 The hour of 1030 having arrived, we will call to order the November 28th, 2023 session of the Santa Cruz City Council and the clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Newsom. Present. Brown. Here. Watkins, here. Brunner. Present. Council Member Calentari-Johnson is currently be a Zoom. Present. Vice Mayor Golder. Here. Mayor Keely. Here. If I might ask the city attorney to provide us with a comment relative to the participation of Council Member Calentari-Johnson on an electronic device rather than being present if you would comment on that, sir. Certainly, thank you. Mayor Keely, members of the City Council. Council Member Calentari-Johnson's participation today is pursuant to recent amendments to the Brown Act that provide a limited opportunity for council members to meet remotely without complying with the agenda posting notice requirements of the old Brown Act statute. A council member can do that up to two times per year based upon specified enumerated circumstances, one of which is due to the illness of a family member or to the council member themselves, and that is the presence, that is the circumstance present here today and individual council members are given the opportunity to do that up to twice in the legislature's wisdom per calendar year. Very good, thank you. Council Member Calentari-Johnson, we are sorry that you are under the weather, but very pleased that you can participate both in the open and closed session today and I'll be alert to your desire to speak and fully participate so the city clerk and I'll manage that together but we hope you feel better as soon as you possibly can. Thank you, Mayor. Okay. This will be the opportunity to anyone to comment upon our closed session agenda, which we will be undertaking in a few minutes. Any of the items on closed session that anyone would like to comment upon, this would be your opportunity to do so. Do we have anyone online? Nobody with their hand. Thank you so much. The real property items to be discussed in closed session are listed below on the council's agenda and receiving no public input or comment on that, we will adjourn into closed session, we will return here not earlier than 12.30 in the afternoon. We stand adjourned into closed session. Recording stopped. The hour of 12.30, having arrived on the council, having completed its business and closed litigation session, we will begin the afternoon session of the Santa Cruz City Council. Clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Newsom. Present. Brown. Here. Watkins. Here. Brunner. Present. Calentory Johnson. Present. Vice Mayor Golder. Here. And Mayor Culey. Here. May I ask the city attorney if we have any announcements? Not at this time. Thank you. For those of you who weren't here when we began the meeting hours ago, Council Member Calentory Johnson is joining by electronic device because she is under the weather today and there are laws in California which permit her to do that and any other council member to do that up to a couple of times a year based on their health situation. So we are wishing the council member a quick recovery and but that too, for those of you that are with us today or viewing this online, that is why the council member is online. We are on oral communications. This would be the opportunity for anyone who wishes to address the city council on a matter under our jurisdiction, but not on today's city council agenda to do so. Good afternoon. Hi everyone. My name is Laurie Egan. I'm the executive director of the Coastal Watershed Council and I am here to say thank you. And it's been a really dynamic year at the San Lorenzo River where the Coastal Watershed Council focuses our work. We've had some work done for FEMA accreditation, some major winter storms and you name it, it's happening out at the river. And what I'm here to say thank you about specifically is really the response that the public work staff had to the vegetation maintenance at the levee. The staff really responded to community feedback and the vendor that they ended up hiring for vegetation maintenance this fall did a phenomenal job. We are so happy with the changes that were made as the result of changing from the lowest responsible bidder to the RFP process. Specifically, we saw increased great communication from not only the staff, but also the vendor around the work at the levee. The whole team could identify native plants and no detail was too small. They did a fantastic job preserving even the smallest poppy while taking care of what they needed to meet the flooding requirements. You might even see some changes out there in terms of some of the smaller types of trees along the river's edge where they did a technique called lollipopping where the branches are removed from the lower trees there so that floodwaters and debris can still flow through while the upper canopy is preserved. Particularly along the river, this is so important to help fish species are endangered and threatened species that rely on the lower San Lorenzo River for their habitat. So the take home is the changes that were made this year worked and we are so thankful for your role in that process and just the dedication of the public work staff. Thank you. Ms. Higgin, thank you to you and your team at the Coastal Watershed Council and we join you in our thanks and appreciation to the public works department and the contractors. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Hi, my name is Megan Carroll. I'm the volunteer coordinator at the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter and I'm here today because you have a representative appointed to our animal services JPA. You actually have two, Laura Schmidt and John Bush. As representative of the staff, we are facing an urgent crisis in the shelter that is being blamed in the media on animal overpopulation but is really about internal disarray and lack of oversight. We have had 22% increase in animals from last year to this year and we are hitting a critical point. It is the highest rate of animals we've had in 10 years. This is a fact, but it's not the reason for the shelter's dysfunction. We are understaffed. There's a lack of resources in a management vacuum that is leading us towards a cliff. This affects the Santa Cruz community because it impacts the level of care that we are able to provide to the animals of this community and also the public who walks in our front door. In the very near future, these problems could and will compound and create larger issues involving public health, public safety, and may affect even family pets. We ask that you check in with your representatives on our JPA board as to what is going on in the shelter and to hold management accountable for the ongoing issues that we are facing. The Santa Cruz community needs a well-run shelter that they can be proud of. We bring this to your attention in order to ensure the Santa Cruz County animal shelter can continue to support our community, continue to support our animals and the public at a high level for the foregoing future. Thank you. Thank you very much, and thank you for your work every day. Good afternoon online. How many do we have? Three, okay. What we'll do is we'll hear from the gentle lady, then we'll go online. We'll go back and forth, talking online and in person so that you know where we're going with this. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Mayor Keely and council members. I wanted to talk about ordinance 8129. That is the prevention of violence against women in Santa Cruz. And under section D, it says the police department shall actively cooperate with public and private agencies, including women's groups. As you know, in my experience, that's not happening and I continue to experience deprivation of my rights under color of law. And I still continue to not receive equal protection under the law. And here are some women's groups who reached out to the Santa Cruz police department. They're Me Too Moms. They're the Family Court Anti-Corruption Coalition. Here you can see my poor child who she and I had been reporting domestic violence in San Mateo County since 2014. I reported domestic violence here in Santa Cruz. I spoke specifically to Officer Parker Rhodes, who wrote a report and agreed to keep my daughter safe with me. However, for some unknown reason, Santa Cruz PD let my daughter's dad strangle me. I've been doing the domestic violence training, which many people should have, especially people who work with our local commission on preventing violence. Strangulation means that a woman can be killed 750 times more likely, so I'm at extreme risk. We still need to know why cops strangled and suffocated my daughter in response to us reporting domestic violence. So I still wanna press charges against David Ross Murdoch for strangling me, for battering my daughter, for attacking me. I want equal protection under the law, and so I'm citing your own ordinance, 8129 Prevention of Violence Against Women. The way we prevent violence against women is we hold these POSs accountable. He needs to be arrested. He needs the book thrown at him. He needs to be prosecuted. It's very simple. Let's make an example out of him. We're going to take the next person online, then we'll be right with you, person online. Good afternoon. Hi, my name's Carol Bjorn, and actually this is the first time I've talked at this forum, so I hope I'm speaking at the right time. But basically I just wanted to voice my opposition to the purchase and the installation of the automatic license plate. So here's what we're going to do. Here's what we'll do, and thank you for asking if this was the right time and place. It's the right place, wrong time. So what we'll do is if you're online, track how we're doing today, and that item will be up in a few minutes, and we'll certainly recognize you for your comments at that time. Okay, thank you. Good afternoon. Okay, we'll be to that item in a little bit. Good afternoon, sir. It is oral communications. I want to live. I cross Morrissey frequently to go to the 24-hour to work out, and recently the back of my left heel was clipped by the right front tire of a person speeding. I was lucky that I didn't get hit, and I would like for this council to consider asking the chief to do something that would actually protect people. Let's get red light cameras for all the people that are running red lights. It'll be a revenue source, and let's get speed traps, speed cameras. You don't have to have a person there. Do it like they do in Europe. You get a picture in the mail, your face, your license number, your speed. I live on Pacheco right next to Morrissey. I'm close enough to Soquel. I hear muscle cars screaming up and down both of those streets, and I think it's time that the police department actually proposed something that protects people. I want to live. Next person online, good afternoon. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Hi, I'm William Sump. I'm the CEO of SE Bloom Network, Incorporated, a local cannabis business, and just wanted to highlight that we need help from the community and the police force. Atrocious crimes are being committed, and it's a public safety concern, and we need the help with your support to have some type of special hearing with the district attorney's office, as well as the police force. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Anyone else with us in chambers who wishes to comment on oral communication? Good afternoon, sir. Yes, good afternoon. My name is still James Ewing Whitman. It's nice to see all of you. I hope all of you stay in the room when items are pulled off the agenda, particularly you, Mr. Tony Kandadi, and you, Matthew Uff. So what can I say? Santa Cruz is setting quite an example, and we have a war on children going on right now. I learned recently that of the 2.2 million individuals that live in the Palestine area, 70% of those individuals are under 25. Some people say that 200,000 people have already been murdered. So it kinda sucks that the city of Santa Cruz seems to have so much in common with the giling aspects of various things that have been rubber stamped in my presence here over the past almost four and a half years. So that's enough for now. I'll be more specific later. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Person online, good afternoon. Yes, hello, this is Garrett. I see you're saying down, that's good. In 2017, the council fell all over itself embracing illegal emigration, passing a sanctuary city status resolution and an ordinance ruling out the welcome mat to illegals. I reviewed that meeting and was amused. Someone only speaking Spanish claimed he was here for 16 years, but apparently didn't feel the need to learn a lick of English and kept referring to El Salvador as his country and lamented over and over how great it was there and not here. In 2017, illegal immigration was very low because the benefit versus coyote price wasn't favorable with high levels of border apprehensions and deportations under Trump. Times have really changed and the criminal political cabal class under Biden have allowed a literal invasion of our country by many millions of totally unknown military age men from all over the world to go wherever they want, also many detained because they aren't terror watch lists or drug smugglers or in pedophile ring. And on October 13th, congressional reports says 90% of those released did not claim asylum. Under Biden's term, the number of illegals is gonna reach eight million, nine million. The report says the Biden administration has failed to deport roughly 99.7% of those illegal aliens. The goal is to destroy the West in one generation. By contrast, local police are empowered to arrest illegal aliens in Texas. The next president may well close the border and start mass deportations. Santa Cruz doesn't wanna be in the shape that New York or Europe is overwhelmed with illegals and since you are always out of money, hey, I'd like to know exactly how much and more you're gonna plan on spending to support illegal aliens. Poland has a zero admittance policy toward illegals resulting in zero terror attacks in Poland and is the safest country in Europe. They adopted this policy because they know the horror of being invaded first by Nazis, then Soviets, and they know the reality of what it means to lose freedom and culture and they're never gonna give it up again. The legal aliens are getting more benefits than most social security recipients that can be kept in our resources while citizens go homeless or in poverty. Repeal the city's invader sanctuary status now if you care at all about having a country. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anyone else wish to address us under all communication? Do we have anyone else online? We do, we'll take the loud, is this the last one? Do we have more than one? One more hand raised. One more hand raised, we'll take that person. Good afternoon. Three, two. Hello? What, hello. I didn't hear me. Hi, you're on. Hi, Darius here. I just wanna give a shout out to two of you on the day it's there. First, Sonya Bruner for her always showing up at events like last week, last Thursday, Veterans Hall Community Thanksgiving meal. She took the time out to be there serving various members of the community, mostly homeless and kind of commender for that. But also, but the prize goes to our mayor. Fred Keely, who in this about a month ago, I think it was about a month ago, he actually went to the Mountain Roasting Company in Felton to meet Robert North for allegedly an interview which ended up turning out to be a lecture. And he was very, I was, I actually listened to his show and I was quite impressed with our mayor's demeanor and response and his willingness to go out and again, out to Felton and from during his currently busy day and meet up with our constituents wherever they may be anyway. That's all just, I just thought I'd call that out. Thank you. Well, that's terribly kind of you. Thank you. And on behalf of council member Bruner, thank you very much for those kind comments. Anyone else online, Ms. Bush? No one else online. We're finished with oral communication. We are now moving to presiding officer announcements. I have none. Statements of qualifications. Any council member have a statement of disqualification on today's agenda? Seeing and hearing none. We'll move to additions and deletions. Ms. Bush, are there any additions or deletions to the agenda? No, there aren't. Okay, very good. Thank you. Mr. Condati, report from our closed session. Yes, thank you, mayor. Healy members of the city council, there were five items on this morning's closed session, which convened at 1030 a.m. in the courtyard conference room. Item one was real property negotiations. Council received a report from and gave direction to its real property negotiator concerning the real property at 140 Front Street. Item two was illegal counsel, liability claims, the claimant name of Lorraine H. Capolino is also on your afternoon agenda for action as consent calendar item number 13. Items three and four were significant exposure or anticipated litigation. Item three was one item of significant exposure to litigation. Item four was one item of considering initiation of litigation. Item five was a public employee performance evaluation slash conference with labor negotiators concerning the city manager position. That item was deferred to the next meeting and otherwise there was no reportable action. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. We're on item six. We're going to review our meeting calendar. Ms. Bush, anything to draw our attention to on that? No changes. Very good. Thank you. We're on the consent agenda. For those of you unfamiliar, what we were doing is taking items seven through 20 as one action. And what we will do is give council members the opportunity to comment upon or ask a question or pull an item from the consent agenda. We'll also give folks an opportunity to comment on the consent agenda items rather plural. So let me start through the council members and I'll work my way from my left to my right. Council Member Brenner. I'd like to pull item 15 and I have a question on item 17. Go ahead and ask your item on item 17. Item 17, the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail Rail Trail Segment Seven Phase Two. I was curious about the timeline on that. If there's any. Who would you like to have on that? Yeah, and I had the same question for 18. Okay, let's go item 17 first, then item 18. Who is going to address this? Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Matt Starkey, Transportation Manager. I'll address items 17 on the rail trail. We are here before you to ask for a budget adjustment to help complete section seven phase two. I wish we'll complete the rail trail down from California to the roundabout at Pacific. We expect to be completed in March. And this work will help us, this funding will help us get through that completion date. Thank you, Mr. Starkey. Item 18 is the Murray Street Bridge Seismic Retrofit Contract Amendment. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council Members, Nathan Nguyen, Director of Public Works. Murray Street Bridge Project, the bid opening has been delayed until December 5th, is when we hope to get our bids received and we're hoping to get a contractor on board by the end of this year, but we do not have an anticipated start date yet. Okay, thank you. Madam Vice Mayor. I had a question also on 17. Item 17. I think there's others too. My question comes from members of the public just asking what caused the need for the budget adjustment. And I did get that answered, but since it wasn't presented here, maybe staff could speak to it. Mr. Starkey, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Yeah, we ran into some challenges on the site with particularly utility crossings down the rail trail that causes the need to spend a little extra time resolving those conflicts, particularly utilities coming in and out of the wastewater treatment. The other challenge was the big winter storm we had last winter that made the site unusable by our contractors for a while. So that delay from the storm coupled with utilities really delayed this project overall. Thank you, Mr. Starkey. Further, Madam Vice Mayor? Council Member Watkins, Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I also wanted to pull item 15, but I did have one more question on item 17, and I apologize I didn't get this to you in advance. Given, is there any potential for FEMA reimbursement for any of that additional cost and where are we at with that process? What are your expectations or hopes? Yes, we are working on finding other funding sources to help backfill these costs. We've experienced FEMA as one of them, and we're working on securing that funding source now. I have a question on 18. Many people obviously are watching this, and I know that this is a project that has been many, many decades in the making at this point. At one point there was a discussion about having some kind of community engagement or neighborhood meeting to discuss what to expect with folks who are in proximity to that crossing, and I'm wondering if that is on the agenda or where things are at, thanks. Yes, thank you for the question. There is a communication plan that we are working on, not just internally, but also with our external partners, RTC and the county, so we'll be exploring that as we get a contractor on board and have some more solid dates established, but there will be additional outreach mailers that will be going out to a lot of the close by residents and we'll be doing a campaign to let people know that the project is coming. Thank you, I'll just say as the RTC representative for the city, I'm happy to be involved in conversations or help however I can. Good coordination, thanks. Further Ms. Brown? We're good. Mr. Newsom? Very good, thank you. May I ask if there's anyone with us in the public that would like to make a comment on any item you would need to do this? If you have more than one item, you're gonna have all the items consolidated into one set of comments. Good afternoon, sir. Yeah, hello, my name is James Ewing Whitman. Actually wanted to pull off quite a number of items. I'm glad that number 15 is being pulled. You know, I wasn't necessarily gonna pull off 17 or 18, but I don't know how this is actually being run because we had some council members make some comments and then certain individuals came in to make some comments and the public wasn't allowed to make some comments. So I suppose, oh, I'd like to pull off eight, 15, 16, 17 and 18. My comments will be brief on 17 and 18. Why don't we do this, let's do this. Consolidate all your comments on all those items. Now is your opportunity. Well, item 15 is gonna be pulled off, so shouldn't I? That's right. Comment on that later. Yeah, so we'll do, we can hear your comments on that one at a later time today. Not that I'm going to use this, but could I not have three minutes on all five of those items? I'm not gonna, could I not have three minutes on all five of those items? I won't use it, but I could. It wasn't my intention to take up so much time, but I'm kinda asking for how this is. How we're going to do it is let's take all your comments as you indicated in a certain amount of time here on all these items. So go ahead. On the items that have been pulled, you will be permitted to participate. So we have pulled 15, for example. Okay. If you wish to comment on 15, we'll hear from you then. Oh, here, you'll hear from me then. Yeah. So, okay, you know, I'm somewhat new at this. Oh, you're not at all new to this, but you're doing fine. So, okay, well thank you very much. Certainly. Number eight is that has to do with the minutes. And I just would like to, I don't think I have that. I wrote something really kind of complimentary about the duties and responsibilities of the clerks because they are the historians in this room. They seem to be not as free as they could be. But a particular item I'd like to comment on would be, I have, I guess I have whatever. So, community member made a comment about what has gone on with the inequities with some favoritism, with some actions that local law enforcement have taken. And she's still dealing with an issue that happened to her on June 28th, 2021. So, I believe that she, and I know I have given you some information about what the remedies are for that. I find it kind of fascinating that not much has happened with that. It's just kind of sad, I'm done with eight. So, how do I get to proceed? Do I have 15s being, time stops, starts again? Okay. So, you know, I wasn't gonna pull off items 17 and 18. But the Monterey, the 17 has to do with the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Senior Trail. 18 has to do with the Murray Street Bridge. One thing they both have in common is once all this information is decided, the Director of Public Works is authorized to execute all future contracts. So, there's no other public discussion about that. I don't know, I find some issue with that. So, done with 17, but more in relation to number 18, that's stated to be a difficulty with traffic, kind of cutting the city in half for up to two and a half years. I sure hope that's not the case because that's my favorite way to travel through the city. I'm done with 18 for now. 17's being pulled, and I wish that I had brought some other information with me, but I didn't, so I'm done. Just so we're clear with each other. No, no, just so we're clear, item 17 is not pulled. There was comment made on it, but it's not been pulled for further consideration, which item, the only one so far that is pulled is 15. So, if you have a comment, go ahead and do it on that. Oh, no, I'll wait for the group comment on 15 unless you would like to give me three minutes on it right now. You and I are on the same track, no comments on 15 yet. You're gonna get your opportunity. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Anyone else on the consent agenda? We have someone online. Let's take the person online, then if you're up on the consent agenda, we'll hear from you. So, person online, good afternoon. Yes, hello, this is Garrett again. Item 17 sure reads to me like you are misappropriating $2.95 million from the wastewater enterprise fund and treating it like some sort of slush fund to pay for cost overruns on the very controversial and ever more expensive and delayed rail trail. The connection between the rail trail and the wastewater enterprise isn't exactly so clear since absolutely nothing caused by the rail trail project should be paid out of those enterprise funds. The rail trail funding should fund itself and 100% of wastewater funds should remain in an enterprise lock box dedicated to wastewater treatment alone as should be the case with all utility monopoly enterprises. Otherwise, you are misappropriating monies and a financially unethical use of monopoly authority. I admit you provided a few details and it's very vague for me to be able to say that for sure but yeah, if I was misappropriating fund monies treating it like a slush fund, I wouldn't make it that clear either. I recall the wastewater director in the past stating when there were improvements that were gonna be made that you barred $20 million that he said he'd like to have $10 million laying around for those planned improvements so we'd have the money there if he needed it but all of that is for wastewater improvements. The idea that you can improve projects and take money from whatever monopoly utility funds might have some reserve money laying around in them and applying it wherever you have some shortcomings of other project cost management goof ups doesn't sound ethical to me. It don't sound right, it ain't right. Anyway, here's an idea, why don't you raid the employer retirement funds instead? Funny huh, but it's not so different. I'm curious and think a better explanation of where the financial responsibility lies in paying for this stated relocating of conflicting utility crossings is in order. I can only imagine it's maybe something caused by the real trial project alone or possibly something to do with water park projects and unrelated also to the real trial project and maybe the wastewater, not me. Anyway, now if you say these funds have nothing to do all with it but something else, why is it in the real trial cost overrun item and why isn't it in the utility or water department item? I don't get it. I don't know, I guess it could relate to item number 19 but who knows, you tell me. I think we deserve an explanation, thanks. Thank you sir, good afternoon. Typical question actually, so God's item number 15. Yes, item 15 will be. Maybe could you just explain assistance to me because I'm new here, I've lived in Santa Cruz for 30 years but my first time at this council meeting, so nice to meet you Mr. Keely. How we're going to do this is except for item 15, we will be voting on all the consent agenda items in one motion. After we've done that, we will take up item 15 and we will hear your comments, staff comment, anybody's comments on that. We will then act on that item separate and apart. You just gave me like a rough time and I've got to get back to work and item 15 is really important. Two or three minutes from now? Oh, we'll be taking it up, I'm going to guess, I'm guessing on that. It won't be two hours though, okay, very good. Good afternoon. Hi, Mayor Keely, Rhonda Reina again, I do want to make a comment about Consent Agenda Item 8, the meeting minutes are not accurate, particularly in regard to my public comment that was referenced so that was taken out of context and I would like to see the meeting minutes reflect more accurately what was said and that is I believe that the Santa Cruz Police Department is perpetrating post-separation abuse to women and children who report domestic abuse, therefore they're not accurately representing the end domestic violence awareness campaign that happens every October. So as the meeting minutes read currently, it makes it sound like I just opposed that program. No, I oppose people not following the program and we shouldn't be spending our money on that until we shore up our police's response to that. So how can the meeting minutes more accurately reflect what the public is saying and also I didn't know that it gets recorded so I noticed in several other meetings on my name isn't referenced, do I have to state my name? I mean, you all know who I am. Can you explain that to me a little bit more? First of all, you don't have to state your name unless you choose to. We cannot require you to state your name or your address, you can choose to do that. We typically prefer that only so that the record is accurate but if you choose not to mention your name we don't require that in order to testify before the body. So if I don't state my name, it won't show up in the minutes, can you just clarify that? That's correct. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Anyone else online? No? Mr. Brokaw on this? All right. 15. Thank you, sir. The matter is now back before the council, I will make one comment on item 12 and that is to thank Ms. Murphy and the other folks who participated in putting together the legislative program for 2024. I think it does exactly what we're looking for to do which is to make it very clear to anyone who reads it, especially our state and federal legislative delegation that we have three priorities, not 103 priorities, we have three priorities that we're going to be focusing in on and we hope that they will do the same thing. So thank you, Ms. Murphy, for your fine work on that. We will now take up the consent agenda in chief. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? There's a motion by Ms. Brown. There's a second by Ms. Watkins. The clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Newsom? Aye. Brown? Aye. Watkins? Aye. Brunner? Aye. Kalintori Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? Aye. And Mayor Keeley? Aye. The consent agenda is approved. We will now take up item 15. And several folks asked for this to be pulled over here, so to speak. Let me ask the police chief if you would come forward or whoever is going to be presenting on a staff basis on this item, come on forward. Council Member Brunner, you asked this item to be continued, I'm sorry, not continued, to be pulled for our further consideration. Let's let everybody get positioned and then we will take this item up. Chief, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members. Good afternoon. Do you have a presentation you'd like to bring up and then so we'll pause until you're ready. For those of you who are observing this either in chambers or online, item 15 is a 2024 State Homeland Security Program grant proposal regarding automated license plate readers. This is brought to us by the Chief of Police and has in the packet the grant application terms, munitions and so on. Okay, looks like we're good. Good to go. Chief, good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council Members. As you mentioned, my name is Bernie Escalante, the Chief of Police for the City of Santa Cruz. We're here before you today to request your approval for the fiscal year 2024 State Homeland Security Program grant, funding in the amount of $84,000. And in turn that money would be used to install or purchase and install a total of 14 automated license plate reading cameras throughout the year. Cameras throughout the city in various locations. So that's why we are here today. So we do have this brief presentation and I could certainly answer questions or address concerns as they come up. But on the left you'll see that these are a variety of similar uses that these cameras will be utilized for. And I will go through the list quickly. Locate stolen, wanted, or suspect vehicles involved in criminal behavior. Suspects, locate suspects that are wanted on an arrest warrant or involved in a criminal investigation such as violent crimes, retail crimes, catalytic converter thefts. One thing that's not on there and it was also mentioned earlier in this meeting is the cannabis thefts that we've recently had where these cameras can capture license plates. The ability to locate witnesses and are victims of violent crimes. Locating missing, abducted children or elderly individuals such as amber or silver alerts is what we refer to them as. Protecting the public during special events and situational awareness. We have several soft infrastructure throughout the city whether it's the university, the boardwalk. We were a big tourist town. So we also have many special events whether it's the Halloween, Fourth of July where these cameras may become very valuable to us. And again, protect critical infrastructure around the city. On the right side here, some of the cameras who sort of what they do or what they don't do. The camera software captures and flock which is the company that we would like to purchase the equipment from. Their database temporarily stores a photo, an image of the rear license plate of a vehicle and that's it. It does not produce facial recognition or any personally identifiable information. We also, I wanted to mention, we also have Pector Solomon Valdez who is the director of the local government affairs at Flock Safety who's also online to also address any sort of security or authentication concerns that come up with this sort of equipment. But it has multi-factor authentication and single sign on identity management tools. It's very secure. The information that it does produce which is just the license plate and we'll show you that in a minute. The information is secure with Flock and I will let him address those sort of questions and concerns. The original policy that we sent in with the packet which was about 21 days ago has been looked at and we do have some areas that we do need to revise and one is to address Senate Bill 34 which clearly restricts the use and sharing of our data. So in other words, we cannot share the information that we have with any private entity, federal or state government outside of the California state. We can share with other jurisdictions within the state of California. So again, some of the misinformation that is out there about what it does or what it doesn't do, again, it does not provide any personal identifying information. It does not identify or do have any facial recognition software. It is not video surveillance. It captures an image of the rear of the license, rear of the vehicle, the license plate of the vehicle. It's not a continual running surveillance, video surveillance system. It does not do traffic enforcement such as red light citations. The policy that we have clearly prohibits the use for any sort of immigration enforcement, harassment or intimidation of protected classes or personal use by any law enforcement personnel. Only the data collected related to the rear of the, the license plate on the rear of the vehicle is used as a pointer system and as an investigative tool of potential last known location. And it also provides us with leads to follow up on related to criminal acts and behavior only. The data retention currently for the flock safety company is a maximum of 30 days. And then the information that the image is deleted. At that point, if we have not identified that image as potential evidence or as evidence in a crime that we are investigating, the information is deleted. We do not retain it any further. If we are going to keep it, it now becomes evidence in a case and is attached with a case number and is part of that overall investigation. I will point out that there is some discrepancy as far as there's a section in our policy government code 34090 that I think does need some more clarification. That government code in essence basically says that information shall be retained from any sort of video monitoring system, is the way it's described, up to a minimum of one year. I've gotten three different interpretations as far as whether an ALPR qualifies as a video monitoring system. So I've gotten everything from it does not qualify to lexical has it in their policy. My assumption is their attorneys put it in there believing that it qualified. We also have Stephanie Duck from the city attorney's office who did the research and it is her opinion that it is not clear whether it qualifies. So I have three very different opinions on that particular topic. But as of right now our policy says unless it is qualified as evidence to a crime, it will be deleted in 30 days. To the data sharing, the ALPR systems are restricted to law enforcement personnel only with official and legitimate law enforcement purposes for accessing the system. The system you can audit the system to determine why or who access certain information and in order to access it, a criminal case number or incident number needs to be entered into the system for them to allow you access to any of their information. Photos generated by the license plate reader devices will not or they are owned by us, the Santa Cruz police department and will never be sold or shared by flock. This is just a real large image of from the Bay Area South of all the agencies and in the number of cameras that are already deployed. This is not new technology. It's improving our ability to not only prevent but in to investigate crimes. It is a trending technology that has been out for years. But honestly I don't wanna see Santa Cruz at the end of this list. You will see there that Watsonville has already deployed 20 cameras in their city. Scott's Valley is purchasing the mobile ARPR systems for their vehicles and also pursuing funding for potential fixed cameras in their city. Capitola will be bringing this forward to their city council the beginning of 2024. I will also add that UCSE is currently beta testing a system at their gates. At this point they are not looking at the same company but they are looking at a similar system where you could upload information into the system for wanted vehicles, wanted subjects, but also for the security of their students and their campus and faculty. They are also going to be deploying these cameras in the near future. Again, as you could see, it's a very extensive list throughout the Bay Area and this is just the Bay Area. I could have done it statewide and it's a very large list. This is an example that we receive from Flock Safety as something that I would suggest we can put on our transparency portal and this is what Watsonville, the city of Watsonville is currently using and Flock provides this for the city and uploads the information. I can't recall. Maybe Hector will be able to clarify but how often they refresh this information but it is hard to see. What it basically does is it reminds everybody the different policies as far as prohibited uses, acceptable uses, what it detects, what it doesn't detect, the hot list policy, access policy and so on. It also will give you information about the usage and how many vehicles have been detected within the last 30 days. How many hot list hits in the last 30 days and you'll see here they had 28 hot list hits within 30 days in their city. They just got these cameras literally a month or two ago. It's concerning to not have these cameras and within the region not to be the only ones without them. I think that that sends a message that everybody else is taking preventative measures and we are not. Next slide. This is exactly what we receive and that's it. I have no idea who the registered owner is. I don't know where they live. I don't know what they do. This is entirely the information we get from Flock Safety and this is it. You'll see that the license plate is blacked out. We did that on purpose for this presentation. But other than that, we received the license plate, the date and time, the location of the camera, how many times it was seen within the last 30 days, the body, the make, the color and any other special identifiers such as window stickers on the back of the vehicle. The camera is fixed. It's not, it's fixed in a static location. It's not moved around. It does not zoom in. It does not rotate. It's not 365 degrees. We don't control it with a controller. It's fixed. It only captures exactly what you're looking at, the rear of a vehicle. Again, to access the information, there's gotta be a need to know and a right to know. This information is actually less information than what an officer can actually punch into their computers and their vehicles right now. That gives us all of the registered information. So they need to have a need to know and a right to know to access this information just like all the other information they access today. At this point, this becomes our pointer system if this vehicle has been described in a crime with or without the license plate, provides us as a pointer system to dig a little deeper and then we can actually go to a different system, run the license plate and start digging about the registered owner and do they fit the description of the crime or the criminal that committed the crime, right? Then we go and we do our investigative work. But I want this to be clear. This is all we receive. I think there's a lot of other information about tracking people and their daily habits. That's not what happens here. Next slide. At this point, like I said, we do have a representative from Flock Safety available for questions. We also have the city attorney's office available for questions. And obviously we are here for questions as well. Thank you, chief. Thank you very much. Ms. Brunner, you had asked, so let's start with you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that information and answered some of my questions. And I know I pulled it because we did receive many concerns from the community around what this system entails, what it would do. And concerns, I know I take very seriously. I worked really hard in 2020, 2021, facial recognition software and eliminating any kind of anything along those lines in our police department, the city of Santa Cruz. And so you said that someone from Flock was here and I was curious to hear from them around the data. I know that some of the concerns were around the data that's stored with the third party and just access and how that could be used or not used and if they could speak to that. Yeah, I think that there are several layers of encryption and security around that information and I'll let Hector from Flock Safety give us that information. Yeah, good afternoon. My name is Hector, I'm the director of local government affairs with Flock Safety. Thank you for the opportunity to answer your questions today. To your specific question, the data is encrypted from end to end. It's important to know it's sent to the AWS government cloud. All of those servers are located completely within the United States. The data itself has what is called a time to live stamp which means that at that 30th day, it is automatically deleted. It's also important for the public to know as far as access to the data. The data is owned by the city of Santa Cruz and its police department. Flock cannot share that data or sell that data. Only the police department can share the information within the system to other law enforcement agencies for legal law enforcement purposes and as the chief mentioned in the state of California that's only other agencies within the state of California and in accordance to your police department's policies. Thank you, that's helpful to know. Chief, I imagine that we have other systems or devices that capture data by third parties and how does this compare to that? Well, I could say such as, for example, our Axon body camera footage, it's a very similar system where the videos are captured throughout the day or night and then the officer docks the camera and the videos are uploaded and then they're retained based off of a retention schedule and policy. And I think what's also I wanna mention which is interested around the retention is the license plate readers or the body camera footage, all of the images, they provide either in culpatory or exculpatory evidence, right? So I know there's arguments about how long we keep the information but this information could also be provided as a defense to somebody that's being accused of a crime. So it's not always used to actually prosecute, it's also our responsibility to provide whatever the facts are. And sometimes this information is valuable as exculpatory. In other words, they weren't in the area because our cameras didn't pick up on the vehicle. So I think that's important to note. And then another question, the Watsonville example of the transparency portal, would we have to provide specific direction to have this, if this were to go forward to have that posted as part of the transparency portal or is that assumed? How does that work? I would accept that direction if you want, I don't know if it's necessary. I could say now that that would be my plan to put that information up on our transparency portal and get that information updated. I don't know if, Hector, can you tell us how frequently that information in that system is updated? Certainly, the transparency portal is updated daily. It is a simple thing that we will turn on for the department, work with them to make sure their policy is linked and as all of the agencies that they're sharing with, et cetera, and the amount of searches performed are updated daily for the community to see. Thank you. I think I'll wait for public comment. If any other things come up, thank you. Thanks for answering a lot of my questions. Okay, we're gonna move our way around. Ms. Watkins. Thank you for the presentation. And I actually have most of my questions asked and answered earlier, so I appreciate you taking the time and also bringing this to the Public Safety Committee. I just wanna make sure I caught something that I thought you said that there were changes to what was in the original packet to now, or is that, okay, and I wonder if you can maybe share what those are. Yeah, it's around SB 34 that clearly states there was a bulletin that came out of the Attorney General's Office a few years back that clearly states that if you're going to deploy the ALPRs that you will not share the information, sell it, give away anything with any other private entity, another state agency, law enforcement agency, or federal law enforcement agency. So it's clearly that in the packet that we gave you is not clearly outlined in our policy, so that needs to change. Okay. And I will tell you that... Sorry, just if I may. In the policy or it needs to change in the resolution today? It needs to change at minimum in the policy. Got it. Okay, okay, sorry, I just wanted to make sure I was clear if I'm moving forward. Thank you. And I will add that the police independent auditor also was given the policy and provided feedback and that was in two locations, the recommendation to include that. Yeah. Thank you. Council Member Brown. I have a number of questions, but I think I'd like to wait to allow members of the public who have been waiting to weigh in and if the questions arise, we can get those answered too, thanks. Thank you. Chief, I have a few so we can engage in a dialogue here for a moment. It's my understanding that the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department either applied for, received, had one of these grants and has now returned the equipment, decided not to use it. Am I informed correctly or misinformed? I, honestly, I don't know all the details. I believe I saw some communication that said they used them for a particular purpose and then gave them back. I don't know all the details around it, but they currently do not have them. They'll not use it. Correct. I'll ask a few others. Let me go, I'm gonna refer to agenda pages, so let me see if you've got the same pages I've got. I'm going to start on policy 415 on page 15.4. Oh wait, are you ready? Under operations? Yes, sir. Okay. Under definitions. Just before 145.2, the sentence before that. It says that alert from the ALPR system that a scanned license plate number may be in the NCIC or other law enforcement databases for a specific reason, including but not limited to being related to a stolen car, wanted persons, missing persons, domestic violence, protection order, or terrorist related activity. So that seems to take a, which I think is a good idea to have this narrowly applied and then includes the broad language of but not limited to. With that language in there, what are the limitations then? Right now the limitations are involved in criminal activity. So it could include misdemeanors, it could include felonies. We did not want to limit it only to violent or serious felonies. So right now it could be used legally for any criminal violation, where this could be a benefit as far as a pointer system. But as far as hits. I'm sorry, please. As far as hits go, I was kind of going off on a tangent there about investigative tool. This is specific to hits. This would be more specific to these sort of higher level violent sort of crimes. But then again, if we have a license plate that we know of that committed a retail theft, we could enter that into the system. And so I don't want to limit ourselves. If we have the information and we can have a higher likelihood of success of capturing them, we would want to enter that data into the system. Would I be right in thinking that if we adopted this with that policy language, that would give you discretion then with regard to what the, but not limited to means. Correct. It's really hard to kind of capture all the potential possible scenarios where we would want to use this. So we do like that flexibility, knowing that the rest of the policy clearly outlines, it's got to be related to criminal behavior. It can't just be for personal use or something along those lines. I understand that. Let me go on to, let me in order to go forward, go backward on the first page of the agenda report from your department and item one under the recommendation, it indicates that the body would send this letter and so on no later than December 31st, 2023. Is that a deadline for applying? Is that what that is? Yeah, I'll do my best to answer and I might ask my PMA to be more thorough, but essentially the application we've applied for the funding and specifically for this equipment. With the OR3, which is the Santa Cruz County Office of Response Recovery and Resilience, they've approved that but wanted council approval of what the money was going to be used to purchase. That is due by December 31st, correct? Understood, thank you. Let me move over to page 15.5 in our agenda packet and let me go to the question under administration in 145.3. In the last sentence of that paragraph, which relates to the administration, it says it may also be used, the IT, I'm assuming is the ALPR system, IT may also be used to gather information related to active warrants, homeland security, electronic surveillance, suspect interdiction and stolen property recovery. The two there that are of concern to me that I'd like to hear more about is used with regard to homeland security, that's of interest to me and it can also be used for electronic surveillance, which it was my impression that earlier in your presentation it couldn't be used for that. Now this says it can be used for that. Help me out. Thank you for that. Regarding the homeland security, originally the thought behind that was related to domestic terrorism and somebody that was of concern that may be coming to our city or going to another city. I will tell you since then and after discussion with the independent police auditor, we will be removing homeland security because of SB 34. You cannot share that sort of information. So homeland security will not be included in the final draft. The electronic surveillance, where that comes from and I will give a prime example. I think it was about sometime this last summer. We had a robbery involving a firearm down on Soquel near Pacific Avenue. We got a good description of the vehicle and the license plate. We were able to enter the license plate into the flock system. City of Roseville pinged on the vehicle in their city. What the city of Roseville was able to do was provide us information of every place that vehicle went within their city, every camera that it passed by in other words. That's where the surveillance part comes in. And it's very valuable during the course of a criminal investigation to be able to show that these four suspects went to four different locations. If we're looking for the gun that was used in the commission of the crime, we may not find it at the registered owner's house. We might find it at one of the other subjects that were with the people during the commission of the crime. So that's where the surveillance part comes where you can actually say, okay, they passed by this camera at this time. Well, now they went by this camera at this time. So you can actually start picking up maybe, again, I'll use an example of if somebody is, if a child is abducted, we would want to know the general path of that vehicle if we're looking for the victim. That becomes very valuable. Let's take a look at one, excuse me, 415.3.1 under ALPR administrator. We good there, chief? Where we are? Good, thank you. In the first sentence there, it says the administration deputy chief shall be responsible for developing guidelines and procedures to comply with the requirements of civil code section 1798.90.5 at second. Has that been developed? It has not, and the reason for that is because we needed to clarify, and as I've seen with running the policy by the independent auditor, we still need to clarify the retention rule, right? So before we start establishing these guidelines and procedures now, I wanted to get clarification exit because now we can establish exactly what those are going to say. Would you be developing these pursuant to that portion of the policy manual? Would you be developing and adopting that portion prior to implementation? Yes, and we will post that on our transparency portal as well. Let me go down to four point, excuse me, 415.4 operations in section B there. It says the ALPR may be used in conjunction with any patrol, excuse me, any routine parole. I'm gonna try this one more time. I'm sure I can get the English words out in a moment. An ALPR may be used in conjunction with any routine patrol operation. So with regard to any routine patrol operation, that sounds different to me than what I think is being advanced here, which is there's something that's already a problem. There's a, somebody's kidnapped, somebody's committed an armed robbery, whatever you're trying to track them down and that kind of thing. That's not a routine patrol operation, or maybe it is, but it seems like routine patrol operation is a very wide net. Patrol operation can be I'm patrolling the street, I live on Market Street, and they decide to trigger this on for some purpose. I'm gonna go in a minute to this, how this system works, actually physically works, but that seems rather at variance with the more narrow-casted way that you folks are presenting this. That seems a broad net as opposed to a narrow cast. As part of our routine patrols, we're always looking for stolen vehicles, and I'll use stolen vehicles as a standard routine patrol operation. Day or night, you have a hot sheet that you're looking for these cars. That hot sheet only applies to the vehicles that are stolen within the county of Santa Cruz. So, where this could be utilized is if a stolen vehicle goes by an ALPR, a hit will alert the officers that there's a stolen vehicle at such and such location and allows them to go find that vehicle. The next sentence reads, reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required before using an APLR. This again seems to me somewhat at variance with the general characterization of this as very carefully narrow-cast, only used in certain circumstances, needing lots of, this seems wildly at variance with that, where there's no probable cause requirement or reasonable suspicion. Correct. So, an example of that would be simply a very broad vehicle description that was involved in the commission of a crime, and we can plug into the system, let's say, a red Mazda pickup, and we don't have a license plate, right? So then at that point, we don't have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to look up a specific person's red Mazda pickup, but at that point it gives us as a pointer system that could give us all of the red Mazda pickups that went through the license plate camera at a particular date and time, and then we start digging a little deeper and we start looking at the registered owners of those vehicles, start seeing if they match the description if we have a suspect description of the crime. So, in the beginning where we just plug in red Mazda pickup, there's no, if three of you own red Mazda pickups, there's no reasonable suspicion or probable cause required to do that is what that means. Now, to go a step further, you start digging about, then we would establish the reasonable suspicion or probable cause based off of other factors, description and so on and so forth. So, now it can produce that and in some cases we have had where there was a distinguished bumper sticker that was described, right? So we can punch that in and that's getting a little bit more defined within the law. On page 15.9 ALPR data detection browsing audits, this, the browsing audits take a moment and describe how that will actually work. What a browsing audit is and how it works. Who conducts that? To whom do they submit that? So, our professional standards unit supervisor, they will conduct the audit just as we conduct other audits within our own system now around property and evidence to ensure we still have what we have booked in and so on and so forth. The professional standard unit supervisor is the one that does any sort of audits that we need to do to just make sure we are within compliance of our policy. Thank you. Good page 15.11. What is an automated license plate reader? That particular point. Two thirds of the way down the sentence reads, the stored license plate data also provides law enforcement investigators with a pointer system that may help them identify vehicles associated with suspects, witnesses or victims and develop exculpatory information that assist them with focusing their investigative resources. I want to focus in on the exculpatory information issue. Can you just clarify real quick where you're at? Oh, where you are. Page 15.11 in the agenda packet under FAQs. Well, my apology. I've kept up up to this point. Okay, under FAQs. They've caught the old geezer using paper again. Sorry about that. Chief, this is on the page that begins at the top with FAQs. Okay. Are we good? Okay. Okay. Ms. Brown, thank you for pointing that out. I've done this for three and a half more years of you hadn't pointed that out. Let's go to the very end sentence on that under the first question. It says ALPR cameras. I'm sorry, let me have two questions here. With regard to the exculpatory information, I want to make sure I understand what that means. Does that mean, let's use your red Mazda pickup truck example, and there's seven of them that you see in this system. Is the exculpatory information there's seven of them? And as you go through it, you can eliminate six of them and that's the exculpatory part? Correct. Okay. It actually basically would prove somebody or help prove somebody's innocence, right? Which is just as valuable as the inculpatory. Shall we say. Is that information then of the exculpatory information? Can this be used by the defense in a case of a criminal activity? You believe you've gone to the DA, the DA files charges, the defense attorney says, I'd like to see this information because it may be exculpatory with regard to my client. Absolutely. We're required to turn over all evidence that's relevant to that case, especially if somebody is being accused and charged for the crime. We, they shouldn't even have to ask for that. That should be provided by us on the front end, which I would say would then result in charges not being filed to begin with. And that's just as important. Fair enough. We've been back and forth on this issue. I think when you were initially presenting it, it was the way the system works is that it's on a fixed, it's somewhere it's on a pole and whatever, and that's how it works. But in an example we've discussed in the last few minutes, you indicated use that could be used by a patrol vehicle because this also says that cameras can be installed on vehicles, which would be the mobile application. And then there's the fixed camera. So in fact, it's they're roaming cameras. Does every patrol vehicle, will they be outfitted with this? Now, we wanted to make sure that that was presented to all of you that it does exist. It is an option, but that is not what we're pursuing. We're pursuing the fixed cameras. So the example that we discussed where someone's driving down a police vehicle is driving down Market Street was not a good example because you're not gonna have one of these license plate readers in a patrol car. No, the example I provided was still a result of a fixed camera that gets a vehicle license plate goes past that fixed camera, then the system provides a hit to us and alert of the hit. So that's how that would work on the fixed camera system. So now I'm gonna abuse my privilege of having for a moment longer, if I might. Let's talk about how this physically works. How many of these will be in the city and roughly where will they be without compromising your law enforcement issues here? Is this gonna be basically busy intersections around the city or where and how will these be deployed? Yeah, the ultimate goal was to purchase 14 as a result of this grant. And in addition to that, I was looking at purchasing eight that would be paid out of our general fund budget. So a total of 22. We've consulted with Flock. They've done a map and their recommendation was 32. So the plan for now would be to start with the eight by the time we get the funding and the processing for this particular grant that's before you guys today, that won't be until the end of 2024 by the time they process it and all of that. So at one point, if we had the 22, my goal is to first have every location to come in or go out of the city covered. That would be my goal. So you're talking Highway One, River and One, the Murray Street Bridge, all the Soquel, those locations. And then the other ones would cover some of the more major intersections within the city. The one that is currently being used was used as a result of an uptick of about two years ago of some shootings that we had in that neighborhood. I went to the neighborhood and had a community meeting with them, the residents, and they thoroughly appreciated and actually wanted more than one camera in order to prevent, hopefully, any further shootings. And if there was one, give us a higher likelihood of success of capturing the ones responsible to any additional shootings. Let me see if I understand how this, the actual physical system works. So let's assume there's a camera at ocean and water. Pretty busy intersection. You're already in the city, but pretty busy. I would imagine that might be on the list of potential intersections. And the technology is on there, it's employed. This is where my understanding of it ends. Is this a constant streaming of information? And then when you, you, the police department says, 1999 Mozda pickup is, we have reason to believe this was involved in a residential burglary. Then the technology sorts through the constant stream and says, aha, at 1232 p.m., a red Mozda, 1999 red Mozda pickup truck proceeding west on such and such, turned left onto Ocean Street. And here's the picture of that vehicle and their license plate. Is that how it works? Yeah, that's how it can be used as a pointer system for us. I don't believe that they do all the way down to the year of the make model. Yeah, exactly. But generally speaking, the real issue I'm interested in is this is on all the time. Yeah. Mayor, I can provide some insight if you'd like on exactly how it works. Pretty good job actually describing the way the system works and there's a couple of facets, right? There's the proactive side of the system in which a vehicle passes by, a camera at the entrance of your city. The license plate is flagged as being associated with the stolen vehicle. One of your officers in their patrol vehicles will receive an alert within 20 seconds, letting them know that that vehicle has been seen by that camera at that location. That's important because, A, it's a potential crime, there's a stolen vehicle, so that's something to be investigated and there's potentially other crimes that are going to happen. At that point, your department's policy comes into place and then they will determine, they will clear that alert, they will, and then determine what the next steps would be. So that's the proactive side. And then there's the investigative side, which means that the cameras will be taking images of the back of each vehicle that passes by. If and when there is a crime reported, your department will, using the different filters, depending on what has been provided to them as evidence, then search the system, right? But they only can search it if there is a case number per your policy and go into the system. In order to protect privacy and not have a long-term retention of data, at the 30-day mark, all images that are not searched and downloaded and placed into the evidence system are completely deleted and no longer retrievable. And so that's really how we provide a investigative tool that's useful because many times things are not reported right away or there's not enough evidence, but still protect privacy and try to balance both of those out. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Can I provide one piece of clarification to you? This is not a system where we will have an individual sitting at a desk and monitoring all of the cameras. Okay, so it has the proactive side that will only give us an alert if the vehicle's license plate is in the system because of a crime that has been committed, associated with that vehicle. The other piece to it is the reactive side that you can utilize it as an investigative tool based off of a limited vehicle description and or a description that includes the license plate. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Anyone who's with, for the questions I counsel, seeing here none, we will reserve the right when the matter's back before the council. Anyone who wishes to provide public comment, this would be your opportunity to do so. Ms. Bush, do we have anyone online? Mr. Brokaw, we'll start with you, then we'll toggle back and forth in person, online, in person, online. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. I requested extra time on behalf of the ACLU to present arguments against. Thank you, sir. I'm sorry, really quick. Mayor, I didn't get that email, so how long are we getting? Let's go ahead with five. Let's start with five. Thank you. I wanna nominate you for the first award at the ACLU Awards Banquet for the Weedwacker Award. If you need a weedwacker at home, I will go to Home Depot and buy you one because you just did a magnificent job. Thank you, sir. I've prepared a two-minute speech in case I didn't get five, so I will go through my two-minute speech and then I will add, please. This is a toy. It is not a tool. This device is designed to collect, not protect. You have to know who you are looking for and their license plate number for this device to help law enforcement. The person driving that vehicle has to be the person you're looking for. This device only gives you information about cars, not people, not little old ladies, not kidnapped children, not violent felons, just cars. In and of itself, it solves nothing and collects everything. The most senior law enforcement officer in Santa Cruz County, Sheriff Hart, practiced openness and transparency by meeting with the ACLU in advance of deploying ALPRs and a short stretch of Soquel for a short period of time. He then returned them. Sheriff Hart has no plans for further development. This is transparency at its best and accountability at its best. SCPD has demonstrated neither. There is no documented crime wave for which this device will solve. It is a device looking for justification. To date, there are 31 letters against in your packet and not one in favor. ALPRs have been in beach flats for two years. When the head of SCPD was asked about their efficacy, did they solve any crime? The written response was, I don't know. When asked to share the traffic stop data with the public, the written reply was, I don't have the manpower. The law requires SCPD to compile stop data on an Excel spreadsheet and transmit it to the state attorney general periodically. If SCPD does not have the manpower to press send to share a document, who will they sign to manage the data generated by these toys? A vote for this device will be remembered in November. Do not advance this request. We the people request, we demand that you reject this absurd request. At the very least, hold a town meeting on this subject. This is one decision that will affect every single resident and every single visitor to this city. I got a number of things to talk about based on what I've heard. But one thing I'm prepared to say is we're talking about an $84,000 grant, but that doesn't mention the ongoing $66,000 per year to maintain these devices. So I think the budget is not properly presented. We have heard through your questioning and the answers that the policy for this is not yet ready for prime time. We should not be buying surveillance devices until we have a firm policy that everybody agrees on. Now, because I used to live in Palo Alto, I've worked in that general area for 40 years, I continue to read their newspapers. Menlo Park had license plate readers. And they don't anymore. One of their officers was busted for using the data to track his girlfriend when they were not together. Okay, you can have all the laws in the world, but if you have somebody wants to get around them, they'll get around them. That's why this guy has a job. Stanford Police Department and Santa Clara Sheriff's Department, entire data now belongs to a hacker. It is being held for ransom and they have yet to pay or decide to restore their own data. Data collection is very, very slippery and we don't have any assurance whatsoever that Flock will follow our requests or our policies. Thank you very much. What color would you like? Thank you, online. We'll take next person online, we'll toggle back and forth. Person online, good afternoon. Three, two, one. We're gonna take next person who's in chambers. Hi there again, my name is Rhonda Reina. Boy, this sure sounds like a Hegelian dialogic and a snake oil salesman pitch because there is nothing safe about this. Have any of you read the Constitution of the United States of America because this is a violation of my Fourth Amendment right? This is an unlawful surge in seizure. It's a violation of the California Constitution, section one, right to privacy. I see an easy lawsuit here. I'm so glad you gave me the list of cities to go after because I'm gonna start suing them for violating my constitutional rights. You are absolutely opening up this city and I would encourage all members to start filing lawsuits against this. This is absolutely unconstitutional. My medical data has been stolen. My retirement data has been stolen. The company I worked for three weeks ago had a cybersecurity hack. There is no way FLOT can say that this system can be protected and the data isn't gonna be stolen. And so I absolutely reject this and if any of you uphold the Constitution like you swore O's to do and, you know, chief, I really don't understand your thinking on this. I don't know who put you up to this. It sounds like the unelected United Nation with our unholy alliance with Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum and the who. And I'm looking at the open air prison slaughter of women and children in Palestine and I don't want Santa Cruz to be like that. So I really am gonna appeal to your humanity here. Leaders in Santa Cruz do not follow suit. How many of you grew up here? Look after us, protect us. This is not safety, it's the opposite. You did a great job trying to throw out some stuff but I've had police officers lie about me. I've had police officers file false evidence against me, they're untrustworthy. So, you know, I don't know who put you up to this but, you know, get a new job. We have a person online. Let's go with them. Good afternoon, person online. Hi, this is Peter Gelblum. I'm the chair of the local chapter of the ACLU. When these things get posted at every entrance to the city I can just see visit Santa Cruz's new motto. Come to the city of sun, surf and surveillance. Every single person I meet in the city is gonna be surveilled. What are we doing here? Look, there is no need for this massive invasion of privacy. There is zero, and this is my biggest point here. When you compare to the certain invasion of privacy there is no evidence. I stress no evidence that ALPRs improve public safety or reduce crime. There is none. You didn't hear any from Chief Escalante. You didn't hear anybody from the person from Flock. There isn't any such evidence. So why are we doing this? And it's gonna cost a lot of money as Mr. Brokaw said, $66,000 a year at the low end for maintenance of these cameras. The city, as I understand it, it's in a fiscal emergency. We don't have that money to spend. This list of neighboring cities with ALPR, to me, it's not comforting, it's frightening. We do not wanna add our name to that list. The data, the data. The data can be hacked. We've seen this over and over again in entities that have vast protections. All data can be hacked. The only way to guarantee that the data is not hacked or obtained by anybody else is to not collect it in the first place. And I mean that, that is the only way to assure that. And finally, I wanna point out something that the mayor referenced, that the law requires the SCPD before implementing a system to establish guidance and procedures. The mayor focused on that and the chief answered directly, did you not have those guidance and procedures yet? You're not done. So, but he says, well, I'll post them on the internet before we implement. That's not point. The point is for you, as our elected leaders, to know what you're approving before you approve it. You need to know the details of these guidance and procedures, which are crucial, their retention, their guarantees of accuracy, their audits, their training, vital stuff, and you will not have that before the vote today. You need to have that, as the mayor suggested, before you decide whether to approve this at all. I strongly urge you to reject this request in order that no ALPRs be installed in the city and in an absolute minimum to put this off, hold a public meeting that was held for the beach flats ALPRs, Chief Escalante said. There's been no public meeting about these at all. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you. Good afternoon, sir. Ms. Bush, while the gentleman's approaching, we have other people online. How many? Two more. Good afternoon again, sir. Good afternoon. My name is still James Ewing Whitman. I wish the community member who was told to be able to comment in two or three minutes was still here, but there's so many things around me when I look around that remind me of the film Idiocracy that. I will say this about two or three minutes, and that is I used to say when I was presiding in legislature that in public agency time, everybody can run a four minute mile. There you go. You're on. You know, I appreciate that. I mean, I'll contact my friend later. It's good to see him. There's just so many red herrings being discussed here, like what's really going on? I don't know. For example, cameras like these were suggested by the previous police chief Andy Mills in 2019 in the lower area next to the boardwalk. You know, I read this thing and I did some research on these cameras. I know when I was living in Europe in 1986, I learned that they had cameras that would give you tickets for speeding. What's not really being discussed, and I wish that everybody, including myself, had access to my YouTube channel that had over 430 playlists were over 316. Their title was Leo and Youth because the only people being thrown under the bus more than law enforcement, peace officers and emergency responders are teachers and youth. So these devices are actually pretty innocuous. It seems like from what I've read about them, they are operating in the light spectrum that we can see and human beings can see between 3% and 5% of the 100% visible light spectrum. But the wireless in this room and the wireless technology where you guys rubber-stamped 27 different intersections from Santa Cruz to Pass State Park Drive, they're operating in spectrums that are actually very dangerous, you know, and they're very dangerous. I wish I had an hour to talk about those subjects. So once again, there's issues that are of real concern that aren't really being discussed. But I, so it's really kind of indifferent when you look at this $84,000 for this expense and how injured people can get from, you know, just regular Wi-Fi or their earbuds, that's just pennies, but $84,000 is pennies because how important is everybody's health and reality? It's priceless. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Next person online, Ms. Bush. Good afternoon, person online. Three, two, one. Good afternoon. Nope, we'll take them in a minute. You hear me? No, you gotta react faster, Nick. Come on, person who's here in chambers, person online, be ready to go. Yes, hi. I'm actually here for the discussion about 180, so Cal, which apparently has been pushed. But in any case, I do have something to say on the topic of networked devices, an IoT, an industrial IoT, as it is in fact the sector that I operate in as a business and corporate entity here in the city of Santa Cruz for decades. And I can tell you this, is if you're reading the news, you'll understand that there's this thing called the CHIPS Act, and this is a multi-billion dollar effort by the government to bring sourcing back to the United States. And the reason for this, well, there's many and varied, but primarily it's the veracity of your supply chains. And there is no one here I guarantee it that can tell me with a clear eye that there is veracity in that startup's supply chain. I guarantee you that's all Chinese bottom of the basement. They probably don't even know what the CPU core they're running is. And you wanna put that, okay, let's put it behind a firewall. Guess what happened to the Danish government last week, everybody? You like your emails being read? Nobody here is qualified. And you guys are gonna make these decisions like this off the cuff? Just say no, people. If there's still time, you can make sure that your supply chains are verified. You can make sure that the servers that operate the cloud, which means somebody else's computer, are within a legally mandated border that we can actually control and sue the firm if they do have a breach. Where's the indemnity? Thank you for your time. I look forward to talking to you about 180 Soquel as well. Very good, we look forward to hearing from you in that regard. Let me go to the person online. Ready to go? Here we go, person online. Come on now. Can you hear me? Now we can. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. Hi, Darius here again. I really, really encourage you to support these license plate readers. All of these comments are, you know, safety, privacy has disappeared 20 years ago with the internet and so forth. You can't walk from a city hall to a Santa Cruz coffee roasting company without being on probably 10 surveillance cameras with watching your date in your face. And you have no control over who's using that data. Further, these things are very successful. The error rate is like 0.4%. And Vallejo, they've increased their vehicle apprehensions by 140%. Again, and our police department is always gonna be understaffed by however many, six, 10 officers. That's just gonna be the, that's the new normal. We need to leverage technology like this to assist our police force. Frankly, I look forward to the day when we have really good facial recognition on every, on a camera, on every street light pole, including one of those, you know, members of the Mousetrap game, to the little cage it fell down. Yeah, with the little cage it falls down on the perpetrator once they have a hit. So please, please, let's have these cameras. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, sir. Ms. Bush, while the gentleman's approaching, do we have anyone else online? One more. Good afternoon, sir. Hello, I'm Bruce Walker from the medical field. Please oppose the purchase and permanent installation of automatic license plate readers in this additional step towards the implementation of a smart city. I grew up in a country that taught me to repel and reject the regimes that are known for surveillance and control of their citizens. This was and is against our ways here in the United States. Now I hear that not only does our country want to do this, but right here in our city of Santa Cruz, the police chief wants to put up surveillance cameras that see who is entering and exiting. This sounds like another country. I'll say communist China in parentheses, not ours. We have privacy rights here that were brought about when our country was founded. Our forefathers and foremothers fought for such freedoms from the tyranny of kings and queens, which it seems like our federal government is trying to become once again. Our veterans have fought in wars to keep our rights protected. Now, right here in our precious neighborhoods, we are losing such privacy rights under the disguise of protection. I do not want these cameras installed. I do not want to live in fear. What I do fear, however, is how they will be used. I have some questions that I would like answered. Some of them were answered with the display up there, but I had what company are you buying the cameras from, which we found out, who will be maintaining them, and we found out the expense of that, who will be running them, who gets the footage that you are collecting, and I do not trust that our federal government is not getting their fingers in the pie. Why do you want to see me when I am leaving or coming back to Santa Cruz? I really do not like these coalitions known as public-private partnerships. When actions are public, they are much more accountable than when they are involved with the private sector. We have elected you, the key word here is elected, as our representatives to look out for us citizens and to see that we are not taken advantage of. Please remember this as you are deciding on such an issue as this that is dealing with our privacy. Please keep my trust in you. And one thing that got brought up earlier was domestic terrorism. And from my understanding, now if I go to a protest that the United States government does not agree with, I am a domestic terrorist. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Ms. Bush, one last person online, is that correct? We'll take that person online. Good afternoon. Three, two, one. Matters back before the body. I will recognize the vice mayor. Would you like to move the staff recommendation? There's a motion on the staff, to approve staff recommendation. Is there a second? Second that? Second by Ms. Watkins. Under debate and discussion, Madam Vice Mayor, you may open. I hadn't intended to speak to this. It was on the consent agenda. And I think that's why we didn't get a lot of public correspondence in opposition on the consent agenda. It's generally assumed that we'll just kind of move forward with this item. I would like to say, I saw this sticking out of Mr. Brokaw's pocket, and I'm sure many of us have those. There's Tesla's driving around that are filming us everywhere we go. Everywhere we go, we are being filmed and recorded and tracked whatever we're doing, right? To me, this tool is something that our local law enforcement can use to help keep us safe. I've been victim of, had my family been victim of, friends, businesses, victims of various crimes throughout the years. And to me, after meeting with the chief and understanding how it works, it seems like a tool that can have in their tool belt to help keep the community safe. And when it was brought before public safety, I really supported it then and I support this now. So thank you. Thank you. Ms. Brown is recognized. Thank you, Mayor. I'm gonna go ahead and ask a few questions now. Some of them have been answered from other council members' questions. Some points have been raised that I also have questions about and so I'm gonna just start there. I do have a few comments I'd like to make before we take a vote. So on the question of cost, we have a cost for it. We have some estimate of what they'll cost to maintain over time. But I am interested in better understanding what the actual cost will be for the department to maintain, use, and the other associated costs. And I'm thinking in particular about related question. So one question on costs for ongoing, what are we looking at here? It is general fund money that's gonna be spent for this. Two, well, and this is cost, but also how will this happen? Training officers to use this technology. How will officers be trained? And we don't have the guidelines yet produced. I'd also like to know how will officers be trained to ensure that they are not misused? I'm not suggesting this to say that, we're looking for people who are gonna misuse it intentionally, but we've heard it happens. We know it happens. In some cases, intentionally others, there's a breach. What kind of training will help us, members of the public be assured that the data will not be used inappropriately? I'm gonna have the principal management analyst discuss the cost part of this. Mayor, council, thank you for the opportunity to clarify on the cost. Each unit that we're looking to acquire costs $3,000 per unit per year. That includes the data management, the maintenance. It includes all of that. The only thing that's not included is the one time installation costs, which ranges between $150 and $650, depending on how complicated. If Flock has to come in and install their own infrastructure in order to securely place the camera, that costs more money. If we can use existing infrastructure, city-owned, that will cost less, and that's it. So the $84,000 would cover 14 cameras for a two-year contract, which is a minimum amount of time. And that does not include installation costs since that is unknown, since we don't know the complexity of that, but it would be between $150 to $650 per unit. So just to be, if I could, try to clarify here, that's the cost for the Homeland Security Grant readers. You are talking about an additional number of readers. It would be the same cost per unit. Sure. And so part of this will be general fund, part of this will be paid for through the grant, that's the intention here, and then ongoing the city general fund would pay for maintenance after the grant is up. That is correct, although there are opportunities yearly to go after a grant like this, and since this piece of equipment is applicable to this particular grant, as far as protection of the community, then we could potentially get approved for additional funding to extend the lease program. Okay, I have, thank you. Another question, I mentioned training and in relation to the cost of this, but I'd like to hear more about how officers will be trained. Yeah, I think the goal would be to bring in a flock safety and have them trained. So we have a group of officers, supervisors, managers, they sort of, we have a train the trainer program so we don't have to continually bring the company back to train just a small number of personnel. So the goal would be to have flock safety come in, do a training for not only managers, supervisors and officers. The platform itself is very simple, it's really easy to walk through as far as the different components that the image captures. And the biggest thing is really, if you don't put in a case number or an incident number, it does not activate the search, it will give you an alert that you need that information. So it is very simple to work the platform. Thank you. Now I wanna ask, because in addition to my concerns about privacy and civil liberties, I have concerns about efficacy here and what the trade-off is, right? If we're doing something that is, what we know is going to lead to additional surveillance, it is going to, you know, these things do have predictive capabilities and so while we're not talking about, the technology does, I've read quite a bit on it. And so we're saying we're not gonna use that, but as the mayor has suggested in the questions asked, there's a lot of really kind of generalized, it feels very open-ended. It feels not fully baked. And so there's a lot of potential for, I hear you say, well, that's not gonna happen or we won't allow that, but I don't see in the guidelines, I don't see that. In terms of efficacy, I'd like to ask some questions about our own experience. They have been deployed. How many of, how many hot list hits are we getting? Can you give us some information about how this has been? I wanna be convinced this is effective and I'm not based on the information I have available to me, so I'd like to hear about our own experience. I recognize that the studies kind of writ large, it's very difficult. The studies I've seen have shown no correlation between the use of these things and actual solving of crime. So I'd like to know about our own experience. If we have, how many crimes have been solved? As a result. I will give you one example. There was a homicide in the city of Fremont that included a five-year-old girl. They had the vehicle plate entered into the flock system. When that vehicle passed the camera down on Third Street, our officers were received an alert. That information was immediately relayed to officers working patrol that day and they stopped the vehicle as it was leaving the city going over Highway 17. All four suspects, three or four suspects were taken into custody and handed over to Fremont Police Department. Okay, so that's one. Just wondering about the- I can give you another one. I'd like to actually have a better sense of the numbers. I mean, the examples are compelling. I understand that they're important, but I'd like to know through our use of automated license plate readers so far in the city what have been the outcomes in terms of crime solving? Crime solving. So I did not capture the information from flock. The current camera that we have now is a flock camera, but we got it as a loaner from Nick Rick, which it's an acronym for Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. So it's actually Nick Rick's camera, but it is a flock camera. So we're not in contract with flock to produce the information like we showed earlier that Watsonville Police Department has access to. As far as total number of hits or total number of plates run in a 30-day period or a year or whatever you would wanna capture there. So we can't access data about whether or not these have been efficacious in the city of Santa Cruz until we approve moving forward with a bunch more. That's what I'm hearing you say, and I don't agree with that. It feels like that's information that would be helpful to have. I don't disagree. What I'm saying is that we're not in a contract with flock, so they're not necessarily in a business decision with us to produce the data, and the camera itself was lent to us from a different company. So that's part of the answer of why we don't have that data right now. I think I'm gonna stop asking my questions because my sense is that they won't be answerable given what you just said. So I'll just make a couple of comments here. I recognize that it seems like it's an enticing proposal. And we see that these technologies have been, there's a huge uptake over the past two decades. We know this, but what we don't have is information about the extent to which they have actually led to successful prosecution of crimes. And the one study that I've seen for Piedmont, California suggests that within the degree of statistical probability over a 16-year period, 0.03% increase in investigations. So for me, the trade-off to really put technology in place that we don't know what's gonna happen. We don't know how it's gonna affect individuals' lives. We don't know what collective impact it's gonna have. I'm not prepared to do that. So I'm, for philosophical reasons, for privacy and civil liberties reasons, I'm opposed. I don't think this is an efficacious project. And I think it's just, everything I hear when I talk to people is these are revenue sinks. So just to, I'll end there. That it's just, there's no, it's not cost effective for us to do this. We're not gonna get anything out of it. I'll leave it there. Thank you. Me, a couple of points here. One is, I'm wondering if the Vice Mayor, who is the maker of the motion on the table to accept and move ahead with this, would be willing to accept a substitute motion which would continue this item to our December 12th meeting. And let me ask you that. And then if you are, I'd be glad to open on this. Or if you'd like a further explanation, I'd be glad to do it. I just have one quick question first, if that's okay. My question is, let's say if you're driving down 41st Avenue, the red light cameras, can you explain what kind of information those are capturing? How is it similar or dissimilar to this? Do you know? I don't, actually I don't. I think quite honestly, I think it's actually capturing more information because they end up sending you a notice in the mail. So then somebody, whether it's the camera itself or the police department, separately runs the license plate to determine where to send it. The other piece to that is that I believe those cameras actually capture images because as somebody said earlier, they were very accurate. It's not the car that commits the crime, it's the driver, right? And so that's why in this particular system, it's simply a pointer system. It's just a piece to one of our tools, potential tools, a camera that you're talking about at some point has to be able to prove that you were actually the driver that drove through the red light. Right, and so I think that's just a little final point or question I'd like to just bring to everyone's attention. Okay, you don't agree with this, but you do go to Capitola, like they're capturing you there. And so it's just, to me it just seems a little ridiculous to say that the point, the reason you don't want this is to protect our privacy when it's happening everywhere. To that end, I'll let you speak and I'll continue the item if that will make the rest of my colleagues feel happy to get more information. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. Is that agreeable to the second of the motion? Could you explain your, you mentioned it. Certainly, I'd be glad to do that. Are you going to second? Would you like me to explain it first or would you like second? So my view is this, that as this sits here today, I can't find my way clear to vote for this. I think I might be able to on the 12th if we can continue this and we can in a more complete way, Chief, discuss potential amendments to your policy that you have here with regard to operationalizing this grant, should we apply for it and should it be received? And there's no surprises here. The items that I've raised with you during our colloquy here would be the items that I would like to discuss at greater length. That may get me to a point, but presumably that would get me to a point anywhere where I may be able to vote for this. But as it sits today, and I want to thank the vice mayor, if that's acceptable to you and the second of the motion, that now is a substitute motion before us. And that would be my desire to continue the item to our December 12th meeting, have the opportunity for anyone who wishes to, to engage you in discussions. For my part, those discussions will go to the issues we've already discussed here in open session and see if there are changes to the policy with regard to operationalizing this, which might address the concerns that have been raised. I can see the city attorney is hovering at his microphone. Thank you, mayor. I would just recommend, should that be the direction that the agenda description include a review of the policy itself as opposed to merely accepting of this grant application and authorizing the... Clear to you, Ms. Bush? It is. Clear. Agreeable to the maker of the motion? Second? Agreeable? Any objection? Just follow up briefly. Today would not be an appropriate time to direct modifications to the policy because it's not on your agenda. Exactly. We can engage in those conversations and when it comes back, then that would be the appropriate time and place. Further on this item, Ms. Brown? Just really quickly, I do want to make the point that what I see is the difference between a fixed camera for red lights or speeding, those images are captured when people actually violate the law. It's very different than just tracking people and thinking about how are we gonna figure out which red Mazda, right? When nine out of 10 of them are not involved, it's a very different use of the technology. So that's where I just wanted to make that clear. Chief, my last comment is this. I have great faith in you and the women and men who work in our police department. I do not believe that you would do things that are untoward. I know you, you are a known quantity in our community. I have great respect for you. We are, however, a city of laws, not a city of individuals. And so before we move forward on this, I wanna make sure we engage in more conversation with each other about this. Clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. If I could just really quick, the turnaround is gonna be really tight for the 12th. The packet does go out in a week and a half. We'll have it for you before then. Council Member Newsom? Aye. Brown? Aye. Vodkin? Aye. Brunner? Aye. Calentary Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? Aye. And Mayor Keely? Aye. Motion passes and it's ordered. We're on item 21. And this is an appeal from the Planning Commission approval of a development proposal at 1800 Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz. Let me, for those of you unfamiliar with the process, let me explain how this will work today. What we have is an item in front of us on appeal from a decision of the Planning Commission. First thing we will do is we will receive a staff report. That'll take 10 minutes or so. Next thing we will do is we will acknowledge Ms. Bone who is here as the appellant on this item. She will have up to 20 minutes to speak on this item. Xander Cameron, who is the applicant on the project, will then have 20 minutes to provide such comments as they wish to make on this. Council members will then have the ability to ask questions. The public will have the opportunity to make comments. Then Ms. Bone, following that, will be given a five minute period of time to provide a rebuttal. So the appellant has two bites at the apple. The applicant has one bite at the apple. Council members and the public also will be engaged in this. Let me begin by recognizing Mr. Bain for a staff presentation. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Excuse me. Ryan Bain, senior planner. And let me go ahead and share. Is there someone else that's sharing? Here we go, thank you. So good afternoon. What we have before us this afternoon is a consideration of an appeal of a Planning Commission approval for our project at 1800 Soquel Avenue. Excuse me. Just to familiarize everyone with the site location, it's about a 0.81 acre project site consists of three parcels located on the southeast corner of Hagman and Soquel Avenue. There's commercial uses that surround the site with the exception of residential uses across the 15 foot alleyway to the south, the alleyway right here. The site has had a number of different uses over the past few years, including used car dealership that's currently operating, a restaurant and other auto related uses. There are currently no trees on the site, though there are three trees along Soquel Avenue that are proposed to be retained as part of the project. So the project consists of a four story mixed use, building, at grade parking, street level retail along Soquel Avenue and 84 flexible density residential units above. In terms of the permits that are involved with the application, there's a demolition authorization permit to demolish the existing buildings on the site, a boundary adjustment to basically merge the three parcels that are involved as part of the project, a design permit and special use permit which are required as part of the zoning code for mixed use projects and for the flexible density units over 16 units and then a density bonus request which will involve some waivers which I'll get to later. So mentioning the density bonus, the base density that was calculated was 67 units. The developers entitled to 32.5% density bonus for 89 units, as I mentioned, it's only 84 units. They're not taking advantage of the full density bonus but as part of that, seven units are required to be provided at the very low income, 50% AMI and 7%, I should say seven at low income which is 80% AMI. So with that being said, that also meets the city's 20% inclusion area requirement of 14 affordable units. So this is a look at the site plan, kind of updated site plan since the planning commission. There's been some changes that I'll discuss a little bit later but the vehicular access to the garage is provided via the 15-foot alleyway that runs along the south side connecting Hagman and Forest Avenue to the east. The first floor consists of 2,889 square feet of retail space along the Soquel frontage including an outdoor dining area for potential future restaurant or food service. And additionally, the residential lobby and access to the above residence units is along Soquel Avenue. Here's just a rendering looking from the Soquel frontage and this is also a Northwest elevation of the project. And then the residential units, as I mentioned, will be located on levels two through four with second floor also including a large podium area with open space, seating, landscaping. And in terms of the 84 flexible density units, half of them, 42 will be 432 square foot studios and the other half would be 615 square foot one bedrooms. So the planning commission heard the project on September 21st. I should mention over the course of the review of the project, planning staff had encouraged the applicant to incorporate additional retail space along Soquel Avenue. I think originally when submitted, they had about 1400 square feet or so located right there at the corner. They did respond and increased it to 1900 square feet. And then prior to the planning commission meeting, we added a condition that basically would require them to provide additional retail along Soquel. In response, the applicants, just prior to the planning commission meeting, did a revised plan and added almost 3000 square feet of retail or should increase it to almost 3000 square feet of retail. But also as part of that, there was some moving around for the floor plan. So there was a storage was reduced from about 1700 square feet to 14,000 cubic feet, I should say, open space was reduced from about 7,000 to 6,700. And then there was a 200 square feet of indoor common open space that was removed. So I'll get to this a little later, but there's amendments that, these amendments also coincide and required additional waivers as part of the density bonus. So at the planning commission meeting, they approved the project on a four to one vote, finding that the project was consistent with the community commercial general plan designation and policies consistent with the Eastside Business Area Improvement Plans and then also granted the density bonus waivers. So the waivers, there are six waivers total, one to exceed the maximum height and the CC zoning allows three stories, 40 feet, maximum height as part of the density bonus waiver. They're asking for four stories, 46 feet in height for the proposed project, floor ratio 1.75, they're proposing 2.45, bike parking 84 would be required and they're providing 73. Usable open space, you can see there's about 1200 and so it's about half of what would normally be required for the way as part of the waiver storage is reduced and then the indoor common spaces I had mentioned earlier. Also as part of the planning commission approval, there were some conditions of approval that were revised. These are fairly minor, but for instance, this one has to do with the timing of demolition, clarifying the bike parking requirements, final colors at the building permit stage. And then these conditions of approval were added as part of the planning commission approval, one being that they require a management plan for the apartments that the alleyway be repaved between Hagman and Forrest Avenues for the entire length and then also regarding the alleyway, they crafted a condition that the applicant worked with the city to basically provide some possible safety improvements along the alleyway on the private portion to help with the use of the alley and making it safer. And then also a condition regarding adding two additional trees along Soco Avenue, assuming that it's feasible at the building stage and working with the city departments, excuse me. So following the planning commission approval on October 2nd, we received an appeal from Deborah Bone representing the concerned neighbors of Hagman Avenue and nearby streets. The appeal letter discusses several reasons for the grounds of the appeal with the three main issues kind of boiling down to a transportation study requirements, mobility goals, and then the alley safety and access. So in regards to the traffic study, the appellant asserts that the calculations and assumptions in the transportation screening memo that was prepared by Hexagon Transportation Consultants erroneously determined that the project does not need a traffic impact study. So the city requires a traffic impact study to be prepared for any project that is estimated to generate 50 or more net vehicle trips during the PM peak hour. So this is considered an objective standard applied to all city projects. And under the Housing Accountability Act, the city cannot require a traffic impact study as part of a residential project that generates fewer than 50 net peak hour trips. Let's see. I was just gonna mention if I go back. So just to kind of clarify what the screening memo basically states is that the actual gross, or the gross PM peak hour trips actually does not exceed 50. And then when you take into consider the net, including credits for the existing auto dealer, it would be about 40 PM peak hour trips. And then there's a restaurant that's been there for a long time. And that was not actually even included in there when technically it probably should be included. And so it actually reduced it even further to 10 PM peak hour trips. So in regards to mobility goals, and this is in our general plan, the opponent asserts that the Santa Cruz General Plan has numerous goals that are relevant to the project and are not being met. So the city's analysis indicates that the project is consistent with the mobility goals presented in the general plan, as well as the objective standards. There are a number of improvements to the public right of way adjacent to the site and on the site that enhances mobility and meets the mobility goals in the general plan. This includes a dedication of over 1,600 square feet of right of way to widen the roadway, relocation of new traffic signals and poles there at the intersection, including a, I should say, including a new dedicated left turn lane from Hagman onto Soquel Avenue, expanding the sidewalk to 10 feet along Soquel and eight foot along Hagman, undergrounding all utilities, paving, as I mentioned, paving the entire length of the alleyway, two new street lights, one along Hagman and one along Soquel, and then there's also new street trees as well. So all of these really do help improve the mobility around this site. So they, as I mentioned, everything here makes a safer intersection at Hagman and Soquel Avenues, more level streets with the widened sidewalks, the level of service improvements at the intersection. And then one thing I was gonna add is, including a new recommended condition of approval, just for more clarification, in coordination with and subject to the approval of public works, the applicant shall refine the Hagman Northbound left turn lane design at the building permit stage and provide new lane striping in the street to ensure proper queue storage and circulation. So that's a new condition that staff is recommending as part of this. And then kind of the third main subject of the appeal is the alley safety and access. The appeal asserts that there are significant safety concerns regarding the use of the alley that abuts the site to the south, which is right along here, connecting Hagman and Forest Avenue. The 15 foot alley basically has historically been used, which a lot of alleys that are, you know, about a major commercial corridor. Basically, these commercial properties use the alley for circulation, as you can see. Both of these parking lots use the alley and require the alley, use of the alley in order to get circulation in and off the site. Also for deliveries to the rear of the building. So the alley is, that's generally what alleys have been used for along these commercial sites. Mention also there's also a single family house that does access the alley from the garage. As is common practice, as I mentioned, the alley is incorporated into the overall design of these sites. It's really the best way to provide access to commercial uses as opposed to creating new driveway approaches along Soquel Avenue. So as currently proposed, the project effectively widens the alley from 15 feet to about 22 and a half feet for the length of the subject site and provides more room for cars to pass each other and to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. Additionally, the planning commission added conditions that the alley be paved. As I had mentioned, and since the planning commission hearing the applicant has been working with the public works and planning staff to address the condition that was added about creating some safety measures for the alleyway. And then this is actually a, this has been an updated site plan since the planning commission to kind of address some of those issues that were brought up. So this is, what they've done here is they've originally had a diagonal spacing here. They've changed it to perpendicular parking spaces. So basically cars can, aren't forced to only exit toward forest, but also they can back up and leave toward Hagman. The driveway approach here at Hagman has been widened from 15 feet to 20 feet. And then a loading zone, which was a topic of discussion that the planning commission meeting has been added here for deliveries. And then also there's been striping in a wider drive aisle for the garage entrance to for the project. So discussions with the applicant are on the improvements to the alley are ongoing. And other things have been mentioned as possibilities of helping with safety include potential convex mirrors here at the entrance. So basically there's, you can see if anyone's coming down the alley as you're exiting the parking garage, potentially warning sensors and down lighting along the building onto the alley for safety at night. So these are all things that have just been discussed. So the development will implement the city's vision of the Soquel East Zone area as expressed by the general plan and the East side business improvement plan area. It provides a mixed use project with retail funding Soquel Avenue and 14 much needed affordable units as well as 70 market rate residential units. And as conditioned, the proposed project meets the requirements of the zoning ordinance and the general plan. So staff is recommending that the council adopt the resolution to deny the appeal and uphold the planning commission's acknowledgement of the environmental determination and approve the related permits as part of the application based on the findings listed in the draft resolution and the conditions that are attached to that resolution. I'm available for any questions as well as public work staff is here to answer any questions as a lot of these appeal is generally having to do with public works issues. Mr. Bain, thank you very much for those, for that staff presentation. I think what we will do at this point is we'll proceed through the appeal rebuttal. We'll receive public comment, council members' comments as we move along. Ms. Bone, good afternoon. And well, oh, you're not Ms. Bone. Good afternoon. And Ms. Bone, this is Ms. Dubin. I am actually Deborah and this is Rena. Good afternoon. Can you hear me okay? Good afternoon, Mayor, council, developers and community. Today I'm asking you to set aside all the other pressing issues which we know you have very many of and just focus on one intersection and one development. And thank you so much for taking time to hear our appeal. Again, my name is Deborah Bone. I live on Hageman Avenue. I've been there for 34 years. I'm here with Rena Dubin who lives on Forest Avenue and many of our neighbors are in the audience or you've seen their letters in your packet from the previous hearing. Our concern as we represent over 100 households that live close to and regularly use the Hageman, Trevison and Soquel Avenues and the alley at Forest Avenue. Please take a minute just to visualize this intersection. You're driving east on Soquel Avenue. You've just passed Morrissey, Frederick Street. You see the Walgreens on the right. Just across the street, across Hageman, once home to May Sushi is the site of this proposed new housing at 1800 Soquel Avenue. In a minute you're gonna dip down past Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Capitola Road. Now for many people, this corner is a pass-through. For us, it is home. We need you to help us make this corner safe. To clarify, we recognize the need for housing. We know the state regulations have changed. We're not here to stop the development. We've asked for a transportation study to highlight the many safety issues that we witness on a daily basis. You have said by statistical analysis that this project does not meet the 50 vehicle peak hour trips threshold for such a study. However, the City of Santa Cruz has defined this as a critical intersection and we did find a memo from 2021 entitled Transportation Study Requirements for Development that clearly states that, quote, any critical intersection receiving 25 additional trips per hour during AM or PM peak hours as a result of the project should be analyzed. So we're asking that you consider with us the impacts of this proposed development. As longtime residents, we have expertise about this corner. We remember how many times the utility poles have been damaged by drivers who missed the curve where eastbound Soquel veers unexpectedly to the left. We have been blocked often enough during construction or accidents to ponder seriously what an emergency evacuation would be like for our neighborhood. At off-peak hours, we routinely watch cars speeding at 40, 50, 60 miles per hour, hardly a safe zone for bikes or pedestrians. We all have stories of near-miss encounters at one or another of the dangerously misaligned corners. I think you guys know about how misaligned those corners are if you've ever tried to get from Trevitz and to Hageman and get in and out of Walgreens parking lot. We are very grateful for this opportunity to bring our safety concerns to you, our elected representatives. If a transportation study had been done early in the planning process, these concerns would have been apparent. So now today, we ask that you take seriously our experiential knowledge about this corner and the adjacent alley. We want you actually to address the problems and use your authority to propose better mitigations, both in collaboration with the developers, and we really appreciate the efforts that have already been made. Many changes have happened since the planning, and we know that you're working with Public Works and we really are counting on you to help Public Works make good decisions about this corner. Every one of you has driven through this intersection. It doesn't take a study to imagine that adding more density will seriously impact this already burdened corner. 25,000 cars per day were counted in 2014. That's 10 years ago, especially for those of us entering and leaving Soquel Avenue at the Hageman Corner, soon to include those residents of 84 more units coming onto our little street and onto Soquel. The proposed development nearly doubles the number of households using this corner. We are concerned about the safety of our own neighbors and for everyone who drives or walks or rides a bike on Soquel Avenue, whether from Arana Gulch, through the alley, or from the many connector streets between Morrissey Boulevard and Capitola Road. You all know that traffic funnels from one side of town to the other along this section of Soquel Avenue, it is the only route besides Highway 1 directly through our neighborhood and it is our only way in and out of our homes. Please do not treat this project as a standalone. There's serious cumulative impact from all the developments east of the San Lorenzo River, as well as another proposed development on Hageman Avenue. And yet we do believe that there are practical solutions. We recognize that the proposed boundary adjustment and perimeter right-of-way are welcome improvements that do allow for modest widening adjacent to the project. In addition, we strongly support the newly proposed wider garage driveway. We thought it was a 30-foot curb cut. Today, you mentioned a 20-foot curb cut. We really want to make sure those cars going in and out are not gonna hit each other. It does go a long way towards making traffic in and out of the garage safer and it does protect neighborhood uses of the alley. However, as proposed, we question whether there will be enough width on either Hageman or Soquel to fully implement the needed bike and turn lanes. In our fondest dreams, the footprint of the corner retail would be moved back a bit to correct the age-old misalignments at that intersection. More realistically, we highly recommend a compromise. Consider making the sidewalks a little bit smaller so the corner doesn't stick out so far. Commit to making a protected bike line, a real true protected bike lane. Provide adequate turn lanes and traffic signals on all four corners. Implement recommended safety features in the alley. My neighbor, Rina Dubin, has prepared a slideshow so that you can understand our concerns in greater detail. We believe that this is a unique opportunity for the city to implement solutions. Once the building and sidewalks are there, it will be very hard to change. We are counting on you, our elected officials, to prioritize our neighborhood safety and provide direction to the developers and public works to make this even better than what's been proposed so far. And I do have a handout that just summarizes some of our suggestions. We're really hoping that you will take them to public works, work with the developers. We're not against having this housing on our corner. We're worried about the 100 people who are gonna be coming and going from our very single traffic light. How do I do this? Do I click for this? Good afternoon. Did I click for the slide on the mouse? Is that how I work? I'm sorry, I said it again. How do I work this slideshow? I did. Oh, okay. Sure. Hi. I was told by a city staffer that the only way to get the alarming safety issues surrounding this project fixed was to appeal. So a lot of neighbors pitched in many to buy the appeal just to have this chance to speak with you. Many care deeply, but couldn't be here on a Tuesday in the middle of the day. Thank you. This appeal is a plea to add modifications to this project so that our real safety concerns are addressed. This project makes an already dangerous intersection worse and we are alarmed about the safety and livability of our street. This is fixable. As one neighbor says, all the residents here are asking is for a better solution, which in reality is a more sustainable solution for all involved. There is a better way. The intersection of Sokellen Hagamon is a traffic nightmare because as a neighbor puts it, this block is a bottleneck. Three main arteries pass through Santa Cruz, water, Soquel and Broadway, which ends at Frederick Street to become one road, Soquel. Traffic here is already at a gridlock. Don't take our word for it. The latest study we could find from 2014 says that this intersection receives upwards of 24,000 trips per day. That's nine million a year. And that figure was from almost a decade ago, as Deborah said. Part of our frustration is that there are multiple developments proposed in our neighborhood that will affect our intersection, this designated critical intersection. And just to say, I understand the need for housing. I understand the density laws handed down by the state. As some of you know, I personally have spent thousands of volunteer hours advocating for affordable housing projects. And generally I'm in favor of developments like this one with studios and what bedroom rentals. But we need you, our city council, to understand the cumulative impact and act upon it. Slide, please. Here's the east side. Slide. We have this, no, another, yeah. We have this development at 1800 Soquel. Slide. The one at the Car Wash. Slide. The one at 515 Soquel. Slide. Another one on Water Street. Slide. Three more on Ocean Street. And another. And another. And another. And another. There are also townhomes planned. And another slide. Half a block down on Hagamon. And I know these are all separate projects. Slide. But when you start, nope, go back. There we go. When you start adding all this housing, mandated or no, you need to be paying attention to the infrastructure, which is already at capacity. The cumulative impact on our designated critical intersection will be way more than this 24,000 trip figure. This area is already dangerous. You need to fix it when you have the opportunity. And that opportunity is now, today, before the development is completed. This area of Soquel is dangerous. We know how congested this intersection is during high traffic times. But what I learned from Quinton Rowland with Vision Zero is that what makes this intersection particularly dangerous is the high speeds that people travel in the off times of the day and night. Slide, please. Quinton easily tracks speeds of 53, slide. 55, slide. And even 60 miles per hour in the middle of the day. The cars you see in the photo are not the speeding cars, they're long gone. But do notice the cyclist and the dog walker and the person waiting for the bus right alongside the cars that are traveling at the freeway speeds. What makes this intersection especially worrisome, slide, is how it jogs strangely in all directions. Note how Soquel curves and narrows on the Capitola side while Hagamon and Trevathen are misaligned. It's difficult for a driver, especially one who is speeding, to anticipate the jog along Soquel. People naturally assume they should keep going in the same line. It's easy for drivers to drive straight into the utility pole, it happens, and into the bike lane. The current design plans for a 10 foot wide tree line sidewalk on Soquel. However, the 10 foot wide sidewalk is very little for the neighbors because the adjacent bike lane is too small. When the bike lane is too tight for comfort or safety, bicycles and fast moving e-bikes ride on the wider sidewalks and they endanger pedestrians, slide. My daughter was hit by a cyclist right here at the bus stop. The cyclist was riding on the sidewalk and she was getting off the bus. And the new renters of this development are expected to take the bus or walk or bike as the state allows this development to be under parked. There isn't even one space for per unit. So this is our first ask, slide. Reduce the proposed 10 foot sidewalk and add a protected bike lane instead. It's better for cyclists, pedestrians, and vehicles. I'm not sure what's on the paper, but this is our first ask. Slide, please. If the bicycle lane is enlarged and a protective barrier is installed, drivers will be able to see how the lanes curve and narrow when driving through the intersection along Soquel. Paint is not enough. Vision Zero has some great additional recommendations to improve safety on this intersection, but the time to make the improvements is now. Once the development is built and the sidewalk is in place and the trees are planted, we've lost. This is a golden opportunity to make the area safer. A cyclist has already died on this corner, so we need you to do what's needed now so that it doesn't happen again. And slide, please. Speaking of this corner, let's look at it from the Hageman side because it's really skewed. See how the Hageman streets and the Treventon streets are misaligned? This development changes the traffic flow from the light and the alleyway, the egress from our neighborhood, and creates some serious evacuation safety concerns. Slide. Our streets, forest, and Hageman make a horseshoe shape with a cul-de-sac. There are about 90 houses. As one neighbor says, you must understand forest and Hageman. Everyone who lives here has to get onto Soquel, which is super busy to go anywhere. Unlike small neighborhood streets that have multiple ways to get in and out, we only have the one cross street, which is Soquel. Slide. We are dependent upon the alley and the light at the intersection of Hageman and Soquel to be able to get into and out of our homes. Whenever there is traffic on Soquel, we can't leave our streets without the light and the alley. If PG&E is doing any kind of upgrade or road work or you have a water pipeline project or a Murray Street bridge being rebuilt, we can't leave our homes without the light and the alley. The public alley is, as a neighbor calls it, an important traffic corridor that mitigates some of the worst traffic in the neighborhood. Slide. So when it was presented to the Planning Commission, this is what we thought the project looked like, and we do acknowledge that the developer did listen to our concerns. Slide. And this is the proposed updated design, and it's not perfect, but it is better than the original, but we still believe that the public alley should not have to accommodate the exit or the entrance at all. We're also unclear exactly what, if this is the final version, what it's going to look like once it gets further down the road, which is very alarming to us. So let me walk you through this. Slide. Here is the alleyway. It's a one lane alley, but traffic holds in both directions. It's 15 feet wide currently, which is big enough for one fire truck, but not wide enough for two cars to pass each other. Here's how one neighbor describes the alley. I live at 178 Hagamon Avenue, and I ride my bike down the alleyway twice a day with my child on the bike. I have used the alley every day for 10 years. It's our neighborhood's outlet to get to ironic Gulch. Almost every time I ride, I see people riding their bike or walking their dog or pushing their kid in a stroller as many people use the alleyway. Slide. This one lane two-way traffic works because there are only 90 houses on our two streets. The development is 84 units, which is in effect doubling the amount of traffic on the alleyway. Slide. The development does not use Soquel for its entrance unlike the previous developments that were there. It throws all of 504 daily trips onto Hagamon and the alley. Slide. You've got people using the development going one way and people coming in the alleyway to get into the development coming the other way. So we're not entirely sure how they're not expected to bump into each other. Slide. Here's the updated version, but we still have questions. What if a car is coming in from forest? What about the cars that will be parked outside backing up into the alley to make a left turn? Slide. Keep our alley a public alleyway, not a private driveway. Slide. And then here's the intersection on Hagamon and Soquel. If we need to go towards Morrissey, we need to make a left at the light. Most times of the day, we cannot cross Soquel without the light at Hagamon allowing us to make a left turn. It's dangerous. So here we are, we have neighbors from forest in Hagamon needing to make a left. You have the Walgreens exit for people making a left back onto Soquel. Slide. You have this very wonky intersection at Shrevethin that is at an angle and difficult to see. Slide. You also have pedestrians crossing as one neighbor says I have had cars almost hit me many times. Slide. We also have the new townhome development coming in here at 162 Hagamon, which we know is separate, but it's going to add the cars. Slide. And you have this project with 504 daily trips. The light at Hagamon is long. There we go. The light at Hagamon is long. The cars, the previous slide please. The cars from this development will as one neighbor explains back up at the Hagamon light. It will likely back up the car traffic enough that it blocks the alleyway. Then what happens? The existing neighbors can't leave, the people who live in the development can't leave, and we are all in effect trapped. Slide. The developer has tried to create two lanes here, one at the left and the other going straight into the right. Unfortunately, the divide is only one car length. Can I keep going for a few minutes? Thank you. This brings us to our next ask. Slide. Make the lane divide longer so that the cars on Hagamon can actually go onto Soquel in one light cycle. Slide. We think this can be done. One suggestion is reducing the sidewalk on Hagamon from the proposed eight feet. We would rather some of that space go towards making sure we can get out of our street. Slide. This leads us to our final concern about the Hagamon corner specifically. Because of the misalignment at Trevathon to Hagamon, the corner is very sketchy for pedestrians. The angle's too sharp. Here's how a Hagamon neighbor described it. Because the crosswalk is so far to the right of the actual intersection on our side, drivers making right turns from Hagamon onto Soquel encounter a crosswalk where one is not normally expected. Just as pedestrians begin their very short time to cross. Slide. This project design will make the safety situation much worse by placing a four story building directly on the corner. So visibly, you won't be able to see when you're trying to turn where that car is. This is the developer's photo, but where that car is, you're trying to make a turn and you go right directly into that pedestrian walkway. We do appreciate that the developer is curving the corner of Hagamon and Soquel, but we need a larger curve and a larger setback here to help Trevathon and Hagamon visibly align. Slide. The boundary adjustments for this parcel are already being changed and a few more feet here would make such an important difference. Slide. We need a larger setback and alignment on this corner to protect pedestrians. Slide. I'm not a safety expert, but do you know who is? The professionals who do transportation studies. This development will have a huge impact on this designated critical intersection. This is our only opportunity to get it right. Please make this development safe for residents the old and the new. Thank you. Let me now recognize Xander Cameron to provide rebuttal. Good afternoon, sir. Mr. Arthur, good afternoon. I have not met you all, so nice to meet you all. But I'd like to thank you all for listening to us today and just want to let you all know that working with planning has been an actual joy as a developer. I've rarely ever said that in my life. So thank you guys very much. You guys have been responsive. I'm not gonna take a lot of your time. I just want to remind everyone of the number of things that we have done at the request of planning and the neighbors. We've pivoted within 48 hours to add more commercial. Did that not happily, but we did it. We've done, we've given up some of our land and eased that corner. I think that's a pretty big move for us. That's not something we typically like to do to give up our land that we purchased. I'd like to thank the neighbors for their ideas on widening the entrance into the building. That was their idea and that was a great one. So it's nice to get feedback like that that we can actually work with. So that was helpful. In terms of the bike lane proposal, and we've talked with SAF about that, that's something that we'd be willing to talk about in the future. But let me remind you that that is gonna be that one quick spot of road. The rest of the street has nothing to do with that. So they'll be safe in front of our building. So that's something we're willing to talk about. I'm not sure we can give up any more of our property for that, but whatever we can do to help make that safer. I also remind you that we are neighbors. We are going to be neighbors going forward. We will own this project. Those 84 tenants will be our tenants. And so their safety is of maximal importance to us. I do hear about traffic that it's frustrating and it's, I think it's frustrating for everybody when we're doing what we can to improve what we have to work with. An entrance off Soquel, I just don't think works. It makes it even more dangerous and you'd be cutting through your bike lane that you want. And then people turning lanes, it would be backing up in both directions without, it just, I like the idea to not load up Hageman, but we've found through working with planning everyone, it doesn't, it doesn't work. So again, I'd like to thank you all for your time and I'm going to move on. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Mayor Keely and members of the city council. My name is Amra Morrison and I'm with the law firm of Wendell. I'm sorry, that was my, the former law firm. Fenimore Wendell and we represent 1800 Soquel in connection with this project's entitlements. And I apologize for the late letter that hopefully you all received this morning, but we did understand that their, the council was considering potentially the imposition of a new condition related to relocating access off of the alley onto Soquel. And so we wanted to just politely remind the council that there are, there are significant pieces of recent housing legislation that really do confine and constrict the council's ability to either condition or disprove the project. The project has been submitted under SB 330, which is the housing crisis act of 2019. And in connection with the project's application, preliminary application in September, that actually locked in or vested the rules and guidelines which were in effect at the time of the application submittal. So we understand from planning staff that there is a general plan mobility goal that discourages mid block access, such as one that is potentially being considered here on Soquel. I also wanted to point out that there is a recent density bonus law case called Bankers Hill versus city of San Diego, which essentially stands for the proposition that at least in connection with a density bonus project, councils or local agencies cannot step into the role as a project architect. The council and local agency is to evaluate the project as it's been proposed. And then I finally wanted to point out that the project has also been submitted, pursuant to the housing accountability act. And in order to deny or condition a project, a council has to make very specific findings related to a specific adverse impact. And that's got its own definition in the government code related to a public health or safety. And we think that the evidence is ample, as was presented to the Planning Commission that the current traffic does not pose a significant adverse impact to public health and safety. We certainly appreciate the appellant's concerns, but to now require that a traffic study be prepared, we think we assert is inconsistent with the Housing Accountability Act and also SB 330. So as Jim noted, we are certainly willing to work with planning staff relative to the bike lane. We've had very good discussions with staff and would anticipate that's gonna continue, assuming that the project is upheld and that the appeal is denied. So thank you and we're available to answer any questions that council might have. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is that the extent of the rebuttal? Thank you very much. This will be the opportunity for council members to ask their initial questions. Let me see if you will recognize the vice mayor. I wanna thank everybody that came out today and I wanna thank staff for meeting with us prior to this meeting to explain the nuances of the project and what's before us today. I did come up with three questions during the deliberations. And one of them is the idea of that one block bike lane. What are maybe Matt Starkey's or Nathan's thoughts on whether or not that would help with bicycle safety? Mr. Starkey, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Yeah, the bike lanes separated bike lane proposal is an interesting one. We are in the midst of undertaking our active transportation plan update city-wide. The volumes on SoCal are high as have been noted which would suggest that we do actually wanna have a separated bike lane on that corridor. I think that's a good suggestion and we've met with the development team to see if that's something we can fit into the existing distance between the building face and the bike lane line that's out there currently. I think it's something we can fit in a sort of interim condition if we move the sidewalk around a little bit and then we'll work through our active chance application plan to perhaps identify additional objective standards so that we can really carve out the space for that sort of treatment that we need corridor wide. So yes, it's a small segment of separated bike lane here but it is a step in the right direction. I think that leads me to my next question because I seem to remember in our objective design standards a certain standard sidewalk width. So if we were to reduce it here, how would that would be in ordinance with what we've already approved a few months back or how would that conflict with what we've already decided? We would have to accept us more narrow sidewalk on this frontage with the goal of just squeezing it in here when we have the opportunity but then when we do our objective standard update we'd wanna maintain that in large sidewalk plus add the extra width we need for the bike lane. So this section would be constrained but then in future proposals that come forward we would have asked for this additional width at the beginning. Okay, and then my final question is you know how Mission and Bay you can only cross like three sides of it? Has there been any thought about just removing that crosswalk altogether and making the one crosswalk on the other side just bigger and more visible? I think the idea here might actually be thinking about how we do this with our signal timing instead. One treatment we have is called a leading pedestrian interval and those give pedestrians a little bit of a head start in the intersection. So before the traffic light turns green to take a right turn we would have given the pedestrians a little bit of extra time to move out into the intersection and become more visible. I think the other note about there's a bus stop across the street. The need for pedestrian access here I think is really high so I wouldn't want to remove crosswalk necessarily and then just try to solve it with signal timing instead. Moving across to Dias here are the questions at this stage. Council Member Brunner. Just a quick question. Seeing the slide show that was presented by the appellant and the concerns of that whole intersection which some of it falls outside of this project but they're seeing an opportunity if work's going to be done and changes made at that intersection that it be done now. And so I'm just curious what city staff can say about the safety at that intersection the misaligned corners and what is in the works or in the plan to really address Soquel Avenue as a corridor and those safety concerns at that intersection for example, you know, other stop lights moving the crosswalk. Any of that outside of this project is anything? I think the improvements are really what have been talked about thus far with the realignment of the northbound approach to create better visibility across the street. The challenges with the alignment that are noted I think are actually more for the Walgreens side of the intersection just the way the angles come together where you'd need the spaces on the other side to allow that to line up a little bit better. I think this, what we've done on this side of the roadway is a good start but there is room for future improvement that's not in a project at the moment. For the question. Thank you. Council Member Watkins. I just have a follow up question if I may because I think if I'm also my line of questioning was similar to what council member Bruners was in terms of timing and sort of acknowledging that this is one project amongst a bigger stretch of need I guess transportation improvement need. So what's the timeline associated with some of those improvements or potential improvements outside of the scope of this project? And I don't want to deviate too far from what we're doing here tonight but I just want to put it in perspective like the Walgreens for example like some of the lights, et cetera. Yeah, that would have to be a project that's not identified currently. So there was not a plan to do those sort of improvements. The improvements we have before us are really just focused on the corner of the development wherever we align the curb line to make the visibility improved between the intersections there. But it's part of our general improvements for transportation, correct? Like we have strategies outlined as aspiration. Yeah, the aspiration is there. I think the addition of objective standards about separated bike lanes is a good step but there's not a specific project today, yes. But as other development happens on the quarter that's when we have opportunities. I wonder, I guess where I'm going with this is how to prioritize that given the traffic and knowing that there's only so much within this development and what's before us tonight but also thinking about it holistically in terms of our strategy with SoCal and what we're thinking about in general. And so how are we as a council able to weigh in on that in terms of timing and priority? I think our next sort of planning project that's coming forward is the Citywide Active Transportation Plan Update and the concerns we've heard about bicyclists and pedestrian safety on a quarter like SoCal would be a big focus there. And the timeline associated with that is? We're hopefully kicking it off in January. Okay, okay, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Council, excuse me, will you finish? Council Member Collentary Johnson is recognized. Council Member. Thank you. And I also want to thank those who came and the appellants for your presentation. Vice Mayor asked my question about the sidewalk and protected bike lanes but I wonder if staff could touch on the issue that was brought up by the appellants around the corner of Hageman and SoCal and the request for a wider, wider turnability and a larger setback. The staff speak to the challenges that, I mean, if that's feasible and if not, what are the challenges that would present? I think right now we're happy with the setback that's been established there, the curvature of the building, the setback of the curb line have all made visibility improved there. I don't think we need to ask for something additional at this time, we're happy with how that looks. And the concerns about the safety of the visibility? Yeah, the setback is what helps us achieve that the visibility. And then guys, I talked a little bit earlier, we have other treatments like thinking about how the signal timing works at that crosswalk in particular to help reduce some of those safety concerns. Thank you. Council Member? Good with that. Do you have further questions? Ms. Calentari-Johnson? No, that was it for now, thank you. Thank you. Mr. Butler, did you have further on this item? Thank you, Mayor Keely. Yes, I was just gonna provide a little bit more context to Council Member Calentari-Johnson's question about an additional setback. And I wanted to point out for the council the comments that the applicant's attorney, Amara, was making with respect to our ability to require those things that are not objective standards. You heard Matt Starkey, our transportation engineer, talk about the frontage and how in future projects, if we have objective standards, either in advance of the active transportation plan or through the active transportation plan, that would allow us to establish that greater dedication to be provided, but we have very limited ability to require that additional dedication, absent having those objective standards. So I wanted to point that out for the council. Thank you. Mr. Butler, don't go away. Let me ask the applicant a quick question. As I recall how you presented your asks, if you will, I think you said here's an ask and here's an ask and here's an ask. That's a summary in effect of this, is that right? They might be a little different. You know what, we worked on these separately. I mean, we had a lot of conversations together, but we each wrote our own, I wrote those objectives based on our conversations. The wording may not be identical to how Rina presented things, but they are a list of things that we feel would improve the situation. Does that help? Yeah, so essentially there's four things that we wanted. That's what you're asking. The protected bike lane, even if it's just on that corner there, we think it will really help the cars and pedestrians and cyclists. That's the four that are in there. Are there? Yes, and the alley, making sure that we have the alley protection, the corner alignments, and yeah, more understanding of that light and yes. So these four? Those four, yes. So you as the, jointly as the appellant. Yes. This is what you're asking for. Yes, thank you. Thank you, good. Okay, Mr. Butler, your turn in the barrel. All right, so let me see if I can work my way through this. If this application was here in 2017, let's go back in the way back machine. We're here with this exact same application. We're in 2017. My guess is, looking backwards, not only at this city, but other cities, the neighbors come in and say, here's a set of issues that we're concerned about. They're largely, if I get it correct, they're largely around traffic. It manifests itself in different ways. Here's something on Soquel, here's something in an alley, here's something on Hagam, and here's something someplace else, so it's really traffic. And if this was here, if we were here in 2017, look at the exact same project, I'm going to guess that what this city council or many other city councils in California at that time would have done is said, we need less units and more parking. That's what we're gonna do, because that's what the traffic is all about, is really how many units and how much parking and how do they get in and out and all that business? Am I okay so far? That would have been. That's correct, and that is also. The jurisdictions including this one did this in 2017. 2017 is when the laws really started to change. Now we're in 2023, and the state has passed 100 laws, and that's not a, that's an accurate statement, at least 100 laws in the last five years, which have their characterization knocked down barriers to development. Correct. And so today as we sit here and we want to deal with traffic, am I right in thinking, we don't have the option today legally to say, well, we're going to deal with this, is reduce the units and increase the parking. That's absolutely correct. We do not have that option. It is, everybody's absolutely clear that's not what we can do. So now we're going to try to do it some other way. And I want to have you step us through one through four here. Sure. And so let's take, and do you have the letter, sir? Do you have the letter? I don't have it, but I jotted down the community asks from the presentation, so I can go from that. I want to do it slightly differently because the community asks as they have indicated is just, okay, so I'm going to use your letter and assume that is what the appellants are asking for. Okay, I'm going to acknowledge you for 15 seconds. Come on. What is it you're trying to do here? 15 seconds. Yes. I want to submit, thank you, Mary Keely and the rest of the council members. I just want to remind the council that. Are you an appellant on this? Yes, I am also an appellant. Aimed appellant. I don't know if I'm added in. I just want to be sure of what we're doing here. Okay, go ahead, you got 15 seconds. But I live also on Hageman Avenue. I want to mention that there is also another project that is coming down the pike that you're probably familiar with on 162 Hageman Avenue, which is half a block away from this one. I could say you can do this later under public comment. Okay, well, I just did impact this because it's cumulative. I understand that, I understand that. All right, now back to you. Let's take item one, safe traffic flow. Items one through D. If the council chose to do all those things, could it do those things? You're talking A through D under number one? Number one, A through D. Dedicated turn lanes that are long enough to accommodate additional cars. You saw actually in that presentation that staff is recommending that the developer work with public works at the building permit and encroachment permit stage to evaluate the striping and provide for additional stacking. So the developer has agreed to that. Yes. B. Install green arrow left turn signal at Hageman. I'm assuming that's northbound left. And I believe that that is a planned as part of the, because there's a dedicated left and then there is a through and right for you planning on doing a left turn signal there. I recognize that. Hang on just a second. Mr. Butler, this way. What I'm trying to do is not understand whether the developer agrees to it. That's a separate question. I'm asking whether we have the legal authority on each of these items. So let's stay focused on that. One B, can we do that if we wanted to? Could we impose that as a condition? Over the objections of the developer. Over the objections of the developer. I do not believe we have an objective standard related to that. So no, we could not. One C. Coordinate cross traffic from Travis and to Hageman to avoid driver confusion, protected left turn and light timing. That is something that we can do internally. We can coordinate the light timing internally, but it's not something that the developer would do. Okay. With or without the objection, with or without the approval? One C. That was C. So one D. I'm sorry, excuse me, one D. Visible speed limit signs. Again, not something the developer needs to do. That's something our public works team can do. So one A through D. The only one we could, we could require. Let me help you out. Yeah. A, the developer has agreed to. Has agreed to. B, C and D are things that the city can do, but not require of the developer. Not require, but we could, we can do those things. They're not imposed on the developer. Those are things we could say we're doing. That's correct. We could do in effect on one A because the developer has said they agree with this. We can do everything one A through D. Correct. They can all be done. Let's go to number two. Legally they could be done, yes. Say it again. Legally they could be done. It's just who's responsible. Understood. City versus. Understood. Try to understand the legal situation we're in now versus five years ago. Completely understand. Okay. Two A. Provide a wider safer protected bike lane on Soquel heading east where the road jogs. You, yes, in that the developer indicated a willingness to not provide additional land, but to work with our public works department on where, on how wide that sidewalk is. So when the project comes through to the building permit stage that can be incorporated. Should it be the will of the council? Okay. I'm gonna ask the developers legal council to come forward for a moment or the developer either one whoever can speak authoritatively for the developer. Thank you. Good, good. Very good. Now both of you stay up here. You agree with that so far? Yes. Yeah, and I just checked with my client. You agree with that. They're amenable to that, yes. With two A as well? Yes. Okay, very good. Let's go to three. Mr. Butler, let's take those A through C. So three A is allowing 30-foot curb cut at the alley for wider two lane entry. We can require that on a legal perspective, on a policy perspective, a 20-foot drive line and a driveway there is gonna be safer in that the narrower aisle is gonna be navigated at a slower speed. That's a choice. Yes. That's a choice issue, but if we want it here. Yeah, the developer I know is gonna be willing to add to widen the driveway cut. They've put a wider driveway cut on their plans. Do you agree with that? Thank you. B. Protect public use of the alley. No, we do not have an objective standard. In fact, our general plan standard actually calls for minimizing driveways on SoCal. So general plan mobility development policy in 3.2.11 improve traffic flow and safety and reduce impacts on arterial streets by limiting driveways, mid-block access points and intersections, removing on-street parking, clustering facilities and so forth. Providing access from side streets and other similar measures. So not only do we have a policy that speaks against that, but also that would require changes to the plan that under various laws and case law that the applicant's attorney has cited, we would not be able to require a driveway access off of SoCal, for example. You agree with that? Let me ask a question, both of you. Some notion of prescriptive right or the ability to, once the public has been able to use something for years and years without obstruction or objection by the property owner, does the public then get some right to that? I have something in my memory that there's something in the law about this. There is such a thing as a prescriptive rights easement and the prescriptive rights easement is typically occurring over a private property, right? So someone cuts across a private property for years and it eventually becomes a public way and eventually through the courts it can be settled that there's a prescriptive rights access easement. This is different, this is a public right-of-way and so public access is allowed through the public right-of-way and we don't have an objective standard that says driveways should be on SoCal. In fact, it's the contrary, so unless the developer was willing to have a driveway access off of SoCal, both the general plan and case law would preclude us from requiring an access on SoCal. So make sure, I'm gonna ask. I would defer to your city attorney but prescriptive rights cannot be achieved against a public agency, so I completely agree with Lee. That's great. No, it's all around on that. So if we wanted to, quote, protect public use of the alley, do we have legal ability to do that or not do that? Public use of the alley, and limit public use of the alley? This says protect public use of the alley. So I'm gonna say the alleyway has public access and we can't say who has public access to the alley. Because who doesn't need protection insofar as it's a public, okay, fine. So in effect, that's not necessary it seems because there is no effort here to restrict public access across this alleyway. That's correct. I was going from the appellant's presentation where they were trying to basically not, I think their words were don't use the alley as a driveway, and so that's why I was saying, moving of the driveway to SoCal is not something that we can require. Thank you. 3C implements safety, mirrors, lights, sensors as recommended. Yes, that is something the applicants have also agreed to that in conversations. If they hadn't agreed to it, could we have required it? We don't have any objective standards related to that. And so that there could be a position where if a developer took a hard line, we might be in a challenging place. The developer has been very flexible and wanting to work with us on these types of issues. Agree, thank you very much. Let's go to item four, which, is this a one-page letter and only item four has A, that's it, is that right? Okay, I just want to make sure I didn't miss a second page. Thank you. Fixed the corner alignment, item A. So that is the move back and reduce the sidewalk width. That's something that I responded to with respect to Council Member Calentari-Johnson's question and no, we do not have the ability to do that. No objective standards. And we don't have the ability to do that, but if the developer was agreeable to that, then we could incorporate that because they agreed to it, but we couldn't oppose it over their objection. That's correct. And they have agreed to that portion, that small amount, but not to additional amounts. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate both of you. Thank you for helping us through that. This is the opportunity for the public to provide us with any comment for a period of time, up to three minutes each. So I'll start with the first person in line and let me ask Ms. Bush, do we have folks online? We do. So what we'll do is we'll start with you, sir, and then we'll toggle back and forth between folks in chambers and folks who are online. Good afternoon, sir. Afternoon. Thank you. I'm just gonna read this statement as prepared. I know a lot of things have been said already that cover it. Socal Avenue is severely impacted by traffic already. I live on Forest Avenue. I've been a bicycle commuter to downtown area for 20 years. Not only this project combined with the two-story townhomes proposed on Hagamon, but all the constellation of new and upcoming construction projects that you saw illustrated west of here sends more and more traffic through the Socal bottleneck at Trevatham. We're not the traffic experts, but they haven't been brought up in upfront. Where's the updated traffic study? Here's what's obvious to me. The Trevatham-Hagamon misalignment at that intersection is not being fully addressed. Only half measures. There's only time. This is, there is no other time to fix this. When traffic is not backed up at Socal, cars are clocked at near freeway speeds. Two types of bad, gridlock and speeding. Lose, lose. Extra wide sidewalks and more trees benefit no one. In practice, they invite the unhoused to camp out forcing pedestrians to walk into the bike lane to get around them. Instead, dedicated bike lanes with barriers and standard sidewalks would increase safety and narrow car lanes to slow down speeding cars. The alley behind the development is critical mixed use for the whole neighborhood. If the developer would go further to redesign both the building entrance and the exit, parallel to the alley, we're dispensing with this enter on Socal idea. Nobody wants that. It keeps coming up as a red herring over and over again. If they widen that apron to accommodate both entrance and exit without impacting the through flow of traffic in the alleyway, that would be a big improvement. And it seems within your power to do that. We saw a 20 foot wide apron, could be a 30 foot wide apron. But so they've only gone halfway. And it's good that they took the measure. They took one lane out of the conflict with the alleyway, but they could take both. And entrance and exit could be parallel to the alley without encroaching on it at all. Keep in mind, there's still those parking spaces. So the people or for the exterior parking, they're still using the alleyway. But for the tenants of the building, you've taken them out of the collide path. It's a very sensible addition. But to fix both the intersection misalignment and the alley, further easement and driveways on the parcel may need to be carved out of the building footprint. This might impact the precious retail space. Which do we need more? Retail space, tenant space, or traffic flow and safety for the impacted neighborhood? The entire neighborhood living in these horseshoe streets has only Soquel Avenue and this alley as our evacuation path in an emergency. Where is the evacuation plan after the double density of housing on this exact traffic pain point? The problems are obvious. The traffic studies to address the intersection misalignment and the evacuation plan are minimal due diligence. Where are they? Thank you, sir. We're going to take someone online, then we'll be with you in just a moment. Person online, good afternoon. Yes, good afternoon. This is Rotheson and Feld, calling in on behalf of Santa Cruz EMB in support of the project and respectfully requesting that the council deny the appeal this afternoon. I do appreciate that the community has really come together to advocate for improving bike pathways on Soquel. And I think many of us who care about this topic would appreciate the continued involvement of the community to help see that planning process and those improvements come to fruition over the next few years by attending transportation commission meetings and other community events that the planning department plans. I think this particular project and the discussion that we've heard this afternoon is sort of a good example of why it's generally a bad idea to do project by project planning and why we have general plans. And general plans are important and we've heard about concern about traffic flow and that we have a circulation element in our general plan that expresses policy goals that will hopefully help us improve the traffic in our community. But we can't require developers under the law in California to make changes to projects that they don't, where those standards aren't knowable ahead of time. And this project meets all of the standards that the city has imposed on it. It's compliant with our general plan and our zoning, including the density bonus units. And so we legally have a responsibility to approve this project, but it's also, it's a good project anyway. It provides 84 homes, including I believe 14 homes for families who are low or very low income. It's right on major bus lines. We generally agree in our community that these are the types of places that we want to be growing in. So if that's the case, we need to move forward and approve projects like these and save the concerns about traffic for long-term planning. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Candice Brown and I am a resident since 85. I was a renter and a homeowner of East Morrissey and I'm also on the Transportation Public Works Commission. And I am so nervous right now. And we have a situation where we know there's direct health and safety concerns and we see Hamburg as a city in the general plan with the dept of standards to address it. When the project was originally developed and approved in 2016, it was with 32 units and at that point they were asked to have an easement. So the developer here would have known about that if it's part of the disclosure when they purchased the property from the other developer, Peter Dores in San Francisco. And it was then increased from 32 units to 84 units. The developer gave notice to the community meaning that there would be at least three people or three people in each unit. And then so you multiply that by the number of people and obviously there's not enough parking spaces so they're invited then to use alternative transportation which is why we're really having this discussion. And we talk about transit-oriented development and yet we seem hampered to do anything to make it viable in our community. We talk about vision zero which was approved in 2019 and yet the staff here is saying we have the active transportation plan we're about to approve with no mention about the one thing that they can do which is to implement vision zero which is to address the speeds on the main transportation corridor. We know somebody that was killed there, the gentleman who was 11 children. I remember a time when somebody walked out got off the bus and got hit an older lady and she got killed. We know many people that had been bumped and hit helicoptered out from our community from my neighborhood which sadly they're not here today because we're in the middle of the day. So we have to have some way as a city to protect our community when it comes to health and safety. There's a lot of words being spoken today. I am not a lawyer. I am an individual and I'm an accountant formerly in high tech. So I'm not completely armed with all the tools right now to advise you but I can say that there are serious health and safety concerns at this intersection. I wanna mention in the 38 seconds that I have I live on Trevathen so I'm on the other side and as I mentioned I've been there a long time. If you make a left there cause people are cutting through from Morrissey to avoid Morrissey and Frederick which is a disaster and they cut through they're making left there on the right of the people trying to go straight and the people straight have the right away but they're to the left and so that's where all the collisions happen. Also because the crosswalk and I thought Renee had a great idea maybe you should just eliminate that crosswalk. You should not invite people to do something unsafe and that's exactly what you're doing. So I really think you need some kind of study. I don't know what you wanna call it and I also want to mention that there were conditions on the original plan that included the applicant will work with Public Works to develop and install pedestrian and bicycles have priority signage in the alley. The applicant will design and install up to two speed pillows in the alley south of the project that will address fire and bicycle access so the concern about fire that can be addressed with a proper speed bump and surface drainage they will work with the immediate neighborhood on need and location. And the public works will install in warning signs at the intersection of Soquel and Hageman. You might have to wrap it up now, thank you. So I'm just saying these conditions were in the original 2016 and they weren't even talked about and they weren't included in the conditions and these address some of the concerns and I was one of the people that paid for the appeal. You've gone way over so when I ask you when I give you extra time. Thank you very much. You see extra time don't abuse that, thank you. Next person. You're the next person. Nice to see you all again. I am in fact the homeowner of the only home that has an easement as I approach my garage as this gentleman mentioned earlier today via this alley. That's how I access my garage. Then the house has been there since 1923 when it was separated from the Hageman family farm. That's the last time that title did transfer. So these systems, this has all been there for a really long time. All those incense cedars, those have all been there since the Hageman track since the Orana family owned the whole Finca, right? So now you're saying that's public property except we haven't had public works out there to fix it in about five years. The gentleman with the dreadlocks and I patched that hole a couple years ago. So you know and also I would point out that my side of that alley does not have a crack in its asphalt. It's the commercial that has this disastrous but then you had the illegal red tagged illegal garage with the illegal lift in there, right? And they tore all, they were putting illegal four by four lifts in there for a while until you red tagged them. But it's not like you guys are caring for this thing but now you're gonna give it away. I care for it. I bought it, I live there. I was born in the beach flats in 1969. You wanna talk local. So I don't see you doing your job. What I see is you given these people with this $300 an hour lawyer, scared, pet scared, you're gonna actually hold them to keeping our community livable. And guys, we forgot about forest. The taqueria, you cannot see Soquel from the taqueria guys. You need a traffic study because all half of those people are gonna come down forest. And guess what? In the time that I've owned that house, I have seen four or five totaled out cars from people trying to get on to Soquel from forest which didn't even come up today which means you guys are not on your game. Thank you for your time. Person online, good afternoon. Person online, three, two, one. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Hi, my name is George Mead and I've lived on Hagamon Avenue since 1990. I just would like you to know that this development as designed is essentially putting a round peg in a square hole. The intersection of Trebethan and Soquel and Hagamon is both very wonky and unique and having all of the access to this development via an alley is unprecedented in my mind in the city of Santa Cruz. If anybody can give me an example of a multi-unit development access solely via an alley, please speak up because this is something that I am completely unfamiliar with. Having the alley widened behind the subject proposed building is a step in the right direction but as they say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So the section of the alley that goes from the corner southeast corner of the proposed development to forest is only 15 feet wide that can only accommodate one-way traffic. That is gonna create big problems when people are trying to enter or exit via forest and they encounter another vehicle. Traffic is gonna back up onto forest or in the alley. There's a history of accidents at this intersection already and I'll tell you that if you accept this proposal as planned, you're gonna have blood on your hands because there will be accidents, unfortunately. Something needs to be done to re-engineer the traffic access. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Gabriella Jones. I was born in the Santa Cruz Mountains and I've lived in the city of Santa Cruz since 1988 consistently the last 12 years as a renter at 225 Forest Avenue. So I am on Forest Avenue. I can speak to that particular issue of the danger of living on Forest Avenue and trying to access getting onto Soquel. I live just down from Soquel Avenue, the proposed development and the alley that connects Forest and Hageman. I've raised small children at Forest Avenue and now have teenagers at home, 18 and 13. We have two cars in our family and we have two members of our family that commute on bikes, a high schooler and a working adult. I support development, affordable housing and increased rentals in Santa Cruz. I'm a renter myself who would definitely benefit from affordable housing. I have secure housing at the moment. However, I feel strongly that there must be a commitment to sustainability, specifically making our streets and neighborhoods more bike and walking friendly as I transition more to walking and biking and my whole family does. We have an opportunity as a city to commit to these ideals. The alley that connects Forest and Hageman is a wonderful bike pedestrian and wheelchair friendly connector between the two streets. We have someone on Forest Avenue who's wheelchair bound and who does use that alley as a way to get across and over to Walgreens and into other places as well. It's also another way off of Forest in an emergency to get onto Soquel Avenue. I ask that you protect and keep the alleyway open as a safe route for all members of the community and we really do rely on it for all of these important reasons. Soquel Avenue, especially near our intersection, can be a very challenging street to navigate, especially where Forest meets Soquel. There is no regulated traffic street light allowing for a safe left turn. Onto Soquel off of Forest, cars often speed on Soquel at that intersection as Rena pointed out earlier and during commute hours it's a heavily congested and very slow route through Santa Cruz. It's an impossible left turn off of Forest during those times and it can be very dangerous. My teen driver was one of the drivers who made a calculated but unfortunately bad decision to make a left onto Soquel off of Forest and was almost killed by a speeding driver on Soquel Avenue. Our car was totaled. We counseled him on making good decisions as a driver but because that left turn is available to make and because of the angle of Soquel and the visibility issues and the fact that people speed, it's an incredibly dangerous intersection. Since that event, none of us have made that left turn onto Forest Avenue and we go all the way around through the neighborhood down the horseshoe of onto Hegemon to make that light at that corner. Unfortunately though, I'm sensitive to that we're increasing traffic on in that neighborhood part of the neighborhood as well. It looks like my time's up. I would just say one last thing that adding this large number of vehicles is going to make this whole, as you've seen, congested traffic area very difficult for all of us. Please consider the best outcomes for walkers, bikers and other people that need access. Thank you very much. We have anyone else online? We'll take that person then we'll see you. We'll see a person online. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, counsel. This is Ryan Mechel. I'm calling in support of this project and urge you to deny the appeal. I just want to comment on some of the transportation aspects of this. This project is going to be in a great position for residents to take buses, bike or walk to where they need to go. So Cal is envisioned as a protected and very important bike lane in the active transportation plan as Mr. Starkey mentioned earlier. And I think staff is going to do great work to address safety concerns on this corridor. I would urge you to leave staff in the greatest amount of room to plan that improvement and not confine it or constrain it to this single project. I don't think piecemeal planning out our bike lanes and safety improvements is the best way to make a corridor. And that's what Soquel Avenue is. It's a corridor that supports safe sustainable transportation. Additionally, Soquel Avenue is going to receive 15 minute headway service from Metro beginning in 2024 with the reimagined Metro process which will provide residents convenient and easy access between downtown Santa Cruz and the Capitola Mall. Additionally, there's a B cycle station within walking distance of this project. So residents have many different resources to get around town besides driving and I think they'll take advantage of them. Staff, both the county level with Metro and in the city have done a great job of encouraging active transportation and encouraging mass transit ridership and I think they'll continue to do so. So I urge you to keep these thoughts in mind while you deny this appeal and say yes to homes at this project. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Hello, Andrea who lives on Forest was here for a few hours and had to leave so she asked me to read her message. The first reason that this project should not be billed is its location, Water Street and Broadway funnel into Soquel and create a natural bottleneck. Adding a development of the size to this intersection will add to gridlock, pollution and dangerous conditions for bicyclists and pedestrians as trap drivers lose patience and engage in riskier driving behaviors and commute times and conditions that are going east will increase. I hope that any traffic studies are done during peak commute times. The second reason is that this is a market rate project that our city workers will not be able to afford. If we want to provide housing for our local workers, housing needs to be affordable. This project does nothing besides destroying a lovely neighborhood and creating huge profits for a few investors. Please imagine that you're voting for a project like this in your own neighborhood or allow the citizens of Santa Cruz to vote on this project. Either way this poorly conceived gridlock worsening project should not go forward. Thank you. Anyone else online, Ms. Bush? We'll take that person and we'll be right with you. Person online, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Councilor Bradley Snyder. Just want to mention that I feel that a lot of the comments about the increase in the traffic pressure and how it's already in such a state of like high intensity, high fast forward kind of motion. I feel like the council really should consider certain changes they make just like the Scotts Valley Metro or the building you're in, there's a plaque where it's engraved the names of the people who established it. These decisions are going to be a monument to you. They're gonna be, if there's like city planning where people feel menaced by traffic conditions. It's in history, they're gonna look back at who made the decision to make it that way. Now, I'm a person who's walked in Santa Cruz. I've lived on Darwin Street. I've worked at the Safeway at the corner of Morrissey in Soquel, I grew up in Soquel Village and would walk all the way to Santa Cruz on Soquel. I'm really familiar with that intersection. Here's a suggestion that I think you're gonna find highly lateral, but to me, the two circular intersections you installed near the beach, it seems like that could almost work at Morrissey and Soquel and Water. That whole intersection, if it were made to smoothly flow in a circle, maybe would slow people down a great improvement over in Capitola on Claire Street. If you get over there are these beautiful speed tables, which just make people look stupid when they go too fast and people don't like to look stupid, it turns out. It's just psychology, but as far as, as far as tightening the screws with the way people drive and the way people are processed in the community, I've seen horrific head-on or total vehicles along there. I'm appalled by it and how increasingly likely it is to occur as you walk along in these areas. So I'm a person, I go to the East Bay, I panic attacks just trying to get from point A to B between Martinez and Concord, but I don't think Santa Cruz is gentrifying by keeping itself safe by designing things well. That's how I feel about the situation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. My name is Quinton Rowland and I am a resident of Santa Cruz and I have family who live within a half mile of the project area. I'm in favor of a traffic safety study, regardless of whether it's required of, the development project or not. I think it's the right thing for the city to do. Sooner than later, why? Because we're inviting 200, roughly 200 new residents, maybe more, into this space that all these people have been describing for you. It's, we experience routine, meaning every hour, 45 to 60 mile per hour speeds, go out and measure them yourself. Now, I've done my homework and I've walked all sides of that intersection, so-called Hageman, Trevathon, in the dark and with sun in my eyes. I've observed the most common movements by all participants. I've stood in the bikeway while traffic roared by at 45, 55 miles per hour, only protected by a white stripe. I've observed texting drivers zooming through the intersection with sun in their eyes. I've witnessed numerous red light runners and many more drivers accelerating toward the intersection to beat the light, accelerating towards the intersection. High school kids cycling to school in substandard bikeway widths, partially obstructed by debris and pooling water and rising seams in the middle of the bikeway, seniors walking their dogs across a vast distance of uninterrupted asphalt, ultimately sprinting in fear to the curb. Bus riders hurrying across the street mid-block, hoping to catch a bus. Joggers listening to music while crossing against the light, thinking the cars are distant enough. Parents en route to Arana Gulch Park, nervously pushing baby strollers only inches from impatient bumpers. No crossing islands to provide physical protection, horizontal deflection and visual friction. This is the cornerstone, by the way, of a vision zero city is crossing islands. Crosswalks located too close to the intersection, creating complex conditions and blind spots for all participants. Primitive, unsafe, diagonal ADA ramps. Drivers weaving from lane to lane at lethal speeds do in part to chaotic speed differentials. Drivers waiting to turn at the traffic light despite no oncoming traffic, waiting for nothing. Drivers waiting much too long for a sufficiently large gap to enter the Soquel Avenue Stream because the speeds are too high, requiring much larger gaps in time for that maneuver. Delay stress, delay stress for all participants. Let's all problem solve together. Let's do a traffic safety together, study together. Let's get everyone who has skin in the game looking face to face, eye to eye, at the intersection. Let's all walk it together many times. Let's experience what all these people have experienced. Thank you. I'll wrap it up. Let's do it together as a team. And I know we'll end up with the best result possible. Thank you. Thank you for being here, sir. Ms. Bush, do we have anyone else online? Good afternoon. See, I told you you'd get to talk. Here you go. I wasn't worried about that. Thank you. First of all, I wanna thank you all for your patience. I know it's been a long day and you've heard a lot of different things. I do appreciate that it's hard to keep one's attention going for all this time. I wanna thank you all for that. I do want to, I don't know what the process is exactly to submit a letter, but I do wanna submit a letter. You can submit that to the clerk and that'll become part of our record. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll do my best to keep my comments very brief and try not to repeat all the things that have already been said. My two primary points are that I understand that the city council is limited in your abilities. I understand that. I understand that there are state laws that you are obviously supersede your abilities. And I also appreciate from what I've studied and understood from previous people that you have some discretion. A little bit of wiggle room here and there. So that is really what we're asking for is for you to do your very best to hear because obviously there's a tremendous amount of concern. The main point I want to bring up two main points. One is that, as I said earlier, there is another project at 162 Hageman Avenue which is being considered very close on the heels of this one and that involves seven town homes with attached ADUs. There are three bedroom two bath homes again with attached ADUs. So that poses an increased tremendous impact of a number of people. Again, we don't know exactly how many people are gonna end up living in those spaces but we all know from having lived in Santa Cruz for a long time what our current rental and rates are so we can easily predict lots of people will be living there as well. Again, increasing the traffic issue there on our intersection and on our street. So I really feel very strongly that these two projects need to be considered in tandem with each other. I realize that's not the responsibility of the developers but I think it is the responsibility of the city council because you're responsible for our whole city and the quality of our lives and our streets and our safety which keeps being brought up over and over again. I think it's, again, I've lived there for many years. I've raised two children. I bike all the time. Soquel despite what everybody else may have said about the safety of Soquel as a bike corridor, it is never a safe biking area. I'm always worried for my own safety and for my children's safety. It's as people have said, people drive very fast. There's nothing to block you. I appreciate that hopefully that's coming down the pike. I hope that that's the case that there's some kind of significant barrier put as has been put on Water Street which is at least a little bit of a help. You know, the little things that separate the bike lane from the road in a few spaces on Water Street. So I just really ask that you consider those two projects together and that's it. Thank you very much for your time. Well, thank you very much. Somebody called in, no doubt. Okay, we have one more person online. Good afternoon, person online. Hello there, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Wonderful. My name is Alex Noisy and I'm one of the neighbors who lives on Hagamon Avenue. I've lived here for eight years and I love my neighbors. I think we have a wonderful community here on Hagamon Avenue. And I'm glad that everyone is so involved in the processes that change and shape our neighborhood. I have read the appeal and its main points and I believe that the plan sufficiently addresses most of the primary concerns about the intersection misalignment, the turn lanes, the alley, the sidewalks, the ADA ramps and others. I know that early on there was some discussion and in fact today about moving the entrance to this project to SoCal directly but living in this neighborhood, I know as well as all my neighbors that the best and safest way to exit the neighborhood is by using the light at Hagamon. So I would caution against making a change like that. And in fact, it sounds like that's something that can't be made, so I think that's good. But in short, I believe that the plan as it is will be a boon to our neighborhood and I do not share the concerns that are laid out in the appeal as written. My primary reason for attending this hearing today is simply to underscore that our city is woefully in need of more housing. And I couldn't think of a better neighborhood to welcome new neighbors into. So hopefully we can all make this work out. Thank you so much for the work you do and for considering the community's varied points of view. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Francaise of on Hagamon and my main concern again is getting the transportation study move forward and to, and underlying that, improving the safety of SoCal for all the upcoming projects and just in general, even if there was zero projects, it's our main corridor. It should be our pride and joy. It's, the city should have a lot of focus on since it's such a main corridor and so many people use it. And many, there's been many fine suggestions and I agree with them, especially the pedestrian islands. Slowing down traffic enforcement on that area has been zero. I've lived there for 40 years. I've never seen a single officer enforcing any speed on that portion of SoCal. Also, as far as alignment on SoCal, the 2016 projects, which was approved for that corner by the Planning Commission, but did not move forward, the people who were developing it voluntarily seated much more than the present developers to the corner to align the area. This was not something they had to do. It was something they did voluntarily to make it safer for their occupants. Also, right now, I'm very concerned that the front of the building where the main lobby is is, where the main lobby is, there is no stopping of any vehicle in front there. There's this very narrow lane. Nobody ever stops there. So if somebody wanted to take a Uber, they could not stop there. They would have to go down to the alley or down SoCal or down for us and then walk around to the front door. So it puzzles me why the lobby would be there when there's no vehicle access to the front door. And the developers has put a loading zone in the back of the building in the alley, which is an improvement over having no loading zone. And they made a place where UPS can drop off in the garage, which wasn't there before, which I appreciate. The loading zone would not actually, from somebody with who has disabilities, they would have to walk again either through the garage or around the building up to the door to get to the elevators. So they haven't really studied the access as far as Americans with disability. And I'm kind of disappointed in that planning didn't pick up on some of these things. And so those are some of my concerns that haven't been voiced before. So thank you. Thank you very much. Ms. Bush, anyone else online? Nobody with their hand raised. Nobody with their hand up. Anyone, last call? Very good. The appellant is your opportunity for a rebuttal. I'm taller than everybody else. Okay, I'll just start by thanking all of you for taking time to think about our intersection and take it really seriously. It affects all of us, it affects our city. I wanna thank the developers for all of the goodwill and the efforts to respond to our concerns. I really believe that you are in good faith and that we are gonna come to the best solutions possible. I wanna thank the city staff and public works for working actively to make this as positive as it can be. We are not against this project. We are very concerned about the impact. And I really wanna distinguish that. A lot of the people who said deny the appeal, well, the appeal is not to change the project, to stop the project. The appeal is to make sure that these traffic considerations are met. And so we really appreciate that it's already come pretty far. And I appreciate, Mayor Keely, your effort to look at our list and see which things can be done, which helped me understand which things are under the authority of the city versus which things are under the authority of the developer. And I understand that there's good collaboration and I have great faith that you will, in fact, do everything that you possibly can to address this corner. And that really is our goal for an outcome is that it's safe enough for all of us and for the future residents. Specifically, we really are counting on UCD council to help public works prioritize this intersection. Somebody mentioned that there's no projects yet on the docket for this corner. We'd like to see that happen. We'd like to see it get mobilized. We're particularly concerned about the left turn traffic lane off of, actually have a light that goes with that new lane. We really like the prioritized bike lane a lot, even if it's only in front of that development because of the jog in Soquel Avenue. So that the drivers know that the street is changing and the bike is prioritized on that corner. If it means a slightly narrower sidewalk, I'm really hopeful that that can be negotiated. We're really in favor of the 30 foot wide driveway cut out so that the driveway in and out of the garage is adjacent to the alley rather than taking up the alley. We think that that's a really good solution so that cars can pass going in and out of that garage without affecting the pedestrian and bike and wheelchair users, as well as other vehicles that also use that alley. And we think that that's doable. It doesn't ask them to change. It just means you guys accepting that that's a wider curb cut than usual. And we do acknowledge we'd lose some parking there. And of course, that's a challenge too, but we understand that that safety is more important in this instance. I think those are the main ones that I just feel like we've taken our time. We've done a lot of homework. We've come to you really in good faith to help us to make sure that this corner is safe. It's in your hands. We look forward to seeing how it all turns out and we thank all of you guys because we know that we'll be working with you living next to you and getting to know lots of hopefully cool new people on our block. So anyway, thank you. Thank you very much. Adder is back before the council. We glad to recognize a member for a motion. Sure. I'm happy to move the recommendation and I want to just make sure. So I'll move the recommendation as stated, but I want to make sure, because what I heard was that all of the things that we could ask the developer to do has been agreed upon. So is that written into the recommendation as presented in the staff report? Okay, I want to separate out you were almost there with motion. Now it's turned into a question. So why don't you ask your question then we'll get a motion. Okay, let's do that then. Yeah, I don't think the letter that we went through in detail is not in the motion. So I think that needs to be included as part of it. Okay. The details of it, yes. Okay, great. Make your motion. So I'll move the recommendation with the additions that were outlined in the questioning around what the developer was willing to accommodate within our legal realm to ask for. Would you like me to read those? Let me see if we can get this. Okay, so let me start with, I think we have to deal with the appeal. Is that correct, sir? I think we have to deal with the appeal. And then as part of dealing with the appeal, then we can take actions which would further detail our approval of this project. Is that correct? Correct. You could adopt a motion to deny the appeal with the additional of the additional conditions that were discussed and acknowledged by the applicant as being. Okay, so let's take this in pieces. Let's go ahead. Your motion is to deny the appeal. Correct. The rest of the motion is to reference the letter of November 28th, 2023, submitted by neighborhood recommendations for traffic safety improvements. Correct. And on those, if I understand. I can read. Where we're going. Please proceed. Thank you for the clarification. So on those include what is feasible for the developer and what I heard was agreeable is to provide dedicated turn lanes that are long enough at least two to three car links and reduce proposed sidewalk width on Hagman to accommodate those lanes. That was one A. Yes, okay. To provide a two A to provide a wider safer protected bike lane on Soquel Avenue in front of the development heading east where roads jog, reduce proposed sidewalk width on Soquel to accommodate the bike lane. And three A to allow a 30 foot curb cut at alley for wider two lane garage and I believe that's, oh and excuse me and three C to implement safety mirrors light sensors as recommended. No, am I, did I, I want to make sure I captured what I believe was heard. My honor, my honor, my honor. Hold on a second, come on. Okay, Mr. Butler assist with the motion here. Thank you. I've got Matt Starchy as well. So for the alley driveway curb cut, the letter here says allow the 30 foot. We would recommend 20 feet. We do believe that's a safer configuration to that if he agrees. The thinking beyond that is we want to make sure we keep speeds low on the alley, especially with the entryway into the driveway. What we're not going to do is a whole bunch of discussion about this. Get straight to the gentlelady's question. We'd recommend 20 feet for the driveway. What do you want to do on that? Not dirty. I'll accept your recommendation. Okay. Next item. Next issue. Next issue. Was that the only one? That was it. We just, I wanted to clarify that. The others were agreed upon in the island. I haven't heard anything else that's objectionable. I just wanted to. As we walked through. Okay, thank you. I would, I would just mention though that the 1A here, we included this sort of idea and the staff recommendation for a motion to have the appellant work with public works to develop the length there of the turn lane. I don't want to be limited to two to three cars if it needs to be longer, for example. Okay. We got to stay in motion world here right now. Ms. Bush is trying to get a complicated motion clearly stated. Ms. Bush, do you have a question? Do you need clarification right now? I just want to make sure 3A instead of 30 foot is 20 foot. Correct. What you're talking about? 20 foot for 3A. Thank you. And then 1A is as outlined in the recommendation based on the staff recommendation. And I don't know if you want to repeat how it's written. I don't have that in front of me. Ryan, do you have that in front of you? If you can just read it and then you can email it to Bonnie Bush. Can I just ask for one clarification? I interpreted the motion as to adopt the resolution with those additional conditions. That's correct. Ms. Bush, make sure you cut that. Very good. Is that the extent of your motion? Yes. I don't know if we want to read for clarification on 3A or 1A, excuse me. Searching for it. I have a presentation. But I understand it was the recommended motion to extend work with public work staff essentially to extend the length of that dedicated left turn lane. Correct. Just of it, yeah. So that's the motion. Everybody on board on that? Everybody clear? Clear rather? Ms. Bush, we good? So we're not putting 1A. I can send it to you. Slow down, slow down here. We're not putting 1A because it's included in the staff. Correct. Okay, so far so good. Is that the extent of your motion? We good? We're good. Is there a second? Motion? I will second it and I have further questions on that. And we'll be right back with you. Do you want to open on your motion? Yeah, no, I just really appreciate everybody coming forward. I think we, I also really appreciate the conversations that I believe ensued between the community and the developer. I think we all share commitment to safety, to traffic concerns. Anybody who lives in Santa Cruz knows Soquel is a really challenging street and that intersection is challenging. I live in the area. I understand your concerns. We have a lot of challenging intersections and streets and I know there's only so much within the realm of this proposal and this development that we can influence and also know it's part of this bigger picture around how are we improving our traffic safety and so I definitely want to make sure that the community knows that we heard that and that is a priority for me and it's a priority I know for our council and our staff and I appreciate some of the specifics that we could influence and the agreement that the developers and we're willing to make to make some of those accommodations take place and look forward to hopefully continuing the dialogue to make sure our community is as safe as possible and we're also allowing for more affordable housing. So that's it for me. Thank you. Ms. Brunner is recognized. Thank you. Wow, thank you for getting us to this point and I just had a question around the 20 foot, 30 foot and what that, what is typical and what difference would that make in the staff, the staffs from the staff's perspective? What data helps inform you to recommend 20 feet when 30 feet is being requested? Will it still impact the alley? As stated was one concern of having the driveway separate from the alley access. Yeah, thank you for the question. So with standard driveway approach for the city of Santa Cruz is between 16 feet and 30 feet and we typically will use a larger driveway approach when we're talking about higher volume development. So commercial development where we have a lot more vehicles coming in and out of that particular area. Right now, what was being proposed for this particular development was a 20 foot wide driveway approach which is very standard for this type of development, the size of the number of cars that we're expecting to come out and in and out of this area. And so that's why we continue to recommend a 20 foot wide driveway approach versus a 30 foot wide. Would it hurt to have 30 foot wide? What is that impact? The 30 foot wide driveway approach would end up impacting most likely the parking that's out there. There could be a bit of an access. I don't recall the exact plan mine as far as the approach into the development. Widening it most likely would just again, mainly impact I think with parking at this point. I'll add that the part of the concern here as we heard about is the speeds on the alleyway and we want to make sure. Excuse me, excuse me. If you want to be recognized, right? This is not some free for all, you're recognized. Thank you. We're trying to acknowledge that concern by making sure we keep a really tight driveway entrance and that's how we know people will cautiously enter and exit the alleyway which is a big concern for the neighborhood. Yes, it could be wider but our recommendation is to keep it as narrow and as tight as possible so we keep speeds down and we help everyone navigate the area safely. So I have a follow-up question and in terms of, I think 3C was implemented into the motion. Did you, three, oh excuse me, yes. So that relates to safety mirrors, lights, sensors as recommended determined whatever the best option would be in this case. What is our ability to ask the applicant or has the applicant agreed for anything that would help reduce speed at the parking, in and out entrance, a speed bump, a stop sign, mirrors to help with greater visibility? Yeah, we recommended that at the entryway from the alleyway into the parking entrance of the development that we had something like you mentioned. We do this at our garages, we put a speed bump as you enter the garage to kind of stop you before you get in and out. Stop sign is also a good tool there and then the mirrors could help improve the visibility for people exiting the development. Is that already incorporated into the recommendation or does that need to be spelled out? Can that be spelled out? Yes, that could be spelled out. Because I think I remember it was mentioned, it's not in our objective standards. Yeah, that'd be a good one to detail. So I'd like to ask the maker of the motion if that can be incorporated into the motion. I'm comfortable with that. To ensure those types of. For Miss Bush's purposes, let's make sure we know exactly what we're talking about. What is your motion, your request for an amendment to the motion? That there are devices that help reduce speed at the alleyway, driveway, entrance, exit, whatever that looks like in this case, such as a speed. Okay, so that the applicant shall include devices that reduce speed and conflict at the parking garage entrance, such as a speed bump, a stop sign, mirrors, anything that will help with that egress and provide greater visibility and safety. We can do that. We can work with the applicant on that. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Further? Griebel? Griebel's second. You are the second? Griebel? Agreeble. Okay, further on this? Ms. Brunner, further? I just have a couple of comments. Well, we're on a motion. So we're, let me see if there are other amendments or substitutes. Anyone, Ms. Brown is recognized. Thank you. I'm not going to try to make an amendment because, but I do wanna ask a question. I wanna revisit if I could for a moment this 30 versus 20 foot driveway. And there's a difference of opinion here and I don't have the expertise to, you know, weigh the different, you know, the variables. But I'm hearing from people who live in this neighborhood who make use of this space on a regular basis that they believe that would be safer. And so I'm inclined to wanna, you know, prioritize that view, you know, the manual that gives the guidelines is one thing. But there are as particularity of place. And so I want, I'm trying to understand this and it feels like that's a really important thing for the neighbors. And if we do have a speed, what, Rumble Strip, whatever it's called, some kind of, you know, other measures, you know, why not go to the 30 foot? Why couldn't we do that? Sure. I think when these, I think we'll kind of think back to the arrow diagram that was presented earlier. Space is one part of the conflict issue, but time is also the other part. And that has to do with the number of vehicles that are entering and exiting a site. And so at this site, we know it generates less than 50 cars per hour. And so that really low volume of vehicles, you don't need as much space because you're much less likely to have conflicts between vehicles showing up at the same time. So that combined with the volume that it's hard to have low speed, is why I'd recommend a really minimal driveway apron. If we wanted to go 24 feet, that would be fine too, but I don't think it really needs to be negotiated. If I could follow up, because we talked about this, and it made sense when we were discussing it, and I've been out there now, and I'm hearing from neighbors, so I just really want to make sure that we address that and have the information. Yes, cars, right? And we don't know that it's gonna be 50 trips, that is a projection based on models. So we don't know that, we think that, and I'm willing to go along with the projections, but there are also, I mean, there are tons of people who use that alleyway on bicycles and on foot. And so I think that that does make a difference. And so again, I'm trying, I can't see people being able to move in that space without additional width if there are cars coming in and out and the increased traffic of moving, not all times of day, every day, but certainly there will be, I think safety issues there. And so having that space means people can get out of the way if a car's pulling in or pulling out. I'm not sure 10 feet is gonna increase the speed so much it makes it dangerous as the, how people move in that space in reality. So again. Let me try to get this into it. Do we have the discretion if we wanted to to make it 24 feet or 30 feet if we chose to do it? Yes. That's all I'm really interested here. Whether you agree with it or disagree with it is not my interest. Do you wanna add, do you wanna add that or not? I would ask the maker of the motion to move to 30 feet. Okay. Is there any objection? If we can do it, we can do it. If we can't, we can't. I'm wondering if we want to think about the 24 feet just to be kind of able to split it in the middle. Make a decision. What do you want? I'm gonna go with the 24 just because I don't wanna ignore the expert opinions or my what type of potential. That's the request. Is that agreeable to the maker of the motion? Yes or no? It's a simple question. Yeah, I'm hearing that this is a perceived safety and I think. I'll accept that as a yes. You've accepted that amendment 24 feet. Am I right? I'm just wondering why 24? If we can just clarify where that number came from. So 20 comes from two 10 foot lanes, which is a very minimal lane with 12 foot. It's kind of like a maximum lane you would use for two lanes of traffic. So 24, 30 is much too big. Yeah. Thank you. So 24. Yes. 24, everybody's good at 24. Sold at 24. All right. Let's see if there are other motions to amend or substitute motions. Ms. Calantari-Johnson, thank you for your forbearance. Thank you. I have two friendly amendments that I will just read from what I've written and then see if the maker of the motion and the seconder would accept that. One is to direct city manager, director of public works to return to city council in 2024 with an updated objective standards for separated bike lanes along Soquel from at least Morrissey to Capitola Road so that additional land dedication can be required of future projects when needed to achieve the desired long-term bike lane space and alignment. And I sent this to Bonnie Bush, so she has it. Thank you. The second. Is that your first offer? That's my first friendly amendment. Okay. Let me see if Ms. Bush, you do have that. All right. And maker of the motion, agreeable to you. Oh, I'm sorry. Excuse me. I'm fine with that unless there's any objection. Okay. Ms. Calentari-Johnson, second item. Great. The second is to direct the city manager, director of public works to further explore the proposed traffic safety recommendations, which are items one B through D in the neighbor's recommendation that was passed out as part of the active transportation update. Sorry, could you repeat that? I couldn't catch it all. And let me also ask Ms. Bush, do you have that? Good. Just a moment here. Would you like me to read it or? I think we're good, Ms. Calentari-Johnson. Ms. Bush is simply getting it ready for us to review. Ms. Calentari-Johnson, now that's up on the screen. Let me see if this is what you want it to be. This is. And when the time is appropriate, I can speak to it. Okay. Let me see if that friendly amendment is agreeable to the maker of the motion. It is to the second of the motion. I have a question. Is this separate from the appeal? And to me, it seems like that was part of the next step. Yeah. Mr. Butler? Yeah. That's a great question, Council Member Burner. I would recommend that that be separate direction and not included as conditions of approval because that's direction to the city. And so I think as long as you're clear about that, then if that satisfies the clerk, we'll keep it out of the conditions. This, these two items would not be conditions of approval. They would be separate direction that's recorded in the minutes. Agreeable, understood, and agreed. I can just follow up on that briefly. Say it again. So the motion would be to adopt the resolution as amended and give this direction to the staff. Thank you. Thank you for. Slow down here, Ms. Bush. I'm gonna make sure you're okay. We're good, all right. For the further amendments, for the debate or discussion, clerk will call the roll. Council Member Newsom? Aye. Brown? No. Watkins? Aye. Brinner? Aye. Callentary Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? Aye. Mayor Cooley? Aye. Motion passes and is ordered. Thank you all for your forbearance. Thank you for being here and providing your input. Council Members, we were, let's see, going to be finished with that item at 3.20. We did, we finished it at 3.20 a.m. What we're going to do is we're gonna take a break until, let's take a break until 10 after five. We'll come back in about 17 minutes or so and we will continue. Standing recess. Thank you. Thank you. 10 after. We're good. Good evening, the Santa Cruz City Council following a brief late afternoon, early evening recess. Resumes its work on our regular agenda. We are on item number 22. This is a 10 year citywide long range financial plan and good evening. And thank you for your forbearance. We're taking a little more time than we usually do on items today, but that's what happens at the end of the calendar year. Lots of stuff gets compressed into one meeting. Ms. Cabell, thank you for your very good work and your staff's good work. And we recognize you for a presentation. Thank you. So yes, Elizabeth Cabell, I'm the Finance Director and we are constantly in finance and probably throughout the city, you know, in a state of financial forecasting and planning. So about a year ago, we enlisted the help of Baker Tilly to help us create a citywide long range financial plan. And tonight, we're here to present sort of the results of that. We have had lots of travel issues. We were going to have representatives from Baker Tilly here in person. Lots of issues in the Northwest. And so just landed in his, at the airport. I think he's at the hotel now, but we had a backup who had his power go out and is now stationed in a library and ready to go. So everything has been working, but so in a way it's kind of good we had this delay. So now everybody is ready to go. But I do want to introduce Bob Leland. He's going to be doing the presentation today. And Steve Toller from Baker Tilly is also online and will be available to answer questions and assist with the presentation as well. And then I also have staff from finance here. So as we go through it, if there are any questions, please let us know. Thank you. Miss Cabell, who will we hear from first? Bob Leland from Baker Tilly. Mr. Leland, good evening. Thank you for being with us. Good evening and thank you for having me here. So let me get right into the presentation because I know you are short on time. Okay, you have the full version before you that you've had a chance to look through. So given the time constraints, I'll be giving you a highly abridged version of that, about 12 slides. The bottom line here is that the city has a structural deficit of about $10.5 million. Baseline forecast assumes that homelessness response spending remains at about $8 million with the general fund replacing lost state and federal funding starting in fiscal 25. So without corrective action, as you can see, in fiscal 25, you are below the city's reserve goal of two months of operating expense of 16.7%. And we'll continue to drop and it would, without corrective action, be negative by fiscal 27. So we will come back to this issue of the 10 and a half million. But I want first to just highlight some of the key assumptions because with any forecast, it's all about the assumptions. You get different assumptions, you'll have a different forecast. We think that these assumptions are realistic and particularly on the revenue side, we have recessions built in every seven years, not because we have a crystal ball, but because we wanna test the sensitivity of city finances, kind of give it a stress test. And so we're assuming a moderate recession in fiscal 25 and then every seven years thereafter. Some of the other key elements of revenue are property tax estimates and they are based on the various components under Prop 13 of a 2% growth for parcels that don't change ownership. About 4% of the parcels we think will change ownership. They'll go up about 40%. And then we have 80 new units per year and $25 million of new non-residential growth each year. And just for comparison, the 80 units compares to 76, which has been the average since 2008. Sales tax growth based on your consultants projections is about 2.9%. The TOT estimates do include the two prospective new hotels, La Bahia in fiscal 25 and the Cruz Hotel in fiscal 28, both of which are expected to generate about $1.4 million in TOT. So that $10.5 million shortfall is even with the two new hotels. The goal is to try to meet the reserve goal of 16.7%. Over on the expenditure side, we're assuming existing service and staffing levels. There are unfunded capital needs and there are new initiatives such as climate action that are not included. There is a placeholder assumption of 2.5% for cost of living adjustments. That obviously is subject to meet and confer, but with everything else in the forecast being inflated, we have to build in some assumption of inflation for labor as well. The 2.5% was selected because it's the 30 year historical average for the Bay Area CPI up until 2022. Plus it includes merit increases and savings from employee turnover. There is an annual contribution of $5 million. That is not enough to meet all of the identified capital needs, but we have that built in. There is the general fund backfill of $5.5 million due to the lost ARPA and CA-14 homeless response funding. And if you see that $5 million and the $5.5 million add them together, that's your $10.5 million that you're short. Then we also assume continued support by the general fund of the Economic Development Trust, the Technology Fund, Children's Fund, and WORF Fund. Now given this shortfall, we took a hard look at a range of budget strategies that could be employed to close the gap. And there are basically four categories. As you see down below, there are three sets of strategies that would maintain current service levels, and that would be what you would go to first, expenditure controls and cost shifts, service delivery alternatives that save money, and finally revenue enhancements. As a last resort, you would have service level reductions. Now of the categories that we identified, whoops, we have about three times the amount that you need, the 10 and a half million is needed to balance the budget. We have 32.6 million of alternatives, and you can see the number of strategies and the dollar amount in the table. Limited number of expenditure controls and service delivery changes, quite a few revenue enhancements, and then there are 14 other primarily expenditure related strategies that total $2 million. So we actually have about 34.6 million to address a gap of 10.5. Now of these categories, I've got the three listed here that do not involve service level reductions. The listing is color coded with black being those items that would save one and a half million dollars or more or generate that much more in revenue. Green are the moderate category of a million to a million and a half, and the reddish color is low, about 500,000 to a million. So again, you see that the amounts and about three and a half million options for expenditure controls such as streamlining operations, investing in a CIP manager to try to get capital projects done quicker and save money, more cost recovery, implementing technology. Service delivery changes involve some that are complicated such as exploring a regional shared service model for FHIR and EMS, sharing homeless response with a county which would require a fair amount of negotiation, diversifying the investment portfolio or reallocating to put more investment earnings into the general fund and reassessing some maintenance functions that would save collectively four million dollars. And then we have a whole list of revenue enhancements starting with increasing the sales tax. Other options include creating a parcel tax under community facilities district, Melrose, increasing parks and recreation cost recovery to 50% across the board, modernizing business license tax methodology. The city has a low level of business license tax revenue for an economy or size. And then various other changes that could affect admissions tax, utility tax, TOT, and then various other small revenue enhancements. So there's $25 million in that category. So let's get back to solving the fiscal gap. Let's say we come up with 10 and a half million in budget strategies. If they got implemented in fiscal 25, this is what it would look like. 10 and a half million is what is required for the city to not fall below its reserve goal in any one year. So you see in fiscal 27, we just hit it. And then in future years, the balance actually grows to beyond the reserve level, but it would take 10 and a half million in order to hit the reserve level in every year. Now, if we were to rely exclusively on the half cent sales tax measure, that would not be enough to close the gap in every year. And given the timing involved, you can see that balance would continue to decline, hit a low point in 27, begin to recover, pretty much hit the reserve level in 31 and 32. And then with the following recession that would be expected seven years after fiscal 25, we would start seeing a decline in revenue again. So that would raise seven and a half million dollars in fiscal 25 and just over eight million in fiscal 26. And so you see that there's no excess fiscal capacity generated, so this does not allow you to address any of those underfunded or unfunded capital investments or other spending initiatives. So in putting together budget strategy scenarios, we took a look at four basic categories on a spectrum of heavier revenues versus heavier expenditure reductions. The first category on the left here is strong revenue enhancements. The next would be a blended approach, mostly revenue, but some expense. The next approach would be blended with being more expenditure-leaning, so it would be mostly expenditure reductions with some revenues. And then finally on the far right, a strong expenditure reduction package. From this, we put together three sample scenarios and we looked at a lot more than three. There are hundreds that you could put together with the elements that we developed, but we picked three to be representative. The first being a revenue-centric approach and that includes the local sales tax, first and foremost. Second, there would be some increased general fund fees and charges for full cost recovery. We would have higher cost recovery and park and rec fees and we would have some reallocation of investment income. The second scenario is a balanced approach. It does still include the sales tax. It does include the fire-shared services model and it includes a range of operating efficiencies and reductions through attrition. The third approach is an expenditure-centric model. It excludes the sales tax, either because it's not put on the ballot or put on a defeated. You would have to fill that difference at roughly $8.3 million of revenue that you would be otherwise expecting to get from the sales tax with a range of general fund fees and charges, the park and rec cost recovery, more investment income allocated to the general fund, resume audits for business license tax, TOT, grant management, full cost recovery, the fire-shared services model, technology improvements, efficiencies and attrition cuts, and finally $2 million in reduction from the existing $5 million that's assumed to go to CIP each year or the homeless investment. So these three approaches. And what I'm gonna show you now is what that looks like for each of the scenarios. So here, you see we've got the items listed with the amount that they raise. And the important thing to note here is that scenario one is sufficient to give you another $5 million a year that could be devoted to capital investment or other initiatives, such as the climate initiative. You see on the chart in the upper right that you were actually above the reserve goal in each year. And in the outer years, you begin to exceed that and then it drops off somewhat as you get toward the mid 2030s. So this is an option that both balances the budget and gives you more fiscal capacity, $5 million a year. The second approach, the balanced approach does have the sales tax and you see the amounts for the other elements of that. This provides an additional $2 million in fiscal capacity, not as much as the other, which was $5 million. This is two. And you'll notice from the chart in the upper right-hand corner that the balance declines and there are three years in which it is under the reserve goal and that's highlighted here in the circle. And then it continues to increase. So again, this assumes the sales tax does have some additional fiscal capacity, but not as much as the first combination. Now we have the third scenario, no sales tax, a whole raft of other selections. As opposed to having additional fiscal capacity, in this case, you're actually still $2 million short even after implementing these other items above. So the highlighted item in pink here says there are still $2 million that have to come out of capital projects or the homelessness response or some other operating costs. This approach also leaves you short for three years, does produce some excess in the above the reserve in the outer years, but in order to get to this point, you've had to do a range of perhaps unpopular reductions and also a cutback in capital and homelessness. Now we have three other options that we've listed here that are perhaps also applicable to a strategy to provide increased fiscal capacity for capital investments such as, rather than doing a pay-as-you-go approach, having the capacity to pay for more upfront. One is the parcel tax for the community facilities district that we mentioned before, that does require a two-thirds voter majority, however, because this is not new development, it would be applied across the entire city. Another might be a specific tax, such as the admissions tax. You get a million four for that by going up to 8%. If it's a general tax, it would be a majority vote. If you earmarked it too specifically, then it would be a special tax, two-thirds vote. And then finally, there's debt financing through jail bonds, which you would have voter approval on a two-thirds basis to impose a new property tax. So that takes us through this very quickly and you have had a chance to look at the whole presentation. You may well have questions. At this point, I will turn it back over to Steph and I am happy to respond to any questions that you might have. Thank you, sir. Ms. Cabell, thank you. Let me see if there are questions from council members. Yes, the vice mayor is recognized. I guess I just was looking for clarity. We're not being asked to make a decision on one of those three things. We're just presented with, okay. We're just giving you an update, right? So no actions required, we're just, okay. You know. The budget and revenue subcommittees look at this work and I want to thank you and excuse me, I want to thank you and Baker Tilley for the fine work that you've put into this. This was an iterative effort over time. I think what you've done that's quite good is get us into a world where these are realistic options. Some of them are not attractive options but they're realistic options for us. And I think as we move ourselves into considering our 24-25 fiscal year budget, certainly this will be revisited. We will visit it quicker than that in one of the elements because we're going to take an action here, I suspect, in a few minutes which will put the sales tax measure on the ballot for March, which would check a big box if we were to place it there and it was to be passed. That then remixes, it seems to me, the blue and the green and whatever, because now we have, assuming a passage, we would have a real situation and we can then track it from there. I think this is very, very useful information. I also want to thank you for what isn't in there. There were some items early on that I think were not, I appreciated because you're trying to catch everything and put it in there that we don't have the council considering some things so that we're simply not going to do. And I think that's an important thing when you're presenting to the council as well. So thank you very much and thank the consultant so much for the fine work. Questions, comments? Ms. Brown. Just really quickly, I want to thank you and I don't have questions. I did get the benefit of reviewing this and getting to talk about it earlier and I think it really builds on previous work that's been done around our long term financial planning. And I did want to ask though, because people were asking me as the vice mayor asked, there's no action to be taken and there's very little information in the agenda packet. So I'm wondering, I don't recall if we talked about those slides being made available on our website perhaps, somewhere that people could actually see that without having to come back to the video would be great. And I think too, it's important to, we can't obviously implement everything at once. So I think putting things out there and then we have the revenue ad hoc committee to kind of like, okay, now we're focused on this particular piece and moving forward. So, but yes, we will put the slides out on the website. Very good. Thank you, Ms. Cabell. If I understand it, we need to take no action on this. It was essentially an informational item and a report. Thank you so much. Thank you, Baker Tilly for your fine work. We are now on item three. This is a resolution requesting placement. Mayor, sorry, just to confirm, we do not have anybody online for public comment. Thank you for your help on that. I appreciate it. It's kidding, somebody just raised their hand. They did just? Someone just raised their hand. On this item. On online. On the item 22. Am I right? And his hand just went back down, so I think we're good. All right, thank you. We're on item 23, a resolution requesting placement of a sales and use tax on the March ballot. There is a staff report and I'm going to ask if Ms. Schmidt, as she's approaching, let me just tell what we're going to do. We're going to take an hour of your time and not use it. We're going to take this down to about five or 10 minutes. So the council subcommittee, we all had a role. We're all, we're going to make big presentations here, but we think given the lateness of the hour and so on, we're going to get right to the meat of this. Ms. Schmidt, thank you for your fine work on this. Why don't you make a couple of opening comments on this? Thank you, Mayor. The council budget and revenue ad hoc committee has been working over the last few months and focusing on some of the feedback from Baker Tilly. One of the key things that you've seen given our financial situation is revenue is very much needed for us to be able to continue to deliver our high quality central services to our community through our amazing employees. So given that one of the biggest ticket revenue items in play was a half cent sales tax. So the budget and revenue ad hoc committee had discussions. They directed staff to do a community based poll about a potential measure. The poll results came back positively and so the budget and revenue ad hoc committee is now requesting the larger council to consider the motions in front of you to move forward with placing a sales tax measure for a half cent for the city of Santa Cruz on the March 2024 ballot. Is that summary enough? Thank you. No, it's quite good. Thank you. Let me ask you subcommittee members who would like to make some comments on this. Mr. Newsom, would you care to make any comments on this item? Thank you, Markely. Just quickly we saw our fiscal situations looks at the moment and this is a measure that we wanted to put on the agenda and have the council consider and put on the ballot. And I wanna thank the staff for all the work on this and thank my fellow committee members as well on their work on this. Ms. Brown. I would also like to thank the committee, the staff that have been involved in this and assistant city manager, Laura Schmidt for creating a beautiful slide deck that we are not gonna look at tonight. But it is a really great overview and hits the key points. And I just wanna highlight, I'm hoping we can make this one available as well for folks, the context slide. I think when you look at it, it will really help sum up why we're doing what we're doing and recommending this now. Let me ask if other council members like to make comments on this item. Ms. Brunner is recognized. I just wanted to comment as a former budget and a committee member. I understand the work and the assessment of any revenue that is required of us as being fiscally responsible for so many parts of the city. So thank you for the work that has been done to get to this point. And thank you to staff for presenting all the information. That's very kind of you. Thank you further. If I was to, which I will point to one page in the agenda packet, I would, although there isn't any such thing as page 23.3, I would point to it nonetheless because it has the one item on here that I think is so vastly important to us. And that is we've achieved a 29% reduction year over year in homelessness in the city of Santa Cruz. And that's a result of fine work by our city and the county working in partnership together. That has to be maintained. And in order to keep moving on what is one of the highest two priorities in the city of Santa Cruz, as I am able to discern it with regard to our electorate, this is one of those. And the ability to retain those gains and make more is literally in jeopardy. And this sales tax measure is a huge and obvious way to fill that hole going forward. So thank you. Thank you for this document. Matters back before the council, the vice-mayors recognized. I'm happy to move the item. If that's- I have to do real quick public comment on this. Oh, I just want to make one comment about that as well. I wasn't going to say anything, but I have to say I was taking those during the last item and I think it relates to this in that if I saw that $2 million cost that might be associated with our city's response efforts, I just want to remind everyone, I know we are well aware, but one encampment cleanup could cost upwards of a half a million dollars. And the proactive approach that we've been taking thus far, I think we are seeing significant increases and maybe people wanting to open businesses and then thus tax revenue and other things. So I think that balanced approach and really addressing it before it becomes a problem and spending that initial money upfront. Well, it seems like a lot. I'm glad that the polling and the community also agreed with that. That's phenomenal to hear. Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. Ms. Bush, should we have anyone online who wishes to comment on this? Let's take the person online first and then we'll see if anybody else is with us. Person online, good evening. Hello, this is Garrett. Since measure F failed last time, you tried to raise sales taxes to the highest in the nation, only just about a year ago, you all should have got it that the people had spoken and don't want higher taxes and you should cut the fat and curb spending among other things to achieve a balanced budget. I guess not. For a long time now, the city government has approved big spending, growing the government, with ever more spending, regardless of population size, the economy, rising income, or what the people have been willing to pay for. We've seen these charts for a while and you've done nothing. As far as the expensive, well-surveyed ballot language of how to con people to vote for the highest taxes in the nation, another wasted expense like measure F, it says money is to be spent to protect and maintain essential services, including keeping pollution out of the rivers, bringing streams, preparing for wildfires, maintaining repairing streets, potholes improving, maintaining up good parks, beaches, and public safety. But all of that is what you should have been doing and prioritizing anyway, like a regular city, with the huge amounts of money you now receive, ignoring that you have an overspending addiction and not all your spending is essential. Other cities can balance budgets. You admit previously in this agenda, the city is, well, in this one too, losing 10 million a year and this produces eight, so no improvements, extra improvements can actually be expected. You promise nothing, you have learned nothing, you haven't shown you can be trusted with budget monies, just more spend first, hoped to tax later, irresponsibility. As far as wildfires, you might be interested to know 2023 at the lowest national forest fire burn rate in decades, stuff those wildfires into your climate change alarmist trash bin. The only other state of use seems to be a slush fund to deal with homelessness, but you don't say how much goes for this or that or many uses. You just hope all these catchy phrases find the voters fancy. I disagree, homeless people are an essential city expense or responsibility. And I don't think that the point in time count this year and the wettest year ever might be accurate and your reduction of homelessness might be fiction. This is a shotgun-faced money grab. Perhaps this should be a temporary tax while you prove to us you can demonstrate a balanced budget as a trial and not just commit permanently to hopeless tasks like ending homelessness that is above your pay grade and responsibility. Nevermind, this is a regressive tax that falls on the forest. Nevermind, we have little to show in California for all these high taxes. Nevermind, our population has not actually grown in three years, despite your false claim we are rapidly growing. And anyway, if more people come, it means they pay more taxes too. The city cost per capital is currently very, very high. Just a suggestion, get rid of all the DEI personnel, the DEI training, the climate change staff, insist any grants, 100% pay for staff, ditch the living wage and contractor requirements, those overly generous extra staff holidays and these expensive surveys because none of any of that is anything we can afford. If nothing else, at least learn from the lesson of where all our financial problems originate which are the expanding debt payments and inflation caused by the ever expanding federal government and the immoral and corrupt debt overspending, not that taxes are too low, thanks. Thank you, sir. Does anyone who is with us this evening wish to make comment on this item? Seeing and hearing none, the Ms. Bush, no one else online, correct? Matters back before the council. I'd be glad to recognize a member for a motion. Mr. Newsom. I'll make the motion to accept the recommendation. Adoption of the staff recommendation which has three parts, accepting the report, adopting a resolution requesting that the measure be placed on the ballot and third to support the measure for purpose of authorizing arguments and provide direction regarding authors, et cetera. And that is the staff recommendation. That is the motion. There is a second. Second. Second by Ms. Brown. Under discussion, questions or comments? Under discussion, debate or discussion? Seeing and hearing none, the clerk will call the roll. May I just confirm, sorry. When it says provide direction regarding authors, do we have that direction? Do we need it? Ms. Schmidt. No, we do not need it. We can just, the council directs that we go about doing that. It's traditionally what we've done. Friday morning meetings, we can have that conversation. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Very good. Clerk will call the roll. The member is Newsom. Aye. Brown. Aye. Martin. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Eulentary Johnson. Aye. Vice Mayor Golder. Aye. Mayor Keely. Aye. Motion passes and sorted. Ms. Schmidt, thank you. We gave you very short shrift on this. Thank you. And your work was very, very good work. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Certainly. Item 24, San Lorenzo River levy letter of map revision application submittal update. Those are all English words. I'm not sure what they mean when they're strung together. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good evening, Mayor, council members, Nathan Wynn, director of Public Works. I'll try to keep my presentation brief today. It is really just an update on the process of where we're at with the FEMA accreditation for the San Lorenzo River levy. Bonnie, do you have the slide deck? Is there a slide deck that I sent you? No. Oh, did you want to write it? Yeah. Are you sure you want to do that? Are you sure you want to do that? It's only a few slides today. Are you sure you want to do this? You want to show us a slight presentation? Oh, yes. Yes, please. We want to be able to show you a few updates. I'll try to keep it brief like I was mentioning. Thank you, sir. All right, perfect. So again, a given update on the FEMA accreditation process and where we're at on the San Lorenzo River. And this is really about a letter of map revision that goes to FEMA. And we'll get to that in just one second here. So next slide. We wanted to provide some kind of historical background in regards to the levy that was constructed in the 1950s. And most recently, it was deemed complete as of 2019. That's when the Army Corps basically handed over maintenance responsibilities over to the city. And that's when we started embarking upon the work of getting a certifying engineer, MBK, to assist us with the FEMA accreditation process. And that's where you see that third bullet point there with the 20 to 23. And I'll go in a little bit more detail in that in a second. Now, some of the work that we've already completed here is, as you guys well know, some of the vegetation management work as well as road and control work. And so we're happy to see that that portion of the FEMA accreditation process is complete. Next slide. So really the effort comes down to, and we've already kind of went over that first bullet point right there, is complying with our operations and maintenance manual. Now hiring MBK, they did the hydraulic modeling work, did some survey work as well as determine our flood hazard zoning, which is really the critical piece to a lot of this work. So we'll go to the next slide. We're halfway through. Yeah, so really a lot of this work comes down to, over the years that we've been working with our consulting engineer, is developing this letter of map revision. So it's called LOMAR. You can see that image to the right is essentially what the certification does is it eliminates over 1,400 parcels within this floodplain area for being considered a part of the flood zone. So we go from an A99 designation, which is somewhat of an ambiguous unknown flood zone, to now an AE designation, where we actually have several locations where we establish a base flood elevation, and those are marked in the light blue of this map. Those parcels that are within this floodplain zone will be getting a letter notifying them of this revision. But first we're submitting this to FEMA as a part of their recommendation to go with FEMA, which we'll go to the next slide. This is the process essentially that we're at right now, where we're submitting this letter of map revision to FEMA. They have an estimated time of about six months to review and respond to that letter. Once we get their approval, there'll be an appeal process, and that is when we'll be issuing out letters to the impacted neighbors once they've actually concurred with the submittal letter that we've provided. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Let me see if there are questions. Was this letter mean? The letter to the residents who are in this area, what's that letter gonna say to them? That's essentially gonna let them know that several of the, there'll be two different letters most likely. Well, someone will know that they're actually out of the, moving from an A99 zone to an AE zone designation, and then some of those, again, 1,400 parcels will actually be removed out of that, out of the FEMA insurance zone. What does that mean to the folks who received that letter? What are we trying to tell them when we send them that letter? Yeah, we're letting them know that we've established a base flood elevation based on the work that we've done on the levee, and that they will no longer be required to have insurance in some of those parcels. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For the questions or comments, vice-mayors. My one question, because I know there's a lot of people watching this that are interested from Santa Cruz High. We think this will be good for the locker room at the pool. This is gonna get very positive for them. Absolutely, we were hoping to hear. Thank you. Yay, the kids can have a locker room. No action to be taken. That's up. Very good. Thank you. For the questions or comments, this is an item essentially for our information. Thank you for being kind enough to shorten it without us missing the point. Very well done. Thank you, sir. We are on item number 25 in ordinance requiring delivery companies to provide a service enabling customers to tip delivery drivers. Matters been before us on previous occasions. Let me see if we have no presentation on this. Is that correct? We actually have an hour long, but no, I'm just kidding. Your votes are now three, two, one. I'm teasing. I just had a few comments from all the tours. Please, please. I'm just kidding around. Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, I just, I will introduce the item and say thank you to... Well, I'm very sorry. Let me correct that. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I'm trying to move too fast after our break. Let me return to item number 24 and make sure that I do give opportunity. Please come forward. And I apologize to you for skipping over that important part of my trip. You know, that's okay. Thank you, sir. Going 22 hours without eating was a mistake. I needed some time to eat. So yeah, this item, it actually looks great on paper. You know what? What possibly unforeseen could be happening with our weather systems around the world that are all part of natural cycles. Well, just leave it at that. This looks great on paper. Thank you. And Ms. Wood, do we have anyone online on this on item 24? I guess we do not. Well, thank you, Ms. Bush, and thank you, Ms. Wood. We are on item 25. Mr. City Attorney, do we need to do anything on 24? Have I cured that problem on public participation? I don't see a member of the public remotely with their hand raised. Okay, what I mean is, since I took it out of order, do we need to go back to that item? Did Mr. Whitman get a chance to make his comments? I'm sorry, I'm not clear on my point. Let me try it again. Just give me a second here. It was a receive information item. We took no action. Thank you, we're good. We're on item 25, delivery service, tipping ordinance. Council Member Watkins has brought this for our consideration. Sure, so I wanna thank our city attorney's office, my colleagues, Council Member Brunner and Calentari Johnson who, if are interested, can also make a few remarks. I'll keep my remarks short. I think there's no question that delivery drivers have taken on a more important role post pandemic in terms of the culture of having items delivered to our doorsteps and the convenience that that provides the consumer. But it also is a hard job for a lot of people who are commuting often from out of our county to provide that service to us. We're also seeing an influx in opportunities to tip people. And there was one occasion in a storm where I think I ordered something very small, like not necessary. And at like eight o'clock at night, it's delivered to my door. And at which point, if I had the option to tip, I surely would have given the circumstances and the storm in which this person delivered the small item that I didn't need really essentially. So all that to say is that this is just an option. This is to pursue an option. It's a new ordinance. And I appreciate folks who've contributed to helping our understanding of what it could look like and what some of the pitfalls could be. With anything that's new, there comes uncertainty. But nonetheless, I feel very good about moving forward and trying something new. And hopefully we can see success and some money in the pockets of those who are providing this essential service to us. And I'll ask my colleagues, Council Member Brunner or Calentari Johnson, if they have any additional remarks. Council Member Brunner, comments? Thank you. Yes. And I just wanted to add in addition to that, that we really want to emphasize this would simply create an option to tip. It's not requiring that there be a tip and the technology already exists. And so having this be something that could really help with a lot of the economic situations that do exist with this industry, then we're happy to support and in this way. So I'd like to hand it off to Council Member Calentari Johnson. Ms. Calentari Johnson. Thank you so much. Yeah, the only thing I will add is that this really upholds our community value of equity. That's really at the core of the intent of this proposal that's before us today. And that we have met with members of the industry and they had some really great points and comments that we've, since we've had time, this was on our agenda. If you remember a couple months ago, we've integrated those and updated what we're proposing in the ordinance. So I think with that, I will pass it to our city attorney. Mr. Condati. Thank you, Mayor and members of the city council. Just add a couple of comments because we did receive considerable feedback from the industry and some very constructive feedback, including a list of legal considerations that were pointed out by Pete Montgomery and Mike Yadon who are in the audience tonight. I'm expecting we'll be wanting to address the city council. I would just say in response to some of the legal considerations that were raised, this ordinance is not intended to affect the employment relationship between delivery companies and their drivers. And it's not intended to regulate delivery companies, except in so far as it will require an unobtrusive, technical implementation of a measure that enables customers to interact directly with their drivers to provide tips. And the companies are given a great deal of flexibility as to how to do that. The ordinance states that they can be, that the option must be accessible to the customer by one of several mechanisms that may include but are not limited to during the checkout or order placement process through a hyperlink or an email notification notifying the customer of the delivery status on printed material affixed to the delivery box on an order delivery tracking package page that a customer can have access to on a generally available website that customers are directed to which tip can be given for specific delivery by providing a tracking number. Those are options, they're not the universe of mechanisms that the delivery companies can use. We did incorporate a number of amendments into the ordinance that were the result of some constructive feedback that we have. And I would also say in response to some of that feedback, we understand that there are some technical issues that may need to be ironed out prior to implementation of this ordinance. We also understand that we will be engaging in a dialogue with the industry in the six month grace period that we've built into the ordinance to make sure that we cover all the bases and do all the necessary research and potentially bring back amendments or changes to the ordinance in response to that additional work that we know given that this is really a unique creature, the only ordinance of its kind in the United States that we are aware of. We expect there to be additional dialogue and additional work to be done. With that, I will be happy to respond to any council member questions or comments. Questions, comments of city attorney, the vice mayor is recognized. I just have a comment and I appreciate the spirit of the intent behind the work that my colleagues have done and because of the Brown Act, I don't have another opportunity to say this out loud. So I'm just gonna say thank you for your work and I appreciate the intent. I'm not gonna support the item. I do anticipate legal costs associated with us and when we're talking about saving money by not doing this, we can save money. The other thing that is influencing my decision is we cannot tip our USPS postal carriers. There's plenty of people we can't tip. I said last time that I think it's on the industry that groups need to organize and get fair wages to their employees and that's kind of out of the control how I see my role as a city council member here. The other reason is when you're shopping on Amazon or something that you're not shopping locally, it's not contributing to our local businesses and it's creating traffic and waste through emissions and just the packaging that it comes in. And so to me, I think that by not supporting it, I'm also supporting some of our core values and so I just wanted to throw that out there because I do try to work with you guys but I cannot support this. Ms. Brown. Thank you. So I wanna, I'm feeling conflicted here on this one because I do wanna associate myself with the comments that our vice mayor made. There are all kinds of challenges with this and in terms of equity, it is very limited and I do believe that workers all should be paid a living wage and that those companies should be ensuring that workers earn enough money to pay their bills. And so I feel you and at the same time, I think I also, given the constraints and that we don't have the ability to change those bigger systemic problems in our society with wage inequality and poverty wages, I do wanna support an opportunity, any opportunity for people to put money in low wage workers' pockets that they wouldn't otherwise have. And so I'm feeling like I'm gonna support it but I do feel conflicted because I think this is just, is a small and potentially challenging piece of this puzzle. The vice mayor is right. One more sentence, you can always give a cash tip. Okay, let me see if there are further questions or comments, let me go out to the public. Mr. Montgomery, good evening. As you're approaching, I wanna thank you for all the good work you did with then Senator McPherson when he and I were serving in the legislature. You did a great job on his behalf. Well, thank you very much. I know it's been a long day. It's been very informative for me, even just sitting here all day. Just so happens that my wife or two brothers and my father-in-law own the piece of property next to the Soquel Avenue Development. So that was a good discussion to see through. And my father and my wife and her brothers own a bunch of property on River Street. So I'll be texting him telling me he's about to get a property tax refund. So all in all, this has been really helpful. Sorry. See you in two weeks. I have a presentation, Fred. Do you want me to put that there? Sorry, good evening. Mr. Mayor and council members, as the mayor said, my name's Pete Montgomery, I'm Santa Cruz native. Been working with FedEx on engagement with the city. I do appreciate, I think we met with almost everybody or at least had communications with just about everybody on this. Really good, lots of time spent with the city attorney. But we're here today to ask you to not move this forward. I think as was mentioned, this would be the first of its kind in the US. And no matter how well-intentioned this measure might be, it's really difficult to implement on a very localized basis for a global carrier like FedEx, for example. Now, the ordinance exempts our two main competitors, which is UPS and the US Postal Service. So really, it's probably why you only see FedEx here. Delivery of residential packages by global and interstate carriers. It's a very complicated and complex process. The ordinance summary makes a lot of comparisons to like internet service companies, like an Uber Eats or a DoorDash or whoever. But in those circumstances, you as a consumer have a direct relationship with that provider. So you have made a decision to interact with Uber Eats or DoorDash or whoever. They have your personal financial information and so then they make a delivery and you can tip them as you wish. The company like FedEx, our relationship is not with the recipient. Our relationship is with the vendor. If you buy something from Antiglass or Bookshop or Wayfair, they then have a relationship, excuse me, have a relationship with FedEx. So we would have to then go get your personal financial information in order to allow you to provide a tip. So there's a lot of discussion about privacy before. It's another, you know, state of California has moved very aggressively on privacy issues. So we would have to then go out and try and somehow get that information. There's a lot of rhetoric been said or in the ordinance that it's so easy to implement. It's really difficult to implement. I mean, we can continue these discussions, but it's not as easily implementable as slab of stick around a box and then your driver gets his tip. So that just has to go through FedEx payroll processing, has to have applicable taxes and wages taken out. So it's a lot different. I don't, I'm trying to be, we've made these points to most of you. I'm not trying not to be duplicative. I guess I took too much time with my personal anecdotes about my family stuff. So, you know, I guess the big thing is, you know, we, as we look at this, it's very difficult to do on a single city basis. We have to put big systems in place. If this is something that is really good for the drivers who make a very, very fair wage working for companies like FedEx and UPS and others, then it should be done on a larger basis statewide, nationally, not for a small jurisdiction like California, or, I mean, like Santa Cruz. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone online, Ms. Bush? We do have two hands raised. Okay, let's take the first one. Good evening. Person online, good evening. Good evening. Jillian Greenside here. It's a very interesting discussion on this item, and I learned quite a bit. And so I'd just like to share a situation of a friend of mine, and I wouldn't have thought about this had he not shared when, more in COVID times, when he would be making, you know, just above minimum wage and making 30 burritos by seven a.m. And the drivers would come and pick it up. And right now, most people do tip drives. Well, people I know anyway, and I do, but my friend shared with me, well, yeah, we do all the cookie, we get nothing. There's no sharing of that tip. So whether you think, you know, that, and I agree the company should be paying a livable wage, but it sounds like at least some of the drivers are not, you know, they're doing a lot better than my friend, who has probably made a hundred burritos by lunchtime. So I just wanted to share that, which complicates it more. But if there were going to, if this were passed and there was tipping, somehow, and this would just make, as the previous speaker said, it's complicated enough, just make it more complicated, but some way of sharing with the producers of whatever it is that the drivers are delivering to you. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone with us in chambers wish to make comments on this? Good evening, sir. Yeah, good evening. This whole situation really seems like a squeeze play, you know, as individuals, you know, I like to tip, you know, I don't really expect that in return. But the previous caller actually made a good point. The cooks and stuff, the people gathering the food, you know, maybe it's just their job, if it's like a grocery store, or let's say Home Depot or something, but the restaurant workers, they're losing out on tips. And so it really is up to the individual as to whether or not they're gonna tip. My current housemate calls out for stuff a lot. Yeah, and my understanding is she includes the tip as part of the thing. I don't know how that's split with the driver or with the company. But this whole squeeze play that happened when the ScamDemic started, and I'm absolutely calling it ScamDemic, when you look at all the small businesses that were gone, gone, but the pot stores and the liquor stores and the big box stores, they stayed open. So, you know, I think it's great that certain companies pay their employees a living wage. Amazon doesn't. Amazon has an agreement with the US Postal Service. Every package that gets delivered by Amazon through the US Postal Service loses money. What is right about that? So once again, this is really just a personal choice. I'm not quite sure what to say, and this is one of the many things that makes Santa Cruz special that we're even debating this. Thanks. Thank you. Anyone else online, Ms. Bush, did we have two? We still have two, all right. Next person online. Good evening. I'm gonna be brief because if I speak too long, my geeky nerdy friends who have something to say on this issue will be jealous. This is kind of turning the house with the key to require these corporations to change their corporate culture, which they have probably because it gives them greater control over their expectations of their employees. I'm for giving cash tips, Renee. I'm for giving gift cards to, let's say, front line workers during say we had another pandemic or I don't know, we did away with ridiculous expectation that children go to school. Anyway, just kidding. The California driver benefit was that was something that they put, I feel like this may be kind of a spearhead in a move to do something like that where the, I mean, all told me it's a bit of a tax on people who use these services. I would have maybe $20, $40 more in my pocket if they had not added that. I mean, why is this different than PayPal? Why is this different than a cash app or what's the other one, Venmo or I don't know, Zell is the chase man, I don't know. Anyway, I guess the point is, yeah, it kind of subverts the expectation that certain workers are not tipped workers, whereas you'll tax, politicians will tax some tips, which I find kind of absurd already. Just as I said, I'm gonna not talk too long, so I'm gonna, that's all I have to say on that, but I feel like it's kind of overstepping. I mean, in some way, it's, I mean, you're really, really, Renee is right about it. There'll be legal challenges, and it seems kind of like a really big pill to climb to make a system that works. Okay, thanks. Well, thank you very much. And one more person online, correct, Ms. Bush? Good evening, person online. Yeah, hi, this is Garrett. Hey, I wasn't gonna speak to this, but it'll be real quick, but I personally am a little taken back when the POS terminal, when I'm going for takeout, in other words, receiving really no service, wants a tip and you have to hit other just to put zero in, I don't know about that. And then have you seen the video where somebody went into a 100% self-service like a 111 kind of thing and no people in the whole place and at the checkout, it asks for a tip. You see that one? Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say. Well, thank you, Ms. Bush, anyone else online? Matters back before the council. Ms. Watkins is recognized. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you to those who commented and came to share their comments. I just wanna say how I appreciate that this requires the courage of a council that certainly some of these policies definitely have a place at the state and federal level and often in one of the things I love so much about local policy is that we can be innovative and we can be forward thinking and often a leader in pursuing these types of innovations and types of policies at the local level. And so I hope that that could be the case for this and hopefully that we can continue to work on some of the wrinkles that may come about but knowing that in the end, it's putting money in the pockets of mainly minority people who are often traveling from lower income communities to deliver our packages. And if you want, you would have the option. And so it's not required, it's an option. Anyways, so with that, I'm happy to move the recommendation and I know I think Council Member Calantar Johnson also had something to add. There is a motion. Is there a second? Council Member Calantar. Miss Calantar Johnson seconds and you may open on your motion. I pretty much did, I apologize. I did that pre-motion. Quite all right, Miss Calantar Johnson is recognized. Thank you, yeah. I'll echo Council Member Watkins sentiments that we as a city have been leaders in looking at new ways of doing things and looking at upholding our value of equity and I think this really speaks to that. We have a pretty long runway of six months for implementation so I invite continued partnership and working with you, Mr. Montgomery and others so that we can figure out those wrinkles. And I think with that six month runway, we can sort out and not get into a situation where we'll accrue any kind of litigation fees. We can't control other people's habits. I also am a strong supporter of small businesses in our local downtown and our midtown businesses but we can't control other people's behaviors but what we can do is provide options for folks to compensate even further those who are being of service to our community. So I'm happy to second this and support this. Thank you for the debate or discussion. Miss Brown. Let's make a quick comment here because I did hear members of the public speak about some of their concerns which I also share. I mean we are talking about a system where it's very selective so in terms of it's not equitably distributed it's based on voluntary decisions by individual consumers and I recognize that there are, I started envisioning all of the scenarios in which I get deliveries. People talked about food service and I agree that those workers who participate in the production of that food should be also fairly compensated and should be included in tip polls but we're talking here today about or tonight about delivery of manufactured goods that are coming from all over the country and there are supply chain issues and so we can't really get, we can't capture that in something like this and so I just wanted to say that I remain conflicted but mildly supportive so thank you for bringing this forward. I hope that we can find a way to make it work and in a positive way without it affecting folks negatively. Yeah. For the debate or discussion Miss Brunner. Thank you. I appreciate the input we received here today as we continue, if this passes today that is exactly why we built in a six month grace period and we hope to continue working through and to see how this could be one option to support last leg drivers and delivery drivers. Thank you. Thank you. Further debate or discussion? I'll say this, I'm gonna do the, wrong thing for the right reasons. I'm gonna support this and what I mean by the wrong thing is I don't disagree with you on what the need is what you're trying to do and so on. This just cries out for state legislation just screams out for state legislation. If this was going to go in effect in 30 days then I'd be making a pretty strong case against it but that isn't what you're suggesting as to use council member Collin Tar-Johnson. The runway here I think is sufficient to say this is coming, get ready for it. That's sufficient time that if this proves to be nearly impossible to do, we can revisit this. So I'm gonna do the wrong thing for the right reasons. I'm gonna go ahead and vote for this and I do appreciate you bringing this. This is who you are. You got the hardest, biggest all outdoors. If it isn't about kids, it's about low wage it's always about something good. So thank you for bringing this to us. Clerk will call the roll. Council members Newton? Aye. Brown? Aye. Watkins? Aye. Brunner? Aye. Calentari-Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? No. And Mayor Cooley? Aye. Motion passed and disordered. We are on item 26. This is municipal code amendments relating to flexible density units responding to modifications requested by the California Coastal Commission. Is there any staff report on this? Nope, ready to go? All right, matters before the council adopt a resolution and introduce for publication the ordinance. Questions? Any member of the public wish to give public comment on this item? Ms. Bush, anyone online? Matters back before the council. I'll recognize someone for a motion on this. I move the recommendation. Motion by council member Watkins. Any second by Mr. Newsom? I'm sorry, by Mr. Newsom. If that's all right, by Mr. Newsom. Is there a debate or discussion? Seeing and hearing none, the clerk will call the roll. Council member Newsom? Aye. Brown? Aye. Watkins? Aye. Brunner? Aye. Calentari-Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? Aye. And Mayor Cooley? Aye. Motion passes and disordered. We're on item number 27. This is an ordinance relating to the energy code and other related matters. We've had this before us on a previous occasion. This is the second reading of the ordinance. We created a bit of a window here for folks who had testified under first reading if they wanted to come in and provide input. Speaking only for myself, I received input from two of the speakers who were here on a previous occasion. They have, at least in their communication with me, dropped their objection to this. Is there a question or comment here? Do we have any public comment on this item? Good evening, sir. Miss Bush, do we have anyone online? We do have one. Thank you. Good evening, sir. Yeah. Thank you, Tony. My name is, we're not here. My name's Silas James Ewing Whitman. You know, I read through most of this. I don't think it's a bad idea to require when the work is being done before the walls are sealed up to be set up to do other things. It does mean that the electrical needs need to really be looked at because electricity is just not near as efficient as oil. Certainly the most plentiful fluid on the planet next to water is oil. Fossil fuels is a complete fabrication. I've spoken about this before. So this is gonna move forward. I don't really have any objections, but you know, my understanding is 2% of the vehicles in the United States are electrical now. Now in 2021, when there was that cold snap in Texas for whatever reason, there were wind farms that were designed by individuals that made their billions from running concentration camps in China. They didn't work. And some people said that the electricity bills increased by 9,000%. That's quite a bit. So we're trying to electrify our system when most of the electricity is created by natural fuel sources like oil and coal that can all be claimed to be mostly very pure. It's just not the way it is. There's a study done and stopped in 1987 in Santa Cruz where they purified the nasty exhaust from coal-fired power plants, created an algae where 60% of that material was oil. That could be diesel, jet fuel, or kerosene. So what is really unfortunate is, not that I like really any of the presidents the past 50 years, but we had a two-year strategic supply of oil in the United States. Yeah, at the beginning of 2020. Now we have less than 17 days. So you know, I'm glad people have sweaters because the electrical needs are, it's a total control grid. One more thing. I went in to find out about some information from the building department. I was very thankful that they were open at 7.30 in the morning or 7.35 when I got there. They were locked out of the room because their electronics wouldn't let them in their own door. Fortunately, that's a pretty big building right over there and they got in some other way, but all this infrastructure that's being done that is electronically controlled. Can malfunction on accident or can malfunction on purpose? Thanks. Thank you, sir. Ms. Bush, anyone online? We do have someone. Let me ask the person who's online to please proceed. Good evening. Okay, hi, this is Derek. Oh, hey, Mayor, I gave you a letter. I was still objected. Anyway, the State of California has been throwing the towel in on individual rights for some years now. First, with ineffective anti-capitalist socialist rent control, which I regard as similar now to this EV building codes and electric ready extra costs, making gas usage more expensive, even though gas is 40% cheaper for energy than electricity. This is similar, but based instead on mistaken theories of a climate change crisis used to impose coercive over the line laws which cannot address inflation or control the climate of the earth when the only real cost problem is government corruption and traffic at spending and debt creation was its abuses of individual liberty. That cruise went over the top of the state's rent control with the large rent and freeze ordinance ignoring reality inflation can top 7% annually for years. Here we go again, similar defects exist here with your and the state's impositions of PV system mandates in new housing based on that TV logic that relies on dozens of questionable assumptions of future cost effectiveness. You further assume consumers are just too stupid to select through a free market cost-effective housing features by themselves. Those rich studies cited to justify even more costs are at best a snapshot look of not even the current new housing reality but creations of very EV friendly model housing assuming all of it will be reality for the next 30 plus years. Their projections have already been proven false in just one year. Those 2022 studies with already sky high energy price and due to Biden that were much higher than just in 2020. Assume for instance gas prices this November this month would be 4.6% higher per year per years and interest rates would be 4% for 30 years. We now know for a fact current natural gas rates for this month even with the anti gas bias Biden's energy policies don't face all according to PG and E are 20% lower than those projections 86 per third versus 71.2 cents and Morgan interest rates are not 4% but they're 100% off at 8.1%. Electric rate increases of 1.8% seem not to acknowledge rates got jacked by around 40% since 2018 peak prices basis change and could happen again easily. Add in all the other variables of real projects versus electric friendly models and all the justifications aren't really so in the bank justified factual reality at all. It's what I call baffling with BS. I'm not that easily baffled. The upfront extra finance costs are just one more incremental government increase in housing costs without any real proof they will materialize savings for the next 30 years. Only socialist central planning needs mandates to justify the unjustifiable. I hope you read my letter on this item which has a lot more very interesting information. One item there shows states with excessive climate change mandates have the most expensive energy in the nation and California tops the list of the lower 48 states in energy. And it's not. Santa Cruz has a laughably mild climate. This needs to be tabled and more data taken on real projects analyzing the corners using real historic variations of the important variables of which these bias studies never did. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Anyone else? Anyone else online? We do have one more. Good evening, person online. Good evening. Yeah, hi. I just, I guess I just want to say that this is really similar to the, it may seem obtuse to compare it but it's real similar to the tipping issue. It's like the choices people make for their energy in their homes and of course there are consequences politically who has access to heat, who has access to clean water and, I mean, who, it's political but I just, I feel like it's often overreach. You know, when I see the council trying to mandate things, people are often sort of left without choices and Lazlo Toth is the fictional, Guido Sarducci character. He wrote all these letters and one of them was, he was sending a letter to government official saying, oh, we should get our energy from rocks. We should get our energy from rocks. And it's funny because it's funny because you can get energy from wind, you can get energy from solar panels and you can get, I don't know, I feel like those solar panels up at the the Emeline complex would be a great place to just build within the confines of it, build a shelter for people because they're, I mean, they're essentially structural and the whole thing, I don't know, the more that gets invested by taxpayers, the more it's sort of a very, very gray area as to like what's appropriate use for it. I mean, that's maybe a society we're heading towards with Teslas powering homes and trying to get away from, I don't know, people having bonfires at the beach because it pollutes too much or the state of California banning solvents that get rid of graffiti as if the graffiti wasn't equally obnoxious. I don't know, I have all kinds of opinions about it and I'm sure everyone else does. So again, time for me to not talk more, thanks. Thank you, sir. Anyone else online, Ms. Bush? Matters back before the council. I'll move the second reading. Ms. Brown moves, is there a second? I'll second that. Ms. Brunner seconds. Second reading of the ordinance. Debate or discussion. Seeing none, the clerk will call the roll. Council members Newsome. Aye. Brown. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Calentary Johnson. All right, aye. Vice Mayor Golder. Aye. Mayor Cooley. Aye. Motion passes and so ordered. We're on item 28. This is the election of the Vice Mayor for calendar year 2024. I will recognize Council Member Watkins for a motion. Sure. I'd like to nominate current Vice Mayor Golder to see if she'd be willing to continue another year. Is there a second? I'll second. Motion and a second. Are there other nominations? Debate or discussion? Seeing and hearing none, the clerk will call the roll. Council member Newsome. Aye. Brown. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Calentary Johnson. I think she said aye. Oh, thank you. Vice Mayor Golder. Aye. And Mayor Cooley. Aye. Thank you for agreeing to do that again. Thank you. Thank you. You did a fine job on that. Ms. Bush, for the matters to come before us. Mr. Condadi, any further matters to come before us? No further business. Seeing and hearing none, just very, very briefly. Ms. Calentary Johnson, we hope you get better soon. We miss your presence here. And so get better in a hurry. You were letting me participate in this way. Very good, very good. Thank you. Without further business before us, the Vice Mayor with deep reluctance moves to adjourn and Ms. Watkins with equal reluctance seconds the motion not debatable. Those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed motion carries and so ordered. We stand adjourned. Look at you catching up all that. You good? That's good. Bravo.