 50% reduction in our receipts for March and April and we hope that we'll still see some decline in May and June. But overall, when you look at the annual amount, we're looking at about a 20% reduction in sales tax revenue. And the following year we estimate if it's a quarter or if it's a 50%, six months, it could be up to 25%. Transit occupancy tax is in a similar situation with the shelter in place order. We're not having our hotels and motels being used. And so we estimate about a 20% reduction this year. What we're seeing so far preliminary is that might be a little low, it could be a little higher. And we estimated up to 45% the following year, recognizing that it will take some time before some of those businesses can fully resume business. Other revenues include interest, detransfer tax, cannabis business tax. The interest revenue is probably the biggest one that's suffering right now decline. So we estimate anywhere from a 20% this year and a 25% next year in the total amount being received for all those other revenues. Proposition 172 may do a little better than this. Actually, the state had estimated roughly anywhere from 10 to 15%. So we're kind of right in the ballpark there at 12%. We haven't quite seen that reduction yet, but our biggest months are coming May and June and there's a bit of a lag. Realignment revenue and AB 109 revenue, very similar to Proposition 172 coming from the state. And then finally our charges for services and permit fee losses are expected up to anywhere from 20 to 25%. So then you'll see on the next slide, we talked a little bit about reserves and we just wanna give you some perspective on our reserves and you can see the growth in our reserves over the last 10 years that we've, they've tripled in size, as Carlos has said. And this final estimate here in the final column there for 2021 shows that if we have to take up to $20 million out of our reserves to solve the problem, this year's problem, it would still leave us in better shape than we were in back in 13, 14 and still leave us with a sizable amount of reserves. However, it's important to note that if we take $20 million out of our reserves, we'll have reduced our reserves by just about a third and that's a considerable amount. On the next slide, this will give you a perspective. We spoke about the different types of revenue losses that we're anticipating. This gives you a summary here for the general fund deficit anticipated for next fiscal year 2021. Here you can see overall the financing. So one of the things that is happening is that typically we save money each budget year and that's money that we carry forward as part of our financing. So in the event we have the losses we have in this current year, 1920, we won't have that carryover fund balance. So that's the first part of our deficit, the four and a half million that we were planning to carry over. In addition, we'll have those general purpose revenues will be reduced. We estimate up to 13 million for next fiscal year. So that gets us to a problem of about 17 and a half million and then we have our department revenues will be reduced as well over the course of next year and that we're estimating at about 23 million. So when you add the two together, you get to about a 40 and a half million dollar problem. And I have to say, it's very difficult to predict these revenue losses right now and they're completely dependent on our economic recovery. We know that it's negative, the pandemic's negatively affected travel, commerce and it's affected globally. And so it's widely expected to continue and negatively affect the economic output within the county. So the other thing that's not modeled here, we talk about the revenue losses is that we have increased costs related to the emergency. We have some money in our contingencies this year and next year that we're counting on to use as the county's match for the emergency, but it's really too early to tell how much of that will be needed. We know that FEMA will be there to help support us and provide 75% of our emergency costs for those eligible costs. So we're hoping our county impact for the emergency costs will be minor compared to the revenue loss that we'll be facing. So the other thing I wanna say about the revenue estimates is that this is based on a U-shaped recovery. There's a lot of discussion about, there's some economists saying it's a V-shaped recovery, we'll bounce right back and then these estimates are based on a U-shaped recovery. The legislative office has just issued a report on Friday and they're modeling also an L-shaped recovery, which means it takes us a while to recover. And so that will be something we'll have to take a look at and present to your board in June. We haven't modeled that quite yet and hopefully we'll have more data. So on the next slide. So the one thing that's hard is we do wanna look at various deficit scenarios. So the scenario we're initially modeling for you is sort of what we call plan A. It's where we have no relief. It models our general revenue losses, our department revenue losses, and it doesn't show any relief from the state or the federal government. And it's important to note, so that's where we get to our 36 million. Plan B shows some relief. So if our revenue estimates are a little better or if we get some relief from the state, then our deficit may only be about 30 million dollars. And plan C is sort of our best scenario right now where we would get some stimulus funding. As a small county, we haven't been authorized any stimulus funding and we believe some money will be coming, but as of yet, nothing's been approved. But in this scenario, if we say we received 24 million in stimulus funding and we wanted to spread that over the two-year sort of recovery period of revenues, we would use about 12 million of it in the first year. And then we would have about a $24 million problem. Important to note that when we talk, and you've heard Carlos say that this is twice as bad, the revenue losses are twice as bad as the Great Recession. And that's true. When we were facing initially the Great Recession, we were looking at a deficit of about $25 million. And that, so if we could get some stimulus funding and when we could be looking maybe at plan C, if our revenue estimates are right on, then we'd be facing a similar deficit of the Great Recession. But right now, we just don't know. And so until we receive additional information, these are sort of our deficit scenarios for you. And we hope to have more information by June and give you an update. So I'd like to turn it back over to Carlos and he's gonna discuss our challenges, solutions and opportunities. Thank you. The challenges we faced before this pandemic will still be with us. And now we have new ones in addition. The housing shortage that we faced as a community, as a state, as a region, will still be one of our biggest challenges. And of course, this pandemic will likely make it worse. We also face rising costs related to health insurance. There's a lot of people predicting that the COVID-19 pandemic will cause great increases in health insurance costs. We don't know yet, but we certainly, that's what a number of healthcare experts believe. So we're bracing for that. We also know that our retirement costs, we're already going up and are likely to increase even further because of PERS's loss and losses that they severed in the stock market. Property tax impacts will, there will likely be some slowdown, continued slowdown in valuation growth. We expect that in 21-22, which is the out-ear, out-budget year. And then we have various deferred maintenance issues. This has to do with our drainage culverts, bridges, road infrastructures, and our buildings. So we will continue to have those challenges and try and find solutions to those long-term maintenance issues. And then our biggest unknown is what relief will we get from the state and federal government? It's critical that we receive aid from the federal and state government. We have the possibility before us of being in a truly horrendous budget situation if we do not receive any aid, in which services to the public will be greatly impacted, in which we would lose many of our staff. And on the other hand, if we receive state and federal aid, it could be alleviated greatly. The state itself is in big budget problems. As you know, they've 40 announced that they're facing combined this year and next year, a $52 billion deficit. It's highest 30 to $40 billion next year. Their rainy day fund is $18 billion. So their ability to help us relates greatly to their receiving federal aid. The way that we relate to the federal government is particular through 1991 and 2011 re-alignment funds, which helps support many of our behavioral health programs, our criminal justice programs, as well as our safety net programs. So those are all big questions that we will find out, I imagine, over the next few months. So in the Great Recession, so this was in 2008, 2009 and it went all the way through, basically through 2014. The recession itself was in 2009. The county in those days implemented reductions of 10 to 20% in net county costs for many multiple years of their departments. And the county also got concessions with bargaining units of up to 7.5%. This included furloughs. And the county also used some trust funds. As we mentioned earlier, this situation that we are facing right now is actually twice as bad as the Great Recession. We are facing very difficult situation ahead of us. As we mentioned, it could be as high as $40 million next year, which is 23% of net county cost. 20, that's hard to imagine a almost a quarter deficit. It's something I've never seen in my 30 years of government service. So we definitely will be asking our employees to help with some concessions such as furloughs. And then we will also be in the cut mode. The current year, as we mentioned is $20 million, which we are going recommending to the board to use our reserves, which is that's what they're here for. We have about $56 million in reserve. We're recommending about 20 million be used for to get through this fiscal year. And then next year we have a potentially somewhere between $24 million to $40 million deficit. Reductions of up to 20% of net county costs for departments. And again, here's the solutions that we had mentioned previously. The opportunities are to continue to leverage grants and public-private partnerships. We're doing that right now with the Community Foundation and the Great Public-Private Partnership where we are helping to fund our save live Santa Cruz County effort. Also hoping for various state and federal grants. Our community safety net partnerships with our nonprofit partners are critical to county services and how we can continue to serve our nonprofit partners at a time when we ourselves are in a very critical financial state is gonna be very difficult, but we're gonna have to try and figure out how to do it. We also have had to greatly expand our telework, teleconferencing, remote work through our employees as most of our employees continue to work from home. But we're gonna have to lean into that in the year ahead and the years ahead. I think it's a permanent change that has come upon our society. And there's many things that could be gained from that. We know that telecommuting, video conferencing, all have benefits from increasing, improving our climate change goals, reducing global warming, improving morale, reducing commutes. There's lots of benefits. There's lots of challenges with it too, but I think that's something we will need to really lean into. And then we will be looking for various other one-time solutions to help us through this crisis. So in summary, that concludes our presentation. We're asking that you accept the 2021 proposed budget, which our staff put a great deal of work into. Unfortunately, because of the crisis, it's mainly a pro forma budget at this point. We recommend that the board direct us to use reserves to solve the 1920 deficit, which we estimate to be about $20 million at this point. We are, have plans for the deficits anticipated in 2021, which include the various solutions that I proposed in the previous slide, including having to potential plan for cuts to our departments, as well as asking for concessions from our labor partners. And then we have also recommend additional direction for special board meetings, August 10th, 11th, 12 and 13, to hold budget hearings and then have the board recommend that the board adopt the revised budget on August 18th, and then come back in September for the final adopted budget. So that concludes our presentation. We'd be happy to take any questions or hear any comments from the board. Well, I just wanted to say a few things. Thank you for the presentation, both Mr. Palacios and Ms. Mowry. It's sobering to look at this information and realize the difficult choices that we're gonna be making in the coming weeks and months. And the need for us to work together with our other legislative partners at the state and federal level to be able to get resources to help us through. The county is a large employer in Santa Cruz County. And so what happens to the county happens to lots of workers. And that is one of the things that makes a big difference when the house and Senate consider federal relief money. I understand this morning, the house introduced a bill that would include a trillion dollars for a local government, state and local government. I think it's about 350 or 355 for a local government and over 500 billion for state government and then some tribal government money. And I'm glad we took the effort coming out of the great recession to build up our reserves. Reserves don't make problems go away. They only provide some stabilizers and cushions when things get bad. And obviously no one would have anticipated 10 years after the great recession that we'd be in a worse economic shape, not through the fault of ours, but through the impact of this pandemic. I appreciate all the work that the staff put in to put it together this budget, which we will review and then work on another budget soon thereafter. I think this schedule makes sense. And I think we're gonna have to watch very closely what happens in Washington, DC to know what level of cuts we're gonna have to make in here in Santa Cruz County, but also throughout the country because local government is a major employer in lots of places. And I hope that there's wisdom and consideration for everybody in the country, not just people in particular states or particular professions, but for all of us because it's gonna take coming together to help us through this very difficult economic period. Thank you for the presentation. Maybe we wanna see if anybody else on the board wants to make any comments. Maybe you wanna ask the public if they have any comments. This Supervisor McPherson, sorry, I have a few issues here, but I wanna thank the CAO and especially Christina Mowry in the office for the team effort and all the departments for their work and for getting to this preliminary response. We are certainly in some uncharted territory. And I think presenting the budget as a placeholder in June for two days and then giving the final okay in August is well thought out, makes a lot of sense. I just wanna make sure that we're looking at the options to reduce our cost to recover the revenue. Certainly our personnel expenses that come out of the general fund in the county provide us with the greatest flexibility. But I wanna make sure that even though all of us will be part of the solution in county government, we can't ask our employees to close the gap on their own. And I hope we, and I think we will be looking at the need to look at operational changes that would improve efficiencies and cut costs. And was stated with our reduction in employees over the years, since our great recession and offering more services. That was a huge effort then. And I hope we can repeat that in some degree as we move ahead when we discuss this in June and certainly in August. And I just wanna thank everyone who's been working in these difficult times to keep the county services available to the community, especially when it becomes to our response to COVID-19. It's been expressed many times by our board, but especially the health services, public safety services throughout. Thank you for your efforts. It's much appreciated. I don't think the general public can understand or understandably not understand how much effort you've been putting into this and what professionalism you've really employed in letting people know how we can move ahead as best we can under this pandemic. So thank you to everyone. And I hope we have some, look at our operational expenses as we move in to June when we discuss the budget on the early part of June or the end of June. Thank you. I'll open it up to the public now for a comment. And is there anybody downstairs also? Okay. No one in the community room. Okay. It's a disembodied voice. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner from Aptos. This is very sobering. And I really appreciate the good report from Mr. Palacios and Ms. Mallory. As a member of the public, I would like to request, and I understand the need to reduce the days of traditional June budgets, but how will you include the public in this? Normally you have an evening meeting both here and in Watsonville with a kickoff of the budget a week. And I really wanna encourage you to keep something like that, keep the dialogue with the public who are very affected and who may have some very creative solutions that staff has not thought of. Use the people, help the people understand what's going on and take their ideas and put them to use. There are some fabulous public-private partnerships available out there. And I understand that Community Foundation is being a big part of that. I do wanna say that I'm concerned how this might affect the county's bond rating. Is that being looked at? I wanna commend Supervisor Caput for bringing to the podium, if you will, the idea that Board of Supervisors and top department heads need to take reductions or deferment of their pay because your pay hasn't been affected at all. And yet here we're looking at this huge deficit and Supervisor Caput, thank you for showing your leadership in that aspect. And I hope that that will be sincerely addressed. I have, I would like to encourage parks to focus on community gardens and victory gardens and helping people with that. We can't supposedly get together at the playgrounds but we can certainly grow our own food at home and share produce over the fence. And that is a very effective way of using some of those funds that they have that will benefit people not only to help with food production, which may be a problem but also the sense of isolation that many people are suffering from. I want to, in my last few seconds here, in terms of the plan for opening up how that does affect the budget, it's very difficult as a member of the public to know what is going on because the Thursday morning sessions are not available to people only on Facebook. So please put those on the counties, can I have just a little more time? Please put those on the telephone conference system that the supervisors have been using that you can be accessed with just a telephone, the 454-222, people can just listen and hear. And finally, I want to say that I'm very much against any forced vaccination which the V stands for, I'm hearing. I am against forced vaccination in this county. Thank you. We have not received any web comments for this item during the meeting. Board members, I'll just note that the schedule in the June continues, still has the evening meeting in Watsonville, Santa Cruz. We may end up having to do that completely virtually depending on what the pandemic scene is. And also it will be mostly about our, depending on what information we have, the covered information will mostly be about hearing the ideas from the public, but also our strategic plan. So for now that is an agenda. If the board didn't want to have them, we could move them. I know in August we are planning to do some evening sessions or some remote sessions with Watsonville and sort of town hall like meetings and in Santa Cruz. Okay, we'll take action. I'd be prepared to move the recommended actions. All right. Do I need to close the public hearing? Nope. It wasn't a public hearing. I'll take recommended action. We have a first. Second. Second. Okay. Okay. I'll do a roll call vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Chairman Kepit. Aye. Passes unanimously. We'll now we have closed session item number 14. Council, will there be any reportable items from closed session? No, there will not be. No, no items to be announced. Okay. Meeting is adjourned. Thank you for.