 All right, good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our 12 p.m. session of the March 24th, 2020, special meeting of the City Council. In order to minimize exposure to COVID-19 and to comply with the social distancing suggestions, the City Council Chambers in Tony Hill Room will not be open to the public. Please note, if you wish to comment on a specific item or oral communications, you may send an email to cityclerk at cityosanacruz.com. Receipt of your email will be acknowledged by the clerk at the meeting and will be shared with the council members as they are received and will be entered into public record. Please make sure to specify which items you are wishing to submit your comments for when you send the emails. I would like to remind all council members to have your City Council email account open for the duration of this meeting to receive public comments that will be forwarded to you from the city clerk. In all today's sessions, please be mindful of your cameras and what they're capturing and also to remember that if you're not speaking to please keep your microphone muted. And I'd like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council members Watkins is here. Here. Matthews. Brown, currently absent. Glover. Brown is connecting. And there's Sandy. Vice Mayor Meyers. Here. And Mayor Cummings. Here. Next up on our agenda is item number one, general business. The order will be a presentation on the item by staff and time to speak for the awardee or protester followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to council for action and deliberation. I would like to now ask on Mr. Darrow. Leave note of the Obayashi Corporation to speak. You will have up to three minutes. Sandy trying to say something. Sandy. I'm going to ask you to pause for one second. It looks like one of our council members is having some difficulties. Sandy, we can't hear you. Looks like it's connected. Sandy, we can't hear you. Looks like we have some issues, some technical difficulties with council members connecting. I think that they may be trying to connect themselves. Sandy and Chris, is it busy? Are you not able to get through? Okay, I'm just going to ask if council members are helping other council members connect. Can you please just turn off your videos because it's difficult for us and we can't tell whether you need help or not and then we can continue with the presentation. So I'll pass it back on to Darrow. After your time, I just say that the Obayashi Corporation obviously we were very interested in the project and it's getting it successfully started and completed for the city of Santa Cruz. So I'm just here if you guys have any questions today. Obviously, we feel like we've submitted a fully responsive bid and we're really excited to get going on the project. So I'll try to keep it short because I know everybody's time is important but certainly if you have any questions, feel free to ask me. Okay, thank you. And now it's our time to hear from a representative from Flatiron Incorporated who is protesting the bid. You will also have up to three minutes to speak. Different contracts from any different owners and it's been very consistent and upheld elsewhere. As you guys review it, we did think we had a good bid in there and we'd certainly love to come build this project for you. I'd like to ask the clerk if there were any, to open up to public comment, if there were any comments sent in on this item. No, we're not. Okay, hearing none. I'd like to bring it back to council for action deliberation. And staff and I'm available to answer any questions or respond to comments if council members have any. Yeah, so there's staff here and chambers with us if there's any questions on this item. There are no questions if a council member would be willing to make a motion on this item. And this is Cynthia. Are we now officially in closed session with just us chickens? We're not in closed session. This is the first special item that's before us today, which was the Newell Creek Dam and the Outlet Replacement Project bid to protest in a ward of contract. For it to close session. No, this is not a closed session item. This is an open session discussion. Okay, okay. Council member Glover. I just, I'm with council member Crone. So it seems like his audio may not be working. I'm not sure. But I got my audio on the phone. Yeah, I'll just, what I'll do is I'll just call on the representative from the Obayashi Corporation to if you could just summarize your position. And then if the representative from Flatiron West could also just kind of summarize your positions on this item since council member Crone wasn't able to hear and because we have substantial amount of time. And obviously we, about the project, we think we had a complete and responsive bid and we're willing to honor it and stand up, stand behind it. So we're excited to get for, get started on this first. And I'm really only here today to answer any questions if you guys have them. That's about all I had. Chris, were you able to hear that? Council member Crone, were you able to hear? Thank you, I appreciate it. Okay, could the member from the representative of Flatiron West please also repeat kind of a summary of their comments as well? Conditions with the bid and what was required to be submitted on bid day funding. That's something that's pretty standard. We've seen that on many bids. As they requested as a result that the Obayashi bid was non-responsive. I'd like to see if staff would like to come up and make any comments on this item. We now have the recommendation. We have the recommendation. So good afternoon. This is Heidi Luckenbach, deputy water director. The recommendation is a motion to overrule the March 17th, 2020 bid protest submitted by Flatiron West, Inc. of Benisha, California, and to award the North Creek Dam Inlet Outlet Replacement Project to Obayashi Construction, Inc. I will just clarify, because it did come up tonight that when this item came before you in January, the council authorized the project to go to bid and subsequent award. Part of the fiscal impact of that item clarified that the project was gonna be funded. We are at that time applying for funding through the state water board, their state revolving fund program. Since that time, we're currently in final negotiations and we've acquired that funding for the project. As was mentioned earlier, there are a lot of requirements during the bidding period as well as during construction of both the city and the contractors to comply with. So that's correct. The bid documents has several requirements in them. During the bidding period, we had, I think, over 100 requests for information and all of those were responded to. There were several that had to do with this particular issue in the SRF funding requirement. I don't know if Mr. Kandadi wants to add anything in terms of the details of the protest or not. Sure, essentially, this protest involves an interpretation of the SRF funding requirements which require outreach to be made to disadvantaged business enterprises, minority owned businesses and other disadvantaged business enterprises. And there are forms that are attached to the guidance that we receive from the State Water Board that specifically say that the failure to submit the reports or the forms that are required constitutes a non-responsive bid. In this instance, the lowest apparent bidder, Obayashi, did submit the forms, but the supporting paperwork was not submitted until a few days after the bids were submitted. There's another requirement that requires that the outreach to the disadvantaged business enterprises occur prior to the submittal of the bid. And the contention by Flatiron is that that supporting documentation has to be submitted with the forms. We've carefully looked at both our bid specifications and the SRF loan requirements and there is some ambiguity there, but we believe that so long as Obayashi submitted evidence that they conducted the appropriate DBE outreach prior to submitting their bid, the fact that they didn't provide that supporting documentation with their bid packet does not make the bid non-responsive. So that's the basis for the staff recommendation. Are there any questions from council members at this time? Tony, I don't see him on here. I'm in the council chambers, Chris. You're on the TV, you're not on Zoom. That's right, I'm just sitting here in the council chambers with a couple other people. I can try. Chris, part of this is that we're trying to work with adaptive technology given the circumstances that we're in and so we'll see if Tony can log on as well, but there's a number of us who are here in chambers and so if you have any questions, I can let you know either who the staff members are, but the city attorney is present, the city clerk is present, city manager is present. Tony, can you email me that link? The assistant to the city clerk is present along with some other staff. So if you have any questions, we can try to have those answered for you by the staff or if you have any questions for the people who are presenting the bids at this time, okay? So seeing no question, Council Member Matthews. I am prepared to make a motion if there are no other questions. If you have one question, this is Donna Myers. So Tony, it was a little hard to hear you. I think there sounds like maybe someone's moving around if whoever's moving to maybe mute. I didn't quite hear to determine that our process was consistent with State Revolving Loan Fund. Is that the funding source? I keep hearing FRF, is that what we're referring to? Yes, State Revolving Fund. There's a feedback loop there. Yes, Council Member Myers, there is a State Revolving Fund loan attached to this project and the DBE outreach that was referenced is a requirement of that funding. Looks like Council Member Brown also had a question. Question, I'll make a comment. I was just gonna raise my hand to second Cynthia's motion. I've read the materials that with the agenda report, the protest letter and the response from the Obayashi firm's attorney. Then I feel pretty confident that, you know, that this is about this as well that was cited. I'm confident that we are in, we're okay to unwarrant the bid to Obayashi, so. Okay, so. I make the motion or I heard Council Member Matthew say she was prepared to do that, so either way. It looks like there's a. I'd be happy to go ahead if you'd like, if, Justin. Sure, so Council Member Matthews, if you'd like to go ahead. Yeah, based on the written report and the clarifications given by staff just now, I am comfortable with the analysis. The bid requirements were met, so I will move to overrule the protest and award the project bid to Obayashi. I'll second it by staff, I'll second that. So we have a motion to accept the staff recommendation made by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Brown. Council Member Glover, I saw your hand go up. Do you have a comment? More to do with that feedback that we're hearing. Some of you that are in the same room don't have your own. I mean, this shouldn't be there. Give me one sec, I'll see what I can do. So I'm muting everyone currently. Yeah, so if anyone's in the room, we just have to keep to stay muted the whole time. Okay, I think Council Member Glover, can you hear us? No, you muted yourself, right? Oh, crap. Are you? Okay, can folks hear us now? Great, I think that might have been helpful. Okay. So we had a motion made by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Brown. If there's anyone who has a question, there's a few click on Manage Participants, there's a hand button that you can click on to show that your hand is raised and if anybody has any questions, I'd like to ask that you click on that at this time. Seeing no other questions, I'd like to ask all the Council Members to- We need to do a roll call. Oh, we're gonna do a roll call vote on this. I can't tell. Yeah, so we're gonna do a roll call vote on this item. So I'm gonna go through and Council Members, yes or no, so Council Members Watkins. Yes, Sue Beiber. Matthews. Aye. Brown. Aye. Glover. Vice Mayor Myers. You're muted, right? And Mayor Cummings. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Okay, we're gonna adjourn this meeting and we will reconvene at 1.15 p.m. where we will start our closed session item for our general meeting. Thank you. We leave the meeting up for a second while I figure this out. Good afternoon and welcome to the 1.15 p.m. public portion of the closed session of the March 24, 2020 meeting of the City Council. In this part of the meeting, the Council will receive public testimony thereafter the Council Members will move to the Courtyard Conference Room for the closed session. Before I begin, I would like to make some announcements. All Council Members besides myself are participating in this meeting remotely. I wanna thank the public for staying home to view today's City Council meetings. In order to minimize the exposure to COVID-19 to comply with the social distancing suggestions, the Council Chambers and Tony Hill Room will not be open to the public. If members of the public wish to comment on a specific item of the closed session, you may send an email to city clerk at city- Mr. Jester, they can't hear you. Oh, they can't hear me? Oh, all right, can you all hear me? I guess I'll start over with that. So good afternoon and welcome to the 1.15 p.m. public portion of the closed session of the March 24, 2020 meeting of the City Council. In this part of the meeting, the Council will receive public testimony thereafter the Council Members will move to the Courtyard Conference Room for closed session. Before we begin, I would like to make some announcements. All Council Members besides myself are participating in the meeting remotely. I wanna thank the public for staying home to view today's City Council meetings and also for your patience as we adjust to digital and online meetings. In order to minimize exposure to COVID-19 and to comply with the social distancing suggestions, the Council Chambers and Tony Hill Room will not be open to the public today. If members of the public wish to comment on a specific item of the closed session, you may send an email to cityclerk at cityofsantacruz.com. Receipt of your email will be acknowledged by the City Clerk at the meeting and will be shared with Council Members as they're received and entered into the public record. All of us are now following the government order to shelter in place. We are only allowed to leave home for essential activities in an effort to limit spread of the coronavirus COVID-19. Please take this seriously. Our individual efforts to prevent the spread of this disease have a big impact on our collective community. Thank you for following these guidelines to protect the health of our community. And for more information, please visit www.cityofsantacruz.com slash coronavirus. I also would like to ask that if anyone is currently on the Zoom meeting who is not invited to close session to please leave the meeting and to return at 2 p.m. when we will be in our open session portion of the City Council meeting. I'd like to remind all Council Members to have your City Council email accounts open for the duration of this meeting to receive public comments that will be forwarded to you from the City Clerk. And as a friendly reminder, please be mindful of your cameras and what they're capturing. I would like to ask a clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council Members Watkins. Peter. Matthews. Vice Mayor Meyers. Mayor Cummings. Here. Before we open public comment, I have a brief announcement. The City Attorney will provide a report on items listed on the closed session agenda at the beginning of the 2 p.m. session. Has the clerk received any comments from members of the public who wanted to speak to any of the items listed on the closed session agenda? I have not. Hearing none, I'm now looking for a motion on agenda item one, referral to closed session. Well, at this point in time, I'd like to adjourn the meeting to the City Council Chambers for closed session. This meeting is being recorded. We're good to go. Okay. Good afternoon and welcome to our 2 p.m. session of the March 24, 2020 meeting of the City Council. Before we begin, I would like to make some announcements. All Council Members, besides myself, are participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home to view today's City Council meetings. In order to minimize exposure to the COVID-19 and to comply with the social distancing suggestions, the Council Chambers and Tony Hill-Rome will not be open to the public. Please note, if you wish to comment on a specific item or oral communications, you may send an email to the City Clerk at CityClerk at cityofsantaCruise.com. Receipt of your email will be acknowledged by the City Clerk at the meeting and will be shared with Council Members as they are received and will be entered into the public. Nothing, we can't hear you. We can't hear you. Can you hear me now? So, let's see. It should be picking up through whatever the conference call microphone is. So, I'm not sure. I wonder if in the Zoom app it's picking up or if there's audio for it. In the Zoom app, because I don't see a microphone or a phone. Meeting ID followed by Pound. Recipient ID followed by Pound. Otherwise, just press Pound to continue. You are in the meeting now. There are more than 20 participants in the meeting. Everyone hear me? Yeah. All right. Let's try that again. I can't get the first time. You'll get it the second time. So, good afternoon and welcome to our 2 p.m. session of the March 24, 2020 meeting of the City Council. Before we begin, I would like to make some announcements. All council members beside myself are participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home to view today's City Council meetings. In order to minimize exposure to COVID-19 and to comply with the social distancing suggestions, the City Council chambers and Tony Hill Room will not be open to the public. Please note, if you wish to comment on a specific item or oral communications, you may send an email to cityofclerk at cityofsantacruz.com. Receive your email will be acknowledged by the clerk at the meeting and will be shared with the council members as they are received and will be entered into public record. Please make sure to specify which item you are wishing to submit your comments for. All of us are now following the government orders to shelter in place. We are only allowed to leave home for essential activities in an effort to limit spread of the coronavirus COVID-19. Please take this seriously. Our individual efforts to prevent the spread of this disease have a big impact on our collective community. Thank you for following these guidelines to protect the health of our community. And for more information, visit www.cityofsantacruz.com slash coronavirus. I would like to remind all council members to have your City Council email accounts open for the duration of this meeting to receive public comments that will be forwarded to by the city clerk. As a friendly reminder, please also be mindful of your cameras on the Zoom and what they are capturing. Additionally, to try to have your microphones or cell phones muted when you're not speaking. And with that, I would like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member is Watkins. Here. Matthews. Vice Mayor Myers. And Mayor Cummings. Here. I'd like to acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awasawa-speaking UP tribe. The Amamutan Tribal Band comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to Mission Santa Cruz and San Juan Batista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma. And if the clerk could please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Do the flag of the United States of America. Nation, God, visible. At this time, we have two proclamations to make. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus, we won't have any presentations. But I wanted to still read these proclamations in order to acknowledge the work that's been done in our community and to acknowledge work that's been done by the Red Cross proclaiming this month as Red Cross History Month and also proclaiming March as National Women's History Month. So I'll start with the Red Cross proclamation. American Red Cross Month is a special time to recognize and thank our heroes, those Red Cross volunteers and donors who give of their time and resources to help members of the community. And whereas today, the American Red Cross is one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world and delivers its mission every day to prevent and alleviate human suffering in the face of emergencies by sheltering, feeding, and providing emotional support to victims of disasters, supplying about 40% of the nation's blood, teaching skills that save lives, providing international humanitarian aid, and supporting military members and their families. And whereas the American Red Cross depends on local heroes to deliver help and hope during a disaster, and we applaud our heroes here in Santa Cruz who give of themselves to assist their neighbors when they are in need and helping hand. And whereas the month of March is dedicated to all those who support the mission of the American Red Cross to prevent and alleviate human suffering in the face of emergencies. Now, therefore, I, Justin Cummings, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, do hereby proclaim the month of March 2020 as Red Cross Month in the City of Santa Cruz and encourage all citizens to join me in supporting this organization and its noble humanitarian mission. And just so the public is aware, we will be presenting this to the Red Cross at a later point in time. Additionally, we wanna acknowledge this as National Women's History Month, and I would like to read a number of the whereases for this proclamation as well. So whereas women of every race, class, cultural, and ethnic background have made historic contributions to our community's nation and world in countless recorded and unrecorded ways. And whereas women have served as early leaders in the forefront of every major progressive social change movement, not only in advancing their own rights of suffrage and equal opportunity, but also in the abolitionists, emancipation, labor, civil rights, peace, and environmental movements. And whereas despite these contributions, the diversity of women's achievements and importance has been consistently overlooked in most mainstream approaches to history. And whereas on March 8th, International Women's Day is observed to honor the achievements of women throughout history and around the world, and to serve as a focal point in the movement for women's rights and gender parity. Now, therefore, I, Justin Cummings, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, do hereby proclaim the month of March 2020 as Women's History Month in the City of Santa Cruz and call upon our community and institutions to recognize and advance the achievements and rights of women in all facets of life. I'd like to thank all the members of the community who helped, who supported us bringing these proclamations forward at this time. And I'd like to ask if there's any council members who would like to say anything with regards to these two comments. And I see council member Crohn's hand is up. My hand is up for a different reason, for a point of order issue, but when you get to explain, not after this one. Okay. Okay, moving on, I have a few announcements to make, 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, cityofsantacruz.com. Our rules of decorum are on the window ledge to my left, and it is my job to keep the meeting running without disruption. And we ask that you respect your fellow citizens when you're inside or outside our chambers. I'd like to ask council members if there are any statements of disqualification today. And I can just go down the list. Council member Crohn, council member Brown. Blockings, I'm sorry. Council member Brown. Blockings, Matthews. No. Vice mayor Meyers. And I have none. I'd like to ask the clerk to announce any additional, clerk to announce any additions or deletions. I do have item 10, which is the bike lock item has been pulled by staff, the downtown bike locker replacement program. That item's been deleted. Yes. Okay. So item number 10 has been deleted. Moving on to oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. And as I mentioned earlier, if should you have any item that you would like to present for oral communications, please email the city clerk at city clerk at cityofsantacruz.com and those oral communication, those communications will be shared with council members and added to the public record. I'd like to ask the city attorney to provide any report on closed session. If you speak into the mic. Yeah, I'll just speak into the mic. Thank you, Mayor Cummings, members of the city council. This afternoon's closed session began at 1.15 p.m. in the courtyard conference room and all over Santa Cruz. The items that were referred to in closed session are as follows. First, there was a referral to closed session of real property negotiations involving parcels at 329 and 325 Front Street owned by the Santa Cruz Seaside Company. Council received a report from its negotiator, Economic Development Director Lipscomb and gave direction on that item. There was no reportable action. Item A in closed session was a liability claim, the claim of Terry L. Keele. That is also on your consent agenda for action this afternoon. The rest of the closed session was deferred pending the end of the open session portion of the meeting at which time the council will reconvene to closed session to consider items B and C, a conference with labor negotiators and real property or and city manager performance evaluation. Concludes my report. Thank you very much. I'd like to call on the city manager to provide a report today. Thank you, Mayor. I'm gonna do a COVID-19 update and included in that will be updates from the departments. As you all know, we are currently really facing an unprecedented event as it relates to the COVID-19 outbreak and the situation is changing what seems like by the minute. We are currently under a city, I'm sorry, a county and statewide shelter in place order and the city council has declared a local emergency. Following emergency management protocols, we have an incident action plan in place that is updated regularly and as needed. And the current objectives are as follows. One, to control community spread of COVID-19 while coordinating with county, state, and federal agencies, maintain essential services, maintain open, transparent and timely communication with community, city personnel and other stakeholders, provide for city personnel and public safety at all times during the response to COVID-19 and maintain fiscal accountability for COVID-19 response. So that is the management objectives that we put in place under the local emergency declaration. And accordingly then, we have implemented aggressive social distancing protocols into city operations and you'll get some reports on that. Limited operations are in effect until April 10th and then we'll see whether to extend those depending on the situation. But that is what is in place up to now. All essential services are operating with adjustments as you'll hear about. And we have contingency plans have been made in the event of staffing and equipment shortages. And we have to be mindful of the fact that we have to maintain essential services. We have also focused on responding to impacts to the community, including residents, businesses and the unsheltered population. A number of measures have been taken to mitigate the impact of the sudden loss of income for everyone in the community. It's impacted everyone. And so we've had to make some adjustments and you'll hear about some of those things. The city itself will face a significant revenue loss and budget deficit that we'll have to confront in the near future. I will just note that the information that will be presented today is all on our webpage. And we've developed a pretty extensive COVID-19 specific response webpage, which has all the information around city operations as well as all updates on any change that occurs. I would encourage members of the public and others to please do that. Also with respect to members of the community that need immediate assistance, the county has coordinated the 211 system that is a place for anybody that needs any kind of assistance to call for whether it's a rental, whether it's a food, whether it's any kind of social assistance, the 211 system is in place to provide that. So I will let each department director provide a brief update. And then Ralph and Susie will also provide an update on communications and the homeless response. I would ask that if you could please hold off on questions and email them to Bonnie for a coordinated response. And as I mentioned, all this information can also be found on the COVID-19 response webpage. So with that, I'll allow or ask our fire chief to please provide a quick update on the fire department. Before our fire chief speaks, I just wanna remind folks who are on the Zoom call to please make sure that your mics are muted during the presentations. Thank you. This is fire chief Jason Hayduk. Are you able to hear me on your end? Yes. Having some technical difficulties. So unfortunately, or fortunately, you won't be able to see me, but you will be able to hear me. So I wanna give a brief update on what the fire department is currently at and what we've started doing in the last three or four weeks as this COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated. So internally in the department, I wanna start off by just, we are here. We are functioning. We are responding to calls. We have plans in place to ensure that we will be able to provide public safety response. Within the department, we have canceled all vacations and that is something that has not happened since 1989 during the earthquake. We have canceled our regional fire academy. That was done in consultation with Cabrillo and our neighboring agencies. We have readjusted our staffing to maintain essential services. And we're moving people around into positions that they normally wouldn't inhabit, but we are here. Currently we have a number of people who are sick and most likely it is COVID related. However, we've not gotten confirmation from testing. We are sending those people home in self-quarantine. We have a very aggressive cleaning policy within our stations as well as a check in and check out for temperatures and we're monitoring our folks. We also have all the proper protective equipment that we need to ensure that we aren't transmitting to someone else and we aren't exposing our folks to unnecessary risk. And that's within the fire department as a whole. Within the city, we have stood up our emergency operation center and we are coordinating our response city-wide to make sure that we're not duplicating efforts and that we are providing that essential service. Right now as I'm speaking to you in another room in the fire department administration, we have a conference call occurring which is part of the planning session for the next incident action plan for the entire city and we are coordinating that. Reaching out to the county through our partner agencies that we belong to, we have developed a county-wide response plan for COVID-19 to ensure that we both have the capacity to respond to fires, vehicle accidents, rescue, as well as what we see as a looming potential for medical calls. And that's through the launch of what we're calling our quick response vehicles. And these are specifically designed to minimize the exposure to public safety personnel while ensuring that we have the proper response for people who potentially have COVID-19. Of those quick response vehicles are being staffed by our folks here within the city as well as our partner agencies from Cal Fire all the way down to Watsonville. The entire county has adopted this and we've got multiple layers within that plan, county-wide, to adjust as needed, dependent on call volume capacity issues within the healthcare system and we're working with our partners with that. The county, this is a public health emergency and the county has opened up their department operating center to coordinate all public health response and within that we have a number of people from the fire services within the county as well as our department who are part of that planning and development team to coordinate all of our responses. The county really, this is a public health emergency and we are here to support our public health officer to the best of our ability. So I am confident that we can maintain services. It may be different than what we've done in the past but we will be here and we are trying to support all of our city functions as well as maintain our essential fire department delivery. If you have questions, please email Bonnie and I'll answer them to the best of my ability. And I also wanna acknowledge that the Red Cross statement that Mayor Cummins read is very timely. They are modifying their response right now but they're still present, they're still here and they are a very valuable partner as we go forward into this COVID-19. Thank you, Jason. I'd like to ask our police chief to provide an update. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council members. The Santa Cruz Police Department is happy to report that overall most residents and citizens and visitors to Santa Cruz have been compliant and seem to be taking the order to shelter in place very seriously. However, we do have some exceptions to that, namely golfers at De La Viega Park as well as mass gatherings at the clock tower. We are currently addressing those incidents and will be more likely to engage in enforcement as we move forward. Our policy published to all of our officers is consistent throughout the county. However, tomorrow the sheriff and I will announce as well as the other chiefs that enforcement will increase at the suggestion of the health department. Our goal is to educate people and then engage with people to make sure that they understand the order to shelter in place and then enforce as needed. Our goal is to however, gain voluntary compliance so that we're consistent in no matter where we are in the city. Currently we have about seven officers sick. We are not sure if it's COVID-19 related. However, they are being isolated until we can get the testing done and get them back in the field as soon as they're healthy. We too have implemented a very rigorous decontamination procedures coming in and going out of work as well as when they get in and out of patrol cars. People have to remember that we are contacting literally thousands of people a day as a department and it'll be very helpful for people to comply so we don't have to have additional face-to-face encounters with people and hopefully keep our public safety officers safe. We have moved to phase two of our operational planning which means that all officers are on 12-hour shifts and we have canceled future vacation times and until we can continue to assess and move forward with that. Because Lieutenant Bush planned early, we have all the equipment we need for right now. We have masks and cleaning supplies as well as goggles and gloves. We're doing everything we can to keep our public safety officers safe so that we can continue to provide the best service possible and we believe that we're in a good position to do that. That's all I have for right now, thank you. Thank you, Chief Mills. Next I'll ask Rosemary Bernard, a water director to provide an update on the water department. I think she's trying to figure out how to unmute her phone so maybe go back to her. Okay, Rosemary, are you on? What I can do is just maybe just have a skip over and just have Mark Gonex and then we'll come back to Rosemary. So I'll have Mark Dettel, Public Works Director, Gonex. Mark, we can't hear you. Can you hear me now? Yes. All right, perfect. He continues to provide refuse recycling and green waste pickups. We're operating as usual at Demio Lane and in light of the shelter in place, most residents probably have more refuse than normal and they can place an extra bag of trash on top of their other refuse. We'll pick that up either on top or next to it. There'll be no extra costs through April 10th. We ask people to put personal hygiene products such as face masks, tissues, paper towels, or any other waste only in the refuse bin or in that separate bag. Please do not put it in the green or your blue bin that helps reduce contamination and we can keep recycling or getting rid of our yard waste without putting it in the landfill. Under wastewater collection, collection, treatment, environmental staff are at work, essential operations continue, all the wastewater is being treated to meet our permit requirements. With the shortage on toilet, you should know that flushable wipes, even though they say that, they're the biggest problem for the sewer backups in our community. So even though the package says flushable, they really never should be flushed and they belong in the trash. Paper towels, disposable, diapers, cloth diapers, feminine products all cause problems with your sewer in the residential and our main lines. We really don't want anybody to have a sewer backup problem at this time. And so we encourage you to dispose of those products properly. Under engineering, a public counter is closed, but we continue to receive and respond to calls and emails during normal business hours. You can also request service to our citizen's response for service portal, the CRISP. It's an online service request. The best phone number to reach Public Works is 831-420-5160 or you can email us at citypw at cityofsantacruz.com. And as most of our engineers are working from home, our response time may be a little bit longer than normal, but we should get back to you by the next business day. There's several projects that are under construction and they will continue to save routes to school, pedestrian crossings, rail trail, segment seven, phase one, access ramps for the water and river paving projects as well as the water and river street paving rehab. And then beginning, ocean and water northwest corner should start soon. After in place, there's several changes in transportation and snow. We've temporarily suspended the jump bike service in Santa Cruz and we've pulled all the jump bikes. Metro is operating at a reduced weekend schedule. Buses are fare free at this time and when possible, boarding is through the rear door. The ADA access through the front door is still permitted. Please stand, stay back away from the bus driver and maintain a social distance with the passengers. We advise against carpooling at this time with anyone not in your immediate household. And we also advise against shared rides of any kind such as Uber and Lyft, if possible, both to protect the driver and yourself. And when walking and biking, please maintain proper social distancing. On the parking front, parking staff is focused on essential cleaning of the city locks and structures and downtown sidewalks and alleys. Parking office is closed to walk up customers but staff are monitoring phone and email requests. Parking is not, there's no charging for parking downtown or down to, what's no charging for parking meters or timely to enforcement downtown. Citations have temporarily ceased except for vehicles causing hazard, they will be excited and parking in the garages, public lots in the war for currently also free. We're also working with downtown permit holders to look at renewing, sending out a renewal approach at the end of May to the end of April at no cost to our permit holders. In addition, in operations, our street strap staff continue to provide street and sign maintenance and assistance with support addressing the homeless population, including sending out the porta-potties hand-washing stations that were installed downtown. Lead is also working to keep our public safety vehicles, water vehicles, wastewater, refuse trucks, operational and facilities is working to support city facilities, keeping them clean, safe and clean by sanitizing multiple times for day and supplying cleaning products. In general, all staff have been organized in the smaller teams of functional work groups to ensure social distancing between employees. We're also using proper personal protective equipment to protect staff in the community. That's what I have. Thank you, Mark. Rosemary, I think it's ready to go next. Go ahead, Rosemary. If anyone wants to know how to unmute their phone, it's star six. So with respect to the water department, water operation is normal. Safe drinking water is being produced and delivered. The water is safe from a COVID-19 point of view. The treatment process we use for our surface water treatment does provide excellent virus protection, virus reduction through disinfection. So that's in good shape and everyone should have confidence in the drinking water. The water quality lab is fully functioned and we've got regular start compliance sampling being taken and completed and processed and sending it to the state on time. Both water quality and operations treatment and maintenance is to maintenance how continuity of operations plans in place. And we're doing a lot of cross-training on those in the event that, you know, situations become more challenging. We'll have backup staff. I wanna give a really big shout out to our customer service staff who basically completely rebuilt the even utility building system and worked a fully recovered system functionality in the last three weeks and then more or less seamlessly transitioned to support customer service functions from remote locations. Among the things they've done is they've developed some procedures for dealing with economic fallout of the shutdowns relative to customers' ability to pay utility bills for both residential and business customers and those have been developed and implemented. Utility service disconnections, late fees and penalties for non-payments have been suspended. Engineering, watershed, water resources and administration staff are maintaining critical functions and regulatory compliance activities and many of the staff are working remotely while sheltering in place. Like the case for many other departments in the city, we've developed alternate ways to interact with customers and the public to get the work done whether it's, you know, customer service or it's engineering development reviews, et cetera. And we have virtually shut down the public comment or contact with people from our organization and the community. Lock Lomond Recreation Area is closed to the public at this time and will be for the foreseeable future. And I think finally, key facilities, water treatment plants, water quality lab and the customer services offices are basically locked down and access to those spaces is being limited to only those employees who must work from these sites as a way to minimize the opportunity for, you know, folks who are doing those key functions to be exposed to people, you know, coming and going or having meetings on their sites and what have you. And I think so far that's been working really well. That's it for me. Thank you, Rosemary. Next, I'll have Tony Elliott doing update on Parks and Rec. Greg, good afternoon, Mayor and City Council. I'll give you a brief update, cover really quickly what is closed or restricted at the moment, what is open. I'll cover briefly our operations and then we'll talk just briefly about communications as well. So in terms of what is closed or restricted at the moment, our Parks and Recreation classes, programs, activities and our city special events have been answered through May 8th and that's per guidance from the CDC facility, including the Civic Artatorium, Loud and Nelson Community Center, Laurel Park, the RWS School are closed through April 10th or longer if needed as directed by County Health. There'll be a good golf course and this golf course are currently closed. The municipal work is on a limited schedule right now from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for walking and fishing and those types of activities. All businesses and restaurants are closed, I believe and Bonnie may speak some more detail on that in a little bit. There may be one or two with some carry out, but generally most are closed on the work. We have security present during the day and at night with additional patrols from the police department during the day. And all of our partner organizations, the National History Museum, the Senior Center and the Wave of Vista, those are all closed as well. In terms of what's open, all of our parks, beaches, open spaces are open with the exception of the golf course and the disc golf course at the La Vieja. All park restrooms are open currently with the exception of the golf course and the three restrooms at the work. The beach restrooms are open though. The full list of all of our facilities, what's open, what's closed, that's on the city's webpage as well. The department is open for online program registration and scholarship applications at the full car. Registration is open for all of our activities that fall after May 8th. Registration and scholarship application forms are also available in hard copy at the front door of the Parks Direct headquarters at 323 D Church Street. Hopefully they're not getting rained on at the moment, but they are available outside in hard copy. The summer activity guide is available online in English and Spanish. The guide and the scholarship information has also been shared with Santa Cruz City Schools as well. So really quickly just an overview on operations. Really across the parks division, we have Skeleton crews, we've got a Skeleton crew at the golf course, a Skeleton crew at the wharf. Really just very small teams out in the field and the parks really primarily handling refuse collection and the restrooms are open, picking those extra clean. Recreation team and the administrative team are really handling all of our customer service and communications. So what's going out through Parks and Recreation, Facebook and social media, they're handling that. The recreation team is also looking forward to the summer, so not knowing exactly how long this will go, we still have steps in place as we are planning, hopefully to get back to some normalcy in the coming weeks, but preparing in all ways what summer camp might look like, what junior guards might look like, different registration dates, so we're communicating very closely with all of our organizers. We are also operating an internal childcare service for essential city personnel that's out of the Loudoun Elson Community Center. This is very similar for day camps and it's allowing kids of essential city personnel a chance to work on homework and have a safe place to be during the day. The Parks and Rec staff is working with the city manager's office on matters of almost this, so Travis Beck is serving as the primary lead with Megan Bunch from the city manager's office. I believe Susie O'Hara will speak more to that in a bit. We as a department are communicating daily, virtually seven days a week with state parks, with Santa Cruz County parks, Watsonville Monterey and other agencies around the area just to make sure that we're sharing resources and communications. There was a little bit of miscommunication, I think, yesterday about state parks being closed. State parking lots are closed in some jurisdictions around the state, but generally the state parks are open. We're working with them very closely and with Santa Cruz County parks to make sure that we're all kind of on the same page and again, utilizing the same communication and resources and so forth. So I just wanted to kind of dispel that rumor that state parks are closed. The department, the recreation team plans to launch a number of free virtual programs and activities for the community. This may be as soon as this week, but may get into next week, but we'll have information on the city's website under the Parks and Recreation webpage and we'll advertise it through social media. Lastly on communication, I just want to encourage people again to not assemble in large groups, maintain the distancing as the fire chief mentioned a little bit ago, but for all things Parks and Recreation, it's very dynamic, it's changed very quickly, but we just encourage people to keep an eye on the city website, on the Parks and Recreation webpage for any updates, and they can call us as well at our mainline 420-527-0. So that's it for Parks and Rec. Thank you. Thank you, Tony. Next is Lee Butler, planning director. Good afternoon, mayor and council members. Can everyone hear me? And we also have some folks working from home and I'm going to give you a quick outline of what each of our divisions is doing in terms of our service delivery. We, right now in advanced planning, we're refraining from bringing non-essential policy issues to hearing bodies right now and we will continue to assess that position, but in the interim, we've got the advanced planning team working from home and continuing to move our policy initiatives forward. We have our current planning division still working on meeting the deadlines that they are required to meet through the Permit Streamlining Act and through the Housing Accountability Act. Neither of those have been suspended. So our planners are working with our partners and other departments and divisions to complete project reviews, to circulate environmental documents, to have virtual rather than in-person community meetings and to have public hearings for projects that are ready to go to a decision-making body. In building and safety, we are continuing our plan checks both in the office and remotely and our consultants are also working some here in the office and some remotely as well to continue work on the development projects that are in the pipeline. We are out conducting building inspections with a focus on exterior inspections and interior of unoccupied buildings. We're also taking special requests for inspections and prioritizing requests that allow for occupancy or reoccupancy of structures. Both planning and building are working on our permit intake and issuance procedures to limit physical contact with the public when those are occurring. In our rental inspection division, we have temporarily halted inspections unless there is a life safety or other issue that's affecting an individual's ability to occupy a residence. Similarly in code compliance, we're continuing our priority one and two code compliance inspections. So those that have life safety implications and we're very much limiting our inspections for lower priorities with a focus on exterior issues that may arise. Our administration division is here. We are answering phones. The public has been very appreciative of having someone to talk to and to answer questions. We're scheduling inspections in the admin division and we're supporting our advisory and decision-making bodies through our administrative staff. The latest information you can find on our department's webpage is www.cityosanacrys.com.com slash PCD. And that's all I've got for now. Thank you, Lee. Next is Bonnie Lipscomb from Make an Elective Element. Hi, so I'm going to share a screen because I don't have video. So our update in general, most are working remote. Our public office is closed. We're responding to phone, emails and checking mail. Our team has been amazing and I will say that's applicable across the entire city. Everyone's responsive and flexible and this applies to willing to help where needed to take on non-traditional roles. It's been really amazing to work with the city employees just across the organization. A few folks on our team are working with the city manager's office on specific emergency communications related to COVID-19. And then we have a number of our folks that are just keeping the basic things going, processing invoices, payments, answering calls from the community, directing business calls specifically. We're still reviewing project applications that come our way and working on time-sensitive projects with either state or federal timelines like CDBG, other things that are time-sensitive. Our ED team, economic development team is focused on business support, including compiling and sharing resources, creating the webpage that you see here and sending out information on social media across all of our media channels. In fact, we sent out information recently on, I'm just going to scroll down. This is available on our website at ChooseSantaCruise.com and you just click on the button here to learn more and it takes you straight to this page. It's updated daily and so we're bringing together all resources for businesses as far as tax extensions, payment relief, funding opportunities, employer and employee resources, industry-specific resources. And then we're also archiving webinars and information resources on SBA disaster economic injury loans, restaurants responding to COVID-19, County of Santa Cruz webinar and resources for local businesses. What we sent out on social media last week or a few days, that's probably actually every day feels like a week, but we reached over 15,000 people locally, just making people aware of the restaurants that have takeout options through Edimal Monterey and through our Downtown Association who has listed all of the restaurants who have takeout and or delivery as well as online presence for retail locally. It's just so important right now to be able to support our local businesses. So we're continuing to do that. We're assessing needs across our industry clusters. We're working with the hospitality industry. We're basically at this point making sure that we understand what their needs are, where their impacts are and across Santa Cruz. And so more to come on that. We're also on our asset management side. We've been reaching out our asset manager to all of our tenants. Most of our tenants are closed. There are a few exceptions, some of our restaurant tenants, particularly those that have takeout or delivery. We are fielding questions, providing resources, working on a couple of different options potentially for working capital and definitely just providing technical assistance for how to apply for some of the SBIA loans and other opportunities as they come off. Looking at the overall city assets, one of the things we are moving forward on this time sensitive also is the draft EIR release date for the wharf. So we're still preparing to release that on March 30th. It can be and will be posted online for public comment and planning also to have a physical copy available assuming that the city manager's office is still going to be open for the foreseeable future for public review. But depending on if anything changes, we may have to change that process or the timeline. But right now we're on track to be able to release that. Our housing team is continuing working again on time sensitive issues, also responding to information and calls about housing rental assistance, affordable housing options, some of our partners in the community that help provide or offset emergency rental assistance for tenants for low cost housing, particularly with the Housing Authority and Community Action Board or all programs that we support. And we're in regular contact with them to assess their needs. Community Development Block Grant does have federal deadlines coming up right now. We're still, haven't been extended yet. We're still monitoring that, but do plan on bringing that forward at a future council meeting to meet the federal guidelines. We're still monitoring affordable housing and answering questions and resources. Still working on some of the information needed for some of our inclusionary housing changes that some of this work can be done remotely and preparing background for a subcommittee and housing committee work. So that's largely what we're working on in ED. Thank you, Bonnie. Next is Susan Nemitz from the library department. Hi, can everyone hear me? I can't see anyone. Oh, yay. Thanks, Sandy, I saw you. Well, you're getting an overload of information. As you know, the libraries are closed. Our events and our classes have been canceled like that perks till April 10th. We are working on, we said the last week, working on reorganizing the staff into 14, one working on traditional core services, one on online and emerging services, one on staff training and one on emergency planning. We've always had a really strong digital platform for the library and it's being used aggressively by our patrons, but we have made some changes. We've got an additional digital content. We're creating digital cards that take away a lot of sort of the bureaucracy around getting a card. We're working with vendors to open up more digital content. Some of our digital content required that you'd be on site at a physical library. So we're trying to open it up so anyone with a card holder can have access from home. I wanna remind everyone, including the public, we have thousands of e-books, e-magazines, downloadable audio, music available to the public, and we will continue to offer up new digital activities where we, like the perks, are also developing online digital programs and services. I just wanna say we're working with K-12 school districts. One of the services we've provided, something called BrainFuse, which is online tutoring with a live person on the other end. And it's a great service, especially if you're trying to keep your teenager calculus and you haven't had it for a few years. Nice to have some experts in the field out there to assist. Again, all you need is a digital library card. Traditional stuff, we often include email and text reference. We put a deposit collection at the jails, but we've stopped our programs there. We're developing steam kits for people to take home. We're hoping to work with lunch sites so that people have some other activities that they can bring home with them. We're moving forward with all of our facility plans, all three projects in the city. We've been working with architects on and continue the planning for them. We're working with the county. We've signed up a bunch of our staff for the 211 system. And I think because part of what they do is answer people's questions. We're also hoping to work with the city and the county and other sort of helpline services that we're offering. I could go on, you're hearing a lot. Thank you for your leadership in this hard time. And we are here to serve you and I'm open to any ideas or suggestions you have of how we can serve them as it's better. Thank you, Susan. Next we have Lisa Murphy from Human Resources. Can you all hear me? Give me a little thumbs up if you can hear me. I'm not getting my audio. Are you there? Yep, I'm trying. Super delayed. Okay, I'll have to get used to this. Lisa, you may want to turn off community TV during this part of the presentation. Okay, good afternoon council members and mayor and community in this. I'll be watching, I'll be brief. I want to thank the HR staff for continuing to work from home and to provide the best service. Legislation that is constantly changing that will impact our employees. We have a lot of employees working from home. We have people who report to the work site. For those who aren't working, we are providing full pay and benefits. Our recruitments are all on hold at this time. Our benefits crew is working and available to support those who need it. Particularly the EAP program is fully functional for those who, employees who need it. Generally HR is a in-house service provider, but we are available by email and by phone. The community needs to contact us. If that's all from Lisa, thank you for that presentation. And next up is our finance department. That concludes my update. Thank you. Good afternoon mayor, vice mayor, council members. Cheryl Fies, acting finance director. I first want to say that I think I have the hardest working people in my department and I appreciate all that they do. Right now, all our finance managers are working remotely and they have access to the city's network. The operational staff, which is the council payable payroll purchasing, they're also working remotely, but they do have to come into the building to print checks. So we're trying to stage that to make sure that they're safe. The revenue division right now is not working, but we are bringing them in next week. So we can mitigate the backlog that will happen if they don't start working. They can't work remotely because of their equipment and systems don't allow that. They have to be at the office. Audits is working remotely and right now the budget team is still working on the fiscal year 2021 budget, working really hard. And at this time, we have three people so dedicated to the EOC and that's about it. Thank you, Cheryl. Next is Ken Morgan from information technology. Good afternoon, mayor and city council. The information technology department has been open and working, but operating with reduced staffing for social distancing and staff staggering. Since last Tuesday, the IT department has been hard at work getting a large percentage of our essential service employees remotely connected to our city's computer network using our virtual desktop infrastructure. We refer to this as BDI. BDI is a way for our employees to remotely connect to a secure Windows desktop here at our city data center. This is typically done using a private internet connection and a city-issued mobile device or an iPad. Once connected, this solution allows our colleagues access to applications and resources that they're familiar with when working on premise. Getting these folks connected has been a monumental effort from all staff within IT, especially our help desk. They image deployed laptops or configured existing mobile devices for close to 100 remote workers. In addition to that, we've been assisting and supporting web-based conferences using the same Zoom technology that you guys are using today for this meeting. In a matter of a week, there have been close to 85 meetings with 750 participants using Zoom. So we've been busy supporting that platform. And I think it's worth mentioning that recognizing that remote work using BDI and Zoom is a change in how many of our colleagues are used to using technology. And with that, there's been an inherent learning curve similar to what we're experiencing today with Zoom. So not only has IT been extremely busy preparing the infrastructure required for this remote work, but we've also been providing on-the-go training and support for staff that they become more familiar with this way of conducting business. Our help desk phones are still being answered and we're doing our best with short staff to keep our folks connected and working. Thank you. Thank you. Next I'll have Laura Schmidt to prevent an update on City Manager's Office. Hi, everybody. The City Manager's Office has been working across this incident, coordinating the citywide with all of our fellow departments and in constant communication with the County Watsonville, Capitol and Scott Valley. We've shifted to an all-hands on-deck COVID-19 response mode and we're helping out with such items as Emergency Operations Center, employee impacts, city facility mitigation measures and communication both externally and internally. We are, however, still processing basic city business such as grant compliance and bill payment, especially for our COVID expenditures. As you've been the recipient of, Bonnie Lipscomb has been doing an amazing job coordinating and drafting council information, daily updates and conjunction with Ralph. Ralph is acting as our public information officer for this public health incident and he'll be giving you an update on the communications team later on. We're also heavily involved with the County's work and coordination of mitigating the impacts of COVID-19 with our community's unhoused individuals and Susie will report on that after Ralph, I believe. And then last but not least, our City Clerk staff has been really hard hit numbers-wise and we're working on calling in additional staffing help to assist with us as far as our City Hall reception function. Additionally, the staff has been working diligently with IT to brainstorm, test and deploy various remote access options for our council meetings. We've done a lot of testing just to get to this point for this council meeting, so I really appreciate everybody's efforts there. Our clerk and our deputy clerk find new twists and turns presented to them each day and they've been creative, patient and resourceful and figuring out how to deliver their essential functions and keep our council meetings running and all the documentation associated with them. So I'd like to shout out to everybody on the team and I'll hand it back over to our team. Thank you, Laura. Next we have Ralph who do an update on communications. I hear you, Ralph. Ralph, you're still muted. Now we got you, yeah. Okay, hey, others of the City Council. You know, as the city manager and the department heads have mentioned, the spread of COVID-19 is impacting the world and here in Santa Cruz it's definitely impacting our organization and the community as a whole. As you've heard, the city's taking several measures to protect our employees and the community and these have had an impact on our services, right audiences in our community. We want to make sure that our community is getting this life-saving information as quickly as possible, all of this information effectively with our entire community. We in the last two weeks have formed a communication team made up of individuals from various departments and I'm truly, truly thankful for their expertise and the time that they continue to dedicate to this effort on a daily basis. We're learning something new every day and we're trying to get that information out to our employees and the community to take some lives to protect individuals in our community as a whole. Our group, our purpose is to ensure the timely and accurate public warnings are issued, to ensure that timely and accurate public warnings are issued. We want to communicate city actions to ensure the health and safety of everyone and then we're trying to identify audiences that should be informed about the situation and we want to get them the right information. We want to communicate facts about the incident and what's going on in the world and in our city and in our county and we also want to work on minimizing rumors. You know, there's a lot of misinformation going around and what we do here about this misinformation or rumors, we try our best to fix it. Information, we want to build trust and transparency by working to provide information in a timely and accurate and innovative way and we're working with a lot of people from different departments and with the individuals and the EOC to ensure that our message is credit to representative of the city of Santa Cruz's values and how we want to respond to this. Share my screen right now and hopefully you can still, all of this. We're working? Yep. Okay, there we go. So how we are doing all of this is one, we're distributing signs and flyers in both English and Spanish to all of our offices and out in the community. We're doing daily press releases, we're emailing our employees. We're sending community messages through the city managers weekly message to the community. This is the latest one and we talked about the utility bill hardship declaration that's available, how we're supporting Santa Cruz businesses in update regarding public safety and some information on how we are providing services to our homeless population and we include flyers in there for the community to share. We also developed a landing page on our website. So if people from the public visitor website, they could either click down here where it says learn more. Amazing website that BD helped put together and here we have, we've been putting out an update, a general update on what's been going on. We have PSAs and we've also distributed the video and audio both in English and Spanish to our local media stations. Each department is impacted by this and what they are doing to respond to it. So for instance, here's the, here's some updates from the library. And we're also reach out to our community. Here's the PSA that we posted and we're able to keep track of how many people we've reached and how many people have watched the video and all of that. So we're doing our best to find innovative ways to really get this important message out and as many of you know, these days there's just so many different avenues for people to get their news that we wanna make sure that however they get their news or getting it and that they understand how the city services are being impacted by this. Members of the public who are watching if you could just take the time to sign up for the city manager's newsletter and it's a good way to get information and a couple of minutes to go through our city website to see how our services are being impacted by all this. That would be great. Thank you all. Thank you, Ralph. And now we have Susie O'Hara who'll do an update on the homelessness response. No, we can't hear you. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, sorry guys. Okay, so I'm gonna share a screen as well and thank you to the mayor and councils for providing this opportunity as I'm sure every department has shared. It's been a very dynamic situation and lots to share with regard to homelessness response and I do have a slide presentation that's gonna help me kinda ground this discussion that I'm going to share with you. Okay, so Jason said at the beginning of the presentation we are focused on with our EOC really in subordinate position to the county's EOC which is driven by a public health crisis. Through the public health director and officer, these orders have been translated down to the community including the social distancing order from a few weeks back in addition to the shelter in place order that was presented to the community effective March 16th. As we work on responding to the issue of homelessness, what we are really trying to do is translate the shelter in place order and the other health orders that are coming down from the county health officer to the unsheltered community. And as we all know that can be very challenging when people are unsheltered. So I wanna give you the council an update on how this system is working and then a timeline for the implementation. The lead agency because this is a public health crisis is gonna be at the county with regard to homelessness response with the supporting jurisdictions being the cities within the county jurisdiction. Under that the city of Santa Cruz has our own incident command system and we are working very diligently on creating a special team that will be focused specifically around homelessness. We, Megan, Bunch and I have been the primary point of contact for that response that is now broadening to include Travis Beck from the Public Works, I'm sorry, the Parks and Work Creation Department and several supporting staff as well as we continue to move forward. But the main efforts underneath the lead agency of the county of which the cities will be assisting are showing up our existing and supporting our existing shelters, creating new shelter capacity, providing distributed safety net services such as food and other safety net services and creating new ways for unsheltered individuals to access information, hygiene resources and intake into the system of care and sheltering. So I was gonna talk about each of those efforts separately and give you an understanding of what we are working towards. So with regard to supporting our current shelters with the county orders of social distancing and sheltering in place, what we will be focused on is providing hygiene resources and training within those existing shelter systems, expanding the sheltering footprints and capacity to ensure that there's adequate space for social distancing within the existing shelters, increased staffing with the county and volunteer resources. As you can imagine, with our existing organization here at the city and felt really across the community, there is a decrease in available staff due to illness and due to other obligations with regard to family members, et cetera. So we are really focused on bolstering the existing programs with staffing from the city and the county and volunteers to keep those programs sustainable and then creating areas within shelters for isolation and quarantine. Next, we're talking about, well, I'm sharing the fact that we are creating new shelter capacity within the system. And that is across vulnerability and risk across the demographic of those unhoused and across the types of shelters that we are gonna be providing. So the highest risk individuals will be receiving a different type of shelter intervention than folks with a lower medical vulnerability. The high risk being COVID-19 diagnosed, exposed or symptomatic, those individuals will be provided a hotel room and the county is in the process of securing, I believe today, about 100 beds, hotel beds, and they continue to move forward under the governor's executive order to add to that capacity as well. Next is the high vulnerability, high medical vulnerability or older than 65. That will be based on a medical assessment to see whether they should be in isolation in a hotel or in a shelter down to high medical vulnerability to lower medical vulnerability. And the types of shelters that we will be providing are hotels, indoor in the current shelter system, indoor in new shelter systems, and then also resources to those that are unsheltered in place, but providing additional resources such as information about how to appropriately social distance, new hygiene resources for those individuals in addition to other safety net resources such as food and other safety net items. Other priorities include working with service providers to stand up a distributed safety net program including food distribution. So as you can imagine, as our congregates of seniors and other places that have provided meals and wheeled service, those congregations of high vulnerability populations need to disperse. So we are moving towards having a dispersed safety net program including that food distribution and then ultimately creating new communication, engagement and intake systems for unsheltered individuals. The county is leading this effort through the Human Services Department. That includes weekly conference calls with service providers to understand their needs and best meet those needs and fill gaps. There is now a new COVID-19 website for homeless service providers, persons experiencing homelessness and persons taking basic needs and other stakeholders. In addition to that, there will be a new email response for specifically around the unsheltered population to get questions answered with regarding to COVID-19 response. And then to finalize my presentation with regard to the triage centers, ultimately I know that there has been some kind of, some confusion in the community as to their functionality. Those programs will ultimately be intake sites and safe sleeping locations for unsheltered individuals that are not currently getting referrals into shelter through the system of care. Our thought is that they will be walk up locations fully staffed with medical personnel for assessments, benefits personnel to ensure that folks have the ability to apply for general assistance, unemployment, Medi-Cal, whatever else they might be eligible for, provide a safe place to sleep until they are moved into a more appropriate shelter location across the spectrum that I discussed in the previous slide. So much to do on this, I will be formally moving over to serve as a liaison for the county EOC focused specifically on homelessness. The county is erecting their ICS, a separate ICS for homeless response, which should be in effect in the next 30 to 48 hours. And that will really be the plan that all of the cities look to and the objectives that we all will be meeting to minimize the spread of COVID-19 within the sheltered community. More on that as we go through the coming days, but that concludes my presentation. Thank you. Mayor, did you want to add anything on the homelessness, the two by two? Not at this point in time. Yeah, I'll just, we're going to have presentations by council members shortly after this, but I think Susie was able to capture a lot of what came out of the two by two meeting that we had the other day as well in terms of where we're headed with the city and county as approach. So thank you for that presentation, Susie. Okay, all right, so finally I just wanted to, let me turn on my video, wanted to just say a couple more things. First, regionally let the council know that the city administrators, we are coordinating really on an hourly basis through texts and emails to coordinate issues around the county. We also have a formal weekly meeting where we're coordinating on COVID related items. So there's a lot of regional coordinating going on as well, as well as city matters throughout the region. And then I also just wanted to finally thank our department head team and our employees who have really stepped up to be responsive to what we're facing and to be creative and flexible in addressing that. And also, Tony just reminded me that I skipped the city attorney, so I'll turn it back to Tony to do an update because he's had impacts also to his department. Sorry about that, Tony. So, last but not least. Yes, thank you, mayor and members of the city council. Our office is right now operating with a minimal staff on site, but all attorneys and paralegals are working during regular business hours, either from home, a couple of people are still in the office in order to comply with the social distancing order we are not taking walk-ins from members of the public and our only meeting in person by appointment and with appropriate social distancing measures in place. We've been working closely with the staff in implementing all of the city's COVID-19 response, including staying on top of federal, state, and local directives and executive orders pertaining to the crisis. We are also monitoring and adjusting to updated protocols issued by the state and federal courts with respect to appearances telephonically and schedule changes and changes in court assignments and that sort of thing, which have been issued almost on a daily basis as this situation evolves. We are still maintaining our normal workload, still accepting phone calls during regular business hours. All of the attorneys in the office are reachable by email and we can also provide contact information for all of the attorneys that might be handling city business. So my main message is that we are fully functioning and open for business, although with the limitations I just mentioned. Thank you. And I concludes the report. Thank you. Thank you. And I'd just like to thank all of our staff here in the city for how flexible they've been able to be during this very difficult time. I think it just shows the dedication of our staff and the members of our community to making sure that our city is continuing to maintain function. And as time goes on, we're gonna continue to work together so that we can minimize the impacts of this disease to the greatest extent possible. So thank you for those presentations. I noticed that there were two council members who had their hands up. So I just wanna acknowledge you all and I'll put a council member Glover on deck. And just as a reminder, I think this is an opportunity to, if you have questions, individual questions for the staff that the city manager recommended that those be emailed, but I'll allow folks to make any comments starting with council member Brown. Yeah, thank you. I wanna thank everybody for the updates. It's good to hear. You got a sense of what you're all doing in terms of operation from this remote location. So thank you. And I wanna thank all of our staff too publicly for being flexible, staying on board. And this is definitely time for community effort and open communication. So thank you. I have a couple of questions and there are actually three and they're all related to homelessness response. And I'm not sure if perhaps she knows and Susie O'Hara might be available to answer these ones. And or anybody else who has information. The first question is how is the city planning to respond to the CDC direction and recommendation that encampments not be broken up at this time to prevent further spread of the virus? That's question one. Question two, given the experience with the one triad site that was opened and quickly closed, what are the plans for moving forward with that strategy? And are there any plans too? I know that Susie, your report indicated the intention to expand shelter availability. I'm wondering if any of that includes opening up camps and other facilities that have commercial kitchens and the facilities and capacities to provide those kinds of services. The indoor, the Kaiser Arena or the Civic Center. I think this is obviously something that's gonna be going on for quite a while and we have many unsheltered in place right now out in the rain. So I'd be interested in hearing about what the indoor plans are at this time. And then three, what are the plans for deploying the additional quarter parties and hand washing stations that have been procured but seem to be not all of them accessible to the public because they're located behind fences, locked gates. And are there any plans, so those that are there but people can't access, are they gonna be made available and when and then plans to increase those numbers given that public bathroom access is being limited now as a result of businesses being closed and other sites being closed. We've been getting some questions around those lines. So why don't we have Susie go ahead and respond to those questions really briefly. Susie or Mike? It's not on. Okay, sorry, sorry. Okay, so thanks, Sandy, for those questions. With regard to the first question around the CDC interim guidelines around the enforcement of encampments, those guidelines were drafted within the specific kind of criteria of not dispersing folks out further into the community in a random way for the purpose of not being able to connect with people with regard to medical evaluations, services, food, resources, et cetera. The city and the county are complying with those guidelines at this time and intend to comply with those guidelines moving forward. If we do have to intervene with any kind of encampment because there is lack of social distancing or lack of hygiene resources within that encampment, we will do so by moving folks into a triage center or into a more appropriate configuration. So it is our intention under the county's ICS to ensure that we are following all the protocols within the CDC guidelines. That's number one. Number two, with additional shelter capacity, this information was shared to the two by two yesterday and I think the county, while we are uncertain as to the number at this time, is really endeavoring to add up to 200 to 300 beds of additional shelter capacity and are looking into new locations across the county and more on that probably in the next couple of days as they continue to move forward with acquiring additional sites. And then lastly, actually, I'm sorry, Sandy, what was your last question? That was, thank you for answering those first few. The last question was about fluricotties and hand-washing stations. My understanding is that there are some that have been for cure-treated cities that have not been deployed and may be publicly accessible. I'm wondering what the plan is for those and then also if we're gonna be getting any additional services to be made available given that there are so few public restrooms now available. Yeah, so with regard to the additional port-a-potties, we did deploy port-a-potties to each of the triage centers that we opened up and erected kind of with a plan that they would be opening once we had a fully staffed and resource model. We have a few port-a-potties that are stored right now and we are awaiting directions from the county as to their maintenance schedules to ensure that they are properly maintained from the perspective of disease and virus control around transmission. We are moving forward with replacing any public restroom facility that we closed because of lack of staffing resources with port-a-potties. I believe that might have happened at the garage bathrooms maybe as early as yesterday. So we continue to have an open contract and purchase order with the United Sites services. They are drastically low on port-a-potties and hand-washing stations. Thankfully, we ordered quite a few, I think 20 of each, two or three weeks ago. So we had a huge cash to work with before the outbreak was really clear that there was gonna be significantly changing our availability and having all these orders coming down from the county. So we will continue to bring those on as needed but probably in the next day or so is when we're gonna have further direction from the county as to how to maintain those in a way that's gonna meet health standards. Before we move on to the next comments, I just wanna point out that we're about an hour behind schedule now and so I'm gonna allocate another 20 minutes. So between now and 4 p.m., we'll try to get through the rest of the questions and if we get to four o'clock and we haven't answered all those questions, I'm gonna ask and you please email those questions along and I'm sure that the staff who are in charge will get back to you with the appropriate answer. So with that, I'm gonna move on to Chris and then on stack right now is Council Member Glover and Watkins after Council Member Krohn. So Council Member Krohn, go ahead. Thank you Mayor. First I wanna say thank you all so much for those reports. I learned quite a bit just now. I am totally concerned about what Chief Hattuck and Chief Mills said about potential for COVID virus within those two departments. I was wondering if they could clarify that. Is it that people haven't been tested or why do you think people are out sick with COVID-19? I'm gonna turn it over to Chief Mills first. I know the Chief said seven people three officers out and Chief Hattuck didn't testify how many. So Council Member Krohn, thank you for that question. We have seven out. We've been testing the ones that were able to test because unless they have this symptomology consistent with COVID-19, they will not be tested. The ones who have been tested so far have come back negative. We have three or four that have not been tested up to this point. That's from the PD side. I don't know if Chief Hattuck is there and could comment. Thank you. I have a question for Chris. Hang on, we're gonna allow the fire chief to respond to your first question. Chief Mills, we do have a number of people who are sick. We have had, I'm waiting for results. I have the other four and then I just have another one that was tested yesterday. So I don't have results back. And part of that is there has been some false, negative false positives with the testing depending on what symptoms they have. They are reserving those testing for the most critical patients to make patient care decisions. And so we are operating underneath guidelines from our health officer as far as how we manage those people for isolation and for when they can return back to work. And our first person who was exposed and they have been tested but we don't have the results. That was due to an exposure that happened over in Santa Clara at an event and they were contacted by Santa Clara Health saying you have this exposure. They developed all the symptoms that are consistent with COVID-19. They have since recovered and we were waiting until their symptom free before we bring them back to work. We are really concerned with it because obviously we can't do our work remotely and we also wanna minimize exposure to the people that we're in contact with. We've got very strict monitoring guidelines for our folks is for when they come on duty as far as documenting their temperature, documenting their symptoms and then self isolation after that. And that mirrors what Chief Mills has done within PD as far as documenting that exposure. But we are no different than the rest of the community other than our work environment is not as controlled as an office space. And there are things that we are called upon to do that are going to make sure that we are not gonna be able to keep that social distancing. And so we've really enacted and we do it anyway but our PPE gloves, gowns, goggles, decon of our people, decon of our equipment before we move on to the next call or come back to the station. Thank you. Are you feeling like you're getting the equipment? We, well- Are you getting the equipment in place? Yes, we have equipment right now. We are forecasting for what equipment we may need if call volume goes up. And we are no different than any other public safety, public health where we are very concerned with access to the proper gowns, masks, gloves. We don't want to hoard. And but we also want to make sure that we have enough equipment to make sure that we can provide that service. We are ordering through our normal supply chains as well as reaching out to our region OES and putting in orders through the county health department operating center through the county to have a stockpile here for all health providers. And yeah, it's a concern, but right now we are good. And city manager, just wondering I might have missed it. How many people tested positive with 23 as of yesterday? Do we have any today? I don't have the latest update. That's the, the 23 is the latest that I have. We should probably get an update later today and we'll send that to the council. I've been doing daily updates. And I'll just mention, Chris, that on the county health's website, they also have the updated information as well. As it's testing people to drive up, is there any chance that we will have that in Santa Cruz and how are they able to have it and we're not? Yeah, go ahead, Jason. I'm getting from the public, so I'm just wondering maybe, I mean, how, why don't we have enough testing kits? Or why don't we have testing kits here in Santa Cruz for people who want to be tested? Right now, somebody from Santa Cruz can actually go to Hayward from my understanding and get tested. Yeah. So I can't answer for the county of Santa Cruz, but I can give you my perspective. We are not the county of San Mateo. We are not the county of Santa Clara. Those tests that they have internal testing. From my understanding, the county of Santa Cruz health office, they don't have internal testing capabilities because that hasn't been supported. So all of their testing that they are coordinating is being sent to another lab for that testing. Right now, for our county, they're reserving testing for those who have symptoms and more specifically for those who have symptoms that is going to dictate what kind of treatment they're going to get. Just to follow up with that, Council Member Cron, earlier this week, we've been meeting with the federal and state representatives, so we've met with Jimmy Panetta, we've met with Mark Stone and we were in contact with Bill Monning's office and we brought these same questions up and so the responses that we've been getting is that there's limited test and when the tests become available, we're hopefully going to get more. But at this moment in time, as the Chief said, we're reserving those tests to really try to test those people who have the severe symptoms and who may be testing positive. So just wanted to share that as well. But we are actively communicating with state and federal representatives to try to get more tests. In the homeless services, there's a couple of questions about food distribution and... Council Member Cron, I want to cut you off there for a sec. Council Member Cron, I'm going to cut you off for a sec because I'd like to allow for other, we have limited time on this topic and I want to allow for other Council Members to speak and since you've just had a number of questions, I'd like to see if we can move on to some of the other Council Members because I'm going to stop comments on this at four. So... Make a motion to extend the time because this is pretty much the most important thing that in our community right now is the COVID-19 outbreak. I'm going to look to City Attorney to see if that's appropriate given this was a report item. So long as it's limited to Council Member questions and responses, the Council can't take any action on this item that's not on the agenda. I haven't heard a second. Second. I'll second. I'd just like to get a sense for, okay, well there's a motion on the floor currently to extend the time by Council Member Cron, seconded by Council Member Glover. And would I, would like to ask is there any other comments from... Is that okay, Mayor? What's that? Motion to extend 15 minutes, is that okay? I don't think there needs to be a motion. I mean, if you want to ask first. But by consensus, sure. So I would like to see how other Council Members feel about extending the comments to four, 15. And then at four, 15, we would conclude any further discussion on this item. We'll go ahead and just extend it by 15 minutes. So before four, 15, on or before four, 15, we will conclude discussion on this item. And so Council Member Cron, if you could please allow some, I mean, I don't know how many questions you have left, but I know that there's other people who are wishing to ask questions. That's due to the food distribution. And I'm just wondering as the meeting was taking place, they were shutting down the food, not bombs table at the clock tower. And Ms. O'Hara talked about distribution of food. And I'm just wondering, the people are food distribution, I'm just wondering how that's gonna happen and why wouldn't it be shutting down food, not bombs if they're feeding people? I'm gonna allow Chief Mills to respond to that question. Then I can also respond to that because I've been working on this subject as well. The question of shutting down the food, not bombs distribution became a significant issue yesterday evening. There was a group of dozens of people in close proximity to one another, sharing cigarettes during the food distribution and et cetera that became very problematic. I personally have asked Food Not Bombs as well as their leadership to make sure that they're adhering to social distancing and maybe get a space a little bit larger so people don't have to jam in there. I know that other members of senior leadership have as well. And we were told that that was not going to take place. And so because of what took place last night, a significant gathering of people. I cautioned Mr. McHenry today via letter and told him to cease and desist being on that location. It's specific to that location. And I just received an email from his attorney saying that he wouldn't comply with that. Now we have to work that out and see what that looks like. But again, we're not interested in strict enforcement. We're educating first, engaging second and enforcing third, but we're at the point where this is a significant health risk, not only to the entire community, but specifically to that population that was there getting food yesterday. It was not a good scene. And numerous people contacted me today. Agree with you, I think it's fine, but do we offer him another place where he could set up that would have the proper social distancing? I'll just mention that last week I went and to meet with Keith McHenry from Food Not Bombs. And at that point in time, the city was willing to and offered a space up by the county intake at 701 Ocean Street. At that point in time, Keith McHenry also mentioned whether we could allow him to stay at the clock tower over the weekend while he opened up the other site so that he could, when people came to the clock tower, he could direct them to the other site. And we agreed to doing that. However, when I had subsequent conversations with Keith McHenry, he mentioned that he wanted everyone to have a hotel voucher before he would move to that other site. And given that we didn't have those resources at that time, we were unable to make that request and he decided that he was not gonna move. And regardless of that, we continued to allow him to serve food at the clock tower through the weekend. But given the situation that happened yesterday, there was, I also received numerous emails about the gathering that was taking place there. And given what the chief said, if organizations aren't gonna respect the social distancing, then that's a big problem for the community. Thank you, Mayor. I'll also follow up with that to say that since your question was about food distribution, I've been actively reaching out to the faith community and to a number of organizations, including Community Bridges Meals on Wheels program and also Second Harvest Food Bank to see how we can start coordinating food distribution within the community. In addition to that, Council Member or Vice Mayor Meyers and Supervisor Coonerty have also been looking into, Vice Mayor Meyers in particular has been looking into senior hours at grocery stores and Supervisor Coonerty has reached out to gray bears and other organizations. So we're all working together to try to see what can be done around that piece of food distribution. And we were hoping to include food not bombs within that conversation, but it doesn't seem like they're very interested in working with the city at this point in time. So, and I'm gonna pass it over to the city manager. I just wanna add and be clear that given a food not bombs lack of follow through and being able to comply with what we've asked them to, that we will now allow them to move forward until we're very certain that they can comply with the social distancing requirements. So we will work with them, but not until we've got what we won't approve change until they make it clear that they're gonna comply. I'm gonna move on to Council Member Glover and then Council Member Watkins. It's Council Member Glover. Thank you. Yeah, it's 3-5-4 right now. There's a lot to talk about with regard to this topic. Thank you to all of the different departments for the reports as well. And for figuring out ways to operate throughout these really tumultuous and tense times, especially for not being able to be onsite and working remotely. So that's commendable. I do wanna take a second and talk about specifically the area of homelessness. And I think that this topic deserves a much larger conversation, especially with some of the different reports that I've been receiving, but I wanted to get some clarity with some of the stuff that was mentioned. The mention of the timeline with the county and the slide presentation. To the county was gonna be hours. The city was as needs arise. There was also the number of 100-ish hotel rooms that were in line with the governor. So can someone explain that a little bit more? So there's 100 rooms for people throughout the county. Are they in the city? What dictates a need arising within the city? Pertaining to, especially shelter as it is raining now. And people that are outside, that may be experiencing symptoms or whose immunity systems may be lowered by this cold and wet weather. Martin, would you like me to answer? Yes, go ahead, Suzanne. I'll supplement if needed. Yeah. So thank you, Council Member Gleber. With regard to the hotel bed, let me provide some clarity on the county's operations around that. About a week ago, the county started procuring hotel beds for the specific reason of quarantining and isolating individuals that are either diagnosed or to have known exposure or to be symptomatic within the context of a COVID diagnosis. Those beds that they've ascertained or just about to finish leasing are up to 100 beds within two hotels within the city of Santa Cruz. They started that process before the governor's executive order and expect that the governor now is going to be moving forward with procuring additional beds within the county. That has been happening all over the Bay Area. And I think that we are expecting that there's gonna be additional beds that are gonna be part of that, the governor's process. I think the governor even asked the counties to stand down in their pursuit of beds, probably outside of those that require isolation. In addition to that, we are working in terms of the timelines, the counties, ICS, that they're standing up within the next 30 to 48 hours will dictate and manage all the objectives around homelessness response from a public health perspective. Where the city has some autonomy and where we will be operating slightly differently is on an admitted basis with regard to infrastructure and things that are required for the city to actively participate in to support the ICS objectives of the county. So all of that will happen in coordination. Our team is working subordinate to the county's team under the direction of the health officer. And we will be deploying resources as often as they are required and as often as we have the ability to do so. Thank you. You mentioned the Distributed Safety Net Program, including food distribution. Now, we just heard the question from Councilman McCrown about Food Now Bombs and the resulting explanation as to what's going on with them. What is a Distributed Safety Net Program, including food distribution look like for food distribution? That would be one question, I guess, there. And what is stopping us, for example, of using indoor facilities, but I was mentioned, I believe by Councilman McCrown, like say the Kaiser Arena or the Civic Center to provide shelter and a space for organizations such as say Food Now Bombs to buy food while maintaining adequate social distancing. Excuse me, with regard to the food distribution, I'm an example of that and this came up in the county's first conference call last week with service providers. For instance, our Meals on Wheels program at Loud Nelson, which is a daily program, we can't have that congregate of seniors in locations like that under the Shelter in Place order. So Meals on Wheels is expanding and we are attempting to distribute to seniors that would typically go to the lunch, for instance, at Loud Nelson, at wherever they are sheltering in place. That is in addition to working with the county on food distribution to those that are in our current shelter system, those that could be isolated or quarantined in hotels, in addition to those who might be in encampments and sheltering in place out in the Pogonib, for instance. So that Distributed Food Model is really intended to ensure that we continue to give access to safety net resources but where people are sheltering in place rather than asking for people to congregate in areas that they might not be able to have appropriate social distancing. With regard to Food Not Bombs, we did offer a space at the Benchlands. We have moved porta-potties over there as well. So as Martine mentioned, as soon as we can get clarity around their meeting, the county health officer's objective is around social distancing, we hope to be able to provide additional resources to support Food Not Bombs distribution. And then lastly, with regard to additional areas like Kaiser, Civic and otherwise, those sites are available and they are on a list of resources that the county is working with the individual jurisdictions to move forward with. It really is about staffing to ensure that we have sustainable models and resourcing to ensure that we can provide a safe, accessible and really focus on health outcomes within those shelters. As you can imagine, as we move folks into large shelter areas, the issues around transmission of COVID-19 multiplies. And so it really is actually a better outcome to have smaller shelters for less people that are more manageable from the perspective of resourcing, staffing and disease transmission mitigation. Thanks. With that concept of sheltering people in spaces that have the adequate ability for social distancing, has the existing shelter systems like the Salvation Army and the Armory been retrofitted so because there were reports coming in from people experiencing homelessness that the mats were eight inches apart with 60 people in each facility. So is that still the case in those facilities? And if you were to say, do you or anyone else want to answer the question? See if the county's supposed to come out with their recommendations or action plan in the next 30 to 48 hours, then will the city have a clear understanding as to the direction that we should be following with the county then and you can provide more information and we can take more action? Or are we just hoping that the county says, yeah, let's use these facilities? Because the reason I'm asking and I'll finish this because in the email that came out today is around the homeless COVID-19 response updates, there were some references to the CDC guidance of encampments and the CDC outline. The CDC specifically lays out some very specific guidelines with regards to providing restroom facilities, having functional taps, all that other kind of stuff, but also with regards to the way to communicate the concepts, what I have that are working on the ground out in the community is that they feel there's a lack of communication between the city and the people that are actually that are serving that population. And in the CDC guidelines, it says to identify people who are influential in the community who can help communicate with others. What's going on around that? What's the communication strategy? And it's four or three right now, I wanna leave some time for some other people. So I think this deserves a much longer conversation. So maybe if you just wanna answer the question about the mass of the existing shelter spaces and their distance or the capacity there and then working with influential community members most likely that are involved in organizations like Food Not Bombs and the homeless union to disseminate information and get as much contact as possible with people outside. Susan, I'm gonna step in real quick before you answer. I just wanna acknowledge that the CDC recommendations were something that recently came out. And we, I mean, this situation, there's sometimes when we are on a path towards working on something in the morning and by the afternoon we get an update from the state around what are some of the guidelines that we should do and then the path that we're on completely changes. So I just wanna be mindful that things have been changing very rapidly throughout this entire process and we've been trying to do the best we can. I mean, understanding that large groups create an opportunity for vectors to spread amongst populations. That is some of the reasoning why initially some of these the larger encampments that we're forming were broken up because there were concerns around if the virus gets into that population where like can it spread more rapidly? And so previous actions that were taken were under that assumption. Now we have different guidelines from the CDC but those arrived if I'm not mistaken yesterday to us. So things are changing really quickly and we're trying to adjust and adapt to all the information that's coming forward to us at this time. So I just wanna be mindful of that and also just wanted to share out that this is something that probably could have came in our two by two but the other day I had reached out to Brooke Newman and a number of other groups within the community to see if we could organize times when we're having these discussions and one of the things that came out of the two by two meeting is that there are bi-weekly conversations with the county and many of the people who are the organizations that are doing direct communication and contact and work with our homeless population. So I just wanna be clear that those conversations are happening with the service providers and it's happening now bi-weekly. So just wanna put that out there and I'll turn it over to Susie to answer the rest of the questions that you asked Council Member Glover. So Susie if you want. I appreciate that Mr. Mayor. But the issue, the reason why I'm asking the questions specifically is because that's for example the police chief just cited the situation that happened yesterday at the clock tower with Food Not Bombs as a reason why they're shutting down the site. Now I'm in no way supporting the violation of social distancing norms or rules but that group was framed as a rally on the Santa Cruz Police Department's website or on their social media posts when in reality it was a hotel voucher distribution that was spent $5,000 of the hotel rooms even if it was just for a night. So while we're waiting on, what I'm curious about is that while we're waiting on the county to come up with this plan of who knows when, who knows where, what are we doing to actively and proactively get out in front of stuff because that's my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong, but that we're ultimately closed for the hotel vouchers for the question then is what happens after those seven days? And then there was also reports of a lack of resources and food and information that were given to those people that went to the hotels. So all of this is really concerned to a short period of time to ask questions. And so beyond all of the way up a hard stop time at 4.15, I wanna give Councilmember Watkins time to ask questions. I'm gonna make a motion that we schedule an emergency meeting either the next 24 or 48 hours to have a discussion and action around the issue of homelessness and how it pertains to COVID-19. But also figuring out how we may be taught looking at relief funds to assist certain aspects with food and shelter and emergency supplies and essential workforce protections. But if none of that other stuff, just a special meeting for us to talk about actual active steps we can start taking as a city, now the county's gonna do whatever it's gonna do and we can coordinate with them but as a city to make sure that we're taking care of the most vulnerable people in our community which up until now, even with all the great work in the PowerPoint presentations, I don't think it's happened as effectively as it could have. Yeah, I'll second that motion. Susie, well, I wanna give an opportunity because Susie was supposed to answer a question and then I still have Councilmember Watkins on deck. So Susie, if you wanna answer that, but we'll acknowledge the motion that was made by. Kate, can I add? I just wanna remind the council that the homelessness response were under emergency declaration under a shelter in place order. And the way it works is that we have to work with the county who is the lead on responding to the homelessness and we put in our request to the county and under the system we have operating, we need to work with them. The county's working on preparing response and so what would be appropriate is to have the county work on that and then we can report out on their work and what the strategy is. At this point, they're working on it. There's a variety of issues that have to be sorted out. One of the major ones of course is that even if we have shelters available, facilities available, they have to be managed, they have to be operated, they have to be serviced and they have to be implemented in the context of the various needs of the homelessness community. So all of these questions cannot be answered at this time. We have to wait for the county to, and I know people want the answers quickly, but unfortunately they're not available right away and we have to wait for the county to work on developing this plan. Once that's done, we can certainly respond back to the council providing answers and give you updates on that. But at this point, there's absolutely no way that we can sit down and come up with our own plan that makes any sense without working with the county. So I would advise the council to please be patient and allow the staff and allow the county to work on responding to this issue. That's why I said that we should have a special meeting after the county comes up with their 48 hour timeline and they're figuring out what they need to do, but that does not mean that we should be sitting on our hands and not coming up with all of these suggestions to move on things once the county comes out or as soon as the county is done with their plan so that we can take action as a city. Be patient is a very dangerous perspective to have with regards to people that are as vulnerable as those that are sleeping outside or all of the other litany of impact is having on our community. So while I respect that we can't have that conversation right now and you don't have the answers, that does not mean that we need to push it off indefinitely and get a report when it's convenient for you. I don't think we'll have the answer in 48 hours either. Would you like me to answer the question about the existing shelter beds and the CDC guidelines or shall we wait on that? I'm gonna give the other council members an opportunity to speak because we're supposed to end this item in five minutes. So maybe if you can follow up with council member Glover by email with that answer, I think that'll be appropriate. Council members Watkins and then Myers. Thank you, can you guys hear me okay? I just wanna also just sort of echo what has been said in terms of appreciation of all of the work that's gone on and the mobilization that's happened so far. These are definitely uncharted times and we're all learning and I appreciate you all and the work of our city staff so hard on this really challenging topic. I just, I won't really go into any of my questions. I'm happy to have those offline. I do anticipate that we will learn more about reassignments as we start to learn that we're gonna need to have certain staffs kind of working on different things as this escalates in the next several weeks which is anticipated as well as enforcement and other types of initiatives that are coming in from the state and the county. I just briefly maybe wanna make a quick comment around what's happening in education. The county office of education along with all of the different superintendents in the county have a website up with different resources for people who are looking for materials, resources, food distribution for families, child care, et cetera. But I also just wanna give thanks to the city for being able to institute a child care facility right away for our essential workforce. We can't have our workers working if they don't have anybody to watch their kids. So in addition to being able to mobilize so quickly at the city level, I also just wanna offer a resource for those who may be listening at home. And potential city employees that the Child Development Resource Center could potentially help with them as a one-on-one child care opportunity is available currently. And in terms of the motion on the floor, I just want to say that I trust that the city staff, the mayor and those who are working on boots on the ground seven days a week on this issue will know when to call a special meeting for us. And I'll be happy to participate in that meeting when the time is, but don't feel comfortable supporting the motion at this time. Vice Mayor Myers. Oh, you're muted. You're still muted. Now we can hear you. Okay. Sorry about that. I, yeah, I just wanna make sure that it's very clear the, I think Susie did a good job, but it's very clear that we are operating as part of a larger system of requirements basically coming down from the state. So in as much as we might feel the need to continue to discuss these things in 48 or 72 hours, we are part of a larger statewide emergency order. And the county is the lead on this legally by state law. And all the directives that are coming from the county are what we need to be following as well as the governor's shelter-in-place order. And the work that was done with Food Not Bombs this day today was appropriate under the shelter-in-place order because social distancing basically laws that are in place now were not being followed. And so I think we, this is a shifting as the mayor just said and others who have been trying to work on this stuff every day, these are shifting rules, shifting approaches. I can guarantee you that no one in City Hall has been trying to disregard the needs of anyone in our community right now. Our community is working as hard as it can. All of our staff, council members, the mayor, myself, other elected leaders, but frankly, we have to follow the chain of commands because of the emergency situation. So I think it's important that our community understand that we are working within a framework that is not something that we created locally, but it's been created by the state. And so I do think that we need to allow our staff and the county and others to be adapting as more directives come down from the governor. And we need to be basically following the chain of command that's been established through the emergency order and through the governor's executive orders. Thanks. It is now past 4.15 and I extended the time respectfully to honor the request of our council members who wish to have more time. Currently we have a motion that was made by council member Glover, seconded by council member Brown to have a meeting regarding COVID-19 response within the next 24 to 48 hours. And so at this time, we will be taking a vote. And I will just express that I've been, excuse me. 48 hour timeline or whatnot, just alter the motion to say when the county has, it was called 48 hour timeline, 20 to 40, or 24 to 48 hours, whatever that's fine with me. How about this? Council member Glover has their plan in place. Council member Glover, can you clearly state your motion so that we can capture it on the record? As it pertains to. Okay. I have an amendment to that motion too as well. I'm going to ask that you speak slowly so that the motion and the language that you're saying can be captured clearly by the clerk. So if you have an amendment to the motion, go ahead. Yes, you recognize Chris. Council member Crom. Thank you. Yeah, I think the questions and every day I'm getting, email, phone calls, et cetera, that people are not getting enough information. I'm putting out as much as I can. I'm in constant communication with Bonnie every day, but I don't think the public really feels like they're informed. I would like to add to the motion that a release, that we've discussed, much to let Berkeley did, covering cost of shelter, rent, food and emergency supplies. And number two, essential workforce protection. You know, people are going to, like workers need to be, essential workers, actually food service workers in Safeway and all the other stores, they're not wearing the protective gear that they should be wearing when they're handling food. Those are two motions, or two things that I wanted to add to the special meeting that we discussed with Relief Fund and that we talked about essential workforce protections from the COVID team virus. Can you clarify, Council member Crom, can you clarify your amendments because that was not clear, unfortunately. Yeah, unfortunately you cut out a couple of times during that. Yeah, at a special meeting, we take up a Relief Fund to assist residents in covering costs of shelter, rent, food and emergency supplies, and that we also pick up the issue of essential workforce protections from coworkers who are being deemed essential during this, if they can't shelter in place necessarily, they're going to work, but they're being. Chris, can you email your amendments to the city clerk because you're cutting out? Yeah, and I can also just clarify what I believe it's to establish a Relief Fund to assist residents in covering costs of shelter, rent, food and emergency supplies similar to Berkeley and a discussion of how to protect the essential workforce from the COVID-19 pandemic, including but not limited to food service workers and grocery store members. Okay, should you capture that? Mayor, I'd like to make a motion to call the question. Second. So the motion has been made to call the question by Council member Watkins, seconded by the mayor. All those in favor, please say aye. I need to do a roll call. Oh, sorry, we have to do it. Sorry, we have to do a roll call. Council member is Watkins. Is she still on the phone? Aye. Oh. Brown? Mayor Cummings. Aye. She gave a thumbs up. Yeah, so unanimous vote to call the question. Now we will vote on the motion on the floor and we'll have a roll call vote for the motion on the floor. Yes. Council member is Watkins. Council member Watkins. Matthews? No. Vice Mayor Myers? That's a meeting. She said no. Mayor Cummings? No. That motion fails. Okay. And with that, we will move on to our next item. We'll be able to act, which is the City Council. If I may, if I may. Sure. If I may. Council member Watkins. Maybe for the record, is it okay? Sure. Maybe for the record, you know, you and the City have the ability and capacity to call a special meeting as needed to address a lot of these issues that are gonna be forthcoming, that we know are forthcoming, that are not anything that we want to be negligent in our duties to serve. But we trust in you to do that as we can activate and mobilize appropriately when we be. So I, for the record, we'll just state that. I'll also state that we have been working diligently seven days a week with the County, with many of the people in our community who have done the kind of on the grounds work as it relates to food distribution. Myself and Vice Mayor Myers have been in touch with the Community Foundation, or Vice Mayor Myers, I should say, has been in touch with the Community Foundation around rent relief. We also were the ones who brought forward the item that's gonna come up for us later around evictions protections. And we're actively engaged with the community trying to figure out ways to protect all workers and all people within our community. And so if there is a need for us to have a special meeting, we'll do so, but at this point in time, there's a lot of change. There's a lot of action that's taking place. A lot of changes that are happening very rapidly and we are working and trying to do our best to ensure that the overall safety of our community and the function of our community as well. Council Member Glover. Thanks for the record, since we're making these statements. As soon as the County came up with its timeline and anticipated structure, is because I am not confident in what I've seen thus far with the execution led by the city manager in the way to address the issue of COVID-19, specifically as it pertains to people experiencing homelessness, where we have reports from Food Not Bombs where they're being told to go over to the bench lands in the mud while it's raining. This makes no sense while we have other resources available while we wait for the County. So it has not shown that we can just put our hands up and say we trust in the government because it apparently has not moved and we are being criticized publicly by a litany of people because of our inaction. If I can respond, let me just say that. Mr. McHendery has been utterly irresponsible and even offering him an alternative site is incredibly reasonable. And I would argue that having them stop his operation while the shelter and order in place may be even more appropriate. We have worked really hard to have them work with us. He has refused consistently. What he's done, as I noted, has put the community in jeopardy. The man does not respect the rule of law. So he should be grateful that we're willing to work with him. And again, I don't know if he can even do that because he has not been able to uphold anything that he said. With that, we're gonna move on to our next Council Member Brown. I just wanna thank for the record really quickly that my support for this idea, this motion was really because I feel like we, this is not to criticize the staff in any way. The response so far, but I really feel like we do better as a community when we are open to coming up with creative and innovative ideas to address problems that we are facing. And this is clearly the biggest crisis that we have faced in my memory. And so I just feel like having that conversation might really help us. And so that's why I wanted to continue the conversation at another time. Thanks. All right. Well, at this point, I think it's appropriate for us to move on to our next item, which is the Council Meeting Calendar. I'll now call on the city clerk to provide any updates to the calendar. Yes, I did not make a note, but I do know April 7th was added as a special meeting to certify the election. I think that's it so far. Thank you. Moving on, item number four, Council Membership in City Groups and Outside Agencies. This is the time for Council Members to report out on actions at external boards, committees, and joint power authority meetings. For future meetings, please come prepared to provide an update on any meetings or actions that occurred since the last Council Meeting, so Council in public can be informed. Council Member Lever has us here. Council Member Lever. Thanks. This has to do with the meeting calendar. I just wanna go out and say that I think it's pretty, on April 7th it has to do with election results, but we won't schedule something as soon as it's viable with the county to talk about solutions to homelessness when it comes to the COVID-19 virus. It blows my mind. And then to have the city manager attack someone like that in a public meeting is... So we'll start with Council Member Glover. Do you have any report backs on any city groups or outside agencies? Nope. None of us have mentioned the last pet takes meeting, I believe. Okay. Council Member Cron. I didn't need to actually, and I'm not really sure why it's not on this agenda. The Public Safety Committee met and we were gonna have a surveillance ordinance on this agenda. I thought that's where we were scheduling it and it was already in the pipeline, but I know we talked a good deal about the ACLU's surveillance guideline and an ordinance that I hope will take it up on a future agenda. But that's all that's the only outside meeting where I've had since then. Okay, Vice Mayor Myers. Oh, you're muted. By the way, right now. Okay, sorry. For some reason, I'm having a delay and when I'm unmuting it takes forever. Sorry, a couple of quick things. We did get an update from Mark Gettle Metro, but Metro, I was at a finance meeting. Metro is currently going through similar COVID-19 adjustments to both scheduling and also working with staff to keep them safe while also trying to continue to provide service. So that is the only meeting that I went to during this period of time. Metro is also looking at longer term adjustments to schedules. So that's my report. Thank you. I have a few other report outs. The cannabis committee met during this time and previously there were numerous items coming before the city council, including considerations for taxes, on-site consumption, license transfers and event permits. The committee agreed that we should prioritize license transfers issues as a priority. And so prior to the kind of COVID-19 issues that we've been having, the direction was that we were gonna begin moving towards focusing on the license transfer issue, which the industry has mentioned is its top priority. In addition to that, the LAFCO met and at our last meeting we updated meeting rules and records management policy. We also reviewed county service area 60, which is Huckleberry Island community. That county service area group has not been active and maybe subject to disillusion. And so we're gonna be following up on that. The affordable housing committee, we explored various bills for a study session and we began reviewing the work completed to date from the housing blueprint subcommittee. We also discussed potential opportunities for funding for affordable housing in general and as it relates to the potential mixed use at the library and a lot of that work has been, I'd say on all the committees has been delayed now given the fact that a lot of focus in the city is on COVID-19. The rental data committee, we had planned on starting some community outreach with realtors and property management companies and owners in the community, but we have now stopped due to the COVID-19 focus and we'll consider how we're gonna continue meeting. As I mentioned with the homeless two by two, a lot of what's happening right now is focus on reducing and preventing death, reducing the spread of COVID-19, supporting the health system and getting accurate information to the public. And so I won't go into that in detail because we just had a pretty lengthy conversation regarding that and those are the committees I'll just report on at this time and I'm sure that some of the other ones I'm on, some of my colleagues can also give updates on those as well. And so we'll move over to council member Brown. I, yeah, thank you. In the interest of time, I think I will not provide updates on the, so Mayor Cummings gave an update on some of the activities I've been involved in, but I think I'll just leave the RTC and area agency on aging and some of the others for another time because there's nothing really important that needs to be reported. Thanks. I'll also mention before moving on that we, the library subcommittee actually met with group four where we were presented a number of different potential options for the library which was a new building renovation and two options that were library housing, parking mixtures and so that group was gonna continue moving forward with their work and kind of bring back a similar presentation as did Jason Architects, I think in late May. So that's an update on that as well that was missed. Council member Matthews. Very briefly, most of the meetings that I participate in have been canceled about the revenue subcommittee which has been pursuing a potential TOT increase. Although the meeting was canceled, conferred informally and agreed that this is not the time to move forward. So we'll be bringing that to the council at its next regular meeting. Since the council charged our committee with pursuing that option and we'll bring back an agenda item and realize that it's extremely important to reach out right now to the entire lodging and visitor industry, which as we all know, has been flabbered. So that's not, we haven't taken action officially but we can expect that at our next regular meeting. And council member Watkins. Okay, that concludes our group and outside agency reports. We'll move on to our next item, which is the Consent Agenda. These are items five through 11 with the exception of 10 which was deleted on our agenda. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who would wish to pull any items? Council member Matthews, I see your hand up. Council member Matthews. Oh, your microphone's muted. Your microphone's still muted. As long as you see a little red phone next to mark right there, your fire, audio doesn't work. Let's see if I can. No, there's two places to unmute it. Okay, I physically left my home office but I was participating and listening the entire time on my cell phone. So I didn't depart from the meeting at any point. Is there any item you'd like to pull from the Consent Agenda? No, no. Vice Mayor Meyers. It looks like no items are gonna be pulled. Oh, Council Member Cron. I had a comment on, and it's not specifically about the locker program. And I know it was put off the agenda, item number 10. But I did hope to see some information come back when it comes back to the council concerning the usage of that RAM and the expedient, why we're spending 175,000 now, but just like, give us some statistics about who uses it. I'm not saying we shouldn't be using it. Great to have those statistics when it comes back to us. To follow up to that, one of my suggestions might be is that you email the staff members who brought that item forward to ensure that your comments are incorporated. Thank you. Can I just point out that one of the reasons why this was pulled is that given the fiscal situation that we have, we may not be able to actually afford to be able to move forward with this. So that's why we're pulling back on it at this point, but we can certainly provide more information. And I'd also just like to comment to thank the county for moving forward with trying to get some regional support for community banking. And I know that we are in a pretty difficult fiscal position, but I think that item on community banking, at least by acknowledging our interests that we can move forward when the time is appropriate. So if there's no items being pulled, I'd like to ask for a motion to move all the items on consent. I'll move the consent agenda. I'll second, but I do have a, is there any public comment on any of those items? I guess you should ask for me. Ask, yeah. Sorry, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Are there any, is there any public comment that's been received on any of the consent agenda items? Okay. Yeah, we received one for six and one for seven. We received one comment for item number six and one comment for item number seven, just so the public is aware and that will be on public record. And so bringing it back for action deliberation, there's a motion made by council member Watkins, seconded by council member Brown to move all the items on consent. And we'll do a roll call vote. Council member Watkins. You're muted. Oh, you're muted. Matthews. Hi. Brown. Clever. Council member Glover. Yes. Voting, I just want to know where those comments went, the ones that you said that we got, where would those be? Did you forward them to the council? I did. I'm looking at my council email. I don't see them. I did. He didn't specify which one in the subject. It's in the bottom. We'll read those comments through for quick items number six and seven. You want me to read it? Yeah, I'll be very short, are they long? Yeah, it includes photos. It's from James Ewing Whitman. Now just note that it's, I think that we should, council members, if you're not receiving the emails, I think that's a valid question. But I think that reading them off is, can be potentially problematic because as we get to items that are further along in our agenda, for example, our evening item or our later item on evictions, we have over probably 300 emails that we've received and we won't have enough time to read through all of them. So I would just like to ask. I sent it at 240. If you search your email at that 240. Right. Issue, Mr. Mayor, I mean, if those 300 people came to the council meeting, they would get some time. So reading a line or two from somebody who couldn't make it to the council or that would have come to the council meeting but didn't today, I think that's the difference. That's all saying. Okay, thanks. And I appreciate that. And given that we are in a very different situation and trying to manage it as we're moving along, I'll take that into consideration for future meetings. So thank you. So we have a motion. Down at the yes vote. We have a motion made by Elton McCrone. Could you repeat what you said? Put me down at the yes vote to move the consent item. Thanks. Vice Mayor Meyers. Aye. That passes unanimously. The next item up is our first item of general business, which is the 2019 general plan and a housing element annual progress report. The presenters on this item are Catherine Donovan, senior planner. So I'd like to see if Catherine is on the lawn, which it looks like she is. My presentation to share with you, at the beginning, ahead of time, my connection is not as speedy as when I'm sitting in the council chambers. So this item has to do with our annual general plan and housing element reports. These are reports that are required by state law. We have come to you every year. The council reports and there's not an approval, but they accept them. There have been some major changes in these annual reports. In 2018, previously only non-charter cities were required to turn in this report. And as a charter city, we did anyway because it provided us with grant funding opportunities, but we were not required to turn them in. Since 2018, all cities and counties are required to do these reports. Also in 2018, there was expanded reporting requirements. Prior to 2018, we only reported on building permit issues. We now report on planning applications received and planning applications approved, building permit and building permits finaled. These reports go to both the governor's office of planning and research and to the department of housing and community development. And they are due on April 1st. And there actually was some question as to whether they, due to the COVID-19 emergency, whether they would be delayed. And unfortunately, the statute requires that they be turned in by April 1st, so there is no delay on these. This report is the general plan report. There is no set formula for this report, but there are recommended topics to be included, including updates to the general plan, zoning ordinance amendments, and just general implementation of efforts towards the meeting our general plan goals. Chapter 11 of the general plan outlines implementation measures and indicates the responsible department for each of these measures. And the planning department has the responsibility of tracking the work of all the other departments and reporting in this annual report. This slide represents some of the departmental implementation efforts that have occurred this year. It includes various housing projects, the front riverfront project, the 908 Ocean Street project, Pacific Front Laurel project, and 190 Westbrook project. It also represents our climate action plan and the work we've done on that, as well as our resilient coast project, the rail tariff project, and our general plan zoning reconciliation project. The second report we have is the housing and element annual report. That report does come with a specific template from the state HCD. And I want to apologize at this point. We have tried various ways to get it to you in a format that you can actually see the most important tab in that Excel spreadsheet. And we have yet to find the perfect way to get it to you. That's an extremely long spreadsheet and it always ends up being shrunk to a size that is very difficult to read. But the basic summary is that our regional housing needs allocation comes to us through the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments and they get their allocation from the State Department of Finance. This is a reporting period of 2015 to 2023. And in that period, the housing allocation is intended to bring our share of the statewide need for housing. In this period, we are allocated 747 units and it is measured by building permits issued. RENA allocations. And as you can see as of this year, we have met our low moderate and above moderate requirements, but we are still far from meeting our very low requirement. And this, since the dissolution of redevelopment, we have very few tools to encourage very low income housing. One of the few tools we have is our density bonus allocation. And units that we have had have all been either through affordable housing projects by affordable housing developers or through our density bonus projects. This slide is sort of a snapshot in time of the work that has come through the department. It shows the planning applications that have been submitted, those that have been approved, building permits that are issued and the building permits that are finaled. And I want to point out that there, since the time that this was sent to you and posted on the website, we discovered an error. The state requires on our planning application admitted that we count only applications that have been deemed complete. And there was a hundred unit housing application that had not yet been deemed complete as of December 31st that was inadvertently included in these numbers. And that had included 22 very low income units and 78 above moderate units. So those were removed from this sheet, which is why it would not comply with what you had seen before. And these numbers represent the number of housing units, not the number of housing applications, number of project applications. In the hopes of keeping this distinct, I will now ask if you have any questions. Thank you for that presentation. Are there any council members who have questions at this time? If you could please click on your raise hand button. I can put you on stack. I had one question for clarification as it relates to the very low housing. So could you click back to that slide? The probably one, oh, one more ahead, yeah. So just for clarification, with regards to the very low, this is all related to construction, right, in order to meet these arena goals. So if a unit went to, for example, was section eight, that would not be considered a unit that is kind of fitting within meeting arena goals, correct? Partially correct. There are two types of section eight projects or programs. One is a section eight voucher and the other is a section eight project. If they were section eight projects, it would show on here. But if it was simply the voucher, it would not. Thank you. Any further questions? I see council member Brown. Just a follow up question to clarify. Thank you for the, I have nothing questions that Mayor Cummings had. So the project base section eight is included, but they, so would they be very low or are they categorized as low or very low? Where do they fit into the table? It depends. Yeah, it depends on the project. You don't have to give me more detail right now in the interest of time, but thank you, that's helpful. Sure. I wanted to add one more thing. Because there were changes in this report after we submitted it, we would like you to accept the reports as corrected. Thank you for that clarification. I'd like to ask the clerk, has there been anyone who's emailed us with comments on this item? There have not. Seeing that there were no comments emailed to us by the public on this item. I'd like to bring it back to council for action and deliberation. Commendation. Yeah, we have a motion by council member Watkins. Is there a second? Second, bar Matthew. Yeah. So we have a motion and if I might be to clarify, the motion is to accept the report as corrected by the city staff. Council member Watkins. I was asking if the motion was to accept the report as corrected by the city staff. So we have a motion by council member Watkins, seconded by council member Matthews. We'll do a roll call vote on the item. Council member Watkins. You're muted, Martina. Council, yeah. Hi. Council member Matthews. You're muted. Yes. Vice Mayor Myers. That's a yes. Hi. Okay, there we go. Hi. So that motion passes unanimously. Okay, so we will move on to our next item, which is item number 13. Is everyone feeling okay with moving forward at this time or does anybody need a quick pause? I guess we'll continue moving forward. Item number 13 is building electrification through prohibitions on use of natural gas and newly constructed buildings. The presenters of this item are Tiffany Wise West, sustainability and climate action manager and Kurt Hurley, green building specialist. And I think, I'll try to unmute Tiffany and Kurt. You think you're both muted at the time at the moment? Yep, we can hear you. Kurt, are you there? Okay, good evening, council members and the city manager and other folks present at the meeting. This is Tiffany Wise West, the sustainability and climate action manager and Kurt and I are here today to present the natural gas coalition ordinance for first hearing. We have a very, very brief presentation and I will start with that. We just want to review the drivers for building electrification, how we got to this point. Very briefly, the policy development process and then if you choose to do so, we will provide the recommended motion to adopt. So recall that your council directs the staff to bring back options in fall of last year. We did so at our February 18th study session where you did give us the direction to pursue a natural gas prohibition ordinance. You also had specified at the time that we were to bring back options that we should align our timeline with Monterey Bay Community Powers support incentives which are now currently scheduled to roll out in the second quarter of 2020. So very shortly here. And if you recall, those are incentives for local jurisdictions adopting building electrification policies. There are for multi-family affordable housing, incentives for developers. And then although not under the purview of this natural gas prohibition, they will also provide incentives for retrofits of things like hot water heaters and heating and ventilation systems. It's also important for us to remember the big why, which is that Monterey Bay Community Powers electricity that they procure is carbon free. So by going switching away from natural gas, we are getting more of our power from carbon free power. And then the state does have a 2045 carbon neutrality target. And this certainly will contribute to that target. And as we stated previously, depending on the outcome of our upcoming climate and energy action process, we could have a carbon neutrality target that may be earlier, but right now we are defaulting to the state. In addition to those drivers, there are a number of benefits and we're not going to go over them all in detail here, but just to remind you, there is quite a degree of control with heat pumps that enable superior comfort. There will be improvements to indoor air quality by preventing combustion within the home. We also anticipate that by eliminating our reliance on natural gas and its problematic legacy structure that we will be reducing the number of explosions similar to San Bruno and will be improving safety and resilience. We've demonstrated previously that going towards an electrified buildings is a cost effective option supported by a number of studies. It also is very well aligned with the integration of renewable energy at various fields. And that's what comes with that as well as our electricity and building trades could be potentially new jobs for this kind of work. And then as I've already mentioned, this is a transformative mechanism for greenhouse gas emissions in our region. We have completed pretty extensive outreach. It took important effort including community workshops and developers round tables. The study session already mentioned and I believe four electrification coffee hours with trade vendors, designers and builders. In terms of the policy process, we did go to the planning commission although not required for a courtesy referral and did incorporate a number of valuable comments that were received from them on the initial ordinance. Today is the first hearing, the second hearing is scheduled I believe for April 14th and then due to the COVID-19 virus we, Earth Day has been postponed as has the building electrification expo that had been planned for that time. And then implementation should say July 1st, 2020. So apologies for leaving off the month. And then on the right-hand side, you can see the website where all of our resources have been placed by the planning department for others to, or for our residents and others to reference. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Kurt Hurley who's gonna walk you through once again what exactly this new construction natural gas prohibition is. So Kurt, go ahead and take it away. Well, thank you Tiffany and good afternoon, Mayor Cummings and members of our council and members of our community. In this FOIL, we're going to review the administration of the proposed natural gas prohibition for new construction. So starting on the left side, if there is a permit application for new construction, we move to the right in the vertical dialogue box and we make a determination if the application is an exemption or not. The exemptions include restaurants, facilities using industrial process heat, accessory dwelling units, less than or equal to 750 square feet for projects where the electric approach, it would be contrary to public interest or infeasible. So in the event that there's not an exemption, we would move up to, well, we move across to the no, not an exemption. And then we're over at the blue dialogue box just about center and we move into the vertical rectangle on the right. And in the case of a residential permit application that is three stories or less, the permit application would be for a code compliant all electric design, solar would be required. In the case of a taller residential structure, solar is not required, the applicant would submit an all electric design. That would also be the case for a non-residential all electric permit application which is shown on the lower right. And finally, stepping back to the center of this slide to finish our review of the administration, if the application were one of the exemptions that were mentioned, they would be able to either use mixed fuel for just that component that's allowed or in the case of an ADU for their heating and water heating. And just on our review of terms at the bottom, when I refer to mixed fuel, I mean that the entire energy demand is met through a combination of natural gas and electricity. In our administration, we mentioned prohibition exemptions and here we'll briefly review those. In the first, if the technical compliance documents for energy indicate that there's no pathway for the applicant, that would constitute an exemption under usability. Second, contrary to public interest, this would be generally a public infrastructure that is already using a mixed fuel approach, a water treatment and it had to be expanded or an emergency operations in a different location. Thirdly, would be a restaurant or a commercial kitchen or a similar occupancy that is preparing food and using heat in that process. Fourthly, industrial process heat. So this would be either providing a service or manufacturing a product where elevated temperatures over long time periods are required and difficult to achieve without the use of conventional fuel burning equipment. And finally, the accessory dwelling unit exemption which is set at less than or equal to 750 square feet. Noting that the exemption extends to space conditioning and water heating only, but requires the use of electric appliances for food preparation for the uniform reduction in indoor air quality hazards that we mentioned during our study session that pertain to the use of natural gas indoors. Next slide please. This is a summary of quantification, our reduction in emissions with this natural gas, the composite new dwelling units over a 60 month or five year period between beginning January of this year and through would actually be January of 2025. At the end of that 60 month period, we would have about 300 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year that would be avoided through those new units being all electric. So that gives us some quantitative indication of this policy and its impact on our city's overall emissions footprint. On the far right, we note that our national average for turnover in building stock is approximately 1%, although in our area our climatic conditions allow particularly wood frame construction to last longer. So our turnover rate is lower than that. So for a broad impact, say for a quarter of our entire built environment that would take in excess of a quarter century. Next slide please. The recommended motion is to introduce for publication and ordinance, adding a new chapter 6.100 to the Santa Cruz Municipal Code prohibiting natural gas infrastructure in new buildings. And with that, if you have any questions, we can answer them. Thank you. Thank you. And just want to express our appreciation for bringing this item to us and for the presentation. Are there any council members who have questions at this time on the presentation? Seeing none, I'd like to ask the clerk if there were any comments that have been received on this item during the council meeting. During the council meeting, we got seven. So there's seven comments. And I just want to acknowledge there was a member of the public, Lee Brocaw, who came and wanted to speak on this item, but given that the chambers are closed to the public today, I just want to acknowledge that we did receive his letter as well. I would recommend given the number of comments that you received that the council take just a couple of minutes to go through the correspondence so that you have the opportunity to take that into consideration before debating or making a vote. Okay, so why don't we give council members till 5.20 and we'll bring back, we'll come back at 5.20 for vote on the items to give council members an opportunity to read through the comments. Actually available, Justin, I don't know whether you can hear me or not. Can you hear me, Justin? I can. But I'd like to ask, I don't know how do you got this number or how are you on the call, but where this call is not open to members of the public. So whose line are you calling from? Okay, then you're telling me that the city council meeting is not open to the public and I think that that's a Brown act violation. Which, where are you calling from right now? I'd like to ask because we're receiving public comment through emails and that is how this is a public meeting and we're trying to be equal to all members of the public. So I'd like to ask whoever shared this or if you could identify what number you're calling from otherwise we're gonna have to restart the meeting potentially. So I'd like to ask if you could please, I don't know which number you're calling from or whose. The blank screen in the center of the. No, that's Lee. Lee is on the. We got a separate one. I have a separate line. There are two leads on the line right now. Okay, so answers that question. Justin, if I could. Okay, she's been removed from the meeting. Councilman Matthews. Yeah, just wanted to point out, we did get an email from Lee Brokaw and I think the arrangement for communications under these new circumstances is that the council members were asked to read all the correspondence that had come up to the time of the meeting began and then to have our email open so we can read the, I think relatively few emails that have come in the course of the meeting. And that means things like a good accommodation under the circumstances. So we have received quite a few bits of correspondence on this item to comment. Yeah, and I'd like to acknowledge that. And we're trying to be fair and equal to all members of the public. And so giving one member of the public the right to call in and ignoring all the others, I don't think is fair, which is why we chose the email model for acknowledging members of the public. So if council members want to take a couple of minutes, maybe to look over some of the comments and then we can bring it back for action deliberation as was proposed by the city attorney. So we can come back online in about at 5.20. And so between now and then we'll just have an opportunity for folks to look over the comments. Those comments to myself that we can review during that time as well. This moment in time. So I'd like to see if, all right, I'd like to see if there are any further comments or actions of deliberation by council members. So if there's no further comments, I'd like to see if we can have a motion made on the item that's before us. Oh, I see Cynthia Matthews and Council, and Councilor Watkins. Yeah, I was prepared to go ahead and move the recommendation before us and thank the staff for all their good work on this. Second. Okay. So we have a motion made by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Watkins. I also want to express my appreciation of the staff for bringing this item for us and helping us as we're trying to minimize our carbon footprint. So if there are no further comments, we can take a roll call vote on this item. Council Member Watkins. You're muted. Thumbs up. Matthews. Council Member Matthews. Hi, but I want to say for the record too, that I don't think we should be making policy like this. I think we should be talking more about the COVID-19 emergency that we're dealing with right now and not asking legislation that's really meaningful, but with not that much scrutiny. Vice Mayor Myers and Mayor Cummings. Hi, that passes unanimously. Next on our agenda is item number 14, Library Advisory Commission, two appointments. I will begin by calling for nominations from each Council Member. Only new nominations should be called. So if a Council Member has already nominated an applicant, then that nomination should not be called again. At the end of the nomination selection period, the city clerk administrator will take a roll call vote to determine appointments or reappointments. The city clerk will then tally those choices and determine the majority vote. The nominee who gets the majority of votes is appointed or reappointed. Before we begin, I'd like to call on, given that we don't have members of the public present, I'd like to ask the clerk, were there any members of the public who emailed comments on commissioned appointments or reappointments? Nothing during the meeting that you guys haven't already received. Okay. There are two possible appointments, each with a four-year term, and we will start with Council Member Glover. Do you have any appointments for the Library Advisory Commission? None. Next, we'll move on to Council Member Cron, Vice Mayor Myers. Are we just doing one nomination or two? Two. Ripma's already been nominated. Given that that's everyone, I think we will start with the vote and we will circle back to, and we'll do these, yeah, we'll just, we'll move forward with this. So, Council Member Glover. We have two openings. There's two, so you should vote for two. Raina Dubin. All right, Council Member Cron. It's Ripma and Vice Mayor Myers. I'm going to say Ripma and Dubin. Council Member Brown. Council Member Matthews. Dubin and Rogers. And Council Member Watkins. Dubin and Rogers. Raina Dubin and Mary Austin Ripma. That concludes item number 14 on our agenda. And I'd like to just thank all the members of the public who submitted their applications to be on this committee and welcome to seeing them and thank them for serving on one of our commissions. Katherine, if I could. Sure. Deb Tracy Crew and Martha Dexter who have served in this capacity since the advisory committee was formed and who have been involved with the library system. They brought incredible knowledge. Deb, particularly through her work with the education community and Martha with her, well Deb is a professional librarian too and Martha with her long experience with libraries. And they helped guide the system through an incredible process of facility planning and fundraising and they just, they helped have such a good foundation for the entire system. So I hope we can thank them as a council and that you will also thank them. They just have made an exceptional contribution. Absolutely. Thank you for those comments as well. Okay, there are no further comments. We can move on to the last item on our agenda for today, which is an emergency ordinance preventing residential or commercial evictions for the non-payment of rent as a result of economic losses related to the coronavirus pandemic. The presenters on this item are myself and Vice Mayor Myers and I have some comments but I'll see if Vice Mayor Myers, if you want to start or would you prefer? I kind of kick this off. Item four today, concerning the dire situation our community and country finds itself in concerning the COVID-19 outbreak. As mentioned in both the governor's order issued on March 16th, 2020 and this ordinance that we have brought to council today, our immediate concern has to be for protecting our residential and commercial tenants from loss of their housing or business due to loss of income. We also must acknowledge the immense pressure facing those who have mortgages to meet in the coming months. We would like all members of our community to understand that everyone faces risk at this point and so working together will be critical to meet existing rent and mortgage obligations. We hope that in the coming days and weeks more clarity regarding financial release packages will become known. The mayor and I communicate daily with federal, state and local representatives regarding getting financial resources to our community as quickly as possible. And we are all working really hard to try to get as much relief to our community as soon as possible. A couple things about the ordinance I just wanted to point out because I know we've gotten a number, we've gotten a lot of communication on this and I've been on the phone for about three or four days responding to questions regarding it. I just want to point out a couple of key points and these are found just for those folks who may be listening to this in the exhibit aid portion of the ordinance. So I would direct people to that if they have additional questions. But I want to point out that the ordinance that we're brought to you today mirrors the governor's order in timeline. So there's an ending date of May 31st, 2020 in this ordinance. And it differs from the governor's order in that eviction protections in this ordinance extend to both residential and commercial properties and prohibit evictions stemming from coronavirus pandemic losses. As they just said, the exhibit aid of the ordinance outlines a verification step for tenants to work within the intent of the ordinance. And I believe staff is also creating a frequently asked questions information sheet that will be available depending on the outcome of today's decision. And I'll turn it back over to the mayor but just in closing, I think it's really important to note that the city is here to help both residential and commercial tenants through offering access to current information and resources. And we need everyone to commit to working together at a time and the city is here to help as much as possible. Many people heard of all the resources our departments are currently putting together. So we encourage everyone that needs help to contact the city and we will certainly try to help people through this difficult time. And I'll be prepared to make a motion after we have questions and other presentations. Thanks mayor Cummings. Great, I just wanna kind of say that I echo those same sentiments that Vice Mayor Myers just spoke about and with regards to this item. I think that we need to be aware that this situation is changing extremely rapidly. Every day we are made aware of more resources that are available to different communities. We've also been made aware of how banks are stepping up in different ways. And so one of the things that I would encourage is that if you are employed and you're able to pay your rent, I just wanna encourage people that they continue to do so. We're still under contractual obligations and by not, if you're in a position where you can pay your rent, you should continue to so that you don't fall behind or become further in debt. However, for those individuals whose businesses may have shut down or for those individuals who may have lost their jobs and their incomes, I think the most important thing that people can do at this moment in time is to contact your property owners to try to work out some plan and also for those property owners to contact their banks because banks are working with property owners and property owners are able to work with their tenants. And if we can all try to figure out a way to meet everyone's needs during this really difficult time, I think that by having those lines of communication, it will really help us make sure that we are protecting everyone within our community from going homeless or from having their jobs be lost. There's a lot of information and decision happening every day, so I encourage folks to check your city websites, your county websites, the federal websites to get a sense of what resources are out there. And I just want to let everyone know that as the vice mayor has said, we have been on the phone daily with our state federal representatives. We have been working diligently with the county and we've been reaching out to tenants and property owners alike to understand the needs and we are trying to work as much as we can to try to get everyone the resources that they need so that they can stay in their homes during this very difficult time. And so I'd like to, well, the city manager, I would like to acknowledge the city manager to ask a question or comment. Yes, I was just going to say that Bonnie Lipscomb, I believe, is on the line and can provide additional information on rental assistance programs if you wish or do to do that. I have an announcement to make as well on this topic. To your slide, Bonnie, but not your, hear you. Yeah, Bonnie, we still can't hear your, I don't know if you're giving your presentation, but we still can't hear you. Available to the community through our agency partners that we support through our housing division here at the city. We have emergency rental assistance that provides a two months rental assistance to very low income households facing eviction. And this is through the community action board that's available. We have assistance through both for emergency security deposits through our housing authority and additional funding that's available to landlords related to our Section 8 program. We also have resources for tenant-based legal advice should they need it during this timeframe. And it's available, some of these resources are laid out on this card, which is on our website, ChooseSantaCruise.com, on our housing webpage. Also, we are available by phone to provide assistance and link to additional resources in the community. Thank you. Thank you. Of the city attorney. Yes, thank you. Bear with me one second. I'm gonna try to share something with the council. Yes. So we received notice from the court today. Just lay back up a second. What this ordinance does is it provides as an affirmative defense to any unlawful detainer action that is brought for nonpayment of rent. If that nonpayment of rent is due to a loss of income, loss of job, medical condition, or any other circumstance relating to the COVID-19 outbreak, then this ordinance provides an affirmative defense to a tenant in an unlawful detainer action, both commercial and residential tenants. Today, we received an order from the presiding judge of the Superior Court, and I'll just read it into the record because I think it's important, both for the council and members of the public to hear. So this is an order issued today, March 24th, 2020, by Paul Burdick, presiding judge of the Superior Court. One, the clerk's office will continue to accept filings in unlawful detainer cases. Upon the filing, the processing of unlawful detainer cases will be subject to the limitations imposed by this order. During the period of March 24th, 2020 through April 30th, 2020, no writ of possession for real property shall be issued in a pending unlawful detainer matter. And a writ of possession is an order that's issued upon the court basically granting an unlawful detainer action against a tenant that is given to the Sheriff's Department who then serves the writ of possession and that's how property is recovered. So no rits of possession shall be issued in a pending unlawful detainer matter from today until April 30th at the earliest. Execution of any previously issued rits of possession for real property is hereby stayed for the period of March 24th through April 30th, 2020, and no payment or undertaking for this period shall be owed by any defendant consistent with the court's discretion under code of sale procedure, Section 918. No new unlawful detainer trials are to be assigned to trial courts until May 4th, 2020. The dates in this order may be extended if public safety warrants it. So this is an important order issued by the court and it complements the action that the council is taking today. I'm happy to answer any council member questions or comments if you have them. Yep. I see council member Brown's hand is up and your microphone's off. Thank you. Two questions. One is in reading, thank you for bringing this together. First of all, Vice Mayor Meyers and Mayor Cummings and staff who were involved. I think it's a really important move to make right now given the severity of this crisis and lots of economic opportunities for many police people. My question, one question is about function and kind of plans for at the city with economic development. The county I know, the Board of Supervisors today has an agenda item, similar agenda item which also included a direction to economic development and the treasurer and tax assessor to come back with a plan for financial assistance to local businesses affected by this. And I'm just wondering if there's been any discussion at the city about doing something similar or kind of maybe partnering with the county to help support local businesses. I don't know, Bonnie, is Bonnie with C'mon? Yeah, you have seen it. Hi, yes, we absolutely would like to come back with additional assistance and we are having meetings twice a week with the county and the county economic development staff and others to try to be both consistent but to share resources across the county and the region. We're also advocating at our state and federal level with our legislators and our lobbyists for additional assistance and even looking at the funding we have and seeing if we can repurpose any of that to get community and get resources and financial assistance out to the community. So we're absolutely interested in doing everything we can on that point. Thank you. And then I have a sexy question which is for Mr. Kandadi about the ordinance as published for our consideration today is an urgency ordinance. And I am interested in consideration of an additional measure which was adopted at their meeting yesterday and I sent it to Bonnie Bush, the language but it's basically providing some grace period for tenants, commercial and residential tenants in our case, it would be both who at the end of the moratorium that they have time to pay back the back rent because as we know people experiencing hardship are not necessarily gonna be able to just come up with a big back bill, you know, with back payment all at once as of today, the moratorium that. The question being, Bonnie, sorry, Ken. The question being? The question being, could we add language and I'll just read it since it's not, I can't, I don't have the ability to put it up on the screen, language to indicate that commercial and residential tenants who are afforded eviction protections under the emergency ordinance still have up to six months after the city of Bintaro's proclaiming the end of the local public health emergency to pay their landlord all unpaid rent. We include that today. You may include it. I have not had a chance to research whether or not the governor's executive order is broad enough to make it be enforceable but I don't see a problem with the council including it today with the understanding that I will need to do follow-up research and report back if I determine that it would be preempted by state law. Council Member Glover. Which I do believe that was included in Watsonville's most recent ordinance passage to protect renters. I'm not sure if that aids in the process but with regards to that. Also in addition to that six months I think something that is important for us to be discussing if we can add the language also which has to do with establishing a either a grace period or a repayment plan or rent forgiveness into that structure because it's important for us to acknowledge that yes people will fall a couple months behind on rent potentially because of the virus but if you're working paycheck to paycheck or day to day you're not just gonna magically at the end of the virus have three months so you can pay back to your landlord or whoever it is even if there is a six month grace period because if you're living month to month on each paycheck then you can't accrue three months worth of rent over a limited amount of time. So whether that's the implementation of rent forgiveness through the city whether that's implementation of a rental relief fund or which I wanted to have a conversation about at the next special meeting or whether it be a rent forgiveness plan whatever it might be or established repayment plan for the tenants to their landlords so that they're not and also in addition to that I think we're talking about is preventing or protesting people from no fall to bictions say they lose their job they get knocked back three months in rent they have a six month period to pay it back what's to stop their landlord within that six month period from issuing them a no cause eviction which then makes them leave or have to find a new place to live while they're already in dire financial straits as we know moving into new places requires a tremendous amount of capital to put down payments on and pay for moving and all that other kind of stuff. So we have to think of all of the implications it's gonna have on the average low income renter to prevent them from experiencing homelessness or being kicked out of their place for no cause. I saw Vice Mayor Meyer had a hand up before and so did Council Member Brown. So Vice Mayor Meyer, do you have a comment? I think I'll wait since I believe we are are we asking questions right now? Are we starting to deliberate? No, this is actually the question period. You're correct. So if there are comments that folks want to make then maybe we'll hold off until the deliberations. I do have one question for Bonnie if she's still available. I'm just trying to get a sense Bonnie of the relief, the amount of relief that we currently have and then whether or not there is a way to operationalize additional funds, for example, through the housing trust or other financing. I'm just trying to get a sense are we, I believe in the staff report I saw a number around $100,000 that's available right now for rental assistance at the housing authority. And I realized that this is an ongoing problem and a lot of people have very different, a lot of different financial situations but I'm just trying to get a sense of the relief that's immediately available. I want to make sure that anyone who's listening understands what is available and what scale we're talking at. Can you speak to that? You might be muted Bonnie. Thanks. We have about 250,000, about a quarter of a million right now across our various affordable housing programs providing assistance. In addition to that, we do have our affordable housing trust fund and so we would need to look at the affordable housing trust fund. We've reached out to particularly the housing authority with some of the programs that they have to see if they need additional assistance and so they're monitoring the number of calls that they have and if they want to increase the amount we said that we would take that under emergency to counsel to get approval for that. So right now they're still monitoring that but we have basically put out to our partners that if they need more funding for the programs that we currently have that we were pretty sure we'd be able to make that available. In our affordable housing trust fund we do have a couple of million. We've been holding that for a state match however under the circumstances I think we need to look at all funding sources that we have and bring to you for consideration. So I do think we have resources. It's a matter of how we wish to deploy those and what makes most sense for the community need at this time. And I just have one other follow up question. I believe Bonnie you guys are tracking this. I did not get a chance to call some of our local mortgage lending institutions but I've been tracking the mortgage release side of what Congress is working on as well. And so I know there's Freddie May and Danny Mack loans are looking like there might be some release there. Do you have any idea Bonnie? Locally with some of our local lending institutions whether or not have you heard anything from with regards to any kind of mortgage release at all? Not specifically. I know that locally they're tracking on what's being discussed at the federal level. So I think we'll have more discussion on that very soon. And it does seem with some of the things that are being discussed at the federal level that this is something that's likely in the near future. So we may have something to bring back to council soon. Okay, thank you. Are there any further questions by council members at this point in time? Seeing none. Like to ask the clerk if there's been any. I know that there's been hundreds of letters of correspondence that have come in over the past couple of days. And I was just curious if there have been more that have come through since this meeting. You guys currently have received about 220 and I have received 37 while we've been here that I've sent on. Okay. I'm wondering if how council would feel about taking some time to kind of look some of those new comments over. And if there's a time appropriate, I would recommend that we reconvene in about 20 minutes. If that's sufficient or if that's too much. What does the council think about that? Council member Watkins, we're muted as well. So they've been coming through on an ongoing basis here on the email that I've been checking. And a lot of them are really kind of a stock kind of a blanket kind of email. So I don't think I'll need 20 minutes personally. Okay. Do other council members wanna comment on that? Three, many of these are form letters. So we can scroll through them pretty quickly. Okay. So why don't if any other council members, if there's some consensus that that's kind of the approach council member crown sounds good to me. And I'll just acknowledge Vice Mayor Myers because I saw your hand went up. I'm ready to make a motion. Okay. All right. Reconvene at 6.05 to give folks an opportunity to look over the comments. Okay. Thanks. Welcome back to March 24th, 2020 city council meeting. I'd like to bring us back together for action and deliberation. And I'd like to acknowledge Vice Mayor Myers and then acknowledge council member Brown. So Vice Mayor Myers, microphone's off. An emergency ordinance of the city of Santa Cruz to enact a temporary moratorium on evictions due to non-payment of rent for residential and commercial tenants where the failure to pay rent results from income or business losses resulting from the novel coronavirus COVID-19 and setting forth the fast constituting such urgency. And I am getting my other part of the motion. Encourage banks and other financial institutions to halt foreclosures and related evictions resulting from not providing mortgage payments as a result of economic losses related to the coronavirus pandemic to avoid further homelessness and lots of jobs and employment opportunities within the community. I'd like to propose also a change in the ordinance under exhibit A. Item, item, Tony, I'm realizing that under item three, we have A, B, we have two, but change to, are you following me, Tony? Yeah, I understood your comment. I see that we misnumbered the paragraphs. So we'll make that correction in the final version. Okay, so my proposal was add the language for everybody following me. So I'm on exhibit A. Right now it's numbered C. I would add the language tenants and landlords. So right now that line says nothing in this ordinance shall relieve a tenant of the obligation to pay rent nor restrict a landlord's ability to recover rent due. I would add to that. Tenants and landlords may negotiate payment plans that identify a set timeline for unpaid rent. This timeline could extend for up to six months. Tenants shall pay all of the portion of the rent that the tenant is able to pay. And then I would like to add on item number D, section D, ordinance shall be liberally construed to provide the broadest possible protection for tenants of the city of Santa Cruz. This ordinance is not unique to Santa Cruz and state and federal action will inform programs and policies to the ordinances shall be taken. Second, the motion made by Vice Mayor Myers, seconded by Mayor Cummings. I just also wanna mention that there's a likelihood that we may need to extend this ordinance. And I think that with regards to grace periods as well, understanding the legality of that and also understanding how long this is gonna last is personally just thinking about this from a biological perspective. And given the size of our nation, I don't necessarily see this ending very soon while I'm hopeful that we can try to end this crisis soon. I'd also like to add as a friendly amendment that we reconsider as necessary an extension of this ordinance at the second meeting in May. I would just like to make a comment. Well, I think this is an extraordinary situation where we as policymakers really need to weigh actually the risk to our whole community right now. And while I understand and certainly support renters and tenants who are struggling right now, I think we need to also acknowledge that people who are the home owners oftentimes are over leveraged as well. And so we need to be balancing because we don't wanna lose homes to foreclosure and don't want tenants to lose their homes because they're struggling to pay rent in the near term. So I think what I'm trying to do is allow some flexibility and really allow the tenant and the landlord to develop a relationship that helps both parties get through this emergency period. And so that is the intent of the language that I've introduced, recognizing that both tenants and people who are home owners or property owners are at great risk right now. So we need to try to provide a platform so that both sides can work together to maintain people within their homes or in their businesses. Thank you. Okay, next we have Council Member Brown. I saw Council Member Brown, I have you. Make a motion, I would hope that it would be a friendly amendment, but it doesn't sound like that will be the case. So I would move to amend the motion to include language which indicates that commercial and residential tenants who are afforded eviction protection under the emergency ordinance shall have up to six months after the City of Santa Cruz proclaims the end of the local public health emergency to pay their landlord all unpaid rent. Donna, your microphone's off. This is a friendly amendment, is that okay? Well, I'll put it out there in the front but I'll make it as an amendment and then we'll have to vote on that, if not. I just, Council Member Brown, I understand the intent. I did review Watsonville's ordinance and listened to a little bit of the discussion yesterday. I certainly understand the intent as I just spoke. I'm really trying to weigh the needs of both the property owners as well as the tenants and I know I've received a number of calls and also a number of letters in contact over the last four or five days where people with mortgage issues are very concerned as well and the cascading effect of people actually foreclosing and losing their mortgages then impacts our banks. I think that we can revisit the ordinance in a couple weeks. We can see how things are going. We can see if there's mortgage relief issues in place or mortgage relief programs in place. I understand I don't disagree with the need. I'm just trying to create protections immediately in certain instances and so I'm not gonna step that family amendment. I have my hand up and I believe I'm the only one who has. No, I, there's. I understand the concern. I'm just gonna say that you can continue because as a response to Vice Mayor Myers but I just wanna let you know that I have been recording everyone's hands that have been up. So when your hand is lowered, that means that I've acknowledged that for all council members that I've acknowledged that I have you on the list, okay? Okay. I'll let you continue. I'll wait, let's find the book. No, you can respond since your hand was up first. So go ahead and respond to what Vice Mayor Myers had said. So Vice Mayor Myers, I understand that concern and I share that concern and I also have been doing a lot of reading up on this and my understanding is that mortgage holders with any FHA conforming mortgage will have up to 12 months of mortgage payment relief. And so much more extensive protection for those who are having more FHA conforming mortgage, which is most people in the United States as far as I understand it. So I think that given that concern would be mitigated. All right, so we have on deck Council Member Krohn followed by Council Member Matthews and Council Member Watkins. So we'll start with Council Member Krohn. What Council Member Brown brought forward and I would second, could that be an amendment to the main motion or is that something totally different? I'll defer to the city attorney. I interpreted it as an amendment to the main motion. You can vote on that. Tony, I had a question also for you when you said no rips of possession before April 30th. I'm sorry, Chris, right. What is your question? Can you repeat what your question was, Council Member Krohn? What that means one more time, sorry. It means that the sheriff's department can't go out to a tenancy with an order for a tenant to vacate, even if the court has already heard and issued a judgment in an unlawful detainer or eviction action. So even in the absence of this ordinance, if the sheriff's department is called upon to basically be a civil standby to a landlord who is seeking to recover possession of property from a tenant who has been determined in a judgment to have been evicted, the sheriff's department can't comply with that order until at least April 30th. I suspect that that date will be extended, but that's how the current order reads. There was something about the federal government offering protection, and I'm not sure that the Horgings Street may already be able to speak to that. Do you know, because that seems when there's actually have some particular... At this point, unless something is passed late yesterday or today, we are really hopeful that something happens very soon to protect those homeowners that are really reliant on rent to be able to keep their mortgage current and just the overall economic uncertainty that this has for our community. Do you have anything specifically at this point? I have a few more questions. I'll let you decide, Mayor, when is appropriate to ask them. Let's go to Council Member Matthews and then Council Member Watkins and we'll return to you, Council Member Cron. Question on the language that Tony just announced from the court today. That did fly by us pretty fast and it was hard to digest, so I don't know, Tony, if it's possible to just email that PDF to it or what it was... I couldn't capture the... even the gist of it, and then, you know, what's the text and then what's the plain English meaning of it. I think you get that idea. My question was, does this apply to any eviction or addictions related to non-payment because of COVID-related financial hardship? I read it as applying to any eviction, but let me pull up the language again and I'll be happy to circulate it to... That's what it looked like to me. That was my understanding as well. While the City Attorney is bringing that up, Council Member Watkins, you had your hand up as well. Yes, we can hear you. I have questions at this point. I think that, first of all, I want to thank the Mayor and Vice Mayor for bringing this forward. I think this is really critical. I also support the added language that was incorporated into the ordinance, into the motion. I think that this is going to be something we're going to have to monitor, and by moving forward in this way at this time, doesn't preclude us necessarily from making changes in the future, given any additional information we might learn, but absent more information, I'm reluctant to add specific timelines that I just don't quite know enough about at this point. But ultimately, recognizing that the intention is, we recognize that renters are going to have a difficult time. Everybody's going to have a difficult time. Let's just be really clear here that this is going to be a really big deal for our nation and for our renters, our homeowners, our families, everybody. So we have a lot to learn and we have a lot to understand in terms of state and federal policy. There's constant packages that are going through our federal government in terms of relief. And until we know that, I don't feel comfortable putting any types of constraints at this time personally, but also just really acknowledging that nobody anticipates somebody to all this and have X amount of dollars to repay right away. I think this is going to be a really, really difficult and long-term situation that we're going to have to work on. So given that, I do feel that this is a necessary action to take as an emergency and I appreciate that. Thank you. We'll return back to Council Member Cron, and I've seen hands go up by Council Member Brown, Vice Mayor Meyers, and Council Member Glover, so we'll go back to Council Member Cron. Maybe my connection is not very good. I don't know. Yeah, your connection, it seems like you're freezing and sometimes you're cutting in and out. What you could try is going to the link that was provided and calling in on your phone as well. But it looks like your connection is back, so I'll give you the option. Okay. And we want an answer to, a grace period after we've sort of listed the COVID-19, because I do think that everybody is connected with the COVID-19 virus right now. I don't think there's, that's a positive or a didn't, you're in that sort of trajectory or rather the steamrolling effect that it's having on our economy. So I'm just wondering, is there a base period, say in the months, is that included in this ordinance or it's just up to the landlord and the tenant to work that out? Apparently there is not a grace period in this ordinance specifically. We were working to try to have consistency with the county. I think one thing that's really important is that, you know, as I mentioned before, you know, this is likely going to go on longer than we expect. And one of the things that I think is important is that as I mentioned before in my amendments, that we should revisit this at the second meeting in May just before this would expire so that we can understand how much longer it needs to be extended and we'll have a better sense of what kind of grace period, what kind of resources there are for businesses. And so, you know, I think that when the time is appropriate for me to make my comments, I would also make an amendment that we consider these kinds of grace periods at that point. But I think it is to know, you know, what kind of resources are going to be available for tenants, building owners, property owners. I also think that, you know, if... I think that we're all trying to make sure that we don't hurt each other during this situation. There's going to be a lot of property owners in town who, for example, since UCS is closing, a lot of students are going to leave and they're going to be stuck with those mortgages and we're going to see potentially if, you know, the business... if businesses aren't doing well and they have to move out of their properties, we're also going to see vacancies all over. And so, everyone's going to be impacted negatively by this and I think we need to, you know, really understand what's being put in place. Everything's changing very rapidly and so if we can revisit, you know, these topics again at that second meeting in May, I think we'll have a little more clarity on what are the appropriate timelines to see how we can see the federal and state governments helping us to relieve some of these burdens. I do think that people are going to be impacted much more than other people. I think we need to keep that clear on that and the City Council does help in our community. Another question that came in was what about utility shutoffs and payment plans and what about taxis as well? Are they going to get their utilities cut off? Are they going to get their internet cut off? Have we had assurances from these utility companies that they are not going to shut anything off until the, you know, when this, I guess, is over whenever that is. I can speak to that earlier today when the water director spoke one of the things that she said is that they weren't going to shut off anyone's water during this time and we've received multiple notifications from PG&E that they're not going to shut off anybody's power during this point in time. As for internet providers and cell phone providers, we haven't heard anything but I think that that's something that we should all follow up on just to understand what those impacts are and I think members of the community should take it upon themselves to reach out to all sorts of providers to see what kind of plans can be made in terms of being able to pay for the city attorney and the city manager. Some folks have reached out to me and we're asking about storage units and whether or not they would be required or if there's anything we can do to prevent the eviction of people's items that are in storage and so this is, as we've all mentioned, this is changing very rapidly and I think we need to be reaching out to folks to understand and try to work together to understand how we can all make it through this together. So, Councilmember O'Crowney that The last thing I'll say is I nailed our form levels and I would use the council if you haven't to read some of these really amazing stories that people have that people are really worried like Sarah, like Dylan who have been laid off in their jobs and they really don't know what the future is and they're depressing a lot of fear and I really think that we need this ordinance to address those fears and speak to the people who are really impacted. I'm going to let Bonnie Lipscomb interject before we go on to other Councilmember Comments. Bonnie, did you have a comment to make? Yeah, I just have a question to clarify that you know, one thing that the President did do was to be up to the individual lenders how they interpret that until we have more direction from the federal stimulus. So that's one of the things that's in the packages is actual relief that we're looking to specifically be able to provide to our local mortgage holders. Additionally, your comment about Freddie May Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is I did go on their website and they do have specific guidance. So if that is your mortgage holder, specifically go to the Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and it does look like they have that you can actually suspend their mortgage payments for up to 12 months and ask for deferral. So there are some benefits if that's your particular lender. Thank you. I have Councilmember Brown, Vice Mayor Myers, Councilmember Glover, Matthews Brown, sorry, so Brown first and then Vice Mayor Myers, Councilmember Glover, Councilmember Matthews. I absolutely recognize that things are in constantly changing that we do not know what even the next few hours making what changes may come our way but there are some things that we do know and I just want to say that we know that people who are living paycheck to paycheck are terrified right now of being evicted and they're terrified of what's going to happen in the future and I think if we say I was thinking let's revisit this in May as well and then I in retrospect I started thinking well, so that means that people are just going to worry about what might happen for June for the next two months or three months of rent and so I feel like giving people that peace of mind by saying this is our intention now is important and I would add in addition to what Bonnie Lipscomb just said about the executive order to suspend foreclosures you can go forward to have the list and it's probably widely available of all of the banks that have implemented mortgage relief third payments forbearance and it just goes on B of A, city bank, ally capital one, shade I mean on and on so many financial institutions have already responded to this so people are getting some peace of mind and I feel like we should offer that for tenants as well Council Member Glover I think I was there I have Glover then Matthews I think I got lost I apologize for that Vice Mayor Myers I did just want to clarify Member Grant my language is my intent is if a landlord and a tenant can work that out if the landlord is getting some relief and they can negotiate that together up to six months that negotiation I'm just simply trying to acknowledge I did do some research this week about when I saw the Freddie May and Fannie release coming through the FHA we you know the lenders that I've seen here locally we actually don't have a lot of FHA loans that are securing our reds ownership stocks so I think I think we are looking at most people getting maybe those 90 day deferments and so I think based on everything we've been looking at coming out of the news coming out of both the feds and most likely with all those institutions you mentioned there's probably a 90 day sweet spot most people and landlords are going to be able to find together and I acknowledge that reds absolutely will also potentially need longer as honestly many people do have mortgages we also got letters to people who use that basically use their house as the way that they survive as well through their business so again I'm just trying to find for us work from for the next if we want to revisit this the second meeting in May I think we'll have a lot more information but my motion is not intended to count the ability for people to work together and look at a six month grade it's really intended to acknowledge that many people who do have mortgages and Santa Cruz don't have FHA loans and so we're going to need to make sure that we're acknowledging that as we sort of build out this emergency order so I don't know if that helps that's kind of where I'm coming Council Member Glover and then we have Matthews and Brown after that I'm really disappointed that the original motion doesn't have a combined into the actual substitute motion or the motion to add things to the original motion just noticed a kind of disturbing pattern throughout this process we're waiting on the county for how we're going to address homelessness and we're waiting on the federal government to how we're going to address housing when Council Member Crohn said there are people in our community who are stressed out because of what's going to happen potentially to their living situation that are renters yes I understand that home owners are also stressed about potential things and there are those out there that are living by the income of their house but that's definitely not all of them and it's definitely not the big structures that exist here in Santa Cruz I think the ordinance really needs to address the fears that people are feeling because stress adds to a a compromised immune system which we're trying to prevent and so we want to provide people with as much security as possible also to get to a magical situation where all of the landlords are going to negotiate with their tenants to fit within their timeline what happens if the landlord is unwilling to negotiate with tenants and then is forcing them to do it or like I mentioned before in my original suggestive language arbitrarily evicts them for not paying their rent for the months that they were impacted by corona they have no action against that unless I'm mistaken in which case please feel free to correct me on that but once on rent enter into a payment period then the resources to pay it back within the timeline that the landlord mandates being at 90 days a lot of people out in the cold necessarily and figuratively with the way that we're dealing with policy today and then also since we care about both sides of this argument or whatever we can't do it in a six month period of time or need it in 90 days because they're living off this just like you're making renters to how they're being infected by the COVID virus you want to pay attention to both sides but the power distribution in this entire process is not equal and the ability of people to maintain housing whether they're renting out another house because they are paying a mortgage on it and crazy mortgage they have to pay granted but the other people don't have a choice of having to rent and be low income workers to stay in our communities so this guise of caring about both of the groups and all this other kind of stuff really doesn't play out if you look at the length of the ordinance and the refusal to even add a timeline associated with it knowing that there may be changes in the federal and county government so this has been a such a disappointing meeting of things that we could do to make an impact and they were passing the bare decisions for us sure go ahead Tony my understanding is what we're doing is we're protecting exactly the renter situation that you just described by housing ordinance because the renter would then show the coronavirus period to your second point councilmember with regards to making the owner of the of the property provide proof as well if they're trying to get a deferment on their mortgage payments they will be filing they will be filling out paperwork so I think that the system is both such that any kind of deferment on loans or payments there's built-in verification and so this ordinance has that request that of people looking for deferment anyone who owned a property and was looking for deferment on mortgage would be filling out similar paperwork so obviously I'm hoping that people take care of each other and that we trust that our community is a lot more helpful to each other than maybe but I would assume that landlords would also have similar documentation Tony I'd like to make sure I'm understanding I'm not understanding exactly the description that councilmember Glover is describing but I'd like to hear if you think that situation is going to be covered under this kind of ordinance I'm sorry the person who is a landlord who is unable to make a mortgage payment councilmember Glover mentioned that I believe the scenario was a renter after the virus has been basically conditions have to be removed understanding of what this ordinance does and what the governor's executive person is doing with the protection during the pandemic period and the losses associated with that so those losses may carry forward into the future correct yes I mean I guess what I would offer to the council is that first of all the most well-intentioned ordinance that you can adopt tonight is not going to be adequate to cover all of the hardships that people are going to be experiencing with regard to this crisis and secondly this is an interim measure that's intended to provide some measure of relief to tenants who without a doubt are going to be severely impacted by layoffs by illness by terminations by loss of income in the gig economy and we're going to be working over the next several weeks on how we might better address it and looking at what other cities are doing and also anticipate that the governor's office will be issuing further executive orders so I think we can debate what nuances this particular ordinance should contain but I don't think whatever we do tonight is still a work in progress and I'm very confident that we'll be back in front of the council at an upcoming meeting before this ordinance is set to expire to refine it or to extend it and certainly we'll be in the meantime looking at ways to improve it so that it makes sense both with respect to the hardships that tenants are facing and to the legitimate concerns of landlords who have mortgage payments to make so I think it's fine for the council to debate and reasonable people can disagree on how far the council should go tonight but in my view whatever we do it's not going to be adequate we're going to have to come back and do more and so I just leave you with that thought just to clarify Mr. Mayor because Vice Mayor Meyers must have misconstrued or misunderstood what I was saying what I was saying with regards to reporting is that landlords if they're not going to either negotiate or accept a six month timeline that we would ideally implement in this item tonight they would have to provide proof and documentation that would show why they can't extend that timeline past the 90 days to the six months to hold them accountable and I think that's the main issue that we're dealing with right now is we have not had regulations on rent and a whole bunch of other issues that we're still trying to deal with and it has nothing to do with making a perfect ordinance it has to do with easing the tensions and the stress of everyday working people that has to do with everyday working people that as Mr. Kandadi just mentioned are all losing their jobs from the big economy and other ways of making money and they are stressed because they don't know if they're going to have to pay rent if they're going to have to buy food if they're going to get backed up by three months of rent and then in many days have to come up with three months of rent to understand how ludicrous that is to expect a low income worker to generate three months of back rent in 90 days you know councilmember Glover I'm going to interject I'm going to interject real quick because I feel like this is going to a place of personal attacks and I think that we really need to focus on what's in hand right now and I know that this is obviously a very heated topic and I'm sorry to cut you off Vice Mayor Myers but I just think that this is starting to go down a route of not focusing on the policy that's in front of us right now but it's really the sentiments that may differ because of the fact that people have different approaches and have different you know rationales as to why they're making the decisions that they want to do so I'm going to just halt this back and forth because I don't think it's going to be very productive at this moment in time councilmember Brown you had a comment that you wanted to make and then I have a comment and I'm hoping that we can continue moving forward on this item as the city attorney said and as it says in our agenda packet this is an emergency ordinance and so this is something that we're bringing forward now we are working and every day things are changing and we're trying to address those changes and so I think that this is a good start and I just wanted to say that for now I'll let councilmember Brown say her comments and then councilmember myself and councilmember crown I just want to say for the record I am not proposing I did not propose this 6th month grace period language because I'm wanting to in some way demonize housing providers mortgage holders and landlord I am saying this because I think it's important that we help to provide some peace of mind for the most vulnerable in our community and people who are at risk of losing their housing in that category people who live paycheck to paycheck so I simply want to suggest that yes there are going to be changes yes this is an evolving story and we can always make some of those changes later make you know as Mr. Condati said nothing we do tonight is adequate but I would like to at least do something to provide tenants with a little bit of peace of mind that they're not going to be left out of this and that's why I would hope that we can just I'm not going to call the question because other people have stuff to say but I hope we can just vote on whether or not to accept the amendment to the motion and move on I just wanted to see real quick is there any way we can get the the motion the language presented on the screen I'm typing it right now okay provided we brush with my the amendment language I'll just say while this is all coming up because there's a few people who are also on stack for comments again that this is an emergency item and this is something that's happening nationwide and the governor is well aware and I think what the governor's intention is is in this immediate time especially because April is coming up that we're going to put some emergency measures in place and I would imagine that given the governor's interest in not trying to increase homelessness within our state or within our community that additional protections are likely to be forthcoming given that we're all looking at a very major hardship so I just want to say that as my feelings on this and I think that people can rest assured that given what's been happening with this crisis we have been responding in emergency ways in terms of trying to provide these protections and we're looking at providing additional protections as we move forward and we've been as I mentioned we've been meeting with our state representatives and our federal representatives almost daily to try to see how we can make sure that we're protecting the people in our community and that's you know what we're going to continue to do moving forward councilmember chrome thank you stopped the landlord from raising the rent during this period of the city attorney we're not putting on a rent freeze right now this is not a rent freeze I certainly saw many many messages to the council recommending a rent freeze that is not before you tonight so the council would have to agendize that for consideration at a future meeting if that's the direction the council wants to go for you Tony to need five votes tonight yes to take effect as an emergency measure it does we were to pass it tonight he needs five votes correct that's right thank you next is councilmember Glover and I'm just going to ask that we stay on topic with the the item that's before us and so go ahead yeah I just hope that we accept councilmember Brown's amendments okay councilmember matthews councilmember matthews you are up next oh and you're muted as well councilmember matthews you're muted as well we can't hear you for the amendment the intention of the amendment as brought forward and I would like to get Donna's amended language I couldn't write it all down fast enough so Donna if you think that out send it to Bonnie maybe she can email it to us I would like to have the actual language and I would say the same about Sandy's proposed amendment although I do support the direction of the mayor's comments that this is a definitely interim measure we anticipate more clarity on situations and how our existing resources are substantial are being used and how the needs are evolving I have no doubt that we will come back and work on this this topic further to some extent so for that reason I don't believe I will support the amendment but I do want to acknowledge Chris's comments they were not all form letters that came in and there were a lot of very personal situations described and other issues were raised as we discussed about not cutting off utilities and so forth so I hope that the mayor can work with economic development with our staff to do a letter that goes back particularly to those people who describe their personal situations and anxieties not the theoretical situation and really describe what we're doing now and point to where to get information because and I know that first card that Bonnie showed gave some summary but my suggestion is just to reach out in a substantive response to those people and who have described their personal situations and that we are our water department has and trash collection has taken some measures to not cut off service to people so that's it I think we're on it it's a start and I hope we will refine this in the future but I'd like to start with it as it is and I'll like to see the language I just sent the language I'm sorry to interrupt but I did just send the two amended languages for the sections to Bonnie Bush so could I jump in to clarify I want to clarify my response to Council Member Cron with regard to the vote needed tonight what is on the floor is a motion to amend the original motion that it requires the council to vote on whether to accept the amended motion to be passed on a simple majority vote the main motion which is to adopt an emergency ordinance requires five votes I'm going to need a sec to get the motions up on my screen right now that we're just sent over Mayor, if I may I think I was in your queue so you can go ahead I appreciate the conversation because I think ultimately we all really deeply care about our community and I still hope that what this is before us is really an affirmation of our commitment to wanting to ease the anxiety and tension around those who are feeling so anxious I can imagine not any person being anxious right now to be quite honest with you I think that this is going to be a moving target as has been mentioned in terms of social stability and we want to make really informed policy decisions and so for me I feel comfortable with the original language I don't necessarily know enough right now about the amendment to the motion as proposed but I might in the future but I don't want the message to be to the community that we aren't thinking of our tenants or we are not thinking of the people who are living paycheck to paycheck this is monumental this is unprecedented and we are thinking about every single person in our community and this is a way for us right now in an emergency situation to take action and so I hope that's not lost in this message and I think that we all share that commitment and we hope we don't lose that by trying to say a certain person fits a certain profile of what they care about we all are saying we care about our community and so I'm happy to move forward if we want to just try to keep the conversation about taking the vote on the amendment to the motion I don't know if we need to call the question on that but for the conversation and action at this point so there was an amendment made by councilmember brown and I think that was seconded by councilmember crone is that correct am I wrong or was there not a second so we don't have a second on the friendly amendment no councilmember crone did he seconded it that's what I thought too so I thought as well so there's an amendment by councilmember brown seconded by councilmember crone to amend the ordinance to include language that indicates commercial and residential tenants who are afforded eviction protection under the emergency ordinance shall have up to six months after the city of Santa Cruz proclaims the end of the local public health emergency to pay their landlords all unpaid rent and I just have one more question for the city attorney because you mentioned before the legality of this is this something that would be legal well I haven't had an opportunity to research that question in depth but I just would note that the governor's order authorizes authorizes cities to adopt eviction moratoriums during the pendency of the emergency now I would expect that this issue will come to the governor's attention and that might be modified but in the absence of that the concern I have is whether or not it would be preempted by state law because under ordinary circumstances the city cannot legislate how evictions are supposed to be handled because it's very specifically called out in the unlawful detainer law and so what the governor has done is provided cities with an opportunity to basically adopt ordinances that supersede state law to some extent so that's something that whether or not the council moves forward with this tonight and I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other we'll need to research and report back to the council regardless I just want to ask a follow-up question on that currently for example the ordinance as is kind of fits under the governor's order which allows us to go above and beyond what normally the city would be able to do as it relates to evictions is that correct that's right under current California law a landlord can give notice of eviction for a tenant if they're three days late on their rent and they can proceed with an eviction action in the court after providing that three days notice and so what the state what the governor's executive order does is it gives the cities temporarily the ability to override that procedural requirement because I just wanted to be clear that from my perspective one of the things that I don't want to do is that we pass something saying that after you know you'll have up to six months and giving this assurance to tenants in our community and then when this ends that it's not true and we don't have the right to do that because that is a possibility that we we are trying to work within the protections we have but if it turns out that the city doesn't have the authority to decide and say how long a landlord must allow for this grace period I don't want to put this in a situation where we tell the community that yes you'll have these six months and then a month or two from now we go back and say actually we can't do that so I just want to make sure that we're also not setting ourselves up to tell the public that we're going to give them these protections and then have to turn around and say we're not so at this moment the motion that's on the floor is the amendment the friendly amendment wasn't accepted by the vice mayor so I think the amendment is going to move forward I think we'll have to take a roll call vote at this time to accept the amendment if there's no further comments I had a question go ahead Chris for the city attorney I had a question Tony what the mayor just said just said could you clarify if we pass this I thought you said that would not that would be okay that would be in line with what we can do as a body as a city council well what I thought I said was that while I have no strong feelings one way or another about whether or not the council adds this language without having done a careful research analysis of it I can't assure the council that this would be enforceable it may be but I haven't had an opportunity to research that and so if you do move forward with it I would do that analysis and report back to the council at a later time personally I think that would be inappropriate if we were to move forward in this direction because since we don't have an understanding of whether or not we can actually enforce this it might be in our best interest to give time for the city attorney's office to understand whether this is enforceable or not and then as we mentioned before revisit this at the second meeting in May where we may need to make an extension of this emergency ordinance and I just want to assure the council that we're very diligently exploring additional measures that the city might take that additional lawful measures that the city might take not just relating to landlord tenant issues to provide additional protection for the public in this time of crisis so I have council member Cron, council member Brown and then council member Glover I did not look at the specific language council member Cron nor have I had an opportunity to confer with their city attorney about what legal analysis went into to their ordinance so if the city attorney in Watsonville has already done that homework and I have a very cordial working relationship with him that certainly could shortcut the process from a legal standpoint from that I looked at the ordinance this is Donna the last sentence in my new language for item D is exact with the Watsonville ordinance the one change that I made is instead of using the word shall regarding six months I used could extend up to six months for unpaid rent it's just restructured recognizing that the shall language may not be enforceable for clarification next person is council member Brown well first of all thank you Tony for your comments related to this I do appreciate and absolutely believe that you are working to within the confines of the law and what we are able to do researching this and trying to figure out how to move forward with additional protections potentially that you know I was not able to watch the Watsonville meeting yesterday but I imagine that they had that their city attorney did communicate with the council during the meeting or in advance to suggest that this was something that could be done and whether or not you know enforceable is to my mind you know not really an issue right now because as we know this is none of this is completely enforceable given that the only remedy is through the court and we have heard today that the courts are not really moving forward with these unlawful detainers and other issues related to tenancy I don't see why suggesting this is our intention today would be problematic but it's been done in other jurisdictions I'm not disagreeing with you I just can't provide you with a legal opinion on that at this point in time Council Member Glover the Watsonville one is that you have to shout out the six months I mean I just we should Council Member Cron given that there's no further questions or comments on this item we'll see if we can take a vote on the amendment to accept the amendment Council Member Watkins Matthews no Crown Glover no and Mayor Cummings no on this one so the motion to accept the amendment failed so we'll go back to the main motion and I would like to ask again the Vice Mayor whether we can also so in the friendly amendment it says the request to add an extension of this ordinance to the second meeting and I would also like to add considerations of grace periods and the legality of grace periods so if there's no further comment at this time we can vote on the motion the item that's before us and the language that's before us today along with the friendly amendments that were made by myself Council Member Watkins Matthews Vice Mayor Myers and Mayor Cummings Council Member Watkins and that includes item number 15 on our agenda last item on our agenda is oral communications oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not listed on today's agenda in order to minimize exposure to COVID-19 and to comply with the social distancing suggestion the Council Chambers and Tony Hill Room will not be open to the public please note if you wish to make a comment during oral communications you may send an email at cityclerkatcityofsanicures.com receipt of your email will be acknowledged by the clerk at the meeting will be shared with Council Members as they are received will be entered into the public record and of note please make sure to specify which item you are wishing to submit your comments for in the comments how far have gotten seven okay so those seven items for oral communications will be provided to Council Members and will go into the public record I had a question for the City Attorney whether I might be able to intern to record some comments that were on the last item for this since I was passed I think as the Chair you have that discretion okay I just want to say that for the record especially with regards to the amendments that I do as this moves forward I very much want to see how we can best protect tenants in our communities and provide the most protections we can towards all members of our community as they are impacted by the fallout from the coronavirus and so I'm hoping that when we revisit this item that we can take into consideration some of the considerations for grace periods for paying back back rent and other sorts of payments as they relate to being people being impacted by the coronavirus so I just want to say that for the record there's no further discussion that concludes our City Council meeting for March 24, 2020 and I thank you all for joining are you guys going back to closed session that's correct Council Member Crown very tough conditions right now with respect to how we hold our meetings and always looking for creative ways I would suggest if we do this again that we have a phone line open to the public for oral comments or include them in the Zoom I was on the Zoom with 96 people the other day and you can mute people and you can open up the line when you the Mayor chooses or someone else can I just think that we are I don't want to lose a valuable way for our public to have input on these meetings so I think we really need to work think about this for the next meeting thank you I was just reminded that we have an item on our closed session and so we're going to end the public session and the Council is going to go back into closed session and my understanding was that the Assistant City Manager circulated a separate Zoom invitation by text to the Council so I think we can exit this meeting and go to the next meeting but I'll conclude this portion of the session of the City Council meeting and before we go, Council Member Watkins had her hand up I think that's appropriate given the fact that somebody shared this link with a member of the community if we were going into closed session and I just want to give you a heads up I will need to step out at 7.30 so I have about 15 minutes I think we should be able to finish by then what's the plan? I don't have the new Zoom link we'll follow up on that in one second let's end the part of the session