 Okay. Do we have a quorum yet? I think we're one away. If I'm counting correctly. I'm counting five. We don't have a quorum yet. Members of the public. We're going to wait just a moment here before you begin because we are looking for a quorum. Take at least one more member to join us. Let's see. Call somebody. There's Donna. Yeah, I hit the nine three link at first. We're going to look at early. Okay. We're going to start then. Even though we're short folks. Bobby, by the time we get to important items, we'll have the people we need. So good morning, everybody, members of the public, members of the board, staff. Other consultants and others. We're opening the August 28th. We're going to have a meeting. We're going to have a 2020 meeting of the Metropolitan transit district meeting. And I'll ask. For a roll call, please. Remember to unmute yourself when you get called. We're doing the tag team again. So we don't have the echo in this. So roll call. Director Batar. Sure. Director Kaufman Gomez. Director Gonzalez. Here. Dr. Leopold. Here. Dr. Matthews. Dr. McPherson. Dr. Myers. Here. Thank you. Dr. Here. Dr. We have form. All right. Thank you. Well, we'll begin. We have a network announcement. Today's meeting is being broadcast by community television of Santa Cruz County. And let's see. Let's see. Our first item is any comments from members of the board of directors on items, not on today's agenda. You want to have a comment for us? I do. Yes. Donna, go ahead. Just to Gina to. Thank you. You know, where our hearts are with you and just thank you for being there and being who you are. We're here to support you. And I just want to thank everyone at Metro. All the drivers, everyone that's been. Working hard to help all the evacuees. And just extremely proud of. Of the. Of the organization. And I just want to thank you, Donna. And don't make her cry. And Mike. I just also wanted to also let you know, Donna. Yeah. I mean, Gina, we're thinking about you. And please let us know how we can help. And I just also want to thank everyone at Metro all the community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the organization and what you've done over the last week and a half to really help our full community. So thank you to everybody. You're here. And welcome home, Alex. Hey, thank you for that welcome. As I was pulling into Scott's belly yesterday evening. It was the best part of the last 10 days for sure. That was cool. Now we got a hope for the rest of the folks points beyond. Yes. Welcome back. If your experience. It's all good to see you folks. I'm still dealing with a little bit of residual from the effects. So it'll probably be a couple of months more, but I'm, I'm here and I'm happy to see all your smiling faces. Even though the world seems to be collapsing in front of us and before us and after us. I think our resilience as a community has just shine forward. And I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to be here. And my heart goes out to Gina and all those that have lost their homes. And many possessions that, you know, are not replaceable. So again, I thank you guys folks. And I thank your everybody for your resilience. And I know it was probably pretty hard for Bruce to leave his house. But we should all be going, going back. Yes, right. Bruce is welcomed home as well. You're here. Okay. So the next question is from Christina grant Granados. Regarding the 2020 census. This is important for us for members of the public who might be on this call. I'm sure the board members are aware of this, but a bunch of our funding is dependent upon the population count, which is directly related to the census that we're doing. So it's really important that people fill out the census and we get a complete count from our county because it really will make a difference in the funding that we get in the service we get. So I think that comments in the board packet for those who have access to it, that tells you by the single click, you can get to the form you need to complete the census, which will be helpful. Secondly, we got a letter from the Mac that Veronica LC wrote to us. On behalf of the Mac, thanking us for the emergency services that the district has provided to the public. And the, the comment that Donna had made earlier. So that's a, we appreciate that, that letter and that they're on top of what's going on there. Next, we have a labor organization communications. This is for items not on today's agenda. Are there comments from the labor organizations this morning? And I'll leave it to someone to find out who's online to give us those comments. See, there's a hand, Mike. Let me just see if I can find it. Okay. So, John Jeffries, Joe, go ahead. Good morning. Make sure to unmute yourself. You're hearing me. Or Mike is still showing as muted. Okay. Can you hear me now? Now we do. Thank you. Okay. Great. Thank you. This is a different format than we've done before. So yes, thank you. Good morning. Board of directors. I wanted to just make a brief comment about. A plan to relocation of our accessibility services coordinator John Doherty to a different facility. And I understand that John has a lot of concerns about this relocation. I just want to say that as his union representative as an SCIU representative, we support John and his concerns about this move. And we do feel that more review had been given the impacts of this move before this move takes place. Both review with John and with his union representatives. And with the community members that John serves the impacts to them as well. So that any concerns could be alleviated prior to this move taking place. And that's the end of my comment. Thank you. Thanks for the comment. Let me ask Alex to tell us briefly what gives a little background detail to the board members are unaware of what's going on. It is a personnel matter. So I don't want to go into detail about that. Please. But I will say that we did receive the letter from the commission on disabilities. I want to acknowledge receipt. We don't have it published as of yet because it came after the posting of the agenda. And we have received that and we will look at their concerns, but I can assure you that nothing in this move should in any way impact. Mr. Doherty's ability to continue to serve the ADA community well as he has in the past. And it actually helps him better accomplish his newer tasks, which are to help us migrate our existing para transit, qualified riders over to our new eco lane app. And that new eco lane app. Will allows customers to both pay their fare via the phone app. And to, to, to, to book their ride. So it's a really important project. He's been tasked with that. There'll be a lot of work. He's been trained on that. As a matter of fact, there'll be a lot of work to do in that endeavor. And at some point, if Pacific station ever reopens, there might be more things to do over there, but we're confident it will not impact his ability to continue to serve the ADA community. Well, Are there other labor organization communications this morning? Looking, I don't see any hands. All right. I think not. I'm going to say under these extraordinary conditions, if there's a comment later, I'll be willing to entertain that. Raise Mike. Who's, who's. I can't hear you yet. Brenda Gutierrez has her hand raised. Brenda, go ahead. Please unmute yourself. Good morning. My name is Brenda. I'm not sure everyone can hear me. Yeah, a little louder would be good. We can hear you though. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. So my name is Brenda. I'm the commissioner. Vice chair of the commission on this. We were the ones that sent in the letter in regards to the room of the office. John Dougherty. We wanted to just. Express our concerns about the room. But like I said, John Dougherty told us about what was going on. He reports regularly to us to. And he told us that he was being relocated to a research park. This is also. And this raised all concerns for us as a commission. Pre-pandemic he typically provided in person accessibility services to approximately 30 clients per month. And a century located area, which is. Pacific Avenue. On average, at least half of those clients. Used mobility devices. So personally, it's an accessibility services office. Is relocated to research park. Well, any of these clients would have. Additional barriers to make it to that new office. All our clients require. Travel. Challenges. So they require buses or. Paracours. And so. It poses a lot of. Difficulty getting there because. That is not a very safe. Area. For people. And so. There is currently no sidewalk. On that area. As well as. Passer to cross streets. So that's basically our concern. About the relocation. So we would like to request. That the decision is postponed. Until a proper study can be conducted. And community input can be considered. To ascertain what impact the move. Could have on the disabilities community. In order to gain a better understanding of the context. In which the move was proposed. We would also be interested to learn of any. Contributing factors, which may be a benefit. To the public. Thank you so much for your time. Okay. Thank you for your comments. I will note that that's on a major, there are many bus lines that run right by that address. There's a nearby bus stop. I'll leave it to Alex again to work out this, this matter. The concerns about the access for the, the members of the public that might need to get to his office. Understand that we understand there are quite a few people that do that regularly. Any other, that's actually a general comment from the public. Any other labor communications. I don't see any. Any comments from the general public on items that are not on today's agenda. I'm not seeing any hands. Sorry, Mike. I'm slow here on the uptick. Deb Molina. Say it again. Deb Molina. Thank you. Deb. Please go ahead. Make sure you're unmuted. Yes. Good morning. Good morning. I, I'd like to talk about the train and the trail that the RTC is pushing. And how it will, and how it will impact the Metro bus lines. I'm opposed to the train because it doesn't get people where they need to go. The Metro on the other hand has the ability to take people to their destination. Whether it's UCSC, Cabrillo, Dominican, or areas in South County. The train could only go one way on the single track. So it would never be an efficient way to commute. The bus allows for multiple routes being run all over the county simultaneously. The bus already has an existing infrastructure, which could be helped by having a lane dedicated to the buses on highway one. Bus routes are flexible and can be changed as needed. Versus a train track that has zero flexibility. The bus is cost efficient and saves tax dollars. But my single greatest concern for the Metro, if the RTC continues to push through train is that more money will be taken from limited transportation dollars to pay for endless studies and an inefficient train. And I'm opposed to the train. The Metro already has a bare bones budget and we'll have to cut routes further to pay for a train to nowhere. Please make sure the RTC doesn't cut the one cost effective and efficient transportation option already in place to build their boondoggle train. Thank you. Thanks for your comments. Good. I'm going to point out, I'm on the alternatives committee that's studying the question. And right now we're, we are still studying for possible modes of transportation. On that corridor and they include both bus. Two bus options and two train options. And the RTC has not made a decision in favor of a train at this point, neither the staff nor the board itself. And so that's the decision that's still ahead of us. And the comments you've made are appropriate to that. And we'll make sure that those are forwarded to that committee so that they get your comments. Along with others that we've been receiving, but that's not a decision that's been made. The RTC is not a decision that's been made. The RTC is not pushing for a train. They're trying to study whether a train or a bus or what kind of train or what kind of bus might make the most sense along that route. Thank you for your comments. Are there other comments from the public on items, not on today's agenda? Looking, looking, don't see any hands. Wait, just a moment. Okay. Thank you. We don't have any comments from the Mac this morning. Written comments other than the one we already mentioned from, in relation to the emergency services. The next item on our agenda is our consent agenda. These are the items under number nine. Go through nine, 14. And these are items that we're going to take in a single motion all together. Unless somebody on the board believes that we should pull one off or further discussion, or if somebody has a brief comment, that's appropriate right now. Let me ask if there are any items that board members would like pulled from the consent agenda or brief comments on the consent agenda. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. I think on item number nine, 10, the, on the ridership reports, I think that would be better discussed under. In cooperation with items number 13 or 14 about the rider survey and the fiscal crisis report. I think we should. I'd like to pull that and have that in the, be involved in the discussions of, of those two issues. Items number 13 and 14. Let's, let's then make this item number 12. Five on our agenda. We'll move it to there. Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair. Yes. Just one, one correction. I believe it was announced as nine 10. I think it is nine, nine, nine, zero, nine. Is it. You got the wrong, wrong number. Yes. Yeah. It is a nine, nine. I stand corrected. Yes. That'll become 12.5. And we'll deal with that along with the other two items. As you suggested, Bruce. Any other items that members of the board would like pulled or brief comments. Seeing any other members of the public that would like to make a comment on any of the items on the consent agenda. Take a pause here. It takes us a while to find people sometimes there's quite a view on the call. I don't see any hands. I don't see any. I would be prepared to move the consent agenda. I'll second it. As amended. Yeah. As amended. Yeah. So I'll take that is a motion from John Leopold. Thank you, John. And that was my ad, I believe. I'm sorry. So the motion was by people than the second was by. Ed. I thought. Thank you. Any other comments? We have to do a roll call vote under the screen regulations. So we'll have a roll call on the consent agenda. As a minute. Dr. Baltimore. Hi, Dr. Kaufman Gomez. Yeah. So I'll take that. It is a motion from John Leopold. Thank you, John. Dr. Kaufman Gomez. Yes. Dr. Gonzalez. Yes. Dr. Leopold. Yes. Dr. Lynn. Yes. Dr. Matthews. Aye. Dr. McPherson. Aye. Dr. Myers. Aye. Dr. Pagler. Aye. Dr. Rothwell. Still not here. Dr. Rothwell. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. We'll pass with the minutes. Thank you. You're now on to item number 10. This is the presentation of employee longevity awards. Impressive ones this morning. We haven't. We're recognizing in terms of long service to this district, Francisco, Estrada, Maricela Mendoza and John Thomas. And at 35 years of service to this district, Andrew Hill. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. It's just to be impressed. 35 years of service. That's. That's nothing to be ignored for sure. That's very, very impressive. And we appreciate when people stay with us, having that kind of experience in our, in our district really makes a difference to the service we can provide to the public. I don't know if Alex has any additional comments you'd like to make or anyone else from the staff. I'm not hearing you. You're unmuted, but you're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. Go ahead. You seem to be muted, even though it doesn't show muted on the screen. We're going to wait just a second. I think Donna wanted to make a comment. I would too. Yeah. 35 years, 20 years. Amazing. We just really appreciate those who have stayed with us for so long. Their experience and leadership really mean a lot to this district. And we're going to miss these people as they leave, but thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. You have any awards. They're going to go on working. Yeah, I got it. Thanks though for your comments. And then Don had a comment. Yeah. I just. Also wanted to echo. Just congratulations and. Just very much appreciate all your service and look forward to seeing you at number 40. Maybe John. Thanks. Actually, I think it's Andrew Hill. Yes. Sorry. Andrew, although 20 years is nothing to sneeze at here. Yeah, exactly. So when you get to the retiree, which is the next agenda item, you'll notice that Mr. Hill is actually retiring after he is retired. I was going to say I thought his name. Okay, so. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. He is right. Gradually him on 35 and happy retirement. Okay. There's no other action required on number 10. Number 11, we have retirees to appreciate. And that is Andrew at 35 years of service, Michael Mullis, Arlen Roy, Esteven Ruiz and Donna Smith. That does require a resolution. I think we could pass them all in one action. It will take a roll call vote to approve that resolution. I move approval of all resolutions. Who made the motion? Sorry. John Leopold. John Leopold. I second that. And Larry Pegler made a second. Any additional comments? Then we'll have a roll call vote, please. She's on mute. I still can't hear her. We can't hear you. Thank you all for your patience. That's not often people tell me they can't hear me still. This is kind of a tone. Okay, retiree resolutions for agenda item 11. Dr. Baltimore. All right. Dr. Kaufman Gomez. Yes. Dr. Gonzalez. Hi. Dr. Leopold. Hi. Dr. Linde. Hi. Dr. Matthews. Hi. Dr. McPherson. Hi. Dr. Myers. Hi. Dr. Pegler. Hi. Dr. Rothwell. Not here. And Dr. Rotkin. Hi. Thank you. Mike, double chicken. Can you hear me now? Yes. Oh, we got it fixed. Okay. Thank you. And appreciate that. And appreciate it again. The service for these folks who are retiring after having served this district for so many years. Our next item, item number 12 is the introduction of Danielle Glagola, our new marketing and communications and customer service director. And I'll leave that to Alex to make the introduction. Sure. Mr. Chair and directors, just in a way of a brief introduction and then I'm going to ask Danielle if she would make a few comments. After an exhaustive search for marketing and communications and customer service director, we hired an excellent candidate in the way of Danielle. She has really hit the ground running and producing some great product for us, especially in the way of collateral related to the COVID and COVID prevention. Probably no more important time to have this position filled than right now when we're both trying to communicate all sorts of safety and prevention messages to our customers and also try to figure out the right strategy for attracting customers back to our system in the coming days and weeks. So Danielle is a local UCSC graduate with over 14 years of marketing, public relations, communications, and event experience, having managed several marketing departments, including marketing operations, creative services, copywriting, video development, brand, public relations, and web, as well as corporate and customer events. She also spearheaded development and management of the first marketing operations department in a leading high tech entertainment company. She also participated in Santa Cruz's Citizens Police Academy in 2018. So I'd like to join with you in welcoming Danielle and if you would allow Mr. Chair for Danielle to make a few remarks. Of course. Welcome, Danielle. Hi, thank you for having me. I just wanted to say, you know, I'm happy to be here and contribute and it's a pleasure just meeting everybody on this call and working with the Metro team. What was your major at UCSC? My major was actually anthropology. Well, interesting. Yeah, I know. There is a switch there. Well, welcome on board. We're happy to have you. Marketing is going to be an important, really important function for us as we begin to try and expand our services. Someday we will be past some of these crises, one hopes. Yes. That would be nice to start focusing on some other things eventually, but the cause now is really important. So we've been really, you know, pushing forward with our COVID-19 measures and, you know, promoting that. So happy to help. Thank you. And again, welcome on board. Thank you. Our next items, I'm going to treat them all three together is 12.5, which was 909 on the Consent Agenda number 13 and number 14. I'll leave it to Alex to figure out what order he wants to treat all three of these items, but they're all interrelated. So take it away, Alex. Sure, Mr. Chair. And as questions come up about ridership, I'll ask John Erdo, our planning director, to step in. Okay. So directors, you might recall that in April I gave you a fairly exhaustive overview of what we had done relative to COVID as an agency to protect our employees, to protect our customers, and to further the message about prevention. That actually took us all the way back to somewhere in around the January timeframe. Then in your June meeting, I gave you a brief overview, but today I'm going to give you an overview that goes back to kind of April, June, and carries forward from that point. It's rather lengthy, but it's really good and useful information for you to be aware of. And I know most, if not all of you, are aware of a number of these items, but also for our public to see what we've been up to. So with that introduction, if we could put the slide up. Let me say, Alex, I think we appreciate the details here, because if others are sharing my experience, we kind of feel not as in touch as we usually are. I usually visit the district and talk to people and members of the staff and so forth, and that's not happening. So getting a complete picture of what's going on would be really useful for the board, I think. Absolutely. And Mr. Chair, we really want, as you'll see on this message today, to attract our customers back to our service and instill their confidence in us. Next slide, please. So again, additional COVID prevention measures taking us back to April and June in some cases. We installed hand washing stations and deployed those at the Watsonville Transit Center, the Scotts Valley Transit Center, and Pacific Station, or sometimes called Metro Center. We've installed hand sanitizing dispenser on all of our buses, with the exception of one that's in the shop. When that comes out of the shop, we have the hand sanitizer to install. We're moving next to 32-pair transit vehicles, but these wonderful hand sanitizing dispensers that we've purchased are on back order. So, as you can imagine, they're in high demand these days. So we'll get those installed on pair crews as quick as possible. As I'll show you a little bit later on in the picture section, we're installing the clear plastics knees barriers, and those are sort of between rows of seats on the buses themselves for customers. So if you had a customer sitting behind you and they sneezed or they were talking, or for some reason they didn't have a face covering on, this is meant to be your protection from the so-called airborne droplets. So we're now at, we made good progress there, we're now at a little over 50% of the fleet, and Joseph over in the mechanics area is just doing a fabulous job. This is a difficult task because over the years we've purchased so many different buses from different manufacturers, and within manufacturers different series, there is not one template that he can make that works for all. So oftentimes he has to make a separate template for each of the buses. But if you've seen his work product, and I'll show you some of that later on, he's done a fantastic job. So kudos to him. Let's ask one question. Is the plan to maintain those after this god-off COVID crisis is over? I mean, there's no reason to take them down. Is there, or does it inhibit movement on the bus or take away seats or overall, do you think that will they'll stay in place afterwards? Yes. So two things in that respect. One, we're treating this as the new normal. We don't see that when COVID goes away that we will pull these barriers down and trash them. Second, these are seen as a quick measure as quick as possible to do so that we can get an extra protection in place, but a temporary measure. So we're also simultaneously just like with the bus operator compartment in the clear curtain that takes a beating, it's a temporary protection measure. So relative to that and these between row barriers, we're investigating the possibility of buying the permanent plexiglass version of those. So permanent plexiglass is available, has been available for years for the driver's compartment, but this whole between seat barrier is a new and evolving industry. That one might be a little bit tougher to convert, but we're working on that. There are a couple of businesses out there that are actually doing that now. We're also simultaneously investigating the possibility of FEMA funding most or at least maybe even half of the cost of these two plexiglass conversions. So as quick as we can get all that in order, we'll move from the temporary environment into the permanent environment. COVID eventually goes away. We're ready for whatever the next thing is, but we do see this as the new normal. Okay, continuing on. As you'll see a little bit later on, Danielle has done a fantastic job with collateral related to COVID-19 prevention flyers and bus car cards that are on our buses. We'll show you some of that in a little bit. We increased our self-imposed bus capacity limits to 25 third, 25 percent of the total capacity, total capacity on a 40-foot bus being approximately 60 people with standees. However, you have a note there that says on highway 17, we've reverted that back to the eight passengers because Santa Clara County's health agency or health officer has issued a much more restrictive order for transit than we have on this side of the hill. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes too. As I indicated, the bus driver compartment clear plastic curtain was completed on June 15, and that is the date that we chose once we made the full conversion to go back to resuming the fare collection, which we did on June 15. Next slide please. We hired what we call cleaners. These are temp employees. They're stationed at the transit centers. You'll see them at Capitola Mall, Watsonville, Scotts Valley Pacific Station. And they are staffed with a bucket of disinfectant and a rag, and their job is anytime a bus comes through the terminal to quickly jump onto that bus and disinfect all high-touch surfaces, stanchions, grab handles, backs of seats, things like that. So not only do our buses get disinfected using the static fogger at night, but throughout the day, as they roll through the transit terminals, they get an additional disinfecting of high-touch surfaces. On April 25, we started enforcing the county health agency order that all customers waiting at a bus stop, boarding a bus, and riding a bus must wear face coverings at all times. So we've produced a sign at the front door of the bus. It says no mask, no ride. The only caveat there is if somebody represents that for health reasons, whatever that may be, we don't inquire, for health reasons they cannot wear a face covering. And we know there is a small population of people that fall in this category. We demand that they wear a face shield instead. Those are readily available these days, and that's how we have chosen to solve that particular issue. In order to better service our customers, because we closed the transit center lobbies down, we've installed customer service windows at Pacific Station. A Pacific Station exterior facing window is fully operational now, and Rina has that staffed five days a week now. And at Watsonville Transit Center, we're in the process of wrapping that up. We hope to have that one completed by somewhere around mid-September. It's been a challenge to get bids, and then it's been a challenge to mobilize people and to custom order the glass that's needed. So there's been challenges there, but we think we'll have Watsonville exterior facing window open by mid-September. Also for ease of credit card transactions, or to reload your cruise cards, we moved our two ticket vending machines, one at Watsonville, one at Pacific Station, to the exterior of the building. They were no good to us on the interior because we closed the lobby. So our wonderful people in facilities did some really quick work getting all of the electrical and communications out to the exterior, and we relocated those ticket vending machines to the exterior. And now our customers can access that for purchase of fare or reloading their cards 24-7. And then as I mentioned before, we deployed our new electrostatic disinfectant fogger. We bought two or three of these. They're very expensive. They took a long time to get in, and we were using a different kind of fogger prior to that, but this is a much better fogger. I'm not an expert at the technology, but as I understand it, the way this works, because it's electrostatic. For example, if you spray the disinfectant onto a stanchion, because of that electronic effect that takes place, the disinfectant actually wraps itself around the stanchion. So you don't have to take the fogger and do a 360-degree around the stanchion. The electrostatic part of it works out well. So that's really cool technology. Next slide, please. So next came a lot of CDC information about increasing inside-outside air flow, air exchange. And the CDC has recommended that in buildings, you increase that to as high as you possibly can. Again, taking the airborne droplets and moving them to the outside and bringing in fresh air. So we hired an HVAC technician to come in and to review what we could do at all of our different facilities. We ratcheted up our inside-outside air exchange to the maximum possible, and in some place, some examples, we increased that 50% over the previous rate. In conjunction with that, we increased our air filters to what's called a level of MIRV that's MIRV 13. So that provides even more protection for the inside of our buildings. I will say that we entered into an interesting challenge like everybody else that's anywhere that has an office building anywhere near the fires. We had to actually turn this back a little bit and temper it back because we don't want to bring in all of the smoke. So that's part of what we've been working with with the HVAC tech to make sure we get that right. Also, to date, our employees have taken advantage of the family's first act. That's a new law, as you recall. It's expanded FMLA and it deals with COVID and childcare. And so they've taken advantage of those rights to do so to the tune of 6,741 hours. And if you just look at that as rough, what is the potential loss productivity or the equivalent FTEs? That would equate to approximately 3.2 annual FTEs. So that's pretty significant. That's a lot of hours associated with Family First Act. Again, not complaining they're entitled to that and they're taking advantage of that. We initiated work on two customer service kiosks, one at each location, Watsonville and Pacific Station. And what that will do, we hope that that will be up and running by September 4th. That's what we're targeting. What that will do is allow customer to not bother the agent at the window who might have a question instead and go to the kiosk and push a button and communicate with a customer service. There'll be a video camera there. The customer service rep will be able to see them and communicate and answer whatever questions they might have right there at the facility. So again, trying to compensate for not having the lobbies open and looking for creative ways to provide more service to our customers. So look forward to that somewhere around the first week of September. Alex, can I ask if it's bad weather? Are they covered so a person could stay on there and talk to the folks without being rained on? What's the situation there? Yeah, they're not up yet, but they'll have to take advantage of that. Just similarly with the relocation of the ticket vending machine, we needed to place those where they wouldn't get directly hit by the rain. Thank you. So we'll have to do the same thing with the kiosk. And I know Freddie and Isaac are working closely on that. We also at one of our weekly COVID meetings with SMART, and Nate, I believe it was suggested that our paracruz vehicles should be able to take advantage of going through the transit centers and having the cleaners board their buses in between customers. We thought that was a great idea. I think we virtually put that into place virtually the next day. So now in between customers, our paratransit drivers can go to one of those two fuses or capitol, one of the four facilities for that matter, and have their high touch surfaces disinfected. Sorry about that. So that's been an effect, and that was a great suggestion. In addition, we purchased a number of tables and chairs, I believe from Costco, that we use to help increase physical distancing at our transit centers. For example, at Watsonville and at Pacific Station, we have located those in what was formerly the lobby so that our bus operators, when they're on layover, don't all cram into the small room upstairs. We want to get them spread out. So now they can either be upstairs in that room, or they can be out in the lobby and spread themselves out a little bit more. We also added those table, one table and some chairs here at Vernon, so our employees here could sit outside and get some fresh air. Again, working with the recommendations of the CDC to have people be in the fresh air as much as possible. Next slide, please. So we continue to offer some non precedent setting temporary emergency pandemic telecommuting for qualifying employees. And I'm happy to report under this item that I've notified some members of the union and some of our staff that we're going to extend that through an additional 30 days through September. And in addition to that, because we've had all sorts of complications related to the fires and some of our employees being evacuated, we're going to have an impacts meeting negotiation, I forget which one it is, with the SCIU to talk about telecommuting the fire impacts on those groups of employees and what we might be able to do possibly a little different than what we're doing for the rest of the employees and rolling over into September. So we should have more to report on that. But we came to an 11th hour agreement last night, I think somewhere around midnight or maybe early this morning, that that would be a good way to go to try to resolve that immediate concern. That's a sex bargaining, I assume. Yeah, I'm not real familiar with the terminology, but yeah. Basically, we want to understand what it is that our employees are experiencing that have been evacuated from their homes and what we can do to try to help them out. Thank you. So thank you to the SCIU for working with me through the night last night and early morning today to come to that conclusion. And let's see, we continue to have our weekly COVID meetings with both the SCIU and SMART and SCIU did something creative, they put together one of those surveys, survey monkey maybe, and surveyed their members in preparation for the partial telecommuting in which in July we had employees starting to return to the workplace. We put in a host through the month of June, Freddie's team put in a host of all of the CDC guidance about returning to the workplace. But we also wanted to hear from our employees, what did we need to do to help you feel more comfortable in the workplace? We got some suggestions there that we implemented. We have provided all of our bus operators the opportunity to have a face shield. We think that's important when they're securing a wheelchair patron because that's the one time, the one time that our bus operators are really super close to the customer. And even though the customer has a face covering and the operator has a face covering, we just felt especially based on industry practice across the nation that it was a good idea to have the face shield available so they can put that on when they're securing a wheelchair customer. Also this week, we completed our first all hands COVID town hall meeting with smart members, that was on the 25th, and we did our first virtual all hands COVID town hall meeting with SCIU members on the 26th. And we might do that again in the near future, that was something that was suggested by both state and federal guidance in order to help educate your employees on COVID prevention and to entertain questions. We also had EAP representation there. Don help me out. EAP, we get stuck in the acronyms and abbreviations. Employee assistance program, thank you all. Such a simple answer. Okay, next slide, please. Excuse me, how do you have an all hands meeting if we have drivers that have to be taking people somewhere? Yeah, it's the drivers have always been a challenge, even when we do things. And so I thought I would be creative this time and put it at a little bit later time than I traditionally do. Five o'clock trying to catch a little bit larger bundle of our operators, but that failed again. So we're still trying to find the magic time to have bus operators participate in all hands. We just get sort of lucky and have a small number. In this case it was mostly paratransit folks. Sure, I have a question. Sure. On that meeting, is that recorded and can the operators or employees that don't have that opportunity to be there, view it and then send questions in? Yeah, it's a great question and either SCIU or SMART had requested that in advance of the all hands meeting. So we did in fact record both sessions. We're going to work with IT in the coming week to figure out where we can post that so that people can go look at that. And that's, I'm glad you brought that up Aurelio because that is one way for those bus operators who couldn't participate for various reasons to go on their own time and review that. Okay. The next page is literally a page out of the apta book tailored for our need and it's on our website now and of course in your PowerPoint here. And it talks about what our customers and Metro are doing and requiring. So on the Metro side government guidance, we follow CDC state and local guidance whenever possible. We protect each other by deep cleaning high touch surfaces, disinfect our buses, impaired cruise vehicles and facilities. We make informed choices. We provide useful COVID prevention information and resources to support safe travel. Health is first. Our employees use personal protective equipment. That one I got adjust the airflow within their buses. So just like we talked about the need to adjust airflow within your buildings, your physical structures. They also have guided us to say, hey, find ways to increase airflow. So we've produced a flyer for bus operators to learn how to increase that airflow of exterior air coming through your bus and pushing out the old air. So we've educated our operators on that. We deployed the protective clear curtain, of course, hand sanitizer dispensers. And we regularly repeat ourselves saying, please don't come to work if you're sick. What do we expect of our customers? Well, we expect them to follow federal, state, local and Metro guidance. We ask them that they always wear their face covering and that they properly wear it and continue to wear it when they're on the bus. And that they not remove it. And that they follow CDC guidance relative to washing your hands regularly and length of time. In the way of informed choices for our customers, we adjust our travel time. We ask them to adjust their travel time to the greatest extent possible to the off peak. And that helps us to bring the loads down and spread the loads out. And then of course, we ask them to not ride when they're sick, observe physical distancing from not only the operator or driver in a pair cruise situation, but also others. And not to sit in block seats and don't talk. That's new guidance coming from CDC when you're on a bus. Don't talk. Alex, one question again from Bruce. We at the County Board of Supervisors, in particular, people really protest, require face masks and so forth. Have you had that much pushback from riders saying, hey, I don't want to do this and that? I mean, really, I hope they respect the rider, the bus drivers and what their job is and what they have to do and they want to get going. But have we had any problems in that regard? We have. We have had some intermittent issues. Now, I've been very clear with our bus operators. They are the captain of their ship. They are the enforcer of that. You must wear a face mask or face shield. And pretty much across the board, people comply. But when we look at our pass up data, we do have a set of data that shows where people did not have face cap face coverings. And so we didn't let them ride. Our operators are trained on conflict avoidance, how to bring sort of the temperature down. But sometimes they'll run into a tough customer and they just won't listen. And if that person's already on the bus, I've instructed the bus operators, if they won't put their face covering back on and wear it properly, they should pull the bus over. They're in full control. Again, they're the captain of their ship. Ask the person to put it back on properly if they don't, then the radio dispatch and dispatch might send a supervisor or they might send the police. Same thing if it's somebody giving them a hard time when at the boarding of at the front door, they would follow that same protocol. Do we have face mask on the drivers have face masks to offer if they if they say I don't have a mask? Yeah, so we we did. And I'm going to talk about that in a moment because we got a lot of face coverings from the federal government. They were dispersed throughout our system. We're thinking about doing another round of those. But really at this point, so far in from the order countywide that people must wear face covering wherever they are, we really kind of assume they've taken the personal responsibility to have one with them. And that it's not the best kept secret either. But our bus operators do a fantastic job in dealing with that conflict when it does occur. And sometimes people get heated. I think in the last month, I've had two reports where somebody who was being refused service kicked the door and broke broke the glass. And that's very unfortunate. Next slide please. So I mentioned that we moved the ticket vending machines to the outside of the building and and Mike or whoever asked the question about the weather, you can see both of these machines are under the awning or the overhead cover. And likewise, we would do that with the kiosk. So that's pretty cool to have them on the outside. Next slide please. And the customer service window, the one on the slide on the right shows you both the ticket vending machine and the customer service window and and our creative folks and customer service have put up a nice big sign with an arrow saying, you know, customer service, come here. We're trying to get people to use that window and not expect to try to get inside the center. And then you can see the current state of construction of the exterior facing window at Watsonville. So both of those are great additions. Next slide. In the way of protecting our customers, we talked about the between row sneeze barriers. These are installed on highway 17 buses, by the way. And we've completed installing these on all the highway 17 buses. And I just look at that workmanship that Joseph has done on those. He's just done a fantastic job. They look they look good and they look like they could last a long time. Next slide please. Alex. Yes. How much does it cost to do that for each of us? So that's a good question. And Eddie, I think Eddie is on the line. I will tell you that we are doing it in house. And it is we ordered the plastic and then our poster does all the work in house. So there's the labor part of it and probably a much lesser expense associated with the plastic. Eddie, are you on to answer that question? Apparently Eddie is not on. Dan, I'm going to send that answer back to the whole board, please. Question cost barriers. Okay, got it. And then I mentioned that we put the hand washing. Was there something? Yeah, Alex, that would presumably be eligible for fever or some reimbursement. I believe Christina and Wanda Mu are looking at that. I don't know if they have a definitive answer on that yet. So we're trying to we're carefully navigating the FEMA world. They're really they're tricky. They have a lot of paperwork for a little bit of money. And we just don't want to make a mistake. So if anything is even close to being gray, we don't throw it into the pot for FEMA reimbursement. Okay, next slide. I'm sorry, stay with this slide. So in a way of protecting our customers, you can see that we rented these hand washing stations, which we put at the three transit centers that gives our customers and even our bus operators the opportunity to wash their hands and disinfect their hands. And then there is an example of one of our cleaners quickly hitting the stanchions on the buses as the bus rolled into one of the transit centers. Next slide, please. Continuing on protecting our customers, you see one of our employees electrostatic spraying the disinfectant, disinfectant fogging. That's what we do at night. And then on the right slide, you'll see an example of a hand sanitizer dispenser that is located near the fare box for the customers as they board the bus. Next slide, please. I talked to you a little bit about Danielle's work on our collateral, COVID prevention collateral. When COVID first hit in April, we developed in-house flyers and ran them through the color copier and cellophane taped them to windows and surfaces everywhere we could to get the message out. Now we've moved into a phase of trying to continue the messages that need to be there but to make them look a little more professional. And so upper left hand corner, you'll see six foot social distancing and that is the the car card that is in all the highway 17 buses because again the Santa Clara County health officer has said you'll have six foot social distancing on buses. You Santa Cruz bring into our county. So those are there. For all of our buses on this side of the hill, we have the lower right hand corner, which is the physical distancing, encouraging people wherever possible to keep as much distance as they can. The clever little face covering mandatory, how to wear it, how not to wear it. An upper right hand corner, there is a theme here where we're trying to encourage customers to use the various tools we have available online customer service scheduled by stop, text and email to get the answer to their question or satisfy whatever their transit need is in a touchless, contactless environment. And that's one way to do it. So we've tried to educate them there. Next slide please. Again, an example of our new no mask, no ride. And by the way, these these car cards are all in English and Spanish. And then of course the lower right hand corner is the ongoing CDC guidance about washing your hands and how long to do that. Next slide please. And Bruce, to your question, there they are. This is one of the ways that we distributed face coverings to our customers. And I just want to give a hearty thank you to the FTA. They provided us free of charge and not just us transit agencies across the nation, but our proportionate share was 5,000 face coverings. And we distributed those across our system fairly rapidly. And so they were they were here. And in some cases, unfortunately, because of the way we distribute them, people would take more than one. But we felt this was a better way to go than to have the operator handing it to them and having people come too close to the operator. In addition to that, the FTA provided us Metro our proportionate share of face coverings for our employees that gave us 5,500 of those. So thank you to the FTA. Next slide please. Alex, if I could make a quick point on the last slide. I think Metro has now become a kind of common English word that people are talking about, but maybe FTA doesn't mean anything to folks. And we might want to spell out the agency on our warnings because I don't think anybody knows who the FTA is except our board members. There you go. Federal Transit Agency and something that makes clear. Yeah, we didn't do a good job of we should give them credit when they do the right thing. Absolutely. Yeah, they are not only a funding agency, but a partner in transportation. They're also a regulatory agency, so they provide a lot of rules for us to follow and they audit us every three years. Okay, moving on in the way of COVID prevention measures protecting our bus operators, you'll see an example of a sign in the wheelchair and ADA securement area. So quite a long time ago, I forget whether it was March or April, we took that wheelchair securement area and we secured, bolted those seats up so they can't be put down. It still can accommodate up to two wheelchairs and then we posted this sign that it's a restricted area. So one of the most important pieces of guidance that came out of the CDC and also the state is create physical distancing at least six feet between the customer and your bus operator. Very explicit in that case. So we put this in place to protect the bus operator and so if you have a wheelchair or two, the bus operator is approximately 8.5 feet from that customer. And if there are no wheelchairs in that securement area, then the first customer sitting in the first seat that's available to them is approximately 12 feet from our bus operator. We won't allow any standees or any ambulatory people in the securement area until further notice. Next slide, please. I talked at length about the clear plastic curtain. There's an example on the left of what that looks like. Looks like a shower curtain. I think that's basically what it is. But that protects our bus operators from airborne droplets and we have educated them that they should deploy this at every stop. So they pull up to the stop, they deploy it, they open the door, people board. After everybody's paid their fare and they sit down, they pull the curtain back so that they can drive safely and they drive. And then at the dispatch desk when they check in every day, they have all of the tools that they need. They can refill their one ounce bottle of disinfectant that we gave them. They can, if they're having, if they wear glasses and they're having problem with fogging of the glasses, those of us who wear glasses and face coverings know that problem. There's a fogging agent, which really comes from the ski world, right? Ski masks use that anti-fogging agent. So we have that available. We have nitrile gloves available. And then of course we have the face coverings available all right there when they check in daily. And we keep that stocked up. Next slide, please. So in addition to protecting our bus operators, we're also making sure that we protect our employees. So here's a good example starting on the left. Well, of course in the upper two right and left-hand corners there, we have disinfecting wipes and disinfectant scattered throughout all the facilities. Not here, not just here Vernon, but golf and and JKS and over at customer service at the Metro Center. But in addition to that, we've taken our cubicles where our employees wanted to have this extra protection and not all wanted it, but where they wanted to have it. We installed the same kind of shower curtain idea for anybody who wanted it. So you can see how creative our facilities folks were. And they've just been astonishing. Let me just give a shout out to our facilities folks. What they've done since March, you know, dropping one thing and moving on to the latest, whatever the latest urgent thing is, fabricating things in-house and saving us money and getting it done as quick as possible. This is just an example. They've done a fantastic job of installing curtains on cubicles. And then you'll see in the center that we purchased 23 of these rather expensive of HEPA air, three-stage HEPA air filters or pier fires. And we've scattered those throughout our various facilities, both here at Vernon over at golf, at JKS, operations and the Metro Center. And I've just worked with Freddie to back order a few, I think up to 10 more of those, because we're discovering, you know, as long as these fires hang out and this smoke finds its way in a bad way to nearby our facility, some of that smoke does get into our facility. And so we're going to add some additional three-stage pier fires here at Vernon and over at golf primarily because of the fires and the smoke to scrub the air even more so. You'll see in the right-hand, top right-hand corner, wish I had a before and after, but all of these cubicles over at golf upstairs used to be low-profile cubicles. And I'm a real big fan of low-profile cubicles. But in the COVID environment, when we're asking employees to come to work at the work site, we need to do everything we can to, again, control airborne droplets and consistent with employees coming back to the workplace guidance. Taller cubicles is suggested. Lower left-hand corner, you'll see Gina's temporary plexiglass. That's temporary. We are fabricating a much larger design that goes from wall to wall. And that will stay. That'll never go away. It'll be permanent. And then over at the pair crews, you'll see that we've put some plexiglass barriers in there with those other two slides. Next slide please. Customer service became a bit of a challenge. So our facilities folks worked with Rina to come up with the kind of protection that we needed in the customer service area. And then Rina works to try to spread the people out so that they're not in two side-by-side cubicles. And so what they did here, you'll see they put the plexiglass protection above the new cubicles, by the way, so that if somebody's on the other side, they're both protected from their airborne droplets. So again, great job to our facilities folks for that. Next slide please. So then we get into the fall service. If you build it, they will come back, we hope. I mean, that's our goal, right? So instead of saying, well, we only have X number of customers today, we should hack and slash our service way back, reduce all of our operating expenses and just make the service available for the number of people we have today. That's not the philosophy we're operating under. We are hopeful that as the county continues to open up, and that as hopefully we get increasing relief on physical distancing and bring our capacities of our bus back up over time, we're hoping that people will come back to our system. But every day that we're not available, that we don't have a seat available to them, is a day that we're at risk that they'll find another way to get to work, to get to the doctor's appointment, to get to the grocery store. And once they do that, they are probably gone for good. So we need ridership in order to sustain our current expenses, our current employment level, we need to put that service back to the greatest extent possible and slowly move toward increasing the capacity on buses. This is not just a Santa Cruz unique topic. This is a big topic across the entire nation, talked about in the weekly nationwide transit calls every single week. Everybody is struggling with these same issues. And the agreement is pretty uniform that we got to get our people back on the bus when they're ready to come back on the bus. Alec, you haven't said this, but just to make it explicit, I'm assuming we have not done layoffs, even though we cut back our service and so forth. And that our plan here is to maintain folks without doing layoffs to be prepared to reopen up service to the public in general. Am I correct in that assumption? Mike, you're absolutely correct. And I've worked to a great extreme to avoid having to bring you that kind of a proposal. So on the financial side, we looked at the CARES money and we looked at how we can best program that in order to make it last as long as possible. On the service side, we're working hard to put as much service as we can back as quick as possible. And the two combined will help us not have to broach the question of layoffs or furloughs. If we fail in attracting our customers back to the system, we'll have to have a talk about that because at some point we can't keep running empty buses. If they're just not coming back, we'll have to run less service. If we run out of money and there's no CARES Act 2 or we don't figure out a way to sustain the system and the level of service when the CARES Act runs out, we'll be broaching that issue again. I take that to heart. I know I have the lives and livelihood of our 300 employees in my hands. And I think about that every day. I do not want to have to come to you and say we have to lay off people. So we need the writers back. We need to offer them seats when they want those seats. And remember 50% of those writers are hanging in limbo for when UCSC and Cabrillo College come back. So we hope to have all of those maybe the end of this year. If they carry their virtual classes into winter of next year, then that could be delayed even further. Alex, I just want to do maybe this is you're going to answer this later under 9-9. But early August, I think our ridership was down 75%. Is that about, is it getting better or maybe you want to get that to that later? But I read in my mind where we're just about 10 slides away from that one. Got it. Okay. Can I hold it for that? That'll be fine. Okay. So again, so as a part of that strategy, we're returning to pre-COVID levels of service county wide with a few exceptions. The biggest being of course school term. We already talked about that. And that's not just when you say school term, it's not just UCSC, San Jose and Cabrillo. Remember this is also our regular public schools too. And then of course, Highway 17 service is at an abbreviated level also. Fall service changes will support enhanced essential travel, provide adequate physical distancing on board and sustain a gradual reopening of the economic activity. When we surveyed customers in this past spring about the types of improvements needed to support ridership during the COVID pandemic, the highest ranked response was to increase service. Next slide, please. Back to Highway 17, it'll operate starting in the fall at a modified weekday weekend schedule. This will be greater than what we were doing in the summer, which is currently for a few more days. And not as much as we would do in a normal fall. So it's kind of a hybrid. As a result of all of that, both the school term service and UCSC in particular, and less Highway 17, will have a little bit larger extra board. And so we'll use that extra board judiciously and try to back up service wherever possible and try to avoid or reduce pass ups. So we'll also have a new service initiative. We're targeting a soft launch on September 3rd, which would be the ability to purchase passes via a mobile phone. And after my presentation, John can answer any questions you have about that. And then we had an exciting call. Instead of getting almost daily calls about people who want to send us less money or no money at all, Cabrillo College called and said, Hey, our students, even though they're doing our students, even though they're doing virtual learning, our students are saying, we want to still ride the bus. And so Cabrillo College said they found some money and they reinstated the student pass at Cabrillo College this past August 24th. So that was an exciting call to answer. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. There it is. Thank you. So all of that that I just talked about for fall is sort of our phase one, welcoming back of our customers. Now we have to be careful. We can't overly mark market because one, we still are restricting the number of seats on a bus. So and two, we don't, we don't just have a lot of money, a lot of extra buses and a lot of extra bus operators to throw a whole bunch of extra service out there to respond to too many people coming back all at one time. So it's, it's an interesting juggle, right? Because if they want to come back, I want them to come back and I want to get them on our bus. So I don't lose them permanently, but I'm still faced with this tough constraint of physical distancing, capacity limitations, and overall constraints on the number of buses we have available and people we have available to drive it. But for those that we want to come back and want to encourage to come back, we're starting a campaign. This is again collateral put together by Danielle. She did a great job. I hope you agree. These will start showing up probably in a couple of weeks or so after they get done at the printer on the sides and the tails of our buses. So as those buses are going down the street, we'll be marketing to our customers that we are disinfecting, sanitizing, and safety is important to us. So we hope that will help bring them back to us. Next slide, please. In the way of financial overview, our projected operating expenses before transfers through June 30, this is just projection, which is the end of your FY20, is that we'll come in at about 304,000 under budget on the favorable side. And that's before transfers. And then on the operating revenue side, therein lies the bad news, through May 31, that's about four and a half million dollars under budget, unfavorable, not good news. And of course, it's all the things that you know about and fully expect our economy dependent revenue sources, passenger fares down, local sales tax down, TDA and STA. Now, local sales tax might change on us. It's interesting that in the last two months of sales tax numbers that we got, we were at or a little above what we had budgeted. Now, that's kind of an interesting dynamic, because what it does show is that right away after the COVID crisis hit, in April and May, those sales tax, those purchases people make, which trigger the sales tax, didn't plummet. Maybe if one wants to speculate, maybe that is in part because that is during the period of time in which we still have the $600 a week federal unemployment augmentation. So now we know, we all know that went away, I believe, at the end of July. So in another couple of months, when we get the July numbers, we may see the effects of COVID on the economy start to hit more directly. Next slide, please. You asked earlier about FEMA qualified expenses. So in the period of March through June, we're at about $229,000 that we've accounted for there, and probably sometime in September, we'll actually make our claim. And this is after a call with FEMA yesterday and going through our identified FEMA qualified expenses, this number actually dropped from the previous number. But we are still exploring the possibility of FEMA funding our plexiglass barriers that we talked about earlier. Next slide, please. So now let's go from the FEMA cost, which is a unique part of COVID, to the total COVID related costs. For the period of March through April, for personnel costs, and March through July for the non-personnel costs, you see those. So you see personnel cost at about $1,039,000, non-personnel at about $410,000 for a total of the period through July slash August of about $1.7 million, just related to COVID. And focus up in that personnel cost section on the district paid COVID-19, $1,101, and what this category is, you might recall, through the summer bid, I had placed the bus operators in an A and B group. A group works this week, B group is paid, but they stay home. Next week they flip and so on and so forth. Daniel placed the paratransit on an ABC format, same kind of format. Those are COVID related expenses because we're paying somebody, but they're not actually working. We also did some other hybrids of that concept in the early days of COVID across the other functions within the agency. And all in all, in that period March through August, that amounted to $1,001,000 associated with all of that. So there's no productivity with all of that. That's not telecommuting. When they're telecommuting, they're still logging hours just as they were if COVID is not here. These are COVID related payments for not working. But that was our strategy, right? That was our strategy to bring down the number of hours of exposure, particularly focusing on our bus operators and our paratransit drivers, right? This applies to the others across the agency to a little bit lesser degree. But these are the folks constantly in contact with the customers. And so the strategy was we can help protect them more if we can bring down the number of hours they're potentially exposed to somebody who might be sick. And this was the strategy that we engaged in order to do that. It also, going back to one of the earlier questions, it was also a strategy that helped us not have to cross the bridge of layoffs and furloughs. We'll talk about that another day. Maybe we won't talk about it at all. But for now, this helped us to stave off a discussion about furloughs and layoffs. Next slide, please. Also, within the financial discussion, we, as you know, we have tenants that we collect rent from at our various, at our two facilities, Watsonville and Pacific Station. So in March, when the shelter-in-place order came down from the county and the state, we had everybody close. We said, you got to close. And we held their rental, their payments of rent in abeyance. We wanted to do everything we could to try to help our tenants survive this crisis. And I know some landlords in the private sector are doing this and doing various versions of this, but this is what we did. So at Watsonville Transit Center, Jessica's Grocery, they'll start charging rent October 1st. He has reopened, but we gave him a chance to ramp up. And because we aren't running that much service through that center, we thought we needed to give him a little bit of time to try to get business to recover. And also, on September 3rd, we'll be in a higher level of service with the fall bid. Can we have a big... Yeah, I can check. We didn't just defer their payments on rent. We just basically said you don't have to pay us rent for these months. Is that correct? That is correct. That is correct. And then the La Mancha space, unfortunately, our tenant owner of that Going Concern passed away. Angela's been working with a new tenant, and I believe they've signed or they're signing a deal to become effective here in a couple of days, September 1st. Over at Pacific Station, El Horace, that business started paying rent August 1st, so they got reopened. Java Cruz, our tenant there, who is also the owner of the Metro Market, consolidated his two businesses into one and vacated that space. And I'll talk about that in just a quick second. Next slide, please. Our tenant local jerk, they reopened around the end of June. We reduced their rent to $500 instead of $722. They're starting to pay full rent August 1st with a half a month credit from March. As you know, we shut everything down mid-March, so we gave them a half-month credit. Then the Greyhound, they haven't been able to access the lobby to sell tickets to store luggage and whatnot, but really, at the end of the day, that didn't matter because they weren't running service to Santa Cruz. At some point, they discontinued service to Santa Cruz. We don't think it's permanent. They are apparently talking about when they're going to reestablish that. So, Angela has talked to them about possibly moving their operation into the Java Cruz space. We think that'll work out really nice, and we hope they'll take advantage of that. Metro Market has been a very difficult one to get open. Angela's worked with them on a number of different concepts because of the way that market's configured in the transit center and its accessibility to the public. It has been very difficult to open. They've come up with a temporary fix to try to get them open in the near future, but he's eyeballing the Betty Noodle space right now. He'd like to move over and assume that space. On that note, that particular tenant basically moved out to open another restaurant way back in August 2019. It has violated our contractual agreement where you have to keep going concerned and you can't be closed for any particular period of time. In addition to that, that particular tenant is in default of paying rent as of August. So, we're working with them, our attorneys, their attorneys to try to sort this out, but if that space does become available, then Metro Market will move into that space, we think. Next slide, please. Bruce, here's your slide. So, this is a ridership depiction. It's a very busy slide, so let me just tell you a little bit about what's going on. So, COVID, on the far left, COVID hits mid-March and you can see the slope of that line where ridership was the preceding month was off of this particular scale. And if you look down in the 350 to 321, you'll see that ridership in the previous year for that same period was 102,400 riders. In this period, it was 25,140. So, that's pretty dramatic. You can see that slope just plummet. And then you can see that we've plotted a number of things that are important to helping us understand why ridership is doing what it's doing. You know, we self-imposed the six-foot constraint way back in April on ourselves, and that was right about at the rock bottom of the ridership. And then as the county started to open up, you can see those little blocks there of when the county opened up. For example, you could do a takeout food, curbside takeout food, and then the churches could resume. And then the gyms and bars and movie theaters could resume. And then the naval salons could resume. And look what's going on there. Ridership is slowly coming up, but look what's happening to pass-ups. In that environment in which we self-restricted ourselves to eight people on a 40-foot bus, we don't have enough seats, we're passing up people, and we got way up there at about 376 in one week. And then a couple of things happened that helped to resolve that, at least in the short run, and help us to start to continue to react to the ridership coming back. One is we changed our self-imposed capacity limits from eight to 15 on a 40-foot bus and to 10 on a 35-foot bus on on July 3rd. But we also had a summer bid on 625 that took place, right? So with the summer bid, we were able to try to use the data that we had about pass-ups and try to program some backup buses. In some cases, they were shadow buses about 10 minutes behind. In other cases, they were sent out to sit in their bus, kind of Uber-like, at key locations and be ready for dispatch to call them. So pass-ups drop substantially. Now keep in mind, a pass-up is a pass-up. If our bus goes to that stop and we're at capacity and they have to tell that customer, I can't let you on, but a backup bus is 10 minutes behind, we still classified that as a pass-up. That customer still got service, but we didn't do our job successfully. We were not there ready to pick them up on the time, the designated time we were supposed to. A pass-up is a pass-up. And in some cases, we can only speculate that that person continued to remain at the stop for the next bus to arrive because it could be 10 minutes behind or it could be longer if the bus is sitting at one of the staging locations and has to go into service. So in that intervening time, our customer might wander away, go find another way to go wherever they're going or just give up on their trip. So we measure it from the first contact with that customer. If we can't get them on the bus, a pass-up is a pass-up. So you can see all of that continue to help us react to the county and essential travel increasing to open, ridership continues to grow. And then you see a down two consecutive weeks of a downturn. So one, as you know, we had an employee that tested positive that got a lot, a lot of press out there. And our union went on to very major television stations, KSBW, KION, and made some pronouncements about capacity and how unsafe it is to ride. And I speculate that those two things combined cause that decrease in ridership for that week. And then the second downturn, the last week there on the slide, is obviously related to the Santa Cruz County fires. We lost a lot of ridership when we had to pull back service. And now, having made this explicit, you did earlier, but when you look at that yellow line, that's of the pass-by, it's reasonable to speculate or at least ask the question, how many of those people are never coming back to the bus? They didn't get picked up when they thought they would. It's not dependable for them and so forth. So that's a long-term problem for us. I'm really happy to see that we've avoided now. Yeah. Yeah, that's why, you know, I keep talking about I need, I need to capture them when I can capture them. And hopefully they'll be recurring customers and not go away permanently. You know, we got these conflicting messages, unfortunately. I'm working very hard to convince the public that we're safe and you should come back to us. And we unfortunately have this ongoing debate with our union in which they're communicating a different message. We need to be partners in this to secure customers back on our bus. If we can grab them and grab them when they're ready, then once again, as we talked about earlier, down the road, as the CARES Act money runs out, or we have to evaluate the level of service based on the demand, if we work together on this and we keep getting those people on buses, instead of trying to drive them away, we stand a better chance of being able to keep that service out there in the long run. So, Alex, when you're at a right place to break or at the end of this, we have a couple of people, James, stand them off from smart and perhaps another participant would like to make comments, but let's hold those for just a moment. We'll take James first and then the other person, whoever that is. Yeah, if I can finish the presentation, Mike, then then I'll be happy to turn it over if that's okay with you. Yes, that would be fine. Okay, so continuing on. So, in this bus capacity controversy, you've heard different pronouncements about what adjacent counties are doing. So, here's one way to look at the data. So, as of August 25th, just a couple of days ago, I went into two state sites to gather this data. And you can see the Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Monterey are adjacent counties, because the observation has- Do you want to be on the next slide here? We're still- I'm sorry, next slide. Next slide, please. I failed at giving him morning. There you go. So, on this slide, as of August 25th, you can see the three counties because it's been said that we're out of sync with our adjacent counties. And all I'm trying to do here, I'm not trying to be a doctor, a scientist or whatever, I'm just trying to utilize the data that's available. It's all sourced to the state site. So, you can see that at the bottom if you want to go look at the data and figure out if I'm telling the truth. So, as of the 25th, this was what data was in the state site. Santa Cruz County, 1708 cases. If you look at that against our population on a per capita basis, measured at per 1000, that's 6.25. We were put on the watch list, the state watch list on August 17th. We were only on that state watch list for three weeks. We are off that. We've been off it for, I think it'll have been 14 days this coming Monday. So, good news for us. In contrast, Santa Clara County, the county that has the much more stringent transit order that we talked about, in which we had to bring our capacity down to eight to go into their county, they had 16,199 cases. They're at 8.4 per 1000. They have been on the watch list since July 12th. They are still on the watch list today. Monterey County, our neighbor to the south, 7,333 cases as of the 25th. They're at 16.89 per 1000. They've been on the watch list since July 2nd. They're still on the watch list today. I give you some information about the state resilience road map, stage one safety and preparedness, stage two lower risk workplaces, stage three higher risk workplaces, and stage four end of the stay home order. And I'll come back to that in a moment. Next slide, please. So, in addition to bus capacity in being argued using COVID cases across different counties, there's been the argument that we're just out of sync with federal and state rules and regulations and orders. Well, that's not true because if we were, then everybody on this list, virtually everybody on this list from the 15 to the greater than 15 category, which is the 41 on the left and the 18 on the top right, everybody here would be operating illegally. It's just not true. There is a bunch of guidance out there and we try to do, we try to conform to as much of the guidance as we can. The guidance is guidance. It's not an order. The orders come down. The orders, the regulations, the law come down from the governor through the state and through the CDC and then probably more so through our local health officer. So what you see on this is a collection of data. It's been growing. It's very random. I surveyed the nation. It keeps growing. People call me every once in a while and say, hey, I want to respond to your survey or I'm on a transit call and somebody says, oh, we're at this capacity. I add it. I update this chart. It's a live document. What this chart shows you is that there is a category in the lower right-hand corner of 17 transit agencies that have less than what our standard is for 40-foot bus, less than 15. Now, a number of those agencies, which are in California, are investigating going to a higher capacity. I'll talk about that in a few moments. There is a big category in the upper right-hand side in which 18 transit properties have been identified as being the same as we are. 15 people per 40-foot bus. Again, you'll note that there are a number of California properties listed there, too. The overwhelming larger category, again, N is 76. 76 in this database. The overwhelming majority, 41 of the respondents, are at greater than 15. Anywhere from the 50% number all the way through a large chunk there at the top that have no capacity limits at all. That is the data. That's real data. I didn't skew it. I didn't say, oh, I got to leave these people off because it's data that doesn't support what I'm contending. It is all the data that came in. In some cases, it was updated as we sat in on these transit nationwide calls. It's good data. We'll keep updating the data, but it shows that we are in sync with what's going on across the nation. It confirms we're not doing anything illegal. We're not breaking any orders, rules, regulations. Finally, on the topic of capacity, this just next slide, please. This is hot off the press. This just came in. I talked about the California properties in Northern California looking at increasing their capacity to our level or greater, but they took a little bit different tasks. They pulled together a task force because they're all in the MTC region, right? The Metropolitan Transit, whatever region in Northern California, Santa Clara VTA over the hill, our neighbor is in that. We are not in that, in the MTC region. A number of properties, including the Contacastas and the Golden Gate Bridge and all of those, they all work and receive their funding through the MTC, the MPO, the Metropolitan Planning Organization. They said we should get some information that we can all use and share and consider applying to our agency. They formed this Blue Ribbon Task Force and they just completed that Task Force task and issued their final report. Only one part of a greater discussion about what new transit is going to look like and what we need to do to help keep our customers safe. One part of that was this physical distancing you see there. I want to read the part in yellow because it's really important. The CDC currently advises six feet. However, it should be noted that the face coverings were not encouraged or mandated by the CDC when the six-foot distancing metric was introduced. Where practical, Bay Area Public Transportation Providers will provide for a minimum of three-foot physical distancing coupled with mandatory, properly worn face coverings. Really important point there. If you recall back in March when the CDC said, oh, we are guidance, again not in order, our guidance is six feet. The CDC in the same breath was telling transit agencies across the nation, don't have your employees wear face coverings. Matter of fact, it could do more damage than good. That's what they were saying and they didn't and that's the same time that they issued their guidance of six-foot. But later on when they suddenly decided, oops, that guidance is not so good about face covering on transit. And this whole airborne droplets thing became what they focused on. At that time they said, wow, everybody should wear face coverings. So they changed their perspective on it as a result of airborne droplets. But as this points out, they didn't go back and change their guidance. So their guidance is out of sync. Their guidance is in sync with no face covering but out of sync with the face covering. That is such an important point. Where does the three-foot come from? The three-foot comes from the European standard and the World Health Organization and that's where that comes from. So important points. Again, trying to make the point, we are operating safely. We're not breaking any laws and we're certainly not out of sync with other agencies. I think Dan has a question. Yeah, Alex I do. So you provided the statistics in terms of other transit districts limiting the capacity or not limiting the capacity and we're pretty favorable on that regard. I'm just wondering though if you have any information about whether those transit districts also have gone to the extraordinary extent that we have in terms of putting up plastic sheeting and protecting people from each other in addition to just being six feet away. Are other transit districts doing all that or are they just limiting the capacity and requiring masks? I wish I had thought of that question because it's such a great question. I will tell you that this agency has been on the cutting edge of this whole topic of protection. We put in the clear driver protection curtain well in advance of the overwhelming majority of properties across the nation. There are still agencies today on our nationwide call that are still talking about what they're going to do. Do they want to go permanent barrier or do they want to go plastic? We said we're going to jump on this. We're going to do it in-house and do it as fast as possible because every day we delay puts our operators at risk. We got it done fast. We were ahead of the game. We are way ahead of everybody in this discussion about between row sneeze barriers. There are some agencies that are buying a product that is a permanent. There are some agencies that have installed something on there, maybe similar to ours in some cases, but we are in the small number of agencies who have just excelled in this area of protection of customers and protection of our bus operators. Others are planned ketchup. In some cases, many across the nation are not even contemplating on those nationwide calls going to these between-row barriers like we have. A large number of agencies are still not collecting fares, are still doing rear-door boarding only. That seems to be a common thread. Pretty much uniformly across the nation what I hear in these calls is that everybody has signed on as fast as they could to the six-foot social distancing between customers and the bus operator. As I said before, that's the one piece of guidance that you read in both the state and the federal CDC that they're pretty emphatic about. You should distance your bus operator six feet from the customers. But everything else, we're ahead of the game. Even disinfectant dispensers, there are a lot of agencies that are doing it, but by no measure do I see a majority that have done what we're doing. Does that answer your question, Dan? Yeah, it did. I was just wondering if you've shared this with other transit districts, Sam pictures, and like you've just shown us here today. Yeah, APTA has done a wonderful job of creating the ability for that to take place. So I upload pictures, I share sometimes just through the chat when we're on a particular topic, and other times I'll ask for the floor and I'll share what we're doing. We get a lot of kudos for how fast we've done the things that we've done. Next slide, please. I have a question. On the last page of your survey, that you showed us of the no limits and then less than 15 and greater than 50. Is there any information on the amount of operator exposure at the different levels of the no limits, greater than 15 limits and less than 15? Yeah, so we've been, I think that question maybe goes to are some of these other agencies that have greater limits experiencing more COVID cases? There's been a significant body of knowledge lately actually suggesting that transit is the safer place to be. I think there was maybe one case in Detroit where there was some suspicion about it actually being potentially a COVID case caught on public transit, but other than that, I have not read, maybe others have read, but I haven't read anything about contact tracing, bringing it back to the transit agencies. Now all of these agencies in varying degrees are reporting COVID cases within their employees, but not traceable to the necessarily to the transit itself. Does that answer your question? Okay. Okay, on the what's next, of course, the big talk today and these calls and everywhere is contactless, touchless, and even in the private sector, that's a big topic. And as I've indicated partly through this presentation, we're trying to work towards that. We have the highway 17 smartphone flash pass app that's coming system wide. We're trying to migrate our customers through our marketing programs off of cash and other fair media to the cruise card. We have some challenges to get the cruise card to work right before we start selling it because we're still trying to get GFI to get some problems fixed. And then we're looking at other technology in the planning department that can help us in that endeavor. We've offered to our employees to have the employees, the two unions identify their members who are faced with starting about August 10th are faced with child care issues. That is because the schools did not go back to in person classes. Some number of employees across our agency are faced with child care issues related to their children learning at home. And so I've tasked HR department to work with those employees to try to do their best to tailor make a schedule that will help them be able to accomplish both coming to work full time and taking care of their children, their school aged children. And HR has done a great job in doing that. It is much greater challenge on the bus operator side to try to pull that off but they're still open to working with the smart to try to explore different ways to solve that problem. And then you should have HR folks contact me starting October 1st. I'm going to have a class and I'm in touch with other faculty at UCSC who have internship courses where students could help the tutors for their kids at home online tutoring help things like that. So someone wants to contact me who is working on that issue. They may be able to help some of those parents with their situation for their kids. Okay. Don, I'm sure Don has just made a note as I am making a note. They care. Okay. Good. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. So finally on this slide you see the new headways that is coming out here real soon and of course the emphasis is on safety and on COVID. Next slide. I'm almost done. So what's continuing, what's next? We're investigating automated temperature chaos for our employees. We're investigating permanent plexiglass for the bus operator, permanent plexiglass for the sneeze barriers, fall to late fall, planning is underway for an on-demand transit pilot. We're currently testing our new EcoLane program for its booking capability through the app. That will be exciting. We're investigating funding possibilities for automatic passenger counters on our buses. Here's the exciting thing about automatic passenger counters or APCs. Remember, we're in the process of installing automatic vehicle location AVL so that customers on their phone, their smartphone app, can see when the bus is coming and whether it's on time or not. We can add to that, with the APCs, we can add to that that the customer can see how many people are on that bus. Probably never more important than right now in this pandemic environment. The customer will be able to see how many people are on that bus and if that makes them uncomfortable, they can choose not to board that bus. They'll see it. So we're working on a proposal that we hope to bring to you in a month or two on funding for APCs. Isaac in IT is also investigating the possibility turning on the Wi-Fi on all of our fixed route, not just Highway 17, and that could possibly be done in late 2020, early 2021. August 17th, the Santa Cruz was taken off the state watch list 14 days later, which I believe is this coming Monday. Maybe we're off. Maybe the county, the state let people go back to restaurants and hair salons inside instead of outside. I only bring that up because if that happens, we could see our ridership turn and go back the other way again and maybe even pass-ups go up. And then finally, Alex, Alex, can I interrupt you just one moment? Just for clarification, the end of the 14 day period is actually today, but the state is not allowing us to allow people to go to dining restaurants, salons, gyms, etc. We expect that new guidance will be coming out next week that will help us, but being one of the last to go on the list and one of the first, if not the first to come off the list, we're a little bit ahead of what the state was ready for, especially with the fires. So we think we're going to get guidance next week, but right now everything will remain the same until we hear from the state. Great. Thank you, John. I really appreciate that important clarification because, again, I'm linking a possible increase in ridership to whatever, whenever that happens, only because our data, as I showed you earlier, supports as more essential travel is allowed, more trips occur. Thank you. John, one thing too, just for, on John's point, I noticed this morning some TV ads on KSBW, I think it was Michael's on Main and St. We're now open again for dining and seating. So there may be some confusion for the restaurants and maybe it's an old ad, but I don't think so. So just be aware that sounds like there's some confusion from you. So you know, actually, I'm only allowing people outside on their deck. It's outdoor eating and they're not actually inside. Michael's, please. The ad, what their ad was possibly old. I've asked our Economic Development Office and our Public Information Office to get the word out because it's, I've received a lot of calls. I've been reaching out to businesses to let them know, but we need to do a better job. It's what is obviously a very unusual thing where you're off the list, but you don't have any, there's no benefit to being off the list. So we're all trying to figure this out. And with the context of the fire, it just makes it a little bit harder. Yeah, great, great clarifications. Final bullet on this slide. As permitted by state and local ordinance, Metro will likely remain at our self-imposed capacity limit of 25%, which I sort of attribute to the California resilience roadmap stage two, with future increases in capacity likely occurring as the county progresses through the state's four stages of the resilience. For example, if permitted by state and local ordinance, Santa Cruz County stage three resilience, we could look at possibly going to about a 50% capacity at that point. And then when Santa Cruz County achieves a stage four resilience, possibly going to the 75% or 100%, all of those future steps also dependent on other circumstances that might be occurring, including what is the state of recommendations of face coverings and physical distancing. So with all of those caveats, that's kind of how I've looked at the possibility of tacking our future capacity increases to the expansion of or through the successful moves through the resilience stages. Final slide. Of course, all of our employees, bus operators, Paracus drivers, and all of the other employees that keep this organization running are heroes. They're frontline heroes. They're providing an essential service. They're helping people get to the places they need to go. Because without us, they couldn't get there. Mr. Chair, that concludes our presentation. Thank you, Alex. I'm going to hold up board questions or comments first here from the public. And so first, James Sandoval from smart Europe. Make sure you're unmuted. James, are you there? I don't see James. It doesn't. It shows a hand, but it doesn't show a microphone. So you might be having the same problem I had. Yeah. We'll wait a moment. There's his microphone. That's a good sign. And then James, you just need to unmute now. There you go. It says you can't. There we go. You're on. Okay. I just got the option of mute myself. All right. So a couple of things, two points to your presentation. First, I'll talk about MST. I actually called them myself and spoke to a manager. They don't allow 15 people on their buses. They allow a max of 10. And it's because they want to allow six feet between each passenger. And the next thing is, if you don't mind pulling up your ridership and pass bys chart that you had. I don't have control of that. If the CCTV can do it. Yeah, I'd really like to see that. So I can point this out. It's the 27, please. Slide 27. Oh, I'm sorry. I gave you, I gave you my number, your number. Go forward, please. One more. One more. Another one. Another, another. There we go. There you go. That's the one. Okay. You passed it. 54. There you go. There we go. Okay. So, interesting point. You mentioned how the factor of us not passing people up right now is because we increased the capacity on our buses. You said that was July 3rd. And as you could see, we had a significant drop before July 3rd. So I want to point out in which we, you know, brought up before and try to explain to everybody, we had only half of the operators working up until June 25th. So as you could see around that time when we had a significant drop is June 25th, because all of our operators came back. And we had the ability to provide a lot more backup service that we weren't before. So that itself provided that significant drop in pass-ups. And by the time we increased capacity to limits, we were already dropped pass-ups. So I just wanted to point that out, you know, again, and just make sure we're all on the same page. Our biggest argument is that we, it's not so much that we're not providing safe transportation. We have the ability to provide safer transportation. And without getting further into it, that's all I have to say. Thank you for your comments, James. And there's another member of the public. I didn't see who that was. Identify yourself. Not seeing anybody, Mike. Because I had a thing on my thing saying two members of the public wanted to comment. Maybe they dropped off. There's nobody else. Nobody else. Okay. Let me just ask again, is there anyone else in the public have a comment? If you wanted to, if for some reason they're having a microphone issue, don't really want to open a can of worms, but you could possibly do it through the Q&A. Okay. All right. I'm going to, you know, again, people can come back with their comments. If they're, when we get to another item, it'll still be okay. I'm, we're going to be generous in terms of accepting public comments here because it is difficult to get a hold of this. We're not trying to, we're trying to make it easier, not harder for people to comment on anything that's on our agenda. So that, Alex, that was your, the writer survey, the crisis report, and the stuff from 909, which became 12.5 on our agenda. Next, the, did John Ergo have anything else that he wanted to add to these comments? John? Mr. Chair, if you, if you would like John, just to comment on the survey and ridership all in one, I think he could do that. Mike, this is John Leopold. Can I just make one, just a clarifying point of something that Alex said? Yes. He ended the presentation with talking about the stage, different stages as being connected to when the capacity limit would change. We have some information from the state that they may be changing the, from the stage system to a color coded system. We don't exactly know what that means, but that they, they might be changing the way in which they, they talk about opening up again. And so I just put that out as a caveat that, that, that those markers can change over time. So that color system works better than the one after 9-11. And Mike, as soon as that happens, I'll go back and revise that slide to the new one. Sure, that sounds great. Again, John Ergo, do you have anything else you'd like to add? Yeah. So I have about 12 slides that go into more detail in the survey. If you want to go through those or... I think we want to be well informed about what's going on. Okay. Perfect. So that, and I'll tie in the quarter four ridership results because that, ridership report, because that's what sets the stage for doing the survey. Okay. So through quarter four of FY 20, ridership was down 91%. And you can just hold on there. I'll tell you when to go to the next slide. Local ridership, so non-student ridership is down about 75%. So about 25% of customers on our local routes are still riding, so essential workers, people needing to travel to access essential services. The largest decrease is obviously in UCSC, Cabrillo, and student ridership and also Highway 17. And the data that I've showed is somewhat encouraging. We're seeing a slight increase in ridership, but we're still at about 90%, maybe 89% down. So ridership is pretty much stuck at that level through the summer. And so this survey was an effort to get at the reasons why besides the obvious of, you know, vast sectors of the economy being shut down, people working from home, and to really develop strategies for that metro can take to encourage riders to return ride more frequently in the future. So next slide, please. So again, the objectives, we wanted to, I gave a preview of this in June. Since then, we really delved into the data. Again, evaluate attitudes, likelihood of returning and the effectiveness of strategies the metro can take. Next slide, please. The survey was distributed in English and Spanish to about 3,000 metro email subscribers on two occasions between June 10th and June 26th. We received about 250 responses. So about a 10% response rate on that email subscriber list, which is pretty good. Next slide, please. And in general, 75% of riders responded that they would likely return the metro once the shelter in place order is lifted. And we sent this in June and the meaning of the shelter in place order, I think I somewhat changed it. It's less of a definitive moment now to a gradual release of restrictions, but still it's encouraging that 75% of riders said they would return. Of course, on the flip side, that means 25% may be unlikely to return. Next slide, please. Most riders plan to ride the same as before, so about two-thirds, which is also encouraging. 17% stated they would ride more often. And 17% said they would ride less. Less encouraging was 20% of frequent riders. Those that ride five days or more per week said they would ride less. And those riders account as a smaller group, but they account for a larger share of metro's ridership. So that's a discouraging finding. Next slide, please. The primary concerns among all customers were related to physical distancing and vehicle cleanliness. You can see we broke it down between those frequent riders and riders who stated they were unlikely to return. The top three reasons or the top two reasons were the same amongst all, although unlikely riders found that they would probably switch to more auto modes. They felt driving their car was faster. And frequent riders were more likely to be laid off or unemployed. Next slide, please. Even though most riders said they planned to return, we do expect ridership is going to rebound pretty slowly. So in terms of timing, 40% of all those surveyed said they would come back once shelter in place is lifted. So we can expect at least a 60% decrease until that time. Of course, we're at 90% driven largely by the lack of school term service. But there'll be a gradual coming back outside of that. Riders indicated they would come back a month to a year to sometimes next year. 17% said they would not come back until there was a treatment or a vaccine. And so that's just an unknown time period where we can expect that ridership loss and 17% said they just weren't sure. So next slide, please. So in general, in the short to medium term, again, we can expect that 50 to 60% ridership to be down 50 to 60% as riders wait for schools in the economy to reopen and a certain percentage wait for the development of a treatment and vaccine. Long-term ridership loss could be as high as 25%. So that cohort that said, we may never return. And the primary driving factors are concerns about the perception of safety and concerns related to physical distancing, vehicle closliness, and less external factors related to the economy or classes moving online. And so this really suggests that through cleaning and bringing service back, their specific measures measure can take. And so the next slide of questions, next slide, please, is where we delved into the effectiveness of those strategies. Among all riders, service improvements ranked as the most important, so very important or important. 77% of frequent riders just wanted to see service come back. And 70% of even unlikely riders with the maintenance of COVID-19 specific measures, technology enhancement, enhancements and infrastructure improvements ranking as less important. Next slide, please. And we then segmented our responses. Among frequent riders, again, those riding five or more days per week, riders planning to ride less and unlikely riders. And so among frequent riders, these customers care most about service quality. So they want to see vehicle closeness, service restoration to pre COVID-19 levels where the top two ranked responses. And then you can see a requirement of PPE. Interestingly, observing social distancing, limiting vehicle opacity was still important, but ranked towards the bottom. And none of them really, not many cared about continuing the free or reduced fair period that we had in the beginning. Next slide, please. We asked riders planning to ride less, what we could encourage them to do to ride more in the future. And these customers were more concerned about safety. So we're concerned about the existence of a vaccine requiring PPE, kind of this perception of safety while onboard metro vehicles. Also concerned about cleanliness and sanitization. And less concerned about restoring service to pre COVID-19 levels. So that ranked all the way at the bottom. It was not a major driver for encouraging these riders to ride more in the future. Next slide, please. And finally, for customers planning to or not planning to ride in the future, again, the existence of a treatment or vaccine and seeing a significant decrease in new COVID-19 cases where the top two ranked responses and also vehicle cleanliness. You know, these top two concerns are not things that are within metros control. And so it could be a while before we see this, you know, 15 to 20% of riders that said they were unlikely return before we see them coming back. So final slide, please. So given all that, we're recommending focusing our immediate efforts on trying to encourage frequent riders to come back. So they're a smaller group that comprise a larger share of overall ridership. And their primary concerns are our measures that are directly within metros control, restoring service to pre COVID-19 levels, which we're doing. So starting with the fall did, as Alex mentioned, where we're pretty much ramping back up to 100% of local service, minus school term service and reduce a reduced highway 17 schedule will be about, it'll be about 25% less service overall, compared to last fall. And they're also concerned about vehicle cleanliness and requiring PPE on the board. Again, concerned about service quality and measures that metric can take. Once we do that, we think future efforts should should be focused more on motivating riders that are planning to ride less and those unlikely riders, because they are generally concerned about things that that are beyond metros control. So the vaccine and a decrease in new COVID-19 cases, all customers ranked cleaning as important to them. And Alex went through all the measures that we're taking to do that. Another important aspect related to that is publicizing that and making sure that customers are seeing that we're doing that. And Daniela's developed the advertisement campaigns related to that. And we also just see that the cleaners at the metro stations, boarding buses after each one. That said, I'd be happy to delve into it or take any additional questions on it. But it was a it was a useful exercise to go through, to develop strategies for for combating this rider loss. Thanks. I see James Sandoval has a comment. Go ahead, James. So I just wanted to confirm the primary reason passengers are not riding right now is because they're concerned about social distancing. Okay. Thanks for the comment. Are there any questions or comments from any other board members or members of the public? Well, just and I think another reason is so many people working from home. Yeah. My question was a confirmation. That was a real question. I just didn't know if I missed that slide. I saw 42% but I didn't know if it was the question was why wouldn't you ride right right now? So I just wanted to confirm that. The question was what are the primary reasons you would be unlikely to ride and concern about social distancing was the primary concern. Interestingly, on the flip side, when we asked what would encourage you to ride again and more in the future, decreasing capacity ranked towards the bottom. So there was a disconnect between the concern and the measure. Customers were more interested in seeing service restoration and PPE and cleaning than limiting capacity on board buses. Thank you. Thanks. Anyone else? Okay. Sorry, Trina, go ahead. Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about the data overlay since the majority of our bus services are students and that's really been what's closed off the most. Do we have any idea how many of these results were from students that aren't writing because school is closed? We did ask some socio demographic data so we do know which respondents indicated there were students or not. I didn't break the data down that way. The survey was sent to our email subscribers but we can do a further analysis. That would be interesting if you wouldn't mind at some point sending us that an email with whatever you find when you break that down. That would be good, I think. Yeah. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Cynthia, Matthews. Yeah. When you get that data, it'd be good to see it. If you could send us your PowerPoint slides too. That'd be great. Okay. Alex, I think as well as John Ergo from that. All right. I'm going to move on. Alex, I don't know if you've done it. You have additional oral report for us? Oh, Mike, I think it really went if you get the floor. Okay. Sorry. I didn't catch that. Raleigh, go ahead. If done. Sure. Yeah, I raised my little blue hand and I raised my physical hand. There's a lot of us out here. Yeah, I have a question on your survey. You indicated something about the vehicle. They're writing their vehicles. I guess it's a two-fold question. I go, has our times increased in our bus routes? All right. Notice how they improved off Highway 1 since there's less traffic? Yes. I don't believe that our schedules are capturing that. Again, we don't have automatic vehicle locator installed yet. But certainly with the reduction in traffic, travel times have probably improved. But we have not been able to adjust our schedules because we don't have that information, that data that comes in. I think that'd be kind of good to capture because if and when the auxiliary lanes do come to effect, that might be reflective of the time that we're going to be able to provide for services to persuade those folks that once traffic does return back to its normal, that we can show them hard fact numbers. Incidentally, peak period traffic is approaching normal. So traffic has returned even though travel has perhaps not quite as returned. Interesting. Good to hear. Do you have a comment? Just made some noise, I guess. Okay. Anyone else? Going once? Going twice? All right, Alex, do you have additional general comments? Not under that one. I have the CEO oral report under number 15, if you're ready for that. Yeah. Go ahead for that. Okay. And if we could bring that up on the screen. Next slide, please. So I'm going to just roll through a couple of slides and explain them real quickly, but there are some slides in here reflective of our fire response. On the virtually the next day after the fire, the CZU fire hit, we reached out that morning to Cal Fire and said, hey, we see that you're exploding at the seams over here at Sky Park. We have this transit center that is in this particular COVID environment is underutilized. Would you be interested in that? And we also have this vacant building that you could use for logistics. By that afternoon, they called back and they said, yeah, can you bring us the key? So we met them out there. We gave them the key. We explained just our part of it, that it's still a live transit terminal and we're going to be bringing buses through there. So we just need them to not bother the bus lane, but what they do with the building and what they do with the parking lot is up to them. We relinquished full control over to them. We're still catching up on the paperwork part of that, but this was an emergency and we wanted to help out. In addition to that, Rufus reached out to the Office of Emergency Services and said, hey, we're ready, willing and able to help evacuate. Just let us know. That resulted in us putting at least a fixed route in a pair of cruise vehicle out in, it's either Ben Lohman or Felton James would know better than I or Daniel. And I think these pictures come from that first night. And then what happened is over, as the fire continued, we progressed to a strategy where we were staged at the Scotts Valley Transit Center and primarily using the paratransit vehicles. And the strategy there is the paratransit vehicles are much more nimble. They can get up into those tighter areas up in Ben Lohman and Boulder Creek and Felton. So we did a number of pieces of work for Cal Fire and we're really, really proud of our staff for doing that. Can you go to the next slide, please? I don't think these are in order. I believe this is that first night too. Next slide. So this is interesting that they're a little out of sync, but it's very rare that you see our bus yard look like this. So here's the thing. So last week when there was an evacuation order up the street here on Highway 9 at Paradise Park, Margo and Annemarie and I started talking about, well, we should do the right thing here as we've been trained to do for floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, whatever, right? And that is protect your equipment. So we talked about, well, they could evacuate us. The fire could come down Highway 9. They could evacuate us. We weren't even at a warning stage, but we thought, well, let's get ahead of this because here's the thing. If something like that happened, it could happen overnight. And that could be a problem to move a lot of equipment overnight. So we thought, well, we'll get ahead of this. We'll fuel the buses and we'll disperse them throughout the county so that they're placed in strategic locations in the event that we move to a warning and ultimately to evacuation in this area around Vernon and JKS. So we disperse buses to Capitol Mall, to the Metro Center, to the SoCal Park and Ride, and the results of that is a pretty darn empty lot for a few days until we felt comfortable bringing the equipment back. Next slide. Same thing. Next slide. Evacuation equipment. Next slide. There we are staged. I think this is either night one or two because we're still using a fixed route bus at that point. Next slide. There's our proud para cruise drivers. They're staged. This was this past Friday. So I came over to the transit center on Friday and had a chat with these folks. They were really proud of what they were doing and telling me a few of their stories. And so they were happy to stand for a pose. Next slide. And this is a slide of a customer, a very happy evacuee that we helped out. Next slide. Looking out at the transit center parking lot this past Friday. And remember, that's the day that Scotts Valley had to evacuate. You can see some fire equipment there in the distance. Next slide. This shows you when we took the buses out of the yard and dispersed them, this is what it looked like at metro center. We were packing them in wherever we could. Next slide. Same thing. They're in like sardines at this point. But we were doing everything we could to try to ensure that if we got evacuated in this area, we could provide some level of service. Next slide. And moving on to another topic. Next slide. This is the fire egress. Our golf building, for whatever reason, on that second story only has one way into that office part of that second story and one way out. And we've identified a couple of years ago that we need to have a second egress. So we found the money finally. We went out to bed and as we speak, it's under construction. Next slide. Next slide. Okay. And then there was only going to be one other slide, but I didn't get it in there. I wanted to show you that even during COVID crisis, we're getting things done. The new roof on golf, the maintenance facility is done. It's quite a spectacular roof. I think it'll last us a long time. And it has been completed. Next, I will go on to new hires, which is a senior accounting technician in the way of Simone Koch. And then you already met Danielle, our marketing communications and customer service director. And then a very quick state and federal update. We're working through CTA, California Transit Association, which we're a member of and I'm on the executive committee of to try to get the state to be interested in providing some funding to transit agencies for operation. Unfortunately, the legislature on August 31st will recess. And so when they come back into session, that'll be high on our topics to talk to them about. We've been working successfully with them and the legislature through the year or the last several months in the COVID environment to get more flexibility of funding that we already have and to get Fairbuck's relief on the TDA. CTA, California Transit Association is also working at a federal level to encourage that if there is a CARES Act II, whatever that ultimate number is, that California gets three billion, with a B, three billion dollars for transit. On the federal side, CARES Act II, the discussion about that seems to have been put on the back burner. Speaker Pelosi indicated to the White House that she was willing to talk about the HEROES Act, but the president has said no, the problem is we're too far apart. He wants to try to keep the overall package at one trillion. So when they're still fighting about one trillion versus three and a half trillion, they're not at any stage where they're talking about a lot of detail of the subcomponents of the package of which a CARES Act program might be. So our best hope is that we get some sort of additional CARES money, maybe a phase two of CARES money in a continuing resolution. Remember, the FAST Act expires here in another month or two. They're going to have to have a continuing resolution because they're not going to get to reauthorization before the election and the new year. So there'll be a continuing resolution and that might be one place to try to insert into that continuing resolution and a continuing resolution allows them to keep funding the various programs in the FAST Act at the authorized FAST Act levels. So that's important to us so we can pay our bills and maybe in that bill there can be something for a CARES Act too. That's where we'll turn a lot of our attention. And then finally on the House infrastructure, what was known as the Invest in America Act, 1.5 trillion with a T, an incredible package would have brought a lot of capital dollars to our agency. It's just not moving at this time. The Senate has no interest in talking about that. So if it comes back alive, it'll be after the new year. And Mr. Chair, that concludes my presentation under the CEO oral report. Thank you, Alex. Our next item, number 16, is about we're looking for public comments on the measures proposed disadvantaged business enterprise or DBE goal of 2.65%. For members of the public might want to know why is that such a low number. This was a program that was set up to try and encourage the use of mainly minority owned or businesses owned by people of color or other disadvantaged groups. And it's based on what the percentages of businesses of that type owned by, for example, minority owned businesses in your service area. And we have a very low percentage. So therefore the number that we're expected, this is a minimum. You must have at least 2.5% of your organizations, either the subs or the main organization when you hire for a contract of some kind that they come on. And because we have such a low percentage of such actual businesses in our community, we have a very low requirement to meet that. And Angela will tell us more about that reality. Angela, it's up to you. You're muted somehow, Angela. Angela, you're still muted. I don't know why it doesn't show you're muted, but you are. Something wrong with your mic or whatever. Nope. Not yet. Take a moment there. Now, okay. Now I can unmute you. You did. You're good. Try it now. Angela, if you want to come in here, I'll move more than six feet away and you can take over this computer. She's on the move. She's left the forest or wherever she was over there and she's And Mike, do you want to open the public hearing after Angela's initial presentation? Let me formally open the public hearing and we'll start with a report from Angela about the proposal. There we go. Here she comes. What I was saying is that Mike did such a good job. Are there any questions? Okay, sorry. Okay, so as Mike said, this is 2.65 is our goal that we're looking for. We do this every three years now instead of only once a year. We have done the publishing that is required to the Sentinel and to the Paheronian. We did that in July. We also did two public outreach meetings and we're offering a public hearing today. We have not received any public comments to my knowledge as of now, but if people cannot offer public comments here at this meeting and the goal must be submitted by October 1st. That's why we need adoption today. We'll take the month of September to make sure we have all our ice dotted and tees crossed before we submit in October. So with that, we can move forward. Are there any questions about this item? Of course, this agency would love to see a higher percentage of disadvantaged business enterprises involved in our various contracts, but that's the, we're now debating, we're not debating, but deciding on whether the absolute minimum we have to meet. Any other comments? I'm looking for a motion then to approve this. We'll put it in front of the public. Do I have a motion to? I move the recommended item. Motion by Donna Meyer, second by John Leopold. So now let me ask are there members of the public would like to comment on this proposed percentage? I see none. I'm going to wait a moment. Ed, do you have a comment? No, I just came right about. Okay, then I'll have a roll call vote, please, Gina. So I have one more thing, Gina, just pointed out to me that at the conclusion of the public review that we did in the comment period, we did receive four requests from the public for information regarding the development of how we came up with the goal, which we did answer. And then we had two comments about the goal setting methodology. So again, it was just comments and questions that we did answer. So there's nothing outstanding at this point. I mean, just so the public understand when we first did this, this was decades ago, it was part of a federal process. And we were expecting, you know, 30 numbers of like 30% or something. And it just was not realistic because they're just are not that many minority owned firms in Santa Cruz County that do the kind of projects that we would put out to bid or out to RFPs. So point of order, Mike, can you close the public hearing before the vote? Yes, we will now close the public hearing and we have a motion and a second and we're looking for a roll call. Sorry, I was busy looking up the public comment number. I missed who did the motion and the second motion was made by Ed, no, I said again, made by Donna Myers and seconded by John Leofold. Thank you. Okay, now the phone. Dr. Wattorf. Hi, Dr. Kaufman Gomez. Yes, Dr. Gonzalez. Hi, Dr. Leopold. Hi, Dr. Lind. Hi, Dr. Matthews. Hi, Dr. McPherson. Hi, Dr. Myers. Hi, Dr. Pigler. You may be muted there. Larry, you there? I don't. Yes, my network went down. I'm back. Looking for your vote on the motion to prove the DBE percentage. Affirmative, please. Thank you. Dr. Rothwell, I believe you've joined us. Thank you. Yeah, I had a disconnection until 45 minutes into the proceeding. Sorry about that. Thank you. And Dr. Rotkin. Aye. unanimous unanimous vote. Thank you. That's approved. Next, we have an oral paracruise update from Daniel. Good morning, directors. We have Ken Hart from Swift Consulting Services. He will be giving you an update on this item. Thank you. Ken, go ahead, make sure you're unmuted. Okay. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thanks, Ken. Thank you. This is Ken Hart with Swift Consulting and we've been retained by the district to coordinate the design team and manage the permit process for the district's paracruise project. And as you probably know, the project would consist of a construction of a 5,000 square foot, approximately 5,000 square foot admin office and moving the paracruise operation to the park and ride lot, owned by the district at the Paul Suite and Soquel Drive intersection. The project requires that the county approve a master site plan and this would be something that the planning commission would be considering. We did hold a public meeting to discuss the very conceptual plans that we have at this point on Tuesday, August 11th. This was a preliminary meeting and once we have developed plans and in advance of a permit application to the county, we will conduct another public hearing with the detailed plans. And our goal is to make the application with the county for the master site plan in mid-January and that permit process is anticipated to take between five and six months to complete. And the district also expects to make application for FTA grant funds in February or March of 2021. And according to the funding agency, grant awards will be made in September of 2021. FTA expects grant funded projects to be constructed within three years of the grant award and once awarded, the design team that we will have assembled will prepare the construction drawings and documents to support an application for a building permit with the county. The plan preparation and the building permit issuance process is anticipated to take between seven and nine months, which would leave about two and a half years to complete the construction of the project. That's the really high-level overview of the project and the schedule and I'm available to answer any questions if you have them. My understanding is that that first meeting, perhaps rare for Santa Cruz County, most of the neighbors and others that came were kind of happy to see us developing that property rather than leaving in its current state. Is that correct? Well, yeah, Daniel, you can jump in, but yes, there was some of the neighbors were very happy that a security guard now patrols the area on occasion. I don't know how often they do that, but they're happy to see that property developed and that it not be just unattended, if you will. Yes, thank you. I attended that meeting as well and I think they were also happy with the thoughtfulness that was put into where the buildings would go. It's only one story where the bands would go. I think that we didn't have a lot of people on there, but they seemed very interested in the fact that they thought it was a well-designed piece. Thanks, John. Any other comments or questions? This doesn't require any action on our part. Thank you for the report. Appreciate it. Next, Angela will give us an update on our key performance indicators. Take it away, Angela. So this is a new report that we've put together. We're going to try to do it every quarter for you and it's going to be an evolving report. This is just a start. We plan on having a lot more information as the months go by, but I think most people know what KPIs are, key performance indicators, and these are things that different departments measure to see how their departments are doing and then how the agency as a whole is doing. So we have ones for financial performance, which I'll be going over. We have ridership ones, which John, our planning director, will be going over. We have safety ones that our safety director will be going over. Fleet maintenance ones that our fleet maintenance manager will be going over. And then we also have service delivery ones that our margar or our CEO will be going over. So if we can bring up the slides for those different charts, here we go. So the first one here is a system fare box recovery ratio. And as you can see, the green is 2018 and you go all the way over to the gold is FY20 and you can see exactly when we shut down, taken fairs into our fare boxes in the middle of March and then it stayed next to nothing ever since then. And then you have the average and then you can also see the average that's come down in the last few months also. Fair box recovery, I want to say I believe under 25% is the number that we want to stay under. And you can see where we went over a couple of times at 26%, but overall we're under the 25%. So the next slide, fiscal performance. So these are two different ones. One is for fixed route along with Highway 17. And the second one is for para cruise cost per trip. The first one shows you this is also FY18, which is the pink all the way through FY20, which is the blue. And you can see that depending on the month, it also depends on how much these routes cost. So July of last year, it was $450. And then June of this year, it was also 401. But during the year, you can see how it came down. Para cruise cost per trip, similar stuff. FY18 is the pink all the way to FY20 is the blue. And you can see, depending on the month, how much those trips cost per month. What accounts for the huge, relatively large numbers that the July, June, summer periods? I'll defer that question to Daniel. Yes, it is really the low ridership. We have the same amount of operators, but our ridership has been extremely low. So what that does, it creates a higher cost per ride. Thank you. And it looks like you can see the same for fixed route, very similar. Okay, moving on to the next slide, I'll let John take that. The top is ridership per revenue hour is a measure of passenger productivity. You can see that it dipped a lot in April, May and June for reasons we've been discussing throughout this meeting and then total ridership. It's on the bottom. Next slide. And then here it's broken down by Highway 17, UCSC, Cabrillo, and local ridership. And again, the biggest decreases during April, May and June were on Highway 17, UCSC went pretty much down 100%, same with Cabrillo, whereas local ridership has decreased about 75% as we've discussed. Next slide. This shows ridership by route, the route 16 having the highest ridership, the most frequent serving UCSC, going down through inner city Highway 17, local and rural routes having less ridership. Next slide. I don't know who's doing safety. This will be Rufus. Rufus you're muted. Okay, we'll move on to the next one. Wait maintenance, Eddie. Yes, on ours it's mean distance between road calls. Basically what that is is how reliable our vehicle is between our minus PM program and what the distance it travels between mechanical failures. Basically, if you look at it in between July and February, right around our COVID, you can see where it tapers off. We didn't run as many miles there. So, but I'm going to go over basically what we're doing to increase our miles between road calls. Basically, we're being proactive in our, instead of having a reactive program, we're changing that to a proactive program, where we start to change these components out, such as engine transmissions and different things that's causing us problems on our road calls ahead of time. So that's that's one we're managing the main distance between road call. And then you'll get into the other one. The second slide is where whether or not a bus can continue in service versus having a problem and it just needs to be taken out of service all together and brought back in. Okay, if we can back up to the safety one, I have Rufus here. Yeah, I hope someone that last slide we were just looking at was very hard to figure out exactly what was going on. Yeah, great to have a little bit more description and writing to know how to read that chart. Well, so Rufus first, then we'll come back to that, John. Okay. Hi, everybody. Good morning. I think it's still morning. Yeah. Yeah, it's still morning. Good morning, directors and staff. As you can see on the there are three portions of this report. One is with dealing with the traffic accidents. And second is passenger accidents and third report will say incidents. So what traffic accidents what we have done that we have documented all the data for 2018, 19 and 20. So 20 has only two quarters, January, February, March and April, May, June. So the coding structure was developed based on the industry safe program, which the district has purchased sometime before my time. And we developed the coding structure to capture that information. And traffic accident collisions mean anything dealing with our buses when they are in the revenue service. And those accidents, whether they take place in a intersection or on the street or at the bus stop, any collisions with our vehicle is coded in that coding structure. This has from coding 10 to 491 different types of accidents, which will be classified under traffic accident collisions. As you can see, this data represents 2018 is pretty much good in a way that it is consistent. 2019 we have, as you can see, in the last quarter rise. And in 2020, we have a significant drop there. You can see that in the second quarter. And as we were looking, because our exposure was less during that period because of COVID-19. Same thing we see on the passenger accidents, 2018, 2019 and 2020. And below is, you can see 2018, 2019 and 2020 on incidents. Can I go back on passenger accidents? That's something perhaps somebody trips on the bus and falls in the aisle or something that would be a passenger accident. Yes, that will be whether they were trying to board the bus, whether they were inside the bus and they slip or trip or whether they were getting off the bus and they got injured. So anything dealing with the passengers during this process of getting onto the bus or being in the bus or getting off the bus. And the coding structure for that is from 500 to 681, all different types of accidents pertaining to a passenger. I have been coded in that. And this is the program industry safes being used by many transit systems throughout California. Could you give us some idea of how we might compare with other agencies? It seems like a large number of traffic accidents, but I don't know what goes on in the industry. I mean, some of these are minor fender benders or something, but could you give us some idea of how we're compared to other agencies? Yeah, we can do that. There is an NTD report, National Transit Database, and we supply pretty much same information to the FDA, Federal Transit Administration through NTD, and we can request comparable transit systems or people or the agencies which are in the same kind of environment to get the data. Yeah, we can do that. If you could send that out to us at some point, that would be useful, I think, to the board. Okay, I'll do that. Are there other questions or comments? I'm not seeing any. Okay, thank you for your report, Rufus. Thank you so much. Back to your question, John. I'm just curious. I don't have to take a lot of time now, but what are the patterns of the passenger accidents? Is it proofs are frail and not steady on their feet or mechanical things they trip on? I'm just curious, and then obviously you want to know what to learn from that. So not to take a lot of time. Can you hear that question, Rufus? No, I missed half of the question. What kinds of accidents are passengers having on our buses? Are they frail people who have a hard time just generally being mobile or tripping over things? Or is it when buses stop and start? What's the nature of the kinds of accidents we're having with passengers? The mostly which we have seen when they are getting on to the bus or they are in the bus and they're not holding to the railings or extensions. And sometimes they are getting off and the trip, while they're getting off on the bus, miss the stop or something like that. And so the part of the question was, I think, do we have any kind of a program to figure out what we might do once we identify what kinds of things are happening, whether there might be something we can do to reduce those? Yeah, that's a very good concern question. I was talking about this thing, preparing a handout or brochure, how to ride our system safely, how to wait for the bus when you are at the bus stop, how to get onto the bus safely. And while you are in the bus, how you can protect yourself and not to get hurt. And while you're getting off the bus, what things you should do in order to be safely alighting on the bus. I'm preparing that brochure as an educational thing, which will be like take once in the buses, we're going to put those things. And I will be working with Daniel, I briefly talked to her on that one. So once that brochure is done, yeah, that will help. That's definitely will help some of those kinds of incidents. Cynthia has a follow up. Thank you. Thank you for that. And just, I would say that sounds like a good candidate for a video too. Oh, that's an excellent thing that can be done. Almost more than a brochure. We will try our best whatever we can do to educate our passengers, our customers, how to safely ride our system. Not to treat it lightly, but you know, one worries about them reading the pamphlet and shipping because they're not looking where they're going. They can read while they're sitting or you're right. They should not be reading while they're getting onto the bus, right? Maybe they should start with that at the top. Don't read this while you're getting on the bus. Any other questions, comments? Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Now we're going to go back to the question John Leopold had raised. John, you want to repeat? Well, I was trying to follow what was being said and I was looking at the colored bars on that chart and the FRs and the CEMs. And it was just very difficult for me to really completely understand what I should make from this chart. And I'm trying, if we're going to be using it on a regular basis, I was hoping that we could just either get something a little bit more writing about what the FRCMs, and I forget what the last one was, mean or just a little bit more explanation. And if I'm the only one who didn't... Well, that would be helpful, I think we understand that would be... Yeah, if we could put the slide back up, please. I think you're talking almost like the key to what the bars mean. Yeah, so I can see that it went down and during COVID, but I don't, you know, as green, high, good is... I just can't understand this chart. Let me try to go over the chart. Let's go to July. Let's start July. The first point of the chart is the fixed route mean distance between road calls. That's the distance that the bus travels on the, our average travel in our fleet on the fixed route fleet without having any interruptions in the service from a mechanical standpoint. The second one is the distance, the mean distance between road call that our commuter buses travel without having a mechanical disruption and having to take the bus out of service. The third one would be our parachutes, which would be the green one, which is the distance that the unit traveled without having a mechanical disruption that caused the unit to come out of service. So a higher bar then is better. That is correct. Okay. And so during the period of COVID, we just went less miles or the buses broke down more often? We traveled less miles. That one indicates that we traveled less miles, not because the bus broke down more often, but we had a lot less miles traveled. Okay. All right. Thank you. Can I have a follow up question? Just have to look clarify a little bit better. I can't tell you that is, but I really don't. Go ahead. Eddie, right? You were saying that miles traveled, I mean the average miles traveled before they had a mechanical failure. Is that correct? Before we had a mechanical failure, that would cause the vehicle to, that would interrupt the service that would cause the vehicle to be taken out. So say in November for the commuter, we traveled an average of 54,000 miles? That's good. In November, that's 1,000 miles, right? One second. Let me go to November. 54,000 miles. That's correct. Before we had a mechanical failure, and then in December, it gave a huge drop back down to 16,000. But that's why, and then it peaked back up in January. Why is that big difference of mechanical failure? Let me go to your November. Let's go to the November chart. Look at the main distance, 54,481. And then when we go to, what was the other in December? Between November, December and January, you have a huge curve. And we had 18 on the commuter, we had 18, uh, 612. Yeah. That one, I'll have to go back and look at the data. I'll go back and look at it and see what caused that different and drop, uh, being that that was, uh, at the time, uh, looked like a few months ago. I can go back and look at that and then give you an answer for that. You don't run much service in December is the answer to that question. The school service is actually, that's on the commuter. That's over Highway 17. That's a commuter. Yeah, that's why I was asking that. Right. It gets the holiday season and the San Jose State being closed for the holiday. Maybe that, but we'll find out. Get back to us, Eddie, please. Okay. Mr. Chair, just to point out, um, as we introduce these slides, this is the kind of feedback and questions we're looking for so that we can make the presentation better and better each time. Um, what I will say is, is as we get better at this, we'll come in more prepared to address any of the sort of anomalies that occur. We should have those answers at our fingertip. Um, and we should discuss them in our pre board meeting. Um, we'll also add in future slides, uh, uh, average, uh, a goal. And then we'll look at how we can take other agencies or peer agencies and give a comparison. Um, that can be a little tricky because this is current data. NTD data is a two year lag. So we have to figure out how to deal with that to make it meaningful where our data measured against itself becomes more meaningful is, is the next iteration of this slide will show you past years. And if you focus on a decrease versus a past year, it begs the question, why is that occurring? And you start digging deeper to find out is, is there some sort of thing that we're missing when we do our preventative maintenance? Do we have a fleet failure in the works? Some kind of common thread. Um, so it helps you really begin to kind of focus on why your trend is going a particular way or not. I'm a little bit suspicious that maybe mileage factors in here only because I'm seeing those drops in March, April, May, and June, but we should know that issue too. Thank you. So back to Angela, are there any other performance indicators we're going to talk about today? Yeah, go on to the next slide, Navi and Margo. You're up. Margo, you got your hand up. There you go. There you go. Okay. Okay. Can I see the site? It went away. We had it for a moment. No, it's back now. Okay. So as we can see that we had canceled trips due to various reasons. Usually it's lack of personnel or breakdowns. That's why it's kind of associated with the maintenance. Key performance indicators, the miles between service calls. And so we had 41% of the incidents were due to traffic, likely Route 17 coming over, you know, coming over the hill. And then it looks like in the last period, the majority of the canceled trips were over the weekend. And during the AM and PMP were smaller cancellations because we have more personnel to cover more service. And does anyone have any questions? So what on the bottom pie chart, weekend 74%, what causes canceling trips on the weekend? Usually lack of personnel. We don't have enough folks to cover the assignments. Margo, I think we're missing that piece of data in the upper left-hand corner wheel because it doesn't account for manpower. That's one we need to go back and look at a little bit more. Okay. Certainly I can help with redoing the KPIs. Good. Okay. So our next quarter, next quarter, we'll get one that's updated giving us clear information about that. Yes. Jerry has a question or a comment? Yeah, I wasn't sure. And this may be part of the ongoing question. I'm not sure what passenger load would mean in this case. Why a trip might be canceled because of passenger load? That would be because of the stay-at-home order where we didn't have enough capacity. Okay. I think that helps. Just clarifying, so it means that because of our passenger limitation, that's why? No, it's diver. That looks like divers. It wouldn't be a canceled trip. We need to go back and check on that. I don't know what this shelter-in-place order. I'm trying to figure out what that means. Yeah. I should have caught that. I don't understand why a passenger load would lead to a canceled trip. So we'll get a clarification on that too and make it much more clear in the next round of these. Yeah. I would say it's great to have these and I appreciate that we're trying to figure out how to read them and get the most information out of them. I think that's going to be helpful and probably take a couple iterations before we find something that we look at and know intuitively what's going on. Agreed. And even then, given the world we're in, some of it will be baseline and some of it will be, you know, this week we have fires and this week the school is closed down. Sometimes on a financial report, you get the variances are called out. Yes. This is really hard to understand that. Angela, are there other performance key performance? Next slide is questions. So I think you guys have all your questions answered. Are there any other questions about the entire report? Okay. So at last we are going to review items to be discussed in closed session. Julie Sherman is going to do that for us. Mr. Chair, if I can interrupt, you didn't ask for public comment on that item. Oh, I'm sorry. Were there public comments of any kind on the key performance indicators? And I believe Nate has a question. I don't see his hand up. Nate, do you want to open your microphone? He may not have a microphone. So Nate wants to know if the statistics include failure such as lift failure or is this only vehicle mechanical failures such as engine and transmission? And Eddie would have to be the one to answer that. I think Eddie has said this would be anything that stops them from proceeding with the ride. So a lift that doesn't work stops a bus cold, I think, and we have to replace it. All right. Eddie, are you nodding yes? That is correct. I thought I was muted there. But yes, that is correct. Anything that stops that unit from making its trip without interruptions that is caused by a mechanical failure? That would be a lift. Okay. Julie, you're on. Thanks, Chair. We have two closed sessions today. They're both on an existing litigation matter. And I do not anticipate any reporting out after the closed sessions. Okay. I'll now announce that our next meeting probably going to be on Zoom as we've been doing. We'll see. It could be too optimistic to think we're going to be meeting in person in September. But that meeting is Friday, September 25th at nine o'clock in the morning. And it will begin open to the public. And we'll let people know about that. You're not going to come back out after closed session. This closed session is only open to members of the board and executive staff. And we, you should have a separate email that came to you that has a different Zoom connecting number. So members of the board should have received that. You'll find it. We're going to... From Ian Berry. From Ian, thank you for that, John. And I'm going to say we're going to take, let's say about five minutes for people to find enough time to perhaps go to the restroom, which we haven't been able to do. And we'll come back in about five minutes and we'll start our closed session for those of us that has access to that account number. Thank you for the public. Thank you for everyone for your patience for this. Alex has another comment. All right. I just want to clarify for the public, Gina is going to leave this part of the meeting open, although it will be muted. And then after we come back out of closed session, she'll make the formal announcement that there were no actions taken in closed session. I'll come back for that. But we should all leave this meeting. Yes. Okay. Dan has a question. He needs a comment or question. Dan has his head end up. I won't be able to get back in unless you send it to me at my Gmail address. Everything's been going to my Cabrillo address and that is disconnected. That's why I was 45 minutes late today. So if I don't get a message indicating the link to get back on, I won't be able to. So it has to go to my Gmail address, which is jdanrothwell at gmail.com. So it's jdanrothwell at gmail.com. Thank you. Gina has it. She's going to send it right now, Dan. That's great. Thanks. Okay. I'm going to point to the public and members of the board for your patience. It's difficult to have these meetings this way. I do appreciate everybody's. We've had really good protocol on these meetings and people are really good about waiting to be recognized and so forth. And I don't want to take that for granted. It's a difficult time to pass through. And again, thanks to all of our drivers and our staff members at the Metro, they've been doing heroic work around and we have so many crises facing us all at the same time. And I think they've done an amazing job of keeping this agency up and responding to it possibly. I'm going to call for a round of applause for all those folks. And now we can leave this meeting. I'll see you all in five minutes. There's Gina. Okay. Do we need anybody other than you and me, Gina? Do we all need the attorney to announce that we have nothing to report from our closed session? Oh, she's back too. I'm here, but nothing to report from our closed session. Thank you all. Everybody stay safe. You too. Bye-bye.