 Meeting is being broadcast live, community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website. City of Santa Cruz dot com. If you wish to comment on today's agenda. All in at the beginning of the item you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your. Please meet your television or streaming device once all in and listen through the phone. These know there is a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device. You may miss your opportunity. When it is your time for public comment. Please raise your hand there by dialing our line on your phone or choosing the webinar. Raise hands on your. And I would like to ask. These all roll. Thank you mayor. Sorry Johnson. Is it older. You don't hear me. Oh sorry here. Here. Mayor. Mayor. Mayor what. Would you like. Mayor. Agenda item today that we will be hearing is climate action plan. For members of the public who are streaming this. If climate action plan 2030 is an item you wish to comment on. Now is time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff. Followed by questions from council. And then we will take public comment and return to council. For deliberation and action. I would like now handed over to our sustainability and climate action manager. Thank you very much. Thank you. Can you all hear me. Great. Thank you and good afternoon council members. As mayor stated I'm. The ability and climate action manager. And today I'd like to share with you an update on the climate action plan. Since I last was in front of you in January of this year. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Are you able to see my screen. All right. Very good. I'm getting thumbs up. All right. Very good. We're going to be focusing today on really funding and implementation. But we'll be circling back on the targets. That's really been a lot of time on in our last study session. I do want to just acknowledge before we get started. It's a land that many of us are on today is a native land. Where I'm at. Is the ancestral grounds of the. You try. And this land is now being supported by the. Okay. Just wanted to start. We're all in the same page in terms of what the goal is for the climate action plan. And what the objectives are for the study session today. So number one, the climate action plan. We want to prepare a. Climate action plan. And we want to determine the year was equitable pathway to. So much more on that. Today. For this study session. The objective is for you all. Even updates on the development progress. I was last in front of you in January. And the considerations of funding and implementation. And we want to determine the year was equitable pathway to. So much more on that. And the considerations of funding and implementation. Of. And please, if I do use any terminology that is. I'm familiar to you or any acronyms, I really will strive. Do that. So feel free to interrupt me. At their. I know this can be a very. Heavy. And a. Climate lingo. Type of presentation and I'm really. Striving not. Not to do that. Okay. I crush you on the major components of this plan. So working on this with the community. April of 2021. We established. Values and visions for this plan. The. Set four. Options for goals and targets. Let's tell it our January meeting. Circle back on today. We have developed a high level measures. Those are. Topic areas. Where the emissions production. To take place. And we have actions. It's both actions. That are the policies. Program. Project. That will. People. Both those measures. And the goals. Target. All of that is. All of that is. All of that is. All of that is. All of that is. All of that is. All of that is. All of that is. Their mobile guidance and recreation plan. Both for. Famicably as well as. Community wide. I do want to be clear that this climate action. Community wide. And that is not just for us. As per municipal operations although that is.カ بر.덴ببب. An important. We have been working with our equity advisors. Our climate action. Sure. Inter with. It permanently developed.size. Screening pool at every step. I'm not so over all this, but I will say, we are right here at the end of the phase three on funding and implementation, and between May and July, we'll be drafting a final plan and the sequel, Health and Environmental Quality Access to the Plans, and we are targeting an on-time adoption on August 9th that will be coming, that next time this will be coming to City Council. So, let's jump right in on this part. If you recall last month in front of you, I presented the Ops for our staff targets, and there were two sets of Ops for targets. Number one, the California Environmental Quality Access targets, which would be our legally defensible target that we would need to achieve, and then we also presented options for aspirational stretch targets that would volunteer it. And if you recall the benefits that people qualified in climate action plan with qualified targets is that we are able to develop mission thresholds for development, and in turn, those developers get streamlined environmental review process. So, it's a win-win city. It is one of our biggest levers to reduce emissions in development, so we want to have these people qualified. In order to do so, we need to stop the greenhouse gas inventory, which we did for 2019. We need to align with state targets, see on the screen here in the upper left, and we need to track our participation towards that target. It is important to remember that with the people qualified targets, the actions need to be feasible, reasonable, implementable to achieve, and that's important to remember because it needs to be legally defensible. As was noted in the agenda report, staff are recommending SB 32 target of 40% reduction by 2030 from 1990 levels as our qualified targets. We have prepared the measures and the actions and have confirmed that we are able to reach that target. That is what we have presented to the community for discussion. However, we also know for you last, as well as from community members, that there's a strong desire to go for acknowledging that the minimum target by the state, perhaps going far enough, that we wanted to adopt aspirational voluntary targets. And there are a variety of targets that would have adopted. We are recommending that we adopt aspirational target carbon neutrality 2035 for two reasons. Number one, the current state's target for carbon neutrality is 2045. However, Governor has directed the Air Resources Board to go back, look at bringing that target 2045 down to 2035. Pretty likely it's going to happen. Number two, and I'm going to show you this graphic. Number two, we calculated our science-based target. The science-based target is the reductions that are required for our share of emissions that will help achieve global temperature increase under 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is the acknowledged tipping point for catastrophic climate impact. And so the aspirational target carbon neutrality by 2035 that we're recommending is likely more aggressive than that science-based target. So we are making this recommendation based on the fact that it is consistent with science and it is consistent with the regulatory direction of this. So those are the recommendations as contained in the agenda report. Okay. And so what is that look? If we look at this graph, I'll remind you that the red line is our projected emissions if we did nothing at all. And I'm not going to go into a lot of depth to explain, but the pump here is because of the change in the procurement of electricity by our local electricity source of community energy. It's an accounting kind of mechanism that causes the pump, but registered by 2030, our electricity will be 100% renewable if not sooner than 2030 because of our participation in central post-community energy. So orange is what state legislation will, where state legislation will drive emissions reduction, specifically around the renewable portfolio standard, which is how clean the grid is. It will be getting cleaner and cleaner because of the RPS. And then secondly, because of fuel economy, as we make those cider for vehicles, that's also going to drive so you see we get a nice reduction there. Now where the yellow star is gray line, yellow star to 40% reduction from 20, between 20, sorry, 1990 and 2030. So that is the target that we're recommending. And if you allow that line to continue, you see we'd hit permutability by 2045. However, we are recommending the aspirational target of carbon neutrality by 2035, just this kind of yellowish line far left hand side. So you can see there's quite a bit of difference between the current state target and the recommendation of 2035 as the aspirational target. And you can see the green line, which was the science-based target, and we are more more aggressive, slightly more aggressive than that science-based target. And as I said some days last time, really we'll need to, in order to make progress towards the aspirational voluntary target, we're really going to need to lean into more aggressive measures. We're going to need to look to new technologies as they come online. For example, carbon capture, we're really going to need to focus in on the carbon sequestration actions that we've specified, as well as climate economy one. Do recall that for the sequel qualified, there's a limited set of emission reduction sources that are counted in that sequel qualified plan. Carbon sequestration is outside of that, as is our climate economy measure. So those really will be working for this aspirational, and I'll be sharing those two in just a moment. So in order to achieve those targets, we need to focus in on these cat measure areas. Transportation is the biggest of no 69% of our emissions from transportation. So active transportation, public transportation, electric vehicles, hugely important. Secondly, electric buildings and renewable energy, water efficiency, waste reduction, and then I have carbon sequestration out on the far right side, because state is considering being carbon sequestration in as a potential emissions reduction activity or measure. So we are quantifying those in that event, but that will will happen. Okay, and I won't go into a lot of detail about what the emission reduction measures are. We joke last time, we talked about costs, talked about kinds of policies that might need to come forward or that would need to come forward targets. These are the emission reduction measures that are needed to achieve the FD32 target for the sequel qualified targets. And again, it really revolves around simplifying buildings. Because again, we will have 100% renewable energy by 2030, not earlier. So very clean grid. We also focus in on the transportation measures. See, we're bumping up active transportation by about five and a half percent for that road share. Active transportation 1%, I'm going to circle back on that for a moment. 35%, 25% faster, partial electric vehicle updates respectively, and a few percent adoption of electrified soft road services, basically landscaping equipment, and equipment. On water, and really don't need to focus in on wastewater, we're able to get our reductions to target building transportation and reductions in both organic and inorganic ways. So those are the measures that are going to get us to that FD32 target. In order to go further, to go towards aspirational targets that we're recommending, in addition to going harder and stronger on the measures I showed you, eating those numbers that I showed you, we also have green economy actions, and we have 14 climate restoration actions that are specifically around carbon. You can see the green economy actions are really around supporting businesses. It's embedding with, we did a chamber of commerce and council focus group and kind of work through what are the priorities and how the wording appropriate on actions. Their highest priority is to keep large-scale climate investments and partnerships, both local and regional scales, that help with address transition. But you can see there are a number of green economy actions that we are recommending. You can also see the final bullet green economy actions, which is perhaps less obvious than business perspective, and that is to leverage our community activation platform, which I'm going to show you a snapshot of at the end of this presentation, leverage that platform and partners to encourage lifestyle choices or assumption-based submissions, including plant-based diets, travel alternatives, and local persons who are buying local. And we also want to explore policy options to increase adoption of plant-based and plant-strong diets. So, again, looking towards those aspirational priorities, we'll work towards them as well as get more aggressive on measures that I've already presented. And again, we are going to need to be optimistic, we're going to need flexibility to respond as analogy new opportunities arise in order to make progress towards that. Since I'm not doing January, we released over 100 draft actions, again, those are the policies, the projects, the programs that will help us reach those measures and our targets. And so we utilized a platform called Considerate. It's been open for over two months now. We have 139 unique users that provided not just their level of support for the 100-plus draft actions, but also able to have some assistance and bring forward concerns for support and really be able to articulate debates, have a public dialogue around action. After the early priority design was finished, funds and cigarettes pulled down all of the institutions, and we took a really close look at actions that either had numerous comments, so see that there was a lot of dialogue going on, and those that showed lower levels of support. I will say that in general, all actions had a fairly high level of support. In fact, none dipped below 50% support, which was kind of like our threshold to where we really needed to consider, okay, this is going to be something our community is going to be able to do. And we didn't have any that fell below that percent threshold. But for those where we had a lot of comments and we had lower ratings, we dove in and looked at why. And this was with the climate action task sustainability team. And we did a little bit of things to address some of those comments. Many were around equity. Others wanted to push further. And so we are actually having some upcoming focus groups to hone in on two topics in particular. And that is public transportation and parking. We have a lot of discussion about actions that revolve around those two topics. We heard from many community members that the 1% increase that we were thinking that we could achieve around public transportation was insufficient, even recognizing that the city has limited levers because we don't own or control the metro. And so what we have said is, let's have that. And let's bring all stakeholders together so we have Santa Cruz Equitable Public Transportation. We have the Metro RTC. We have our board members from the Metro on the RTC. And a number of other stakeholders who are going to participate in this focus group on public transportation. It's important to remember, however, that whatever might come out of that for the parking focus group is that we need to be sure that whatever is adopted for this qualified person is achievable. And right now the 1% all of stakeholders from the RTC, Metro and Staff are in agreement that the 1% increase truly was achievable, right? Anything that might come out of those focus groups that goes further for us all to consider could go towards that aspirational purpose, right? So we can aspire to, you know, beyond that one co-chair increase. But we don't want it as part of our qualified plan because we don't reach it. It could put us at legal risk. So we want to make anything that comes out of the focus group be part of our aspirational purpose. And so we have a lot more to come on this. We have many, many more focus groups over the month of April. We'll be doing about four different focus groups on building electrification with different types of stakeholder groups. We have public health and housing we're going to be talking to as well as developers, labor, designers. We have a number of stakeholders building electrification. And then we'll also be doing another focus group down in the class. And so using this considerate tool was a really good way for us kind of in a organized way to collect comments. We did also receive some email comments also considered when we were thinking through the revision action. So that's a major engagement that's happened since the last in front of January. So moving forward from the draft action, those are getting finalized right now. We are developing also concurrently the implementation and funding. So right now we are discussing interviews with all of our divisions within departments who are relevant to this discussion. We are talking about stakeholders and we are identifying roles. Is it an enforcement role, a compliance role, supportive, a leadership role for our monitor role. So we're assigning roles, different departments, divisions and partners. And I should say that really important to see a little quote on the right hand side. Everyone in the community, all departments, we all have a role to play in this plan's implementation. That's really important for folks to remember. And we're trying to put in plays and implement some plans, accountability mechanisms and activation rules to help folks to be part of that implementation. And consider where it's identifying systems, schools, resources, what the task is internally. What about funding? Trying to problem solve largest obstacles or risks that we're asking departments to identify. We're trying to put in place equitable, efficient, effective processes as well as the funding plans. And lastly, we would like to tie the outcomes to our health and community well indicator metrics also adopted in November of last year. Again, trying to weed health policy every two and have alignment across our. So our approach to the funding plan, this is one table that really going to constitute our approach. How we are going to fund this plan, which I told you last time, community wide is approaching a one billion dollar implementation cost over the next eight. What we are doing with our right now is for the key measures and actions. So those are going to be primarily around where our biggest emissions sources are those building electrification. We're going to be developing, we're doing this right now. The funding and the financing that is available. We know that not all the funding is going to come from grants alone. We need to leverage philanthropy. We leverage potentially new revenue streams called out for evaluation in the plan and actions. So and then we want to really target in on what is the top funding or finance pathway for the action and measure and give very solid examples of all the organizations that have utilized similar funding methods so that we have both top goods across. You see in the box on the lower left hand side, there are already sources that are being put in place right now to help us discover. All the jurisdictions, not all, but many jurisdictions in the Monterey Bay area recently contributed and pulled funds together that are being going to be held by the community foundation as a fiscal sponsor to hire a regional climate project fellow grant writer. This is because recognized that we as the small cities and a cruise likely will be unable to compete on the federal level for federal infrastructure funds. But so together as a region, it's more likely for those funds. So I'm very proud and happy to say the city has committed to this fiscal year, two more fiscal years of contribution to this regional climate project fellow grant writer. And we have a target of bringing in $10 million in year one. Now that's not all city that's the Monterey Bay region on full climate priorities that we have. Very excited about this resource and this collaboration. We also are working internally as part of our grant management strategy to put some resources together for staff, pursue grants and to administer grants, as well as support and training so that, you know, folks have understand what makes a competitive grant proposal and how to it. So there's really a lot happening in the space right now regarding funding. And we know we are getting well spent for funding that is coming down to federal government, of course, the billions that are set aside from the state for climate. So the implementation and the funding plans are complete. We have already started the draft climate action task courses, worked with us to look at other plans and what we like, put together the table of contents. We will have a public youth draft available entire months of June. This draft is very accessible. It will 40 pages, not going to be some long length, techno jargon kind of plan. And I have rich infographic, I'll play for some English, really highlight, you know, what we need to do and what we've submitted to doing. We have a number of technical memorandums that back up this 40 page plan. And if folks want to go and reference that, they can go do the keep side. We'll make those available for everyone. But we want to make sure that this plan is accessible. People will read it, and that they will embrace it. And we plan to use an online platform. You can see here it's called Convio to for that where everyone can see what everyone else is saying. And it organizes comments, questions, and so forth for us so that it allows us to fill that information offline and very quickly address comments and questions. So we're not 100% set that we're going to use this platform, but I think that we'll probably post that. In addition to the draft, and I'll give you the timeline on the adoption we also have a task being developed specifically for tracking and reporting. Instead of me going to all the departments for the data and then conditioning the data spreadsheet and then making grass cells, this tool, we will give access to this for collecting data. They will enter it here. And it gives us a very robust class to track reductions, our progress towards our targets. And we can filter it in a variety of ways by departments, by individual measures, so forth. So this tool is going to be very important. It also has a public view that will serve as a sustainability dashboard for how close are we towards our targets. We know that it provides that feedback with the community and it can be embedded in our website. It has to go somewhere else so folks can see that. So we'll be developing that couple months while folks are reviewing the draft plan. And we will also be developing our community activation platform that will launch in September. We have put into the climate action budget a little bit of funding to get on to the platform. And again, we are getting at a reduced price because we as a Monterey Bay region have vetted all the very gas platforms out there and under the conclusion that we should all adopt platforms for consistency. And so we are the counties, Watsonville, and others are doing so. It's called Bright Action and it will allow folks to go and see what are Santa Cruz's climate action goals. How can I get involved? What's my commitment? Can I join a team? Oh, there's incentives. Oh, there's teams. What's great also is that College of Action is going to put staff through this tool to recruit people to it, do the social media, which is the stuff that we don't have the bandwidth really to do. And so together, again, going together as a region really is what has unlocked our ability to launch a platform like this. And frankly, this is, I mean, in the past, I've got like 10 best things you can do for climate. You know, it's just like a fact. And it's so much more robust for folks. And it's really something I think our community is craving. So very excited about the launch of Bright Action. And last but not least, I want to share with you the timeline to completion. We are nearing the finish line. After today, we've got really cool youth digital storytelling pieces. There are environmental justice pieces featuring local youth and youth university students that are coming out. End of this week, we're actually submitting to an EPA challenge, a climate justice video challenge, some of those. And that's our Civic Parks fellow who's been working on those funded by the social currency, working with us. We also are having education, a learning webinar on heat pumps, which is the primary technology that enables building electrification. One of our local companies here want to grant Center for Community Energy, it's called Lumina, to develop a tool, very easy tool, where homeowners can enter a few things and they what are the costs, what's the grade, what's my return on investment, in very accessible kind of ways. So we're going to be co-hosting that webinar on the 13th. We're also going to use it as an opportunity to collect more information for our building electrification roadmap that we're developing currently in climate action plans. In May, we're going to be sitting a couple commissions. We're going to make that public review draft available for folks to provide their comments on the draft. We will be wrapping everything up and going planning commission on July 7th and bringing the plan, the final plan, to Council August. One thing that's not mentioned here is there is a CEQA checklist that's being developed to guide that CEQA threshold piece. And then there's the full quantification of the emissions reduction. That's all part of the plan itself. That is my update for you and I'm happy to take any questions that you might have on the climate action plan status. Thank you. Thank you so much, Tiffany Wise-Wess. That was, we did all in, very informative. Let's see. Does Council Member Golder have a question for...? I just, yeah, a quick question, but I also want to thank you, Tiffany, for all that great presentation. I especially like how you were saying, reasonable and achievable because sometimes we have big goals and they're not, you know, don't meet goals. Specifications, it's better to put them as spectacles. I did have one, it's kind of a random question. So with moving towards building electrification, and I know the governor has made a policy about gas, gas generators and been some gas power tools, and I don't know all the details I have to say, but one question is my husband was saying that in San Jose they're doing a similar thing and they're converting all the fire stations to electric stoves from gas and they have some things that they need that they would need a backup generator and they're running into red tape, that he works for, in getting a gas generator to run some things that they will need in the event of power outage and emergency operations. And so I'm wondering there's like, you know, flexibility within our plan to understand that some of our necessary, you know, like obviously like some things need generator backup and it might have to be gas powered and so I'm wondering if there's that in the plan somewhere. It definitely is and it's funny that you bring that up because I just talked about this very issue with fire today with our internal meeting. So yeah, there we have although we need to understand, we have added in language, you know, where feasible in many cases with that said, it's a really great feedback that that fire brought back to us is, well, can you lay out for us a state of technologies right now and then where you're anticipating it will go and when. So it'll give us an idea of when we need to make these changes and that was a brilliant, I gotta give Paul for that credit for that. That was a brilliant thought and so we're going to do that. It's not difficult to do it. We've done it already, a couple of the measures, but not all of them. So yes, you know, this bright spot there for solar battery storage to act solely a place up like a diesel or natural gas gun set. And so, you know, we need to find those when that's ready and we bring it online. Now, also the fire department has indicated the fire admin building would be a great pilot system or that kind of technology where it would, you know, it's not, you know, doesn't have the kind of emergency loads that say a fires. So great question. Yes, there's flexibility in our plan, but I don't want to take away from the fact that we do need to push also. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome to the question. Councilmember Kelly. Thank you, Mayor Brunner. And thanks so much, Tiffany, for the presentation and all of the work. I just had a couple of questions. I was going to ask about youth engagement and you shared a little bit about the youth stories, the digital stories. I'm really glad to hear that. I wonder if there's anything more you can share on focus groups and whatnot that you've done with youth groups. I know you've done that in the past, anything in recent months. So I'll just ask all my questions if that's okay. There's not that many. And then in terms of the draft plan review, if you could just share a little bit how we will accommodate for Spanish speakers who have that, do that review and how we'll outreach Spanish speakers and what are your thoughts on sort of digital access difficulty and how we can kind of accommodate that. Okay. Thank you for those questions. Councilmember Collentary Johnson. Number one, as you mentioned, we had done three focus groups with youth up through January of this year. Since then, I have continued to participate in our monthly Climate Action Task Force meetings as advisors. Also, oh yes, we have also participated in both city school district green school committee as well. So that happens only three times a year, done that I think twice in January. And then also the county Office of Education has, they call it Greenlit. And that's a monthly meeting. And we've been participating in that as well. And there are lots of youth get time slots to be able to present and ask questions. It's not a full hour. And then last, want to do one more focus group with UCS both youth but also staff. We've done, I've done some platform where I've put up classes and kind of use that as a focus group. But we're seeing that need to kind of have one more and get that staff engagement especially. So we're going to do one more there. So that's youth engagement. Number two, the plan for Spanish parks translates that 40 page document. And it will be very accessible language and not a bunch of technical jargon that will be accessible to folks. As I mentioned, we're also doing a focus group in the beach flat next month, which is going to be super important because really that, you know, we made available considerate Spanish and we didn't have anybody do it, right? People don't necessarily come to the website to review stuff, especially. And so it's really important that we have those one-on-one touch points in the community, the focus groups that we're going to be doing. And we're going to structure it so that it's like a draft and review without having So that's our on the side of and then on digital access, you actually have brought up something that I haven't given a lot of thoughts quite frankly. So thank you for raising that. And I will need to get back like to talk to our equity consultant, our outreach engagement consultant about what that might look like. It hasn't quite yet. So if you all have any questions on that, I'd be happy to hear those also. Great. Thank you. I mean, I'm super excited for the interactive dashboard, but I know some people that's a barrier. So thank you so much, Tiffany. Appreciate all the work. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor and Tiffany for the updates and all of your work that's going into this really, really comprehensive and ambitious plan. So just I have a question, but before I go ask it, I would say about ways for increasing accessibility and just having recently talked with folks at the Wavavista Center and others in the beach area, it seems like they have some capacity and I don't want to just offer up our community partners to participate in this, but they have capacity to facilitate. Like I know with the rental assistance, COVID rental assistance, other programs, they provide that. And so they have technology available and they also have people to facilitate that. So it's been like a session where the dashboard together and maybe make it an event. I know youth at the Wavavista program have many, many wonderful ideas. So that could be a way to try to increase that engagement. My question is a big question related to forecasting around where we where we believe the state is going in a couple of the interagents boards. I'm on the regional transportation and the Monterey Bay Air Resource District come up our conversations around particular agenda items that and then just talking with staff. There is a move at the state get more aggressive, but also perhaps take more control over decision making as we're seeing, for example, with housing development. And so and that presents some opportunities and also some challenges. And so I just wanted to ask you while we have you hear your thoughts on what that land looks like, what you're anticipating. I know there's likely to be more funding, but also potentially some things that we'll have to then figure out how to manage not unfunded mandates well potentially. So just wondering what your thoughts are about how that's going to intersect with our work. Thank you for that question, councilmember Brown. As I mentioned, the state has directed the Air Resources Board to look at that carbon neutrality target and bringing it down to 2035, which you know is a more aggressive target. At the same time, there are a number of unfortunately unfunded mandates that are coming online for 2024. And this is something councilmember Brown that may have come up at Embard the sunset of gas powered equipment, not being able to purchase them in California any longer, which you know really accelerates. I was not really anticipating that comes this soon. And you know that pressure not just on our land keeping industry, but the city as a whole in the parts of our department. So yes, there is there are mandates that are unfunded that are coming down the pike. At the same time, as I mentioned, there also is unprecedented funding, and it may not be exactly tied to each of the mandates that are coming out in some cases are in some cases, they are not. With that said, I've been involved in a number of the sessions with the governor's office planning and research and a number of other state agencies on how to match up the mandate with the funding. How qualified I've really been advocating for is qualifying and providing applications for grants across the state organizations and reporting requirements. Very onerous and arduous. It differs by agency. So with all of that said, it does appear in the state that there's a lot of work to do to kind of shore up the funding and also the capacity constraints that we all have. And in terms of control over banking, I'm not 100% sure what you're referencing here necessarily, as it is the unfunded mandate. But we continue to stay involved in state legislation, our lobbyists on this kind of stuff. So I'm not sure that I can answer your question about how exactly that plays out in our climate action plan implementation, but you have pulled out continuing our engagement with our lobbyists and keeping a pulse and providing comments on state legislation and state grant funding opportunities as they develop. So I'm not sure if that gets to your question 100% and if not, I'm happy to kind of check into this a little bit more. No, thank you. It's helpful. Some of these things that we're hearing about may be coming. And so I don't really have a particular set of concrete that I'm asking about. So that was really helpful. And I will touch with you as more specific come up. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Please do embark. If you continue to be a key funder for us, as you all know, they funded the electric refuse trot dumpster coming out, you know, I mean, there's a lot coming from MBAR. So keep heart. Thank you. Councilmember Brown. Thank you. Councilmember Cummings. Hey, Mayor, thank you, Tiffany, for all the work you've been doing over these years, having been on the climate action task force, you know, going to those meetings and seeing all the engagement, you know, the long time coming and we're getting close to the finish line. So thanks for all the work that you do, and especially the attention you've given the community engagement process. One question I had given kind of where we're at is the first is around kind of like space and opportunity for new media ideas and how we can incorporate that as we move forward. So for example, I know some people have purchased water heaters for their homes that are, you know, more efficient. And some of the things that they've, that is, you know, is there a way that the city can help subsidize these, you know, more efficient water heaters? So the one we're moving away from gas, water heaters. Two, you know, these are energy efficient water heaters. And so, you know, kind of see where there's subsidies for new technology. And then the second question is kind of opportunities to work with CSC. For example, the pilot new technology, like they're folks in the engineering department across many departments where they're coming up with new innovative ways for us to think about like micro grids and, you know, other sorts of technologies that really can help us kind of move on this path of coming up with new ways to conserve energy and reduce our carbon footprint and, you know, the relationship between UCSC and the city kind of ebbs and flows in different ways. But, you know, there might be opportunities for us to, you know, work with labs on campus and use, for example, as you mentioned earlier, you know, one of the fire department's office buildings as a way of, you know, incorporating new technology and seeing what could work. So I'm just wondering on those two fronts, like summarize all that is what opportunities are there for new community ideas and also what are there for us to partner with the university to kind of highlight new technology. Absolutely. Thank you for those questions, member Cummings. So first of all, on the building electrification piece, in addition to the four focus groups that we're going to be holding over April and May, that of course will, we are counting it as engagement to inform our climate action plan, but really going to be informing the more existing building electrification road map. So we have those four focus groups coming up, and that's just phase one of our engagement to inform the road map itself. Our intention is to bring just a draft road map as a second point in September and then as we identify the near-term policies that we want to put in place, we are going to develop an entirely new engagement strategy around that as well. There's a lot of incoming building electrification, and we know that we need the rebates to make this happen. And we do have rebates that exist right now for, say, electric water heaters, like mentioned. There are other technologies and there are other opportunities for rebates through their district, through central coast community energy and so forth. So we, you know, we're providing feedback on that. In terms of opportunities to work with UCSC, we do have called out a number of actions, specifically around health farming, energy, a couple other, and I think you know that I work pretty tight with UCSC on a lot of different stuff, so that is not just an important way to give students and researchers real-world experience, but it actually stands our program's path. And so me, it's a win-win. I'm always looking for those opportunities. I think we've got that covered in the plan. If you want to pick up on how to introduce your question, you said, where's the safe opportunity for new community ideas moving forward? And that really resonated and as we're developing this implementation plan where, you know, we're seeing an annual update like we typically do, what we haven't done in the past kind of give that space on a regular basis once the plan's adopted. So I'd really like to consider that part of our plan maybe as a community discussion or maybe a couple communities' discussions leading up to that update. That would also be an opportunity to collect implementation feedback from the community itself, not support it from social perspectives. So thanks for the questions and for kind of completing that idea. All my questions. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Cummings. Okay, at this point, I will bring it out for public comment for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. If this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The item that we are on is Climate Action Plan 2030. You can raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar polls on your computer. When it's your turn to speak, it will hear an announcement you've unmuted and the timer will then be set. So go out to the attendees and the first hand raise is the name I am watching. Yeah, hi. Even the IPCC admits this is of lesser priority than a great many issues facing humanity. Never forget the number one concern is always the human condition and it has been the exploitation of cheap energy with the western values of liberty and capitalism that have done the heavy lifting and producing the continuous benefit to the highest priorities which are always poverty elimination, adequate food, medicine, et cetera, and to the massive betterment of the human condition in many other countless ways. Let's not screw that up. California has the toughest emissions targets to achieve in the world. Question those who would make them even tougher, then question them again. Climate change is a total win-win proposition for every politician justifying no limit. Save the world mandates without any possibility or necessity of proving that any of their extreme actions taken actually will achieve any global control or even help more than harm. I would remind, because it takes decades to actually evaluate climate, I would remain reminded after decades of trying to go renewable, fossil fuel still represents 84% of all the world's energy use and 97% of transportation. It's not because of a lack of trying. It's just not that easy. And issuing totalitarian mandates of huge CO2 reductions to be done in just eight years is very risky in itself. The same people who want to go full green will not allow the 1,000% more mining of the materials needed to massively build out green infrastructure and they're not too fond of nuclear power either. Future energy needs will also be far greater. They always are not left. Of all the adopted leftist agendas, sustainability has long-term legitimacy, but it is too important to be hijacked by the likes of leftist AOC, Bernie, the New World Order, globalists, et cetera, getting the greatly enlarged maximum inflammatory and justice-averse and the maximum predictions of doom and hysterical fear mongering. Please, no hijacking to support or other leftist dogma issues. The moronic phrase climate justice is a tell here. Those who actually care nothing about individual rights, our constitution, practicality, and the collateral damage to the human condition instead have their false claims of injustice and virtuosity powering their central authority mandates to greed the acquisition of power and control in mine. Scientific grants aren't awarded for claiming non-emergent. They're heading by progressives like the scrunched Hitler-like angry face pal Greta Thunberg or AOC, the vareese that turned dangerous, Chris Simpleton progressed. The Congresswoman really alarms there is serious scientific opinion against the notion that the science is settled as to the certainty that it saved the world's critical emergency exists, absolutely requiring such rapid, radical, risky mandate action just the next eight years. Lots of lies exist and the narrative is muddy. Not the desire to mount a massive propaganda effort. Lastly, I think it would be too offended, but this is how it feels. The stomach turner is these types simply cannot keep their hands off of children. Similar to the indoctrination, not education, teaching of six and seven year olds about various sex options. They always seek to indoctrinate the vulnerable to their narrative as early as they can. It's a kind of fifth column pedophilia. Keep the girl scouts and religion out of it. If actions were saying rationally derived through well through thought, obviously to the human good, promoting type ideas, propaganda, peer mongering, and even legislation wouldn't be needed to gain support. Consider getting a lot more objective counseling. Make sure your priorities just show actual abilities and consent are considered. Okay, we have the next name is Pauline. Go ahead and unmute yourself. This is an interesting diet drive follow. I'd like to say thank you, Tiffany, and Justin and Sandy, especially because you've been more at the forefront of the climate change than everybody on the council. The goal of your emissions by 2035, I applaud that. My group has been pushing for 2030 for a long time, but that would have been incredibly difficult and hopefully this will work. There is a lot to be done, but that's been acknowledged. I like the choice of the Bright Horizons platform because working with other cities and with ecology action makes a lot of sense. As you know, I'm part of the Climate Action Task Force. I put several new things today, several things I've put before, but the new things are all good. Thank you. For your comment, if there are any other members of the public who would like comment on our agenda item today, Climate Action Plan 2030, please raise your hand by styling Star Knight. I see the name Kyle Kelly. Hey all, this is Kyle Kelly. Thank you, Dr. Weisbass, for the presentation and the Climate Action Plan. It's been really great to see that coming together. I do want us to keep pushing on transportation and land use. Climate scientists overall know that we can change our cities to meet what we need and actually reduce our biggest source of emissions, which is from transportation. That means bringing people back into the city, allowing the 30,000 meters that come here to live in the city. It is basically the policy to actually change and allow for more people within the city. Unlike everything else that we do for fleets and waiting to electrify all cars within the city and hoping that we're going to solve traffic while also driving the car. I would love to get to a walkable, bifolial community that connects us with the train back to the rest of the state. Anyway, I just want to say big support. Thank you. Thank you staff so much. Here's to getting Climate Action done. Thank you for your comment. There are other attendees. Now is the time to call in. Don't any other hands raised. So at this time, I will close the comment and bring it back to council to provide feedback. Since this is an item to review the Climate Action plan and no action is being recommended at this time, it was more an update. I do want to thank you, Vice West, for highlighting most equitable path to carbon neutrality and the partnership and the work that's been done since our January 18th meeting, I believe it was, in mid-January. For your next steps, there will be a webinar on pump education and four focus groups, different categories. How would members of the public get information if they were interested in a focus group? Thank you for that question, Mayor. We'll be providing that on our website and we will be doing targeted outreach. Leave it or not, almost a thousand people on TechList and we have them categorized by different groups and so we'll be doing direct outreach also. Wonderful. Thank you. Okay. Council Member Golder, do you have any feedback? Council Member Brown, any feedback? Thumbs up? Two thumbs up. Council Member Callentary-Johnson? Council Member Cummings? Just I think the one thing I might add is that to Seal's point that she brought up, there's a number of folks in the community who would really like to see a more aggressive plan. I think it would be great for us just to have a plan. And I know this is something happening, but just remind the community that we will be providing them with updates on where we're at with our goals, just so that if we're actually moving more quickly than we anticipated, making sure that we're letting the public know that we're on track or we're off track and what we can do to help improve that and just continue to keep everybody updated on the efforts that we're making to really take seriously and try to meet our goals and actually go above and beyond our goals. Would that be seen in the cap dash tool that you spoke about? Yes, Mayor. Folks can always go on their own time to cap dash to see where things are at, but then we also will be doing that annual update to the Council and I'd like the idea of having kind of a different way to feedback mechanism and in advance of doing that. So I think we'll have a couple different ways for folks to go on their own time or to participate more formally. Wonderful. All right, well thank you very much. That does include this study session. Thank you so much for your presentation and this meeting is now adjourned. We will return at 4.30 for our special meeting on our district map. I'm pronouncing that correctly, is here and available. Mayor, would you mind turning on your camera or announcing that you are here? There we go. Hello, City Council members. Yes, I'm here and I'm in the order for anyone who needs help. Thank you. Thank you so much. And Peter, I will be giving instructions on how to call in and if you could relay that as well, that would be great. Okay, so if you wish to comment on an agenda item today, you'll need to call in at the beginning of the item you are wanting to comment on using instructions on the screen. Are there any instructions in Spanish on the screen? They're not. So we will need to make sure we can get that information out. View your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through your phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming, so if you can listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity. When it's time for public comment, you can raise your hand by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar polls on your computer. Sure. Is there any of those instructions you'd like to relay in Spanish? Sure. I would now like to ask her face call roll. Here. Remember, it's Helen Tari Johnson. Is it? Here. Are you watching? Here. Present. Thank you. Our first agenda item this afternoon is public hearing receive input from the community regarding the selection of a district map and election. For members of the public for streaming this meeting, if this is an item you wish to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from council. We will then take public comment and return to council. Sure. Is there a need to translate that? I think we're good right now. Go. Let me know as well. Stop at any point or repeat anything. So at this point, I would like to hand it over to Casey Heemard here for our staff presentation. Thank you, Mayor Brunner. And actually, I'm going to read it over to the city's demographer, Dr. Doug Johnson, National Demographic Corporation to do a presentation. Thank you. And may our members of council and the public, it is a pleasure to be with you again. I'm going to share my screen and walk through a presentation. As you recall, I had two prior hearings that were an introduction to this issue and an introduction to the rules and demographics of the city and the idea of the change. We're going to review that a little bit. Really, today's discussion is about the first set of draft maps. I do want to emphasize the first set of draft maps is not final. They are certainly open to revisions, new options, new maps. But the goal of these maps is really get the discussion. And as noted on the agenda, we're starting with the six districts options, and then there'll be a later item on seven districts. I'll come back to that. Let me jump in. First of all, for those that didn't listen in on the earlier hearing, and I do want to remind folks, we are looking at a change in how the council is elected. So right now, we have what are called at-large elections by elected. Everyone runs for however many are up. The top vote-getters are elected. If people do some research on this, they may come across as called from district or residence district. That's where elections are city-wide, but the candidates have to live in a certain district. I think we're only down to two or three cities left. In part because under the California Voting Rights Act, those are treated the same as an at-large election, with no protection from that system. The only safe hardware under the California Voting Rights Act where things are not allowed to bring to the kitchen and city is my district collection, either entirely by district system or districts city-wide election. Both are safe hardware. So that's what we're looking at. This whole process is all of the city transitioning from city-wide at-large elections by district collections where candidates will need to live in the district they want to represent, and only the residents of that district will vote at-elect. This is an extensive process. The city has been doing a lot of discussion and outreach and meetings on this topic. We did start back in August, September with initial hearings. As I mentioned to introduce the issue, those did not have draft maps in them. We actually received the census data from the federal government in August, and then California actually adjusted that data to move the state prison population prison location to the last-minute home addresses. So we really get that official data for this process at the end of September. So we did work on draft maps which have been posted to the project website for quite a while now, and then this is the first of two hearings today, and the next one is currently scheduled for April 19th. To talk about these maps and like to reaffirm what I said, this is just the initial set of maps, certainly open to direction and bring those maps, post those maps a week before the next screen. After these hearings and after the council selects their preferred map, there will be the ballot measure, I believe it's going to go on the June 7th ballot, where voters will be asked to define whether they prefer a seven district. This is where the mayor rotates among the council, four-six districts, the city-wide elected mayor, and then the city will have its first elections by district, the first set of districts this November. Welcome back to that issue of seeing what the plan later on. You want to hit the reason for scheduling the two hearings today, one on six districts and one on seven is that as everyone knows, currently there's seven council members rotating mayor, and that's the next hearing that we'll get into is the options that would draw maps that fit in the current system, and the council has voted to put a measure on the ballot, which is six districts. The key thing for today is emphasize that the reason we split them is that we're looking today to start the process of deciding on the best six district map and to decide on the best seven districts. The debate on whether six or seven is better is really better held in the context of that ballot measure. That's not the goal of the night, why the list is separate. We will come out of this process with two maps. They preferred six district maps, preferred seven district maps. We really want to get good input specifics of the maps rather than six. So with that introduction, I'm going to jump into the rules and how lines get drawn. There are really three categories of rules and goals in the process. The first, the left of your screen, is federal laws, the requirements have to do under federal law. Number one here is local population. And this is a tough one. It is very, very strict that in 2020 census data as adjusted by the state of California, we have to have almost exactly the same number of total people in each district. There's a couple of percentage plus or minus margin to avoid including a neighborhood and that kind of thing. But it really is a very strict requirement. One of the questions that's come or comments come up a lot in the sense of input you've already received is, you know, why is this neighborhood combined with that neighborhood? Or why did this line end up here? Almost always when those lines end up in a place it doesn't, isn't a natural neighborhood boundary. It's because of the equal population requirement. Neighborhood that's trying to be kept together is big to be a district by itself, or it's whole and half. So when folks are looking at the maps, they always need to remind that equal population requirement that taking something out of a draft map of one district in a draft map also means you have to put some other people into that district from somewhere else so that we can get that equal population. So that's a lot of information. I won't go into that much detail on the other criteria, but I did want to emphasize that since it does, it is the explanation for a lot of the questions I already have from so far. Other federal laws are, you have to comply with the Federal Voting Rights Act. In the context of Santa Cruz, that really means being the beach flats area united and together. It's not large enough to be a district by itself, and the Latino and African American and Native American and Asian American that the city are not large enough for the district, for the other district. We're not looking at it, but under the law, we do need a flat area neighborhood in one. I'll show you a map. And at the same time, no racial gary management. So race can be a consideration, but it cannot be what the law calls predominant. Not supposed to choose a map because it has a 28% district where, say 20% with another district 25%. It's all about neighborhoods. Those are federal laws. The state has new rules. These just took effect in 2020 called the Fair Maps Act. It's the middle column and it says, these are prioritized. Number one, districts have to be continuous. You can only cross water where there's a road or a bridge or a ferry middle off. Number two, the district should, to the degree possible, avoid dividing neighborhoods or what the law calls communities of interest. And that's an area that has a shared interest, either demographically, socially, or in terms of city policy. When that community benefits from protecting one district. Number three, the district should follow easily identifiable boundaries, such as streets, rivers, major streets, rivers and like that. And number four, the district should be compact. State defines is not bypassing one group of people to get to a more distance. The state also bans districts being drawn or not being picked in a way that favors or discriminates against the political party. That one's pretty easy. Just don't have political data in our database. We're not looking for partisan data. So those are the requirements. We have federal requirement. We have state requirement. We have multiple maps that meet all those requirements. Then courts have approved a set of traditional principles. These are goals. They're not requirements. Two things. And some of these are only applied to redistricting for on but when you're redistricting, you can try to minimize the number of voters should election years. That doesn't come in now because when you're districting time, everyone voted. One that does factor in that this phase is you can repossible after you meet all the cash story requirements. You can respect the voter's choices in terms of trying to avoid putting council members together. The idea here is let the voters by which council members have earned reelection rather than the lines dictating that state voters you cannot really like this person. Again, this is a goal. It's not a requirement. You can also consider future population growth. Within the population margins I mentioned earlier, so you can't consider it a lot, but a couple percentage closer. Then the other one that will come up next time when you are redistricting with 30 census is you can try to keep the core of existing districts together. So the people who have worked together on the past campaign for a given district continue to work together and don't fight it up. This is why this first time for the process is so important because you are setting up the districts. While they will be revised every 10 years, these districts will be the core basis that those revisions are made on. That's a lot of rules. It is a complicated process. There are a lot of things to be balanced, but we've already seen their community feedback in the city that people are wrapping their heads around it and giving us very good. Mentioned the Federal Voter Rights Act and the geographic concentration. This map, the blues and purples are very low. Those are less than 25 to 35% of the city block. The city blocks that are yellow, green, and red are the majority of the population. Most city blocks only have a few people, so the scatterings and reds don't really impact the demographics of the district. You can see down in the beach flats we have a neighborhood that has a much higher concentration than our found elsewhere. That's why I talk about that neighborhood. Generally, as you may recall from the past presentations, there's not nearly as many African Americans in that area, but there is more of a concentration of African than elsewhere. The other protected class population that does have significant numbers in the city, Asian Americans, and they are concentrated That's really our voting right. Those of you that have looked at all the demographics we put out about all the maps know that we look at a lot of data, renters, education levels, age levels, that we can generate maps such as this one of the percentage of renters in this area. You can see the data is not city block by city block. It's all neighborhood or what the census calls block group. But it is somewhat handy if folks are interested in looking for how many districts have a majority of residents for renters, they can get that kind of data off this demographic sheet and actually all the data that's shown in those sheets is also available in the online mapping. With that, I will jump into the maps and I'll go through these really quickly, but I'm happy to come back in more detail and hopefully folks have taken the time over the past few weeks and posted to look at them in more detail. Well, I'm showing them in static images on this app, on the city website and linked on here is a what we call an interactive review map. And if there are detailed questions, I'll jump to that because that lets us zoom in, enter an address, you can switch over to satellite view, all kinds of detail, buddy. Start off with the 601 or three maps. All the other that have 601 could see highly compact district. Really, you get regional squares now with a northeast barren district one, really we're on both sides of the freeway. Then South Water Street in district two, both of which are bordered by the river. Nice, easily recognizable boundary. There's a little bit more population east side of the river than is needed to make two districts. So district four picks up that last bit, especially below Beach Street. And then comes over, gets the pier and inland there, up to Mission. And goes over to Bay Street. You can see district six then is the west side. Three and five are up above Mission Street. Most road enough. 602, gets four districts down to the ocean front. This does have the result, a couple of commenters noticed this, which I was happy to see. District three has what looks like an odd pension going west. I see downwards as Woodrow Avenue, each there actually is green in part of district. The only reason for that is that we have to follow a census plot. Which is the geography that gives us the population. Divide them up, then we don't have official population. What the Census Bureau drew is one giant census block that goes from where it says West Cliff Drive all the way down and around. So there's no conscious policy choice saying district three should extend along the west of Columbia Street. That's just forced by the block yard. But you can see this is less of a square and blocky approach and more of a extend from the beach up road. So we do again get a district one in the northeast around the freeway. Get the north of high street, much more focused district five. District four really in the center of the city down the street. I'm sorry, down to the beach. And then district three taking the west side of Bay Street. So we get down to district six. And this one does end up kind of an unusual combination. It's the west side of the city graphically. It looks pretty good, but as has been noted by a couple of commenters, it is a serious mix of different neighborhoods on that as it goes west side upwards. And then the last map to show you in this six map set is 603, which is just the slight changes from the original. So generally close, but multiple weeks. Do you want to emphasize, too, the goal of these maps is to show, get the discussion going. There's certainly revisions possible. Then as long as we population things reflect me. The other thing just to touch on briefly is on the F maps that are posted to the project website. There is election sequencing. And now that he's going to district elections, some of the districts will be up one election cycle. The first ones will be up in 2022. Other districts will be up in 2024. So once the council ultimately picks a six district map and a seven district map, it will need to also choose which ones are up in which year. This can be a very complicated calculation. So we tend to come back to this once we're down to a final map or final map. But I'm happy to discuss it earlier. I wish the one key thing to keep in mind is that there's no change regardless of which map is chosen or where council members end up. There is no change to anyone's current district. I'm sorry, current. All the current council members will serve the remainder of their current term. Regardless of which map is chosen. These maps only pack council members once it's time to run for reelection. Council members find it. I'm happy to come back in more detail on that. But it can get very convoluted and hard to follow. Have a bunch of maps like that. The goal of this hearing is to talk about the six district maps. See what residents and ultimately the council members believe is the best map. And then, as I mentioned, get back on what should be changed in those maps before you back for next year. And then I do have this quick reference slide that I'm happy to put up if you want to see the maps side by side. These are the same maps, obviously, just side by side. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions you have now or after public comment. Thank you so much, Johnston. We did receive questions from some constituents and one of the main questions on this six district map was the separation of the right area. And so two seem to keep that north to the south. Area, neighborhood, community of each other. And the other two didn't. Were there other variations that you looked at in terms of all the requirements federally? Not yet. But that's exactly the kind of feedback we're looking for, which is to figure out which pieces of the maps make sense and which don't. What we often come up with is let's use left-hand side of this map and the right-hand side of that map and then you see figure out how to put those pieces together. So it's certainly excellent feedback. And if there is a preference for one of the other maps, try to quantify it. We could see right from others. And then after all the questions you received today from council members and members of the public, will you return with the answers at the next April public hearing? Or do you hope to kind of address some of those now in terms of map configurations? In terms of questions about the maps and the rules, I definitely want to answer those now. In terms of drawing revised map, we probably come back with those well before the next hearing. We want to get those revised maps, look at them, react to them and kind of be very concerned. And last question, do those revised maps have to be posted again seven days before the April hearing? Yes, exactly. Okay. I should note too that if residents want, there is a link on the city website to try their own hands drawing maps as well. So we do certainly encourage that. It takes a couple minutes to figure out how to do it. But once you figure it out, it's pretty straightforward. And there are some videos. Wonderful. Thank you. Hi, council member coming. Thanks. I'm wondering if for the purpose of discussion, if we can have the maps on the screen so we can look at them as we're having this conversation. And then I guess I'm wondering, one of the questions I have is, so it's 601 and 603, I'm just thinking in terms of kind of like demographic similarities and similarities within kind of neighborhood impacts and needs. Like the ocean corridor shares a lot common with the beach flats. And I see that in 601 and 603, there's kind of like this downtown kind of beach area. And then it extends kind of way over Seabright. And I'm just kind of, and I'm just curious about why that's the case. And whether there's any kind of way that that could be drawn in such a way that the downtown beach area and like lower ocean with one area, and then the kind of Seabright area impact, because I think that also gets to kind of one of the, what we see in 602, which is kind of seed that Seabright's more intact, but then also just thinking about the beach area, the ocean corridor there being kind of kept within the downtown flat kind of area. Yes, certainly everything about taking areas out of certain districts and into other districts. There's a lot of flexibility challenges for each area we take out. But certainly right now I can 601, four and six really split waterfront to the length of the city. That could be rotated. One of them could become entire, the entire waterfront, the other one then become kind of in Finland from the waterfront. So Seabright by itself isn't big enough its own district all by itself, but certainly the lines could be readjusted to that neighborhood together with just past it for some, but that could certainly be, that's the kind of thing we're happy to cause, but if there's just one coastal district that would be more of the somewhat inland coast area. Yeah, I think that would actually probably be even worse, just my opinion because there's different competing interests as you move along the coast from kind of more affluent large homes on the west side to low income and the beach flat area and then you get to more like, you know, vacation rentals in the Seabright area, but, but I guess that leads to another question with kind of, you know, what are some of the, I know population driver and obviously like can't split up beach flats neighborhood based on kind of what you said, but it also seems like when you look at demographic like the beach, the ocean forward or has a higher, seems like has a higher population Latinos versus other areas city and that sounds like one of the drivers of not splitting up flat area. And so I guess part of what I'm interested in understanding is, you know, is there then a, is there a driver for keeping kind of that ocean to beach flats corridor in fact? And so instead of, for example, 602 kind of spreads that district for kind of northeast rather than that, having it spread a little bit further south like in still one, not going into Seabright area, but having it kind of squeeze into two and then having parts of one be incorporated to area two. So these are just, I guess this is less of a question and more of a suggestion of that, you know, when we think about populations of renters and we're looking at demographic populations like that corridor, pretty heavily renter heavily of a single socioeconomic, similar socioeconomic class and demographic. So there might be, you know, the, a reason for why we should keep that intact versus kind of taking for and shifting it over in Seabright area and which splits up Seabright, then also really kind of breaks apart this continuous corridor that has similar interests. Yeah, I'd be happy to come up with a revision and we really use the river as a long, I read all three of these maps, but as you know, the demographics on the two sides of the river are not that different, especially as you approach the coast, then we can certainly do a version of that together. Thanks. Yeah, and I guess the last comment I'll make is I say that because for example, in the summer months, Ocean Street has a lot of traffic. That traffic all goes into the flat. We're trying to get to the boardwalk. So those impacts are shared by the people who live within those areas. And so keeping that as one district might be helpful so that whoever's representing that district have a strong say given the impacts that those people face in those areas. And I guess there also could be the argument to want more representative that have a say over that corridor, but you know, just putting that out there is something to think about there. Those are my comments now. Let's see. Council member Myers, have any questions before we go to public comment? Thank you, Mayor. I do not at this time. Thank you. Council member Golder, questions? I have any questions? I have a comment. Can I just say my initial I wasn't I'm not prepared to make any decision about this, but after listening to the President and looking at them side by side and knowing like possibilities for me, having lived in different neighborhoods, like the right side of 602 seems to make sense. And the left side of 601 seems to make sense from like, you know, like neighborhoods. That's just my initial I'm definitely not prepared to make decisions tonight. Thank you. I would say that does align with some of the emails that I did in terms of 602, map 602 and map 601 comment writing that people felt were communities of interest. And if the left side and right side together, Vice Mayor Watkins. You know, the only question I would maybe ask is if there's an opinion on it. Is there a benefit of having sort of looking at 602, for example, on the left side, how it does kind of merge the different districts. So there is a little bit more of a spectrum of representation. And I'm just wondering if our demographer wants to speak to that at all. This is an issue that comes up all the time. And it's a very good question. There's no right or wrong answer, really a neighborhood by neighborhood question. So if there's being generically not to the comments of Santa Cruz, but if there's an area that, for example, has never elected, never been a council member from that area. That tends to be good to put that area together, but they can be heard and finally get selected. I don't know that that's really true here, but you would probably know that better than I would say. If there's an area that has always been fairly well spoken and gets the vote out has no problem getting the attention of council on their issues, they're probably better off being divided. So they still have two or even three council members who are directly accountable to the neighborhood. Obviously each voter, we vote for one, but they have a neighborhood meeting, you'd have two or three council members. It dilutes their voting strength in terms of the odds of them electing someone from that neighborhood because they're split, two or three. But if they're able to make their vote heard and get attention to their issues, they're probably better off more. That comes up most often with large, like, un-city retirement. When you have an off-cycle April election, it still turns out it's 99%. You don't have to be united in the district to be heard. So that's kind of the spectrum of neighborhood by neighborhood design. It's certainly expected that certain communities benefit from being kept together and other communities benefit not in part because the key thing for everyone to remember, the council I'm sure has a top line, it still takes four votes to pass any. So it is having a consolidated district makes it possible through your voices heard, but being divided up to get a policy adopted. That's helpful. Thank you. Council Member Brown, do you have any questions? Mayor, I have one question I wanted to ask now, and then I thought I'd reserve across my question for after the public. In terms of the, but since we're looking at the maps and I'm talking about it, the city division district requires that it's based on population. And there know that across the city, there are different levels of turnout, which I mean, I understand that that's a factor in any election, but in district elections, where some districts end up having a much lower number of voters collecting their council members. And so I understand that there's in balance and not really much done, but I'm wondering if in your experience where districts are drawn, there have been where there is such a significant imbalance that it's if anything, nothing else, the district boundaries. So I'm just talking about UCS and the fact that that district is going to have no matter how it's drawn, but if it is all in one district, it's going to have a much lower voter. I'm wondering how that's in your experience. Sure. So traditionally, this doesn't really apply to a university scenario here, but additionally, that's actually a benefit of district elections because traditionally, it's the historically poorer, more heavily immigrant, generally low turnout neighborhood. The benefits from going to districts because their turnout rate is low, their voice to be wide, their voices get small. Now that they have a district, they can be heard and have a seat even though their turnout tends to stay relatively low. So that element tends to be viewed as a benefit, but you're exactly right. I don't think you'll see this kind of extremes in categories, but there are congressional districts, for example, where in our LA, members of Congress look at elected with 50 or 60,000 votes because there's so many immigrants who are not reached low, whereas in say, South Orange County, it's 250. So they do get those disparities without a doubt. Where it's driven by area that hasn't been heard, that's a benefit. Where it's driven by dynamic like a university, we also see with military bases that that is also a challenge, not really a benefit. But we have a couple of clients for military base size, council districts. Of course, not only are they almost all registered in their hometown, active duty military are barred by military code of justice from running for office. So we have to get very creative in order to find someone who can fill that. It is a challenge. Council, okay. That concludes council member questions at this time. So I will take it out to public comment for members of the public who are interested in commenting on the selection of a six district map and election sequence. Raise your hand either by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting raise hand in the webinar on your computer. When it is your turn to speak, we will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted and the timer will then be set in it. I translate that to Spanish. Yes, please. I was just looking for, you know, we will have Peter be here translate Spanish. Buenas tardes y ustedes quieren comentar ahorita sobre la discusión de los seis distritos de la ponencia que acabamos de escuchar. Lo que usted tiene que hacer es que con su teléfono presione asterisco nueve para levantar su mano o si usted está en el computador levante la mano con el icono de la mano. Gracias. Phone number ending in nine six or two. Hi there. Hello. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I'm having trouble with my computer. So I went on my phone but now I'm back on the computer and I have raised my hand. So I'd like to talk using the computer. Okay. Your hand raise is Catherine. Go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself or unmute on the webinar goals. Hi, welcome. Can you hear me? Yes. A couple of comments here. I think that it's really important to um, let's see. I'm looking at map 601, which I think is best for residents living on the west side because the other maps, um, we as households will lose our boat to the UCSC block if we're included in the UCSC district. And so 601 is the best in that regard. And then my second thought is that I think it is important to keep the beach area and the downtown area, the two primary commercial districts in as a as a combined interest and whether that goes to ocean street as had just been discussed, maybe that makes sense too. But I think it is important not to divide the beach area from downtown. And finally, the point it was made earlier keeping Seabright as a district is important. So the right side of 602 looks good to Seabright, um, but it looks terrible for, uh, households that would be swallowed by a UCSC. That's my comment. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine, your comment. Our next, uh, hand raised is the name Rafa Sonnenfeld. Yes. Uh, thank you very much. Um, my comment, um, has to do with, um, really the spirit of the district elections, you know, um, we're responding to, um, a potential lawsuit alleging that we, uh, have an inadequate process to ensure minority representation on the city council. And it seems to me like the best way for us to, uh, ensure minority representation on city council would be to have as close to a minority as possible. Um, so I wanted to really echo the comments that, um, council member Cummings made earlier about trying to, um, connect, uh, the beach flats area and the ocean ocean street area, which, or lower ocean area, which have a higher concentration of, uh, Latino voters. Um, in the hopes that, you know, we really, uh, honor the spirit of, of this redistricting process to try to ensure that we have, um, Latino representation on our city council. So I hope that we get to see another map, um, that tries to, thank you very much. Your comment. Our next, uh, member of the public is Vivian Vargas. Yes, welcome. As a former, uh, Latino affairs commissioner for the city of Santa Cruz back in 2011, when, uh, district maps were being considered and the lawsuit happening, um, I was of course interested in Latino, Latinx representation. So when the post maps came out, I looked at both of them carefully and what I kept saying was that, um, voter registration of, of this, of the council districts and all of the maps, uh, could be able to form a majority. And then I learned to follow the reasons why the maps were written as they, um, and in beach flats, the voter registration for the Latinx community is, uh, 17%, but for the non-Hispanic white community at 73%. So I became a bit frustrated, um, seeing as how this is the way district maps are and also the origins of the lawsuit were supposed to be Latino or Latinx representation. And then I remembered or that I consider, uh, percentages is not destiny as we can see by our own city council. Uh, uh, racial, um, percentages from the census 2020 does not determine, you know, uh, the representation of, uh, council members on, on our city council. So what I feel is that looking at all of the maps, perhaps maybe to, uh, answer the initial, um, uh, argument that was brought up why to, uh, ensure Latinx representation is maybe we need a comprehensive study on why there is no Latinx representation in the city of Santa what are maybe systematic, um, protocols or things that are in our city that not help support Latinx representation. And, uh, so I think if you can spend the money and the time for a comprehensive plan to deal with homelessness, I think we can spend, uh, time to, uh, have a, uh, investigation of a, uh, a, uh, a study into Latinx representation in the city of Santa Cruz, especially since we're talking of over 12,600 persons who are living in the city of Santa Cruz. So thank you for hearing my comments. And, um, thank you. Thank you very much for your comment. Our next member of the public is phone number ending in zero five two. Go ahead and unmute. Yes, you are. You're very quiet, but we can hear you. Okay. Thank you. Our next public comment is phone number ending in one seven zero five. Hi, thank you for taking my comments. Um, I think the big problem with absolute one and so three are that they, they go all the way from really the heart of the west side or the B flat all the way to the far east side. So I don't think that there's anyone who actually lives to be a Santa Cruz who would say that poses a community of interest. And I think it really grossly violates that, uh, that principle. I understand there's issues trying to make all, uh, there's compromises with all the districts when you move apart, uh, neighborhood out of one district that's going to other districts and all these rules. But I really think that district four and 601 and 603 are really out of line. And, um, even in 602, just four is little marginally, but all the way from high west side through the end of the beach flat. So I think that 602 is S three, but I still don't think because of district four, so I don't think it's that great. And, uh, there was a prior caller who said that the one was the best for kind of, um, not deluding the vote of in town folks from university actually don't, that is the best job of kind of giving the university together as a community of interest in, um, yeah. So that's a one comment. And then following on council member Brown's comments about the university having a much lower registration rate, that's true, but that actually gives the university more power. And I have a corollary that kind of unique because university is exempt from all municipal votes. So I wonder how that works where the university could potentially get its own council member would be voting to enact laws by every other city that the district that they represented. I'm wondering if the demographer could or the city attorney could comment on that because it seems pretty undemocratic that, um, you could have someone elect by district who's deciding laws someone else that applied. I don't know that's more relevant as university almost has its own district, but I'd like to hear um, some of the experts comments on that. And that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Our next member of the public is named Dennis. Go ahead and unmute yourself. Welcome. Hello. Can you hear me clearly? Yes, we can. I would like to comment about the lower west side. In both maps 601 and 603, uh, the lower west side is kept together as a district. I believe that the entire length of west cliff and the residential areas, uh, inland from west drive, uh, share, uh, a sense of community and in many issues. I believe that map 602 splitting, um, it in half kind of artificially between district three and district six does not make sense. District three would extend from lighthouse field all the way up through the close to the university on Nobel drive. And I don't think that, uh, that has a sense of community or of a district. So again, I would support 601 and 603 because of the district six, uh, boundaries. Thank you. Thank you. Next color is a phone number ending in seven zero four. Press stars. Unmute yourself. There we go. Hi there. Hello. Hello. Yes. Um, I, I'm just the demographer. Is there any objective way of finding a neighborhood? I like the things you love. He's pressing all different kinds of views about neighborhood and they all have different ideas. Uh, am I right in thinking there's no objective way? It's just that whoever everyone has their own concept and doesn't necessarily agree with many other people. And if that is the case, then it seems like drawing of the district is a very arbitrary and sense, uh, purpose, which really doesn't mean anything as far as democracy is concerned. I'd like to mark comment on that. So for public comment, we do not do Q and a do have a full three minutes. Like you with your comment and, uh, Okay. Okay. Uh, that's it's done. I would think so. I'm quite unfortunate that that is, but again, that is the rule. But I think conversations are very, very educational and people learn from them and they're interested. But I can't have that. I'd like to, uh, work on a river like that, uh, a proportional system allows them to, uh, line up with other persons, uh, see that they agree. So they are choosing, uh, you have the chance of being easily represented. Uh, I'd like to see their, uh, having a district, especially in the way now, not really. Thank you for that. Thank you. Our next caller is Benan. Hi, I'm on 1% matter here. So excuse me if I cut out midway through, but I really wanted to press the support for not six of three and also, uh, the draft map that a lot of, uh, the seven proposal, uh, really highly encourage those office shows and, and I really wanted to just comment on the narrative that students might have outside of the city or, you know, having him, even though I completely aren't part of the city, but I think that I get the problem that students are people, these are residents. I think we have just as much of, you know, right to be represented as anybody else. And the fact that, you know, 30,000, uh, sorry, 20,000 staff faculty at NCSC out of a city of 60,000, 30%, we haven't seen that kind of reputation for a long time is something really worth considering. So that's why we support six of three and the draft proposal before they really goes ahead and keeps the downtown together. It keeps the lower west side together and your side is also really represented. Thank you. Thank you. Our next caller. We're taking public comment on the six district map, Beverly Day Show. Hi, this is Beverly Day Show. Um, I'm wondering, did I miss something in the beginning of this presentation? Like why is this happening in the first place? Why are we suddenly breaking the city up into neighborhoods? And yes, I agree. You know, who decides what a neighborhood is. And there's a confusion here about that, although you're not what I understand is that you said not allowed groupings by interests yet making them by neighborhood. So that's, excuse me, that's a bit confusing. But you know, why, why is this all of a sudden happening? Who decided? I don't like it. I don't like it at all. It's dividing up our city. And so is there someone or a group of people who are more knowledgeable than I who are overseeing this to make sure that this is not a gerrymandering move? Really, let's see. So the other thing that I don't like is that now suddenly, person who is being elected has to live in the neighborhood. That's a very limiting thing. What if there, you know, what if there isn't anyone, the neighborhood is qualified or who feels like running? Whereas the time who's like not working jobs, that's, you know, there's a, there's an equity issue here, I believe. I mean, really, for people who have time, okay, but for people who don't, then they don't get to be represented. You know, this is, I don't like, yeah, so who's, who's overseeing to make sure this isn't a gerrymandering move? Okay. That's my two cents. Thank you for your comment. The next name is Catherine. Welcome. Catherine, let's go ahead and press star six to unmute yourself for a mute on your computer. Hi, this is Catherine. And I need to say that you had called on me previously. And, and so I was surprised that you called on me again. So I am the one who made the comment that I didn't use the word gerrymander, but that's the feeling that upper west side residents, if you include 200 homes of upper west side residents in with UCSC, those residents are definitely going to feel gerrymandering. Thank you. Thank you. Our next caller, I am watching you. Yes, hello. I suppose on further reflection, I suppose 601 map is my preference. But I could also see alterations starting with that that might have worked in census. You know, I tried using that map drawing application. Wow, that's too hard to use. I question just as a, just a statement that Hispanic race has been ever been a factor in elections. You know, I have, I looked at like the last four elections and, and I said this in my letter, I wanted to explain it all again. But really, people have been elected amazingly, or so by how many people run with identical politics. And when the, you know, when one like leftist or leftist are people went one side or the other has more people running, they lose because their vote is diluted. So I don't know. Like I, I do not think that Maria was at all famous or whatever. I don't think she lost because I think she lost because she ran in a year when there are way too many people with her politics, you know, back up for yourself. I mean, I thought that's not hard to do. And then looking at, you know, opposition to the council, it's, it's not, you know, centered against minorities or anything. If anything, like I said before, I mean, white men are left out of the picture maybe, but that's all I can think there. I would say I, I'm kind of disappointed. It's too late now, but it's too late now, but the runoff thing, I just can't see you needing it. I mean, only 10 people ramped the entire city last year. I can't see three people running in any of these districts to require a runoff. I, I, maybe, maybe one will and they got, you know, runoff, but they have to run for a whole year, you know, to run during the primaries. I don't, I don't get it. And, well, I mentioned before about the two and four year mayor thing too late for that, but I think, well, like, well, it's dope Biden. I mean, boy, it'd be nice to have another election this November or anything. Anyway, I, I mostly though, I would in this meeting, if possible, please clarify the details of what happens to the existing health members with two more years to go on their term and how you will decide which district vote in 2022, once you pick them and why. Thank you for your comment. Our next caller is a phone number ending in 704. Yes. I'm responding to the last citizen problem that, you know, sometimes the voters. It's a hard time hearing you. You're cutting out. You want me to unmute the mayor here? I see. I muted him. I can unmute. Yeah, go ahead and unmute and go ahead caller. I don't again already spoken. Call in earlier. Yes, I did. Okay. Yes, I did. But I wanted to respond to just the gentleman that spoke just before me now. Uh, his point is that, uh, both are diluted between a number of candidates who have similar, uh, ideas about what would be good for the city. Uh, the, that is definitely a problem. But, uh, voters may want to consider adoption of ranked choice voting, which largely solves that problem because voters can rank all those candidates, uh, that they want to. And then, uh, the one that will get the most votes from all those, all, all those, uh, people who like that kind of outlook, uh, they can concentrate their votes, event, event, their count of votes, their votes will be concentrated and they will have a better chance of electing at least one of those they like, where in the, in the current voting system, uh, they don't have that. So, ranked choice voting for voting for one winner, uh, uh, makes, makes the situation a bit better. We are taking public comment on district map, uh, and this agenda item. And are there any other members of the public that, like, that haven't already been commented? Okay. Looks like that's it. I will bring it back to council for questions that were brought up in, um, public comment that I would like to, um, ask staff or, and, or Doug Johnson, um, to answer, um, one of the questions I go ahead, there was a caller who said, why are we breaking the city up into districts? And I just want to direct that member of the public to the information on this city's website, cityofsantacruz.com slash district election. And there is a wealth of information at cityofsantacruz.com slash district election. Um, there was a question about what happens when there is no candidate that runs in district. Who able to answer that? Just like any vacancy, um, the council, the city attorney or staff, I mean, I don't know if your program has special provisions. Typically, the council would decide there to appoint an application process for the special election. It's just like they're big. Thank you. And there was a question about what decides what a neighborhood is. What comes from a neighborhood? I guess there's a very in-depth discussion of that in the prior two hearings that folks can go back to, but very briefly, the law kind of blends the two ideas, but really they're two separate interests between what's a community of interest versus what's a neighborhood. So a community of interest is a sort of geographic defined area, but it's defined by demographic and social characteristics such as it could be on this, but it's more commonly renters, income levels, education levels. Big one is language spoken at home. And it can also be issue-driven. So a community as the council member coming earlier about a neighborhood is particularly hit by traffic in the summer. That would be, so those kind of laws specific about the social, economic or issue-driven group geographic area. A neighborhood is more self-defined. In some cities, they have formerly recognized neighborhood. The most common ones are faster playing communities or districts, but other cities also have gone through and I formally identified neighborhood because of those, but ultimately a neighborhood is whatever the people in it find as a neighborhood. So if people view their neighborhood as the area around the park, area around the school, anything that ties those neighborhoods together meet the definition. So it really is self-defined. There isn't a, the Census Bureau does not define neighborhood for the whole country much more. Whatever the residents view as their neighborhood is a neighborhood and they may disagree or may consider those parts of culture. And the last question I had was a caller stated that the university would be exempt from unique codes and how does that work? Council member enacting laws that do not apply to that. I would briefly say that's not a concern that clashes into district redistricting and for more details I would refer you over to city staff for the city. It is correct that city regulations in general don't apply to the university campus but there are certainly issues that people who reside on the campus would be affected by decisions of the city council and therefore have a very legitimate basis to weigh in on university or city policies. So there's not a legal impediment to somebody who lives on campus participating in city politics merely because city zoning regulations and whatnot don't apply on the campus. Thank you. Council member Cummings do you have a comment? I have one question I wanted to follow up on and I guess it's a comment to what was just stated in addition to that people who live on campus are isolated for living on campus they're going to freely move throughout the community and given that campus is part of the city the fact that some laws or regulations don't apply to the campus that's not to say that the campus is like an island where people never leave so I just wanted to put that out there as well because you know if people are shopping in town or what have you they're going to be subjected to the same laws as we're living in the rest of the community. But the question I did have and I'm going to ask this again later is a follow up on one of the questions that was asked during public comment which was given the outlay of apps how will the upcoming election work 2022 given the options that we have because like myself so I now live I used to live in the big spots I now live downtown but you know that seat would be open there's the potential to be a seat open on the lower west side I believe that there's two sitting council members in district one I might be wrong on that and then there's one and two so that potentially leaves depending on the map three to four seats that might be open and so I'm just kind of wondering how that might work because that came up in public comment I had that question as well. So the big picture that governs all this is that the same number of positions on the council that are due right now to be up in 2022 will still be up in 2022. One of those so with three one of those may be taken by the mayor's slot so if you had a six district map plus the mayor there'd be the mayor plus two districts if you had seven districts it would be three districts if you have a six district map then the other four districts would be up in 2024 actually both ways you'll have four districts election before it's not over like give a little bit more detail um because there was a related question with the public about what happens current council members are up until 2024 you would actually remain council members till 2024 I mentioned there's no impact on your current term and you would actually be at large citywide council members till 2024 the rule is you represent whatever jurisdiction elected so even in 2023 if they come an elected citywide in 2020 signs and leave these a vacancy that placement either a special election appointment would be a citywide vote because you're filling the last year of that wide at large so it does get speaking in generalities about the rule it can be hard to wrap your head around in different scenarios but but we will definitely walk through in detail the in some jurisdictions it's really easy because one council member ends up in each seat though that each district just gets assigned to that council members here as you can see on these PDFs every map has some pairing members are in several years and that gets very complicated we'll spend a lot of time talking about that help it helps a little it's it's still a little I guess yeah it's a little confusing um I wonder the maps that are on the city website so proposed election sequence and alternative election sequence and it lists each council member and what they would be in for 2022 and 2024 and that was really helpful me see I'm not seeing that on this slide um however those um draft maps zero one growth growth do you show um current council members those correct and uh election but I can show one of those if you'd like me to put that might give a good visual just to show an example here this is 603 um all of them have the language in the bottom left as a sixth district map it'll have the mayor plus seats up this year because in this map council member governments is the only 2022 council member who's alone in the district not paired with any other council member is the four the district four we definitely got then district three is the vacancy so while district six has a mix of council members so the difference between the proposed and the alternate and then and and I should clarify there's no policy preference for the proposed over the alternate uh a poorly worded losses must show a proposed election sequence so we just had to pick proposed on one of them but there's no it's no better than the other and the proposed sequence the vacant seat is up in 2022 and then the seat that has 2022 members in 2024 members is up and seeing the alternate that flips that vacancy is 2024 with the districts that only have 2024 council members and the mixed seat moves to 2022 so that's kind of walking through the reason that seat which is from one scenario another that seat has 2022 council member in it and it has a 2024 council member so the council will have to wrestle with which is the better year where there's only one council member of course the seat just gets us here that the kind of key impact of this is I mean there's obviously lots of interest so if a if a council member who's a current term ends in 2022 ends up in a district that doesn't come up for election until 2024 this will be that council members last believe when this term ends there's no word for them to run so they would leave and they'd have to wait years and then come again on the flip side of a council member whose term is up in 2024 ends up in a 2022 seat that council member has a choice it's um the council member could just serve the rest of this term to 2024 that they're entitled to that and then in 2024 leave the council because they would reside as he's not up the other option and this is the twist that rarely happens but I'm aware of it happening twice the 2024 council member can actually run mid-term 2022 as if running for state assembly and if the council member wins that seat they're sworn into the 2022 district and they resign the last years of their at-large seat leaving a two-year at-large vacation first they'd be running against another council member whose term ends in 2022 but often that's the way it goes because at least it gives each council member the option to run no one is forced off without the option I do often emphasize that if you end up in that scenario we hope that everyone will will keep the election civil because if the 2022 council member wins 2024 council member is still on the council for two more years he would actually end up sitting next to the person you just ran against on the dais so we hope that they will keep that professional law on the issues and not end up with the hostility that goes over just for years but as I mentioned that doesn't usually happen usually one or the other doesn't run again but we are aware of two situations where someone has run mid-term in that guess a follow-up question at what point do we kind of set out those you know provisions of how we're gonna set up the election I mean I guess a lot of it depends on the outcome June with whether we go to six or seven but then at the same time yeah just kind of curious like when because this is something we need to prepare for now in terms of all these different scenarios so I'm just kind of curious about you know how that's coming along of what we're kind of doing as a city to prepare for different types of alternatives and options around elections I believe and Casey and the attorney jump in if I mistake this but I typically the would need to determine the points at the time that you choose the map you'll be needing to choose the sequence for your six six district map and need to choose your sequence for your seven district now so as you know sometimes this can be an issue with that fact which map is is selected and that is appropriate policy solid on that and our hope is that we'll resolve the map and sequencing in the near future not not closer to the ballot I know we have another series of maps so I'm gonna hold for us in my comments because some of them apply to I'll just I'll end my comments there and I have more to say round of questions okay member Myers I have a question about this the sort of how the proposed election sequencing maybe for Tony my understanding is that we have so we have to we will be doing an ordinance to adopt districts do we also at the same time if is that that an actual ordinance action or is that out of those not sure who who baby Doug yeah Tony go ahead unless you want me yeah I mean I think that it's contemplated that that would be part of the ordinance okay so that's where that's that's where that sequence comes in Tony so you would you would adopt right and then you would also define the sequencing to begin at three point two that's okay and can that sequence ever be changed by a vote of the for a charter amendment or something it could be changed by a charter amendment or by well I'd have to research whether it could be changed by subsequent ordinance um but I think once it's set and once it's established the intent is that it would remain in that sequence going I think that my one comment would be stability is always the best scene would be would be the best policy for for this kind of major change so thank you for clarifying that yeah we worked with one or two jurisdictions that have for various reasons mainly because they're adding seats needed to alter the sequence a little bit and as we mentioned you can't alter the term of someone that's already in office so you end up the only way to really alter it is a vote and you have to do a two-year term so to change the sequence of a seat you hold an election for a two-year seat and goes back to before your seat after that someone would have to run and run again so it is very difficult and and your point of stability very destabilizing yeah but in your case as you look at having two seats if you go with the mayor option two seats plus the mayor and then four seats if you ever wanted to try to get that to three we'd have that I just want to apologize to my colleagues and public and to the mayor um unfortunately I have to jump off I will try to come back in but I do to jump off learn a little bit about what the governor did today with the executive order on water so I'm sorry exactly but I'm gonna get all the way for a while I'll try to come back in though thank you thank you council member Myers okay so we received the presentation sorry I did have one more question I realized that the next item since it doesn't feel with the direct like mayor that it wouldn't be appropriate for me to ask this question at that time so the one question I did have along the lines of direct like mayors good that does that mean that the council would have to have the direct like mayor during this election cycle or would there be the opportunity or the option for them to use to have the direct like mayor happen during presidential election years just given that in non-presidential years there's lower voter turnout and then in presidential years and so it might make sense that if we're going to move with a direct like mayor that would happen during a year when you'd have higher voter turnout and just curious whether if that were to pass with with that charter amendment then kind of restrict the election of the left of the the directly elected mayor to being in kind of non-president here and I don't know that's the the city attorney uh I guess unless Doug has an answer that I'd ask you to hold that thought because I didn't review the proposed charter amendment uh bearing for this so I want to take a look at that to see if that specifies when the first election of the directly elected mayor would be but if it doesn't then I believe that the council would have some authority to make that call when you adopt thank you okay the presentation from the demographic consultant demographer uh Doug johnson uh national demographic corporation regarding the draft six district maps and election sequencing um and received public input on the draft map election um we will now move on to our next agenda item after a five-minute break so we will return in five minutes and then return to the next item on the agenda turn on your cameras welcome back thank you for that short break we will continue with our next agenda item before you go there mayor um I do have an answer to councilmember Cummings question that yeah the proposed charter amendment does contemplate the mayoral election occurring in 2022 uh it doesn't expressly require it but it does does state for the purposes of the election of a mayor and council members in the year 2022 for timing reasons only one round of elect will be held etc etc um and so my interpretation of the charter amendment is that it would um you know if if the election uh charter amendment passes and if the vote is certified by the july 6 deadline then there would be a mayoral election in november if um I also just wanted to ask if council I think it might be appropriate if council members have opinions on the maps that have been reviewed or on changes that they would like to that you would like to see made to any of the draft maps that have been discussed um it might be useful to get that feedback so that we can bring that back to the council when you meet again on the 19th of april okay we will oh councilmember Cummings I said a question is that in addition to what we mean if we've already kind of expressed some changes we wanted to be are you asking that we follow the emails with that in writing or any additional sorry I suppose you could send follow-up comments but I think it would be useful to give some limited direction to um the staff and the consultant so that we're not going back and preparing a multitude of additional maps so if the council has a preference uh even if it's a preference for you know some people commented on liking the east side of one map and the west side of it and the council you know wanted to give any sort of direction or my consensus um indicated preference it would be appropriate to do that now it sounds like um more specific direction based on the question comments for example black ocean corridor the lower west side and sea bright area too so um you know it seemed like there were three considerations um really focused on for um additional map draft um and whatever that looks like in terms of all the requirements population um equality and all the other requirements and is that are you looking for more specific direction or I guess I would defer to Doug on that question um if he feels like he has some direction or or to staff uh some ideas about what how how we might modify maps or what we should bring back and focus on for the next yes I think the the three you just mentioned I think we're just the kind of thing we're like um I think those three are sufficient for those goals but um the city attorney just wanted to make sure there wasn't that another thought that someone had thank you I think um and council members if you receive any other input um as soon as possible to uh send that on in addition to those three then I know Doug would appreciate it in order to have draft map drafted and posted at least seven days for our next public hearing mayor if I might just there's been a couple of questions about how do we guard against very mandaring or like that and just a point of certainly welcome any thoughts the way we handle messages that come in outside of a public meeting is that we would come back and say here's the map that implements your request from council member so we continue to have that full transparency um even if it's a thought you have tomorrow or the next others thank you for clarifying that okay um are we ready to move on to the next agenda item like we are that up on the agenda is public hearing to receive input from the community regarding the selection of a seven district map and election point for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item that you would like comment on now is the time all in using instructions on your the order will be a presentation of the item from staff followed by questions from council we will then take public comment and then return to council sir to hear are you here and to translate that sure I will thank you mayor los del personal de la ciudad después de eso se va de debatir entre los consejales y después se va a abrir otra vez la sección para comentarios al público gracias gracias okay I will now hand this over to our staff bc he martin demographer Doug johnson national demographic corporation welcome back you're up Doug that's good i have a shorter presentation without all the introduction up just as briefly we still have the same federal the requirements the rules are the exact same depending on whether or not you're drawing six or seven and then the traditional criteria are the same um obviously uh because we're drawing seven districts now 63 000 people in the city have not changed so where with six six districts district aim to be a little bit over 10 000 with seven we're aiming to be right about 9 000 so each district is a bit smaller get seven districts and so as was somewhat previewed in some of the public comment it is possible now to draw a purely university district seven as you see in the app 101 and then actually to the point that councilmember commons was making about district map this case our district four crosses the river puts puts the two sides of the river together um that largely happens because district two is smaller so it does not extend other than right at the the water it does all the way over the river um we still keep a northeast turn kind of both sides of the freeway just one um get a much more concentrated uh district five there west cliff drive and above that and then uh over on the west side 101 there's again that western district we saw earlier but now because it's smaller it does not extend up into the university so and then in this one you get the university as I mentioned all in district seven is all university and then three is really the northeast side of bay street mixing university that's map 101 map 102 kind of roti that again instead of having three districts on the on the water says two and this is a little bit of the idea that we talked about earlier about shifting those two that now you have district four on the water district two is kind of inland I can see it jogs a little bit up and down but really moral and point of vista are the two boundary roads also tried to show a different approach to district one where instead of it being well that's the whole freeway corridor this map districts one and three get considerable freeway area that means that district one comes farther south over on the side of town so along Frederick street that neighborhood becomes part of just um six seven is still university dominant it's a little bit different really one thing we always try to do in these maps is give you a variety of options um there aren't a lot of ways to draw that seven without getting fairly wacky how it ends up so this one's slight changes but given the population there's not a lot of writing and then over the west end of town you can see again we this one takes a very different approach of rotating five and six so this six no longer comes down to the water it just goes through those five to the whole ocean the third and final one this is the um the look at can we draw even in seven districts could we have two seats that are in the university so this would show um how we get two seats in the university really the goal of the difference is to prompt that question we were discussing earlier about different communities might benefit from being in one seat or might benefit from being in multiples they want to show an option that would clearly um eat all the rules let's still have two seats first so you get that in this map really Bay Street running um changes names up farther north but uh Bay Street comes to defining back or left the district seven um seven does then because it's not all university it then does come down Bay Street into non-use university um neighborhoods and pick up population get uh six and this now because seven's coming down to get population six becomes that L shape you're rounded the population then five this is similar to the 602 map right where you saw it going from cliff drive up in this case all the way up past and in this case we get a again that horizontal two and four but a different configuration and people thinking about and wondering about what really are the the boundaries that make sense over there on the side of town a lot of flexibility there uh as long as we're making trades that are equal in population can shift to this broadway or go all the way to fred rick who's going down those kinds of possibilities so perhaps even more than the six district maps these three seven district maps or concepts designed to start the discussion and get your reactions the other thing I should mention is that I don't have it in this presentation but it was mentioned by um uh someone from the university called in earlier there was a there is a map that's come in that they sent in and asked could we take a glance at it and see if it looked like it was legal um which uh Casey and I worked together and we got back to them on that it wasn't clear at that time whether they wanted it posted yet or if they were just getting that back now that it's been mentioned in the previous hearing we will post it I also um what I mentioned that was included in the um attachments uh to the agenda package that that map and um their specific feedback in the demographic data that you generated that's part of the package that the council received so it's going to council and it's on the uh the agenda page for this meeting and we'll get it up the only reason it isn't wasn't sure whether they actually wanted it now that they've proposed it we'll sort of so uh same questions this time of which maps per and um on your preferred maps what would make them even better we have that same slide thank you um let's see we had questions and a lot of comments already come in through the interactive um site which thank you that was really helpful to read through and it seems that I it was over 70 that preferred map 101 um over the other two um I will see if council members have any questions um vice mayor Watkins I don't think I have any questions I think it kind of we got at a lot of the bigger earlier for me so thank you mayor council member boulder I haven't had time I yeah I don't have any this time and then council member brown have any questions don't I'll have to save my comments for after okay council member coming do you have any questions on these maps not so much questions I do have some comments on the maps so I can either save them now or wait okay let's let's go through questions right council member calentary johnson thank you mayor yeah also no and I will take it out the public comment then for the seven district map their draft map hidden commenting on the seven district map and election once item raise your hand either by calling by dialing star nine on your phone or selecting these hands in the webinar polls of your computer when it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set eight minutes I will go out and I sounds raised the first name is Dennis go ahead and unmute yourself good evening um number 102 for the west side whose I believe truly reflects communities it keeps all of the lower west side together along west cliff in the upper west side together our city together I think map number 103 for the west side is a disaster the district five in this map goes from lighthouse field up to ice and that is not that is just not a also housing for along Columbia avenue in the lower west side one side of the street would be in one district and the other side would be another and that is a very very arbitrary uh delineation so at least for the west side I think map 103 is terrible but west side opinion map 102 uh reflects thank you thank you for your comment our next speaker is phone number ending in 0252 comments on seven district map go ahead and press star yes you are welcome what is it can you say that I think that's one case other league thank you I have a caller ending in 1705 is the number and we're taking public comment on this agenda items seven district map elections thanks for taking my call I think map 101 by far is the best the these hello can you hear me yes oh great I think map 101 is the best piece I um want to revisit my comments on the six I mean this is related to more so with seven districts regarding the university district and my comment was putting this through I I absolutely believe that everyone deserves to represent the council my point was in certain areas such as land use planning housing uh and housing university is completely exempt from municipal code that seems really unfair and democratic that a representative of a single district that is completely exempt from municipal control would have a vote in determining what goes on in every single district besides its district represents so here's an example the resident front code client um relocation payment for just cause frank control all these things the representative that represented exclusively the university be able to vote to implement in every area of the city except for the district which it represents which that representative that council members I think of course I believe everyone should have a vote everyone should have a representative on council but it could be some process where either the university agrees to protect themselves those municipal ordinances or that council member has to choose for issues where its own district was exempt so um please don't misconstrue what I'm saying I do believe that everyone deserves a representative thank you okay thank you for your comment looks like that will conclude our public comment on the agenda item of seven district maps um there was I will bring it back to the council and I did want to ask the question for maybe staff there was a for a comment or a question regarding someone who was not able to navigate the technology to see the map have there been in person or other options available for community members to access absolutely we thank you mayor brinner we have had the maps publicly available in multiple locations including London Nelson and the library I am also happy to facilitate getting um our our local citizen a set of the maps and whatever resources they need so I I will I want to make sure that whoever wants to understand this has all the resources thank you so much okay great so uh at this point we have now made a presentation on the seven district maps and we didn't specify the or discuss the election when seeing on these maps um Doug Johnson I wonder if you can just briefly speak to that aspect yeah certainly happy to um ends up being very similar um number of six each up up each year is a little simpler because there's no mayor question so it would be three seats will be up in 2022 and four seats will be up in 2024 let me share very briefly with the pds of people um for example this is map 101 the one thing that happens in 101 that I don't think happened in any of the six district maps is that we have two vacancies so you can see for 101 proposal is the pose for the alternate we have two vacancy so that could their way one of those vacancy would be up in 2022 the other one up in 2024 that would be completely up to public comment and the council's ultimate decision to say does it make more sense for district this case um six or seven up in 2022 for the proposed election that's factors it could play in there I think um we're already touched on a little bit if a district is traditionally low turnout then we we tend to recommend putting that on the presidential year so that there's more voters printing out that election so that can be one factor the the only legal guidance on that is the sequence to come up with the sequence in line with the goals of the college buddy right back if you had a vacancy um there was heavily latino or another protected class didn't have a count you know historically was not represented didn't have a council member that would that actually leads to an interesting challenge if you want that seat up right away so it gets the legislator as soon as possible or probably more likely want that seat up in a presidential year um the reason for that even though it would mean waiting a little bit is that this decision that you talked about earlier is actually permanent so getting someone elected two years sooner um probably isn't worth being in the low turnout election or as you put it in presidential year get that turn up get that turn up I don't know that that really plays in here as much but I leave that to you your discretion in the end to say six versus seven if you went with those like if you flip that then where the the district five that has multiple council members in it then the two vacancy as you go through the different maps are different but all the options out the three seats of course thank you all right um very helpful to see and hear thank you I'm just seeing my notes here okay I'm going to bring it out full uh and council member talentary Johnson thank you um I have a question are are the six strict maps the seven district maps are they aligned if there's one sort of map I mean I know obviously there's one with six and one with seven but are we trying to like um do the groupings of neighborhoods similarly question sure um they aren't really aligned um there's no there's certainly no correlation that's best um it may be useful for me to briefly show the interactive map um because that's the easiest way to compare the map so that just so people are here with what I can do there we go so in this map you have all the maps over on the right hand side and you click and change from map to map obviously and you can even enter an address and zoom in you know you can also a little odd name but if you change the base map gallery click on that option you can change to a satellite as well if you if you get in that's often you really want to see where the lines are that but to your point um you can compare the maps by set by turning them on together so I mean so you can see the differences between 101 and 103 are where there are lighter colors where the colors stay bright you map map you try to compare 101 to 601 you get some so you can see district one is almost identical both here's the extra thousand what it gets so this is a handy way to compare maps where do they map and then the lighter colors are where they there's definitely some similarities between 101 and 601 but then um that that's probably the most useful tool that's linked on the city's project website and if you pull this I'll send this power point to oh I this power point to go on the website and just send about an hour ago there's nothing yet but uh people can get the link to that as okay thank you council member coming I didn't want to follow up there was a question from a member of the public related to rank voice voting and how that might be able to suffice the issues with the california voting rights act and so I'm wondering maybe if the city attorney might be able to comment on that question that was asked you know rather than moving sure central for voice voting that might as well talk about both issues um it is correct that the Santa Monica case is pending before the california supreme court and if the california supreme court uh upholds the decision of the court of appeal then that might have a bearing on whether or not um the city is legally obligated to transition to district elections um it but it wouldn't necessarily mean that the city is immune from liability on the california voting rights act um each you know as as you're aware um vast majority of cases in fact I think Santa Monica is the unique exception um cities have either titulated or or lost most voting rights act challenges in california um there is a friend of the court refiled by the attorney general in the Santa Monica case in which um in which the attorney general makes a statement that uh alternative forms of uh of elections such as ranked voice voting could be an alternative to district elections the problem is it it is not a it's not a legal precedent whereby a court has ordered a city to transition to to rank choice voting so there's a little bit of risk associated with that and of the remedies that might be available um district elections is the only one that is actually specified by um the california voting rights act although um as I said arguably an alternative uh mechanism like ranked choice voting could uh address a voting rights act uh uh lossy we just add to that too when practical it is while your Latino percentage is almost identical to Santa Monica's um Santa Monica does have three Latinos on it so it's a you know I think there's going to be a if Santa Monica does prevail support I think there'll be a lot of people that say yay and then they'll read the decision and realize it doesn't help so it will be it's it's not so much if Santa Monica wins or not it does Santa Monica win and on what basis do they win they will forever and and the this is in your career saying from from my practical perspective if you're in districts they can't sue you the cvr is a safe harbor you have an alternate system they can sue you and it might be a successful defense but you still have to pay for in thanks and then um had a few comments um similarly I'm wondering if you put the maps up as well so it's um similar to what um individual well one one oh one seems like you know in terms of some of the issues we've heard around sea bright um that it kind of addresses that along with some issues with on the beach flats and lower lower ocean although it could also you know shift a little bit further south have more of that ocean to be corridor um incorporate into district four so if there's a way that that might be able to come forward it would be good to see what that option could look like um just because again from demographic socioeconomic perspectives there's a lot of similarities between people who live from the beach flats all the way up to that ocean corridor and that might be a reasonable voting block in terms of trying to keep those people together um but at the same time you know wouldn't the person who called in about map 102 with the west side lower west side and the upper west side kind of staying in their own areas makes sense as well because those are pretty continuous neighborhoods that have shared interests I would say also with number 103 though that um one of the benefits is one one of the members of the public pointed out that students do make up 30 of the population in city of Santa Cruz so having two representatives on the council could be of benefit and with the map in 103 it also allows for if students want to move off campus that there are places where they can move to in the city that wouldn't keep them restricted to kind of that campus area like they do in 101 and 102 um at the same time though that by sharing um that broader space there is the potential for students to not be elected because they're then competing with people who have um more access access to financial resources so um just wanted to put those comments out there on the maps um and then um in addition to that um it would be good like thank you for also showing the online tools and something that might be worth adding to those layers is the socioeconomic map with kind of percentage of renters and also the demographics map so that people can see that as you kind of overlay where these districts are they can see how that impacts where um both different socioeconomic classes and also different demographic live within those areas um and then the last comment I want to make is that no I think one thing that people might not be aware of is that there's nothing legally binding us to going towards district elections and I think one thing that's um you know within the language that's been put on the ballot is that it's a little misleading because it makes people seem as if that we either go to six or we go to seven but since we're giving the community an option there really should be an option on the ballot of that we don't go to districts and that we they the people fight and I think there's good reason why we should give people that option because um one of the comments that was just made um by the demographer you know Anna Monica has three Latinos on their city council but we also had history Latinos run one so David Taraz's a few terms on the city council he also served as mayor um and you know he was elected in 2010 and in 2014 so elected twice very recently um we have the past few elections um four African Americans who have run and who've also won that happened with in 2016 we had two African American run in 2020 who both won and then we had another African American who uh two African Americans who ran in 2020 and also won uh we have our first Iranian representative won in 2020 we have six women right now in our city council in one man so there is or and well six yeah six women in one man so there is an argument made that don't have racially polarized voting here in the city of Santa Cruz and that should be an option as well and one of the comments that someone made earlier as well is with the socioeconomic factor really playing a role which even if we do move district collection um for low income community to run it's really difficult because and I'm just converting to transparent California when I was there in 2020 I made $41,000 $41,724 as mayor and as a council member in 2019 made $20,862 so that socioeconomic factor is a really big driver and it's gonna run uh for office because it's extremely difficult for low income people in this community to run for office so I just wanted to make those comments because um there are a number of people someone can call then who really don't want to see us go in this direction and just want to help with their voice this conversation um because that option is present now and I think that you know given the options we're providing that should be something that on is um whether or not we want to they know to know to this right those are all the comments I have on this and thank you for the opportunity thank you council member shane vice mayor what yeah thank you mayor um and I just wanted to see if maybe Doug you could clarify for us but what I think your point with the Santa Monica Harrison what's getting at is that the majority minority of that community does have representation on the council whereas in the city of Santa Monica majority minority which is a lot in that population doesn't have representation and therefore there's a difference is that accurate yes you know as your secretary will tell you trying to guess what the Supreme Court's going to rule is nearly impossible and it's a little strange that the you don't even have a hearing scheduled that of course we have no idea where they're actually but yes you're correct when the Santa Monica not only do they have to be arguably there's a potential fourth Latino depending on how you define Latino on the council and an African-American on the council and the other twist there is that the proposed remedy district the plaintiffs have asked for would put three the three Latinos and the African-American all in one seat so there's a the league of voters is filed saying they're dismissed this case not that they're not in violation of not that they don't have polarized voting but because the harm would be worse than at large of course the four uh protected class so then if that's the ruling they call that legal voters request that would be more or less useless for all the other because it's so Santa Monica in which case the fact that Santa Monica's Latino population is good citizen voting age population yours is 16 percent but I can definitely see we're both thinking here demographic claim that really will apply to us it might or if I not we really won't know a thing you know with respect because the Santa Monica case came up with respect that and I imagine and so maybe if those of you who are more familiar please um fair um I I'm thinking that there's also a question about the number of candidates given demographic and how many are elected so like case of give Santa Cruz example majority of which you know candidates have won when they've run and not all and so I I'm going to put it out there I I think that may be a factor as well there are considerations I've been here the conversations that I've been and thinking about this uh state newspapers they there is a question about whether through evidence of racialized voting as provided right because right now all these claims are being made without any evidence and so I guess that say something about that I mean I think this goes this is the uh the ultimate point of what the attorney was saying earlier nobody has successfully defended themselves and so we don't know where that bar is when no one has left the bar all we know is that we don't know where the bar is yes you're exactly right to the letter of the law not just a numbers game there should be proof of polarization for voters or for candidates but the very few cases so far have been all over how you measure and find that just good pieces and as was mentioned earlier pieces are so expensive that Monica won't say how much they spend I've been estimating 8 to 10 million they spent on their case I was sold about two weeks ago that I was significant by someone in the know that I was significantly they're estimating much they've spent on themselves so that's why all the points you've made this councilman was made the public made about different systems that could be legitimate are right the problem is how much it cost to prove that in court and one thing I should clarify on Polaroid on ranked choice voting well 2020 all the jurisdictions in California had ranked choice voting had ranked choice voting in district so San Francisco, Berkeley, San Leandro open they all have districts and then they use ranked choice voting within district 2020 Albany is the first to go to uh ranked choice voting at large and it's it's not it's never had a voting rate so there are other there are other systems there's people to voting there are other varieties that would probably be better options ranked choice voting is the most common alternative but it's used thank you for that sorry go ahead I was just gonna say thank you for that because that was another question I was gonna ask about so I was just going to point out that um while the council still has some work to with respect to moving the seven district uh election process forward as far as the six district uh issue that is on the ballot in November and so the California Supreme Court do any number of things and that part of amendment will be on the ballot so if I think the question of whether or not we should have uh district elections I mean I think that's probably been established by the council at this point and the focus of this meeting is really intended to to get council member preferences on the on the map options yeah thank you uh Tony for that I I was asked a question primarily well I just I know I think you know by now that I disagree with this process um and I disagree with extortionist moves to uh that's the broadest place um but I was asked mostly thinking about uh what the potential factors for determining the outcome of the Santa Monica case and the extent to which they may apply here since I heard a question suggesting that and I heard some discussion that it wouldn't apply and um while the political will with the council it cares that it has sailed I am not going to give up on having the conversation about other systems that may be more representative more democratic and uh prevent the kind of vote dilution in uh our electoral or our winner take all which will be even more amplified just take all so um I just want to say a couple of things I I don't have a whole lot of input on the configuration of the map I think any map that we choose is going to some people will be happy with it and others won't there isn't there just isn't going to um uh you know I I heard people say well it's arbitrary they're looking at the west side of their vision they don't like arbitrary but it makes sense over on the east side and then from other part you know maybe with a different perspective saying that's arbitrary over here so that's just going to get a challenge that we're faced as a decision and um so I don't have a a whole lot of input about um which map or wrong feelings about really confiding lines uh with the exception though I did want to just raise the point that um council member Cummings earlier and it's been just my mayor Booner raised it as well uh that we really ought to try to find a way whether we end up with us for both the map select make for six and seven to provide for lower at that a minimum lower ocean in terms of the the demographic that if we're really committed to addressing um the under-representation of our Latinx community that would most perspective way try to address that district setting so I do think that that may take a little bit more to figure the lines but I think it's important that we look at and then I would add um I I agree with the right that um that that's like being right together makes a lot of sense um but the one that I feel very strongly about is the is the lower ocean I think there's a way that we that without disrupting the rest of and then in term I just want to make one last comment um uh just following up on about uh the framed realm of possibility that we are asked voters that are you're asking for that without a whole lot of context I've had one uh member of the public showed up today and what is that like what is going on here why is that can reference uh web site for in on that the page is very well organized a lot of documents here and I want to hard especially for all trying to make this challenging process as accessible to the public and and to and informative public as possible just if the challenge um so you know I I'm concerned about that and I I think we should I think the public good people um vote on whether or not they want to have just a ballot and telling them you're getting this and oh but you know and you have a choice about whether or not it's gonna come with six district or seven is you know it's a false choice not really it's not really product voters here so um I'm going to continue to share my perspective on that as this process um I think I'll leave it there for today thank you council member brown council member calentary johnson thank you I think tony gotty impressed what I was going to say but um I think my colleagues makes very good um points from diluting votes um and we are where we are and my understanding is that that we have conceded go that direction for all the reasons that mr. kandadi um shared tonight and johnson shared tonight and I just want to make sure it's clear for those who are listening that what's for us right now is talking about the 607 district um that's the decision that the council before I was on the made and that's the direction the city's going so you don't call into it thank you okay council member golder any final um comment first no I think that I you know I I appreciate everybody's work on this and it'll be interesting to see if we you know end up going um just about that makes the most sense to me um after you know analyzing them and taking into account thoughts with the 701 but you know I could wait like I feel like I still have a lot of work to do on that thank you johnson do you have the direction you need for seven district maps draft before that public training date yes although thank you although we had a logistical note which is likely given the request that you made for us to draw and I expect now that draft maps are out there we'll probably get a handful of public drawn maps as well at the next hearing we're likely to push fairly hard for you to narrow the options down quite a bit or perhaps like to map so if there are thoughts you have or or comments you see from the public that you would like drawn please forward those at the time you have those thoughts so that we can get them posted and live and consider them at the next rather than waiting and then that that means saying you know hey I want I'd like to see so if you can ask us for those now that you can evaluate on that the sooner we get that feedback and he can generate that the sooner we can post it and make copies and get those out so that people so that you all and public being on that so the sooner the better and may I also add mayor brunner we have copies of the maps here at city hall and sets with the demographic data that are nice nice and then I also have very large maps that are out in the lobby area that you come and look at more closely and if anybody would like to get any of the additional resources I'd be happy to connect with you and they can reach me at eight three one four two zero five zero one nine eight three one four two zero five zero one nine that number is on our website but you can also just try the city manager's office if you didn't get that number thank you so much Casey I know that um there you know I share the same concern that was brought forward as well regarding public outreach and engagement and I know that um to date there are many efforts to uh have community participation and um to get the information out there and having the the tools for everyone to kind of craft their idea of of their own district map representation um so I know there've been um I believe virtual and in-person meetings and um working with uh you know community organizations and really um um intentionally working with um different community groups to get that information out there so thank you um again uh the the city website is theoskinacruz.com slash elections and cce marred one four two zero five zero one nine so much for sharing your information um and we hope to uh have updated maps our next step will be updated draft maps at our next public hearing April 19th and we will be narrowing it down to um those map options and it will be interesting to see some of that for that data here and just a date so the public is aware so the maps for the night considered on 19th will have to be posted by the 12th um so we are hoping for those residents who want to try their hand at the online tool that's linked to the project site if they can try to submit those by the 7th um that it is a little tricky thing they need to submit it time for us to process and post it hopefully they can submit it at least by the by midnight 7th process posted I agree to consider it on so by April 7th essentially a week but you have to get the maps up there first um they're most most of them are out there I just 701 I need you see at the UCSC generated okay thank you for yes okay great wonderful thank you for that information thanks for being here this evening um that does include this public screen on both items tonight you received input on the district draft map and election went and the seven district draft map thank you so much meeting is adjourned