 Hello, everybody. Chair McPherson, we are ready to start. Good morning, everyone. This is February 23rd, 2001 at 9 AM. Welcome to the meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Clerk, please call the roll. Supervisor, if I may, before I do roll call, I will give the public listening the ways to participate in our meeting today. Very good. Very well. Thank you. And actually, I would like to introduce myself. I am actually the Chief Deputy Clerk of the Board, and my name is Stephanie Cabrera. And to those listening, welcome to the teleconference for February 23rd, 2021, Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors meeting, presented to the provisions of the Governor's Executive Order, N29-20. This meeting is being held virtually. The county welcomes the public to participate in today's meeting using the Zoom link provided on our website at www.SantaCruiseCampCA.IQ. Click on today's date and then the agenda. You will find the Zoom link there, or you will be able to type it in as you see it on the screen. If you wish to participate by phone, you may do so by calling 1-669-900-6833. The meeting ID is 8864522-8831. And again, you may call 1-669-900-6833 and enter the meeting ID. If you need further help logging into today's meeting, you may call the Clerk of the Board's office at 831-453-2323, and someone will help you log into the meeting. Thank you. Very well, thank you. And Clerk, please call the roll. Koenig. Present. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. Thank you, Chair. You have a form. Thank you. We will now have a moment of silence followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance. The United States of America. And to the public. The Pledge of Allegiance. One nation under God. Indivisible. With liberty. With liberty. With liberty. Mr. Palacios, CAO. We consider late additions to the agenda, additions and deletions from the consent or regular agendas. Yes, Chair McPherson and members of the board, we have a number of corrections and some additional materials. On the consent agenda, item number 52, there's a correction. The item should read, approve the addition of 34 full-time equivalent, limited term staff positions for the emergency shelter response and rehousing efforts related to COVID-19 and approve funding of the benefits representative positions as recommended by the director of the human services department. On item 53, there's additional materials which are attached to the email. There's an agenda on the consent agenda. Item 67.1, this will be to adopt a resolution authorizing the chair of the board to complete the designation of subrecipient agent resolution form 130 as required by the hazard mitigation grant program and take related actions as recommended by the county administrative office. There's a board memo printout, there's a resolution and Cal OES designation of a authorized agent form. There's also an agenda 67.2. This is to adopt a resolution approving and accepting the terms and conditions related to the enclosed property acquisition agreement, approve a amendment to cooperative agreement for real property services between the county of Santa Cruz and the SCCRTC, increasing compensation by $596,310, authorize the chair of the board to execute the deeds associated with set agreements and take related actions as recommended by the deputy CAO director of public works. There's a board memo printout resolution of highway one acquisitions. There's a quick claim deed section 83 transfer, RTC county co-op agreement and there's an easement contract and deed. There's additional materials as well. There's a revised memo page one and a revised attachment E. That concludes our additions and corrections Chairman McPherson. Thank you. I'm number four, the announcement by board members of items that they would like to have removed the consent to the regular agenda. Seeing none, we will go to item number five, public comment. This is the time for any person to address the board once during public comment, not exceeding two minutes. Comments must be directed to items on today's consent and closed session agendas yet to be heard items on the regular agenda or on the topic, not on today's agenda within the jurisdiction of the board. We'll take public comments now for up to 30 minutes and if necessary, additional time will be allowed for public comment to be made after the last item on today's regular agenda, which is going to be going into the afternoon. Is there anybody that would, from the public that would like to make comments to us? Yes, Chair, we do have members of the public that would like to make public comment. If I may address these members on the protocol for public comment for a moment. Yes. To those listening, now is the time for public comment. If you wish to comment and are joining us through the Zoom link, please find the hand icon on the bottom of your screen and click on the icon to raise your hand. This will place you in line to speak. When it is your turn to speak, I will call your name or you call you by the last four digits of your phone number, when is your turn to speak. If you're calling in from a phone, please dial nine now. This will virtually raise your hand and I'll identify you by the last four of your digits. Each speaker, you will have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and start speaking when your name is called. Caller 1999. Your microphone is unmuted and you have two minutes to speak. Good morning, my name is James Yuling Whitman. Can I be heard? Yes. Excellent. So there's 983 pages on the agenda today. I wish I had time to comment on number 15, 19, 25, 26, 32, 36, 45, 49, 55 and 65. I thought there was a meeting on February 9th. This is what I wrote. The dogs hold an election. I don't have time to discuss how dogs pick their leaders except to say centuries later, they still have not found a candidate that smells good under its tail. Yet in the USA before it became USA incorporated by the 1871 Organics Act, there was an office in every county level that could arrest the president. Maybe more candidates should try this example of a platform. And this is from his holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama. The paradox of our age, we have bigger houses, but smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees, but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, but more problems, more medicines, but less healthiness. We've been all the way to the moon and back that I have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but at less communication. We have become long on quantity, but short on quality. These are times of fast foods, but slower digestion, tall men, but short character, steep profits, but shallow relationship. It is a time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room. There's something I like to offer to community members. So besides the ability to provide notices of liability to the FCC and ANSC, that are both international corporations, as is USA Incorporated, every community member will have the opportunity to provide notice of liability to Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX, et cetera. I am offering free opportunities to learn how to do this, and with only the cost of printing, and with a very interesting document about the history of foundations that seem to control every aspect of every city and county in the US, but with specific focus upon Santa Cruz County. I have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and start speaking. The timer will begin when you start speaking. Good morning, Chair McPherson. Good morning, members of the board. This is Jim Heaney. I am the Chief Steward for the County of Santa Cruz, my employees of the General Representation Unit. I did contact the board over the weekend. We have a grave concern about item 42, which is the outsourcing of the Cook's positions at the jail kitchens. And we are asking that the board remove this from the Consent Agenda and put it as a regular agenda item so that we may address this item. So that is our request this morning. This, as far as I could tell, is the only opportunity for us to ask for this to be removed from the Consent Agenda, which used to be a regular portion of the agenda before we went digital. Thank you for your time. I am done. Carol Bourne, you have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and start speaking. The timer will begin when you start. Good morning, this is Carol Bourne. Can you hear me? Yes, you can hear me. In 2008, Dr. Anthony Fauci co-authored a paper about the Spanish flu pandemic. In that paper, what did Dr. Fauci and his colleagues find? Here's a quote. The evidence from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic indicates that bacterial pneumonia led to the vast majority of deaths, end quote. So what would cause the bacteria to proliferate wearing face masks? Here's another quote. The virus landed the first blow while bacteria delivered the knockout punch, end quote. So if the virus was infected with the virus, what would happen to the virus? Well, I'm going to read that again. The evidence from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic end quote. So Fauci knew that masks caused the bacterial buildup that caused pneumonia. Not only did he not warn the public of this, he recommended the public wear a face mask. Even though we all know there are effective treatments for COVID-19 such as HCQ. So please remove any face mask requirements from the people of Santa Cruz County today. Please also remove any other restrictions around COVID-19 today. Further, as I previously talked about, the PCR tests and the COVID vaccines have not been approved by the FDA. Therefore they are classified as emergency use authorization, which means they're experimental. They cannot be mandated. Mandating products approved for emergency use violates federal and state law. Since EUA means the products are investigational and experimental, federal and state law are both very clear that mandates are legal for EUA products. This comes from the Nuremberg Code. Thank you Chairman McPherson. Supervisor Coonerty has his hand raised. Yeah, thank you. Just briefly to speak to Jim Heaney's point, we had a moment where the board members could remove items, but we left all the items on the consent agenda. I would encourage any members of the county bargaining units or impacted employees or concerned community members to speak about that item during this oral communications time. You have two minutes, just like you would if the item had been pulled and it's an opportunity for you to have your voice heard. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well. Thank you, caller 2915. You have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and the timer will begin when you begin to speak. Good morning, this is Becky Steinbruner. Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you. Good morning to the board and staff. I am bringing to you some information I think is very critical, especially for our CZU fire areas. Tomorrow at 830, the California State Board of Forestry will hold a fire safe rulemaking workshop. This is bringing back proposed regulations that are shocking. I'm going to read for you an excerpt from comment submitted by CSAC and the rural county representatives of California to the board. Quote, the proposal to flatly prohibit rebuilding of existing homes and businesses lost due to disaster within these no build areas is more severe than the prior draft regulations and is especially ill-conceived. Rebuilding an existing home or business creates no new impact, no heightened fire risk and no increased fire serve need. There is no nexus to require upgrades to existing public roads as a condition of rebuilding these structures. Moreover, prohibiting homeowners and small businesses who have lost everything from rebuilding their homes is unfair, particularly to uninsured and lower income residents who cannot simply afford to move elsewhere. The resulting displacement would also hinder achievement of this region's housing goals, further exacerbating the housing and homelessness crisis. Board staff's concern for, quote, replicating an excessively hazardous situation, end quote, is notable, but this does not justify dispossessing residents of their homes and their livelihoods, end quote. This meeting will be virtual tomorrow morning, beginning at 830. I have contacted Assemblyman Stone and Senator Laird and Veronica Velazquez. You have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and the time will begin when you start speaking. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Veronica Velazquez. I work for the Department of Family and Children's Services as a senior social worker. And I also serve as chapter president for SCIU 521 membership here in the county. I'm here to speak with you today about item 42 on the board's agenda that sheriffs propose outsourcing of cook positions in his department. I urge you to vote no on this outsourcing. Outsourcing will not fix the financial crisis our county faces. For context, the supposed savings from our outsourcing, our members' jobs amounts to less than 0.001% of the county's budget. And what do we, what are these miniscule savings biased instead of a good union job with living wages, benefits and a pension, workers will receive minimum wage and minimum benefits. Since the pandemic began, cooks have gone above and beyond including regularly working overtime to make sure meals are served during this extremely stressful period. Not one meal has been missed for an officer or an inmate. The sheriffs outsourcing our members' job after all their hard work and everything they've been through this past year is to slap in the face. What makes this proposal all that more frustrating is that help is on its way. Santa Cruz County is protected to receive 53 million in relief revenue through the upcoming federal relief legislation. The intent of this relief funding is to cover for specific budget deficits like the one facing the sheriffs department. As a union, we are ready and willing to work with management to do everything we can to make sure that we preserve these union jobs and that we have a lot of qualified, competent community members that would be able to benefit from living wages and appropriate healthcare in this community. Outsourcing hurts our community without helping the financial challenges the county faces. I urge you once again to vote no on either. Thank you, James Sandoval. You have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and the timer will begin when you start speaking. Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. Good morning, Supervisors. My name is James Sandoval. I'm the union representative for the fixed route and paratransit operators at Santa Cruz Metro and the paratransit drivers and lifeline in Watsonville. I forwarded you all an email I received from Tony Sloss, a vaccine, Malaysian officer for the Public Health Operations Center where I ask him various questions and clarifications and trying to figure out when transit operators are able to get the vaccine. I also asked him a couple of other questions regarding that. And I saw that we were removed from phase one, B tier two. And I don't really see us anywhere else on that list. So I can't seem to get a direct answer or even a rough estimate of when it would be our turn. I do wanna emphasize that our operators are on the front lines exposed every day in a box with many passengers breathing the same air. And we just recently went through an outbreak at Metro where many operators caught COVID. Every day we can't get the vaccine could be detrimental. MTA has lost over 136 operators and counting due to COVID. I just urge you as County Board of Supervisors to prioritize your bus and paratransit operators in counties so we could get the vaccine soon. Thank you very much for your time. Monica McGuire, you have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute. The timer will begin when you begin speaking. Thank you, can you hear me? I guess it's Monica. We are continually not being responded to which is still very painful because that is your jobs but the key is to bring you new information. I'm so sorry for that last gentleman that he hasn't got this yet. Please hear this coming from thehighwire.com investigative reporter, Mr. Jackson and this truth that these vaccines are not actually even vaccines, they are treatments. Please hear. These vaccines were promised a safety net. As they were being trialed and we saw these things coming into markets and coming into people's arms at that point and they're vaccinating millions. We were promised a safety net and we were promised answers and ways to petition if we get hurt and the lines are showing what appears to be the truth. And this is right ahead of New York Times. This is called, this is the FDA. As millions get shots, FDA struggles to get safety monitoring system running. Not even optimum is running. So it says in here, the much touted system the government designed to monitor any dangerous reactions won't be capable of analyzing safety data for weeks or months according to numerous federal health officials. For now, federal regulators are counting on a patchwork of existing programs that they acknowledge are inadequate because of small sample size, missing critical data or other problems, it gets better. These FDA officials acknowledge that a promise monitoring system known as BAS is still in its developmental stages. They expect it to start analyzing vaccine safety data. So I'm pausing it. I hope you could hear that well enough. The truth is you can go to thehighwire.com just as it sounds or children'shealthdefense.org and see all the information about this is not a vaccine on the layers that we usually know and understand. Please inform. Jessica Peters, you have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and the timer will begin when you start speaking. Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Perfect. Just want to address the public comment time period. It seems to be more difficult to communicate with the board these days. And I'm wondering what's changed. Why are public comments being limited to two minutes at each meeting? Every single person is being cut off. As a matter of fact, everyone that spoke this morning has been cut off up to this point. Also, I'm wondering why web comments aren't being read into the record. You need to read these comments. For many, this is the only way that they can participate. They can't wait two hours during the workday to comment on the issues that they're looking to talk about. Other boards, they're giving three minutes. Please give the public their due time and opportunity to communicate with you. Thank you. User one, you have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and the timer will begin when you start speaking. Good morning, board of supervisors. Dr. Sharon Goldberg provided a testimony October 4th, 2018, before about 5G dangers to the Michigan State Subcommittee, Michigan Senate Committee. I'm urging, and I'm asking, I'm urging people who are listening and asking the board of supervisors myself to, for a halt to the 5G deployment. Also, we can contact the planning department. They have a hearing tomorrow, morning regarding increasing the proliferation of 5G. Just as this county deemed itself a sanctuary county, it can take back, take back its sovereignty to protect the health of its citizens. Here's Dr. Sharon Goldberg. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. I'm Sharon Goldberg. I'm an internal medicine physician. I practice medicine for 21 years and my background is mostly academic internal medicine, hospital-based, clinical research and medical education. I am going to skip the things I want me to say because I didn't realize it was only five minutes. Wired radiation has biological effects, period. This is no longer a subject for debate when you look at PubMed in the peer-reviewed literature. These effects are seen in all life forms, plants, animals, insects, and humans. We have clear evidence of cancer now. There is no question of it. We have it evidence of DNA damage, cardiomyopathy, which is the precursor of congested heart failure. Neuropsychiatric effects. The 5G is not a conversation about whether or not these biological effects exist. They clearly do. 5G is a conversation about unsustainable healthcare expenditures. Why do I say this? Thank you, Jim Haney. You have two minutes to speak. Please accept the unmute and the timer will begin when you start speaking. Thank you. Again, Jim Haney, Chief Steward for the County of Santa Cruz. My apologies for needing to come back on because apparently there's been a change in process here where in past years, the union and other members of the public could come and ask for something to be removed from the Cassence agenda. Apparently we have to do that through a board member now. As someone spoke earlier, this does not seem to include the public very democratically. But briefly, we have an issue with item 42, which is the outsourcing the cook's jobs for a number of reasons. Absolutely, these folks have shown that they're solid and committed County employees. They work any shift they're asked to work, they work overtime. And even though a person that will tell you that they're going to be placed, these folks are cooks by profession. They're not looking to work on a public works road crew. They're not looking to do clerical work. They're looking to do what they believe is their life's calling, which is to feed folks. And that includes inmates, that includes the sworn officers. And there's no way that our contractor is going to do nearly the jobs these folks do. It's going to have a negative effect not only on them, on their families and our community. And a number of these folks will not be placed. And so they will be going out into a pandemic world, attempting to find work in the food industry where look around restaurants are partial if they're even open staffing. So what we want to tell you is essentially that the email I sent the board this weekend that mentioned many items where Airmark, the contractor is truly a bad company. And I'm really surprised that the county has not done their due diligence when reviewing this contract to make sure that the company was competent and capable. The state of Michigan fired this company because they found maggots in their kitchen. Is this what you want as a board? We ask you to not approve this contract today. Thank you. Thank you, Carol Bourne. You have two minutes, number two. You have two minutes, user number two. You have two minutes to speak. The time will begin when you begin speaking. This is Marilyn Garrett. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. So the problem I see here is that though we're told this is a government of four and by the people, it's of four and by the corporations like Verizon, the telecom industry, et cetera. And corporate rule is incompatible with democracy. We're trying to give some democracy here in protection of the people. I want to continue the testimony of Dr. Sharon Goldberg on the hazards of 5G. And this county is rolling out the red carpet for this disaster of technology. Here's Dr. Sharon Goldberg. I think most of you know statistics. They're very scary. One in three American children will become diabetic in their lifetime and if there are Hispanic females, the number is one in two. So what does this have to do with wireless radiation? Wireless radiation and other electromagnetic fields such as magnetic fields and dirty electricity have been clearly associated with elevated blood sugar and diabetes. That is what the peer reviewed literature says. It is not opinion. The closer you live to a cell tower, the higher your blood glucose that is based on hemoglobin A1C measurement. So the idea with small cells of putting themselves closer to people's homes and bedrooms scientifically is very dangerous and from an economic perspective, it's dangerous. And you may not notice, I was shocked to find this out but the way you create a diabet, a model of diabetes in rats in the lab is by exposing them to 2.4 gigahertz and this is not for long-term exposure. Thank you, Sharon. That concludes the speakers for public comment. Okay. Thank you. We will now move to the items or to action on the consent agenda and I will ask each board member if there's anything that they may want to remove or comment on the agenda. Mr. Koenig or Supervisor Koenig. No comments. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do want to comment on item 57 which is a public works project in my district and I want to thank Mark Streadley and his team and others that have been working on this in the public works department. It's actually quite a remarkable wetland restoration project that'll address some of the flooding issues down by the Pajaro River mouth as well as for the Pajaro Dunes area. If you haven't been down there, it's an absolutely beautiful area but it floods consistently and there's been some habitat related issues. This project which he and his team have taken the lead on is going to be fully funded by outside sources and we'll do a lot to address some of the flooding of that issue but even more importantly to restore the environmental conditions down there. So this is a project that is often overshadowed by the greater Pajaro River levee project. I understand why but this is something that they deserve a lot of credit for for the work that they're doing down there. I just want to acknowledge the work. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Yeah, Mr. Chair. Good morning. Just a couple of comments. First on item number 43 which is the sexual assault forensic program. I just want to thank Sheriff Jim Hart and his team for getting this back up and going on this side of the hill. It's an important effort to address victims to assist victims of sexual assault in this county and I'm glad it's happening. Item number 48, the Fish and Game Commission allocated a relatively small amount of money but to five really cool programs which will expose our youth to science and nature and I just wanted to take a moment and recognize the work of that commission and these grants and the organizations that do the work. Item number 56, which is the CZU repairs by public works. I just want to take a moment to thank the public work staff who worked quickly and hard to repair culverts and roads and our infrastructure in the wake of the CZU fire. They did excellent work and they did it quickly and we're all grateful for the work they did under very difficult conditions. And finally on item 67.1 this is the OR3, the Office of Resilience, Rebuilding and Recovery, applying for hazard mitigation grants. I think in our new reality, this is incredibly important to start building our infrastructure for this new reality that we see not only in our state but now across the country and Texas this week. It'll be another place next week where old infrastructure is going to be very challenged by the impacts of climate change. So I'm excited they're doing this. I do want to add additional direction that any grants should be approved by the board. As you can imagine though, there's competing public interests or other efforts and it should come before us so that we can hear from the community and make sure that it works with what these communities want. Thank you. Supervisor Caput. Thanks Bruce. I'll just comment on number 27. Like to welcome Felipe Hernandez as the fourth district appointee to the Human Services Commission. And a quick comment on item number 39. It's good to see unanticipated revenue in the amount of $69,500 for the Azteka Youth Soccer Program which is based basically in South County but they do travel. And it's a real good program under the probation department. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. I have a couple of issues I'd like to address. Number one, first one is item number 26, the Highway 1 and 9 encampment which I know a lot of us have received some correspondence regarding this issue. I wanna thank Supervisor Coonerty's office for partnering with my office to bring this item forward. We co-signed a letter to the same effect from the Santa Cruz Mayor, Donald Myers to the governor's office. The public health and safety situation at the intersections of highways one and nine really is unacceptable. And we're requesting the governor to give his approval for Caltrans to work with the city to close the camp and clean the property. Local governments cannot bear this burden alone and the state's help here is really critical. We will continue working with the city to prevent these large encampments from forming. And it's gonna require a collaborative effort of both our social services systems and our law enforcement partners. So I wanna thank the city for this cooperative effort and I hope we can address and clean up this encampment very quickly. Just generally on items 31 to 36, there are commission reports and from various commissions, we have about 40 of them throughout the county. And this is a good opportunity to once again, thank the community members who serve on these committees and commissions. These are volunteer efforts and roles that advise the board on our staff on the important issues facing our community. And I also wanna thank the county employees who staff these commissions for all the work they put into providing the advice to the board and our departments. It's very much appreciated and you just need to know that and thank you for your ongoing efforts. On item 52, the limited term positions, I wanna thank you and our human services department for its management of our COVID-19 sheltering system and all the personnel that effort has required and it has been plenty and many people that have been engaged in this. As mentioned in the report, there are deadlines associated with the funding that underwrites our current sheltering. We're working on how to maintain shelter for folks after COVID so that their housing remains destabilized. And I look forward to hearing more about this report in March. As supervisor Coonerty mentioned on the repair work that public works is the item 56, I also on item 63 with everything else going on that we have at the moment it's easy to overlook the ongoing repair damage that occurred during close to four years ago now. I wanna thank again the public works department for coordinating the repairs on Bear Creek Road and for their management in these repairs as well as our measure D program and the fire recovery response. So public works has been above and beyond the call of duty for months on end now. I know we really do appreciate it. And I think that concludes our comments on the consent agenda to have a motion to approve. Move the consent agenda as amended. As amended. Move by Coonerty. Second. Seconds. Okay. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Supervisor Coonerty. Aye. Supervisor Caput. Aye. Chair McPherson. Aye. Thank you. Motion passes. Okay, we will go to our regular agenda item number seven and one of the most delightful times of our board meetings that we have each year. And that's the presentation of our 2020 employee recognition program as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Mr. Palacios, would you like to introduce this item, please? Yes, Chair McPherson and members of the board, we're doing something a little bit different. We normally would be doing our annual employee awards program, but this year because of the COVID situation, we have decided to do it a little bit different. In 2020, our community was faced with monumental challenges, including the COVID-19 global pandemic and CZU Lightning complex fires. These are incredible emergencies that our staff has had to deal with. The worst pandemic, at least in many of our lifetimes, at the same time as the worst fires in our county's history. Over the years, we witnessed how all county employees responded to these challenges and performed his or her work in a manner which deserves special recognition. In an effort to recognize all employees for their dedicated service on behalf of the County of Santa Cruz, individual or team nominations for 2020 employee recognition awards were not requested. Instead, department heads were asked to submit 2020 departmental achievements supporting our local residents during this time through the efforts of their staff. In Lubin awards ceremony, we asked that the board of supervisors recognize all county staff by issuing a proclamation highlighting departmental accomplishments. Department heads have been invited to speak as a representative of their staff regarding their accomplishments during this very significant and difficult year. And with that, each board member will be asked to present awards for the five of the county departments. Board members will present the award to a department and a representative of that department will be invited to speak for a few minutes following the presentation of the award. And with that, I see that we would start, I believe with supervisor Koenig will be presenting the first of our awards so supervisor Koenig. Thank you, CAO. So staff in the agricultural, this award goes to the agricultural commissioner. Staff in the agricultural commissioner's department quickly formulated a plan for rapid deployment of much needed protective equipment in spring of 2020. As agricultural production in our region got underway and protective equipment was difficult to find. The department organized the delivery of COVID-19 protective supplies and distributed information regarding access to COVID-19 testing, food resources and rental assistance to farm worker housing locations in Santa Cruz County, including the Buena Vista Migrant Center. In addition, staff went out of their way to prioritize delivery of these protective supplies while continuing to complete their regular work assignments. And on several occasions, this meant working long days and weekends which staff did without hesitation. Each member of this department deserves accolades for all that they have done to support the agricultural community during this difficult past year. Accepting this award on behalf of the agricultural commissioner's department is agricultural commissioner Juan Hidalgo. Good morning, chair, members of the board, Juan Hidalgo, the cultural commissioner. Thank you so much. My staff and I are humbled by this recognition. As a department, we are proud of the opportunity to work and collaborate with growers and local community-based organizations to support our agricultural workers during the challenges we have experienced this past year created by the COVID-19 pandemic and then the wildfires this past summer. These collaborations made a tremendous difference in getting important protective equipment, quickly out to our farms to protect our essential agricultural workers. I want to thank my staff for their efforts and dedication to find ways to continue to serve and support our community under the extraordinary circumstances we have experienced these past few months. So thank you so much for the recognition to my staff and myself. And we really appreciate it. And it's been an honor to be able to step up as a department to support our community during a time of need that we have an experience in our lifetimes. Thank you so much. Thank you, commissioner. Next, it's my honor to award, recognize Animal Services. Animal Services staff, volunteers and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office worked tirelessly providing outstanding care to animals that were left behind due to the mandatory evacuations during the CCU Lightning Complex fires. Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter was not only a safe haven for approximately 400 evacuated animals but also an emergency supply drop-off and pickup location for evacuees. SCCAs also managed the animals at the county fairgrounds and in total oversaw the care of over 1,900 evacuated animals from dogs and cats to exotic birds, snakes and livestock. The SCCAS team made sure they were well cared for. Some animals required special medical attention from outside contract veterinarians which was provided as well. All animals evacuated from the fires stayed at the shelter and fairgrounds free of charge. Staff were also able to take in animals from shelters that had to close to the public due to COVID exposures and were able to get many of these animals adopted out to new homes. The Animal Services Department demonstrated their commitment to serving all pets in need regardless of their owner's financial circumstances by having staff travel to homeless encampments to vaccinate animals. The shelter also allowed low income community members to receive free vaccinations for their pets as well as get free food for their pets at their pet food pantry as well as through pet food distribution events in Watsonville. The immense amount of work that the Animal Services Agency performed in order to save and caretake the animals of our community during this past year is just outstanding. And we all thank them for their tireless efforts accepting this award on behalf of the Animal Services Department this program and development manager, Erica Anderson. Thank you. Hi everyone. So for all of us, I think 2020 was such a tough year and I'm so proud of our team and what we were able to accomplish despite all these challenges each of our staff members were deployed as disaster service workers during this time as well serving as staff at the different human shelters that were set up throughout the county which also included our animal control officers serving as delivery drivers bringing food, breakfast, lunch and dinner to each of those sites as well. When the pandemic hit, our doors remained open the entire time as we knew it was so important to continue to provide these free and low cost services to the community. And I'm also very proud of our staff and volunteers who made that possible and stuck through all these challenges to really provide these essential services to pet owners in need. Then the CVU fire hit and that completely flipped our worlds upside down. And in total, we were caring for over 4,500 animals. This included not only the 500 that were at our shelter the 1200 that were at the fairgrounds that were being cared for by just amazing community members. But this also included the thousands of animals that are officers in the Santa Cruz County equine evacuation team. We're going back into the burn zones on a daily basis to provide food and water to these animals that were left behind. 2020 truly brought forth such a great need for us to see how we could meet people in their pets where they were out in the community. And that sometimes meant leaving our shelter site and going out and seeing what people needed. And I think often people think of the animal shelter as puppies and kittens. And I'm not gonna lie, we do get to cuddle a lot of cute animals here but we really have learned from these challenges this year how to accommodate the community and provide our services in sometimes a new and innovative way so that we can meet them where they are. And something that really stuck with me this year was said by a community member who lost her home in the fire we were having her pets for many months. She said that she wasn't sure what she would have done with her pets during this time had animal services not been able to provide our safety program. And that question made me really nervous for what other communities might not be able to provide if they don't have a department like ours being able to support pet owners. And that made me very proud of the services that we provided this year. And I'm so thankful for this recognition for our department and the support from the community so that we can continue to make Santa Cruz County a better place for people and their pets. So thank you for the support today. Thank you, development manager Anderson. Next step, I wanna recognize the assessors and recorders departments. As a response to stay at home orders staff in the recorders department worked tirelessly to set up remote workstations to report documents offsite allowing staff to say stay safe while keeping up with increased recording volume. Staff and the assessors and recorders departments assisted residents impacted by the CCU light and complex fire at the recovery resource center with the Kaiser Permanente arena by connecting them with various agencies and providing information regarding property tax relief. In addition, assessors and auditor controllers departments worked together to expedite property tax relief to victims of the CCU lightning complex fire relying on their long hours and years of experience working together to process these tax reduction reductions quickly and efficiently. During an incredibly, an incredibly difficult and stressful time these departments provided much needed support and guidance for our residents that were impacted by the CCU lightning complex fire. And for that work, we thank them for all their hard work and dedication. Accepting the award on behalf of the assessor and recorders department is assessor Sean Saldevia. Good morning. Can you see me? We can't see you, but we can hear you. Okay, sorry about that. Well, I wanna thank the members of the board on behalf of the staff of the assessor recorders office. Staff has really come together over the last year to not only maintain but to extend services to folks in need in the public. We now have staff in the recorders office that are recording from home, electronic recording. This is the only way we've been able to stay current with recordings over the past year. They've done a wonderful job. Staff in the assessor's office has really reached out to those affected by the CCU fires. Whether it's direct mail or email or phone calls, we even manned an information booth down at the resource recovery center for quite a bit of time to really get the word out on the tax relief that folks are entitled to who are victims of that fire. Those are just a couple of the ways that staff has really went the extra mile over the last year. And I want to thank this board for recognizing them with this proclamation and I apologize about the video. I have no idea why that's not working. Thank you, assessor Saldavia. Next, I want to recognize the auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collector's office. Staff in the auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collector's office showed a tremendous amount of flexibility and resiliency during 2020 as vendor payment processing transition to be in almost fully remote operation and new procedures were implemented to allow for electronic processing of wire transfers, bank transfers and other types of reports and forms using Doctosign. The county's collection teams processed over a thousand COVID-19 related penalty waiver applications. And the website was updated to be able to accept electronic collection payments and the property tax administration team in collaboration with the assessor's department issued hundreds of supplemental tax credits in response to the CZU fire and the unfortunate reductions of the assessed values of properties. Staff collaborated with the personnel department and were able to process hundreds of extra help employees hired by the county to respond to the local emergencies, set up new pay codes for emergency response and COVID-19 related sick leave and respond to the various payroll implications of having a remote county workforce. It's a financial engine for the county. We couldn't have gotten through this past year without your staff and we sincerely thank you for all your efforts to keep the wheels turning. Accepting this award on behalf of the auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collections department is Auditor Yusko. Thank you, Chair McPherson and members of the board. Thank you for this acknowledgement of the dedicated staff in this office. We are charged with the safeguarding and accounting of the assets of the taxpayers. This year, that also included staffing key roles in response to the CZU fire emergency as well as the pandemic. This was not done alone. We also want to use this opportunity to thank our fellow departments who allowed us to fulfill our mission. On behalf of myself and the only 44 staff in the auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collectors office, we all would like to say thank you for the acknowledgement. Thank you, Auditor Yusko. Well, thank you, Supervisor Koenig. I'm going to handle the next set. And I have to say how excited I was to hear not just what you talked about with those departments, but in general, this entire recognition really does help paint a picture of each unique role that each department played during not just the pandemic, but also during the fires. And it really is quite remarkable the work that county employees have done. And I have the honor of starting off with the county clerk elections here and staff in the county clerk elections department hosted voter outreach meetings through Zoom to provide information about the November 3rd, 2020 election and the changes that were being made to conduct it safely. And mobile voting units brought voting to all areas of the county, including communities that were impacted by the CZU Lightning Complex fires as well as to all the hospitals, senior living and senior care facilities where voters were not able to access voting easily. Staff also implemented a voter service center model which involved mailing a ballot to every registered voter and providing in-person voting locations with extended hours to help flatten the voting curve, as they had said, to encourage voters to vote in ways other than in-person on election day. In addition, the staff worked with our information services department to set up a voter hotline that was staffed by county employees which involved creating a special conference line that rolled the voter hotline calls to various departments, buildings and phone systems and setting up restricted access to the voting registration database for the database for the hotline operators to obtain information and help direct the voter. They really did think of everything and would like to thank the county clerk elections department. Our county was able to safely participate in the election last November and we saw the highest turnout in the history of Santa Cruz County. So accepting on behalf of the clerk elections department program coordinator, Marie Segura. Good morning, thank you. Good morning, Chair McPherson and members of the board, county staff and citizens. I'm extremely honored to be receiving this recognition for our clerk elections department. We have faced exceptional challenges this year but these challenges strengthen us to perform better at each stage and return election goals. Our staff could not have been more accomplished this year and we would not have been able to do it without the support of so many county departments and also citizen volunteers. Personally, after 32 years of county employment in a state public works and clerk elections, I hope to retire next month if my paperwork falls into place. I will exit my employment from the clerk elections department and I could not be more proud to have served with such wonderful staff and very supportive open door policy clerk supervisor to show ever. And with that, I thank you very much and I thank all our citizens of the county. It has been a huge pleasure in so many departments and so many halfs of this county work. Our supervisors have been very supportive to our department, so I appreciate it. I appreciate this honor and thank you from all our department. Thank you, congratulations on your retirement. Well deserved. You've had some wonderful people that retire in the last year and so enjoy your retirement on behalf of all of us. We appreciate all that you did. Thank you. Thank you. The next department that gets some recognition here, well deserved is the county council's office and staff in the county council's office provided focused legal services to assist the health services agency and the public health officer in responding to the COVID-19 crisis, which included significant collaboration in order to draft public health orders, pivot and adjust as new information serviced and it sure did on a constant basis from the state and to work with internal enforcement partners to implement these orders and also by the way to really help inform the board on things that were going on and changes across the state and federal side. Staff drafted emergency ordinances, contracts, resolutions and directives to respond to the twin public emergencies to address shelter needs, eviction protections, increased services, debris clearance and urgent needs for the purchase of goods, all which help support our community in this extreme time of need. Staff also work collaboratively with the civil and juvenile divisions of the superior court to overcome logistical and technical hurdles to help ensure that the legal process in numerous matters continued to move forward at a reasonable pace, despite the significant challenges that were presented during the pandemic. We'd like to thank the county council's office for the many hours they put in providing legal support and guidance during this challenging year and accepting on behalf of county council's office as assistant county council, Jordan Scheinbaum. Jordan. Good morning, board. Thank you very much. On behalf of the office of county council, we truly thank you for your board's proclamation. Whether helping craft emergency health orders side by side with our county's public health officer or working with stakeholders or our enforcement partners to implement those orders in some of the most challenging times anyone can remember or coordinating nearly hourly with our general services department and our CAO's office to draft emergency ordinances, resolutions and contracts so that the county could shelter folks who lost their homes and CCU fires and provide desperately needed emergency services. I saw our entire office spring into action with this singular mindset of helping critical county departments step up and serve those in need. It may be truly proud to be part of the county council team and I think that feeling is shared by my colleagues who are the ones that truly deserve the recognition here today. I think I speak for my whole office when I say we were proud to be of service and lend aid so that other county departments that directly impact people's lives could do their jobs and help our community in a time of real need and do so in a truly concrete way that really helped people directly. So we very much appreciate your board support and we thank you kindly for your proclamation. Thank you Jordan for your leadership and support of the entire county family and to everybody at the county council's office for your outstanding guidance and leadership we do appreciate it. Thank you. We'll move on to child support services and when the COVID pandemic required staff at the Department of Child Support Services to work remotely, the department adjusted by training staff on the use of DocuSign, creating general email boxes for the receipt and processing of legal documents, reaching out to case participants with upcoming court dates to educate them on the new remote hearing procedures and increasing the use of TextPro for text-based communication. Staff recognized that in a year that was rife with financial and security for many people, adding enforcement actions for the failure to pay full child support would not be in the best interest of the families and staff that were able to suppress certain actions while allowing others to get back on their feet again and begin making their child support payments in full again. In addition to staff serving as disaster service workers the Department of Child Support Services provided 16 surplus of voice over internet protocol telephones to the health services agency to support the COVID call center and contact tracing needs. The families of Santa Cruz County appreciate all that the Child Support Services Agency has done to continue their commitment to supporting families in our community during this challenging time and accepting this award on behalf of the department is Child Support Services Director, Jamie Murray. Jamie. Good morning, board members. I'm honored to accept this proclamation on behalf of the employees in the Department of Child Support Services. It has been an extremely challenging year with the onset of the pandemic, the CZU Lightning Complex fires, being thrust into remote work and state funding reductions which resulted in workforce reductions. Through collaboration with personnel and my fellow department heads the majority of our displaced staff retained county employment. Several of our staff stepped up and performed disaster service work. Everyone in the department learned new skills as we adapted to remote work and balancing work, home and school obligations. We remain resilient and ready to provide Child Support Services to the parents and children in our community. I am very proud of the entire team in Child Support Services. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you for your team's great work this year. I'm very flexible in adjusting to the needs of the community during this time. I do appreciate that. We'll move on to the district attorney's office. And the DA's office had issued, as I'm sure many of you saw, press releases to alert the community about CZU fire-related scams that were taking advantage of fire victims and educated many in our community on how to protect themselves. Staff in the DA's office also worked with the Santa Cruz Superior Court to implement a system in which attorneys and parties could appear for court remotely, supported the courts and their transition to accepting documents for filing online and in collaboration with the Information Services Department, established an online payment system which helped protect the community members as well as staff by reducing the need for in-person financial transactions. In addition, staff implemented the Neighborhood Courts Program, which many of us were involved in, which is a community-driven pre-filing diversion program designed to divert low-level misdemeanor offenses from entering the criminal justice system. Thank you to the entire DA's office for your efforts in the past year and accepting the award on behalf of the DA's office is our district attorney, Jeff Brazel. Jeff, perhaps we don't have Jeff or Jeff's on mute. Maybe Jeff is giving a closing statement somewhere. Jeff, is your last chance? We know you like the microphone. Can you hear me now? We got, well, of course. Of course you showed up there. All right, go for it. District attorney Jeff Brazel. Thank you. I just wanna say on behalf of the DA's office, we are very grateful. And I just wanna, for the award, I wanna take a few moments to acknowledge our staff. Throughout these challenging times with the fire, with the murder of Sergeant Gutzweiler and many other challenges that we have faced, employees of the DA's office never lost sight of our mission and our duty to promote public safety. We have not only with the remote ability with the courts to appear from home, but we have literally filing intake, all of the coordination with law enforcement agencies took place within a very short period of time. We also throughout this, I wanna acknowledge those people that have been continually going to court. We have had court appearances literally every day where people have had to actually show up to court in the midst of all this. And I want, I think that needs to be acknowledged. Our unfailing commitment to victims has continued. We have victim service representatives that have continued to provide service to victims throughout these challenging times. And they have been challenging, make no mistake about it. I also wanna say that in terms of investigations, investigators were up for burglary and suppression efforts to prevent looting, that the Bureau of Investigations literally took over the entire investigation of Sergeant Gutzweiler's murder and those sort of things just show that we are working in cooperation with our law enforcement partners. We have an Apple settlement that Consumer Affairs did. They brought in $4.1 million when after one of the largest corporations in the United States, that was taking advantage of consumers and they were diligent in pursuing that action and rectifying the behavior that had taken place. I also just wanna say that we've done many things. You mentioned Supervisor Friend, Peer Court, but there's been peer review. There's been numerous other programs that have taken place. We're involved in the blueprint for safety. We did a South County Halloween event for people that weren't gonna have a Halloween and that was incredibly successful through the efforts of a lot of folks in this office. So I just wanna say, you touched on a lot of things we did. I've only touched on some of them, but make no mistake, the unfailing commitment from this office to protecting the public and public safety continued throughout these times. I just wanna make sure I acknowledge that and we thank you and we are humbled by the award. Thank you, D.A. Roselle. And I think you were able to showcase how much work your team has continued to do, the fact that work has not stopped over the last year and you guys really are one of the top teams in the state and we appreciate that. Congratulations to all those that were just acknowledged. I'm gonna hand this over to my colleague, Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. This is an exciting day, I think to show the wide variety of work that's been done and then also the way the departments have supported each other. I think that collaboration not only paid dividends for the people who were suffering from impacts from COVID as well as fires, but hopefully for years to come. The first award I'm gonna present today is to the General Services Department. That department played a major role in coordinating the collection of donations and supplies from four community members who were impacted by the CZU fire. Just days after the fires erupted, staff and General Services Department began taking steps to ready the county warehouse to accept donations from the public, making it the first time the county had ever set up a location to accept community donations. And then the community response continued to grow and staff collaborated with the Human Services Department to open a secondary warehouse in Watsonville. Because of the outpouring of support from the community was unmatched, a system for tracking donations was needed and assistance from the Auditor Human Services and County Councils Department led to the creation of a database for organizing the many items received. This database also allowed staff to develop a comprehensive layout for receiving donations, coordinating requests for donations and for the subsequent delivery of the items to fire evacuees or to the evacuation sites. It was truly a team effort and managing and managing the collection and distribution of these generous donations and through their hard work, the General Services Department and volunteers from the Volunteer Center were able to deliver much needed provisions to our displaced community members. On behalf of the county and the hundreds of people who received invaluable supplies, we thank you for all your hard work and commitment to help our fellow residents in a time when they needed it the most, accepting on behalf of the General Services Department is Deputy Director Carol Johnson. Good morning and thank you, Chair McPherson and members of the Board for recognizing our staff of the General Services Department for their response to the August TZU Lightning Fire. I'm extremely proud to be a part of the General Services team. This community-wide effort would not have been possible without the dedication and tireless hours of our General Services staff that were supported by employees in every county department, as well as retirees, community businesses and residents. Our employees readied the warehouse in record time to be able to begin accepting donations of food, water, sleeping bags, tents, and so much more. It was incredible and heartwarming to see people drop off items one day and turn around the next day to volunteer. To give you some idea of the volume of donations, at one time, the line of cars waiting to donate went from the warehouse at the back of the Emeline campus almost to Highway 1. In addition, shortly after our Emeline warehouse was up and running, the county set up a second donation site down in Watsonville with the help of staff from HSD as well as the city of Watsonville. So thank you again for recognizing the staff of the General Services Department. We were humbled and so grateful to be able to support the county in their time of need. So thank you. Thank you, Carol, and thanks to your whole team. The next department we wanna recognize is Information Services. 2020 was the year that relied on technical support and innovation from the Information Services Department more than ever before. Staff completed major infrastructure changes and upgrades and created copious documentation on remote procedures to support some of the 1,200 or more remote workers accessing county resources from home and elsewhere. The ISD department also provided vital communication resources and support from the Office of Emergency Services and first responders during the days following, during and following the CZU fire by providing remote communication abilities and technological resources to evacuation sites and command centers. Staff deployed laptops, some printers for emergency response personnel, set up call centers in support of responding to the need of evacuated citizens and created real-time county websites for fire victims and evacuees with maps of the impact of destruction and guidance for rebuilding. Without the quick thinking and problem solving of the ISD department staff, this past year of sheltering in place and working from home as well would have been much more difficult. And we thank you for continuing to come to our technological rescue over and over and over again. Accepting this award on behalf of the ISD department as assistant director, assistant director, Tibi McCann. Chair, board, Mr. Palacios, I am Tibi McCann, assistant director and ISD and I am honored to receive this recognition and accept this proclamation on behalf of the ISD department. Much of the time not having recognition is a good thing for an IT department. That means everything is generally working. This year, it was a little bit different. In fact, it was a lot different. In addition to our never-ending normal work, we got 1,500 county staff up and working remotely when the shutdown happened. We spun up COVID shelter after shelter with Wi-Fi and internet, supported the EOC, TEPs, created website after website, apps, maps. We're to keep the communication infrastructure up and alive, deployed radios, cradle points, phones, PCs, laptops, and as Ryan said, printers, purchased and deployed $1.5 million worth of CARES equipment. Most of this was done in the midst of high pressure, rapid turnaround and at times life-threatening conditions. We even managed to support a presidential election with 17 new polling sites, one mobile unit plus a voter hotline. Admin, IT support, networking, telecom, GIS, SysAdmin, RadioShop, duplicating, programming, project management and management. We were all in, all 61 of us masks on over and over during the year. It was also very personal for us, especially the CZU fire. Seven ISD families were evacuated and one lost his home of over 25 years. So it was real to us. And the work meant more than ever. The amazing spirit and positive attitude that all of ISD was inspiring as the hits and the demands kept coming. I could not be more proud to acknowledge this recognition by the county. Thank you on behalf of ISD. Thank you, Tibbie and your whole team. Thank you. We really appreciate your work. The next department is the Parks and Rec Department. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Parks and Rec Department supported our community by providing childcare to essential workers and when the shelter in place restrictions were relaxed, staff redesigned the childcare program to serve onsite support for children connecting to their online remote learning classes. Maintenance staff continued to keep our parks and facilities clean and safe, despite the added risk of in-person work and put up new signage at all the parks describing the COVID-19 guidelines and practices, which in some cases involved removing entire picnic tables to ensure social distancing. Maintenance staff also assisted at the Santa Cruz County fairgrounds, erecting animal enclosures for livestock and pets displaced by the fire, as well as assisting numerous logistical projects from delivering bottled water to the San Lorenzo Valley to helping clean up at fire evacuees shelters. We thank the Parks and Rec Department for their countless hours they put into keeping our community safe at our parks and facilities and for also taking care of our children during the past year. Accepting this award on behalf of the Parks and Rec Department is Director Jeff Gaffney. Thank you and thank you chair and fellow board members and CAO Palacios for giving us this recognition and award and Supervisor Coonerty, I think you were right on in that the way the departments work together and the camaraderie and partnership that we had, I think that's been palpable just in the last couple of recognitions and acceptance for those proclamations. So I wanted to recognize that first and then I wanted to also just thank our employees in this department. It's been an honor and a privilege to be the director here at Parks and from day one. As you highlighted, our staff has been there. Parks have been open from day one. We've had people that have taken care of and stewarded those lands and facilities and continued to do that without hesitation even despite all of the ambiguity and fear that was out there in the beginning and continued to progress through the pandemic. Our recreation staff as well, they provided services to children at times when they had no idea whether their own safety would be at risk or not. They provided facilities and care for those kids so that families of essential workers could make it to work. And I guess what was really just amazing to look back is to watch how much we've actually made progress through this pandemic as a department to be able to provide services to communities, especially underserved communities and people of color that we weren't able to get to before and were really critical during this time. We opened more parks, we opened more access points and again in partnership with all of the people that are being recognized on this during this proclamation today. And it was just, again, I can't express how much of an honor and privilege it is to work in this county and work with these people every day. So thank you. Thank you, Jeff. And thanks to your whole department. Finally, I'm gonna be presenting the personnel department. The personnel department played a huge role in mobilizing our response teams to both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the CZU fires. Despite managers and non-managerial staff being reassigned to staff the COVID-19 response department operations call center for over five months, the personnel department was able to onboard nearly 600 disaster service workers to staff the county's homeless and evacuee shelters and other disaster related services, which required creating, testing and implementing emergency same day hiring processes. To support the families of our county employees, the personnel staff collaborated with the parks and rec department to set up five childcare centers for central county staff, including negotiating space use with two non-county properties managing logistics and ensuring all COVID-19 safety guidelines were met. Staff also collaborated with the CAO's office, the ISD department and members of others departments to establish the county's first remote work policy, which entailed researching best practices from our neighboring counties, as well as reaching out to private technology companies and other state and local jurisdictions for guidance. We thank the staff of the personnel department for all their hard work behind the scenes that allowed our county employees to respond to the unprecedented disasters over the last year. Accepting this award on behalf of the personnel department is director Ajita Patel. Good morning. This past year has brought forth some unprecedented challenges to say the least. The personnel team has shown resiliency, creativity, dedication and most importantly, commitment to public service. I am honored to work with this group and on behalf of our department, thank you for the recognition today. Thank you, Ajita. I'm now gonna hand it off to Supervisor Caput. Yes, thank you, Ryan. And I just wanna say I'm proud of all the departments in the county of Santa Cruz and how everybody came together. We had multiple disasters happening simultaneously and to coordinate all that was extremely tough and people were working under very pressured situations. It's my honor to be able to give awards to three departments, the planning, probation and public works and also the sheriff's corners office. I'm here to present the employee recognition award to the planning department. During the past year, staff in the planning department performed intensive field and technical work to assess and characterize the geologic hazards within and outside of the CZU lightning complex fire burn area and organized information for communications about the debris flow hazard that resulted from the fire damage. Staff were able to complete an accurate damage assessment throughout the burn area, which facilitated opening the area for the return of evacuees and continue to provide information needed for managing recovery and rebuilding within the area. The planning department staff were able to successfully transition to working remotely through changes and looking at technological information without a loss of services to the public. They created an electronic intake system for discretionary zoning permits, performed virtual building and code compliance inspections and held virtual public hearings through the planning commission and zoning administrator, as well as other public meetings. We wanna thank the planning department for all their hard work and helping the community members through a very complicated process during under extreme stress going on. Accepting this award on behalf of the planning department is assistant planning director Payah Louvain. I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. Thank you. Good morning to everyone. On behalf of the planning department, thank you so much for the recognition today. It's a real pleasure to be part of recognizing the contributions, the very sustained hard work and commitment to service that was shown by the planning department staff this year. All the divisions of the planning department, we work together to quickly move our operations online to keep the services that we formerly gave in person remote and we kept the public in remote public hearings. Our planning commission was among the earliest in the state that was up and running in a remote manner. We were handling everyone's increased need to communicate and we kept normalcy for the part of the community that wasn't directly involved when they really needed it wherever we possibly could. And then came the fire. The planning department staff, especially the building inspectors and code compliance, they mounted part of the early response. They evaluate and document fire damage right after the event, property by property. And they do it in a way that will really assist the property owners with their insurance processes and with rebuilding going forward. The planning department brought our geologic and engineering expertise to recognize and characterize and respond to the debris flow hazard, which was and continues to be a threat to health and safety in the aftermath of the fire. Staff that wasn't directly engaged in response work was serving in the local assistance center, giving early information to people who were affected by the fire. We brought our specialized skill and what can we do to help orientation to everything we did this year. The public service was free flowing and inspiring and it was really a great pleasure. It is a great pleasure to recognize all of the staff that did that and that they're continuing to do this. I'd like to specifically thank the geologic and environmental planning team, development review and zoning, the building counter staff and the plan check team, code compliance, administration and fiscal staff people, the sustainability group and code compliance. We're very proud. I'm very proud of the work that we all did this year and we're all very grateful for the award. So thank you very, very much on behalf of everyone in the department. Okay. I'm holding up a copy of the resolution. I don't know if you can see it. There you go. Thank you. And we go next step. We have the probation department in response to the CZU Lightning Complex fires. Staff of the juvenile hall coordinated the relocation of detained youth to Santa Clara for over two weeks where they were cared for during the evacuation. As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic the scale of pre-trial services significantly, significantly increased to serve an alternative to incarceration, which has been essential to protecting the health and safety of inmates and jail staff. Juvenile and adult divisions shifted to curbside wellness checks focused on meeting the needs of youth and their families by providing assistance with remote learning, school supplies, food and baby items, as well as referrals for rental assistance, food distribution sites and behavioral health support. In addition, the student success project team partnered with the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, the Potterville Valley Unified School District, the Community Action Board to ensure students were supported with remote learning throughout the purchase and distribution of Chromebooks and the establishment of a tentative resource center where family could get assistance with Google classroom information resources and children could access tutors and be assessed for other needs. Student success project teams. We thank the probation office in many ways for how they stepped up to help our community during a challenging year. Accepting this award will be probation department assistant chief officer Valerie Thompson My children received Chromebooks and they're doing homeschooling also and we appreciate all that you've been able to do. We're looking forward to getting them back into the actual classrooms and we'll see how that turns out. So Valerie, it's all yours. Thank you. Good morning chair and members of the board and CAO Palacios. Thank you for acknowledging the great working commitment of our probation staff. On behalf of our chief, Fernando Gerardo and our management team, I wanna thank our staff for their efforts to support not only each other during the pandemic, social unrest and CZU fire response, but also for how well they adapted and shifted to safely meet the needs of those we serve and supervise. Our staff maintain meaningful partnerships with county and community partners to provide equitable, comprehensive and supported services to individuals in contribution to stability, well-being and community safety. As you heard from supervisor Kathy, our probation staff displayed tenacity, creativity and commitment to excellence throughout the year and during much uncertainty. Yet they stayed the course, manage work-life balance which included virtual education for their own children and care for their families. We kept our department open and provided much needed support, court services and supervision services that included providing food, daily necessities, activity kits for families, holiday baskets and connections to needed services. We are truly proud of our staff's work this past year and we thank you for today's proclamation. Thank you. You're welcome. Next up, we have the public works, the Department of Public Works has 120 staff members and over 10,000 hours they were involved with the CCU fire response, supporting operations, providing shelter support and they were part of the rebuild and repair process. Public Works took a lead role in coordinating the brief flow, preparation efforts, working with Caltrans, CalFire, the planning department, the sheriff's department, the environmental health division, Santa Cruz County Fire, local fire protection districts of the city of Santa Cruz, along with the geographic information service, the office of emergency services, NETCOM, the regional water quality control board and the national weather service and other organizations. Staff also updated the county's rain gauge monitoring system to add new rain gauges in the burn zone and also created a new dashboard tied to the brief flow that would trigger thresholds to help response units anticipate impending emergency. Over the past year, Public Works helped support our infrastructure during a time of uncertainty and they are helping us to prepare for future events. We owe them a great deal of thanks for this larger and actually dangerous undertaking. Accepting this award on behalf of the Public Works Department is the Deputy CAO, Matt Machado, by Matt. Good morning and thank you, Chairman and supervisors. I appreciate their recognition today. I'd like to thank all the men and women in the Department of Public Works for their extraordinary effort and commitment to providing this essential service to our entire community on a daily basis. I'm very proud of the department's direct response to support for the CZU fire and for the leadership role in planning and preparation and monitoring for the debris flows. I also want to thank the Board of Supervisors and the CAO office for their continued support. I thank you for this opportunity to recognize our amazing staff. Thank you, Supervisor Caput, for this opportunity. You're very welcome, thanks, Matt. Lastly, we want to recognize the staff of the Sheriff's Coordinator's Office in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Staff in the Sheriff's Coordinator's Office weren't closely with a public health officer to educate local businesses and community members about the rapidly evolving nature of all of the health concerns. They also implemented numerous new procedures and systems in both the Operations and Correction Bureau to better protect the community. Staff and the incarcerated population from contracting COVID-19. Staff also responded to many social justice civil unrest events, which included mutual aid requests from outside the county, while still providing robust services to our community. During the CCU Lightning Complex fires, the Sheriff's Office successfully evacuated 70,000 residents from the San Lorenzo Valley and Scotts Valley, and they remained in the impacted area for 38 days to provide security and other services. The Sheriff's Office was a regular presence during press conferences about the fires and were able to provide the community with up-to-date information during a rapidly evolving numerous emergency. And we thank the staff and the Sheriff's of the Coroner's Office for the commitment to protecting our community during this year of unforeseeable tragic events and accepting this award on behalf of the Sheriff's Coroner's Office is Sheriff Jim Hart, I-Jim. Well, we can't hear you. There you go. Still trying to figure out still can't hear you, okay. Good morning, Supervisor, can you hear me? Hi, we can hear you now. Hi, good morning. Well, I just wanna start out by saying that I think this presentation is really a good way to demonstrate to the community that local government is working further regardless of the circumstances. In my 33 years with the county, I've never seen a year like this. This year really challenged us. Both the county departments and the Sheriff's Office with multiple crises occurring at one time. We started out the year with COVID. We went into some civil unrest and we had the tragic killing of Sergeant Gutswiller. And then we had more civil unrest and then in August, the CCU lightning fires kicked off. That took us through September where we experienced some deep budget cuts and furloughs. And then we went right into debris flow planning and then oddly in January, we have another event where there's 20 spot fires and more evacuations. And during that time, my staff has remained resilient, committed and dedicated to their jobs and to this community. I think the silver lining with all of this tragedy that occurred in 2020 is that county departments are working more closely together than ever. And our relationships with other agencies like Cal Fire, the Highway Patrol, State Parks and the local police departments are very strong. And so I wanna thank my personnel for all the work that they did in 2020. And I also wanna thank the CAO, the board and all of the county departments. I think we all banded together and served Santa Cruz County well during a lot of really challenging times. So on behalf of the Sheriff's Office and my personnel, I wanna thank you for the recognition. And I also wanna thank you for all your support that you guys give us. Very welcome. Thank you, Sheriff. Go ahead, Chris. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. And thank you to everyone of the well-deserving awards for each department. I'm gonna finalize this. And I want to note that the scheduled item for firefighter awards is at 10.45. We'll do that on completion of this presentation. I have the distinct honor for giving this award to the staffs of the Board of Supervisors. For the past year, both the district staffs and the administrative support staff of the Board of Supervisors has worked tirelessly to communicate with the public to keep them up to date on the ever-changing COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination efforts, the CZU Fire, Lightning Fire Complex and the rebuilding efforts. And we also responded to inquiries and concerns about other community issues, which are always consistent. In an effort to continue to have a presence for their districts in spite of the stay-at-home orders and social distancing requirements, adaptations were made to improve remote access for constituents through video conference town hall meetings and regular talks with community members and neighborhood groups. Staffs of the Board of Supervisors Office also helped to manage the county's response to the fires and then collaborated with county, state, and federal agencies, as well as with nonprofits to ensure our community members who had lost so much receive the assistance and support they desperately needed and as quickly as possible. We really want to thank the district staffs as well as our administrative team for all they did this past year working so hard to help each of us as we all tried to support our community through a time of devastating loss. I will be accepting this award on their behalf and giving it to them. And there's usually two to three F2 positions in each Board of Supervisors. And you cannot believe the complexity, the differences of requests that you get in a regular year, which this certainly was not. I cannot be more proud of the staffs of who we have on the Board of Supervisors and for their response to each and every constituent that we have in the County of Santa Cruz. You have gone over and above and been in so many meetings overseeing the coordinated efforts that have been going on and believe me, as we've just heard from so many departments, this has been a tremendously important and challenging time as we all know but the way we've coordinated the efforts through our staffs and what they have done is just overwhelming to me. So I wanna thank the staffs of the Board of Supervisors. You are the best. We certainly couldn't do it without you. And I know that the people of Santa Cruz County who contact our offices day in and day out weekend and week out are very appreciative of your support and your immediate response as possible under some very trying conditions. So thank you to each and every one of the staff members. We didn't think that we would be able to have each and every one of them make a comment but I know that they appreciate and they like the work they do and they love doing it for you people of Santa Cruz and serving you. So thank you to the staffs of the Board of Supervisors. My next presentation is to the staff of the County Administrative Officers Department which has responded tirelessly to the COVID-19 pandemic and the CZU Lightning Fire Complex. By putting in countless hours of staffing the Emergency Operations Center and serving as disaster service workers to support a variety of functions that include planning, logistics, shelter and care and many others issues. In order to protect the health and safety of the community which is the top priority the clerk of the Board Office was able to move to online meetings for the Board of Supervisors and the Canada Licensing Office staff were able to increase licenses and maintain effective compliance and enforcement activities despite logistical challenges of the past year. On the fiscal side, in 2020 staff in the CAO's office managed two budgets at the same time the one pre-crisis and the one after and we continued to make progress on the County's Management Act initiatives and as it stands right now the County remains on track to complete more than 70% of the 180 objectives in the 2019-21 Operation Plan. In addition, staff were able to complete and draft the draft of the three-year strategic framework to address homelessness and managed the smooth transition of homeless services coordination to the new Housing for Health Division. We wanna thank the CAO's office for everything it has done to support our community this past year and for continuing to keep the County working toward our future, our goals that we have that we've put in place on accepting this award on behalf of the CAO's office will be our CAO, Carlos Palacios. A Chair McPherson and members of the board on behalf of the County Administrative Office staff we want to thank you very much for this recognition. Our staff, as all other staff in the County did a tremendous amount of work this year not only in keeping the regular business of the County going on but in responding to the emergency as well. Our staff were key members of the Emergency Operations Center and provided 24-hour coverage during the crisis, especially during the fire. We also supported the EOC during the COVID pandemic. Our staff also helped to set up the COVID shelters and the CZU fire shelters. And our staff actually served as disaster service workers and a number of our staff actually worked in the shelters to staff them. We also helped to serve and to set up the County Call Center for the COVID pandemic. And we did all of this work while we ourselves were impacted by the crisis. Two of our staff members actually lost homes during the CZU fire event. And it's amazing to me, but our staff continued to work at a time when they lost their own homes and continued to serve the public during those very difficult days. Our family, our staff also suffered from COVID, both as all County staff, both family members getting COVID and also family members actually dying of COVID. And yet our staff continued to serve the public during that entire time. So it is with great pride. I accept this recognition on behalf of my staff. And I also thank my staff for all the tremendous work they did during this very eventful year. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Palacios. Next, we'll address the Human Services Agency or HSD, which has stepped up to lead COVID care and shelter operations for vulnerable people experiencing homelessness, which led to the activation of six hotel operations, two congregate care shelters, sheltering for transition age youth and expanded shelter operations at the Armory. To date, more than 1,300 people have been served by these operations and approximately 250 extra help employees support these shelters. Extra help shelf also provided shelter management and logistical support in managing their collection and distribution of donations for fire survivors. Family and children's services utilize remote meeting platforms to ensure that parents were able to maintain visits with their children. And during this past year, permanency was achieved for 77 children, a remarkable achievement. Meanwhile, the adult and long-term care staff were tirelessly to ensure older adults, persons with disabilities and veterans who would have care and safe housing as they set up that county shelters, staff them around the clock, assessed plant needs and linked residents to programs such as Project Roomkey, FEMA, hotel vouchers, Home Safe and Housing Assistance programs for veterans. ALT staff targeted outreach, visited each evacuation site and leverage technology to ensure critical in-home support services, APS and veteran services continued throughout the crisis. Through Great Plates Delivered, which has served more than 215,000 meals to date, they are helping meet the needs of homebound seniors facing food insecurity. During a year in which so many of our community members lost employment due to COVID-19's impact on different industries, the Employment and Benefit Services Division was able to help more than 6,400 individuals received access to EDD services. This is, these numbers are remarkable. I mean, this is not tens and hundreds, we're talking thousands. It's remarkable of what they have done. Collaborative administrative teams provided departmental support by ensuring that all planned operations continued and they were able to incorporate new tasks and quickly set up an array of data collection mechanism to support disaster services. The Human Services Department stepped up to support our community in so many ways last year that we really can't thank them enough for how they helped so many people in such a time of need. Accepting this award on behalf of the Human Services Department is Department Director Randy Morris. Thank you, Chair McPherson and Board members. I wanna start by echoing the sentiments of a number of the departments who said they could not do the work that their department did without the partnership of the whole county family and everything you just listed and everything I will say briefly was done in partnership with a number of county departments. I have been here just a year. It has been one heck of a year but one thing that I really enjoy is the sense of family and teamwork that is here. So it is my honor to accept this recognition. I do wanna share, we are a department of 500 employees and like many departments, our workforce is compromised due to being on furlough. Throughout this year at any given moment, 10 to 15% of our staff are on approved leave time supporting their children and their families at home. We also have deployed almost three dozen of our employees to handle a number of the disaster operation centers in like many departments, a number of our staff were evacuated. We managed a triple challenge this year. You listed Supervisor McPherson in that proclamation that our child welfare division, our employment and benefits division, our aging and disability division had critical programs to run during this year in COVID which were complicated enough. We also, as you mentioned in your comments about the CAO's office, we inherited the homeless services office, the housing for health office that is now in the human services department, managing the real humanitarian crisis of homelessness that is quite a challenge in our community. And last, I do wanna recognize that we are managing four crises still. We are managing the shelter doc that has provided service that's the hundreds of people in our community. Although the CZU fires are over, we are still managing a human care branch of fire recovery and of course the brief flow. And I just wanna end by also recognizing the 250 new employees we've put on board to help deal with those shelter systems with extra health staff and thank all 500 tenured employees and our extra health employees for their resilience, their perseverance and it is just nothing short of heroic. And it's by honor to be the department director and accept this recognition. Thank you, chair McPherson. Thank you, Ms. Morris, appreciate it. Thank you very much. And finally, the health services agency. We wanna recognize the health services agency whose role of the health services agency or HSA in the COVID-19 pandemic response cannot be overemphasized. The public health division led the HSA department operation center for COVID-19 response and implemented the save live actions plan whose highlights included mitigating the spread of COVID-19 through intense case investigation, contact tracing and the development of isolation and quarantine resources for the community. HSC has been committed to providing consistent and actual information to the public and help to staff the department, operations call center alongside employees from the personnel and parks and recreations department. The health services agency has also used an equity lens and all its decision-making including dedicating community outreach resources and activities to the South County and the Latino population who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. And HSA has opened a drive-through vaccination clinics and other vaccination sites throughout Santa Cruz County to serve our most vulnerable populations. HSA public health division provided medical health leadership for CZU Lightning Complex fires emergency and public health staff were integral in the medical preparedness efforts for the planning of the debris flow evacuations. The entire Santa Cruz County community bears a debt of gratitude for the efforts of the health services agency and for all its tireless work during this challenging year. I cannot believe the changing messages that it gets not almost weekend week out but day in and day out that are ever changing and how you've adapted in the health services agency to serve the Santa Cruz County community to the best of your abilities and they are very great abilities is really remarkable. Accepting this award on behalf of the health services agency is director Mimi Hall. Thank you, Chairman Kirsten. It's my great privilege to accept this award on behalf of HSA staff. I'm really honored. It's such a wonderful recognition on behalf of every staff member and volunteer. I have been in awe of this incredible team and the perseverance and commitment they've shown over the last year. February 28th marks the one year anniversary that we as the health services agency first activated our department operation center in response to a threat to public health. Four days later on March 4th, your board declared a public health emergency with the COVID-19. Sheriff Hart said it really well. Over the last year, we have experienced so much loss and so much change and so much to look forward to as well. But what we have endured together as a nation and even as a county has been unimaginable and I know that everyone is going to be forever changed because HSA as a local health jurisdiction has an integral role in any emergency response. You are correct that our staff has been entrenched in 12 continuous months of an active emergency response to the pandemic in addition to being activated to respond to wildfires and debris flow. Well, many of them are personally impacted by these emergencies to which they were responding. I wanted everyone to know and our staff especially how much they are recognized for the public servants that they are because even without a pandemic, they provide the vital safety net services to our county residents who have limited resources and limited access to care and services. We have always pandemic or no pandemic and we will always serve everybody from the elderly to the very young from individuals to families and people who have limited or no income especially during these times and those experiencing homelessness and the impacts to the people that we serve have not been seen as a burden but they've been seen by our staff as a call to action and our staff has acted at every level of the agency to show their commitment to the people of Santa Cruz County. Now, I know that every county department and so many in our community have endured great challenges and our county departments have much to be proud of in showing ability to adapt in order to serve but I have to say I'm especially proud of HSA staff. They have been in this continuous state of adaptation and commitment to respond to the needs of our community and I wanna make sure that each of them know that we recognize collectively their heroism and their sacrifice but more importantly, we recognize that they are people first before their employees and they have endured personal and family losses just like the rest of our community has faced. Our team has worn multiple hats. Many of them have worked consistent overtime for 12 months straight. Our staff are also parents who have been doing double time as homeschool teachers, caregivers for their older family members and just like many of you, our staff have also experienced loss due to COVID. So I want them to all know that today we all stand together to recognize them as people and recognize the challenges that they have overcome to achieve the accomplishments they have over the last year for Santa Cruz County and that their actions have no doubt saved lives. The only way we can accomplish everything that we have in the last year in this community is it's only one way together and we have demonstrated that as a community and a set of county departments. So I wanna also express my deep gratitude to the Board of Supervisors and all of our county departments, all of them from the CAO's office, GSD, personnel, ISD, auditors, elections, parks, ag, sheriff's office, everyone had to work together with a clarity of vision and purpose. And it's only that collective care and concern that we all showed that made our community take precedence over everything else. So today I join you all and I thank you very much in expressing immense pride and gratitude, recognizing the contributions of every single staff member and volunteer that has worked at HSA over the last year to save lives in Santa Cruz County. They truly represent the very, very best in humanity and I'm proud of them all. So thank you. Thank you, Director Hall. Thank you very much. And that concludes our county employee recognition award ceremony. And to summarize, we just couldn't have envisioned the challenges that we faced in this past year, but with the dedicated staff and what they have done over above and beyond the call of duty has been remarkable work. There's no question about it. Time and again, one department had to coordinate efforts with the other and they did it seamlessly and they did it very well. And we have been able to get this far and I think we're gonna be going onward and upward from this point forward for sure. And I also wanna thank so many, this is for our county employees and I think that the general community needs to recognize how much extra effort people put in to serve so many. And also to you in the community yourself. We've heard of people lining up to give food or help others in one place or another. People in the community really stepped up too. And I can't thank you enough for making our efforts in the county as convenient as possible, if you will, and the way you've responded. Overall, people have been courteous, understanding and kind and we need to keep that concept as we have in the county family throughout the entire Santa Cruz County community. So thank you for each and every one of the departments. We are glad that we think this is the proper way to recognize how so many people have done so much to help our neighbors. And we're gonna be going moving forward 2021 is gonna be better than this last year. And thank you again for all of your efforts in the county community. And now I'm going to go directly into item number 10. And that's a presentation of the firefighter of the year award for the career and the volunteer firefighters of the year. And Cal Fire Chief Ian Larkin will be making an introductory introduction for the recipients of this year's awards. Chief Larkin, are you there? There he is, he's coming. Yeah, one second we have a technical difficulty with our camera. We can see you. Oh. Look out at the head. Look out at the head of the group. Let's just say they're ready. All right, okay. Sorry about that. Some technical difficulties this morning. Good morning, Chair McPherson, members of the board, Mr. Palacios, members of the public and most importantly our firefighter of the year recipients and their families that have joined us here in our Felton training. It's with a great honor that I'm here before you today to present to you the 2020 Santa Cruz County firefighter, volunteer firefighter and career firefighter of the year. This recognition is presented to a volunteer and career member of the county fire department that is given of themselves beyond the call of duty while providing emergency services to their communities. This year, our recipients of this award are volunteer firefighter, Captain Joe Paquin and fire apparatus engineer Adam Hall who will come join me up at the podium at the side here. I'll just give some brief statements about each individual and then I'll turn it back to Chair McPherson. The 2020 volunteer firefighter of the year is Captain Joe Paquin from Company 37 Davenport. Joe has been a volunteer with the county fire department at Davenport for 10 years. Joe has worked his way through the ranks to his current position as captain. He has been resourceful in his efforts to recruit new volunteers for the county fire department. Joe demonstrates a lead by example demeanor in all aspects of his duties which motivates those around him, encourages professionalism growth and provides exemplary mentorship. He commits countless hours to helping train new and current volunteer firefighters in obtaining required and ongoing training that is mandated to be a volunteer firefighter. Joe has been instrumental in assisting with Volunteer Basic Fire Academy as an assistant instructor. Joe has taken a concerted effort to help coordinate facility maintenance and repair at the Davenport fire station. Joe is a trusted and valued member of the county fire department. And when we requested of him, took on additional responsibilities in assisting with the oversight of a neighboring volunteer company and Bonnie Dune, Company 32 on an interim basis to mentor rising new officers within that volunteer company. And he did this with no hesitation. In addition to his commitment to making the county fire department a better organization, Joe also works for Cal Fire as a fire captain assigned to our emergency command center here in Felton. Joe has used his knowledge, skills and abilities to help other firefighters be better prepared in providing services to the community. And he does that all as a volunteer. Our 2020 career firefighter of the year is fire apparatus Adam Hall from the Saratoga Summit fire station. Adam had served Cal Fire since 2016. And in that time has always been assigned to the county fire department service area. Adam came to Cal Fire after serving as a county volunteer for three years with the company 29 South Skyline volunteers. Adam has provided exceptional leadership in his assignment as well as fostering close working relationships with the county volunteers and the local fire agencies, which makes him a unique ambassador for Cal Fire and the county fire department. Adam sets high standards for himself. He has a positive attitude. His professionalism resonates with his supervisors and his peers. Adam has become one of the go-to guys. He is always willing to take on new challenges. And he is instrumental in training the county volunteers in their weekly and monthly trainings. Adam is a member of the Santa Cruz County apparatus and equipment standards committee. And Adam demonstrates a strong work ethic, positive attitude and a constant willingness to go above and beyond as expected of him, which makes him an integral member of the Cal Fire team and more importantly, the county fire department here in Santa Cruz. It is my honor to present to you your 2020 volunteer firefighter of the year, Joe Pacwan and your 2020 career firefighter of the year, Adam Hall. And with that, I would invite Joe to say a few words. Shift the camera just a little so we can see him. That'd be great. Can that be turned? I'm sorry. We can see you right now. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Hello, I'd like to thank the Board of Supervisors, County Fire and Cal Fire for the award and recognition. It's a great honor and privilege. I'm really proud to be a part of this organization. County Fire, especially the men and women of the department really stepped up during the CZ Lightning Complex. A lot of our team members and Davenport and Bonnie Dune lost their homes and still continue to volunteer. The hours of service and commitment of the men and women of this organization is inspiring and it's something I'm very proud to be a part of. So this is a great honor for me and I really appreciate it. So thank you. Adam. I'd like to say thank you very much after such a challenging year for 2020. I'm blessed to work alongside some of the best in Santa Cruz County, the men and women of Santa Cruz County Fire and Cal Fire. I'm thankful for my support from my family and from everybody in the county, all of the volunteers who work alongside as well as the members of the community. And I'm very honored to be receiving this award. Thank you very much. All right, and on behalf of Chair McPherson, I have two proclamations. This is for Captain Packlin, congratulations. Thank you. And Adam, congratulations. Thank you. And with that, Chair McPherson, I will turn it back to you. Thank you, Chief Larkin. And I want to thank the two of you, congratulate the two of you, but thank each and every one of you of your associates. You've seen the signs all over the county. Thank you, firefighters, public safety officers and so forth. Again, I use this phrase above and beyond the call of duty and to perform your tasks as professionally as you could have, you and all of your teams. We can't thank you enough from the bottom of our hearts in Santa Cruz County. So congratulations and thank you. And let's keep this cleaning up and keep us safe. Thank you very much for everything you do. Thank you, thank you. Okay. Thank you, Chief Larkin. And we are going to go directly now into our item number eight. It's a study session on the process and timeline to develop the collective of results and evidence-based investments requests for proposal, sometimes referred to as core and direct staff to return on or before August 24th with a report on the proposed, on the completed process, excuse me, and proposed framework as outlined in the memorandum of the director of human services. Mr. Palacios, is someone going to be, who's going to be presenting? Mr. Morse, are you, can you hear me all right? We can hear you, Mr. Chair. I believe that the presentation will be by, Lisa Benson. Yeah, I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. Yes, Randy Morris and Emily Bali will be doing the presentation today. Mr. Palacios had to step away from his desk for a moment. So yes, I see Randy's now visible. Okay. Yes, good morning, Chair McPherson and board members. I think technically we were being shifted back into presenter mode and during that pause that was going on. So yes, I'm the human services department director and along with me, as Alisa Benchin just mentioned is the deputy director, Emily Bali, but also a third colleague, Nicole Young, who's the owner and principal of Optimal Solutions Consulting. And before we pull the PowerPoint up, I just want to make a few introductory comments and then we'll go through the actual presentation. For over 30 years, well before my tenure and I believe generations before you all as elected officials, the board in this community has asked the human services department to administer general fund money to community-based organizations to help provide critical safety net services to the community. About five years ago, there was a pretty significant policy shift in the way in which this program was administered and the name of the program was shifted from community programs to what it was called today as you just introduced Supervisor McPherson to CORE, which is an acronym of collective of results and evidence-based core investments. Because as has been described to me that transition of three decades of running the program one way to the current trajectory it's on which was always meant to be incremental in nature was filled with discussion and debate by your board and a lot of feedback from our community-based providers. I wanna start to tell you what we are not planning to present today to put your board and anybody listening to August as you listed we have asked for us to be directed return when there will be debate and discussion about some important issues. So today we are not gonna be discussing and do not have any plans to walk through or ask your board to take any action on anything related to the budget. We understand historically there's been a number of questions about how much money is in this budget, whether or not there are coal is built into this budget and just wanna recognize during this recession your board took a previous action of reducing this budget by 10%. So today is not a presentation to discuss anything tied to the budget that will be during budget season and we can revisit this in August. The second is, as you will hear in the presentation today formally we are wanting and asking your board to support us coming back in August at which point your board can make critical decisions based on our recommendations about how to structure the second request for proposal or competitive bidding process based on agreements and discussions that occurred that led to the first one five years ago. So I hope that's helpful to just keep your board focused on what we're not presenting because this has been points of controversy in the past and know we are gonna walk through how we are gonna walk from here to August when those discussions will occur. So with that said, I will ask the PowerPoint to be pulled up and then we'll kind of walk through the formal agenda and I'm gonna pause a minute to see if it gets pulled up and that would depend upon Nicole Young and Emily being pulled up as presenters by I believe it's the clerk of the board. So I will start in a minute if the PowerPoint's not up yet to not delay too much more. And if I can ask the clerk of the board do you have Nicole Young and Emily Bali? Yes, both of them have been promoted to panelists. There we go, okay. So thank you to my colleagues for running this through. So if you can go to the next slide. Okay, so what we are gonna formally discuss is I will say a touch more about the background of core which leads to where we are today. I will then turn it over to Nicole Young who is our consultant colleague who will speak about how a core is much more than this RFP and a funding model but actually a movement. And then that will serve as foundation to turn it over to Emily Bali who will end the presentation with a proposed timeline and process that we the human services department want to engage upon with our community-based organization partners between now and August when we will have some moments to make decisions under your direction about how to release the next RFP. So next slide. So this is, I'm gonna share a few things about the history of this program. As I mentioned, as described to me for those three decades the money that your board asked human services to make available to communities providers was not done through a competitive procurement process and it's often referred to as RFP requests for proposal. And the contracts that we had in place as human services department did not include results often referred to as result space accountability or other phrases. And so back five years ago when the RFP was released and the new awards that exists today were put in place that was done through the competitive process and there are results and outcomes being measured in the current contracts. I also wanna recognize that there was a discussion that played out historically that led to the agreement of our jurisdictional partners at the city of Santa Cruz to work with us as the county of Santa Cruz collaboratively. So they took their general fund money as a city and partnered with us so that these RFP would done in collaboration. And then that way the city and county could issue awards through the same process. I next want to recognize that there were two actions taken by your board historically that led to the term being extended on two separate occasions. The original awards were put in place for a three-year term and at this point they are in a five-year term which we'll walk through which Emily will end the presentation on. I did not have this history so it was important for me to understand what was behind this. The first is in December of 2018 when the county administrator's office presented to your board a proposal to move the budget process from a one-year budget to a two-year budget. The CAO's office asked your board and your board approved aligning the term that was three years to four so that the procurement could line up with that next cycle of two years. So that was done a good year plus before I got here that the term had already been extended. And then the second extension occurred in May when the COVID impact led to the recession and our community-based organization partners were struggling trying to keep their lights on, losing philanthropic and funding donations and a whole host of activities happened that led to us coming to your board and asking for a second extension just given the chaos and the downward spiral that everybody was in at that moment. So those two actions occurred by your board that lead to this term being five year and we're getting ready to release the RP in ways that we'll describe. And the last item on this history is I wanna recognize that there is a program called Set-Aside which is approximately $150,000 of additional general fund money that had been purposed in different ways. And based on an action of your board in November of 2019, your board made the agreement to integrate that funding stream of Set-Aside to align it with the competitive procurement process. So that dollar amount is also living alongside the full RP that we're gonna be talking about. I do wanna take a minute to recognize that despite there being three decades when there was no competitive process and no ability for community-based providers to apply for these funds, once the store got opened for the RFP, these two extensions have meant that for those providers who do not have an opportunity to apply until this is opened again, though it has benefited the current providers that has meant those who have been waiting have had to wait two extra years with these term extensions. So I do wanna recognize that happened. The next item is you will hear from Nicole Young why this effort is much bigger than a request for proposal and the approximately $4 million of general fund money but it's actually a movement under which this RFP process is tentacle of it and I'll let Nicole cover that. And the last item that I wanna share is that this core investment movement and RFP process is all aligned with the County Strategic Plan and Operational Plan and there are actually two Human Service Department Operational Plan items tied to core. They're actually linked to the acronym of core, the first being making sure that there was sort of a results menu which Nicole will speak to and the second was tied to the E evidence that there was a library of evidence-based best practices that our us as funders and our providers could refer to and both of those operational plans are actually more than 90% achieved. So we're pleased despite COVID to be able to share that those are in place and those serve as foundation for us to then move forward to operationalize the next iteration of core through the next RFP process. So my final statement before turning this over to Nicole Young, our consultant partner is I do wanna bring to the board's attention and those in the community watching that we mentioned this in a board action. I believe it was a couple months back where we asked her board to accept $50,000 from a philanthropic organization to add to optimal solutions contract to do their work that we mentioned in and I think it's worth mentioning because of the recession we're in that the contract that we in HSD have with optimal solutions is actually 81% federal and state money and philanthropic contributions to the contract. So it's only at 19 cents on the dollar that we're able to leverage those other dollars to have the work done in partnership with the community that Nicole is gonna walk through now. So with that said, I turn it over to Nicole and then Emily will close us out and then we're all here for responding to public comment or questions from your board. So thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Randy and good morning supervisors. As Randy mentioned, core began as a fund model and really over the last few years has evolved to reflect its broader potential as a movement to achieve equitable health and wellbeing for all people across Santa Cruz County and across the lifespan. So when we talk about or refer to core as both a funding model and a movement really we mean that it serves as a framework and provides tools to engage with diverse partners, amplify and align efforts, set shared priorities, co-invest resources, measure results and increase equity. And so we view this funding model and the movement as deeply intertwined where one feeds into the other in a continuous loop. And really this broader definition of core has emerged from our work over the past few years that we're doing on behalf of the county to engage multiple stakeholders in enhancing and expanding the original core investments funding model. And so together with many people we've created frameworks and tools that can not only be used in the upcoming core RFP process but in fact, we're already seeing organizations and other collective impact initiatives start to use these tools in their own strategic planning and program planning, evaluation, grant writing and advocacy efforts. And so my colleague Nicole Lezen who works closely with me on this we're continuing to build capacity to apply the core investments framework within organizations and different collaboratives and across systems. So we're doing that by developing web-based tools, fostering shared leadership and creating opportunities to build shared knowledge and skills through the core institute for innovation and impact. So things like the core coffee chats, core conversations, trainings that we hold, forums that we co-host with other again, countywide initiatives. Those are all part of what we consider or fall under the core institute. And this is what I mean by the core investments framework. So it's the vision, the mission, the values and the core conditions for health and wellbeing. And hopefully you recognize this graphic by now with these eight interconnected and really interdependent core conditions. So think of them as these are the things that every person needs across the lifespan to be healthy, happy, thriving. They also represent the systems in our community that interact with and provide resources and services to community members. And so we also wanna think of our systems and sectors being interconnected and interdependent as well. And when I say equitable health and wellbeing we're talking about reaching a point where opportunities and outcomes can't be predicted for better or for worse by things like race, ethnicity, income, gender, immigration status, sexual orientation or any other aspect of people's social and cultural identities. And then just know that every piece of this framework that you're seeing on the slide was developed with again, extensive input feedback and conversation with many people, many who represented different organizations and again, collective impact or collaborative initiatives from all different types of sectors. So this isn't work that we own but really have built a sense of shared ownership over the last few years around these key concepts. And equity has been at the center and really a driving force in the evolution of course since the beginning and that also came from stakeholder input early on in our process. So I'll give you a quick update about two of the tools that Randy mentioned just a moment ago that we've been working on. And I really think that these tools will be useful to the county and the city of Santa Cruz and their role as funders in this upcoming core RFP process as well as to nonprofits that are applying for funding. So this first tool is what we're calling the core results menu. So you might remember a couple of years ago when it co-presented on core and we talked about this concept of an online interactive menu searchable by core conditions where you could connect community level impact statements with community indicators and keep drilling down to the program level. So we are excited to say that we have launched this online interactive tool. We launched it last October and the very exciting thing about it is that it actually lives within DataShare Santa Cruz County. So it's an existing platform that we didn't have to create but we created kind of the concepts and the structure of this menu. And I do wanna say that the health improvement partnership which up until recently had been the administrator for DataShare and Conduit Healthy Communities Institute or HCI that basically runs the platform have been fantastic partners in this process as we've tried to take this from concept to a reality. So the menu itself is organized by core condition and in each core condition there are multiple community impact statements meaning the kinds of results that we wanna see in terms of health and wellbeing at a community level, county wide level and for each of those impact statements there's a set of community indicators and then when the actual data is available in DataShare it's actually linked to that data. And again within DataShare wherever possible if there is data that can be broken out by what we call equity dimensions, age, ethnicity, race, income, gender, that data can also be viewed in different ways on DataShare. So we're really excited to be able to have launched this menu we've conducted some initial training on it through core coffee chats. We actually have a couple of people that have agreed to be test users for us. So they are trying out the menu they're giving us feedback about how they're using it what works well about it, what could be improved. And so we really consider this a living tool but we've already received feedback from some of them that the menu provides a helpful way to think about how their specific programs or plans for programs align with and contribute to community level impacts and indicators. And then they're finding the sample language that we've created in a certain part of the menu that provides suggested language about how to kind of articulate strategies and program outcomes that they're finding that really helpful in particular. So again, we see these as tools that will not only be helpful to the county and the city as they're preparing and developing that request for proposals but then also useful for nonprofits as they are applying and preparing their grant proposals. The other tool I'll mention is the promising practices database which is also an existing feature in DataShare. So this is a comprehensive searchable database of programs, practices and policies that have been categorized as either evidence-based to meaning they have the kind of typical rigorous research studies backing them up or they've been categorized as effective meaning that there are strong outcome evaluations demonstrating that they're effective at producing certain outcomes or they're categorized as a good idea meaning there's maybe a limited evaluation data or it's more descriptive data usually because the program is new or they're just having been the resources to do a really thorough evaluation but as the name implies, there's something about the program or practice that makes it a good idea. And so the promising practices database in DataShare has a very similar function that many other online clearing houses of evidence-based programs in practices serve or EBPs. And but the advantage here is that instead of someone having to go and one know where to find all those clearing houses and then search multiple clearing houses to see if something exists. This is all housed in one database and we have the ability to add programs and practices if they're not already in the database. So you can see that blue arrow and that's in fact what we're doing right now working on compiling several different batches of programs and practices to submit to the research team at Healthy Conduent Institute. They have their own criteria about how they categorize things. So they do kind of the heavy lifting in terms of deciding whether and where to place something in this database. But the nice thing is that there's also an option if there's a program or practice doesn't somehow meet that threshold of even a good idea. We still have the option to request that it be added as a local program or practice. So that means that even if something doesn't appear or can't be found in another online clearing house we can basically create our own that's what we mean by local library that we can kind of add to and customize what shows up in the Promising Practices Database for us. So that's what we're doing right now we are both looking for EVP's Promising Practices in other clearing houses that don't yet exist in data share and we're building a list of and gathering the information about programs and practices that core contractors have said that they are implementing but again, those don't yet exist in the Promising Practices Database. We're feeding all of that to HCI and at this point we're still waiting to see how they handle our first couple batches of submissions but I wanna say it's a kind of slow methodical process but much more efficient than us trying to create our own clearing house or libraries as we've been calling it. And so we plan to continue working with HCI just to get as many of these additional programs and practices in their database categorized at any level evidence-based, effective, good idea or local program. And so again, we think this will be very beneficial not only to the county and city as they're preparing the RFP but thinking about the non-profits as they apply for grants that the burden of finding evidence-based best practices trying to verify the credibility of the data and evidence behind them while they're preparing a grant proposal that that burden doesn't fall on them during the application process. So we are working really hard to get these tools as functional and comprehensive as possible before the RFP is released. And so at that I will turn it over to Emily who's going to share more about how these will be used and what the actual process will look like over the next few months. Thank you, Nicole and good morning, board. Over the next six months, HSD staff will examine the many lessons learned from the last RFP process evaluation and determine how to incorporate those lessons into the next RFP framework. We will also be collaborating with stakeholders including the city of Santa Cruz to align our goals for the RFP. Additionally, Nicole and her team will continue the work they've been doing to help people across the county learn about the suite of connected tools and practice applying them to various uses including but not limited to funding proposals. In August, we will return to your board to present a draft framework for the core RFP. After incorporating your feedback, we plan to release the RFP in the fall. As in the past, we will provide opportunities for individual and group technical assistance to answer questions from applicants and connect them to existing tools and resources like the core results menu, data share indicators and promising practices database. Next slide, thank you. Proposals will be due in the winter and will be reviewed in the spring. Later in the spring, we'll return to your board with award recommendations for approval and agreements will begin in July of 2022. As Nicole mentioned earlier, we are weaving together the core funding model and movement with the goal of moving together toward the shared aspiration of more equitable health and wellbeing across the county, across the lifespan and across the core conditions. And this concludes our presentation at this point and we're happy to answer any questions you may have. Okay, thank you for that presentation. I'd like to just praise the work of both the county staff and our nonprofit partners who provide the services under the core contracts. It's been a great cooperative effort. I think that the core approach to funding community programs as it came forward several years ago with the full support of the board, we recognize the need to align these services with the county's strategic objectives that we've developed. And we also recognize the need to raise the bar for effective outcomes serving the most vulnerable in our community. I believe this approach has substantially worked well and I look forward to the next round of proposals for these services. I think we are going to have a more efficient, more efficient delivery of healthcare and human services under this core proposal than we have in the past and it's moved forward very well. Are there any other questions that the board might have? Members of the board? Chair, I'll just jump in if that's okay. Sure, please do. Yeah, go ahead. So first let me say when we looked at reforming community programs, funding, about a decade ago at the city and then at the county, I don't think we envisioned such a robust and thoughtful process. And I wanna appreciate all the people who took the sort of desire by the board and have run with it to create such an integrated thoughtful process. And I also wanna say, we just went through a long recognition of county departments who have been working under very difficult circumstances and our community programs have been doing similar work under very difficult circumstances and really excellent work serving the needs of our community. I think we all wish we had more money to allocate them to them so that they could only increase their impact but I appreciate the framework and the analysis that you all are doing. My only brief question is what's your plan to engage with the city of Santa Cruz and the other cities, frankly, in the county to see if we can all align our community programs, funding to meet shared needs? Am I coming through in response to the supervisor community? Yeah. Okay, so I do wanna first and foremost recognize the city of Santa Cruz and lock and step with us. We actually, given the board agenda and made a decision in collaboration with them that they were fine with not co-presenting with us but we are working with the city staff and so we are in active conversation with them. The other three cities predate me but we do have plans to engage them to see if, as I understand was asked during the last round when the city of Santa Cruz agreed to see if there's any interest which is of course their jurisdictional decision to align. So both Santa Cruz is active and conversations with the other cities will happen between now and August. Great, and are you gonna do a study session or something similar with the city council? You know that's planned. I don't think we have that plan. We will take any direction or advice from your board and when we consult with the cities we'll follow the lead with the city of Santa Cruz staff to see how we lift that up. I understand that did happen with the city of Santa Cruz before. So I would imagine they would ask the same. Yeah, I won't give direction because it's obviously up to them but I think it would be helpful to bring not only city staff but the elected leaders of Santa Cruz to make sure that they're understanding this process and where the opportunities for collaborations and focus on outcomes is. So I'd encourage it if they're open to it I'd encourage us to make that offer. And similarly for the other elected bodies around the county. And in fact, as I think about it some of the maybe perhaps the other funders who I know are involved but making sure that we're getting out to their boards of the community foundation or the other institutions in town to make sure that the boards are aware and that we're building a bigger army who's moving forward collectively to address the many needs. But thank you for all the good work and I look forward to hearing more as we get closer to the summer. Any other comments from board members? There. Yes, Mr. Koenig. Thank you. I want to thank the Human Services Department for this great presentation. I certainly understand how we arrived where we are today on some of the challenges with the past way that we allocated some of these funds. My concern with looking at the presentation today is just how intensive the process has become of creating these metrics. My understanding is that we're looking to allocate roughly $4 million, that could change but based on past allocations we're looking at about $4 million, is that correct? Yes, after the 10% cut it's just about $4 million depending on budget process it will or won't incrementally move up again but that's approximately correct. Right, and how much staff time do we anticipate we'll go into creating this framework for allocating those funds? Oh, I'd have to calculate really quick but yes, I think your point is it is a body of administrative work and I don't know if this is also where you're going but it's a body of administrative work for us as staff to make sure we bring forward a framework that hopefully your board can support and it's a body of work for community providers to put the time and energy into applying which is always the conundrum of competitively awarding contracts. So yes, I don't have the answer and we can get back to you with the calculation if you'd like but it'll be work of our contracts often and us as department leaders to sort of work that through with the community between now and August. Right, yeah, you correctly defined my point there. You know, we're spending $50,000 on a consultant. I understand that's not all county general funds but nine, you know, nine and a half thousand dollars. And additionally, of course, your valuable staff's time on this project. And just to point out the promising practices if I'm looking at this website correctly there's 234 pages of them. So that's a lot of information for anyone to either collect or sift through. And I really think the more complex that the framework becomes, the harder it becomes the more time it consumes both for staff as well as for these organizations who are trying to compete for these dollars. So, you know, I would really encourage us to create a framework that sort of does what it says on the tin. It is, you know, extremely straightforward. We have a very clear idea of whether or not people, you know, are meeting the goals they set out to and you know, what we're communicating to organizations to do is clear and the longer the list of metrics or requirements becomes the more difficult and time consuming it becomes to do that. I'll just hoping I'm on point with what you're bringing up. I think it's worth reminding the community or maybe letting the community know and putting in perspective to the board. As a department whose 90% of its budget is federal and state money and therefore the regulations that govern what we do are not in your jurisdiction. This is the one program that's 100% in your jurisdiction as the board of Santa Cruz County. So we completely take your lead on trying to find that sweet spot in that middle ground and going from no competitive procurement with no clear rules, no outcomes to trying to create a framework that I think I'm hearing from you is digestible and understandable. But I would extrapolate not so simple that you end up with the wild west of saying, you know because we will have way more applications for way more money than the four million even if your board finds a way to increase it. So it's trying to find that sweet spot so that your board doesn't get put in the position of arbitrating when we go through the process, have panels and then we come back to you with recommended awards that you can have confidence that we've found that balance. So the process had the right integrity. This being a local process we don't have the feds and state telling us how to do it. I think our job as staff is to come back to you in August with a framework that strikes that balance and your points are heard. Great, thank you. Thank you, Supervisor. Any other comments from supervisors? Yes, Mr. Chair, I have a brief one or actually it's a questions from Mr. Morris. Now, thank you Mr. Morris for the presentation. Thank you Ms. Young as always for your presentation. My questions deal a little bit with the set aside funding, you know, the board as you well predates you but the history of this was and a little bit to Supervisor Koenig's point we had a pretty complex process for the larger funding. So we tried to have a simpler process for the set aside for new and emerging programs but also for smaller programs. Do you feel that that smaller set aside is actually meeting those goals of addressing these smaller programs? Oh, I'm gonna talking to an elected official. I'm gonna probably sound like one in my answer and I'm gonna lean on Emily a little bit who has some history. I would say first and foremost I wouldn't wanna speak for those smaller programs because I'm in a very different position as a funder and particularly a new one year new county employee. What I understand was to have $150,000 to sort of purpose to fill a few small holes for some smaller organizations had real merit but I think ultimately the question if I'm hearing right Supervisor Friend is those got coupled by a board action looking at my notes. It was back in November of 2019 to merge it all together before they were decoupled. So I'll ask Emily if she can come in. I think I hear your question is, are they filling those holes? Are they meeting those needs with the humility that I think the community-based providers would get that money would be differently and well-positioned to answer how they feel it's working. I know for us it's a lot of workload to go through a procurement process for $150,000 mindful of what Supervisor Koenig just said. So there is something very efficient about having them bundled together but ultimately will follow your direction. So Emily, could you share more to see if I didn't quite respond to Supervisor Friend's question? No, I think you did. And I think the intent of the set aside was also to provide a more lesser cumbersome process for those smaller agencies that may not have the administrative support to go through the entire the larger RFP and our intent is to at least to do the same that they will have access to those funds for one time and some emerging needs. So Supervisor Friend, could I just ask, would it be helpful if when we come back in August we delineate the process for set aside funding as part of a presentation in August? Would that get at your point? Well, I think to Ms. Bali's point, I just want to reiterate what the board's purpose of creating it in the first place was and it wasn't for, say, COLA applications for existing programs, right? And so what I think we need to do is be very specific. It shouldn't be a large processing on your side if we simplify the application and expectations of the applicant. So the idea of the set aside wasn't to be hard for you and it wasn't to be hard for them. It was for, as Ms. Bali had noted, small programs, 15,000 in funding, for example, that didn't have the capacity or the potential for a new and emerging need. We have a pandemic. Maybe there's an add-on component to something. The funding was designed to be flexible by design. I just wanted to be sure that that's what it was. If you're getting inundated, for example, with a lot of applications for requests that maybe you're outside of what the board had sought, then maybe there should be greater clarity in the application process or if you need greater direction from the board as to what we wanted that funding to be for. Because I don't want you to be getting 500 applications with 450 I'm just making this up, but 450 are COLA requests. When the whole point of this was you had $5,000 programs, $12,000 programs, $15,000 programs that for 30 years weren't allowed to participate in this process. And we wanted to come up with a way that they could do it and not have to meet the greater metric argument that the larger programs do. So to your point, should you come back? And I mean, I don't really need the framework. I'm trying to ask your help and whether we need to provide greater clarity on what it's for or whether you feel is so that it can be narrowed to be a more effective and sort of easy program for both you to administer and others to apply for. Emily, I'm going to turn to you again. I now think I hear the more focused question from Supervisor Friend if we feel like we understand or we need to get asked the board for more direction. I think we understand the board's direction and I think when we provide the framework, that's another opportunity when we incorporate the set aside for feedback from the board. Okay, and I'll speak a little bit to the point that my colleague made Supervisor Koenig on the metrics. And this has been, I mean, we were really redesigning an entire program that had been entrenched for quite some time. So we went from, I mean, some would argue there were metrics in the previous programs, but really we was, for example, a number of meals serve, but it didn't actually talk about whether there had been changes to the underlying conditions of the individual that was seeking the services. And those were in many respects, not helpful metrics. One of the challenges I find with having sort of a simplified program, although it's a good ideal is that these programs are so fundamentally different and cross so many different sectors of the county's strategic plan. I mean, they crosswalked all kinds of different worlds that we're interested in. It's really hard to standardize a system that shows across the board metrics. For example, very different from like a road situation where we can standardize number of miles paved is actually a very interesting metric versus number of meals serve doesn't talk about how many people have left poverty as a result of the program, which is what this is about is about cycle breaking. So I'm all for a system. And by the way that the providers have expressed concern over what they believe to be, you know, a onerous system of application. And understandably so, because it's much different from it was, you know, a decade ago. And if there's a balance to be made, I'm all for a balance, but I think that I was just trying to present why I think it's more complex than simply just refining the system. I mean, it really is, I mean, a Meals on Wheels is fundamentally different from something the diversity center does, which is fundamentally different from what Lifeline does, which is fundamentally different. And so these services are so different. And what we seek out of them are so different that it might be hard from a metric basis to standardize that. But if there's a way to do it, that I'm missing them all for it, but I wanted County staff to know that I completely understand why it appears the way it does. I mean, we're trying to meet a lot of varied goals that different programs do. And I just appreciate the transparency and the effectiveness now that's outlined that wasn't done historically. So for me, just moving forward that my interest is really also in that set aside and ensuring that it's not harder for you than it should be for 150,000. I mean, this was meant to be easy for everybody all around. I mean, I didn't need a 50 page thing on each deal. And I also wanted to make sure that people weren't trying to apply just maybe because they didn't know what the board's goal was. Use the application process to meet other needs than what the board was doing, which made your life harder on that. So that was all. Thank you all for your presentation. Thank you. Any other questions from board members? Yeah, if it's all right. Sure, go ahead. Supervisor. Yeah, let me put my hand down. Sure. You're good. Go ahead. There we go. Yeah, I want to thank you very much, Randy and Nicole and Emily. When we first were dealing with CORE in the beginning, the concern I had was like a supervisor friend was actually asking me about is that we wouldn't prevent small groups from getting some money to help projects that are very dear to the community of each district that we represent. I don't know some of the programs that are very vital, the small programs that are very vital to Santa Cruz, Felton, Scott's Valley, Davenport, Aptos, but I do know South County and I think you've done a wonderful job in getting the input of each supervisor from each district that knows their district better than others that don't represent that area. So that concern is not something that I have now because I've worked with you and I see that you are open to the idea that South County is different than Davenport or some of the other areas. And you answered a lot of questions. Supervisor Friend actually asked what I was gonna ask and I think you answered them. I don't wanna see the small programs get buried under paperwork, especially during the COVID crisis we have going on now because they don't have a big staff. They're not good at writing term papers and presenting them to the core in order to get money. I don't want it to become like a competition where who writes the best paper. I wanna get actual input on what we see as representatives of our community that the money is being used well. And Meals on Wheels is a great example. I believe a lot of the money that we give to the Community Action Board, they're under that umbrella, am I correct? If any of you can answer that. Meals on Wheels is under Community Bridges. Community Bridges, okay. So we're watching to make sure Meals on Wheels is taken care of both in South County and Mid and North County. Yeah, it's an open-ended question. Meals on Wheels for the entire County, North, South, Mid County, they're all under Community Bridges. Yes, and they are currently funded under the existing core programs. Okay, I just don't want to get much behind because I've seen, especially during COVID, how important it is for people that cannot get out and to have a meal actually delivered to them and that actually also that person will contact other than the post office. I think you're frozen. Okay, I think Mr. or Supervisor Caput completed his remarks. I'm not sure what's happened there, what the hangup is. I think each Supervisor has asked a question. Are there any comments from the public? Yes, Chair, I have one speaker. Go ahead. User five, your microphone is unmuted. You have two minutes to speak and the timer will begin as soon as you begin speaking. Hello, this is Marilyn Garrett. I'm a retired teacher. I was listening to your presentation. In the future, I think it would be helpful to spell out the acronyms and what they stand for, but it seems to me we're talking about, I agree with Supervisor Koenig, this seems like a questionable use of money and isn't the county facing bankruptcy like many counties during this COVID crisis policy that is putting more people in poverty. Supervisor Fran, you asked how many people have left poverty? More and more have fallen into poverty by these policies. So it seems to me not in touch with the real, real problems or hunger, housing, unemployment and policies that are increasing that, I heard that 84% of the so-called COVID relief money has actually gone to corporations and banks and there's been a huge shift of money upward to the corporations and CEOs of Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. So I feel like this is totally an adequate funding for the needs that are increasing by the policies the county is adopting to make the situation more. I'm not sure what happened to Ms. Garrett's audio, but I think she made her point. Is there any other comments from the public? There are no other speakers from the public chair. Okay, we'll turn it to the board then. This is a study session, so I don't think we'll wait for your August report. We thank you for this. And I think the evidence-based best practices criteria that you're using is showing some real dividends for the people of Santa Cruz County. So thank you for this report and we'll look forward to your coming back on this in August. Thank you very much. Hi. Pardon me, Chair. Yes. There is a vote on this item to direct staff to return. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it was read into that. Okay, we'll have a motion for direct staff. Thank you very much to return. A lot of before August 24th. Unmoved. Coonerty. Coonerty moved. Seconded by, I think it was Catholic. I'm not sure. Okay, please call the roll. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Friend. Coonerty. Hi. Caput. Hi. McPherson. Hi. Thank you, motion passes. Thank you very much. Okay, it is just about noon and we have one more item on the regular agenda before we go into closed session and we have a scheduled 130 item. I would like to just go ahead. I don't think that item number nine should take more than 20 or 30 minutes. So I would like to move forward with that. We will then take a, we're going to our closed session, probably about 1230. It may be that that scheduled 130 item could be at 145 or something, but I'm not sure. But let's go ahead and move on to item number nine. Consider authorizing county participation in state rental assistance program or RAP RAP, except 8.123 million in federal ERA grant revenue adopt resolution authorizing the county administrative officer designed a state agreement and related documents to secure 8.742 million dollars through the state RAP. Authorize the planning department to administer your local section of ERA administrative funds and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. That is the BCSH letter to jurisdictions January 28th, 2021. And it was Senate bill, state Senate bill 91 expression of intent for the state RAP or the rental assistance program, federal ERA program, conforming local rental assistance program February 3rd, 2021, a resolution authorizing the participation and Senate bill 91 stakeholder meeting presentation. We will go ahead with this item. Is there a presentation? Yes. Good afternoon, chair McPherson. This is Suzanne Isay with the planning department housing division. And I'll be giving a brief presentation if I could ask the clerk of the board to show the PowerPoint please. Ms. Isay says on the departments to share their presentations. Oh, okay. Can everybody see the slide presentation? Yes. Okay, great. Okay, so some of you may recall last year we implemented a rental assistance program related to the COVID pandemic through the CARES Act federal fund. We used a portion of the CARES Act funds that the county received to provide that program. In late December, Congress created a new funding program for a similar program at the national level. And that was through the Federal Appropriations Act of 2021. So that appropriation provided $25 billion for this rental assistance program nationally. So it is similar to the type of program we had in 2020 through the CARES Act, but it is now a little more defined both at the national level and also at the state level. And it has a specific funding stream associated with it in the federal budget. So that federal appropriation essentially split the funds into two different pots. One pot of funds went to the states directly and then each state is responsible for determining how best to distribute those funds throughout their state. And then the second pot went to cities and counties that had populations of 200,000 or more. Santa Cruz County, when we include the population of our four cities meets that threshold. And so we received a grant of slightly over 8.1 million directly from the federal treasury. In addition, we were notified in January by the state of California that we were eligible for an allocation of nearly 8.8 million through that pot of funds that went directly to the state. And I'll be going into a little bit more detail about that state distribution. So the state essentially several weeks ago, informed us of the results of the Senate Bill 91 which was passed in Sacramento at the state level to do several things. One of which was to extend tenant protections for tenants and landlords that had been provided last year through AB 3088. And then it also provided a little bit more guidance and specificity for the state's use of the funds that it got through this federal rental assistance program. And so it created a system for distributing the money statewide as well as some pro guidelines to be implemented by both the state and any local governments that would be getting these funds. So a couple of key parameters about the program, both the federal legislation as well as the state guidance makes households eligible if they are low income according to this definition, which is if their income is 80% or less of the area median income. However, it does prioritize households that are very low income, which means their income is at 50% or less of area median income. The program funds themselves can be used, 90% of the program funds must be used for rental assistance, which can include rent and utilities of rears, as well as a certain amount of prospective rental assistance for a limited time. Overall, Santa Cruz County is eligible for a total of nearly $16.9 million of this type of funding when both our direct grant from the Treasury as well as the state funds that were eligible for are combined. So the state informed us that we had essentially three options with respect to the funding that the state received that the county is eligible for a portion of those funds. So they provided us options A, B and C. Option A is that we join with the state in a statewide platform that will be available for all participating jurisdictions as well as a number of smaller counties that did not meet that 200,000 population threshold. This option would mean that we would essentially commit the local grant that we got into the pot that will be administered at the statewide level. However, all funds that are designated for our county will be reserved specifically for our county's eligible households. In doing this, we essentially save on all of the overhead costs, the costs of procuring sophisticated software that would be needed both to accept applications as well as do all the backend accounting and audit trails and fraud prevention on all these other requirements of the program. And instead we can focus at the local level on getting the message out to our local communities and helping folks apply and get through the process of applying. So the program design that was set up through the state actually requires the state to contract with what they call local partners within each participating county. That means local community-based organizations that will be brought on board by the state to ensure that there are actual locations within the county where people can get in-person assistance if needed to apply. For instance, if people do not have smartphones or good internet or cell phone connections to be able to do the online process, there will be facilities locally where they can submit those applications on paper or however they need to do it. And also to ensure that we have local entities that can really do outreach and ensure that those least likely to apply will become informed about the program. The program design includes provisions for language access in multiple languages. They've built into the system capabilities for communications in 18 languages. But in addition, if we have any languages at the local county level with or not among those 18 languages, we can have those accommodated as well. And so there'll be a process for our local CBOs and other stakeholders to communicate with this statewide contractor to make sure that our language needs are met. The state has provided this website. It has actually been operational since last year with information on the prior programs for renters and landlords that are impacted by COVID-19. There's a shortcut URL, it's housingiskey.com. If you type that in, it brings you to a specific page on the Department of Real Estate's website. It also has a calculator so people could type in their income and their household size and figure out what income level they are. And it has a language line to provide phone assistance in multiple languages. This is a snapshot of what that website looks like. Here we go. Oops, I'm sorry. Whoops. So like I mentioned, there were three options provided to us. Option A was that we join with the state and that will make us eligible for this extra 8.8 million in state funds as well as including our local grant with the pot for our county. The second option was option B, which was that we would request that the state provide us with the block grant of the 8.8 million. And we would be responsible for administering the entire program for our county locally. However, in order to be eligible for that option, we would have had to have a program already running and operational by early February that met all of the requirements in SB 91. Now, the SB 91 requirements have a long list of both programmatic and also technical criteria that the program has to meet in including things like robust fraud prevention mechanisms within the software, the ability to deliver payments at a large number of households, the ability to have a website that won't crash even if it has 20,000 active users at the same time, just a whole laundry list of technical and programmatic criteria. And we do not actually have any rental assistance program that even comes close to meeting that kind of scale or sophistication at this time. So option B was really not something that we could have pursued. In addition, if we had pursued option B, the state would have had to review our program and determine that it does in fact meet all of those criteria and performance criteria set out in SB 91. And if they determined that it did not, then they would reject our request for that block grant. Option C was that we could administer our 8.1 million federal funds locally through a rental assistance program. And then the state would administer their statewide program and also offer that program to residents of this county. So essentially any interested residents would be trying to figure out which of the two programs they should apply to, they would be getting different outreach messages different application platforms that would just create a lot of confusion. And more importantly, it would set both of the agencies up for a high risk of what is called duplication of benefits, which is not allowed with federal funds, which means that there's the potential for, for example, let's say a family wanted to apply for rental assistance and they applied to both programs at the same time and received assistance for the same months of rent or the same arrearages through both programs. Then, when the federal treasury is getting this, they would create findings against both us and the state for allowing that agent of benefits to happen. So we felt like that was not a risk that we could recommend that the board take. The state also provided that any jurisdictions going with option C, those jurisdictions would assume all liability for that risk of duplication of benefits. And we felt like that's just a risk we can't really take. So we are recommending that the county pursue option A. In order to go with that option, we would need the board to adopt the resolution that is attached to this item today for your consideration. And let me just go back to slide. So prior to writing up this item, staff met with the staff of all four cities in the county, the housing authority. We had multiple meetings with COPPA and also communications with a representative of all the water districts in the county who had reached out to us because they're concerned about water bill arrearages. We also discussed and reached out with various service providers, nonprofits in the county that do provide these types of rental assistance programs and other stakeholders that contacted us about this program. All four cities, the housing authority and the water district after learning all the details about SB 91 and about the program, both at the federal and state level agreed that option A made the most sense. In addition, after talking with COPPA and the service providers, then after they reviewed all the detailed information that was available from the state, they also agreed with option. So we feel very confident that this is the right path with respect to this program. By participating in option A, the state hasn't informed us that we are eligible to participate in a statewide advisory body that they're setting up so that all the participating jurisdictions can give input to the program's contracted statewide vendor. That is LISC, which is the Local Initiative Support Corporation, which is a CDFI or Community Development Financial Institution. They were selected by the state after an RFP process for this purpose. And so the state has indicated that the first meeting of that advisory board will be this Thursday at 1 p.m. And initially at least staff, myself and Melody Serino in the CAO's office have been designated to be representatives on that advisory body at the board's discretion. Let's see, the program is scheduled to launch. This is one of the criteria that was noted specifically in SB 91 that whoever is going to roll out this program, it has to launch on March 15th, no later than March 15th. That was another significant reason why we felt that it was beneficial for the county to go with option A because we did not feel that if we went with one of the other options that we would have the ability to roll out the program that fast. And then of course it is of benefit to all the people who would want to seek this assistance to be able to obtain it sooner rather than later. So the recommendations are on the slide before you. And I am happy to answer any questions you may have. I have a couple of questions. The way I understand the program is that any rent in arrears has to be dealt with before the tenant is eligible to get support for a future rent. How does that clearing up the unpaid rent effect whether they're eligible for 12 months of support? Would they be eligible for a shorter period in the future then? Yes, my understanding of the program design is that it does prioritize arrears first. And the reason for that is they want, the ultimate goal is to prevent eviction. And so part of the program design when the legislature was debating SB 91, they had a goal with this funds of maximizing the number of households that could be stabilized. And so they came up with a requirement that essentially in order to accept this assistance, participating landlords would agree to accept 80% of the rent arrears for a given tenant as payment in full. And essentially what that means is this program will have a savings of 20% across any households that are assisted and stabilized. And that way they'll be able to make the funds go that much further and assist more households. So by accepting that 80% payment, the funds can go further. And then there's a certain time period for which arrears can be paid. It is April of 2020 through March of 2021. And depending on certain other factors specific to the household, the client can also obtain forward-looking rental assistance for I believe it's up to three months. So it's not necessarily that somebody's gonna get a 12 month forward-looking assistance. The priority is really on the arrears so that the landlord would not be able to go and evict that tenant. Okay. And can landlords change the amount of rent charged during the period of their tenant is drawing support? How will the leases that include a scheduled rent increases impact the amount of funding available for two tenants? Can they go back and increase their rent? I don't think they can do it retroactively. So if they had a lease in agreement in effect for the period in which the arrears occurred whatever the rent was in effect at that time is what the program administrator would use to determine the amount of the arrears. Now, nothing is to say that they can't increase their rent going forward, but the priority is on the arrearages. So I think in most cases it wouldn't be possible for them to say, okay, I'm gonna implement a rent increase now for last year. I don't think tenant landlord law would allow for that either. Right. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions from the board? I don't see any. We have supervisor Caput has a question. I got my head up. There you go. Thanks, Chairman McChryson. Go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, you know, with the state, I guess option A, you know more about this than I do, but it's very complicated even with option A. We've got, are we gonna be ready when the money comes in to make sure that the money goes where it's supposed to go? And what I'm talking about is the small landlords, the tenants that are having a really hard time and are we able to distinguish between someone trying to manipulate money that's coming in. I wanna make sure that it comes in and it goes to where it's supposed to go. If the state is gonna run it, I guess locally we're pretty much responsible that it goes where it's supposed to go. Is that correct? Sort of. I will say thank you've identified one of the main challenges in running a program like this. Right, because obviously there's gonna be a lot of people wanting to pursue these funds. And so there's a challenge in sorting out legitimate requests for assistance from potentially fraudulent claims, correct? So that's a big challenge that's going to be faced by the program administrator. In this case, if we pursue option A, we will not be the program administrator. So LISC is this statewide nonprofit entity that will be administering the funds and they will be responsible for vetting all documentation and applications to determine who is eligible and who is not. The county again would be able to provide some guidance and maybe some problem solving suggestions and things like that by participating in this advisory committee, but we will not be responsible for the day-to-day administration of the program. Now, another point I think you raised is that you can be challenging to try to make sure that the small landlords, your mom and pop landlords have one unit or an ADU or something like that that they can access the program equally. That is also a priority of this program design as laid out by SB 91. So there is really a priority in trying to get information out and to make the program as accessible as possible and prioritize the household's most in need. And so we would be helping with that at the local level, both county staff as well as these local nonprofit agency partners that are likely going to be subcontractors to that statewide administrative entity. So we would help by messaging and getting word out in multiple channels, for instance, at community events through local radio PSAs, through social media blasts. There's all sorts of ways that we will be able to help push out information at the local level in various formats and channels to make sure that those who might not be on social media all the time or have good internet access and so forth or maybe speak other languages to make sure that they are getting the message and have an opportunity to apply. In addition, the program requires prioritization. So there's going to be essentially three application rounds. The first round will be open only to very low income households. So that's the first priority. The second priority will be for those locations and essentially neighborhoods or county subregions that were the most impacted by COVID and that data will be based on state maps that show communities that are most in need by a lot of your kind of usual parameters, high poverty, census tracks and things like that. In addition, we will be able to advise the state advisory board and the contractor as to areas we feel specifically in the county need some special level of outreach or might qualify as heavily COVID impacted neighborhoods or zip codes or any kind of geographic areas of the county. So we will be able to provide that local input to the statewide operator to make sure that the right neighborhoods can be prioritized for that second round. And then the third round will be open to anyone who is low income who was not already assisted by the first two rounds. So anyone up to that 80% AMI level. Okay, thank you. You're pretty much answered because with big money comes big responsibility. And what we're looking at here is having to cooperate with the state obviously is dealing with 58 counties and we'll probably be dealing with local cities housing authority and different agencies locally to make sure that money actually goes where it's supposed to go. I guess I'm concerned with the bigger picture of multimillionaires that actually owned a lot of rentals and whether or not a year ago or two years ago, they raised the rent way up and making it more difficult for the people that are actually trying to pay the rent. So I guess I just don't wanna see where we get money and we find out that it's going to people that don't necessarily need the money as much as all landlords that might own a couple of rentals and people are having a hard time paying the rent. Right, any other questions from supervisors? Okay, are there any questions from the public? There are no public speakers for this item. Okay, we have entertained a motion to adopt a resolution now authorizing the county administrative officer to sign the state agreement and related documents to secure 8.7 for two million through the state rental assistance program. Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions. Mr. Heath, did you have something that you wanna do, Adam? No, thank you, supervisor. I was just getting ready for the next item. Thank you. Okay, no, sure. So Mr. Chair, I'll move the recommended actions with great appreciation to our county playing department and CEO's office on this. I believe that any of the administrative challenges really gonna pay in comparison to the challenges that members of our community have been facing that may need assistance. So I appreciate their leadership on helping to obtain this funding. So I'll move the recommended actions. Okay. I'll second it unless somebody else wants to second it. That's okay, motion by Friend, second by Caput. Clerk, please call the roll. Thank you, Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. Ferson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes. Motion passes unanimously. We will now go into closed session. Two questions, Mr. Palacios. How long do you think this might take? And then Mr. Heath, is there any reportable action? What's your guesstimate on the timeframe, Mr. Palacios? Yes, I think closed session will take at least an hour. Okay. It's 1230. So I'm going to move the scheduled item for 130 to 145. I think I can do that. All right. Would you, will this open up the public, the scheduled item for 130, it won't be until 145. And Mr. Heath, is there, Council Heath, is there any reportable actions? There are not. Okay. No reportable actions. Thank you. Okay. We will recess into closed session and come back to address item, the scheduled item number 11 and one, we hope at 145. So let's take 10 minutes and then get into closed session. All right. Or should we just stay on, Mr. Heath is, we can do that. All right. We can certainly stay on and gather everybody together then we can decide. Okay. Why don't we just do that? Let's just go into the closed session right now that, okay. Pardon me, Chair. You do have a quorum of supervisors, although we're still waiting for Supervisor Caput to join. Okay. We'll go ahead and reconvene the February 23rd, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. It, the time is about 10 minutes to 2 p.m. We have a scheduled item for 130. We knew we were going to be a little late. This is a study session on the injection drug use crisis in Santa Cruz County with presentations from the Sheriff's Office, the Superior Court and the Health Services Agency. And defer to May, 2021 report with recommendations to improve syringe litter reporting as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Health Services. We have two items, the risk of infectious disease outbreaks associated with injection drug use and county syringe services programs role in prevention. And that is attachment A and B. We have syringe access and disposable and disposal in Santa Cruz County attachment B. And if we refer to SSP, it is the syringe services program. I think we do have a presentation coming from the Health Services. Hi. Yes, this is Jen Herrera, Chief of Public Health. I will share my screen. And our health officer, Dr. Gal Newell, will start with opening comments. I'll go ahead and start speaking as Jen shares her screen. I want to thank the supervisors for the opportunity for education, for all of us and our greater community on injection drug use and its impacts on our county. And I want to thank our partners who participated in preparing the study session and who have proved to be invaluable partners as we work on this problem together with special shout outs to the sheriff's office, the courts and probation. And I want to express my special gratitude to the sheriff and his office for his willingness to initiate Matt in the jails, medical assisted therapy. This is a pioneer and landmark effort in our county along with WellPath, our jail medical services provider to provide treatment for substance use, including injection drug use in our jails, so that when our inmates are released into the community, they can already be drug free and ready to be active community participants. And this has been supported by the courts and probation as well. So a big thanks to all of them as we move forward with that effort. And I want to remind all of our community that when we work with this population, with this problem with injection drug users who are our community members, we are not just serving that population of individuals, but serving our entire community. It's all of us who are impacted by the problem of injection drug use in our county, not only those who use drugs and their families, but the greater community as well. And by working on this problem of injection drug use, we're serving everyone in our community, preventing infectious disease like HIV and hepatitis C, and also disability and death due to overdose and other increases in mortality due to injection drug use. So with that, I'll turn it over to our staff. And again, thanks to all of you who are here to learn more about this problem. Thank you, Dr. Newell. And thank you, Chair McPherson and board. Again, I'm Jen Huera. I'm the Chief of Public Health and I will be facilitating this presentation today, this study session. On December 10th, 2019, following a presentation from HSA Surringe Services Program, the board directed the program to hold a future board study session by March 2020 on the IV drug crisis facing our county with presentations requested from the Sheriff's Office, the Superior Court, and the Health Services Administration on the law enforcement, criminal justice system, treatment and prevention efforts that are being made to address this crisis. HSA requested a deferral of the study session from March 2022 today as public health had been coordinating the pandemic response. Today, I am grateful to be joined by a panel of experts to support this study session. This session will cover the following topics, an overview of injection drug use, a review of available local data with a presentation from the Sheriff's Office, injection drug use and substance use disorder with presentations from HSA's Behavioral Health Division, the county's medication assisted treatment program and the SAFE-RX Coalition facilitated by the Health Improvement Partnerships of Santa Cruz County. And lastly, we'll have an overview of injection drug use in the criminal justice system with presentations from the Superior Court and the probation department. Defining injection drug use. Injection drug use or IDU is the act of using a needle to inject drugs under the skin. A common route is into a vein, hence the commonly used term IV drug use. However, there are other routes to inject drugs, including under the skin and into the muscle. Why do people inject drugs? It can reduce a rapid and powerful drug high, notably when injected into a vein or artery. However, the reasons why people inject drugs are personal. It can be based on personal preference or because their drug of choice is available through this route. Injection drug use is associated with drug addiction. As Dr. Gabbarmate had said, it is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds or hopes to find in the drug or the addictive behavior. Injection drug use is associated with an increased risk for illness and death and the public health impact. Because it involves breaking the skin barrier, injection drug use makes an individual vulnerable to diseases and serious medical conditions, as Dr. Newell had mentioned, such as HIV, hepatitis B, as well as heart infections, such as endocarditis. Repeated injection drug use causes skin damage like abscesses. These conditions have impact on our healthcare system and communicable diseases can be difficult to control if widespread. Those who inject drugs may have a drug addiction, also known as substance use disorder. Addiction is a disease that affects both the brain and behavior. Drug addiction is a chronic disease characterized by compulsive or uncontrollable drug seeking and use despite harmful consequences and changes in the brain, which can be long lasting. These changes in the brain can lead to the harmful behaviors being in people who use drugs. And lastly, the consequences of repeated injection drug use is intensified by social determinants, such as homelessness and poverty. For example, someone who does not have access to clean running water has a higher risk for infection. This is a list of notable California laws related to syringe possession. In summary, it is lawful for individuals to possess syringes for personal use acquired from an authorized source, such as a pharmacy or a syringe service program. SSP participants shall not be subject to criminal prosecution for possession of syringes and safer use materials. And it is lawful to possess syringes regardless of source as long as they are in a safe disposal container. This next section will review available local data related to injection drug use. Though there is limited data sources available, we have a SSP program data through the county SSP program, as well as drug related fatality data through the coroner's office. The county SSP collects information on the characteristics of its participants, which are posted monthly on the program's website. The following few slides show preliminary data for the entire year of 2020. From January through December 2020, the program served 481 unique individuals. The majority of participants are between the ages of 25 to 44, slightly more males and females, primarily those identified as white. Next slide, we'll come through it for a while. If you can please mute, please. Thank you. In 2020, the majority of SSP participants were from the city of Santa Cruz. 48% of participants noted that they are experiencing homelessness. Of the 481 clients served, the SSP had 2,110 total visits. The majority being secondary exchange, which for our program definition, that means exchanging for themselves and for other people. The primary drug that is injected is heroin. Due to COVID safety precautions, the SSP staff have limited the face time with participants. However, at nearly every single encounter, we reinforce and support harm reduction education, and we continue to provide referrals and or education around drug treatment services. 73% of participants also receive overdose prevention education. As the opioid overdose reversal medication, naloxone or Narcan is distributed at SSP. In addition to the regular monthly SSP reports, the program conducted a more in-depth review of people who inject drugs in our community through the syringe access and disposal report. The full report includes field work and focus group conducted in October, 2019 and was presented to the board on December 10th, 2019. The following slides highlights some findings from the field surveys and focus groups providing a glimpse into the injection drug use in community in Santa Cruz County. And I do wanna emphasize that it is a glimpse of the community, the results of these findings can't be generalized to the entire community. The table on this slide shows the demographic breakdown of the field survey participants, all of which support self-report as injecting drugs. The majority of those surveyed fit the primary clientele of the SSP demographic, the SSP program demographics, which are primarily white male and between the ages of 25 to 54. This table shows that the majority of participants of the survey were currently experiencing unstable housing, many of which live in Santa Cruz. However, this is likely due to the design of the study as our field surveyors focus on outreach and walking in neighborhoods and asking people out in the community if they could participate in the survey. This table shows the health outcomes among the survey participants. From these types of questions, we found that gaps in syringe access were associated with riskier injection practices, like reusing and sharing syringes, both of which have negative health consequences. Additional findings of the survey population include that participants who obtain syringes exclusively from a syringe service program were nearly half as likely to share use syringes with other people. 75% of survey participants reported reusing their own syringes, 29% of participants reported sharing syringes, and participants who share syringes were found to be more likely to have skin abscesses. In addition to the field surveys, we also conducted focus groups of people who inject drugs. The next few slides highlights some quotes, which provides a qualitative glimpse into the perspective of this community. For us drug addicts out there, it's a problem. It's an addiction. And I think clean needles is safe needles. I think that makes a difference. I have a lot of friends who do use the needle exchange. I think that has a lot to do with recovery. They give hope. It's like, if they can do it, well, I can change things too. When you're sick, you have to take care of that first and worry about the rest. But if that is removed from the equation, it's one step toward a decision to better for your situation. You start somewhere, just having clean needles. Okay, I'm taking care of myself a bit. Sometimes that's snowballed into, I don't want to use as much as I have been, you know? It can. That's what harm reduction is. It starts somewhere. As opioid overdose is a significant risk with injection drug use, we also asked focus group participants about witnessing overdoses and their experience using naloxone. I can't tell you how many people I've had to bring back in the past couple of years, but grateful for the opportunity to do it. Another quote, there's a lot of fentanyl going around. Just in the last month, I've had to bring back five people. Fentanyl is a very, very different overdose than heroin. And this segues to the next portion of our presentation around drug-related fatalities in our community. And this next report out is from Dr. Stephanie Fiore, our sheriff coroner. And you're on mute, Dr. Fiore. There it is. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, thank you. Jen, are you moving the slides forward? Are you advancing slides? Yes. Yes, I am. Go to the next slide. The sheriff coroner's office is mandated to investigate the circumstances, manner and cause of death of all deaths that occur in violent, non-traumatic, non-natural, sudden and unexpected circumstances. Next slide. And this includes investigating all deaths that are related to drug use, including those from injected drug use. The way that we can help is by providing data to folks in the healthcare community and the lawmakers to show them what some of the current drug trends are that we're seeing, and as well as highlighting the geography where this drug use is occurring in our community. And I do want to say that while injected drug use is certainly one of the most visible types of drug use we see in our community, it is only a fraction and there is more going on than just the injected drug use, which you'll see in the following slide. Next slide. When I came to the county back in 2014 and when people started becoming interested in the opioid epidemic, this was the graphic that the California department of Public Health was putting out about the where Santa Cruz County fit in the state distribution of opioid drug overdoses. And this is a per capita graphing showing that Santa Cruz, which is highlighted with the arrow and I understand this is pretty hard to see but Santa Cruz is towards the top. It's number six in this graphic showing that we had one of the highest drug overdose deaths per capita of all the counties in California. The state average is highlighted by the red bar. And when you look at the neighboring counties, San Benito County, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Monterey County, they all fell below the state average where we were way towards the top of this grid. And when they reported out a three-year average, we ranked number 41 out of 58 counties for our drug death statistics. Next slide. Over the years, we've improved our ranking in the subsequent grouping of three years, 2015 to 17. We dropped our rank down to 36 out of 58 counties. These reports I have to stress are for opioid deaths only, which are not the only drugs that we see in our county. But we did improve our statistics. And by 2018, you can see that there was quite a bit dropped in the number of deaths per capita in our county. We have seen a slight rise in those cases but the two bars on the far right show the national objective and the current average for the state of California. So we've been staying below that in the last couple of years. Next slide. This is more reflective of what I'm seeing. And the bars are showing the percentage of my caseload and below the bars I have the actual number of acute drug overdoses versus the total number of my cases for a given year. And you can see that from 2015 to 17, we did slowly drop that number of overdose deaths. But then in 2018, that number started to climb again as opposed to what CDPH is reporting with just opioid deaths. In 2019, we saw quite a few deaths compared to what we saw in 2018. Last year with 2020, where the nation has been reporting a surge in drug deaths related to the COVID pandemic, we have not seen that in our county. The actual number of overdoses between 2019 and 2020 were actually the same. The percentage of my caseload, however, it was decreased because I saw quite a few more deaths overall last year than just drug deaths. So that's why we're seeing a slight decrease in my overall percentage, but the actual number of overdoses remain the same. Next slide. This is a graphic that kind of shows the class of drugs that we've seen over time from 2008 to 2018. And the red line across the top are opioids. And you can see that that has always been the most prevalent drug we've seen in our county, but from 2014 on, those numbers have been decreasing over time. The other line I wanna point out is the light blue line, which has been raising, increasing the number from 2013 to date. And that's reflecting stimulant use. And we're starting to see more and more stimulant use and less opioid use over time. And we'll get back to that again in a few more slides. Next slide. This is a slide, our graphic shows opioid trends over time with heroin being detected on the bottom and the orange bars and methadone, the blue color. The green is what we would consider prescription opioids like hydrocodone and oxycodone, but they're not necessarily reflecting that they were prescribed, they're just that class of drugs. And then we have the designer drugs coming in in 2015 depicted by the gray bar at the top. We never saw a lot of fentanyl or the other fancy designer drugs that have been hitting the east coast in the Midwest portions of this country over the last few years, but we're starting to see more fentanyl now. But you can see that both in 2011 and 14, we had some spikes in drug use. Since 2014, the prescription drugs, the opioid epidemic that we've been hearing about has kind of disappeared. The numbers have decreased over time, but heroin has stayed relatively stable throughout the years. Next slide. This is the slide comparing methamphetamine use and heroin. You can see that from 2010 on heroin use has stayed pretty stable in our community, but methamphetamine use has continually risen. And in 2019, we saw a sharp increase in the number of deaths related to methamphetamine use. Next slide. This is a preliminary results for 2020. I have most of my cases reflected here, but there's still some that are not closed out. Heroin use compared to last year has stayed again, relatively stable. We are seeing a lot more fentanyl this year than we ever have. And it is a more challenging drug to reverse with the Narcan. The medics will say it takes more than one dose of Narcan to get somebody to come around. So it is much more challenging to reverse these deaths than with heroin. And it's a big concern for me to see this rise in cases. The stimulants cocaine is a little bit up. It's never been a big player in this county, but we can see that methamphetamine walled down in numbers a little bit, still maintains the number one slot for the drugs, the drug that I'm seeing most prevalently in that scene. And then alcohol, alcohol is a big player as well. And we see it mixed with both illicit drugs and prescription drug use. Next slide and my last slide. I don't know, it's not my last. So this is a graphic kind of showing some of the distribution of drug use and just like with Jen's data, most of it is taking place in Santa Cruz city. And these plots are showing actually where the death, not the death occurred, but the drug use occurred that related to death. And you can see that it most frequently occurs around the San Lorenzo River Belt in the downtown area. And that's why, with the drug use and the bench signs around the county building, it's right in our face and we see it a lot because that's where most of it is taking place. Next slide. This is the Watsonville, which is the other high incident location in our county. And again, most of it taking place in the downtown areas. Next slide. Rout of administration. For us, we don't always know what the route of administration is for our deaths. We do have some information on them and then Jack, this is data from 2019 provided by California Department of Public Health. Inject, and these are numbers of cases, not percentage, but injection was listed in a fair number of cases that when you can take in smoking, snorting and ingestion, it's still a small percentage of the number of cases that we see for deaths. It does cause a significant amount of health issues for the individuals because most of our cases have hepatitis C infections with a few also HIV. But hepatitis is ubiquitous in our client population. I think that's my last slide. Thank you, Dr. Fiore. This next section, injection drug use and substance use disorder will be covered by a few speakers, including our behavioral health director, our MAC program and a presentation from the SAFAREX Coalition. As stated earlier, someone who injects drugs and suffers from addiction may experience multiple barriers to access health and social services. Some of these barriers include stigma, trauma, isolation, lack of trust, and even just an unawareness, not being aware of resources. Harm reduction is an approach to minimize the barriers that someone who injects drugs may experience. Harm reduction is a movement focused on shifting power and resources to people most vulnerable to structural violence. It incorporates a spectrum of strategies, including safer drug use, managed use, and abstinence. And it meets people where they're at, but doesn't leave them there. Harm reduction does not minimize or ignore the harms associated with illicit drug use and sexual activity. It applies evidence-based interventions to reduce negative consequences of drug use. It moves past judgment of a person's drug use and sexual activity and addresses the whole person. It works to elicit any positive change based on the individual's needs, circumstances, and readiness for change. There are benefits, the benefits of harm reduction include challenging stigma, increasing trust, improving community and individual health, engaging people into care and reducing utilization and cost in the medical system. These are the principles of harm reduction in the following presentations of this study session. You'll find that these principles are incorporated in our community's approach to support people who are injecting drugs. This slide shows the different types of harm reduction services, which includes medication-assisted treatment and syringe services. A syringe service program, like the counties, provides clean syringes and safe disposal of used syringes. It's existed since at least the 1970s and it's played a central role in dramatically reducing HIV infection among people who inject drugs. SSPs are one piece of the harm reduction paradigm for promoting health and safety with people who use drugs and it's never just the syringes. An SSP is always part of the system of care. SSPs are at the intersection of multiple epidemics and provides a gateway to services which support linkage and education around things like overdoses and other infectious diseases. Syringe services supports the entire community through a variety of ways beyond just the distribution and collection of syringes. Again, it's never just the syringes, it's always part of the system of care. This next section covers another major part of the system of care to support people who inject drugs. HSA Behavioral Health Director Eric Riera will cover the county substance use disorder services. Good afternoon and thank you, Jen. If I could get the next slide. So we are very fortunate in the county to be actively participating in a state and federal waiver that has allowed us to significantly expand substance use disorder services within the community. And these are a highlight of some of the services that we provide to the residents of our county, including early intervention and outpatient treatment, intensive outpatient and residential treatment, our narcotic treatment programs, which you'll hear a little bit about later along with medication assisted treatment, withdrawal management, physician consultation services, case management, recovery support and 24 hour access to treatment resources in the community. Next slide, please. So the drug MediCal organized delivery system known as the ODS waiver has allowed us to expand services in the community and most importantly, leverage additional federal funds to support service expansion. Programs and services are targeted to individuals with MediCal as their primary insurance. And in order to leverage those additional federal funds, local matching dollars are required. The ODS waiver also comes with a significant amount of state and federal requirements around access to care, timeliness requirements and the use of a standardized assessment tool to determine the appropriate level of care for a client called the ASAM. Next slide, please. This is a listing of our primary service providers within the county, our Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency, Janice's Santa Cruz, Encompass Community Services, Pajaro Valley Prevention and Student Assistance, New Life Community Services and sobriety works. In addition, if we lack capacity within the county to provide services to an ODS recipient, we do have contracts and agreements with out of county providers to provide access to those critical services as well. Next slide, please. This is some summary data in terms of treatment volume. You can see the different levels of service that we're providing within the different service categories as well as the total number of clients served in fiscal year 19 and 20 in our current fiscal year 2021 through December 31st. Next slide, please. This is a breakdown of the primary substance for those participants in our withdrawal management programs. And you can see that 38% of the participants are being treated for an opioid addiction or abuse. And of that 38%, the majority of those individuals are using heroin as their primary drug. And that's it for my section. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. And next, I'd like to introduce Danny Controse, the Health Services Manager for the County's Medication Assisted Treatment Program. And Danny will provide an overview of this program. Hi, can everybody hear me? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, you sound good, Danny. Okay. So good afternoon, everybody. Like Jen said, my name's Danny Controse. We have three clinics, the homeless persons health project, Santa Cruz Health Center and the Watsonville Health Center where we provide medication assisted treatment. Basically anybody can come in as long as they have Medi-Cal and we can get them connected with services. We have groups, we have everything integrated in all our clinics. IVH integrated behavioral health, therapy, psychiatry. So they get pretty much everything wrapped around them as far as the services they need. And we have a pretty robust and I would say strong program for patients to get involved. And with that, I'm gonna pass it along to one of our peer mentors right now. We also have where we're training up some of our patients that are in long-term recovery to be able to get back in the community, work shifts and needle exchange do outreach. And if they choose to outside of this, they can step into the field and become drug and alcohol counselors another and anything in the field that they wanna do as far as that. So I have a couple of people before I introduce Coach, one another guy who wasn't able to be here today. He's actually working at Salvation Army and the disaster service workers. He's been with us for about four, four or five years and he's got about that much time sobriety. He accessed care through the needle exchange and for the needle exchange got connected to HPHP because at that time we only had Matt at HPHP and he was from Watsonville. So he would catch a bus or whatever he needed to do to get HPHP to get on Matt's services. And that guy's house now got his family back in his life working a couple of jobs and he's just doing great. He couldn't be here today but he wanted to let everybody know what he's been able to accomplish and stuff like that. And so I'm gonna introduce you to Coach. Let's see if I start my video. No, I won't let me do it. Okay, well, Coach, go ahead. Okay, hi, my name is Kim Campbell and I'm sorry you're on the set. Oh, are you there? My name is Kim Campbell and I'm a resident here in Santa Cruz. Now I came here around December of 2017. After I was recently, or I mean in 2017 I was released from federal prison from doing a parole violation on what was more commonly referred to as a career bank robber. And I came to your city to get cured. I am from San Francisco. I was at the end of my rope. Everyone had given up on me. I'd been in and out of prison. The majority of my life I spent a good 35 years behind bars mostly in federal prison for bank robbery. Those were unarmed bank robberies I might add. I'm not trying to clean anything up but I was an idiot. I did all of that to secure the money behind the counter for heroin. I was what you call a full-blown heroin addict in and out of prison, stealing, robbing, telling lies and everything that went with it for the majority of my life. As I said, three and a half years ago I came to Santa Cruz on the wings of my parole officer who got me into Santa Cruz residential community drug treatment program up on Riggs Street here in town. I spent roughly four months there going through the program. I left there and moved directly next door to the sober living environment where I started to learn a new way of life. I also became involved in the Suboxone program here through the County of Santa Cruz, the Medication Prediction Treatment, MAT as it's known. I've also been through the, I believe it was 16 week program for peer mentorship and I come down the road but being on the Suboxone program I won't want to go into that is I made a big change. I'd been on methadone and things like that before but through the new MAT Suboxone program it has worked miracles in my life and I'm here to share them with you. I have basically turned my life entirely around with the help of the MAT program here at the county. And I mean, one of my jobs, I worked for a year and a half as an Uber driver. Made a nice living at that. Of course, the pandemic came up and I've been integral in a lot of volunteer work through the program here. I have been able to make what are commonly referred to as good choices as opposed to bad choices. And even though my old way of thinking disagreed with those choices, I made the good choices and they're working. What I do is, let me get one thing to show you. They can't see you. Okay, I'm gonna come right back to you for right now. But they can't see you. Oh, okay. They can't much turn up. Okay. They got them turned off? Yeah, they turned me off. So anyway, I want to put out that the program here through the county is something that if a person is willing and able to take a small bit of direction from people like Danny or even myself and involve themselves in the program that's being offered over here, a person has a living chance of turning themselves around. And it is something that is true. And I'm a prime example. I was a given up person by my family and everyone that knew me. And finally, through the program here and through making good choices and learning as I go, I've been able to come up and become an integral part of their community. And to be quite truthfully honest, I'm having fun doing it, even though some of it's not fun. And it's a whole different ball of wax when you do things and do them correctly. I can't recommend this program enough. Thank you. Thank you, coach. So there's a bunch of other testimonies of the work that we've been doing as like coach coaches put in a lot of work. I just want to give some numbers. Last month, we had about 274 patients in our Suboxone part of the MAP program and about 113 on our Vivitrol. So that's the patients that are suffering from alcohol use disorder. So there's a lot of patients coming through it's just us working with them wherever they're at. Jen talked about harm reduction and it's just creating that safe space to be able to work with people where they're at and help them get to where they want to be as far as in the recovery. So thank you. Thank you, Danny and thank you, coach. This next presentation will be on the SAFARX Santa Cruz County Coalition. Our county MAP program has strong collaboration with other MAP programs in our county through the hub of the SAFARX Coalition. It is facilitated by the Health Improvement Partnership of Santa Cruz County and Shelly Barker, the Behavioral Health Director for HIPP will provide the overview of SAFARX. Thanks, go ahead and explain, Jen. So SAFARX was initiated in 2015 and we have these three primary goals and we've placed some logos to just a partial listing of partners. As Jen described, our intention is to really be a hub to foster ideal practices and to be also pragmatic in acknowledging that this is a challenging problem. And so when we think of SAFARX prescribing practices as all of you are likely very aware, in the 90s the tendency was to say that if a person was experiencing pain, especially chronic pain, that the answer from Western medicine was prescription opioid. And I think we've clearly learned that that has provoked a lot of problems. And so to be part of the solution, SAFARX since 2015 has really been convening local players from multiple sectors. But our work around SAFARXcribing practices we're really pleased with in the sense that we launched a concept called opioid failure. So really again, being pragmatic and trying to foster person-centered care and realistic solutions for people. The concept of opioid failure that's embedded in our pain management guidelines is to help providers have frank conversations where, so let's say someone has been coming more frequently for higher doses of opioids, that prescriber can have a conversation and say, look, you know, we started, I started offering an opioid because of your lower back pain a year ago. And here we are today and you're using a lot higher dose. And yet you're still having the back pain and we're also noticing some other things in your life, like you're less available to your family and you're losing your prescriptions. And anyway, noting some behavior and then really saying, so it seems that this treatment isn't serving you, that the opioids have failed you. And so I share that brief story as an example of trying to be pragmatic and provide realistic, appropriate beneficial solutions, which can open that door to new opportunities as coach just described. Also, another layer of our work that has been very robust is around medication-assisted substance use disorder treatment. And go ahead to next slide, please, Jen. This is admittedly a very busy slide and I think it shows that SafeRx is complex and more busy and we're doing lots of prongs of our work. What I wanted to really highlight here is we have always, we have a metrics work group, so there are several initiatives and we have our medicine-mapped advisory group. And as you likely are also aware, so clinicians who need to, who wish to prescribe medications like Suboxone and Vivitrol, need to take an additional training. And so in that additional training, that training is not so onerous, although it's difficult to find the time, but then there's often a reluctance. And so what that advisory group has done is to really foster peer-to-peer connections amongst prescribers so that they can be more confident in utilizing their ex-waver, their license to prescribe those medicines and therefore increasing access so that we can, we as a community, when a person is potentially ready to seek recovery or to look at their life differently, they have access to evidence-based best practices. The other thing I'd like to note here is, you know, our prescriber practice initiative, I already mentioned the prescriber guidelines, those were developed in a multidisciplinary way, so we're very much rounded in the goal of offering multiple solutions that could include behavioral health as in mental health, mild to moderate, mental health services, as well as medicine. So I think the other layer here that I wanted to mention is we also are deeply committed to community education and our goal is always to be nimble and responsive. So as Dr. Fiore shared, we've noted recently the trend is that there is a lot of stimulant use, but yes, there's an opioid problem, but there's also a lot of multiple drug use and stimulant use in our community. And so SafeRx has pivoted, the bottom left there is we've launched a polysubstance work group. And Jen, go ahead to next slide, please. This list, I'll let you read it, but what I wanna speak to, some of the accomplishments of this group, and when I say this group, it's the people on this conversation with you today that have been working together on a lot of these efforts. So this polysubstance work group really is an example of SafeRx being driven by data and trying to respond and be effective in matching people with the resources they need. So as we've seen stimulant use increase, SafeRx has brought together folks who want to focus on that and we've brought stakeholders from multiple sectors and we've really, we've featured Danny Clumthreades' efforts, part of one of the prongs of the work that he leads is contingency management, which is one of the few well-evidence-based practices around a response to stimulant use disorder, as well as Dr. Dimitri Bakos, you have amazing county leadership within your health services agency. He has fostered an approach to using medicines for stimulant use, medicines to treat stimulant use disorder that has some promising outcomes and has been featured regionally and nationally recently on some webinars. I know that your reading as I'm talking, we've partnered, some other things we're proud of is really, when we think of medication access, that means really starting, if people are ready, starting MAT in the emergency room settings as well as having access to MAT in primary care settings, both safety net and private. And as Dr. Nual alluded to, also in the jails. So there's been a lot of progress and we feel that we want to be a part of the solution and we're really pleased. And I will stop there and make sure that there's time for other components of this important conversation. Thanks so much, Shelley. This next section covers the overlap of injection drug use in the criminal justice system. First, we will hear a report from Katie Maida, Collaborative Court Manager from the Superior Court of California. Then we will hear from Fernando Geraldo, Chief Probation Officer with the County's Probation Department. Hi, thank you so much for having us. It's really been an exciting time at the Superior Court over the last three years. We have had complete investment in decreasing the population of mental health and substance use in our criminal justice system. And that really has happened through a couple of different grants including what we had, which was the innovation grant that developed the collaborative justice system. This is in partnership with the DA, the public defender, county behavioral health, county substance use, as well as multiple other players that are on this meeting today. And within that process, we have leveraged drug medical funds in order to set up an assessment and screening process throughout the court system that we have expedited significantly so that judges and attorneys can have professionals that work with substance use and also work with mental health to provide input on the direction of the criminal case regarding to the person's needs and their current access to treatment. And so we are able to within a week to two weeks do a screening for our clients to find out what their substance use concerns are and whether or not they qualify for any treatment within our community. And so we've partnered with the Sheriff's Department to really allow for what Eric mentioned earlier about the drug MediCal to be able to access treatment. We're doing the ASAM assessments within incarceration so that the judges can make the determination to release someone from custody into treatment right into residential treatment. And so that process alone has created just so much education for the judges and the court staff on how to address the overwhelming need for substance use treatment within our community. And we've also been able to establish several collaborative courts that really focus on providing treatment in lieu of incarceration or penalties within that process. And so we have partnered with County Behavioral Health to have a court clinician that is available Monday through Friday for court in order to do assessments, to do recommendations for attorneys and judges so that they can move forward with an educated and more understanding as they move forward in the process of sentencing or moving forward to possible diversion. We have a veterans court that works with substance use. We also have behavioral health court. We have a reentry court for people who are on parole. And we have a family drug court that works with dependency in order to support families and reuniting. And then we also have our PACT court, which I know that you guys are very familiar with, which really supports the high utilizers in our community that really struggle with substance use that affects every aspect of their life. And so within this process we have really been able to identify people that have needs, identify people so that we can reduce the recidivism and really prevent them from coming back into our services. The one thing with the criminal justice system is we don't wanna see people again. And so these programs and the systems that we've put in place have really taken us into a brand new, really exciting movement and part of that is through the champion of probation and their support as well as the DA's department to really implement neighborhood courts, which is another way of being able to divert people out of the criminal justice system. And in all of these, we do address IV drug use as well as other multiple drug use and mental health. So we're kind of really excited what's going to be happening because we have several new grants within the court system to continue these programs for another three years. What this does is this also provides treatment and housing options for people within our programs. And thanks to the CAFE's program that I'm sure will be mentioned right after me, we have access for people that do not have MediCal to get into programming as well or people who do not qualify for other types of funding sources for them to really get the treatment needed. So I'm actually really excited about kind of where we're launching to and how far we're gonna progress within the next three years within our criminal justice system. So thank you. Thank you, Katie. And we'll turn it over to Fernando, our probation officer. And don't see. I am not seeing Fernando on the attendees or the panelists list either. We have contacted the department. Okay, thank you. So I'll just go ahead and read the slides. This is these slides were the content was developed by the probation department. So what probation does is they complete assessments and recommendations to the court regarding custodial status and sentencing as well as providing monitoring and supervision for justice-involved individuals under the jurisdiction of the probation department. How probation interacts with the injection drug-using population. As part of monitoring and supervision for the IDU population, they provide program and resource referrals associated with injection drug use, as well as other risks or need areas to support the individual's overall health and wellbeing to promote public safety. Building relationships and trust with injection drug users is especially important in creating readiness for treatment and recovery. How probation is part of a greater system of care to support people who inject drugs. Probation staff are actively involved in the organized delivery system of SUD services throughout the county. They provide oversight of AB 109 treatment dollars and BSBC Prop 47 grant funds for treatment and housing under the FES project. They are under an active partner with Collaborative Court. They've initiated the early Vivitrol project and they run a probation service center which serves as a co-location for a variety of services targeting justice-involved individuals, including SUDs assessment and program referrals. And this is the final slide of the study session. A quote that comes to mind is as I was putting this slide together is the opposite of addiction is connection. This is a quote that's said by many in the field of addiction. The opposite of addiction is connection. An effective response to injection drug use requires a coordinated system of care. All of these agencies who presented today, the voices of those who inject drugs through our focus groups, we all are connected to ensure that those who are using drugs have access to health and social services. And this concludes the study session. I want to express sincere gratitude to all of the panelists and their respective agencies for their contribution. I also wanna thank the CAO's office for their support and coordination of the presentation. And I will stop sharing my screen. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you for that very detailed presentation from a broad range of participants. We appreciate it very much. And I wanna thank you for this report today. I know that drug use has taken a heart wrenching toll on our individuals and families and our community at large and Santa Cruz County. In fact, it's true across the nation, as we know, unfortunately. We also know that law enforcement response alone really can reduce the amount of IB drug use and we need a strong public health response focused on prevention, treatment, and harm reduction. And it's really encouraging to see the coordinated effort from the federal and state governments on down to the county level. But I know that preventing disease through exchanges and preventing harm to the community by properly discarded needles are equally important. We have an obligation to approach really all of this work with the goal of improving public health for everyone. And you are really doing a dynamite job and it's good to hear some testimony. And first of all, I wanna congratulate and say thank you to those who have gone through the effort. And I imagine it's not a very easy regression to go through, but thank you for your efforts and keep at it. I just wanna encourage you for your own cause in particular, but for the community's cause as well. And we don't really have data, I think on the people using IB drugs, but what's really been a concern is the litter and we'll get more to that later, I think in a presentation later in the year. But I know Supervisor and Coonerty especially, and we have some of the city of Santa Cruz in our district have long supported the downtown streets team, which is a tremendous organization that are making individuals are making great comebacks in their lives. They've contracted with the county to collect needles in our districts as part of a work training program for people experiencing homelessness. And some of the data that they have got received or collected, I should say, from I think it was July 2019 to December 2020 and just 18 months, just that downtown streets team picked up 12,000 needles in the city and on the North coast. And that's a lot of, well, I think somebody said it was 168 gallons of litter. So we have a problem, we know it's undeniable and we need to act swiftly on a more comprehensive response, especially for the litter issue as we're looking at, but from purely health perspectives and the collaborative effort that you've put forth and we have done here in Santa Cruz County, I just wanna say thank you to those who participate in getting, helping get a lot of people get their lives back together. And for those who have done so and we heard some of those from I think it was Coach Campbell and so forth, congratulations, just stick with it and you're gonna be a shining example for others in their road to recovery, I hope. And so I really wanna thank you for stepping out in front and I know nobody could be happier about that than you. So just stick with it and I hope we can have many more like you that participate in this program, the programs that have been mentioned. I don't know if there might be any other comments from members of the Board of Supervisors. Yeah, Mr. Chair, I have some questions, if you don't mind. Sure, please go ahead, Supervisor Coonerty. Sure, so one, I wanna thank the staff. I know you all are responding to a global pandemic. This was requested before we were in that pandemic and while I think you've given us some really important information and great work is being done in the midst of the pandemic, I do think that as we emerge hopefully soon from the challenge of COVID, we can really focus on this public health crisis that our community faces. I guess I have a lot of different questions but I guess I'd start with, do we know how many methamphetamine users there are in Santa Cruz County or heroin users there are in Santa Cruz County? How it will defer to other members of the panel, maybe our Behavioral Health Director, Eric, if you can take that? I don't have that specific information, Supervisor Coonerty, no. Do we know it and you don't have it or do we not know it? I don't think we know it. Okay, because I was looking during this presentation, I was looking, we know 15.6 of the adult population smoke and 12.4% of teenagers smoke and 18.2% of our population binge drinks. I think we should, as part of our data dashboard, be able to have a sense as to what that number is in order to understand the scope of the problem. Do you think, not again, I understand everyone's very busy responding to a global pandemic, so not right away, but over time, is there a mechanism by which we can assess the number of people using those specific drugs? I can look into it further. I think as one of the things we showed during the presentation today, the use rates vary pretty dramatically by substance, by county, as reflected in Dr. Fiori's presentation. The data that we have is based on people who are actually engaged in services, but what we don't have are the actual prevalence data or estimates by population in the county, but I can certainly continue to look for that sort of information to make some estimates. Okay, yeah, I think it could be helpful to sort of know where we are within that county. I guess for Dr. Fiori, my question was, Santa Cruz County, both the board and the health department have long been sort of national leaders in a harm reduction strategy. How come the adjacent counties to us who are engaged in less harm reduction strategies, but have similar rates of poverty and underlying health disparities, why are their overdose rates lower than ours? That's a good question. I think that when you're looking at San Benito County, which is a really high Hispanic population, most of the drug use in our county has to do with our Caucasian population. There is some in the Hispanics, but it's actually underrepresented for the number of Hispanic people we have in this county. So maybe that's part of it. And then I think in the larger counties like Santa Clara, it's probably just because of the size of their population and the demographics and other things go with it. So I don't really have a good answer. It's an interesting thing. And as we've improved, they still remained below the state average. Some of the other counties have shifted around like San Francisco now is towards the top of the ranking because their fentanyl cases have shot through the roof. But I don't know. It just probably has to do with the way the demographic of the individual counties. And I just don't know. I don't really have a good answer. Okay. And I mean, that's sort of, I appreciate that. And I don't think we are similar to San Benito County, but I think we are on a per capita basis, probably very similar to Monterey, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, demographically. And so it's trying to figure out a little bit about what's going on, especially when we know they're handing out fewer needles less Narcan, they're engaging in less harm reduction. You would think that their numbers would be higher. Yeah. I haven't looked at their numbers lately. I mean, this is from 2014 before we really started doing a lot of harm reduction. So we've improved our status. And I don't know how they are in comparison if they maintain a status quo instead of improving it. I haven't looked at the other counties as much. I don't have that similar graphic to compare the rankings of the other counties to compare it with. Yeah. I just did a quick look at the health data website, but I, because I saw that that data was from a little while ago. So I thought that I checked, but it seemed as though while we had improved, they had also stayed steady. So it's a little bit, I don't know if Catherine, if you have an answer to the question. Yeah. I don't have an exact answer, but I can tell you that those countering counties have a lot more programming that is targeted towards substance use comparison to our program, our programs here. We do not have a lot of detox beds or residential treatment facilities. Unlike these other programs, they have a lot of other nonprofits that already do provide that treatment. And so I think that when we're talking about addressing this need, we're addressing it with minimal services. And so the progress that we have made has been really incredible with that limited access of detox beds as well as residential beds that focus on substance use only. I think, and again, recognizing everyone's really busy, I think that would be incredibly helpful as a follow-up information, which is to look at the availability of detox or these other residential options on a per capita basis for comparable counties that may be performing better. And if that is a solution or I guess a tool in addressing the issue, it would be helpful to know because then we can start building strategies to construct more beds. Because I think if that's, certainly there seems to be there's a need and if other counties are getting better outcomes then we should be looking at where deficiencies are and what we can do to address them. So I'd love follow-up information on that if there's time. Katherine, can you also let us, for the drug Medi-Cal and the efforts, I think it's been great to have these vertical courts or these specialty courts. Do we know how many people complete treatment who have been diverted and then how many re-offend versus in the years prior where we didn't have these programs? Great question. We're actually in the process of finalizing some evaluations right now that have that data. I can tell you that with our re-entry court, we have, it's about 90% it's, I think it might be like 92 or something of people who have not committed new felonies while they've been participating within the program. A lot of the complications come to trying to find comparable data for people either after they graduate or also if they're people who are not on parole, we wanna have a comparison and we haven't been able to do that. We can say with our PACT court that we have had a lot of success but that court has only been relaunched within the last two years. And so an evaluation of the relaunch is in process right now and I can get you that data. It will be posted to our website probably by next month. That would be great. I mean, I think for all folks here whether it's expanding mat treatment or detox beds, getting that information as sooner as we come up on budget time would be helpful because it helps us evaluate where we wanna make these investments. Can I ask Danny Contreras if you're still around? Yeah, what was that? Yeah, so how have you had to adjust SSP operations during COVID? Oh, I think we would have to bring Roshana and I'm not in the SSP. So my staff are in SSP and maybe Jen can speak a little bit more to that but they've still been running SSP and like I said, our peer mentors have been working shifts in there too. So I don't know if Jen wants to share a little bit more. Sure. Yes, for our sovereign services program what we've done is we've adjusted the physical location of it's still on the Emeline and Watsonville campuses but we've reorganized it to ensure that physical distancing is in place. We're minimizing the amount of space time that our SSP staff have with individuals. So, just to minimize the amount of time people are in a closed environment, obviously we are enforcing masks, face coverings at all times. We have over this past year per the board's direction, we've expanded hours, so we're operational five days a week and we expanded our hours based on participant input which was primarily that we should have more evening hours and we're looking to improve upon our South County services as well as Dr. Fiore's presentation showed there is a need in Watsonville in South County area for syringe services, so we wanna make sure that we're accessible. And it looks like even under COVID restrictions you've been able to essentially maintain the same number of participants as in 2019. Is that correct? In 2020 you were able to. I believe it actually decreased but I'll have to review that data. Okay. Yeah, I'm trying to, I have this data here but it's a little hard to read, it looks like maybe it was a little over 500 at times but it dropped below that in Q4 2019. We'll plan on having that information included in the SSP biennial report this spring. Okay. And then Coach Campbell, are you still around? I am, I am here. Cool, so one congratulations on your sobriety, that's great. I wanna thank both of you gentlemen for complimenting me. That means a lot to me to have people of your stature say something about an old guy like me. So can I ask like what brought you to Santa Cruz? Like why, of all the places, why Santa Cruz? I'm so glad you asked me, there was something that I did not say during that presentation which I put together in part time, we can see it now. Federal judge in San Francisco, believe it or not, the men that used to send me to prison for 10 years at a pop decided that prison wasn't working for me and he insisted that I get treatment when my own attorney, my own parole officer and of course the USUA wanted me back in jail as a lesson. The judge said, no, I want him in treatment. They sent me to Santa Cruz residential and I guess I got the luck of the job because the program in New York City came to my aid. And there were many times I wanted to walk out and go right back up into the tender line, right back into the jaws of nastiness. But I stuck and I stayed and that's part of what I preached during my peer mentorships to people that are trying to come in and get help that you gotta stick and you gotta stay. Even if it hurts, you have to stay and listen. They've cotton out of your ears and stick it in your mouth as we say and listen to people that have the experience and that have leadership skills to help you in the right direction. And it's everything that you ladies and gentlemen have been talking about today and Danny Contreras on the hand in a big time kudos to him because he's been a big part of my recovery here. He's always been there for me and he's got me going here and doing volunteer work and I'm enjoying every bit of it and I've come to really like Santa Cruz and love it. And I heard you talking about why maybe things are a little higher in Santa Cruz. You know, the reputation of Santa Cruz to beautiful town. It's always been that town that people come from all over the world here and the people that use, they probably look at it as a party town. So it might be kind of up a little bit there but that just gives us more work to work on. You know, I turn a negative into a positive there. But that's about all I wanted to add and I'll just say that if you stick with it, yeah. And you're right. The first man that gave me a kudos, you're right. I'm the person that's the happiest out of this. And then comes my family that talks to me again and is instrumental in our relationship. So yeah, it works gentlemen and ladies, it works if you work it and stay with the prescriptions from the clinicians here kind of back up. I'll be 70 next year. And it took me till this age to learn that I need to follow the rules that we're talking about my mother and father and I learned at school and the stuff and make good decision. That's all I can say for today. And I really appreciate you guys wanting to get a part of your meeting today. All right, well, thank you for your, also thank you for your volunteer efforts. Sounds like they're making a difference. So I've taken too much time but I just wanna, I wanna thank everybody for taking the time to provide this information. I do think as we emerge from one public health strategy, hopefully we can take some of the lessons learned from that sort of a multi-departmental, multifaceted approach and apply it to this health crisis. We spend a lot of time in this community responding to I think what is the consequences of drug abuse and homelessness and property crime and violent crime, need a litter and I'd like to spend some time. We certainly need to address all those impacts but I think I'd also like to spend some time trying to do more upstream work and more preventative work. So thank you, thanks for all for taking the time and hopefully as more capacity emerges we'll be able to address this crisis. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Any other Supervisor have any comments they wanna make or input? Chair, I've got some questions. Yes, Mr. Coonerty. Thank you. My first question and just some clarification is that my understanding is that we currently have no dedicated funding for this range services program. Is that correct? That was correct. We did recently receive some additional funding, a grant called the California Health, California Harm Reduction Initiative, also known as CHERI, but it is primarily funded through general funds. Okay, so we received, and roughly how much was that grant for? What were those specified funding? It was approximately around 150,000 for multi-year grants. So for how many years we'll back cover? It is a three-year grant. Okay, thank you. And then my next two questions are in line with what Supervisor Coonerty was asking, just trying to get a sense of the overall population that we're dealing with here in our county. I noted in one of the attachments that there were 1,170 HSA clients who inject drugs. And I just wanted clarification if that was necessarily illegal drugs, such as the ones we're talking about, or if that could include insulin or other regular medications. Supervisor Coonerty, this is Mimi Hall. So what you're referring to is information from our clients who are accessing services through behavioral health. So when they're reporting on their primary routes of delivery, so it would not be for insulin, for medical reasons, for injection, and the question is posed as regarding your drug use. And I'll provide another point of clarification regarding Supervisor Coonerty's question, kind of around the same area, is for tobacco and other things, the state provides a lot of comprehensive efforts across the entire state and each of the counties to do surveys regarding certain risks and behaviors. And it's easy for us to have that data because it's collected statewide, but when it gets down to the more detailed information, local information that we don't, in order to get what's being asked for, we would have to start an effort to proactively collect it. But what we can do is provide data that we do have in terms of the patients who see us, of those people who are either our patients or our clients, their reported use. And that provides somewhat of a picture. Right, that's great. So we've got 1,170 clients who inject drugs of how many total? We have about 7,000 substances to sort of find out. So, okay, so then others would be using alcohol or not injecting, but that's the universe of 7,000 clients who are dealing with some kind of drug addiction. Correct, and this is reporting primary route or preferred route of administration. I see, got it. Regardless of the drug. Okay, thank you. Again, just to try to get a sense of how we compare with to the rest of the state, I really appreciated Dr. Fiore's review of some of the overdose deaths and how we compare to other counties. Although I'm a little confused at this point, I read again in one of the attachments that in 2018, our opioid overdose rate was 48% higher than the state average. So whereas it seemed like some of the other numbers that were shared suggested we were perhaps now lower than that, but is that approximately still where we're at? Is 48% higher than the state average? So again, I will defer to some of my panelists. Again, Behavioral Health Director Eric Riera or Dr. Fiore. So were you talking about one of my graphics that said that it was 40% higher in 2018? Actually, that stat came out of the attachment, risk of infectious disease outbreaks associated with injection drug use in the county's range service programs, role in prevention. And I was trying to reconcile it with some of the graphs that you'd shared, Dr. Fiore. Right, the data that I gave you was from California Department of Public Health in combination with my caseload. We have had some disparities in the past, but we have been working in collaboration over the last couple of years to tighten up the consistency with the data from my cases to what they're reporting. But in 2018, there isn't, for me there has been an increase in deaths since you were asking about deaths in 2018 for all comers of all drugs. I know that in the graphic from California Department of Public Health, it showed a decrease, but that was just with the opioids. And I'm not sure what this other data that you got where that came from. So I can't speak for their data, but as far as my graphs, I'm the only one investigating drug overdose deaths. So I would think that my data is more accurate because it reflects my reality. So I'm not sure where they got their data from. Yeah, looks like either, maybe according to CDPH. Yeah, you have to be careful with the data that comes from CDPH because they talk about very specific things. So they may be reporting specifically out of one type of drug and they also normalize all their data to a per capita basis too. So that kind of sometimes skews the data. I'd have to see exactly what you're looking at in order to help you interpret it. Okay. And just generally speaking, if we're seeing whatever the number is, I'll just use that for sake of comparison or example, this 48% number, if we were seeing 48% more overdoses from opioids in our community, could we assume that we have 48% more or larger per capita population of people who are using those substances in our community? I don't know where this 48% of drug overdose is coming from. That's a huge amount of increase, but if there are more deaths, then there has to be more people using in order to get that increase in deaths, but I don't know where that 40% increase is coming from. That seems just like a huge amount for this county. Maybe that number is for the state as a whole. I'm happy to share the document. It was one of our attachments for this item. That would be helpful. Sure. I wanted to move on to the SRIM Services program a little bit. I was looking at the December 2020 report and it looks like of 137 visits. Just six people or 4% of total visits received some kind of, I believe this is a drug, matte type referral. So yeah, drug treatment. So I'm just kind of curious, how come we're not prioritizing matte referral more in our process of working with people who visit SRIM Services? I can take that question and I definitely invite Danny or others to chime in. So when it comes to through our SRIM Services program, part of using a harm reduction approach, meeting people where they're at, is we provide that referral when people are interested in that referral. So when our remark that education was provided or referral was provided for drug treatment services, it's because there's a specific engagement and the participant identified motivation to seek drug treatment services. It is offered to every participant and we offer people wanna get no more information. Many times they don't, but whenever there's the opportunity for people to be engaged in a conversation, we take that opportunity and provide that referral. But certainly Danny would be able to provide more input on that. Okay, so you're saying that potentially 100% of patients who visit the SRIM Services program are offered some kind of drug treatment. I'm just asking for clarification because the SRIM Services program report says education offered drug treatment 4%. So is that, maybe there's some confusion there that that's like acceptance versus. So when, yes, I'm happy to clarify Supervisor Koenig. So when people, when an individual, a participant goes into a service program, we ask them what they need. We usually, so it is typical that our SSP staff will ask, would you like any information about MAP or other social service referrals? And then, but what we do is we don't check the box that we provided education or referral unless we had a significant conversation with that individual. Maybe they actually asked about resources for MAP. It could be that one of our peer mentors was down there working SSP and they were able to engage in a more detailed conversation and were able to actually do a referral for MAP services and set up an appointment. So that's when that box is checked that there was a, it was a significant encounter related to drug treatment education. Great, yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned peer counselors. I don't know if coach is still on the call, I also really wanted to commend you for overcoming a really difficult and debilitating addiction and emerging that much stronger today. And I'm really inspired to hear your story and I'm heartened to hear that you're also working as a peer mentor today. So my question is, do we currently, we're currently employing some number of people who have personally overcome addiction in the syringe services program? And is that correct? And if so, how many? Am I there? Can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me now? Yep. Okay. So our peer mentors, our peer support specialists, they go through a curriculum that we have set up for them on those services, you know, and once they go through that training and we get them through our VIP process and basically they're just, none of them are paid positions. I wish we had some paid positions. That'd be awesome to give them some paid positions, even if it's some extra help or something. I don't know if there's some way to work that in some way, but they're basically volunteering and they come in and they get a give back in that way. And that's what we have set up for now. You know, something down the road comes in. I mean, I would love it if we can offer them a job and then they could step right into the field that way, you know, or even that experience. Right now they're getting all the experience and they're giving back. Some of them, like I said, are in school. There was a couple other guys that wanted to share today too, but they have class at two o'clock. And so they weren't able to come and then other ones were working. So, but they're not paid, not paid positions. Got it. And how many people currently volunteer? And this is at the Syringe Services Program This is through our this is through our MAP program in partnership with the Syringe Service Program. So COVID, COVID, you know, like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan to get hit in the mouth, right? COVID hit us in the mouth and we had to rearrange and do everything and how we do our workflows and whatnot. And so that kind of really hampered things of getting people in here. You know, we had to change how we did stuff in the clinics, telehealth and whatnot. And a lot of our patients weren't coming in or they were coming in every couple months and it was just real quick in and out. So right now we have, I want to say we have like maybe around five, I'd have to go look that are actual peer mentors. We have, I think there was about 20 of them that went through the curriculum. And right now I'm in the midst of working with UCLA. We have a more updated and better curriculum for them that we're going to start teaching them and through more of our cohorts in there. So there's probably about five right now, but we're starting to ramp up. It's a little process. I'm not sure if you know for the VIP process just it's like getting a job. They got, we help walk them through, get in a cover letter explaining criminal background, the resume, saying a letter, why they want to be in this field. They have to go do fingerprints. There's a whole process of going through that. That takes some time sometimes. And you can imagine that with this pandemic and going in and out. So we're starting to ramp up. And I feel like we're going to start to get more and more of our patients that are in long-term recovery in vault and we're going to have more of our cohorts of these guys and women go through the training that I'm getting set up through UCLA for all of them. Great, that's really encouraging to hear. And I have to say, if I, you know, again, coaches experience was really inspiring. I can't think of a better use for some of that $150,000 grant that we got then creating some paid positions for people like coach to really be part of the face of our county program and directly working with people who are still struggling with addiction today. Yeah, so Rashan corrected me. We got three actively in working through the exchange. And then we have a bunch of them in the works. When I say in the works, they're doing the completing all those processes and steps. Okay, but those are still volunteer positions. They're all volunteer, yes. Right, right. Maybe we can get everybody to make some permanent positions for them. Right, happy to look at that. So this is just a simple question that I've been asked by folks in the community, various constituencies, just, you know, why wouldn't the county just totally focus on leading with a MAT program, right? Whether it's methadones or Suboxone. Why don't we just put all our resources in leading with that program instead of providing needles to people? Is that question to me or everybody? It's whoever wants to answer it. I mean, I'm just curious if, you know, have other communities tried this kind of approach? I mean, I definitely understand, you know, the public health challenges around limiting, diseases related to IV drug use. But has any community tried leading with offering MAT related services instead of needles? So to answer your question, this is Mimi. I'll help those as agency director. Thank you for your question. You have to think about the reason that we provide services and the approach that public health takes for any public health issue. It's kind of like saying we only wanna prevent heart disease by one approach and that's diet and exercise or one approach, it's medications. So the primary reason for syringe services programs is to address communicable disease from injection drug use. And there's a reason that these programs are under the California Office of AIDS because HIV is one of the key diseases that we're trying to prevent transmission, including other blood-borne pathogens, such as hepatitis. And so for that approach, if we're only focused on that and we know that harm reduction means you meet people where they're at. So rather than saying you cannot receive any services unless you agree to a full solution, really means that there are so many people in our community who are actively drug users that will not be able to access a whole school of services. We take the same approach when it comes to preventing pregnancy, when it comes to preventing STDs and chronic diseases as well. Rather than saying we will withhold treatment or not provide access unless you take the best, what we deem as the path for you to take, we meet people exactly where they're at. And so that's the approach for SSP and then the reason for SSP is always to reduce disease. The end goal of MAT is not to reduce communicable disease transmission of blood-borne pathogens. The two programs work hand in hand and MAT is an avenue to get people have drugs, to get them into recovery, but it's certainly not the solution for reducing HIV transmission and hep C transmission treatment. Thank you for that explanation. I would also say, this is Danny, you can't force nobody to do anything, you know? There's a saying, you know, what if you could take a horse to the water but you can't make them drink? But the other part of that is you can make them thirsty, right? And so the way we make them thirsty is having our peer mentors and our other staff be in there to be able to be there to catch them at that time and meet them where they're at. You can't say, everybody has to do MAT because this ain't, I always tell people, this ain't a cookie cutter treatment, you know? Well, for some people doesn't work for other people, you know, and that's why this, like me was saying, this is one avenue, you know? So we can't try to force everybody down that avenue. We're gonna have a lot of problems with that, you know? And we just got to work with people where they're at and when they're ready to come and us making them thirsty, every time they come in there, you see how Jen was saying it's offered to everybody. You know, they're gonna say one day and that's been my experience. All right, man, Danny, I'm ready, man. I'm tired of this, man. How do I get connected, man? You know? Mm-hmm, thank you. Yeah, I like that analogy. You can't force a, you can lead on horse to water, you can't force them to drink, but you can make them thirsty. Just a couple more quick questions. I was really encouraging to hear that we began a MAT program in jails in August and the midst of the pandemic. And I'm just curious, you know, how we're managing the transition when people get out. I, you know, I understand from other programs like Rhode Island that that's really the critical piece is making sure that when people get out and now they, you know, have access again to maybe some of the injection drugs that they were using before, how do we ensure that they continue treatment? So we're on a, it was every Tuesday and now I think we're going once a month with the jail, a bunch of different agencies and the county and we've been working through that since August, maybe a little bit before August. And so if somebody needs MAT services, they call us, whatever agency that is and then they connect them. And so that is working. And as if things don't work out, we kind of check in all with each other and figure out what went wrong and how we do things better. And, you know, people are still learning, we're still growing as a county and different agencies. And so that is working right now. It is up and running. And it's starting to, people are starting to come in. I know Catherine, you want to say something? Yeah, thank you, Danny. I know it's weird calling me Catherine. My name's Katie, but it says Catherine. So actually I just wanted to address, I know that Sarah Fletcher is actually on, she was going to be doing the presentation for probation. And so I just want to kind of add a little bit about our Prop 47 cafes grant. Part of this is that the sheriff's department does have a position that's a discharge planner that is specifically for the MAP program. And so once someone is connected, there is one position that is currently in the process of getting hiring that will link them to the clinic or other services for MAT. But then part of the cafes grant is a six million, a little bit under $6 million grant that came into probation that really supports decreasing the population with substance use in the criminal justice system. And part of that is that there are two positions that are called discharge planners that are currently hired by Encompass that can provide linkage to services from the jail into treatment. And so it kind of goes beyond just doing the assessment and being able to case manage to support for people who are not linked to other services or other programming. And so with someone that's linked to collaborative courts, we work with them, we get them out of the jails as soon as possible, but then there are several other people that are not linked. And so these discharge planners are specifically for that. And a lot of that is not only linking to MAT services, but also linking to detox treatment and also housing. So part of the cafes grant also has a significant portion that is for treatment funds for people who don't qualify for maybe AB 109, things like that. And so there's this full continuum of care that is happening in order to get people out of incarceration, link to services, and then also moving them forward so that they can kind of address their substance use in advance before it becomes kind of a repeat into the criminal justice system. Right, so the majority of people have a discharge planner to work with is what you're saying. And our goal is to hire two, but we have one today. We have two discharge planners that are through the cafes grant that is within Compass. And then we have one that the sheriff's department has hired that is just about to start that's specifically for the MAT program that's in the jail. Got it, thank you. My final question is, I know we're trying to create a centralized syringe litter reporting service. And I was just curious, I think this would be a question for Mimi. If we've looked at using the My Santa Cruz County app as a way to do that, I know today that I pull up the app on my phone as a way to report encampments or potholes or other kinds of trash. And it would seem natural enough to use that same app to report needle litter. And maybe there's already have been some reports through that app and have any needle related reports come through that app today and have you considered using it in the future? Thanks for the question. Yes, we have had lots of discussion about using the existing app as well as other apps. I think the barrier, the reason we're deferring the report and recommendations is less because we don't have ideas, but more because we want to engage not only our FSC advisory board, but also we have city partners that we need to work with because the directive of the board was for a centralized systemic approach. And we want to make sure that all of the partners that are a part of public works of disposal of all, there are many, many stakeholders that we would like to bring together. And there may be a very, very simple solution which is find a contractor to do that once we put the system in place. I will say that when we get to that place, part of the barrier is funds. You asked a question before about dedicated funds for the program. So we don't have any permanent staff that look truly funded for the program. We do get the grant that Tufa-Rero mentioned and then out of, out of the not county cost or general funds that we apportion that we get as an agency that we apportion to public health more than 20% go to support the syringe services program because it's not like it's a, there's a dedicated funding stream from CDPH to the state to do that. And then we add our epidemiological staff, we add our admin staff, we achieve a public health. So there's a lot of folks who are working on this and we're using public health discretionary dollars to fund it. And it's getting harder and harder because of the financial situation of the health services agency in the county. So we're trying to find ways to fund things that live both in and outside of public health in partnership with, with other partners who have responsibility in those areas such as disposal. I'm just clarifying what you said, Director Hall. So of the 20% of discretionary funds that HSA receives, or sorry, of the discretionary funds that HSA receives from the general fund, 20% are somehow involved in the syringe services program? No, let me clarify. So HSA receives a certain amount of net county cost and every division receives some. So of public health, so syringe services program lives in the public health division. So of the entire public health divisions, net county cost or general fund contribution, over 20% goes to support the cost of the syringe services program. And over time, as we've gotten more directives from the board and asked to expand the program and accessibility and, you know, we've had several directives this year. The cost of the program continues to increase, but we have no additional funds set aside to do those things. So we do the best that we can with the discretionary public health funds that we have, but it often means that our staff are simply just working over time, trying to make things happen. Thank you. With clarification and for the hard work. That's all my questions. Thank you. Hey, Supervisor Caput, did you have any questions? Are you? Yes, real quick. I don't expect detailed answers on all this, but I want to thank all of you for being, seems like we have a wealth of information here at our disposal. So let's take advantage of it. Any one of you could probably comment on this, mental health counseling. When somebody is trying to get off of an addiction, would you say all of them need follow-up mental health counseling? Hi, I can start with a response. Hey, how you doing, Eric? Good, how are you Supervisor Caput? Okay, good to see you. I think when you look at the success of each of our programs, it's based on a combination of different approaches, counseling being one of them. Often we're supporting counseling with medication assistants, such as the program that Danny oversees. So it's often a tailored response based on the person's needs, but the more components that we can add and that they're accepting of the higher success rate we're likely to have on a long-term basis. Okay, and then I guess, let's just take a couple of situations that have happened that our office has dealt with trying to refer people and get help. A single mom will take and the dad's gone and the mom has an addiction. Now the children then end up with our child's protective services and all of that. Are they getting counseling and also they're getting a lot of services from the county? In terms of the children? Yes. So behavioral health has a formalized relationship with our human services division and we get referrals directly from them, particularly from child welfare. So we're often the ones that are working directly with those children and helping to support the children through the services that we offer. And we're also often working with the parents as well and helping connect the parent who has the substance use disorder with services in the community. Yeah, that's where it gets real difficult. Like the mom will say, hey, I want my kids back. I want my kids back, but they're still addicted. It does get difficult, but it's often a strong motivator for parents as well. And it's something that we can work with them to support that as a goal. Their goal being to get their children back in the home. There are certain conditions that often come with that and we use that to help support them connecting with and remaining in treatment very often. Right, and so we're also talking with like CASA court appointed advocates or whatever for the children too. Yeah, there's often a number of different groups and advocates involved in that family's care. And we're trying to coordinate and use whatever support we can to ensure that the needs of the family are met, both for the kids and the parent. And all of this seems to be overlapping until the other problems we're having like homeless problems right outside my door here at the vet's hall. We have 71 people here and some with the mom and their children. So I guess we're dealing with them also, right? We are, and I also wouldn't, I would be remiss in not saying that the impacts of having schools closed for such a long period of time has resulted in lots of kids that we would ordinarily be receiving referrals from the school for behavioral health services. That's declined significantly because kids are home right now and we're just not seeing those referrals come in. So I know in behavioral health we're looking forward to seeing schools reopened so that we can get those connections back in place and provide access to the services that they need. Yeah, I just saw four children during our break that are here. And I guess they're set up with the school somehow also. I hear that's all, I'm not sure about that though. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you, Supervisor. I don't think that there's any more comments from the board. I don't know if we have anybody from the public that wanted to comment on this. We do not have speakers for public comments. Pardon me, we do? We do not, no. Okay, okay. Well, this has been a very enlightening discussion for two hours and I really appreciate this report. I think, thank you everyone for participating and presenting in this. And I think we'll just make a, if I could entertain a motion to defer this to May for a report with recommendation on we're improving the syringe litter and I'm sure the other aspects of this subject will become up at that time. If I could just have a motion and a second to do that. I'll move the recommended action. Second. Second by Koenig. Okay, please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay, that concludes our board meeting for today. I wanna thank everybody for participating in this last discussion, very, very interesting. We will adjourn this board of supervisors meeting of February 23rd, 2021. Everybody have a safe week. Thank you very much for everything. I'm really going to have a late lunch. Thank you.