 Okay, we'll go ahead and call, good afternoon. We are going to go, I'm going to go ahead and to order. This is the 1130 a.m. session of the June 22nd, 2021 meeting of the city council. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website at cityofsantacruz.com. All council members are participating in this meeting remotely. I'll look for staying home to view today's city council meeting. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in at the beginning of the item you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and then listen through the phone. Please note there's a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. When it is time for public comment, please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak during public comment, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The time rule of then be set to two minutes. You may hang up once you have commented on your item of interest. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you mayor, councilor. Mayor. Calentary Johnson. Here. Here. Brown. Oh sorry, Brown. Here. Cummings. Here. Boulder. Here. Vice mayor Brunner. President, and I'd also like to inform the council that I will be leaving from 12 to 1 p.m. for required commitment. And mayor Meyers. I'm present. Okay. Next we have our parks department director, Tony Elliott. We will be here for the parks and recreation month presentation. Welcome Tony. All right. Thank you mayor Meyers and members of the city council. I'd like to introduce our recreation supervisor, Jessica Bond, who will give a short presentation on July as parks and recreation month. Hey Tony, it's Rachel. I'm going to make sure Jesse's on since there was a delayed moment. Yep, thanks. Thanks everybody. She's jumping on right now. Okay. Thank you for your, sorry we're late, Tony and Rachel. No problem. No problem. We're ready to go. Hi everyone. Let me get this pulled up. Welcome Jesse. Thank you. Thank you everybody for giving us this time to share. Parks and Recreation Month with you. One can see my screen for this opportunity to share and celebrate July as Parks and Rec. This is always a really fun month for us to celebrate and this year it's even more meaningful as we are back in action this summer. Junior lifeguards are back. The London Nelson Community Center has opened. Our classes have expanded and the civic is taking limited reservations for October and beyond and our parks, beaches and open spaces continue to be more popular than ever. Felt like we had so much to offer this year. We have created a list of activities for every day in July. These activities and events can be found at cityofsantacruz.com forward slash Parks and Rec events. We did want to highlight a few events during this meeting. Mayor Myers has teamed up with the county and other city mayors to bring outside the frame. Each frame has been created by a won't be displayed all over the county and the city of Santa Cruz's frames will be along West Cliff. You can join Mayor Myers on a walk, June 26th at 3.30 p.m. Meeting at Bethany Curve and West Cliff Drive. And if you can't make that date, that's okay. All the frames will be up through the summer to enjoy any time. Beach cleanup days, this is new. For those of you who've been on council, we know Parks and Rec loves a little competition. So we are challenging each of you council members to pick one of our beach cleanup days, gather your constituents, and clean up the beaches this summer in July. This is a friendly competition to see who can gather the most people. The beach cleanup signups will be posted soon and found at santacruz.com forward slash Parks and Rec events. On July 24th, from 10 to four, the London Nilsa Community Center will be hosting Day in the Park. Fun, family-friendly day for all to enjoy. And this summer we are bringing back our ever-popular City Hall tree walk in person with Urban Forester Leslie Keady. That will be our very last on July 31st at 9 a.m. meeting at City Hall. And last but certainly not least, we're offering up our walking adventure group WAG is happening every Thursday from 9.30 to 11.30 a.m. So all these events, again, can be found with this QR code if anyone wants to take a snap out of that, or at citysantacruz.com forward slash Parks and Rec events. And please let us know if any questions and thank you so much. Thank you, GST. Thank you. Thanks for putting it all in one of those QR codes. That's super cool. So, and can people access that on the website too if they hold up their phone to that and all that? They sure can. Yes, we'll have that available on the website. Yeah, and on the posters as well. So those should be going up around town shortly and that QR code is right on top. Thanks so much. Any council members with comments or questions for Parks or GST? I am not seeing the crowd. Okay, thanks again. Can't wait to get out. Thank you so much. Thank you, GST. Thank you. Next up, we have a proclamation recognizing June as Fire Readiness Awareness Month and June 22nd as Fire Readiness Awareness Day. And I will go ahead and read the proclamation. I see that Chief Hydrick is in the crowd and I'll see if he has any comments after that. Where the over 4 million acres of land were burned and thousands of homes were destroyed in the state of California during the 2020 wildland fire season. And whereas over 83,000 acres were destroyed during the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire. And whereas the threat of wildland fire is increasing in the city of Santa Cruz due to drought and climate change. And whereas the city has recognized this threat and has made vegetation management a priority within this and privately owned property, fostering the creation of fire-wise neighborhoods. And whereas today there is an increased awareness of wildland fire, the proactive steps that the city and community can take to be prepared, the value of the fire-wise neighborhoods taking collective action to minimize the impacts of a wildland fire, vegetation management and emergency preparedness. And whereas the city is a leader in the county creating fire-wise neighborhoods, having created the first fire-wise community in the county within the Prospect Heights neighborhood followed by the Highland neighborhood. And whereas we as one community come together to promote fire readiness and prevention through groups such as fire-wise neighborhoods and promote best practices for fire prevention. Now, therefore, I, Donna Myers, mayor of the city of Santa Cruz by proclaim January 22nd, 2021 as fire readiness awareness day and the month of June, 2021 as fire readiness awareness month in the city of Santa Cruz and encourage all citizens to join me in this observance. So thank you, Jason. I don't know if you have any comments today or not, but if you do, please go ahead and chip in as needed. Thank you, mayor. I'm going to be giving a presentation on fire risk as part of the city manager update, but I just want to thank you for making that proclamation, raising the awareness and the preparedness efforts that we can do collectively. I'd also like to really thank Abby Young and Trine Bell. I don't know if they're online right now for stepping up into that leadership role and really collecting their neighborhood to do actions that benefit everyone. And I think the more we do that, the better off we all are. So I just want to thank those people, but also everyone for having that awareness for what we can do together to protect everyone. Yeah, and I'll echo that as well, chief. I want to recognize the folks from that Firewise Group, Firewise Groups who are listening in today, and I see some names here that I recognize. Yeah, and I'm just very pleased that your neighborhoods are just really getting involved and taking it upon yourself. I also want to recognize the FireSafe Council work for our county, their really instrumental group and teaching neighborhoods how to make themselves fire safe. We hope we can somehow get more resources to do this work in the future. We'll see what happens, but really appreciate those neighborhoods that are working hard to try to take care of themselves and be ready for fire season. So thank you all, and we look forward to more Firewise neighborhoods getting created in our city. Okay, the next proclamation, unfortunately, the recipient was not available today, so I will go ahead and make sure that individual is able to receive that. Bonnie, should I read that or what's the best procedure for that moving ahead? You could read it or you could just mention that the proclamation is being issued. Yeah, this proclamation is recognizing Kid Day and Dennis is retiring as part of the Com Center, has served a long career here and we want to recognize him. Unfortunately, he was not able to be here today. I'll be presenting the proclamation to him just via a handoff a little less than this, but we do want to recognize that July 23rd, 2021 as Dennis Kid Day here in the city of Santa Cruz, and thank Dennis for all his work in the decades he's been here and we sort of a little bit of the interest in time of being a little bit late today. Go ahead and get that proclamation to him and just do you want to recognize his work and I'll go ahead and move on to the next item today and that is the annual climate action update and I'll invite Tiffany Weiss-West, our Sustainability and Climate Action Manager up. Thank you very much, Mayor and good morning, Mayor and Council members. Let me just go ahead and share my screen please. You should be able to see my screen now. Let me know if you cannot. You can see it, yeah, Tiffany, thank you. Okay, great, thank you. So I'm Tiffany Weiss-West, the Sustainability and Climate Action Manager and I am here today to share with you the progress on our 2020 Climate Action Plan. At a glance was adopted in 2012. It's sunset just last year in 2020 and it consists of in addition to two greenhouse goals which are related to or rather at year 2020 and 2050 we also have 12 milestones or goals that are tracked through 13 indicators each of which has a target and there were 254 actions specified in that plan in order to achieve those milestone targets. 2008 is the baseline year for our milestones and because of COVID and just due to normal data availability, much of our data was not available for 2020 or it had, it was an anomaly year obviously because of COVID and did not necessarily reflect trends in the typical year. And so we are in the mix of 2019 and 2020 data for the close up for the report today. So of those 254 actions, about 70% of them are either completed, ongoing or in progress and I'm happy to report that about $244,000 has been invested, reinvested in municipal projects via our internal carbon. So before I get into sharing where we landed on these indicators and targets I do wanna mention that one challenging thing with tracking these data are that the data sources frequently change or they change formats. Also in some cases they don't exist for all years and so I'll try to mention some of that but that really plays into, as you will see we did not achieve the majority of our although having very robust progress. The other piece to this is that our indicators and targets were set very high to reflect the environmental ethic of our community. So while in many cases we might say be leading the nation in a particular metric we still did not achieve our goal. So let me go ahead and jump into that. So in terms of milestones that we achieved really have a shining example here with our UCSC sustainability projects we exceeded our goal and I wanna point to some partnerships with Waste Recovery. We currently have a project with the social and environmental justice interns to support our climate action plan and the equity advisement and of course with our resilient coast project recently we partnered with the coastal science and policy grad program. I know that some of the staff also teach some of the UCSC staff sustainability curriculum. So lots going on there in terms of green businesses we're holding about steady almost 200, 197 but I'm gonna go ahead and post credit here for that because it does fluctuate depending on who's renewing. I think it's a real testament to our program that we held steady through COVID and then on the bike mode split this is a really kind of an interesting metric even though we are just behind Davis in terms of the number of folks that can we have inexplicably seen that metric increase to 10.2% thus achieving the goal in 2016 but then inexplicably kind of decreasing over the past few years to where it stands now at 7.6%. Claire Globley, the transportation planner tells me that the way that that question's asked in the census says what do you use for your longest part of your commute? So oftentimes that may be a confusing way to answer that question. However, she does expect with potentially a bike share coming back with a lot of folks getting on the road during COVID and with the efforts that we're doing with education, with partners like Ecology Action we are really expecting to see this metric tick up the way it really should reflect what's going on here in the city. We do have a number that we're not achieving but there are some bright spots here. No pun intended on the solar we do have a really strong solar penetration although we did not reach our goal. You can see the actual numbers in parentheses following each of these indicators. We also wanna give a ton of credit to our public works facilities and energy divisions. Although we did not meet our goal on meeting 30% of municipal energy load with renewables or reducing our load by 40%, we have made substantial progress there including the installation of three major solar PV installations last year in 2020 and some major energy efficiency rather innovative projects to reduce energy load. We are still working on what that end number is gonna look like. So that's why you don't have the end number for reducing energy load. Also in terms of waste diversion this is another interesting one where we experienced a high of around 69% in 2016 but then that has reduced over time since 2016 to about 60.3% diversion. And in speaking with the waste diversion manager certainly China's national sword policy has come into play where they are no longer accepting many kinds of recyclables. And then second, we really have begun to look at measurement and reporting. And while we might say that there's a percentage diverted is that diverted amount actually clean and able to be recycled? And so now that we are really only accepting clean recyclables, we're seeing that that was probably artificially high in the past. Also wanna give a lot of credit to our transportation team. Everyone knows that we've just really seen lots of green, green bike paths on the road and all kinds of infrastructure projects. Also on the urban tree canopy, of course, Parks and Rec just completed the 503rd tree planting funded by Cal Fire, as well as their new street tree plan. And then lastly on expanding energy efficiency to 30% of homes, I really shout out to the green building program. And while electrification wasn't actually explicitly stated in our climate action plan, as you all know, the city did adopt and put into place a natural gas prohibition. And I'm happy to report that the number of units or development units that are going through 100% electrified buildings is double what we projected when we brought this ban to council last year. So lots of progress on that front. In terms of our overarching community greenhouse gas emissions goals, there were two. They are aligned with the state goals to reduce emissions from a 1990 base by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Right now what you see on the screen are our community greenhouse gas inventories from all sectors. And this is as determined by AMBEG, the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments. We do have a patchwork of internally prepared inventories that we right now are trying to reconcile between the two, but under both we have achieved the 2020 greenhouse gas target of a 30% reduction by 2020. And that is largely because of our participation in central coast community energy. We are on track to meet that 2050 goal, but I will point out that with an executive order this California state has a 2045 target for carbon neutrality. So that will supersede our 2050 goal coming out our planning process. So we did achieve our emissions goal. And that takes me into what's next here. And I know that y'all know that the Climate Action Plan 2030 is happening and the goal of that project, which we're gonna be kicking off today moment the first engagement on the visioning to the community, but our goal is what is the most equitable pathway in year to carbon neutrality? And for those who might not know what carbon neutrality is that is no net release of carbon dioxide equivalent or associated greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So really reducing the amount that we are responsible for. And you can see our logo, which is the first time we've had it in public, resilient together. This really ties together three familiar city initiatives, the themes from those initiatives. And that would be resilient coast Santa Cruz, our sea level rise initiative that just wound up stronger together, recent public works, infrastructure theme and re-envision Santa Cruz, the building a future for everyone, which is our interim recovery theme. So really, you know that folks are interested in every issue and every issue's connected to climate. Climate really, we're looking to become more resilient together. And so our visioning process begins today. This is the first of four major engagements in the Climate Action Plan process. And I really wanna acknowledge and thank our External Community Climate Action Task Force, a new set of equity advisors, and our internal sustainability team as well as our consultants for really, getting us to this point, it's really been a year of planning and preparation to launch this publicly today. So I wanna invite you all and the community to be at SantaCruise.com or slash Climate Action Plan to check out three flexible ways to share your hopes, your dreams, your vision for what a sustainable and equitable 2030 in Santa Cruz might look like. So please go and check that out. Again, lots of flexible ways, virtual, live, or just shoot us an email. We've got some prompts for you on it. Again, really hoping to connect to as a whole, whole stream values. And again, making that connection that all things relate to climate. We will utilize this information and identify these value themes in the next step of our project, which is setting. I will just show you, this is our virtual visioning collage. Our Climate Action Task Force has gotten it started and folks can share words, videos, sounds, imagery, get creative, selfie videos. We're gonna be inviting city council members to share selfie videos of their vision. And you got a QR scan tag too that'll link you right there, just in case folks wanna hop over to that or if they refer to this later on. But just to close things out, I do wanna share the Climate Action Project timeline. So again, we are in this phase one, this engagement. The yellow bubbles are the engagement and the purple bubbles are the different kind of phases in the process. So we are closing out this 2020 Climate Action Plan. You will actually be getting an FYI in early August with the consultant technical memorandum on the closeout and we'll be spending July fine tuning that. And then we'll move on to goals in the next phase of our engagement and our project as well as developing strategies. I'm really excited about announcing the launch today. Check it out. We do have a robust social media campaign going on and folks can opt into the email or we are trying for the first time text notifications for the project and that can be done at cityofsantacreets.com forward slash climate action plan. So thank you for your support on all things climate city council members. We really appreciate it and I'm happy to take any questions that you might have. Thank you so much, Tiffany. That was great, really great. Do council members have questions for Tiffany? Let's see. Council member Collins, I just wanted to say thank you so much incredible work. I'm looking forward to the next iteration of our plan. Thank you, Tiffany and Tiffany. I have a question, Tiffany. Always looking for those funds to get things done with. And I understand, I believe, there is a lot of climate change money sort of being discussed at the federal level as well as the state level. And how do you, how do we support? I know you're kind of a one person show but I'm just curious about how we're able to support and be competitive as you move through some of our goals but also knowing that there's gonna be a lot of federal investment and some of the kinds of things I think that, I would imagine the city's pretty geared up and ready to go on in some ways. That question, mayor. So I would say in the near term, the things that the city is queuing up to get ready to go is are the prioritized projects on our interim recovery plan, which in my area of responsibility includes the resilient post initiative in the West Cliff Drive Plan implementation which has about a million in projects over this next 10 to 13 years. In terms of the climate action plan, we do call out a funding and implementation portion which will be developed later in the year. But in the near term, I do know that the city manager's office has engaged the grant writing firm to help us to prioritize, to project the opportunities that are coming both on the federal and state level and then map out, okay, what are the priorities? What are matching the projects to the opportunities? Now we know that grants are not going to solve all of this both on the climate adaptation side and the emissions mitigation side. So of course, operation is on the table potentially as well as philanthropy. That is something that is rather untapped in this area and we have been doing some relationship building to see how we might be able to incorporate that into an overall funding strategy that really helps us to advance agenda. Yeah, that's exciting. I just happened to be looking at some things going on in Monterey County with regards to multi-benefit climate change oriented projects, especially on the Carmel River. Yeah, I just saw that they were able over the last 10 years, pulled in about $63 million to be queued up to be able to kind of put the pieces together and it looked like a very large coalition between sort of nonprofit partners in science and academics with the local government. So it was pretty exciting and it reminded me to ask you of this today. So it's good to hear some of those things are being explored. And now you have that resource at least. Very excited about hopefully what the commitment continues to focus on it seems like we're well positioned. So thank you for all your work over the last many, many years. You are quite welcome. Yeah, and thank you to all of you for your leadership and supporting these planning processes that really are positioning us to access and unlock the funding. So thank you. Thanks, Tiffany. Okay, not seeing any other hands. We will go ahead and end with our presentations for today. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsanacuse.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be opened for public comment during today's meetings are number 13 through 46 with the exception of item 45 on our agenda. I'd like to ask council members if there are any statements of disqualification today. No hands. I'd also like to ask our city attorney, Tony Condati, to just come online for a moment here. There's been a number of communications that we've received, Tony, regarding conflict of interest and some FPPC rules. And I'm wondering if you might be able to just provide some statement to just, you know, just in a public setting a little bit about some of those recent emails and concerns. Hope have been, you know, voicing during our meetings. Sure, I'd be happy to do that. Yes, you might recall during the council's consideration of amendments to chapter 636 regarding camping, there was a member of the public who made a claim that council members who owned real property within the city of Santa Cruz had a disqualifying conflict of interest based upon the notion that their property values would be by implementation of the camping ordinance. We considered that claim and rejected it out of hand because the camping ordinance really putting aside for the moment, whether the enactment of a city-wide set of regulations would have a bearing upon an individual parcel of real property or its value. We rejected that out of hand because under the conflict of interest rules, if a decision's effect upon a council member is the same as its effect upon the public generally, then there's an exception to the conflict of interest rules. That's exactly what the various iterations of the camping ordinance did. It examined an ordinance that enacted city-wide prohibitions on camping on public property and restrictions on camping on private property in the city and it replaced it with an ordinance that still maintains city-wide regulations on camping in various ways, but certainly its effect upon a member who owns real property or one who lives on real property would be very similar to its effect on the public generally. So we rejected that out of hand. There was also a claim made that an individual council member, Vice Mayor Bruner, who is employed by the Downtown Association that it would have an impact on source of income, namely the Downtown Association. And we rejected that claim out of hand as well. And the reason for that is that the Downtown Association is funded by assessments that are imposed upon properties and businesses and the assessments are annually levied by action of the city council and so the imposition or the adoption of a city-wide ordinance regulating camping has absolutely no bearing on the amount of revenue that the Downtown Association receives on a given year because the assessments are fixed based on things like square footage and street frontage and the type of business. And moreover, the Downtown Association expense are only limited by the amount of revenue that they receive. And so the adoption of the ordinance will have absolutely no bearing on how the Downtown Association functions or how much revenue it receives or is required to expend. There was a complaint then made to the Fair Political Practices Commission based on the bare bones allegations that were submitted to the FPPC. The FPPC did apparently open an investigation on the claim with respect to Vice Mayor Bruner, but we've since responded to that and are waiting for a response from the FPPC along that investigation. At least one other council member has received a note from the FPPC just acknowledging that a complaint has been filed, but not stating that an investigation has been opened as of yet. And that just came to our attention within the last couple of days. And so we'll be reaching out to the FPPC within the next week or so as well. But just to reiterate, from our perspective, the claims regarding disqualifying conflict of interest are specious at best. Thank you. Okay, I will ask the city clerk to announce any additions or deletions to today's agenda. There are none. Thank you. I'll make an announcement about our oral communications schedule today. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur at or around 6 p.m. today. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in at 6 p.m. I'd like to call on our city attorney to provide the report on the closed session, please. Myer's members of the city council. The closed session began right in early this morning at 8.30 a.m. The following items were discussed. First is liability claims, the claims of Bob Good, Jesse Steven Smith, or Stephan Smith, First Amendment Rights Preservation Society, Inc. And the claim of Ronald Chinnitz. Those are also listed for action on your consent calendar this afternoon. And two was public employment. The topic was the city manager recruitment. There was no reportable action on that item. Third was a conference with labor negotiators involving all bargaining groups. Court, council received report from the staff and there was no reportable action on that item. Legal counsel regarding existing litigation that the city's participating in. And that is a matter of city of Arcada at all versus specific gas and electric company. That case involves a challenge to PG&E's practice of collecting utility users tax net of greenhouse gas credits and there was no reportable action on that item. The last was your counsel involving anticipated litigation, potential initiation of litigation. There was one item of potential litigation discussed and no reportable action. Thank you, Tony. I'll now turn this over to our city manager, Martín Bernal, to provide updates on the city's business, COVID-19 response and events. Thank you, mayor and council. We do have some updates for you today. I'll start by just noting that we've had planned on doing a workforce development update by our water director, but given the lengthy meeting, we're gonna defer that to the next meeting. However, she did send out a informational item so you have some background information to prepare for the presentation in August. But today we will have first our fire chief do an update, all fire prevention and planning and then also does a brief update on COVID and then city attorney's office will do an update on the eviction moratorium status with respect to the state legislation and other issues. So I'll first turn it over to Chief Haiduk to do that presentation. Thank you. And mayor, city council, Jason Haiduk, your fire chief. Before talking about wildland, I just wanna give a brief update on COVID. We've been having weekly and bi-weekly meetings with the county health office and today was the last one for the foreseeable future and that's because our numbers are so good. We have a little over 50 active cases in the county, really low hospitalization rates. And one of the really big pieces of information of those who are eligible for vaccination are county. So those who are 12 and over, we have hit 70 plus percent of those people for being vaccinated. And so they're still continuing with that and they are looking to continue with the vaccination efforts. Hopefully by this fall, they'll be able to bring it to that age group that's younger than 12. And they're also looking for the variant resurgence of COVID this fall. But for right now as a whole within our county, within our state, we're in a really good position. And that's because of all the efforts that people have done. So that's positive news on the COVID front. So we're not done with it, but we're definitely in a lull and we are looking much better now than a year ago or even four months ago. So that's really positive news overall. At the request of city manager, wanted me to give an update for a wildland season that's coming up. And so I'm going to present some slides and then I'll take questions at the end here. So next slide Bonnie, plan potential here in Santa Cruz because it's different than other areas in the state and there's some really specific reasons for that. I want to talk about some of the efforts that we've done as a city and then also within our community and then some specific focus areas for wildland, not just fires in general. So the next slide. This is a picture of a fire that occurred in Moor Creek. And before we get to this point where we have air tankers dropping fire retardant and we have fire engines with firefighters responding, there's a number of things. And wildland fire, think of it as a record. And it's not necessarily a good record. But there's some things that have to happen and some of them we can control and some of them we can't. So one of them that we look at is fuel and those are things that burn and we can manage those a little and I'll talk about what we've done to do that. We can look at the ignition sources which is really important and we can minimize the number of ignitions and where they are within that fuel. And then the weather, we can't control it but we can become acutely aware of it. So in order for a wildland fire to happen before this happens in our city, we have to have that fuel come together with the ignition source and then weather that really drives it. Next slide. So when we're talking about fuel, we're talking about all vegetation. And most vegetation is drier later in the summer and really that's predicated on how much rain we've received. And if you look at the slide on your left, that's in the 2019 to 2020 and we've received about 50 to 70% of our average rainfall. If you look at the slide on your right, we're looking at 25 to 50% of our average rainfall. And so those, that fuel, the grass, the brush, the trees, they're really drought stressed right now and they are, they're dry. And if you go to the next slide, I'll talk a little bit about what that means for us in the firefighting world. So this is a bunch of numbers. And what this is, is we do sampling of brush and trees and grass. We measure the relative humidity or the amount of moisture that it's holding compared to previous years and previous months. And so what I wanna highlight here is the old growth in red. And we are four to six weeks ahead of schedule and we are looking at historic lows within our fuels. And for those of you who hike or mountain bike or run are forced right now. And so what that means is, I'm gonna use an analogy here. That newspaper that was delivered in your driveway, in the middle of winter, the entire paper soaked. You couldn't catch it on fire if you tried. In spring, summer, it's probably a little bit damp on the outside because of fog, but the inside is dry. In the middle of summer, the entire thing is dry and it's ready to catch on fire. What we're seeing within our fuels, we are looking at historic lows back to 2014 at the height of our drought as far as where we are for fuel moisture. I fully expect that the next sampling that occurs in July, we're gonna be up two months ahead of schedule as far as how dry those fuels are. And that's everything. Those are our redwood trees, that's our grass. And so this is our fuel. It's receptive to catching on fire. Next slide. And so within the firefighting world, there's a number of different services that we look at. And this is just a forward-looking based on weather, based on fuel, what kind of conditions might be available for a wildland fire. And come September, the outlook for our area within California specifically, we're above average based on dry conditions, dry fuel, and the potential for a fire happening is higher. Doesn't mean it's going to happen, but if it does, it's going to have more of an impact than it would in a normal precipitation year. So we are very much following this, and this will get updated, but this is kind of the macro view for wildland. Again, this is for fuel. So let's go to the next slide. And like I said before, we can, for fuel, we can't control precipitation, but we can manage it. And when we talk about vegetation management, a lot of people think that we're clear-cutting everything and we're not. And so some of these before and after pictures, there are subtle differences. So we have eliminated some of the smaller fuels. The vegetation is still there, but we provided those horizontal and vertical breaks so that if a fire occurs, it can be put out or it won't have that catastrophic impact and spread really quickly. And so this is a project that we did in Pogonet consisted of 13 acres. This is clearing our access ways in there to make sure that we can get in there if there is a fire, but also minimizing the impact of a fire that occurs there. Next slide. This is a project that's being undertaken right now within Arroyo Seco. We received a grant for $100,000 and we're looking at doing vegetation management and sending out the fuel on a city-owned portion to Arroyo Seco. And it's approximately 26 acres, so really large area. And again, making sure that all those roads are accessible, that we send out that fuel and that if we do have a fire, it doesn't spread rapidly, it doesn't have that catastrophic consequence. And so these are just an example of some of the projects that we as a city have undertaken within our open spaces. Next slide. And that vegetation management extends beyond our city limits. What you're seeing here is all the infrastructure that the department is responsible for. And during the TZU fire, this was a really big deal for us. And so we've gone out and worked with Water Department, looking at Liddell Springs, looking at Laguna Creek, looking at Loch Lomond, Newell Creek. And during the TZU fire, we went out to these pump stations, to these water intakes, to these different infrastructure areas and made sure that if a fire came through there, it didn't impact over 100,000 people that depend on the city of Santa Cruz Water Department for their water. And I have to give a lot of credit to the Water Department and Rosemary for being forward looking specifically within the Newell Creek Dam and the Loch Lomond area for what they can do to minimize the impact of a fire within that watershed. So our efforts are pretty widespread, not just within the city itself, but also for the totality of all the different things that we're responsible for. Next slide. So here within the city, this is within our wildland urban interface, or Louis. So these shaded areas represent the city-owned portions of our open spaces within the city of Santa Cruz. And this is what we've really kind of concentrated going forward. Next slide. And this slide shows all of our wildland urban interface, city-owned, privately-owned, but this is what we consider to be our Louis. And each one of these dots represents a specific fire incident. Not all of them are equal. Some of them were a simple two-by-two piece of graph zipper. Some of them were up to 14 acres or two acres. So, but each one of these represents a fire within our wildland urban interface. And again, if we have that really dry fuel, we have that ignition source, and then we have the weather that's driving it, we have the potential for a catastrophic incident, which is what we're trying to avoid. Next slide. One of my focus areas has been within this area specifically, and it's been for two reasons. One, this is our open space in the city, and it also represents the most frequent ignition events within the city of Santa Cruz. I am happy to say that we've managed to decrease the number of ignitions or the number of fire vents within this area, and we've also managed to do a lot of vegetation management to try to minimize that risk. But we have to get it right every single time. Each one of these fires represents potential, it's a condition spreading. And also, Pogonuf is connected, is the most continuous portion of our city that is connected to the rest of the wildland going up outside of city limits. So we've managed to decrease the number of incidents within there from a high in 2019 down to 35 in 2020. And we've had a few this year, and we've been fairly aggressive about educating, but also doing outreach and trying to minimize those ignition sources within our wildland-urban interface. And again, this is just concentration within our city. Next slide. So what we need to do collectively, and we're doing this, is identifying areas that we can do vegetation management, minimizing those ignition sources, making sure that we have access to all of those areas if needed, and making sure that we maintain those fuel rates where it doesn't spread quickly. Also, the water department has been doing a new pre-watershed vegetation management on a regular basis. And again, they're looking at the totality of lockdown and for our most significant water source. What we can do also outside of the city is support those fire-wise neighborhoods that take those actions that protect those neighborhoods and making sure that our people are doing the same actions to minimize the spread of a fire. Next slide. And fire-wise, as a nationwide program, we started the first program in Santa Cruz County here in the city, and it really teaches the people what they can do to protect their homes and their neighborhoods. And the most critical component is that zero to five feet around their house and making sure that they've separated those things that are flammable. They're standing out from that. We have three active groups. Two of them have been formally recognized, and they've done a lot of work. Prospect Heights has had annual events for removing brush from their neighborhood. The Highland Group has been doing a Goat Fund B, and they're gonna be moving forward for doing vegetation management in their area. The Western Drive is not formally recognized yet, but they're working on it, and we would encourage anyone who wants former group to reach out to the fire department. We will provide that technical expertise to move you through that, but we need those people that wanna take that on themselves. Next slide. And then always we want people to be prepared. And if you come by the fire department, we will give you this brochure. If you come to our website, you can download this, but this is across all different emergencies that can happen, whether it's a fire, an earthquake, a flood, having a plan that you can put in place if needed is what we want. And so this is a checklist that you can do in advance. And again, it goes across all different types of emergencies and disasters. Next slide. And then this is just a continuation of that preparation that we want people to do. And next slide. And again, for right now for 911 to contact you, go to, you can come to the city of Santa Cruz to our fire department website. You can go to Code Red, download the app, and it will push information out to you wherever you are for that incident. And this is how our 911 Center can get information to you in the middle of the night, middle of the day to let you know what to do and why. And next slide. And that's what I have for you. And I'm more than happy to answer any questions if you have them. I should turn council members for our fire chief. One question. Oh, I'm sorry, I see Sandy Brown. Who like council member Brown? Yeah, thank you for the presentation and for all of the work that has gone into doing all of this work that's led to us feeling a little bit safer around our wild hand or in her face. But I do wonder about your thinking about how we approach this summer given the likelihood of additional campers ending up in places like the Pogo Nip as camps are cleared. I know that that's where, I'm told at least that that's where some folks went yesterday. And so I guess I'm just, I'm wondering how you're thinking about approaching that. It's an extreme fire season. We all know that. I know we're all really, really worried. This is not unique to me, but I do wonder what's gonna happen and how we're thinking about what to do about that. It's a good question and it's a challenging situation. And so it's not the fact that people are sleeping. It's the fact that they are starting fires that can impact someone beyond that. Also, when we have people in a wooded area that's at high risk of a rapid rate of spread for a fire, they're at risk too. And so what we've been doing is doing outreach and education, identifying those spots. And I will say that the number of encampments in Pogo Nip and Sycamore Grove is radically decreased from previous years. And part of that has been our outreach and our education. And that's why you also have seen a number of ignitions that have started in that area has gone down. I don't know that we can ever get to 100% but doing nothing is not acceptable with the government. 100% but doing nothing is not acceptable with the risks not only for those individuals but for the community and the environment. As we get closer to July 1st and with our fuels being what they are and also Fourth of July, that outreach and that enforcement is going to increase. And so I'm partnered by the fact that we don't have as many people there that the efforts that we've done in previous years has really minimized the number of ignitions that have happened in that area. So I don't have a perfect answer for what to do for those who are unhoused right now but from a fire perspective and the impact doing nothing is I don't think that's acceptable for those individuals or for our community. Thank you. I just have one other question. As you were presenting and the same was true actually for the climate action plan I was trying to screen grab the presentation and then I thought I could just ask if it would be possible for us to get those presentations and I think they'd be helpful for the public to be able to access. So if we could get those on our city website as well that would be great. I think Bonnie, that's something that Bonnie can do. She has the PowerPoint. We can make sure that you get it and we can post it. Thank you. I had a question chief about the Firewise groups. I've talked with all of them off and on over the last several months or emailed with them and I know there's a lot of state money but it's very hard to get to in terms of the different channels it's getting into and I know that we just received some grants. Congratulations. The city doesn't have a source to help these groups right now, right? I mean, the grants that are coming to you are do you do that work directly or is there a way for neighborhoods to get access to that kind of work or do you do it together with them? I guess that's my other option. A little bit of both. I mean, this is kind of a changing landscape as far as what those funds are. So when the governor announces X amount of millions of dollars that are available for the state a lot of those are for state responsibility areas not city but I will say that having a recognized Firewise group having that organization in place and having a defined plan for what you want to do makes it more likely that you're going to be able to receive funds from whatever revenue stream there is as they become, as we become aware of them we try to push that out and work with them through the fire state council and also the different funding opportunities to grab a hold of those funds so that they can do that vegetation management. I don't have a magic answer for if you go here and this is the specific source and it is changing and sometimes what you read in the paper about those funds being available there's some nuances there about what entities are actually able to access those funds. I do see that in the near future and going forward so having that group that is already formed and ready to move forward makes it more likely that they're going to be able to access them. Okay, that's great. And these groups also, I mean if we had a local source we had a source coming out of the city that's in the other way that we could potentially continue to assist folks with these kinds of projects. Yeah, we really focused on the city-owned open spaces for extending city funds. We've done a little bit of support as far as delivering dumpsters for green waste for neighborhood cleanup but I think it's going forward that that collaborative effort is something that we need to do. Okay, thank you. Any other council members with questions? Next up. Okay, next up is the city attorney's office. Who's going to do an update on the direction moratorium status. And I think it's Stephanie, I think it's Matt. Good afternoon, mayor and city council members. At the last council meeting I spoke about the various eviction protections both residential and commercial evictions. Since our last meeting Governor Newsom issued Executive Order 821 which extended to local jurisdiction's authority to impose limitations on commercial evictions through September 30th of this year. So that means that the city's commercial eviction moratorium will remain in effect until September 30th, 2021. He did not indicate if that Executive Order would expire after that point or if he would be possibly extending it again another time. And at the last meeting I also spoke about the residential eviction protections provided under SB 91 which among other things prohibit a residential tenant from being evicted for failing to pay rent between the period of March 1st, 2020 and 30th, 2021. Again, that deadline is quickly approaching. This week we've just started seeing statements indicating that lawmakers are working on a bill to extend this eviction moratorium beyond the June 30th deadline. It's my understanding that in addition to extending the residential eviction moratorium while makers are also in the final state saying a $5.2 billion program that would pay off 100% of unpaid rent for qualifying residents with $2 billion of that set aside for unpaid utility bills. So from what I am reading it sounds like it is very likely that there will be an extension to the residential eviction moratorium. It's just that extension are still unknown. We could know as soon as sometime this week hopefully but my understanding is much of the conversations have kind of been kind of behind closed doors and very little information available but it does sound very likely. That's all I have. Happy to answer any questions to provide any additional information if you'd like. Thank you, Stephanie. Is there any council members on this? Sounds pretty hopeful. Council member Cummings and then council member Brown. Thanks for that presentation. I just wanted to make a few comments because I was able to connect with some of the staff over at community action board. And one of the things that they were mentioning is that there has been some faculties with getting funds out to people. So I just would encourage council members to connect with the action board because yeah, the infrastructure and the funding to kind of get the funds out has been problematic. And so I just think that as we continue moving forward with all this really understanding funds into the pockets of local residents is going to be critical. And given the discussions I've had previously it doesn't sound like right now but that's very easy. So just wanted to put that comment out there. Council member Brown. I'll thank council member Cummings for mentioning something that I also from CAB, I'm the city representative to the CAB board and we did talk about that as well. So really the call was for anybody who has the ability to get the word out through various networks to let them know that they should be looking to CAB as a resource right now. They do have some administrative hurdles related to the way the funding streams happen but they as an agency work really hard to be nimble and make it really as smooth as possible. So I really encourage people to, you know don't be afraid of the potential bureaucracy and all of that, they work with you and I really do wanna use the resources for the purpose they were dedicated. And so my question I have was thank you Stephanie for the updates that is heartening to hear. I just, I wanna make sure that I'm clear. So that would mean if the state acts, the city the way we wrote our eviction local eviction moratorium that would just automatically extend. We don't have to take action again after the state takes action. Is that, am I getting that right? With regards to the commercial eviction moratorium that's correct. So that is tied to the governor's executive order. So when the governor exposes executive order our commercial eviction moratorium is extended along with it. And that's not so then for residential that would mean once we hear something we also have to take action. Not exactly. I guess it will depend on the form that this new legislation comes in with the prior bills AB 3088 and SB 91. Those essentially preempted the city's local ordinance. And so the city was preempted or amending any residential eviction moratorium. I suspect it would be the same with this new bill coming out that they would just preempt the city from creating any additional moratorium. But that's something we would have to look at once that new legislation comes out. Okay, I'm just curious because this is all gonna happen over the council hiatus and that time between June 30th and August 10th I think is our first meeting. That's a significant amount of time for evictions to take place. And we won't be able to roll that back, reel that back once it happens. So I just am hoping that we can figure it out and make the timing work so that people aren't, you know, harmed in the interim. That's what I think it would automatically cover. I know that it was the language that they embedded between AB 3088 and SB 91. I think they would just change the date there. And so I think I don't foresee that we would need it to take any action. But we will certainly be staying on top of it and bring any new updates to council as soon as we have anything. We could certainly call a special meeting if the council needed to take action to protect tenants in Santa Cruz. Thank you, Stephanie. Any other questions? Great. Martín, are you, who's up next? That's up for today. Thank you very much. Martín, I have one question and I know you might not have a completely clear answer on but with all the changes last week issued by the governor, I know just for the public to know, we are, Martín, I believe, beginning the planning work to look at the person meetings, correct? And we don't have an exact month, exactly when that will happen, but that is something that we have started to assess, right? That's right, that's right. And we'll be taking the recess period to sort of get everything in place and move toward to that, that's correct. Yeah, so just wanted to let the public know that we will be going back in person sessions. We're still working on the timeline for that. Okay. The revisions to that calendar, please. We are a little bit ahead of time and the council has not had a more than a five minute break since we started at 8.30. So I'm gonna go ahead and have council take a break coming back at, why it looks like if we came back at 1.25, we'd still be maintaining on our schedule. That's right. Okay, so we'll take a 30 minute break and hopefully get some lunch and for the public we'll be coming back at 1.25 and we'll start with our consent agenda, which is items number 39 on the agenda today. Thank you, everybody. Council members, turn back on their cameras. We got enough faces to be ready to go. Welcome back to the city council meeting. First up today are now is the consent agenda. These are items 39 on your agenda on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. Now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items 13 through 39. Instructions are on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the cues saying you have been unmuted. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Council members who wish to pull any items today. Council member Cummings and council member Golder, this would be for items that council members would like to have pulled. Council member Cummings. A couple questions on item number 20. Okay. And also I thought I remember the city attorney at some point mentioning something that needed to get pulled from consent as well. Right, and that was, yeah, item number 34 needs to be pulled, I'll go ahead and pull that item. Council member, okay, council member Brown. Yeah, I just have a quick question on 19. Number 19. One item that has been pulled, that's item number 34 and we have two items that have been just, we have questions, comments on before I move on to public comment. So why don't we go ahead and start with council member Brown's question on item number 19, which is the Economic Development Administration Wharf Grant Appropriation. Yeah, so I just wanted to follow up and thank you, Bonnie, Liskam, for answering some of the questions that I sent in advance and that definitely helped me understand what's happening at this point, but I did just want to follow up on the concern that I heard and that the sent into the city around the timing for that work to be done because of the bird nesting season and so I'm just, and I know there are other agencies that weigh in on this, you know, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, possibly the Coastal Commission, I don't know if that would, yeah, I think that would also be triggered. So I'm just wondering what your plans are for, if you have plans to work around the nesting season and ensure there's some mitigation, I guess. Thank you, Council Member Brown, for bringing this up. We did receive a number of emails on this and correspondence on this topic, so I appreciate the question. Yeah, we will work around that. It both was identified in our EIR and staff, and I will acknowledge that David McCormick, who is our project manager on this project, is also on the call, but that we have been working with Fish and Wildlife and the Coastal Commission on this and in talking with Joe Hall, who originally helped us submit the grant as well, we have a really, a several year window in which to move forward on this so that we can work around the nesting season, so January, February timeframe to September, it's gonna take us, you know, probably the next number of months, you know, certainly through the summer, early fall anyway, just to pull the various pieces together, bit it out and, you know, identify a firm at which point we'll likely at that point come back to you again. So this is the first step. This is really today as a budget adjustment. We, you know, received the award, notice of the award just before you were considering the overall budget. So we didn't know that it was coming, so it didn't get included in the budget. So this is just an administrative step to make sure the funding and the grant funding is included in our budget. Thank you. I really appreciate the info. Thank you, Bonnie. Next up, Bonnie, you might want to stay on screen. Next up is item number 20, questions regarding that. Council Member Cummings. Thank you. And I just wanted to start by thanking staff for bringing this forward. I know for many businesses that have been impacted by COVID-19, this is something that's really been helping them to, you know, generate more revenue as we try to kind of bounce back from last year. And also, I know many members of the community have wanted to see more outdoor dining and opportunities for outdoor. And a lot of people have been really excited and happy with our ability to allow them. And so I just want to, you know, just express my gratitude for everything that we've been able to do to bring this forward and for these extensions. And I just wanted to ask about the creation of the permanent program and kind of the process around that. If small business owners want to provide some input on that and what that looks like, what would be the best way to provide input? Is there any opportunities from the community meetings where those individuals could join and kind of provide any feedback to you all? Absolutely, thank you, Councilmember Cummings for that question. We actually are working with an architecture firm right now who is starting to do the design work for a couple of permanent options. And we will be doing some stakeholder groups to get more feedback. We've done initial feedback, coordinating with the Downtown Association and Councilmember Bruner has been really helpful with that as well. So we are and have had feedback to date and for any council members and members of the public who are interested in this item and watching, feel free to contact our office. Rebecca Unett is our economic development manager and she's the point person for this program. They could reach out to economic development and we can follow up and include them on stakeholder outreach. We will be coordinating a design and sort of feedback meeting with interested businesses prior to finalizing any designs as well. So we've done some preliminary outreach and received quite a bit of feedback on the temporary program, as well as some consideration from a number of stakeholders on things that the city should be considering for a permanent program, as well as we've conducted some internal across city departments on what's working well, where do we need to focus? What are any issues that may come up if we, when we're proposing to make this permanent? So that's what we've done so far, but we will still have some community outreach around the design of the permanent parklet option. So when I say options, the reason why we're doing that is that we wanted to have a couple of streamlined options for a permanent parklet with the design, with all the costs, everything sort of laid out along a timeline of, okay, we wanna do this design, I know how much it costs, I know how long it's going to take to get permitting, we're gonna be pre-vetting that. So that's the concept behind the pre-vetting two designs that we're working on right now. And our plan is to bring, come back to you on second meeting in August. Great, thanks. And then I guess I would just also say might be good. I know that there's some state bills that are getting voted on around this and it'd be great if we could get an update on kind of where the state law is moving as well. Yeah, and we did, we can come back to you with that. And we did submit a letter of support for AB 314, sort of a related item as well. Okay, thanks. Any other council members with questions on this item? Okay. Okay. I am not seeing any other request to pull any, or to pull or questions on any other items. So I'm gonna go ahead and take this out to the public now if there are members of the public that would like to speak to any item of consent agenda with the exception of item number 34, now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak, you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted. The timer will be set to two minutes. And I have Ian M. as our first call-in person. Ian, you should be unmuted shortly here. I'm sorry, star nine, no, I'm sorry, star six Ian. Excuse me. Flip my nine to my sixes all the time. Ian, yeah, if you press star six on your phone, you should be able to unmute yourself. Ian M., if you press star six on your phone, you should be able to be unmuted. Okay, Bonnie, I'll come back to him. Next, I'll take a phone number ending in 1810. Please press, please press star six and we'll be able to hear you. Yeah, Gareth Phillip. It seems to me that as regards extension of the COVID emergency, you show lack of autonomy and are waiting for somebody to tell you that it's over. Okay, I'll say it's over. Nobody died of COVID in the county last month. It's over, even though it sure seems like government would like its emergency powers to go on and on and on forever. Or maybe it is that the big farm and government would love a fast man, woman and child to get the experimental job, which can only have a liability exclusion from the thousands of vaccine related deaths and adverse side effects, only possible with the emergency youth authorization, which is only possible with that extension of state of emergency, emergency or not. It's increasingly past time to examine the devastating effects of the government response, past time to examine all the lies, past time to keep moving the goalposts, past time to stop violating individual rights, past time to modify politics. All information and not the selective narrative of mass creating of science, past time to stop the censorship, past time to expose conflicts of interest to follow the money and mostly it's past time to stop hypnotizing the people by fears, threats and bribes to accept the corporate mainstream media version of COVID-19. The well-organized government sanctioned very sophisticated propaganda campaign drawing on the human fear of death and disease needs determination. Locking down hundreds of millions of healthy people insisting they were useless of mass, dismissing the fact young people's healthy immune systems are adequate and destroying the economic lives of regular people has created fast suffering mostly just to achieve a mass obedience. We know the high settings of the PCR test cycle threshold should only result in mass false positive results. We're asked to believe all sorts of normal causes of deaths like the flu took a break this year replaced by COVID deaths. We know effective treatments were denied, treatment research squashed, doctors trying to save lives, other ways where silence canceled and the pharmacies refused to fill their... Okay, thanks. Bye. Thank you. And again, E and M, if you're a star six, there you go. You should be able to talk now, Ian. We're not able to hear you. Ian, if you have... If you're on a device, Bonnie, they need to mute them on this item that they're on, correct? If they're using their phone. He looks like he's on. There he is. Does that work? There you are, Ian. We hear you now. You're there. Ian, we're barely can hear you if you can get a little closer to your speaker or your phone. You could turn your microphone up. Are you on a phone or an iPad, Ian? Home phone. If you can turn your volume up. Okay, go ahead and we'll be real quiet. Okay, well, first of all, I wanna thank... Sorry, we're having a really hard time hearing you. If you do have your comments written down, could you maybe email those to us too as well? That would be very helpful. Some of us could not hear because of the speaker situation. Okay. Oh, thank you. Now we can hear you. Can everyone hear me okay? We can hear you. Great. My name is Rami Kay Ali, I own Melamelo Calvobar on Pacific Avenue. We've had some issues dealing with the city regarding the parklet and the program. And I appreciate Mr. Cummings comments regarding that. It's been a time and very difficult for us to navigate COVID and on top of that, having to navigate the bureaucracy of the city and dealing with parklets and all the associated issues have been really, really taxing. I have two other businesses, one in Berkeley and one in Oakland, both of which allowed us to have parklets and they had programs in place to really help during the crisis. And I'm just frustrated and wanted to vent my frustration regarding the slow moving issues we've had with Santa Cruz and not allowing us to have any kind of covering for the parklet. And that was really frustrating. And I really do hope that we move a little quicker because as we start to approach the rainy season here soon, we're gonna be very limited on our ability to serve people. And this is by far a very, very good revenue source for us. And it's something that definitely beautifies the avenue. I'm hoping we can see something happen a little quicker. So either way, I appreciate all your help. I know it's been a stressful time for all of us, but yeah, I just wish we could move a little faster and we have a little more dialogue about this. Thank you guys. Thank you. And next up I have caller ending in funder number 2289. Hi, was there an exception to item 34? That's, I'd like to speak on. That item will be, we'll be addressing that item next. Okay, so do I wait and speak when it comes back up? Yes, yes, yes, we did pull that item. So we'll be able to have discussion and deliberation on that. Is there anyone else out in the meeting attendees today that wish to speak on any of the items that are consent agenda except item number 34? I'm not seeing any more hands. So I'll go ahead and bring this back to council and I see council member Cummings. I'm happy to move the consent agenda with the exception of item number 34. And council member Brown, I'll second that. So we have a motion by council member Cummings, seconded by council member Brown to approve the consent agenda except for item number 34. And I would ask the clerk to go ahead and take a roll call vote. Thank you mayor, council member Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Brown. Boulder. Vice mayor Brunner. Mayor Meyers. Aye. That passes unanimously. We'll now come back to item number 34 and I believe this is an item that our city attorney has brought forward. Tony, can I turn this over to you? Yes, thank you. Mayor Meyers, members of the city council. This is a hearing on the issue of necessity for the city to initiate a process to acquire PG&E owned street lights within the city. As we all several months ago, the city approved an agreement with a consultant to analyze the possibility of acquiring PG&E street light infrastructure as a way both to improve service to the street lights and to result in some cost savings for what the city pays PG&E currently for its street light services. PG&E owns a portion of the city street light but most of it is already owned by the city. So this would be basically incorporating an inventory of PG&E street lights into the city's infrastructure. In order to do that, the first thing that has to be done is an offer needs to be made to acquire the property. And that offer has been made based on the value of the street light owned by PG&E. The second part is a hearing and that's the hearing that you have before you today on a resolution of necessity and in order to meet the statutory requirements to acquire property by the power of eminent domain, you have to make certain findings and those findings that you need to make are that the public interest and necessity require property interests that are described in the resolution that's part of your agenda packet that the project is planned or located in the manner that will be the most compatible with the greatest public good and least private injury. Three that the property is necessary for the project that the public utility facilities to be acquired are a more necessary public use than the present use to which said facilities are appropriated and five that the offer to the owner or owners of record required by government code section 7267.2 has been made. Those are the findings contained in the resolution on necessity that's included in your packet. Also, I will just note for the record that Public Works Director Mark Dettel is here and available to answer the questions that the council might have are outside consultant, Jason Tango is also present and available and Matthew Grace from my office who has been working with the Public Works Department to bring this matter forward is also available to member questions or comments. I believe that the person who spoke previously is a representative of PG&E and would like to address the council. They have also submitted a letter opposing the adoption of the resolution and necessity which is in your packet. With that, I will turn it over to the council to have any questions or comments that you may have. Before we bring it out to members of the public, are there any questions from council members regarding the report by the attorney? Okay, I'll go ahead and take it out to the public and the caller with phone number ending in 2289 who was just on the line. If you want to go ahead and unmute. If I could just briefly before the caller begins because this is a formal statutory hearing, the representative of PG&E, I don't believe should be restricted to the two minute public comment. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I was just gonna ask you that. Okay, great. Thank you, Tony. Let's see. So phone number ending in 2289, go ahead and press star six and you're welcome to speak. And there's no time restriction. Okay, can you hear me? Yes, we can. My name is Gina Arnold and I'm the government relations and public affairs representative for PG&E. I'm here to let you know that we've received and responded to the city's notice to acquire PG&E street lighting facilities by imminent domain. As a longtime partner of the city of Santa Cruz, I like to reiterate the value of our relationship with the city. PG&E believes that we have a shared objective of providing our customers the best service available and we are committed to discussing any concerns the city has about our streetlight service. We do not believe, however, that an imminent domain action by the city is the appropriate path forward. We would love to work cooperatively and discuss the city's concerns about streetlight service. And we hope that you share our preference to come to an agreeable resolution rather than undertake costly and time consuming litigation. I apologize for the legalese, but for the record of the meeting, I'd like to quickly summarize why PG&E formally objects to the proposed resolution of necessity. Number one, the city does not provide sufficient description of the project. Number two, the city appears to have a predetermined outcome of the hearing on the resolution of necessity. Three, the notice does not demonstrate that public interest and necessity require the project. Four, the notice does not indicate how the project would satisfy the greatest public good slash leased private injury requirement of a minute domain. Five, the notice does not demonstrate that the property sought to be acquired is necessary for the project. Six, the notice isn't, the project would be more necessary public use. And seven, the city does not make an adequate offer required before adopting the resolution of necessity. Again, we invite you with the city to meet with PG&E to discuss your concerns about our streetlight service. In the meantime, for the reason stated, we do not believe that the city may properly adopt a resolution of necessity to acquire any of PG&E. We look forward to meeting with you. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. I will bring it back now. I don't see any other members in the public looking to speak on this item. So I will go ahead and bring it back to the council for continued action or questions of our attorney. I guess I would like to suggest that Matt Grace for my office comment on the points raised by PG&E. Okay, welcome Matt. Good afternoon, Mayor Myers and council members. Would like to, Mr. Cando to just said, I'd like to comment on the actions that were raised. First of all, the description of the project is self-evident that the city is proposing that they acquire the streetlighting facilities to operate them more efficiently, to maintain them in a more responsive manner and to also maintain to operate them in the most efficient way manner. So that is the public purpose and that is the project that is being proposed. And there is no further requirement for the city to articulate anything more specific than that. To the commentator from PG&E, it said that there's a predetermined outcome. I think that is speculative because there's been no evidence submitted and the council has not made any determination. So I believe that's pretty speculative, no outcome has been made at this point. And I think those four objections, three, four and five, and those are basically relate to the required findings that a public entity must come to if they're to proceed with them to domain. The first being that the public interest in the set require the project, two that the project would satisfy the greatest public could lease private injury requirement, three that the property sought to be acquired is necessary for the project. There is evidence before the council that those three requirements have been met. And if there's any questions, we can, I'm happy to answer them. But there's been, this is a hearing of the council being presented with evidence to vote on no determination has been made prior to now. Likewise with the objection related to the property, being that the CSNR particularly why the project would be a more necessary public use. Again, that determination has not been made. There's evidence being presented to the council regarding why the city's operation and maintenance of the street-line facilities would lead to a substantial public benefit. And finally, regarding the adequacy of the offer, there's no specificity that's been proffered regarding how the offer is adequate or inadequate. And for that reason, there's, it's difficult to comment on PG&E claim that the adequacy is offered because the city's complied with the code as far as providing the information, the amount of just compensation would be based. So with that said, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Matt. Are there any questions by city council at this point? I'm not seeing any. So I would look for a motion to resolutions, a motion to adopt a resolution following the hearing and a resolution amending the budget and wondering if there's a council member that would be willing to do those. Any hands out there? Great. Council member Fulda. I'll go ahead and move item 34. And council member Conntary Johnson. Second. Great. We have a motion on the floor to adopt a resolution following a hearing providing the owner of the property and opportunity to speak. Finding that public necessity requires the acquisition by eminent domain of the street lighting facilities owned by Pacific gas and electric PG&E located within the city's territorial boundaries and authorizing the city attorney to pursue that domain proceedings to acquire the real property. And to adopt a resolution amending the fiscal year 2021 budget and appropriating funds in the amount of $152,960 in gas tax funds for the acquisition of the citywide street lights project. And Bonnie, can we do a roll call vote please? Council member Watkins. Aye. Council member Johnson. Aye. Vice mayor Brunner. And mayor Myers. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Okay. Move on to our public hearings. Next up on our agenda is item number 40. It's the public hearing for the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 2021-13 pertaining to special events. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. Are there any council members who have questions or comments? Council member Brown. Yeah, I just wanted to make a quick statement about this item. We approved on a first reading at our last meeting. I have since received a significant number of messages asking about the purpose of this and being quite concerned that it appears to be an effort on the part of the city to restrict protest, public protest. And so I just wanted to say for coming out there and I've been sending messages back to people that I did after getting those messages, I went through with a colleague and looked at all of the changes through the red line version. And the changes are indeed what we were told in the presentation about this item. This is about shifting the authority to the Parks and Rec Department, hopefully one day getting them to cover the cost of doing that, but and then just really some cleanup. So I just wanted to say that I'll be voting yes and I am doing that, having done a lot of followup work to make sure that we're not doing something unintended. Thank you council member. I'll go ahead. Is there any other council members who have questions on this item? Yeah, I'll go ahead and take it out to the public. And I have a caller ending in 181, excuse me, 1810. This file says public assembly of over 50 people for the purposes of free speech is not without permit allowance or face infractions issued by seemingly any city employee with a job description. No matter how many and or as you include and some have lame justifications aren't excessively authoritarian, that is what it says. There may be behaviors or consequences that mass gathering events that need explicit restrictions, planning, funding, land use authorizations are fine to preserve other citizens' rights, health safety and excessive public cost. But instead of just defining those at best, you have a instead assumed that the mere possibility some behaviors could occur requires extermination of the First Amendment via permit requirements and fines for both anyone who shows up and organizers blame for these behaviors, whether they incite these behaviors or not, and for not having civic permission far in advance. At worst authoritarian logic like a permit is not required unless the current officer thinks it should be or pledges like I promise not more than 25 people will cross only a crosswalk that each life change are plastered all over this. It's not my job but yours to examine each one for unjustified overreach. Now I'm not saying something like this isn't needed. Last summer BLM groups continually vandalized and appropriated the clock tower and some kind of misguided alter worship and marching mobs like the one involved is activist piggybacking the BLM movements, mob intimidation who loudly street marched to then mayor Cummings home residents or the BLM processing vandalism to police station included unacceptable mass gathering expression behaviors. I always wanted to mention then mayor Cummings stand against the mob vandals even in front of a police station was very brave and highly principled. However, considered Depot Park protests for peaceful oops. Oh boy. Consider the Depot Park protests for peaceful assembly and free speech asked for a government redress of the homeless camp plan grievances or even the beach lockdown protests. They don't need no stinking government permits to assemble and free speech government protests. Thank you. I'm not seeing any other members of the public. Go ahead and bring this back. Council member Brown. Thank you mayor. I did want to make another comment. Actually, Mr. Phillip reminded with his comments about something that I had been talking with some folks about who contacted me. And I am wondering if there is a possibility to think about increasing that 50, the number 50 to 100. I think the specific context for those concerns was related to the fact that the town clock and the county building, the steps of the county building are often spaces where people gather for a variety of reasons. And that under this ordinance that looks like it would be restricted. And some of those are quite spontaneous in response to things that are happening in the moment. I know there's some language about that, but it seems like 100 would be an appropriate number to, for the threshold. And I'm just wondering how folks feel about that. Another item was related to the number of hours that allowable hours under a permit, which seemed short to me. And I'm just wondering about looking at four to hours. So just put it out there. And I'd like to hear, and if there's folks on staff want to respond to why you selected those particular thresholds or stuck with them, I'd love to know what those are. Hi, council member Brown. This is Lindsay Bass, Principal Management Analyst from the Parks and Recreation Department. Thank you so much for the questions and thank you to the public for the comments. We continue to receive a lot of really thoughtful feedback around this cleanup and adjustments that we're looking to make. I would say, and just reinforce, council member Brown, your statements were spot on. We're really looking to make adjustments that reflect the transition of these duties over to our department. Regarding the specific question around the threshold and some of the concerns around public expression and gathering permits, I would say where possible, we didn't want to adjust the ordinance if it wasn't necessary. So feeling that I don't believe the public expression and gathering permit has prevented any expressions of free speech. And we feel that we have an exercise, a lot of latitude and careful thought and analysis around making sure that continues to be the case, which is why we didn't adjust those thresholds. Reinforce that our actions with respect to that permit in particular are really just around ensuring the safety of those gathering wherever possible and ensuring the safety of those who may encounter to the best of our ability without permits. These are our attempts when we know of large gatherings to just make them as safe as possible. And those are best efforts that we make. But to this point, we're just trying to not overly adjust the ordinance to what is absolutely necessary at this time. Thank you. That totally makes sense. I just wanted to try to get folks who were really concerned about that some reassurance that things aren't gonna, and they're not gonna be restricted from showing up if there's something going on at a more spontaneous event. So thank you. I really appreciate it. I do, Bonnie, I close public comment. I'm seeing two hands over there. I'm not sure if they're for the next item or not. No, I know at least one of them is for this one. It's for this one. Okay. I'll go ahead and just capture these two. So if the two people with their hands raised, if you do wanna comment on this, I'll go ahead and go back to public comment. Hey, with you, Bonnie, and I'll have Thomas lead it. Go ahead, press star six. There you go. You're ready. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. Thank you. I just wanna say that regardless of the grassland actions or the justifications or the fact that this is an existing ordinance, it's blatantly unconstitutional on its face to respect. I am consulting public interest lawyers who have a specialty in this. And if you do pass this, I will probably be pursuing a lawsuit. We're doing everything possible to facilitate that process. This ordinance specifically and explicitly simply requesting donations to a nonprofit is going to require a permit. This ordinance puts undue and shilling restrictions on free speech that specifically impose liabilities on people attempting to organize the events and means that people who have less resources and are less in a position to take the risk of organizing a protest and assuming these liabilities will be discouraged from organizing and protesting. And that's really all I have to say. The letter that I sent you earlier that was prepared with the assistance of a public interest attorney outlines some of the concerns in detail. And I will be following up with you subsequent. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll move this back to the council and we will, I would look for a motion on this item. And council members that are willing to, there we go. Council members Golder and council member Watkins. I will go ahead and move items. And council member Watkins. Go ahead and second that. Great, thank you. So we have a motion to adopt ordinance numbers 2021-13 amending chapters 10.64, 10.65 and 4.02 of the standard code related to special events. And could we please have a roll call vote? That motion was by council member Golder, seconded by council member Watkins. Do we have a roll call vote? Council member Watkins. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Golder. Vice Mayor Brunner. And Mayor Myers. That motion passes unanimously. We'll now move on to our general business items for today. And first up is item number 41. And for the site of the order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. For the members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. So this is item number 41, the regional Santa Cruz County bike share system, request for proposals and CalClaire Gallaghery. Our transportation planner is here for the present presentation. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor and Councils, CalGlobal Transpiration Planner with Public Works. We're thrilled to be here today to bring you this item on bringing back the bike share system to the city of Santa Cruz and not just that, but regionally to the entire county as well. I have a brief presentation that I will put up right now. I'm gonna give you a brief overview of the history bike share within the city of Santa Cruz, what we're currently working on with our regional working group and next steps in action. As many of you know, they're on the council at the time eight, a few years ago, applied for and received a Gold Level Bicycle Friendly Community Award from the League of American Bicycles. This is the second level of awards. There's very few cities that achieve this, but the next level is platinum, which is what we're always striving for. And in getting this Gold Level BFC Award, we got a worksheet that was stepped to achieve platinum. And one of the recommended actions there was to implement a public bike share system within the city. We started pursuing that idea in 2016 and out a request for proposals for a bike share vendor to come into the city of Santa Cruz. At that time, we selected social bicycles who quickly became job bikes when we launched. We, after selection from RFP and execution of the contract, underwent about a 1.5 year-long public outreach and engagement process that included extensive work in the community as well as a multitude of meetings for station sighting in the public right away. This involved you seeing me numerous times to grant these easements after going to the Transportation Public Works Commission Downtown Commission, Zoning Administrator, Planning Commission, coming to you and for five of these stations getting appealed all the way to the Coastal Commission where we were unanimously given permission to continue. We then launched the program by Dork Day 2018. And for just shy of two years, we then managed the program in partnership with Jop. During that time, the almost two-year timeframe, we saw over 680,000 trips for over 1.3 million miles. Each of our bikes got used over four times per day for an average trip distance of just shy of two miles. One highlight to stick because that two-mile distance is really important. We think of it as replacing car trips and being really in line with our general plan, active transportation plan and climate action plan goals to reduce vehicle trips and to encourage multimodal transportation. During the time that we did have jump operating, we averaged about 300 bikes in service at any given time. At the beginning of the contract, we allowed up to 250 and first contract modifications. We allowed for up to just shy of 600 at the maximum. Something else I'd like to highlight is that bike share trips during the time that we had jump occurred on every single street within the city of Santa Cruz. This is a one-month origin destination map that I've shared a few times where you can see that there's a density of trips that have occurred in the downtown and the beach area and work in the long west coast. But then there's not a single street in the city that didn't have people taking bike trips to or from those locations. So really was used by residents, visitors, students, employees and the really, really broad community. We're doing right now. Since jump exit into the market at the beginning of COVID, we have been working with three cities, the county, UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College to determine if we can put forth a region-wide single bike share system. We heard over and over again while we were running our bike share system in the city of Santa Cruz that folks who were using bikes didn't necessarily stop their trip at city limits. And you would oftentimes see bikes piling up on or in a lot of goal trips at other various end points of city limits because people were wanting to continue into Live Oak, into Capitola and further trips, but we're not able to with the system that we had at the time. So setting up a county-wide system would allow those trips to take place. We worked very hard at a staff level with our regional working groups to come up with a set of shared values, finding areas that we can all agree, recognizing that are different values, but there were some core areas that we really did reach consensus on. From that, we released a request for information which we thought it was our fact finding. We wanted to know what type of system can we get? The market has changed so dramatically since we last released an RFP in 2017. COVID has impacted operations of shared mobility systems. We wanted to see what would vendors say would be a sustainable, reliable system that they would bring to the Santa Cruz community. We received nine responses to that RFI which gave us a multitude of answers to our questions and will help us to craft the RFP that was approval we hoped to be stressing in July and putting on the street in August. Going back to those shared values amongst the four cities, the county and the university and the school of college, what we came up with was a bike-only system with a single vendor, a hybrid docked and dockless system to respond to the needs of the less dense and incorporated areas. Only third party owned and operated with no cost to any of the jurisdictions and those were the things that we all agreed upon as being in line with our norms and values that we had. The next steps that we're all doing today, UCME and other staff people are taking the same item to their councils or board in June and Watsonville in early July. We then plan to cross the RFP in July, release it in August, select the vendor and negotiate a contract hopefully in September and October. Begin that process where the commissions and UCME a lot coming back for that right away citing process and then launch in early 2022 and something that we'd like to highlight is that it does involve when we launch a new program and the staff involvement there. The recommendation that we have before you today is modified just slightly here. This was held by the Transportation and Public Works Commission last night. They unanimously recommended the recommendation on their screen to you with the three words added and that is that the city council approves the issuance of a request for proposals for a no cost to the city bike share system with a single vendor and direct the city manager to execute a service agreement for a bicycle sharing system for the city of Santa Cruz and form acceptable to the city attorney. Supplementary spot, I know that there has been discussion on other vehicle types and if at this time you would like to provide any input and recommendations on next step actions related to non bicycle shared mobility programs for the city of Santa Cruz, I would welcome those as well. That would be secondary to the final reaction and recommendation there. So at this point, I'm available for any questions, my information is on the screen and I would stop the screen chair now so that you can all see each other again. Thank you so much. Thank you Claire. Is there questions from council members on this item? I knew you have a question. Okay, hands everywhere. I have council member Brown, council member Cal and Tari Johnson, council member Cummings and then council member Watkins. And Sonya, vice mayor. Yeah, can I go? Sorry, I wasn't able to raise my hand. Yeah, go for it. Thank you for that presentation, Claire. I just wanna say that the no cost to the city system and the collaboration as a county wide program is a huge change in public benefit. I think we could all agree on that but we can also agree that received concerns from some people regarding the lack of customer service with the previous vendor. And I'm wondering if there's a way to direct that the RFP before it goes out really includes strong language on the customer service piece, the response, the accountability would look like or what the current language is. Even though the previous vendor had a local operating team, the customer service number that one would call was elsewhere and oftentimes unresponsive. So I think that was a missing component that really did damage in a lot of the perceptions of the program. And so I'm wondering if you can speak. Totally. A few things there that go hand in hand. The most frequent complaint that we got was bikes that were improperly parked. So if you can solve that problem then you more easily and readily address the problem of customer service and responsiveness. There are new and better tools now than when we were first operating bike share. Many of them photos to be taken of a parked bike which serves to both self-check a person who is parking the bike when they're thinking I have to take a picture in order to end my trip. Did I do this right? As well as offers a way to validate if a complaint does come in. Why yes, that person did park that bike inappropriately and they can be served with a fine. So having a, we like to think of it as a carrot and stick system for parking. So a carrot as an incentive to return a bike to a rack, a station, a geofenced area or other official parking zone. It might be a credit on a future ride or lower cost for something else. And then a stick being that there is a final penalty if you are a repeat offender of parking. That's part one. So solve the root problem of why the customer service complaints are coming in address that problem and reduce the number of complaints that are coming from there. Part two is the requirement to take a number app based program and online presence for how users and non-users not needing an account can report issues and have responsiveness there. One of the things that we did have with the jump program was a service level agreement of responsive time that they had to respond within. And we every month were within that window for average time. That is not to say that there were not outliers that were not responded to within that time. But it is something that we would monitor and have a metric on going forward as well to continue monitoring. And I think finally, the final point there is something that we've agreed upon as a shared value is being very important is having a local team in place. San Jose is not close enough, Silicon Valley somewhere else is not close enough to be a local team having a team in place in Santa Cruz County to be responsive. Is that currently in the RFP that's being worked on? That will be included, yeah. Great, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor, Council Member Brown. Thank you. I'll just say thank you, Vice Mayor Brunner for asking the big question that I was going to ask. I really appreciate hearing your response, Claire. I have another question because one of the other controversies around the program, if folks will recall, was related to the locations of docking stations, at least some of them. And so I'm just wondering how far along you are in the process of thinking about where those will go, how those decisions will be made just so we can be prepared for what's coming. Yes, I love this question because probably as many complaints that you've got about locations of docking stations and actual racks, you've got 10x complaints about bikes not being in racks. And so that dichotomy of needing to have official bike parking spaces and probably needing to have more than we have before will address the issues that Vice Mayor Brunner just brought up about bikes being parked inappropriately not in the correct location. And so in terms of where we are, we will likely reactivate many of those locations that we were at because they were requested by the community, they were well used, we have data on those. We will revisit that and evaluate and we would likely be proposing adding additional stations as well to address the community concerns that we've heard and that you saw in your comments what has he received today about bikes being parked out of station and to really take our carrot and stick approach more effective in that way. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Collin Tari-Johnston. Thank you, yes, Vice Mayor Brunner asked one of my questions, so thank you for that. And thank you Claire for the presentation. I really appreciated you bringing forth data that really connects us to our larger climate action goals. So appreciate putting it into that context. There was another concern question that came up through emails that we got around helmets and the lack of helmet wearing when folks ride these bikes. I mean, I can't imagine a helmet sharing system. I have young kids and anyway, life has been an issue and other stuff. What are some ways to encourage or acquire helmet wearing when using these bikes? Oh, and I have one more question. I'll let you answer that. Okay, love that question. I like to compare helmets to car seats similar to not wanting to have a car seat sharing system because you don't know if that car seat's ever been in an accident. You also don't want to have a helmet sharing system because you don't know the safety of that helmet. What we do do at Workout and Helmets City is that anyone who is employed in the downtown and is part of the Go Santa Cruz program can sign up for any of our monthly education events that we host right now. They're all hosted virtually. And if you participate in those, we will hand deliver you a helmet and a light. If you are outside of the downtown, many of the vendors that responded to our RFI did have helmet programs, helmets that were either free device or reduced helmets. And we'll also continue to do our ongoing education and encouragement to our street smarts programs and other programs as well to really promote helmet use. We know that wearing a helmet significantly reduces the chance that if you are in any collision, you will get a traumatic brain injury. So definitely, definitely support helmet use. If you are in downtown, it will also just continue to plug the Go Santa Cruz program and the access to helmets that we do provide there. Do that. Thank you. That makes sense. The other question is, as I understand it will require extensive staff time and management. Is there opportunity to, since we're looking at doing this across jurisdictions, is there opportunity to leverage resources and have sort of a county wide person or person that will help manage? Oh, how are we thinking? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So we do each have a point person, each of the jurisdictions. To put it in context, when we first launched Jump, I estimate that I spent about 20 hours a week on the phone doing direct engagement with community members. Many people who had questions, concerns, complaints and compliments and just wanted someone who worked for the city, even though there was a number that they could call with Jump, but someone who worked for the city that they could directly engage with. And from a customer and community service perspective, really important, it definitely did go down over time that the staff needs there. But being able to have that shared across the various jurisdictions I think will be really helpful. If there's someone from UCSC who has questions about that, I can refer them directly to the UCSC point of contact. If there's someone in the county, I can refer them directly there. So we do have, let's see, four or five, six, seven, second of a context now that you- Thank you. Great, Council Member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. And I would just want to thank you, Claire, for bringing this back to us. This was something that so many people in our community, although there's concerns around where bikes get parts, so many people were using these and I personally moved my car away last when this program was around. So I do want to express how much I and many other people in this community really appreciate and love this program. And I'm also really glad to see the emphasis on bikes because I know that there was some potential for discussion with Lyme, but Lyme wants you to use their scooters in a bit bikes. And I know that many people have expressed how they do not want to see scooters because of just how they get strewn about the sidewalks and block those areas. And so it's really encouraging to see that we're moving forward with this. And a number of my questions have already been asked around bike helmets and so I won't ask that, but I did want to touch on, so it sounds like it's no cost to the city, but I'm just curious about whether or not this will generate revenue for the jurisdictions that are participating and whether we will be a part of that profit sharing because I think in the last contract, we didn't receive any of the revenue that was generated from jump. And so I'm wondering if that's also the case with this contract or kind of what could be discussed around that? That's a great question. In this RFP, we are planning on including a revenue sharing item that we are kind of working out the details of that likely will look like a one time upfront, we think as an administrative fee to offset a portion of the staff time. And then likely a per trip fee in the future. One of the concerns that I have with that is I don't want that fee to be directly passed on to users, I think for our values and ability values with the ability to have more of why we're implementing a bike share system, not a revenue generator is keeping prices low enough for people to think bike share can be my first choice, not I'm choosing between driving or biking because of the price point. Additionally, I think as we consider revenue sharing, we should consider what other public benefits would rather be direct revenue. Things that I think are for that are expanded low income passes, expanded student passes, expanded safety and outreach including things like helmet giveaways and on bike trainings. And to me, while we are moving forward and we'll be asking for a new sharing, those are those other values that I think are more important as it relates to increasing the safety of our mobility system and the access to bike share system as well. Great, thanks. And then I had one other follow-up question because I know at the end of your presentation, you'd mentioned some non-bike related mobility programs. And so are you wanting us to kind of provide some ideas or I guess what was? You know, that's a good question. And I'll give you the context that we got at commission last night. So the Transportation Public Works Commission took up this item last night for about two hours and there was a pretty broad discussion. And generally the direction that they took is that we have so many other transportation initiatives going on right now that are priorities that their interest has been not taking this up for the near future, not at least until into 2022. There was general interest that scooters or other mobility devices could be a component, but that right now we should start with bikes, we should move forward on doing the first thing, doing the first thing well, and then evaluate if we want to expand from there. So bring this up with that language in the recommendation for if you do want to take the direction, but direction at this time is not required on that item. Great, let's hope, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. I have Council Member Watkins. Thank you, Chair. And I think honestly, all my questions might have been answered or asked and answered at this point. I guess just following up on what Council Member Cummings was bringing up in terms of other mobility options, in terms of the regional discussion, has that been brought up within the other jurisdictions as of interest or is it everybody sort of speaking to just the bikes at this time? That's a really interesting question. At the staff level, we've discussed it extensively and at the staff level, no jurisdiction feels comfortable moving forward with other mobility devices at this time. Recently, a member of the Board of Supervisors brought an item to the Board that would have been a permit program for any type of shared mobility, bikes, scooters, one-wheels, other types of devices to be able to operate within the county. Our regional working group, the City of Santa Cruz, the City of Los Angeles, City of Capitola and Cabrera College all submitted letters to the Board in opposition to that because allowing for a permit program within the county that didn't have all the public benefit requirements that our program would have would put our regional operator at a disadvantage in the unincorporated area and would really, in our opinion, break the overall partnership. The Board did take up that item, Supervisor presented, heard public comments, three of the Board members spoke in opposition and the sponsor of that item ended up pulling the item prior to a vote. So at this time, no one, no jurisdiction in the county is moving forward and that's my knowledge, there's nothing on the horizon to do so. Yeah, okay, I appreciate that because I think it makes a lot of sense if we're gonna go at it together that we continue that kind of approach, right? The only other thing I would ask is if we can weigh in on, and I know that you're familiar with the opposition to the colors of the bikes, the jump bikes, like, but not like the bright orange red and I don't know if there's a way, as we move forward, we can kind of- Yeah, I love this question and so again, it's something came up extensively at commission last night and one of our commissioners who's a lovely engineer mentioned that red is one of the first spectrums of color that you can see and having people be visible is a key element of safety be seen. That said, you know, red is a color, I heard a really, really wide variety of opinions on the color of bikes and likely it's not something that we will have the ability to weigh in on. Many of the vendors that come in have their branded bikes that are red, blue, black, purple, what color it is and that is just their standard bike. But yes, did hear that. The other thing that I love to bring up is that, well, yes, these bikes are out there and they are parked in the public right away and under no scenario do we regulate the color of cars that are also parked on the street and so the trade off there is, yeah, you might not like how it looks and you might not like how something else looks and you might differ from someone else there. But yeah, I talk a lot about colors of bikes. Good point, good point, yeah. And I appreciate the safety lens, first and foremost, that's critical, you know. Okay, thanks, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you, are there any other questions from council members? I see council member Callentary Johnson and I'll bring it out to public. Thank you, just quickly, I wanted to go back to council member coming point around revenue sharing and you shared there that I would want us to really be careful with that because as you said, really don't want to have this result in increased rates that will then be put on the users and I love the public benefits examples that you provided and I am just curious, was there a profit last time around when you jumped? No, there was not a profit actually in the last year of operation, jump lost $800,000 in the city of Santa Cruz. So that balance of finding a vendor financially sustainable who has a revenue model that will pencil out over the long term and be a good partner while not having user fees that are so high that it disincentivizes ridership is one of the things that we'll be looking at. Thank you. All right, okay. I'll go ahead and look for anyone in the public today who might want to comment on this item, not seen any hands. So I will go ahead and Veronica Elsie, go ahead please. Okay, there you go. Hi, I'm Veronica Elsie and live on the west side of Santa Cruz and I happen to be blind and a couple of things that I would just like to ask you to consider thinking about the RFP is that the reporting process with jump bikes, so much of the onus was actually put on the pedestrians. And if you're blind pedestrian, you can't read the serial number on the bike. You can't read the phone number to call. Some people who use wheelchairs couldn't get bend over the angle that they needed to get. And it seemed like, if I was reporting every bike that was blocking the sidewalk, I would spend all of my trip time stopping twice a block to try to figure out is this a safe place to stop and find somebody to read the information and then you'd have to call and their website was a mess. So I would just hope that maybe if they have a local team, they could do some of their perusing around to find violators and not make pedestrians work so hard. I would also like to see something about maybe higher penalties or something if you lock your bike to say a pole containing a walk light button because sometimes they're parked too abreast and you're trying to reach around and you think you've gotten around the bike and the handlebar comes up and jabs you in the neck. And so I hope that whatever we do, we can avoid the feeling of giving greater access to one group at the expense of another and just to kind of consider everybody's needs when these bikes are around, especially the electric bikes where a lot of people don't know how to drive them. Thank you. Thank you, Veronica. Are there any other members of the public who want to speak on this item? This item number 41 on our agenda. Okay, seeing none, I'm gonna go ahead and look for either further discussion. I see Councilman McColder. I'm happy to move the item, but I do think the last cold one, I mean, I'm fairly strong and one time one was parked literally behind my car and I could barely lift it to move it because unless you pay for it, you can't really wheel it. And so it was in my driveway. So I think even if there's a piece around education and fines and swooping, and I know towards the end, they were good about picking them up, but I agree with it. Yeah, thank you. And I'm happy to move the item. So we have a motion by Council Member Golder and Council Member Cummings. I'll second the motion and also express my same sentiments around, making sure that we're not blocking the right of way of other individuals. Great, thank you. So we have a motion by Council Member Golder with a second by Council Member Cummings to authorize the issuance of a request for proposals for a no-cost bike share system that the single vendor and direct the city manager to execute a service agreement for a bicycle sharing system for the city of Santa Cruz in a form acceptable to the city attorney. And I believe I left out those words there. No cost to the city. Yeah, for a no-cost bike share program, bike share system to the city of Santa Cruz. No cost to the city bike share system. Okay, no cost to the city. Okay. Okay, let me read that one more time. Motion to authorize the issuance of a request for a no-cost to the city bike share system with a single vendor and direct city manager to execute a service agreement for a bicycle sharing system for the city of Santa Cruz in a form acceptable to the city attorney. And could we have a roll call vote, please? Council Member Watkins, Callentary Johnson. Aye. Cummings, Golder, Vice Mayor Brunner, and Mayor Meyers. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Thanks all. That's clear, thank you for all the information and the work you've been doing on this for so many years. We're running a little, we're actually running pretty late, about 40 minutes late right now, but we are going to move on to item number 42, which is the approval of a contract with Kim Lee Horne and Associates for Consultant Services for the Downtown Plan Expansion Project. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The item will be that we will receive a presentation of the item. We will then take questions and comments, questions and comments from the council. We'll then take it out to public comment and then we'll come back to do a council deliberation. Okay, I will go ahead and turn this over to Matt Van Waugh, our principal planner with our planning permit. Welcome Matt. All right, thank you. Good afternoon, mayor and council. I'm going to share my screen here. Can you see that? We can not yet, not yet, no. And it says- Okay, let me try one more time. Sorry about that. We can see that you're in preview mode though. Now it says end of slideshow click to exit. We can see it, it's just so we can see all the slides. There you go, perfect. You're there. Sorry about that. I don't know what was right in there. I struggle with it every time, myself. Well, thank you very much again. I'm going to provide a brief background and then I'm going to hand it over to our consultant, Bill Weisman with Kimberly Horne, to provide a presentation on their scope of work as well. Still not letting me click through my slideshow here. Every time I click forward, it ends. Bonnie, any suggestions? Did you go to start from beginning? Go to your, the first top, go to slideshow, no. Over, over, over to the right, slideshow. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Matt, over to the right, keep going. Up on your slideshow, go up. I can't see you with the zoom on. Do you want me to try? Okay, here we go. Here you are. Yep. And then from beginning, far left. All right, Ashley working now. Thanks, Bonnie. There you go, thanks, Matt. Oh, I've never had them before. All right, so go through this really quickly. We had a major update to our downtown plan in the early 2000s and mid 2010s to increase height and residential uses in the core downtown. And those proved very successful in bringing additional housing opportunities to the downtown area. And planning recently applied for two state grants, the REAP grants and the LEAP grants to build on those successes because these grants specifically are to provide funding to facilitate greater housing production in cities. And they have grant end dates of 1023. And these two grants in particular are both for $300,000. The city was awarded them. Planning intends to use 150,000 of the LEAP grant to also do our housing element update next year. So that leaves us with $450,000 in state grant funding projects. And as you'll see later, the project is just over $500,000 as has scoped right now. So planning would also be using additional consultant services budget to fund that difference. And so going back a little bit, and RFP was initiated in April to select a qualified consultant. And just prior to that, we went to council in March just to select a preliminary boundary to provide in the RFP scope. And this is that boundary again that we showed that was chosen in at the March council meeting and included in the RFP for scoping purposes. And again, I just want to reiterate that this boundary is really just the starting point for our consultant in the community. And there's going to be still a significant community and outreach process to determine the final boundary. So there's a lot of time still for changing and refining this boundary as the project goes forward. And so in our, we included draft goals which was increasing housing units of course, connecting the downtown with the river and beach areas, creating opportunities for public amenities and infrastructure, working with the warriors for a permanent arena home and providing economic opportunities through this process as well. And so through that, we chose Kimley Horn through our RFP process. And there's a number of things that stuck out to them that we really liked. The first was local knowledge. They're a national firm but they have an arm in Cabotola. So they really understand this community well and have done a lot of local, including their experience with the city includes planning work, a lot of sequel work and transportation work as well. So these connections and previous communications with the city are really going to help streamline this process and really make it a consistent project. Also have a lot of design expertise. They've done this type of work throughout the Bay Area and they're all very successful. So we look forward to bringing them in for this project as well. And then finally, schedule and outreach. There's two main drivers to whine the schedule to be as fast as possible, or to at least expedited I should say. And the first is really to bring more housing to Santa Cruz as soon as possible. That's a really important part of the project. And then also we have this really key community resource in the Santa Cruz warriors who have a, who currently have a temporary home, temporary arena. And we really want with them to create a permanent arena home in the city. And they would be done through this process. And so Kimley Horne really saw that and tried to look for ways to expedite the schedule a bit. And they came up with a schedule that would complete the process about four months prior to that end date in the grants. So they would be June 2023 rather than October 2023. And so that was something that we admired. But in addition to, in addition to expediting that schedule a little bit, you know, they also really created a very measured, really measured schedule and outreach process that created a lot of touch points for all, for all members of the city. Anywhere from, you know, two key joint planning commission and commission meetings at key decision points. So we'd have study sessions with them, one council study session, two coastal coordination meeting, coastal commission coordination meetings, three community meetings, and then also three stakeholder property owner meetings in this process. And this planning process would be happening in just over a year because almost the year of this process will also be creating the EIR for this as well. So there's really gonna be a lot of community and decision maker touch points in this process and creating the plan. So we had really admired that as well. And so here's the staff recommendation to execute the, to direct the city manager to execute the contract with Kimley-Horn for $508,812 to consultant services for this downtown expansion project. And with that, I will send it over to Bill Wiseman with Kimley-Horn, our project manager to tell them, tell you more about Kimley-Horn and how they intend to do this project. Thanks. Thank you, Matt. Okay, thank you. Can you never will hear me? Yes, we can. I'll do my screen chair and let me know if that worked and it's up on screen because it changes on this. Okay, thanks for the thumbs up. Okay, Mayor Myers and council members and community, thank you very much for the opportunity to present. I'm gonna be very brief because Matt gave a very of what our plans are. I just wanna start by saying we're really, really excited about this project. I mean, you've got three really key elements. You've got the transformation of the community in the context of putting a permanent sports and entertainment venue in your community, which is as important as a boardwalk and the retail core of downtown and other sort of destination elements in the broader community. And that's really exciting. There's an opportunity to create a plan that's gonna implement the transformation of the lower Pacific area that is underserved and to set up a thoughtful plan that's gonna look for that transformation, particularly given the development pressures that are currently undergoing in the downtown area more broadly and then the ability to provide affordable housing. So that's a really, from a planning standpoint, you can add a more important and living locally to be able to contribute to that in the community. I know I speak for myself and the rest of the project team. We're really excited about this project. So now, excuse me. Okay, so just wanna make sure that's transitioning. We're all good. Another thumbs up. Thank you. I want it to be wonderful. Okay, so our team, we're the prime consultants. And as Matt mentioned, I live in Santa Cruz County. We have a local office in Capitola. So we are available on a moment's notice. So we're gonna be very responsive throughout the process. Dudek and Matt Thompson architects also have offices in Santa Cruz. So we really felt strategically, it was important to combine a local presence and a local knowledge with a national breadth. And then both Dahlin and EPS are gonna join us. Dahlin is a design firm in the Bay Area and EPS will be doing the fiscal economic. And I'll describe a little bit more about some of the sub-consultances in the context of how we're structured. So our approach is basically based on five major themes that I just wanna summarize. There's obviously a lot more in context, but these are the main things that I wanna share with you today. The first thing is meaningful community engagement. So any successful plan, we've gotta make sure that community engagement is done, that it's broad, it's equitable and it's effective. And we've got a lot of good tools to do that. And we can do that both in a digital format and a non-digital. So we're kind of at a transition point here, trying to determine how to scope it and how to react best in sort of the post COVID elements, if you will. So we're set up and positioned to work in both formats and that ends up coming about this. And so we're certainly flexible and can do that. And we have some really good systems and ways of engaging so that we're broadening that participation. So it doesn't have to be a tactile and a meeting, although that's obviously has its rich components to it, but also where people can also come in a meaningful way on their own time. And we can talk about that later, but at another time, the key here is that we're gonna prepare a community engagement strategy. So we'll be working with staff to tailor the engagement based specifically on your needs. So we've identified in the scope various approaches and we have some items that we're gonna talk about in the next slide. But the key is that we're gonna set up an engagement plan and that that plan is dynamic. So as the project rolls out, flexible with you, working with you throughout the whole process to evolve that and change as needed. This is probably the most important slide and that is it's looking at the work program in combination with how we do the community engagement. So the blue boxes show the six phases of the project from project initiation through to the public hearings and adoption and in the kind of the orange text, you see where there's opportunities for community engagement. So at project initiation, we'll do the community engagement strategy and basically do some of the backend stuff with the digital component of it. Through project discovery, we're gonna engage in focused outreach with various groups including the warriors, landowners, community organizations, et cetera and conduct a first sort of visioning and exploration workshop. And then in the development scenarios is really looking at options and that's really a key because that's where the evolution of taking the vision and then what is that gonna translate into as far as the genesis and the themes of a plan. So the be focused outreach, we identified the opportunity to do joint planning and downtown commission study sessions. So if that's agreeable and defined in the engagement strategy, but we thought that might be a good synergy there and then to have another community workshop and then at the end of those development scenarios would be a preferred at least in draft and that back to city council and make sure that we're moving in the right direction. So it's really key to make sure we don't get too far down the line and make sure there's plenty of community engagement particularly at that critical junction to make sure we're moving in the right direction. And then once we start to prepare the draft downtown plan and associated amendments, we wanna go back to the community for a third workshop, have another with the planning commission and the downtown commission. And then once that's done and we can refine that then we would go out for a secret review. Again, another opportunity for a community and others to provide comments on the sequel analysis. And then the public hearings and adoption and that obviously would go to both planning commission and city council. So lots of opportunities, lots of touch points for engaging with the community and decision makers exit. The next point I wanna highlight is a higher expectation of the public realm. So I noted that we've got Dudek and Matthew Thompson architect involved. And we did that very purposely. We wanna have a local architect that really understands the local context. Matt Thompson's been around for, I don't know if he wants to admit it, but like 40 years, he knows a lot. He's built town, he understands the community very well. So we've got Matt, Kamlee Horne with our planning and urban design experience and then Dudek, excuse me, not Dudek, Dahlin Group. And the idea and we just wanna communicate what the theme here is and that is to really visually communicate what we're doing. So this slide is showing from another project the concept of tricks and areas and then how that translate into specific areas and those amenities and then carrying that forward into specific standards and design guidelines. The idea here is to be able to communicate visually so that people can understand and implementation isn't a lot of code, if you will, but it visually complements text and graphics and images to help people understand what the comp but to help in the implementation. And then the other part of that is it's not just the built form itself but then how that connects. So connectivity here is gonna be really critical. How does the project area connect to the rest of the downtown, to the San Lorenzo River and to the beach, boardwalk, main beach, et cetera. So that's gonna be really a critical component to look at how that whole urban design component works together. The other thing I wanna highlight is our in-house transportation and parking expertise. It just so happens that in 2014 Kamlee Horne prepared a parking study for Lower Pacific Avenue. So we're well positioned to get started and we've done a lot of projects for cities throughout California. On the left, you're seeing a parking study that was done for San Luis Obispo. On the right, another one for City of Carlsbad. These are just two examples but the whole context of parking is gonna be really important, particularly as it relates to parking management strategies both on and off. What's the appropriate parking ratios for the different land uses? And then looking at event parking, for example, when there's something going on in the permanent arena facility. So parking is gonna be an interesting component to this and we're well positioned to address that. Fourth thing I wanna talk about is just our CEQA experience, about a little bit. As you can see from the list here, we've got a lot of CEQA experience, both Kamlee Horne and Dudek. So we're gonna bring that to bear in both the strategy and creating a very robust and defensible CEQA document for the city. And then lastly is project completion schedule. We know that that's very important to the city and so we've heard our work program accordingly and this is identifying how we plan to do that for each of the six phases. And as Matt mentioned, our goal is to, and commitment is to bring this to the city to start the public hearings and adoptions in May of 2023. So with that, I will conclude my presentation and bring it back to Matt or the council. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bill. Okay, Matt, queue you up if there's anything to close with and then I'll invite the council to ask questions. I didn't know if you had anything else to ask. Nope, that's it for staff. Welcome, any questions? Thank you. Okay, I'll take it back to the council. I have council member coming. Thank you, Mayor and thank you for the presentation. I guess the thing that I'm hearing about the most for members of the public is the potential for the community to weigh in. And so while there's study sessions that are set up, I'm wondering, will there be an opportunity at those sessions for example, commissioners to vote on suggestions or make a recommendation? I've also been hearing that there's concern about having the meetings combined as well and that it might make sense for these to be separate meetings with the different commissions so that commissioners can provide their input. And so I'll stop there but just wanted to bring that up with those. That's what I've been hearing. Bill, did you want to respond or Matt, did you want to respond to that? I was gonna say the other, there's certainly going to be a lot of time for the public to, there's gonna be three separate community meetings for them in addition to these study sessions that they'll be able to attend as well. I haven't heard pushback about doing this potential joint planning commission and downtown commission idea but we can certainly talk more about that and separate those out if that's desired. Another thing to mention about that is that, this project, this preliminary area that we've chosen isn't in the downtown commission in the parking district area. So while we're certainly gonna wanna coordinate with the downtown commission, that's something to keep in mind as well and going forward and we haven't worked that out yet. So that's gonna take a lot more coordination with them at the beginning of this process to better understand that and where we wanna go with the parking district and how we wanna work with the downtown commission on that. So we're certainly flexible in that approach and we have no problem changing that depending on what the commissioners would like to do. Okay, has this been discussed yet as well or with the chairs at least of the commission? Cause I'm just kind of curious whether they've had a chance to weigh in on whether it makes sense for them to have a joint commission meeting versus them having independent meetings. I have at least coordinated with the downtown commission chair and the parking district manager, Brian Pergonow. And he did say there was some interest in having those together, but we can reach out to the planning commission as well and consider changing that if we need to go in forward. It's no problem either way. Will you do us something more to add to that? I would just add, it looks like Bill might want to chime in as well, that I think the commissioners, as you were alluding to, Matt, may, we'll have to see where we go with the project because if the parking district is expanding or if there's some reliance on the parking district, then certainly there's a direct connection. But we may find as we move forward that there's an alternative approach that we're taking. Maybe there's parking that's provided within the south of Laurel area. There's a new parking district or, so depending on that approach, one of those study sessions for both of those study sessions may not even include the downtown commission, but certainly we would need to include them if there was looking to be, if we were looking to have some tie in. And so I think it needs to, we need to understand how the project evolves to really understand does it need to be a joint study session? Should it just be the planning commission? And so forth. I think it will be, it's yet to be determined is what I would say. And I don't know if you had any other, do you want to be sure? I just say I concur and I think it's going to be dynamic. And, you know, these were ideas to think about integration and the end story or the outcome is that you want everyone engaged and understands the process as it occurs, not that they're informed at the end so that basically it's what I call informed consent. So, however the city wants to approach that and then evolve and respond as the project proceeds, we're here to be flexible and work with you. Great, thanks for those comments. I'll just comment myself. I think what might be useful is even splitting out those meetings at first to have independent meetings with the downtown commission and the planning commission. And then if there's a time to come back after receiving input from those commissioners, we can then weigh whether the subsequent meetings should be joined or whether having separate meetings makes the most sense. I think especially since it sounds like there hasn't been any communications with the planning commission yet on this. And so it might be a good way to start the process. And then again, understanding that it's flexible and dynamic, it can come back to council, we can weigh in and then it can proceed. But I think that that would be a really good way of just ensuring that we're giving our commissioners an opportunity to weigh in at the beginning of this bridge. Thanks. Those are all my comments. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Cummings. Council Member Brown, and then Vice Mayor Bruner and then Council Member Konter-Donner. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Matt, for the presentation and all the work that's gone into this, as we move through the process. I have two questions. The first is, and these are based on concerns that have been expressed to me as well around how to create a meaningful public input process. And the way that the agenda report is written here out of study session and information item type steps. And my general sense is that when we do those things, and I think they're important, I'm not critiquing having those, but those are not opportunities for public input generally. They tend to be a one-way transfer of information to the public. And so informed consent, consent needs to be developed not just through receiving information, but also being able to engage in the process. And so I'm just wondering what you're thinking is about how to actually shape some of these meetings to meet that goal. So that's my first question. And then I guess I'm curious why the Planning Commission has been pretty well sidelined. It looks like in this process, having two joint meetings is wonderful, but really, since we're talking about ultimately general plan amendments, that is the role Planning Commission plays. So I'm just wondering why they have such a little, you conceive of such a small role for the Planning Commission here. Well, I'll speak first to the Planning Commission question and thank you for that, Council Member Brown. So like I said in the presentation to the actual EIR is gonna take about half of this two-year process. And so we're looking at about a year process and that includes existing conditions analysis and creating the outreach strategy so we're looking at a pretty small area of time where we're really creating a lot of this and that's where there's gonna be a lot of energy put in to get all this input from community members and decision makers. And so it's really gonna be at that time where we're looking at there's really two key touchpoints where we're coming back to the Planning Commission and possibly the Downtown Commission. However that goes, but the Planning Commission is still gonna have really two key areas in this where we're looking at the future development scenarios. So they're gonna be involved directly in that discussion and as a study session. And then also when we have the first draft of the amendments as well. So there's going to be those are probably the two most important areas where they should be involved and that's where we have them involved in this process. So that's certainly sufficient given this timeline and schedule and then of course they'll, they're gonna be a recommending body to you when this is nearing completion. So we certainly feel like those touchpoints and decision making areas are the perfect time for Planning Commission to be involved and we'll get successful input from them. So yeah, thank you for the response. I have one other question. Although I will say just based on what I'm hearing it really sounds to me like we are heading down the same road that we often head down where what comes to the Planning Commission and then ultimately to the city council will be pretty fully formed proposal. And I understand that you're trying to make that an iterative process and that there are possibilities for change. So I don't wanna be critical of your intentions here but what I see is what I see is kind of a process that will guide us towards the logical conclusion that we're looking for and not take account of kind of the messiness of the community's perspectives and views on how to move forward with this. The other piece is that I'm trying to understand the steps in this because the last time this area for the downtown expansion came before us we were asked to make a decision about the process for moving forward about whether or not we were going to move forward with this type of plan. And as far as I know, neither the city council nor the public have been able to provide input about that question. So we are now making an assumption that we've all agreed that's what we're doing and we're gonna move forward in that vein. And I think if we are gonna do that that it's particularly important that we involve the public in meaningful ways. So I guess if there's any, if you all have a response to the question of like why are we talking about how before deciding yes. And then I guess the rest of my comments if you have any thoughts. Yeah, thank you again. This idea of expanding the downtown was brought before council several times through the grant, both through the grant process and in applying seeking council authorization to apply for the grants, also enacting them. And in addition to when we went to council so it was those two grant processes and going to council last month prior to this RFP process. So we did receive direction a few times in those for public meetings. We received comments on that. So at this time we're moving forward based on that direction and going forward with the grant goals and trying to meet them through this project. I'd like to also just invite Bill perhaps to respond to some of the comments from council member Brown relating to the community engagement. And the approach that you'll be taking to ensure that the community does have a opportunity to weigh in and help shape the vision for where we go. And then also the proposed standards that we'll be crafting. And so maybe a second to just speak to that Bill. Sure, I do. And just let me just share my screen real quickly because I talked about, can you see my screen? Just to make sure, okay. So there's really the two sides of it. There's the digital and the non-digital. So what we're proposing to use on the digital side is a platform called social pinpoint. And that's what the center ring is to pick. The idea of this is that it's going to be the glue that provides the information format that people can engage in outside of direct content. So this is basically, we can hold virtual meetings. We can do surveys, et cetera. And just to show you some of the functionality, it enables people to go in and post comments spatially so they can look at a map and make comments there. There's a concept called an idea walls. There's forums that can be held. There's pages that can be put together. So it's a really robust way of enabling people that can do surveys, et cetera. So it enables them to do it on their time and they can provide very meaningful comments that can be summarized and grouped, et cetera. So a way to just come together. The other component of that, and by the way, this can be done where we can host meetings through the social pinpoint. We can have interpretation so that there's, in this case, you're seeing example where we actually had someone speaking Spanish to help facilitate for those people. So it's really robust and it enables us to do that in that, if you will, COVID type of environment. But then there's also just the straight hands-on. So if we can do some of these workshops or in combination or separately where we're doing direct outreach, I envision maybe having meetings in the existing Kaiser arena where we can hold the forum and be having face-to-face contact. Hopefully maybe even having some of the planning commissioners where they're engaged in that process and listening or whomever else, however we wanna do that, but obviously staff and consultants. But this is the other side of where people can be able to provide their comments in an enriched dynamic manner. So we're looking at both ways to do that and get the broadest participation as possible in that. I'm ticking over for a minute. Council Member Brown, did you have any more questions? Okay, thank you. So I have myself up in the queue and then Council Member Calantari-Johnson. So my question was also on that community engagement piece. I know that it was previous council that for the grants, for the housing opportunities, was that in October, I believe? And so the last time around in March or when we heard this, there was a lot of community input to be part of process rather than being told what the process is. So I just wanted to emphasize that importance in this process that is being proposed that they're part of the decision-making in that. And on digital and digital formats are great to see and multilingual is great to see. Thank you for sharing the examples from the other cities that you've worked with. Ken, maybe it's Lee or Matt. Also, I think it might be helpful in clarifying some of the, is in the commissions. When we have the word downtown and a lot of the names, it's called the Downtown Expansion Plan. There's a Downtown Commission, there's a Downtown Management Corporation. And just understanding maybe if you can, the geographical differences of each of those and their roles, the Planning Commission, the Downtown Commission, what exactly their districts and roles are? So now I'll speak to the first part. Thank you again, Council Member Brunner. Just reiterating, staff certainly agrees with your comments regarding the outreach process and bringing people along through this. And one of the big reasons we chose Kimley Horne and Bill for this was we really appreciate just how measured the schedule was and how well-thought-it-was in bringing people through this process and always coming to the community at the decision-making times and really making their comments part of the process and then going back and showing how those comments are brought forward. So that's the first part. For the second part, I'll turn to Lee. I saw him pop up quick. Do you wanna explain that a little better on the district trick? Thanks, Lee. You had some questions about sort of that. Maybe I'll just start with the Planning Commission looks at certain land use decisions that are city-wide. So that, of course, includes the Downtown, but they look at the land use decisions that fall within their jurisdiction, whether decision-making capacity or in a recommendation capacity. In this instance, for this particular plan, it would be in a recommendation capacity to the city council as the formal required process. And then, as you heard from Matt and Bill, they're also built into other Planning Commission would also be built into other parts of the process. The Downtown Commission actually looks at areas within the parking district. And so they're focused in large part on the parking issues associated with parking district number one that covers a large chunk of the downtown, but that actually includes the project area right now. And I think that might be what you are looking to get the diffusion regarding. And I apologize for not making that clear because I'm sure that members of the community aren't necessarily aware of that. And so the parking district does not expect the south of Laurel right now. And as Bill was mentioning before, how parking is handled in this area, we're gonna be looking at a variety of different options and we'll be looking at creative approaches to how parking could be shared, we'll be considering should the parking district be expanded or shouldn't it be expanded? What are the pros and cons of that? And so we'll be looking at those needs, but the project area in and of itself right now, if it wasn't expanding the parking district, we wouldn't actually be mandated to go in front of the Downtown Commission, but we may want to do that if we're incorporating the, well, we would do that if we're incorporating the, or expanding the district, the parking district. We may want to do that anyway, if we think there are gonna be parking implications across the district boundary. And so I think that's why the proposal came in, recognizing that there may be some, that there may be some stress, even if that parking district isn't expanded. So did that help to respond to the question that you were getting at there, Vice Mayor Brunner? Yes, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have Council Member Calantari Johnson. Thank you. Brunner, you spoke to some of the comments that I was gonna make, but I'll say it my way, that I was actually really pleased to see in the scope of work by Kinley and Horne, some extensive thought given to the community engagement process. I had some questions initially around it, but you answered them in the presentation. Again, pleased to see the multi-mode, multi-lingual. I've heard and understand is that we are looking at going and meeting the community where they're at. I saw one example of going to the farmer's market. So I think that is important as Council Member Brown brought up authentic, meaningful methods of engagement. So I saw that in the scope of work and in the presentation. Some other things consider just could be literacy levels and multi-lingual, of course, but also looking at literacy levels. I was glad to see visual opportunities of educating the community and engaging the community but considering literacy as well when we're doing community engagement. And I think just the couple of other questions. In my mind, it makes sense to have these commissions do some joint meetings because this project does include land use and downtown. And so to have the partnership between these two commissions that have expertise in these areas, at least in some of the forums, seem like a logical step to take. So just that comment. And then a question around the parking research that will be done. Does the parking research look at the modes of transportation fit into the bigger picture? How does that look? I don't know who would answer that question. I can answer that absolutely. In fact, that's a critical component, particularly as it relates to the strategy with VNT, with vehicle miles traveled and the fact that the downtown has so much alternative options. So that's a very critical component to that. Great. Those are my questions. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not seeing any other council member's hands up. Yeah, I'll just echo some of my colleagues' comments. It does seem like a, it's a quick timeline to study an area like this but it does seem to be that you're able to fit in a number of engagement points. I'd love to see, if it's possible, there's mentioned in here about, really looking at architecture and understanding that neighborhood feel and to the extent that even having a neighborhood walk about as one of your community engagement type of activities it would be neat to see that. It's kind of the last little bit of our downtown that's got some little history or at least some architecture that's really interesting and it's got that real neighborhood feel. So I would encourage you to hopefully not just PowerPoint people but really think about, we have beautiful weather pretty much all the time here and get people out walking about. Especially, I'm a big fan was one of the folks that worked on the river plan many, many years ago and I think the river is completely untouched resource and having a new neighborhood such as this kind of planned around its edges and understanding how to get people connected to the river and utilizing the river in a way that's more neighborhood based. I mean, it happens now that this could bring a real opportunity. If the warriors are able to maintain that location there's also a facility there for the community to do things. I would imagine baseball but other things as well. I know the warriors have been very generous with their space in terms of accommodating other things for the community as well. So it looks a really exciting area to plan and certainly look forward to the meetings and encourage you to kind of get people out on the river and get people really understanding like what will this neighborhood be like if I lived here? What would this neighborhood be like if my kids were here? And just kind of use the space and a creative way to have those conversations. So thank you for the proposal. It's exciting to have you guys on board. I'll bring it out to the attendees now unless there's any other comments by the staff or the consultant or okay. We'll go ahead and bring it out. I have one caller with your hand raised. If you do want to comment on this item you should raise press star nine on your phone to raise your hand when it is your time to speak. You will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set. And again, we are on item number 42 in our agenda. So if you do want to speak to this, press star nine on your phone. So phone number ending in 5362, go ahead please. Press star six and that'll unmute you. We can't hear you yet. Phone number ending in 5362, if you could press star six on your phone that should unmute you and we'll be able to hear your comment. Good afternoon council members. This is Judy Grenstra. This is very interesting. As you know, the community is a little bit skeptical when they hear words about robust community engagement. I see two terms here that sound promising. Facilitated dialogue and participant generated content well sound good. And the social pinpoint means of doing outreach that seemed very interesting. I'm just interested in it lately. And when you say focused outreach, I certainly hope that does mean to the Latino community and not just providing interpreters. You really have to get them involved in this area of town. And what else? I thought that there was something in the proposal about 3D modeling being optional. And I think you really need, as any of these big projects go forward in the community, they shouldn't be just optional. You need to have story polls and you need to show people on the site how large these projects are going to be. So, and as far as parking, I don't see why the warriors can't be providing some of that parking or chipping in some thing, perhaps sharing it with the boardwalk because they're all gonna benefit by having parking and it shouldn't be all on the city's dime. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, I'll bring it back for further discussion and deliberation by the council. Council member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. This is, it's pretty exciting the direction of trying to consider expanding the downtown and I want to thank staff for the presentation and for the consultant for coming today. I think that there's a lot of great opportunities and I think so long as we really create a meaningful input process from the beginning that we can really get the community on board with us because it's something that could be a huge win for the community, especially, you can keep the warriors here and all the benefits, not only the solidarity that that brings for our community, but also the revenue that that has for potential to generate for our community as well. But I do want to express just some concerns around the participation of some of our commissions. So I together motion on it if I can share my screen. But if so, I can see, I can use it as a starting point and see if we can find consensus. So let me see if I can share my screen. Everyone's like, sorry. So the motion would be to move the staff recommendation with the filing changes. And just for, just so people are aware, the language here is based off of the, it's page 42.99 from the Kimmelhorn report that has kind of a breakdown of time online. And so it would add the downtown plan expansion project items to the agenda of the planning commission and downtown commission after the first community workshop, after the release of the first administrative draft downtown plan prior to city review for input, after the third community workshop to review and provide input on the draft downtown plan and add a downtown commission meeting prior to the final decision in 2023. And so really what that's doing is it's not changed. It would still have, we'd still have the joint meeting, but it would allow for each of the commissions to provide input kind of after there's been some community feedback after the first workshop, it would allow them to provide input after the first administrative draft downtown plan after the third workshop. And then it would just then add another, because we already have the planning commission and city council meeting in May and June of 2023, but adding the downtown commission for final input prior to city council making decisions. I think that that would provide additional opportunities for community input and input from our commissions. And I've spoken to some of the planning commissioners. I know they haven't been meeting much this year and so this could give them something to do and we provide meaningful input from our commissions on this process. I might just see if the consultant or the staff might give us a little bit of whether this is a timeline issue because I know these commissions sometimes meet only, there's three more meetings that plan based on one day a month types of things. I'm just curious about that. And then if there's additional costs for these and whether that is within the budget of the proposal. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I'd be happy to speak more about that. It appears to be adding one additional planning commission study session and currently the way it's folks now there would be two, which is after the first community workshop and after the third community workshop. And between those two, there's a city council study session in between those two. So the staff would still prefer to have that set up to get additional input from each of the bodies. I think adding a third planning commission meeting, of course, in addition to their final decision, a third study session I should say would add costs and could potentially back the schedule as well. So you're okay, but thank you for that, Matt. Council Member Brown. Thank you. Yeah, so I appreciate the proposal, Council Member Cummings, that you've put forward. I do think that I would be much more comfortable with moving forward along these lines where we two have the planning commission play that role. And so, and to be more involved earlier on rather than just taking a fully formed draft proposal and giving us comments on that, I just don't think that's a meaningful public session. It's not a meaningful role for the planning commission. They ought to be collaborating with the staff and consultants in this process. This is what the planning commission does. This is what we have them to do. I don't believe that this would create undue time burdens. I, you know, the planning commission theoretically meets and so there's time to schedule those, to actually have those meetings and to have the planning commission be a collaborative partner in the community workshop public input process. And that I would feel much more comfortable with that. I have not seconded the motion, Council Member Cummings, because I'm in a way to include the intention to enroll the planning commission in a collaborative way in community workshops, public input process from the beginning. And so I'm wondering if you would be willing to include some mention of that in the motion, in which case I would comment. Council Member Cummings. I'm wondering. Yeah, I mean, I guess the question for staff would be not in SING's language on the screen. I'm wondering as a way to cut costs if the community workshops could be with the planning commission. So that that is something that rather than creating more work that those community workshops would be planning commission meetings where we'd get input from the public and input from our commissioners. Matt, do you want to answer that? Yes, thanks for that suggestion, Council Member Cummings. We've worked through this before where we've had a community meeting advertised as an official planning commission meeting. And that's the case when there's a quorum of planning commissioners had a public meeting. And what we've really found is the way we've set it up now I think is a preferred way because... Matt, you're... When you have a community meeting, that becomes a formal planning commission meeting. It doesn't get the same responses from the community as a formal planning commission meeting. And it doesn't give us the flexibility to do additional small groups or focus groups or anything like that during the meeting or small groups and facilitated groups, things like that. It becomes more difficult to come to a formal planning commission meeting that has to have an agenda and is run rather than through staff. So that wouldn't be the preferred approach from staff. We think it's a better option of moving the community through the process if there are separate meetings, just for them and for planning commission and still for the planning commission or the community commission meetings as well. Yeah, I would chime in and then I'll see Council Member Calantari-Johnson, Council Member Brown and Council Member Watkins. My feeling is that, I mean, my experience in doing some of this around here, people really enjoy the left formal engagement in more of a workshop setting where there can be storyboards and small group setting. I think the commission, the commission has a huge role in this. I mean, they will ultimately be the body that refers recommendations on to the council. So it's not like we're leaving them out, I don't think. And I'm trying to understand a little bit it looks like the proposal and the motion is to actually have the first community workshop and then go to the planning commission. So you have a workshop that goes with planning commission and downtown commission and then you have the admin draft downtown plan. Personally, I really like when we did this with the master plan for the parks master plan. We've done a lot of different plans that I was involved with. That midway stop with city council to me is really important. I don't wanna get to the end and have everybody else look at it. And then we're like, okay, well, let's dig in here. City council is a place where people do like to come and really voice their opinions. So I think that study session for the city council is very important. And I like the positioning of it. But I really think that community workshops are really what that's really what they are. They're community workshops. They're not in the chambers. They're not formal. They're not having commissioners run the meeting. They're having our consultants and our architects and our designers and our artists, hopefully and other people engaged and excited about what's happening, what could happen on the ground. A really different feeling than sitting kind of listening to commissioners. And I feel like commissioners do have quite a lot of role in this and it seems really appropriate. And I would really not wanna miss that midway check-in with city council at the study session. So that's my thought. Council Member Callentary-Johnston. Thank you. That was a question as what would that combined community workshop and commission meeting do in terms of community, true community engagement and would it potentially deter the level of community engagement we want? So sounds like we addressed that. And the increase engagement with the commissions and earlier on is not a bad one but I am concerned about the impacts on the timeline and the cost. And I don't know if we're able to get that information now. How much would it add to the timeline? How much would it delay us towards our end goal and what kind of costs are we looking at? And if we don't have that information now, then maybe we could consider this in the near future when we do have the information. Thank you for that question, Council Member Callentary-Johnston. Like adding one planning commission meeting as a planning commission study session, I should say, between the preps, the meeting itself and then writing a memo afterwards, acknowledging what was received from the meeting seems to cost around $10,000. It's slightly a little more. And while planning commission holds meetings, twice a month throughout the year, it's tough to say between that and a city council meeting around the same time. Could add two weeks to a month to that process, depending on where that falls and in my, based on where the schedule is now and trying to get this to council approval by June 2023 before the summer break, making sure we don't fall past that could end up saving us a few months unless it would get pushed to August if we didn't make that June timeline. So it might not be a significant amount, but it could be enough to push that to the August phase. Thank you. Okay, I have council member Brown, council member Cummings and then council, I mean, excuse me, council member Watkins and then council member Cummings. And then I favor. Thank you. So I guess before we go any further, I'm going to second the motion. We aren't making any changes. The one that council member Cummings has put forward, I'll second it. $10,000 for a meeting is a shocking number for me when I think about the fact that the materials that would be presented at a planning commission sponsored community engagement session or planning commission partnered workshop, it's all the same information that you're going to prepare for a workshop. And so I guess I just, I have a really hard time understanding what the $10,000 cost is there to just to hold a meeting with the planning commission that is based around materials that's already being produced and used in other arenas. Sorry, that's just, it's pretty hard for me to believe. I guess I just want to stress again that we are obviously involved in making decisions. And I think the halfway point is really too late, honestly. But I do think that if we don't create a meaningful engagement process, I'm sorry to be cynical about this, but I have just seen it happen over and over, over decades now. If that process feels stilted, if people feel like they are not actually being able to provide meaningful input, there will be a lot of dissent. And so my goal is to try to, even if it's a little messy and it takes a little longer, have a process that we come out on the other end will feel good about it rather than just having the polarized yes or no, all or nothing. So I guess I, yeah, I don't feel comfortable moving forward with the proposal as it is. I really appreciate what's been written in the scope of work and I know you are committed to this community engagement, but I think that based on the way it plays out in our community time after time, that it's not, it's a one-way transfer of information from our staff and or consultants to people who then have a moment to, if they get their hand, if they get called upon, say something. And that is not, to me, that is not meaningful community engagement. So I guess I, you know, it's a shame that we can't think about, you know, a more central role for the planning commission as a council, but I'll leave it there, I guess. And I'll have to, I don't think I'll be able to support this. Council Member Watkins, Council Member Cummings and Vice Mayor Brut. Thank you, Mayor. I think a lot of my questions have been asked and answered. I guess my only additional question is, in regards to best practice, so that our consultants have worked in other communities around engagement and around the role of the planning commission, how does this fit in that and their experience? I don't know if that's for Bill or Lee or others. Matt or Bill or anything else? I think I'll turn to Bill on this one. Okay, and I apologize. Can you repeat the question for me? I've got part of it, but not all of it, and I apologize for that. I'm sorry, for something my, like our Alexa went off and got like, I don't know why, sorry about that. She's not talking, I'm talking so weird, so sorry. My question was in regards to, like, you know, I'm just trying to get a context of what's meaningful, a meaningful role of the planning commission in this process. And I know that you've worked in other jurisdictions, you shared that. And so in regards to sort of your experience and best practice, you know, how are we aligned with a, you know, a community engagement at meaningfully used the planning commission and their capacity as well? Okay, thank you, and I apologize. I got just a bit, but I wanted to make sure I understood what you were asking. While we're talking, there's a couple of things that are going through my mind. One is how the planning commission gets engaged and I don't think it always has to be the words. Let's say that we have a study session or a workshop. That workshop can be noticed as a public meeting and then the planning commissioners attend and even participate, which really makes it a great way to do that, but there's no formal thing. You just basically start the beginning and say, hey, this is a public meeting, blah, blah, blah, blah. You go through that sort of stuff and then you have someone close the meeting. Apart from that, no one really knows that it's a public meeting and that's a really nice way to do it. And I concur with Ryer's comment that it needs to be informal. It has to be creative. People have to feel free to express themselves and the beauty of that is that they're right there hearing what the community is saying and in some ways engaging and recording those comments. In other words, they're an extension of staff or the consultants. That is really effective and I think that might be one thing to consider. As far as the quality of it and decision-making, it seems like we're struggling with when to bring them in and what those key points are. What we've defined in here is that they are, after the project discovery, they're hearing what the vision is from the community and then after the scenarios, they're hearing what the response is. So formal standpoint, if the planning commission is in response to what the community is stating, and that's why Matt was saying, we need to put together a memo or it's a presentation or whatever. In other words, here's what you said and then here's how that translates and then you check with the planning commission. And that way they can formally grasp onto something that is genuinely driven from the community, not from their own personal opinions maybe or otherwise. So I think if it's a grounded process that enables them to respond to what the community engagement process is driving, it'll be much better for you as council members to then see that process and logic and that's what we've done with other communities many times. So there's kind of that hybrid of engagement but then there's also the formality of direction. And I think, I mean, that's what I see you design here for us today as well. So I really appreciate that context and I appreciate the input around community engagement and community voice-driven input as opposed to individual, more formalized planning commission voice. And but also incorporating them in the checkpoints along the way. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to do a time check for the council. We are now an hour and a half late on our schedule today. I'm wondering if there is any way to go ahead and either take a vote or I'm not hearing a lot of support for the proposed amendments. And I'm sure as we get into the process, as many council members have said, sometimes you do find yourself with an extra meeting. Maybe they'll spend the night and the next morning he's willing to take another walk around the neighborhood with somebody. I mean, I think this is a two-year process. I think trying to set everything in stone is, it compromises the creativity of the hiring and the professionalism that they can bring to the process. And so I'm not hearing support for some of these amendments right now, but and I'm very aware that we're an hour and a half late. So, and we do have people I know that are waiting on some of these items that we're gonna be tackling, hoping to take another break, but I think we're losing that opportunity. So I saw vice mayor or council member coming, vice mayor Bruner and council member Brown. That is like the state, but the planning commission really addresses line use and that's kind of what this process around expanding the downtown footprint in the city, which has impacts and implications for land use. And I agree that I think that Kevin community workshops that are less formal are really helpful for getting people engaged. And part of why I had mentioned having the feedback go to the planning commission and the downtown commission, independently after some of these community meetings is an opportunity for those groups to hear about what is being said in the community and then also being able to provide some kind of feedback and direction. I do, I also want to point out that, like for example, this year the planning commission hasn't met since April 1st, and this is the body that's supposed to meet twice per month. So, and it's now the end of June. And so, I think if costs are an issue, I mean, these meetings we plan for these meetings in our budget. I mean, these meetings are budgeted and so, and it's something that's supposed to happen, right? And so I think that this notion that it's gonna cost the city more isn't accurate because of the fact that we've already budgeted for these commission meetings, and so I would even go to say that this year we have a savings from not having those commission meetings since the commission hasn't met since April. Overall, I think it's really from the consultant team having to do an additional meeting. So when you bring together the full suite of the consultant team, you're talking several people that probably are pretty highly priced. And so I think that's where the extra cost maker, just for clarification. I don't think it's the cost of holding a meeting. I think it's actually convening all the experts to make presentations and do those things. But please continue. Thank you. But I guess the overall the point for trying to add some of these commission meetings in is because when I read the schedule that we have, there's one joint planning commission meeting with downtown commission in February of 2022. And then there's one planning commission meeting in May of 2023. And that just seems like it's not adequate that we need. I mean, when we have these administered draft downtown plans, those should go to our commission for review so we can get input from them. I think about when we had our parks master plan and how the commission plays a large role in providing feedback on those type of documents. This is a similar scenario where we're talking about land use. And the purpose of what I've put into the motion was really to just provide additional opportunities for this to go to our commission because as it currently stands, that's not what I see in this project schedule that's being provided to us. So just wanted to give some context around purpose and really wanting to ensure that we are utilizing our community members who we've appointed to our commissions because ultimately, trying part of getting community feedback is also getting feedback from our commissioners and creating meaningful opportunities for them to provide input, which I don't think there's adequate a level of input from commissioners with the current draft is laid out. I would like to clarify a quick thank you for your comments, council member comments and good catch. The scope of work in or the schedule and the attachments includes just one of the planning commission meetings, but the schedule that Bill showed in his presentation is the correct one where there are actually two planning commission study sessions and they would be right at the second community meeting, the third community meeting. So there are two, the scope of work originally included the potential for two of them right around the time that they were doing the development scenarios. But we have decided to break those out into two separate meetings around the second and third community meeting. So I would like to take this time to clarify that there would be two planning commission study sessions and not the one and that bill schedule and timeline of the meetings was correct, the one you showed in this presentation. Thanks. Vice Mayor Brunner and then council member Brown and then I think we might need to take a vote so that we can continue with some of the items. Vice Mayor Brunner. So Matt just touched on something I be on in that this motion that has been brought forward by a council member Cummings. There's talk about planning commission study sessions and planning commission meetings and we're talking about regular meetings and are the study sessions at the regular meetings or extra meetings, I'm not clear on that. So if there's a difference and my understanding when this came up and can you clarify council member Cummings, my understanding is you're wanting this item to be on planning commission regular meetings agenda a month as like checkpoints along the way and then it got into a whole discussion about planning commission study sessions that there would be two, which sounds separate from regular meetings. So I'm not clear on what's being recommended or what the intention from the consultant is in regards to regular planning commission meetings twice a month. Thank you, Vice Mayor Brunner. I'll clarify that. So the as scoped, there would be two planning commission study sessions after the second and third community meetings in this process. And the first community meeting that's really just introduced the project and begin visioning. So there wouldn't be a great deal to report that there would be certainly after the second, which is how it's wide scope that way. So the community meetings would be separate as it's soaked right now where there'd be three standard community meetings at various points in the project, whereas study sessions with planning commission and potentially downtown commission would be separate from those after community meetings. Thank you. Thank you. So there would be separate planning commission study sessions after the community meetings. And on top of the regular planning commission meetings twice a month. And so council member Cummings, are you giving direction to just agendize this at each planning commission regular meeting as is that what I'm understanding in your motion to add that to the staff recommendation? If I can respond, ultimately yes, because so for example, after the first community, we would be anticipating that the planning commission is going to be in November. So have that go on their agenda as an item for discussion or just to get an update, for example, after the first workshop. The draft downtown plan is the first, it says first administrative draft downtown plan that looks like it's going to be in March. So going into the city review in May, it would be good if our commissioners could weigh in on that plan, if that plan is going to be completed in March and that could be done at the meeting, the planning commission and downtown commission, those regular meetings in April. And then I'd mentioned also to adding, just when we're getting ready to do the final review in June of 2023, the planning commission is going to meet in May and the downtown commission I would imagine would also be meeting in May. And this is something that could go on their agenda to get input from them at their regular meeting. And so the intention is not to add meetings, it's really to, during the regular meetings of the commissions to have more feedback from them and have this go to them so that we can throughout the entire process, they can, the communities coming from, they can provide us with input. And given that we have regular meetings scheduled, for me it doesn't make sense why we're not using these as opportunities to get more input on this process. So that's the intention is to really utilize the regularly scheduled meetings throughout this process to get input from our commissioners. Can I ask the follow-up staff question to staff? And do the consultants need to be present at the regular planning commission meetings? It makes sense at the study sessions. But can staff updates be at the regular planning commission meetings? Yes, I mean, potentially we could. I suppose it depends on what the discussion involves and what experts from the consulting team may need to be a part of it. You know, we're certainly open to working with planning commission as much as possible, but it's also a matter of, you know, planning commission every two weeks, you know, staff would generally prefer to work with them when there actually needs to be decisions made. You know, we could potentially update them here and there, but I would say general, the way it's written now, still reaches planning commission at key points in the project where they naturally need to review stuff and provide direction and feedback to staff. So that's the way it's currently scoped right now. Yeah, I might jump in here. I mean, my experience is at least working through plans that on commissions is like the Parks Commission, we had two workshops, you know, for the master plan after they had four, you know, they had a lot of community input, they did a lot of survey work, and it was only when we really needed to make a decision, you know, on a preliminary sort of either feedback that was given by the community sessions and that was comprised and then there was a list to respond to, but I mean, as a commissioner, your advisory, you know, your role is not to be sort of managing a project, it's a purely advisory seat. And so that has to sort of determine when the best thing is time is to bundle all this information and go and get that advice and be able to do that deep dive with our commission. They're not, I don't believe our commissions are meant to just sort of, you know, be, you know, at least that's what I've known about planning commissions is, you know, most are looking for those nuggets of real work that they wanna dive into and, you know, so I'm gonna see if we can kind of round this up. Council Member Brown and then Council Member Cummings and then I don't know if any council members would wanna, if we need to keep working on this or if we can maybe take a vote. I'll look for a council member to sort of help me with that at some point. So Council Member Cummings, we've been on this item for almost two hours now or a little over, well, getting close to, no, I'm sorry, an hour. So Council Member Cummings. And then I'm sorry, but I'm sorry, I have to ask because I had my hand up. I'm sorry, my hand went down. And then Council Member Brown, I'm just looking at my queue. Council Member Cummings, Council Member Brown, I'm just looking at my queue. So you disappeared and then you, so I'm happy to go on that work. Council Member Cummings. Yeah, I guess I wanted to make some follow-up remarks because, you know, a big, not clear to me based on the way that the schedule has been created that, you know, for example, when the first administrative trap, the downtown plan, I think it's a little bit of a challenge for me to be able to go on that work. I think it's a little bit of a challenge to trap the downtown plan. Like that's a, that seems like an opportunity where we could get input from commissioners. That would be good because we're going to do, there's going to be a second draft that's made and we're going to make, you know, some kind of decision on that. And then again, then after the draft of the downtown plan, you know, the idea would be that this could go back to commission. Like these plans as they're being produced are being reviewed by commissioners. That's really a big part of the purpose of this is to get the commissioners to provide us with input as these traps are produced along the way. And so, so that's really the intention here is not to have these commissions managing this, the flow of this work. It's really, you know, after the first community workshop, getting input and then as these plans are produced, that they're giving us input as well on the drafts that are coming before us. So that's the intent. It's not to have the commissioners kind of managing this process, but it's really trying to utilize them so that we can get feedback. And I will say that when there aren't, when there isn't, when there are not items, the commissions don't meet. So it's not that this will agenda for the entire year. It's kind of at these key points when we have these traps of the plans that they're going to them, we get input from them, you know, so that when we're making a final decision we've allowed our commissions to weigh in. So the intention is not to have this on every single downtown and planning commission agenda, you know, until the end of the project. It's really trying to identify these key points on when we can get input on the plans from the commissioners and so they can understand where the community is at too on this. That's member Brown. So yeah, I'll just say a few more things. And I recognize that it's taking a long time, but this is a really big deal. What we're doing here, the decisions we are making are a really big deal and we need to be prepared to work through it and get to a vote. So I just, I feel the need to say that because, you know, it's just frustrating to be felt like I'm being hurried along and then still have to kind of respond to the things that I'm hearing, you know, that I need to respond to. So in response to the contention that, you know, my interest or, you know, an interest in including the planning commission more robustly is undermining the consultant. I just really take issue with that. That is not at all what I am talking about here. I want to say I'm very pleased with what I've heard from the consultant. You know, I liked the presentation and I believe Mr. Weissman said that these shops could actually allow the planning commission to be present, not to manage it, but to participate and to be there and to see and hear what the community is saying if they are properly noticed. I didn't hear, and I'm sorry, I'm not, I'm just, I don't mean to put words in your mouth, Mr. Weissman. So correct me if I'm wrong, but what I heard was that that's fine. And so I'm just having a hard time understanding why that is such a problem. I'd really like to see us try to do that to make that a part of the, this is not about the planning commission managing it, it's about them being involved in the conversation. So, you know, I'll leave it there. Part T, Councilor Hopkins is next. Sure. I appreciate all those different opinions and I think the general interest around community engagement and checkpoints within the planning commission and within the council along the way. I, given the conversation, I really feel like I understand the logic behind the proposal that we've received from our staff and the consultant. I wonder if, you know, in the interest of trying to move as a, you know, move policy forward here at this time, if we potentially could have the planning commission receive regular, you know, memos or updates on progress. And of course, naturally, if there are, if there is a need that arises to bring it to the planning commission, then, you know, we wanna see that go forward. But given what I've been presented with in the discussion and kind of the overall intention around really robust community engagement with checkpoints within our advisory bodies, as well as within the council, I, you know, I feel more comfortable, I think, with what the consultants and what the staff is recommending. So I'm happy if we want to just go ahead and take the vote at this point and then we can move the policy forward. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor for, to make an amendment to the motion, to the staff recommendation. Bonnie, can you throw that up again? And that's had a second to it. So the amendment is, original motion was to direct the city manager to execute the contract in a form approved by the city attorney with Kimley Horn and associates in the amount of 508.12 to procure consultant services to complete the downtown expansion plan project. Tony, I have a question for you, where the actual motion is to execute the contract. And now we may be changing the scope of work with this second motion, but I'm not completely clear after the discussion. Is that something we need to worry about or can we act on the second on the motion without assuming that there will be a change in the cost and that that could be brought back to, I'm just curious. I think that just given the discussion, it seems likely that there will be a change in the cost, but that can be something that comes back to the council for approval of an amendment if it's necessary. Okay, and the second, the amended motion is that, or excuse me, the amendment to the motion is to direct staff to add the downtown plan expansion project item to the agenda of the planning commission and downtown commission after the first community workshop, after the release of the first administrative draft, after the third community workshop to review and provide input on the draft downtown plan and add a downtown commission prior to the final decision. I would suggest it's up to two votes because the first is really, it is executing the contract. The second is sort of a scoping and may come back as if we do approve that motion, Tony, we could bring that back with a cost adjustment. Is that, would that be the best way to do it? Tony disappeared. Yes, it's the mayor's prerogative to divide the question. Okay, I think we'll take a vote on the first motion, which is the staff recommendation, which is to direct city manager to execute the contract in a form approved. And I believe I need a motion on this. Is there a motion on the floor for this? There is a motion on the floor. You just divided it. So there is a motion on the floor. If you want a new motion, we have to vote this one down first. Okay, I'd like to break them into two. So let's go ahead and take a vote on this one. And then we will try to break it into two motions to make it clear staff. So there's, and clear for the consultant, frankly. So, can I ask for clarification? Yes. If the decision is made to divide the question, then you would just vote on the first question first, and then have a subsequent vote on the second part of the motion. Okay, so I don't need to break them up in two different motions, and Tony, okay? So we can hold a vote on the first part of the motion. That's right. And then we can hold a vote on the second part of the motion. That's correct. And it's the same maker of the motion and same seconder. What was that again? I knew it. It's the same maker of the motion and same seconder. We're just voting one and two. That's right. Yes. Council member Cummings? I'd like to have some clarification because if we could put the motion back up for a second. Part of this contract is the timeline. I think that these are two, like that they're not mutually exclusive. I think that approving the staff would be approving the timeline and schedule that is being proposed. And that's the issue for me. I'm supportive of us moving in this direction, but my big issue with supporting passing this contract is that these changes were added to it. And if we adopt the contract, I guess we'll be then going back to changing that contract because that doesn't seem like it makes sense if we're gonna approve a contract and then subsequently right after change that contract. So, I mean, if there's, and I also think that if there isn't support for these changes, then another motion can be made just to pass the initial contract. There's nothing stopping us from doing that, but that's the, my support of this is really around trying to have more of the planning commission and commissioners engaged in this process. And so that's where, you know, and so I think if we were to take this as one motion, we could vote on a separate motion or if someone wants to make a substitute motion, maybe that would be more an appropriate way, but it feels odd for us to split the motion if we're gonna vote to approve the contract and then we're gonna vote right afterwards again on amendments to that contract. So. My understanding from the staff's response to the proposed, the proposed additional amendment was that that was different than what the contract currently states in the scope of, oh, that would be considered a change in the contract. And so, and that change could come back with a clock that's a minute if this passes, but you're adding extra meetings and that is different than the scope of work that they have brought before us to approve, I believe tonight, but Tony, you can correct me if I'm wrong. You're not incorrect. Essentially, the motion as a single motion is to approve the contract with a, basically a change scope of work that includes additional meeting. If you approve this as two separate questions, it's really the same thing. The only difference is that you're looking at the change scope of work as a separate question, but the ultimate result would be the same whether you treat this as one motion or as a divided question as is the mayor's prerogative here. Okay, it's, yeah. Why don't we just vote on this? We'll keep it together. Point of order again, mayor. Let's go in. Point of order again, mayor. Please go ahead, council member Brown. I'm not, if you insist on dividing this, I'm gonna withdraw my second because what I wanna see, I will not vote yes on that as recommended without the additional considerations. So I guess if we can't vote on these together, then I'll withdraw my second and we'll just see where it goes. Tony, I need better direction, Tony, about my read of this is that we're voting to actually change the scope of work. And two separate motions, we have the ability to approve the contract and either approve or not approve the change in the scope of work. We don't know the cost of the scope of work included in these extra meetings. And so that's my reasoning for breaking it apart because I've heard support for actually executing and starting this process. And council member Watkins, you had your hand up. Tony, maybe you could respond and then maybe we could try to get to. Right, I think I interpret the motion as you suggested. You could approve the scope of work in one motion and then essentially approve among the scope of work in the second motion. And you could direct that that cost be brought back to the council or you could just approve it, subject to some additional unknown costs associated with the additional work. Thank you, Tony. One quick question for our staff. Can you, I think I heard you say that you would prefer to stick with what is in the scope of work in the original contract, but we can change that. It's our purview, but I just want to clarify that. Thanks, Mayor. Correct, staff did work with the consultant on craving and we feel like it provides more than adequate check-in points at all the key areas with both the community and the decision makers. So that's what we support, but we're certainly open to whatever, we're flexible with whatever the council chooses. Okay, thank you for that. I had council member Brown again and then I guess council member Watkins. I just have to say that we could have gotten through this a lot quicker if we had just voted on this motion and then moved on to a new motion. We would have saved a lot of confusion and a lot of time, but we are where we are. I have withdrawn my second motion. I want to be very clear that I would support part one, part two was included in the motion and I would ask the maker of the motion to decide how he'd like to proceed getting another second or by other means. If there's another second, then you can vote. I did question. Otherwise, it would be appropriate to place another motion on the floor. There a second for the original motion with the two parts. Council member Watkins. I'm not seconding the motion. I'm willing to make either a substitute motion or to move the recommendation as suggested. Okay, so we don't have a second for that motion. And so we'll go ahead, council member Watkins, you mentioned you were willing to make a motion on the staff recommendation. Yeah, no, I appreciate the conversation in the interest around wanting to have a meaningful community engagement. And given what we've heard and the discussion points as well as the checkpoints along the way, I feel comfortable moving forward the proposal as recommended in the agenda report. So I'm happy to move the motion as written. I don't know if I need to read that. I think we already kind of had that up there. It's essentially the recommendation. And is there a second for that motion? Council member Contari Johnson. Yeah, I'll second and just quickly say that we've engaged experts in the field who've done this work. They've created a process for us. And I trust that this process is going to create robust meaningful community engagement and engage our commissions in the way that we need to. So I'll second that. So we have a motion on the floor to essentially for the staff recommendation. That's to execute the contract in a form of approved with Kimley Horn and associates in the amount of $508,812 to procure consultant services to complete the downtown plan expansion project. And could I do a roll call vote, please? Council member Watkins. Contari Johnson. Aye. Brown. No. Council member Cummings. For the record, I'd just like to say I'm supportive of, you know, making amendments to our downtown plan, but get back to that, you know, the intention behind my motion was to really, as we're looking at land use, really trying to make sure there are planning commission whose role is to inform land use decisions as provided opportunities to provide input on these different plans. And it doesn't seem like that that's built into the schedule. I'm not supporting this today. So no. Okay. Boulder. Vice Mayor Brunner. Aye. And Mayor Meyers. Aye. That motion passes five in favor and two against. We'll go ahead and take a, see, we have two more items before our six o'clock session. We will take, why don't we take a 20 minute break? Let's take a 15 minute break. We'll come back at 445. And for members of the public who are tuned in, we will be coming back at 445 or agenda item number 43. Thank you. Okay, if council members can turn on their cameras. We will get started. We have two items to finish before our 6 p.m. session, which we have another item tonight on that. Start now with item number 43, which is a resolution requesting the placement of a sales and use tax ballot measure on the November, 2021 special municipal election. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The or will be that the revenue committee, which is comprised of myself, council member Cummings and Vice Mayor Brunner will make a very short presentation a little bit around our process. And then our staff is available to obviously answer questions regarding the actions that are needed to potentially put this on the ballot. So I would ask Bonnie, if you wouldn't mind putting up that PowerPoint for me, Bonnie, that would be great. And then I'll ask council member Cummings or Brunner to kind of tag team this with me as we move through. Just an overview, a lot of this is captured in the staff report, which we also authored. So that is a report that came from the committee. And then I would call attention also to the memorandum that was included in the staff was some of the analysis that we did with various types of measures that were considered. So today we thought it would be helpful for you, for our fellow colleagues to understand sort of the process that we've gone through. The council revenue committee was appointed in January. The annual appointment of representatives to external agency groups, council committees, et cetera. So the ad hoc revenue was formed in January. We began meeting immediately after that. So we've been meeting about six months on this about every two weeks. And we've done a variety of analysis along the way. We'll just hit some of the highlights or talk a little bit about our process, the goals that we've identified for such a task, a tax. And we'll get into a few details for you guys, for our colleagues. Kind of the next slide Bonnie. The revenue committee in appointing the revenue committee as mayor, I considered really the importance of the continuity of knowledge, of the breadth of the impact of COVID on the city revenues and functions. Mayor council member Cummings, obviously was mayor last year, he was very aware of all the various stresses on city finances as COVID hit. And then as we went through the two waves, we were hearing details about both sales tax and TOT taxes plummeting. We were working with a financial modeler who was informing us along the way that really this really was a once in a while situation. And it was really pretty much unknown where we would end up as a local government at the end of all of this. So as incoming mayor, I thought it was important to keep his knowledge and his expertise on this committee. Obviously vice mayor Bruner will be in the seat next year and it was important for her to help us build what we all considered a recovery investment into our community coming COVID. And especially really focused on the severity of some of the social impact happening in the city but also the intimate needs we know about all of our local businesses, about families who are struggling, about folks who may have become unemployed or lost their jobs, a lot of things to recover and a lot of things to fix through back into our community. And so vice mayor Bruner will have an important role next year and really understand how to again put the pieces back together. We did review the loss of revenues, which again we learned as the fiscal year continued on. And that was due to COVID, the loss of COVID but due to COVID restrictions but also the cost incurred during the pandemic and the fires also. Those are about $21 million in total to date. We learned and spoke with both our federal and state elected officials as federal stimulus started to hit. We lobbied our congressmen about trying to look as to really have a cart out for governments, local governments, like the city that were not made whole by some of the calculations in the first round. And we looked at that both from short-term deficits which were really quarter to quarter in the early part of our fiscal year and we were still going through to COVID and then that was all done through a financial model that was presented to the council as we also looked at our budget from last year and transitioning into this year. And that financial model continues to be the guide for really understanding the recovery coming out of the COVID and the fires. And then our evaluation of revenue sources. We looked at a number of sources, property use taxes which included business license tax, parcel tax, sales tax, transfer tax, transient occupancy tax, utility users tax, and a vacancy tax. And then we also looked at service charges, assessments and fees including development impact fees, regulatory fees, utility rates, user fees. And then we also looked at the potential to use to rent our public properties and looking at rents, royalties and concessions that may come from that as well as franchise fees. Ultimately, we ended up with the sales tax because it is projected to bring in the highest amount of revenue of all of those sources that we had considered and analyzed. So we did make findings really before we sort of dove into really exploring the sales tax in a more meaningful way by conducting polling. And really these kind of capture the three main findings. One is that although we're federal funds, so between the two parts of federal funding that we did receive, we had an initial amount of around just under 800,000 that was received through the CARES Act. And then the current about 14.2 that will come in from the Biden related legislation. Stabilize the budget, but they're not going to fully address the losses due to COVID and we will continue.