 At number 12.1, 12.1 is the next regular agenda item of 12.1. Okay, anybody else? And now we'll have a public comment about how many people would like to speak on the public comment. This will be anything that's not on the agenda or is on the consent agenda. Okay. So we'll allow three minutes. Chair, this is also for people who wanna speak on the regular agenda item, if they're not able to stay for the regular agenda as well. Okay, that'll be fine. Anybody that would like to speak on an item that is on the regular agenda, but you cannot stay, you can only speak once though. Okay, that'll be fine. Thank you. Good morning, board members. My name is Steve Holman. I've lived in Bonny Dune for 44 years and I'm here to oppose your board certifying the election for a CSA 48 tax increase. Sent you all emails and I sent one again last night and I sent a hard copy, dropped it off before 8.30 this morning at the clerk's office. So I'm not gonna try to read four pages of my letter to you. I just want you to know that I believe there were a lot of irregularities in the election and that they should be addressed before you certify the election. And I hope you get a chance to read my email or my hard copy letter that I dropped off at the clerk. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, nobody else, we have anybody else? Okay, we'll move on to the regular agenda or our action on the consent agenda. I'm sorry. Okay, except for item number 26, right? Any comments? Yeah, I just had a comment on item number 19, the climate action manager. The strong recommendation from the commission on the environment was very well, very much appreciated as well as a recommendation from the CAO. We're getting ahead of this issue. It's upon us and we read about it all the time on the climate changes that are taking place. And up to this point, the our own planning department I want to mention too has done a terrific job on the sustainable sustainability aspect of what we're trying to work on. And starting with our climate action strategy and the teamwork this county did and all this departments to bring about Monterey Bay Community Power which this county led the way and we now have five customer agencies or five counties as customers in that agency now. But moving forward, we really need to implement the adaptation initiatives outlined in the climate action strategy. We need somebody to be at the front of the line to direct this. And I'm very pleased that we're going to be able to add a climate action manager to the government of Santa Cruz County. That's it. Yes. Good morning, Chair. Just a item or two to comment on the consent agenda. Also on item 19, I'm glad to see us moving forward with this. I appreciate the work that our CAO's office did in creating this position, the job description. I think the task of the appropriate one. And I think that as the board letter points out, the state is seriously considering putting a major resiliency bond on the ballot in November and having this person in place to help us access these funds to be able to prepare for the changes in the climate and its impact on our infrastructure will make a big difference. So I think we're being ahead of the curve is going to pay off for us. On item number 35, I just want to thank the members of the parks and recs commission. This is a great group. They do a lot of good work. And Mariah Roberts, who is my representative on there has taken the additional effort to be a leader in County Park Friends. And we saw just a couple of weeks ago, the opening of Shannon Clear Park and Leo's Haven. And I tell you, I go by there every day and that park is filled every day. So if you haven't got there, hope you find a parking space. And lastly, I'll just comment on item 41. I'm glad to see that we're moving forward on looking at the old Harbor Veterinary Hospital building and trying to figure out how we can use it to meet our behavioral health needs. My hope is that we can accomplish both these tasks. And I think it's going to be a challenge for us to identify the resources for it, but both a crisis stabilization center and a children's crisis center would make a huge difference in our community and they're very much needed. And so I hope we can pull both these pieces off. Thank you. I'm okay. Okay. All right, do we have a motion? I would move the consent agenda as amended. Second. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposition? None. Passes unanimously. We'll go to the regular agenda and how many people would like to speak on the regular agenda? Well, we have to call the item first. Right, that would be item number seven. And that is on the schedule. Consider the final report and presentation of the advisory tax force on justice and gender. Take related actions recommended by the task force as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Caput and members of the board. Today we have an item before you to consider the final recommendations of the advisory task force on justice and gender. So I'd like to take a moment to introduce Dr. Susan Green who's been facilitating the task force these past two years. As many of you are aware, Dr. Green has been working in the criminal justice system for over 20 years. She has conducted and published a number of studies on women in jail with a focus on their social histories, risk factors that contribute to their incarceration and what women face upon release in jail. She was the founding director of the GEMMA program and is currently a research associate up at UCSC. And in 2017, she presented a report that was supported by the sheriff's office entitled gender matters, a profile of women in Santa Cruz County jail. The board responded to that report and presentation by convening this task force. And today members of the task force are here to present their final recommendations. So with that, I will introduce Dr. Susan Green. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Good morning, Chair Caput and members of the board. I wanna thank you for convening this advisory task force on justice and gender. Our presentation today marks the end of a two-year term of this task force. And I wanna start by asking task force participants to please stand and be recognized for your participation and full dedication in our efforts to address the unique needs of women cycling through our criminal justice system. It is truly an honor to work and walk alongside these justice and help leaders. I also want to extend thanks to Nicole Coburn, Assistant County Administrative Officer for your participation and support during these two years. And to senior administrative analyst Sven Stafford who also contributed and was there every time. Thank you Supervisor Leopold for serving as the board's representative and showing up regularly. I wanna thank my research assistant Jennifer Hill for her commitment and hours of research behind the scenes. And I again want to acknowledge the sheriff's office for supporting the Gender Matters research. I wanna recognize the Marriott's Fairfield Inn in Suits on 41st Avenue where they generously hosted most of our meetings because they also support our mission as well as the Inn at Pasatiempo who donated their space as backup for a couple of meetings too. We started with 19 appointed representatives and nearly all made it a priority to come every month. Over time new partners attended and then came regularly and our final few meetings on reentry, healthcare and prevention had up to 30 and 40 participants. The level of engagement of this group of incredible women and a few good men has been truly remarkable. Thank you all for stepping up. We discussed various topics with a gender lens that is from the perspective of women and the effects on them and their children and with sensitivities to the intersections of race, class, culture, sexual orientation and sexual identity. Looking at these practices and policies from a woman's point of view is especially important because the criminal justice system was designed by men, for men and largely overlooks women's differences. One of the core values of this task force has been to include people with lived experience in the criminal justice system to ensure that our reform efforts are successful at reducing harm. Nothing about us without us is a quote we have embraced and there were several representatives on the task force who brought statistics to life and our models of resilience, healing and transformation. They are also experts and made valuable contributions to the recommendations that you'll hear today. It is their experiences and the courage to share them that task force members have consistently highlighted as the most valuable and informative aspect of our work together. Sadly, women's experiences are often stories of survival of gender-based violence and pain, raw and real trauma and recurring. We've talked a lot about trauma over these two years and we tried to be trauma informed in our own meetings. To that end, I want to acknowledge that much of what you will hear today is painful. And it is important that we not forget or walk away or shy from hearing it. In order to instigate positive change and to heal. I encourage people to please reach out to your support networks as needed. We are here today to present recommendations that mark important steps toward expanding effective substance use disorder treatment, reducing sexual assault and domestic violence and addressing gender-specific needs in the judicial process, as well as preventing incarceration. Our first recommendation requests that the Sheriff's Office and Health Services Agency coordinate screenings for medication-assisted treatment, also called MAT. Develop a pilot program to provide MAT in custody and ensure that equal access, outreach and education is provided to women. 84% of the women profiled in gender matters struggled with addiction. Their high rates of sexual and domestic victimization are inextricably linked to their addictions and incarceration. I'd like to introduce Amanda Magana to speak to this recommendation. Good morning, board. My name is Amanda Engeldra Magana. I'm the director of medication-assisted treatment at Janice of Santa Cruz. Medication-assisted treatment is a standard of care for treating individuals with opioid use disorders. This includes using one of three FDA-approved medications, methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone. Janice has been the sole provider of medication-assisted treatment at the Santa Cruz County Jail for 15 years, where we have provided methadone for jail staff to dispense to enroll Janice Community Clinic or Janice South County patients. We are also able to do intakes on incarcerated pregnant women who use opioids. But other than those few women, no one else has access to starting treatment while incarcerated. As we know, a number of women involved with the criminal justice system suffer from mental health and substance use issues. They go into jail having those issues and are released to the community where that cycle of use and crime starts again. This drives our nation's crime rate and the most vulnerable remains sick. Not only that, but individuals released from jail are some of the most likely to overdose. Studies indicate that in the two weeks post-release from jail, individuals are anywhere from 40 to 129 times more likely to die from a drug overdose than the general population. The jail setting is a unique and ideal place to screen for substance use disorders. We can offer and start treatment using medications. Jails and prisons are increasingly doing this across the country. Offering medication-assisted treatment to individuals with opiate use disorder is an evidence-based best practice form of treatment. Long-term treatment using methadone and buprenorphine has been shown to reduce drug use, overdose, mortality, crime, and recidivism. In Santa Cruz County, we have worked to build a comprehensive system where no door is the wrong door to access and start treatment for individuals with substance use disorders. This includes partnerships with primary care, our emergency departments, hospitals, and substance use treatment facilities both in North and South County, all of whom offer buprenorphine. We have successfully built a system that can meet with individuals the very next day upon release so that there is no interruption in treatment. The missing link in this no wrong door approach has been starting treatment in the jails. We are passionate about this next step of our mission to save lives, reduce suffering, and help build a safer community. Thank you. Thank you, Amanda. And we wanna recognize that we are aware this is not the first or the last conversation on providing medication-assisted treatment in custody, but this one is with a gender lens recognizing women's differences. We're encouraged to hear that efforts to make this happen are well underway and also recognize that Sheriff Hart has been in support of providing Matt and custody for many years. Our next recommendation focuses on reducing risk of sexual assault upon release from jail. Fortunately, our jail in Santa Cruz no longer releases women at midnight. However, women still report being released late in the day, sometimes after dinner, with no place to go but the streets. I'd like to invite Alisa to Qog to speak to this recommendation. Hi, I'd like to preface this statement with, this is written by a woman who is a current resident of the Gemma House and she has given me the privilege of reading her words and I'd like to say that these words, even being written are proof of a lot of healing and growth. My name is Natalie and I am a current resident of the Gemma program. I have struggled with a substance use disorder for many years over which I have had numerous experiences with the justice system. The issue I would like to speak to this morning is in regards to preventing sexual and relapse for women upon their release from either jail or from their hold in booking by eliminating or minimizing evening releases or early morning releases and coordinating with resources in our community like Monarch Services to help ensure that all women being held in custody are aware that they have a safe place to go when released unexpectedly or during times that make them vulnerable to victimization. Unfortunately, I have direct experience with the consequences of being released in the early morning and early evening without a plan and with no idea of where to go but the streets. Several years ago after being released from Elmwood Jail in San Jose in the early evening hours without information about emergency shelter resources or proper attire to keep warm, I found myself desperate, scared, and willing to take shelter behind a row of bushes along the street with a man willing to look after me and provide me with some extra layers of clothes and drugs stipulated upon a sexual exchange. Later that morning I met a pimp who was also willing to let me take shelter in his motel room with a similar set of expectations which led me to being violently raped and beaten by numerous men. I was strangled, beaten in the face and body and left severely injured with a swollen face and completely red eyes from my blood vessels being burst. After being taken to the hospital less than 48 hours from my time of release from jail, I was told that I had cerebral contusions among the host of other injuries. I also had an experience in Santa Cruz County years ago where I was released in the early morning hours after being held in booking likewise with no plan or information about emergency shelter resources or proper attire to keep warm. I found myself using drugs on the streets downtown with a man within an hour of my release and later walking to my abusive ex-boyfriend's house to take shelter because I wanted to be off the streets and just didn't know where else to go. While I understand there are limitations when it comes to the resources that can be provided to women being released from custody, I feel that both minimizing or eliminating late night or early morning releases in unison with clear communication to the women in jail or booking around how to access the safety services like Monarch that are available are absolutely imperative in minimizing assault, relapse and degradation of these women. I am one of these women. I have struggled with addiction and I have made many mistakes that have led to run-ins with the justice system. And I'm also a loving mother, a good friend, a hard worker and a passionate and curious woman with the desire to learn, grow and be a productive and happy human being. My only hope is that the justice system might find willingness to be more trauma informed in their decisions in regards to the women being released who are vulnerable, scared and generally just want to make their way back to a life worth living, a life to be proud of. Thank you for your time and thank you for allowing me to have a voice, Natalie. This is really hard to hear. Yet we need to listen and not ignore what is being said and what is happening here in our County. As an advocate and representative of Monarch services, I have seen firsthand the repercussions of women not having a safe place to be at night. And that includes a heightened risk of sexual assault, human trafficking and relapse. Of the 31 women interviewed in the gender matters report, nearly half indicated that they did not have a safe place to live upon release. It is the recommendation of the task force to request that the sheriff's office and probation department work with Monarch services to develop policies and protocols for an emergency release line to reduce the number of women being released from jail to the streets with no safe place to go and mitigate the associated risk of sexual assault and relapse and overdose. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa and Maria. That was Maria Luna from Monarch services. And I want to also acknowledge again, Natalie, for sharing her story with us. She couldn't be here today. She had a visit with her son which is exactly where she should be. Several women have expressed that finding their voice to share their stories as survivors of abuse reframes it and helps take the shame out of it. They have turned their stories of survival into experiences of empowerment and they remind us of our shared humanity. Our next two recommendations are about addressing gender specific needs in the judicial process. The majority of women in the gender matter study reported that they had experienced the incarceration of a parent as a child and for many separation from their own child is deeply traumatic to both their children and themselves. Colleen McLaughlin is here to speak to this recommendation. Good morning, board. My name is Colleen McLaughlin and I am the intake and outreach coordinator for the Gemma transitional housing program. I work at the Gemma house and teach classes with women in the Blaine Street women's facility. We discussed these recommendations in classes last week and the women had a lot to say about this recommendation and their own experiences. In two classes, we had a total of 15 women. 80% are mothers and about half reported having a parent who had been incarcerated which is consistent with the sample of women represented in the gender matters report. I'm here to share their voices. Some of the women asked me to use their names. Others chose to remain anonymous. Women talked about their experiences as children of incarcerated parents. Elizabeth said, my father was locked up in and out my whole life. I'm a daddy's girl and it really affected me not having a father growing up. What helped me get through this experience? To be honest, nothing did. Another woman said, I had a huge void not being ripped away from my family would have helped me. I numbed the pain away. Mothers also talked a lot about how incarceration has affected them as mothers, how their incarceration affects their children and what they believe could help prevent these cycles of trauma and incarceration. Marissa said, I feel as though my identity to be my son's mother has been stripped from both my son and I. I'm my son's only parent. His father passed away before he was born. I've been through a lot of traumatic events which has made it difficult to stay positive and be successful in life. JD admitted, my incarceration has affected my identity as a mother because I've had to shut down a part of me to survive being here away from my girls. I feel completely powerless. My 11 year old finally came to visit. I refused to visit through glass at the main jail and it took me five months to get to Blaine Street so seeing her was emotional. Her last words were that she didn't want to leave. Another mom said, incarceration has directly impacted the healthy development of my two year old son as well as my experience with motherhood. At his age, physical contact connection is his primary need. The women fully support the recommendation to consider diversion for parents of minor children to help reduce the trauma to both children and their parents. Jamie told us, if a program were started, hopefully it involves self love, parent therapy, family therapy and in-house jail CPS worker to coordinate with the outside, self defense classes, family mediation, scholarships, photos of moms for family at home, reentry coaching and mentorship and housing a safe place. The connection is a must. We need therapy in jail. We are not our crimes. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Tara George and I'm the chief deputy at the district attorney's office. For the last year, I've had the distinct honor and privilege of representing my office as a member of the justice and gender task force. The meetings would start and Susan Green would have a PowerPoint. The last slide always read nothing about us without us. Because Susan realized and recognized that we needed to have voices of experience at the table as we were discussing these matters. How were any of us that woke up in a warm bed sitting at a conference room in Capitola with our Starbucks cups, going to be able to understand the experiences of women with lived experiences if we didn't hear from them. And every month went by. Every month, somebody with new experiences came and talked about the trauma that they experienced, their abuse, their recovery, their transformation. Family members would come and speak to the task force about being an indirect person involved in the criminal justice system because of the woman in their life. And as the months proceeded, those of us around the room began to share our own experiences. Those of us around the room realized that many of us were one mentor, one program, one moment, or one step away from being the voices of experience. And all of us realized that our own experiences drove the work that we do to help the members of the Santa Cruz community. When you are able to hear the experiences of women in Santa Cruz County as it relates to the justice system, we were able to realize that there are some things that we do well, some things that we completely fail at. There are some programs that we need to create and other things that we need to explore the creation of. You just heard from Ms. McLaughlin who talked to you about the experiences of women who are currently incarcerated in the Santa Cruz County Jail and the effect that that incarceration has on themselves and their children. Recommendation number three from this task force is a request of this board to get criminal justice partners together in a room and have them discuss the creation or possibility of creating a primary caregiver diversion program. This recommendation stems from legislation the Governor Newsom passed in SB 394. That legislation allows counties to have the presiding judge meet with the prosecuting agency and the defense bar to consider the creation of this diversion program. Under this diversion programs, the individuals would qualify if they've committed a nonviolent, non-serious offense. They are the primary caregiver of a minor child at home. They are the sole or primary caregiver of care and financial support. The crime that they committed was not against that child. That incarceration would be detrimental to that minor child at home and that there's no risk to public safety. This legislation arises from the research and experience that shows that when custodial parents are incarcerated, the children are exposed to the trauma of separation and household instability. Many of the children of incarcerated parents experience physical trauma, behavioral problems, economic instability, and many times homelessness. Parents, when they're eventually freed from incarceration, have financial instability where they struggle to maintain the economic support. This legislation and this recommendation would allow for those that qualify the opportunity to trade incarceration for rehabilitation and services. There are many of us that grew up talking to our parents behind glass. There are many of us that received birthday cards and Christmas letters post-marked from a correctional facility. And there are some of us that were able to thrive, but there are many more that weren't able to. This recommendation merely asks this board to direct justice partners, to have conversations, to allow opportunities for many more to thrive. Thank you, Tara. Our next recommendation to consider the creation of a women's court will be presented by Cassie Gazapura. Good morning, I'm Cassie Gazapura with Monarch Services. Women's experiences and opportunities differ from men's, both within and outside of the criminal justice system. And data shows that their pathways into the justice system are often different from men's as well. Women are more likely to have suffered trauma from physical abuse, sexual assault, and other forms of violence. Dr. Green's Gender Matters Report also highlighted the fact that for many of these women, the violence that they experience is pervasive and not an isolated incident. Women also have higher rates of mental illness and addiction. After working with hundreds of clients, I came to see a pattern in the women I represented. While each of their stories were unique, a staggering number of them had experienced some sort of trauma or abuse that resulted in instability, substance use, and or mental health issues, and ultimately culminated in their contacts with the justice system. We also know that women respond to custody programming and supervision differently. Because the justice system is not designed to take into account trauma histories or gender power dynamics, women's trauma is often perpetuated through law enforcement contacts, courtroom interactions, and in jail or prison environments. Additionally, women's employment histories and access to job opportunities are different, and mothers generally have greater parenting responsibilities. Unfortunately, very little information about a women's history is typically revealed during court processes. And when it is, it often comes out after she has already pled guilty and the severity of punishment is all that remains to be determined. The criminal justice system created for men and by men is still dominated by men in power. Women's inclusion in this system was really just an afterthought. And the guise of treating people equally, women have been thrown into the justice system with little to no consideration of their unique needs. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that the results often aren't what we would hope. Now that is not to say that the criminal justice system is working for men either. But it is especially deficient in its capacity to meet the needs of women and their families. In an effort to recognize gender differences and implement trauma-informed gender-specific practices as early as possible in criminal proceedings, the task force requests that the district attorney's office, public defender's office, and probation department collaborate with the Santa Cruz Superior Court, State Parole Services, and Monarch Services to explore the creation of a women's court for women, by women. Thank you. Thank you, Cassie. Next, I'd like to introduce Lynn Boulay, who will speak to our next recommendation related to reducing domestic violence. Good morning, board. Thank you for this opportunity. Victim safety and offender accountability have been central figures in the domestic violence field over the last few decades. As a result, we've seen significant expansion in crisis responses and legal intervention. While our crisis responses and legal interventions typically look like victims leaving and offenders going to jail, we see many survivors who wanna keep their families together and the efforts they're making to find effective solutions that increase safety, support healing, and serve the whole family. We see people who use abuse to maintain power and control that want compassionate help to change their behavior, and we see families struggling with the weight of multiple pressures and layers of oppression. Arresting someone for domestic violence does nothing to change the behaviors and often escalates the dangers to the survivor. Existing law specifies that the terms of probation granted to a person who's been convicted of domestic violence are required to include, among other things, successful completion of a 52-week batters program that requires the program to be completed within 18 months and allows no more than three excused absences. This model has been a one-size-fits-all for mitigating abusive behaviors no matter the severity or longevity of the abuse. This model has been shown to be ineffective with a recidivism rate as high as 80% and little or no accountability on the effectiveness of the programs. Assembly Bill Number 372 authorizes six counties, including Santa Cruz, to offer an alternative program for individuals convicted of domestic violence. Domestic violence is a learned behavior, and it is acknowledged that most people convicted of domestic violence grew up in an abusive household and that the majority experienced abuse themselves. With alternative approaches to ending abusive behaviors, those who have chosen to do harm will have an opportunity to look at their own histories of abuse and learn how to address their underlying issues and learn new, nonviolent ways to deal with conflict, frustration, and emotional pain. Good morning, my name is Alyssa Thompson. I'm a lawyer with the Public Defender's Office. Consider these startling facts from the Gender Matters Report. Three-quarters of the women interviewed in custody had experienced domestic violence, and two-thirds of them said it was happening a lot. This is consistent with data that's collected across the country confirming the link between experiencing domestic violence and future contact with the criminal justice system because the harm of domestic violence is not just the initial physical harm. It's a ripple effect. It carries on to instability, to emotional and mental health crisis. It can lead to substance abuse and ultimately with future contacts with the criminal justice system. That's why it's so incredibly important for us to stop the cycle before it keeps going. For decades, domestic violence probation has been exactly the same. It's three years of formal probation. It includes volunteer service. It includes a very large fine. It includes the batterers intervention program. That is a 52-week class that typically costs over $1,000 for which, as you've heard, absences are generally minimally accepted. Doesn't matter if this is your first or third offense. Doesn't matter if it's a misdemeanor or a felony offense. It's the same for everyone. Now imagine the person tasked with completing this ineffective and burdensome program is also the sole breadwinner of a family. We cannot ignore the reality that in many cases partners stay together or at least co-parent. Once we recognize that, we start to see that the cost, the time commitment, and the inflexibility of this 52-week class are not just obligations on the probationer. They are burdens that fall squarely on the family that the system is supposed to be helping. These families who so often are already barely making ends meet are doing the best they can to cope. A missed class or a late payment means the probation violation, possibly jail time, losing a job, a cascading devastation of consequences for vulnerable families who just want to survive. Let me give you a real-world example. This family had only one car. The mother, who was eight months pregnant and had three children, would pack everyone into the car to shuttle her partner to and from the classes every week for the year. She would do this because if he missed class, he risked being re-incarcerated. They would lose their only source of income right before the birth of their fourth child. Another survivor was using the bulk of her own paycheck to pay for her partner's domestic violence classes because he lost his job after his employer found out about the incident and they had no income besides hers. She did not want the father of her children to be re-incarcerated for violating her probation by failing to attend this class. Advocates and legislatures have known for years that the batterer's intervention program is not working. That's why they've created this six-county pilot program that is AB 372. It gives us a three-year window to try to innovate, to try to fix what's broken. Probation's first steps have been to create a matrix in which they sort offenders. They try to identify different needs and different risks. They try to match lower-level offenders with less burdensome obligations. The new opportunities include some shorter and some cheaper class options. The high-risk offenders are still asked to do the traditional ineffective program. To build on the work that has already been done, we are asking that the board direct the probation department to conduct a survey of the willing probationers and their families to learn directly from them whether what we're trying to do is working or not working. AB 372 is a unique opportunity to transform our approach and to end the cycle of domestic violence. It could mean meaningful support for these vulnerable families. Who better to tell us what's working than the people directly impacted? Please direct probation to talk to them. Nothing about us without us. Thank you, Alyssa and Lynn, and to Assemblymember Mark Stone who brought this legislation forward. He understands that if we can reduce violence against women, we can reduce the incarceration of women and men. We can reduce kids witnessing domestic violence and we can reduce intergenerational cycles of pain. Our next recommendation focuses on working within our schools to prevent incarceration. Two thirds of the women in the gender matter study reported they'd been suspended or expelled from school or both. Half spent time in juvenile hall or a group home. We haven't talked enough about girls in juvenile hall in Santa Cruz and we must not forget them either. Fortunately, there are only a small handful. I think last time I heard asked there were three but that is three too many. And there are more effective ways to respond to and support youth who might be struggling. We have a team here from the County Office of Education to speak to this recommendation on prevention. I'd like to introduce Julius Mills Dentie. Good morning everybody, thanks for having me. I come from the County Office of Education. I'm kind of responsible for doing some of the restorative practices work and some gang intervention as well. So let's get started as an alternative to a conventional criminal justice practices, which at times overlook the needs of those most intimately affected by conflict or harmed. Restorative justice believes that those seemingly at odds with one another should have the opportunity to get together, reconcile their differences and really get to the root of what led to the conflict in the first place. So schools who effectively implement restorative practices do three things really well. They focus on social emotional learning which creates conditions for engagement. They utilize restorative justice when harm and conflict is present as a preventative measure that reduces further discipline and suspension which we know now correlates well with juvenile justice system involvement and they respond to student behavior that is challenging in a manner that is relationship of firming, accurate and empathetic as opposed to punitive which can lead to defiance related to fractions which also can lead to suspendable offenses. So when two young women at a school getting a fight in class and one suffers a bloater abdomen which compromises her pregnancy, it's gonna take a lot more than an ed code violation and a change in schedule to repair the harm upon returning to school. And that's where we come in. Concerning gender, 70 of the participants who've engaged in some restorative justice practice process over the last three years in both San Benito and Santa Cruz County, out of all 75 of the participants have been young women, many of whom have come to the school for support before the conflict indeed did escalate. This suggests that one, young women are willing participants in a process that's complex, difficult and holds people accountable. And two, that they're willing to challenge in no snitch code which often keeps people silent and distant from one another and can increase violence. As a father of a two and a half year old daughter now I think about it and I only hope that my daughter demonstrates the strength when faced with social adversity than some of the young women I've had the privilege of working with have shown. So our recommendation is largely to expand the efforts that are already occurring at Sequoia High School which is an all dead site in Watsonville and also expand the efforts into comprehensive schools and some select alternative at schools. I have a kind of a model of how to do that back there but I didn't bring it up here. So if you wanna see it, I guess we can chat some other time. But Sony's gonna talk now about Sequoia School, thanks. Good morning board members. Thank you for welcoming us here today. My name's Denise Sony Sansen. I'm a senior director at the County Office Educational Services Programs. This is a new assignment for me. I was previously the principal director at Sequoia Schools in Watsonville. Alternative Education serves approximately 800 students across the county from Felton to Watsonville. Put all of our programs geographically or spread out but put all of those students together and we're pretty regular sized high school for this county. I was asked to speak specifically about Sequoia Schools. It's our newest school, our only school that we own the building, Alternative Education, the County Office. The school opened in 2016 and I was privileged to be a part of leading that effort. We have implemented restorative practices since the school's inception and we have seen a dramatic decrease in suspensions nearly down to zero and an increase in student attendance. While these quantitative metrics highlight the success possible when schools take matters into their own hands, the attachment that students have to the school is the most important measure. I worked for Alternative Ed for 13 years and that qualitative piece, harder to measure, things like eye contact, things like coming to talk with a trusted adult about what might be going on at home. Those important metrics really demonstrate that our efforts there are working. Many of our students are experiencing trauma. Some have incarcerated parents, family members or are part of the justice system themselves and are in and out of juvenile hall. Some of our students are struggling with substance abuse, gang activity, homelessness, many of the things that people have already spoken about today. Part of being restorative is really about addressing a student's social-emotional needs and being able to separate the behavior from the person. Two weeks ago, we had a mid-year graduation at Sequoia Schools and a student who I met in eighth grade who came what she defined, she came as a you need to leave or you'll be expelled type of situation. I met her in eighth grade, she's 19 now and she graduated two weeks ago. I asked her, what contributed to you being able to be successful and get to this big accomplishment of your high school graduation? And she said, it was the teachers who supported me and believed in me. I didn't have family support, but you guys believed in me and told me I could do it. You also gave me another chance, lots of second chances. This particular student had been in fights, had brought a weapon to school, had many blowouts with other students and teachers. I actually asked if I could talk about her today and she said, absolutely. I'm not gonna say more about her than that, but just that for me, what that means is giving people second chances, particularly children, because they make mistakes. I'm a mother of four boys and they make a lot of mistakes. And so being able to give children because that's what they are, second chances, third chances, 10th chances, that's what alternative education is about and helping them work through those conflicts that Julius was talking about and keeping them at school. Lastly, I'll just add that Sequoia Schools has, we've been able to successfully address issues when physical violence or threats of physical violence occur without law enforcement. That doesn't mean that we don't involve law enforcement for substance or weapons or physical altercations. We have developed a relationship with the sheriffs, with the SRO, that largely they allow us to, it's our jurisdiction to make those decisions knowing we're a restorative practices school, knowing that we have systems in place, knowing that we make referrals to counseling or substance classes, substance abuse classes, things like that. And so our efforts are, we're trying to keep students out of the system essentially. Is Celeste Gutierrez here? I'm gonna read her last part. So lastly, in California, the statewide ban of suspensions for willful defiance has sparked a demand for skilled interpersonal interventions when challenging situations arise. According to the ACLU, students suspended or expelled are nearly three times more likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year. Though the correlation between suspensions and juvenile justice has become common knowledge, many schools are still at a loss when trying to replace the use of suspension with a more relational approach. Not only does restorative practices offer process for reconciliation, repair and resolution, it also offers creative responses for responding to defiance and resistance. Instead of viewing the defiant and non-compliant as fixed characteristics, a restorative school looks at them as having important underlying themes, including a desire for independence, mistrust or wariness towards authority. Lastly, because law enforcement has a presence on school campuses in this county, schools must find ways to utilize their presence effectively. When matters that jeopardize school safety occur, their role becomes clear, yet when law enforcement is employed to handle low level school discipline issues, in-house matters can be quickly conflated with legal punishment. When schools outsource school discipline issues to law enforcement, they may be turning over the student to the juvenile justice system and undermining their own authority. That said, when law enforcement personnel engages in restorative justice, they are showing a commitment to connect before correct. It is also fair to hypothesize that they will be better equipped to constructively use their authority and delineate between matters that are very serious and matters that are more interpersonal by nature. I'll just say lastly that my personal experience at Sequoia High Schools with restorative practices, if you ever have an opportunity to sit in a circle with young people and other adults because we're included as well, it's incredibly impactful and I would even say life-changing, thank you. Buenos dias, good morning. I'm Teresa Carino and I'm co-chair for the Santa Cruz Women's Commission and I'm also representing Salud Carino and the young girls that we serve. As a woman who has experienced trauma in my youth and who has been working with youth for over 20 years, I know firsthand what prevention and healing practices such as restorative justice can offer a young person. Girls especially can benefit from practices that validate their emotions and struggles and give them a platform to use their voices. Voices that are all too often silenced. Help us amplify the voices of young women, promote healing and prevent further trauma by supporting the Justice and Gender Task Force recommendation to implement restorative justice practices as part of the comprehensive school safety program recently funded through the Justice Assistance Grant. I would also like to take a moment to say what an honor it has been to serve on this task force and also to thank Dr. Susan Green, our fearless leader. Thank you, Teresa and Sony and Julius. It's important to hear stories of success. Of course, very important to continue to talk. We talk about working upstream. We always have to talk about prevention and how to intervene earlier and we can never give up and never lose hope. Our next recommendation is related to data. In order to establish where gender differences are most pronounced in the criminal justice system, data must be collected in a way that can be disaggregated by gender. We know that challenges persist with collecting and sharing data across systems. And as we continue conversations to develop strategies to overcome some of these challenges, the task force requests that recognizing gender differences be included in data collection and reporting. Our final recommendation to establish a commission on justice and gender will be presented by Laura Segura. Good morning, everyone. So the task force final recommendation, like Susan said, is to establish a commission on justice and gender to replace the domestic violence commission. So I would just want to provide a few insights about the DV commission as I'm the former and the most recent chair of that commission. I was involved with the commission for about nine years until we stopped meeting. In the early years of the commission, the DV commission set out some pretty ambitious goal based on trends and needs at that time. The commission was effective in many ways, having representation from many different sectors in the community. And the commission, however, also faced many challenges in the latter years. And part of it was, firstly, because it was focused on only domestic violence. And gender-based violence is not siloed to only domestic violence. It's complex, it's multi-dimensional, and includes the various types of violence and trauma that women face, including very high rates of sexual violence, both in and out of the jail system. And then secondly, the engagement was inconsistent and also not conducive to our goals. We needed to have the voices of survivors and those most impacted by violence, including people of color. I remember I was one of the very, I came into the DV commission for the first time ever, and I actually thought I was in the wrong meeting because I did not see people who looked like me. And so that was a stark reality for me about this commission. But it changed over the years, thank goodness. And lastly, the Domestic Violence Commission also lacked the necessary resources and the staffing to roll out the work and make it effective. So learning from those lessons and the strengths of this task force, we have an opportunity to engage diverse perspectives and bold new approaches to interrupt the cycles of pain, abuse, addiction, and incarceration for women and their families. We also need to do this from a holistic and gender and racial equity lens, survivor voices. With firsthand experiences in the criminal justice system were key in this process and helped shape all our recommendations. In the 18 meetings over the past two years, the task force examined a wide range of issues and developed recommendations that plant seeds to better meet the needs of justice-involved women and their children. The level of engagement from community leaders, in my opinion, was very impressive. Some meetings had up to 40 people in attendance. We had engagement from community leaders who work in systems and also recognize that we can do better to stop the intergenerational cycle of incarceration. Therefore, the task force recommends that the board direct the CAO's office to return with an ordinance, establishing a commission on gender and justice and gender in place of the Domestic Violence Commission that will help oversee the implementation of the task force recommendations and continue to respond to and better meet the needs of justice-involved women and their families. The commission will also address gaps in areas of needs identified during the term of the task force, including outreach and education, gender-specific trainings, gender-specific treatment, and supporting families directly impacted by the criminal justice system. And I also recommend, personally, based on my experience from the Domestic Violence Commission to have adequate staffing and resources to help us advance this work. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Laura. And thank you again to all of our presenters today. This concludes our presentation. And as you could see and hear, we have a powerful and passionate team of leaders. I wanna thank you, board members, again, for convening this advisory task force on justice and gender and for recognizing the importance of this work. We are not done and we are not alone in our efforts. We're part of a movement of women and men across the state and nation, also working to reduce the incarceration of women and girls, to strengthen families directly impacted by the criminal justice system and to do less harm. I often say there are at least two things that keep me inspired to continue this work after 25 years. One, the more I learn, the harder it is to walk away and pretend it's not my problem. And second, there are thousands of formerly incarcerated women and men who are leading reform efforts. And working in partnership with these local leaders I'm as motivated as ever. Thank you for supporting this important effort. We're happy to answer any questions you might have. Okay. Well, thank you. We'll bring it back to the board for questions and comments. I would say that we do have a 1045 zone seven meeting. So if we could keep our comments a little bit shorter. Sure. Go ahead, John. Yeah. I want to go first, John, sure. Thank you. Thank you for the wonderful presentation. As people can see, this task force did not take any issue lightly. We had always had thoughtful presentations, involved discussions, and these recommendations are reflections of dozens of members of the task force work. This wasn't just a small cadre of the task force. These are really the task force recommendations. I want to thank our board for taking the issue of justice involve women seriously enough to spend as much time as we have at board meetings, talking about these issues and committing the resources to impanel the task force. It shows a real commitment to these issues. And I was grateful to be the representative on this task force because I got to see this work mature and blossom during these last two years. I want to thank all the task force members. This was not a group that was checking the box and coming to a meeting once a month. This was an engaged group who reached out within their own organizations to make sure that people, not just the one individual, but if there would need to be other individuals from that organization involved that they would bring those individuals and for those agencies or organizations that help reach out and find speakers with lived experience that could share their stories with us to make the statistics that we read so frequently real and present for us in the room. What we heard was complicated, heartbreaking, but as you can see with these recommendations, there are some responses that we can make happen that will actually help improve our systems. I'm impressed by the agencies and organizations and individuals who have stepped up already and are committed to making our system work better. We've heard recommendations, this is the second time we've heard recommendations at our board, but in between agencies, like our Human Services Department or our Sheriff's Department or the DA's office, there's been awareness of some of the issues and there's been efforts already underway to address some of these pieces. So that tells me that we have a committed group of leaders who understand these issues and want to make progress on it. I think that it's important. I won't go through these recommendations. I thought the presentation did a great job and I hope that we all heard the thoughtful presentation and understand the significance of each and every one of these recommendations. These are achievable, but they will take work. They will take resources. They will take some time, but if we are committed to making our system work better, to ending intergenerational incarceration in Santa Cruz County, to improve the lives of women in our system and to stop a revolving door for some, we will have accomplished a lot. And so having a commission on justice and gender to be able to oversee these recommendations, to continue to delve into these issues will make a huge difference in the success of the efforts that have been outlined here today. I want to thank Susan Green for her work in this. As you saw today, there was no meeting that wasn't thoughtfully prepared that involved lots of other meetings. This wasn't just I'll call this person up and they'll get somebody, but it was really interviewing speakers, talking to people ahead of time, preparing materials, sending it to us in advance so we could have informed discussions. That is a standard of which we should all strive for. And it made each and every one of the task force meaning meaningful and thoughtful. And it's why this task force grew in size over two years instead of drop in size as you can often see with a monthly group that meets once a month for two years. So I urge the adoption of these recommendations by our board and I urge the County Administrative Office to work on an ordinance that could bring this to us. The commitment that you've already shown by Ms. Coburns and Sven Stafford's participation in this is a good sign of commitment. And I hope we can continue this to really make our justice system work better. I am hopeful that we can do it. And I know that we have the experience where we've changed the arc of our justice system to make it work better for young people and now we should do it thoughtfully for women. Thank you for the work. Thank you. So I don't have any questions because I thought the report was thorough and powerful and incredibly well thought out. I just want to take a moment and thank everyone who served because these recommendations I think are based in data but then also paired with live experience and real world impacts. And so you can see how the system could start working not only in our County but what I'm hopeful is this serves as a model for other counties in California and other states across the country because I think that the group that came together and put so much time and energy into this did it so well that as we implement this overseen by the new commission that we can be a model for so many places going forward and not only impact the lives of women here in our County and their families but also around the country. And so I just want to take a moment to thank you for putting together such a good process, the right people in the room, people with the thoughtfulness and courage to talk about their experiences and share their experiences and then a willingness to continue the conversation and continue the work going forward. So I just thank you very much. Yeah, I want to thank you for a very telling impressive presentation. It's obvious that this is going to take a lot of cooperation, a lot of time. It already has taken a lot of time and there already has been a lot of cooperation which is really good to see. I think that going forward and we need to have an evaluation of the funding and resources and how we would do this and I don't, we're going to do this. It's not a cost factor but I want to know to have in that formula how much are we saving when these young women or women in general are not incarcerated again and cost us something. I mean, if the repetition of somebody going back into the judicial system or the court, the jail system is reduced, that's a, well, it's terrific just socially and to start with but financially it is too and we have to measure that. I think that's, I think people would want to see that. It's not the most important factor but it's a factor that we really need to spell out in this whole thing. I want to thank those who've presented today but just the cooperative effort between the education community, the judicial community, and the faith-based community as well and that's a reach that we can have that it's a place where we can have another reach for to have an impact on some of these women. Most of many of them young has been explained but I'm just thoroughly impressed with the work that you've done to get us here. I'm very encouraged and enthusiastic to carry this forward to see how we can complete a real corrective system before the incident happens, so to speak. Are there any existing women in court systems in the state of California right now? I think you were talking about that. There was one of the recommendations. As far as I know, there is a women's court in Los Angeles County, I believe. We, as you can see in the language in the recommendation, this is a recommendation to explore, to consider, to have a conversation and see if this is something that might be part of our collaborative courts here in Santa Cruz County and it might not. There are lots of issues to consider and we will certainly learn more about any other models that exist. And what do you expect from the legislation authored by Assemblyman Mark Stone about the domestic violence victims? Is there a report back or a time period where we're gonna have some sense of those six counties and what's the impact of what that legislation. So the legislation is a three year pilot and does require a significant amount of data collection. I'm sure the probation department could speak more to that. I know that the probation department has been leading the effort locally along with judicial system partners to begin to create an alternative pilot program and we really recognize and appreciate the progress that has been made in these early months. And I believe that there, is there a report? I can't remember, I'm sorry, if there's a date on that recommendation. There is December 2020. Thank you. So for getting some input from families and people directly involved in the classes and the alternative program that's programs are being offered. We've asked for an update or a report by 2020 and recognize that the timeframe for somebody to be engaged in these new efforts is still small. So this is, it's early to start collecting data but it can still inform the process. And I know Assembly Member Stone, who came and presented and spoke to us at one of our task force meetings is counting on Santa Cruz County to do better. So I encourage you to follow this and see what the data show over the coming years of this pilot program. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I thank you, Chair. And thank you for the remarkable group of people that came together for this. It's an exceptionally diverse and talented group of people and shows what happens when you can put that group into the room for positive gain. And Dr. Green, I did have one question of you, if I may, in regards to the new proposed commission. The language within the staff report spoke about the replacement of the Domestic Violence Commission. The Domestic Violence Commission, as Ms. Segura noted, served an incredibly important function at its beginning, especially with local law enforcement to be able to inform their practices. And I recognize that over time, it met some challenges. I wanted to be assured though, because the language in the report wasn't really clear that the new commission, that really what this is is an expansion and enhancement of the scope of the previous Domestic Violence Commission, that it's still fully intended to maintain that as one of the tenants of what's researched, just not in a siloed format as it was previously. Because I think it's important for the Board to know that this is our intention. I imagine it was your intention as well, but it just didn't end up in the report with that specific language. I wanna be clear when we're creating a new ordinance that we're specifically calling out that that is one of the things that we're looking to have this new commission consider. Yes, thank you. I think as you heard today, gender-based violence is at the core of this work. And the recommendation to create a commission on justice and gender is an effort to revive and restructure the Domestic Violence Commission that has been dormant for a number of years to make sure that we can respond to domestic violence as well as other issues that justice-involved women are facing in our community. I hope that answers your question. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. We're gonna, I'm thanking you also. We're gonna open it up to the public. And we do have a 1045 zone seven flood meetings. So, hi, Marilyn. Anyway, we'll give you three minutes in the beginning. And then we may have to change that first. Thank you. Very impressive. How many people do wanna speak? Okay, so you've got three minutes, so. Very impressive report. Thank you so much. And I hope you listen to the comments of people here. It was both informative and disturbing. I think of the kind of society we live in that promotes violence. And I have a cartoon here. I have a few copies that sets the point. Feeling sad and depressed. And there's a young medic writing on the clipboard. Are you anxious, worried about the future? Feeling isolated and alone? You might be suffering from capitalism. Symptoms include unemployment, hunger, homelessness, incarceration is on this list. So, we have a symptom problem here. Also, I wanted to recommend, there's a book called Incarceration Nation. We have a huge, some of the highest incarceration in this country. And now people who really don't belong in jail. I reckon the men, the movie Just Mercy, that is at the Del Mar about a black man who was on death row accused of murder, totally innocent. It's a true story. And the lawyer who represented him and the trauma to the family, like what you describe. Let's see. Also, I listened to Ralph Nader Radio Hour and there's the Corporate Crime Reporter on. And I'd like to see the corporate criminals in jail more than somebody who's smoking pot, for instance. The militarism in this society, the violence of the military, the videos, the TV, that children watch is very influential in this violence. And last, I want to recommend a talk by Dr. Karl Merritt on wireless technology, can it harm you? And it's going to be Saturday, February 1st, at half a fire, Scott's Valley Library at one to three. Some of the symptoms of exposure to these microwaves have to do with neurobehavioral, neuro-psychiatric problems, behavior disorders, anxiety. A lot of the symptoms we see are related to this exposure. And I hope you can attend that and the board members too. Thank you so much. Thanks very much. Good morning, Chair Caput, Board of Supervisors Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner. And I just wanted to talk to you about a few things. First of all, I really appreciate the work that Dr. Green and the Justice and Gender Committee did. I think this is an outstanding report. I support the recommendations in this report. I do want to have some clarifying language though, because we've been working on medication assisted treatment in the jail for the last year. There's a request for proposal that it's being being responded to now. We're gonna, it's gonna take effect on July one. And under recommendation one in the report, it's indicated that a pilot program for Matt be established in the jail. We're going into a three year contract with our next medical provider. And so I just don't want the pilot language to conflict with what's in the contract. And so hopefully the board will consider that and maybe do some language cleanup on that. And then under recommendation number seven, there's a report back that's due on August 20th. My office plays a big role in this as we have a very robust records management system in the jail that does collect a lot of data. And so I'm not clear on this recommendation what it is that is being asked for. And so if I could get some clarification on that, we're happy to participate. But some of these data requests that come in are massive and it just, it takes us some time to put that together. And so if we can get involved in that conversation far ahead of the August deadline, that'd be very, very much appreciated. Thank you very much. Sheriff Hart, on the question about the Matt, I know that you have been very good on this issue. And I think when you look at a pilot program and a three year contract, a pilot is probably, is not going to just be six months or a year. It's probably going to take a little bit of startup, doing it and assessing it. So I'm trying to get an idea of what it is you're looking for in terms of language and where that wouldn't work out with. And maybe County Council can help us with that. I just didn't want, I think of a pilot as like a six to 12 month program. I just didn't want the language to conflict with our contract. So if County Council doesn't believe that's a problem, I just want to make sure before you voted on this that it was clarified. Sure. Thank you. And the other question, and maybe it's really one for Ms. Coburn or Mr. Palacios about the CAO's work around collecting data, getting some clarity around that. I think that it was the idea was to have the CAO bring the departments together to figure out what it is that could be done. Yeah. That's correct. I think between now and August, we would meet and talk about, kind of come up with a framework for what's going to happen. I don't foresee we're going to have everything disaggregated by August, but we can meet and work out the plan for trying to address this recommendation. Great, thank you. Thank you. And thank you to the Sheriff's office for always making staff available. It really made a difference. It was really helpful in our first year to have representatives there and participate in the discussions. And in the second year, to have a variety of people from the jail who could participate and share information. It was very helpful to the group. Good morning supervisors. Dr. Gale Newell, Health Officer for the County of Santa Cruz. And I want to thank the justice and gender task force for the good and important work that they've done over the past two years. I've been able to attend a couple of their meetings since starting as health officer and was very impressed with Dr. Green's commitment and the commitment of the entire task force. I'm very grateful for their insight and willingness to address the issues of substance use disorder as a gender-based matter, especially in our incarcerated populations. The treatment of substance use disorder, including the provision of medically assisted treatment or MAT is important for everyone impacted by addiction, but it's especially important for those who are incarcerated. I also appreciate the efforts of Janice in their ability to provide continuing MAT services for their established patients and for an initiation of new MAT for our pregnant incarcerated persons. I want to reiterate the sheriff's absolute commitment. He's been a consistent supporter of MAT in our jail populations over his entire five-year tenure as sheriff to date and before that as well. I as health officer have also worked with the current medical provider in the jails to support MAT services and encourage them. And in my former position with San Bonito County, I worked at a statewide level to establish MAT in the jails with our current medical provider, WellPath, who provides services in 31 counties in California. I also want to say that I helped establish the wording in the current RFP for medical and mental health services to provide full scope substance use disorder treatment for our incarcerated population, including all FDA approved forms of MAT. And that is included in the current RFP and starting July 1st, whoever is taking on that contract will have the obligation during their three-year contract to provide full substance use disorder scope of treatment, including all FDA approved methods of MAT. Any questions? I just want to thank you and Shayna Zerlin, who was a regular participant. She couldn't attend the last couple of meetings because of the birth of her first child, but she was very helpful and also offered her services as a counselor for any member of the task force who was dealing with the trauma that they might have heard about or experienced or reminded themselves of from the testimony we heard from people, from the courageous women who spoke during the process. Morning, Chair Caput, Board of Supervisors, Fernando Giraldo, Chief of Probation. I just want to take a moment to first thank the task force, the wonderful work led by Dr. Susan Green and all the other members, the diverse group of stakeholders that helped inform a two-year process. I think now is the heavy lift when we operationalize or implement the recommendations. And of course, couldn't help but notice that probation is included in five of those recommendations and we are eager to support that but seek your guidance in those efforts, but this is very exciting. 20% of those in the probation system are women. Today, we have two females in our juvenile hall, so it's critical for us to stop that cycle. So thank you and we look forward to your support. Thank you. My name is Raquel Capella. I'm a parent of a student at Santa Cruz High. I'm also part of our faith-based community. Beverly Brook is the one who told me about this meeting because we go to church together. So first, I'd like to thank the advisory task force. I learned a lot this morning just from listening, so thank you for that. So there's two considerations I'd like to bring up. First is around restorative justice. I think that's a really important recommendation that the task force made. And I think there's a discussion about, can we expand this into comprehensive high schools? And I know that they talked about Sequoia High School in Watsonville, but it would be great if we could actually get this pilot in a comprehensive high school in North County. Just I think having different people in the county getting involved would be helpful as a consideration. The other consideration is Ferris Sebao over in the County Office of Education has launched a program where we're having these meetings with the County Department of Mental Health and trying to think about where does the overlap occur between, it's the teachers who are seeing the students on a regular basis every day. And so they see a lot of these issues coming up and then how does county mental health kind of overlap? Almost like a Venn diagram with the students in the middle. And so obviously Ferris and I think Mimi Hall is kind of the leader on the county side. They know way more about this than I do, but just in terms of all these different initiatives going on, just considering kind of how we better maybe coordinate this and let the public know what's going on. So, thank you. Hi, my name is Natalie and I just wanted to thank the board and everyone here that participated this morning. I was recently released from Custody on January 13th and I spent a decent amount of time at the Blaine Street facility in the last, I was there the last six months. So I just wanna express my gratitude and my hopes that moving forward that women such as myself are survivors of domestic violence and of sexual assaults have a voice and have some more opportunities that a lot of women who are near and dear to my heart are still incarcerated, they're fighting for, that the resources are made more available to us upon release, that women specifically, not just at the Blaine Street facility, but at the main jail are able to get more resources more easily. So I just wanna thank you guys and express my appreciation and optimism for everything, thank you. Thank you, thank you for coming forward. Hi, my name is Maria Luna, I'm an advocate at Monarch. I'm gonna be reading a letter that one of my clients wrote, she wasn't able to be here today due to her new job. So I'll go ahead and read it. Hello, my name is Jessica. I'm writing this letter to say thank you to Monarch Services and my advocate. If it weren't for all the help you and your team has given me, I don't know where I would be, probably out on the street, homeless, lost on drugs and on my way back to jail. I was in a really bad abusive relationship, afraid, angry and confused without hope. Today I have hope and in a way out of that cycle. I was given shelter and food along with clothes which helped me advocate for myself to find work, to get into a sober living house where I'm living now and thriving. With ongoing help and now enrolled at Cabrillo College where I'll be getting a career while working part-time and doing community service, I'm still doing outpatient. It seems like a lot but I can do it all along with my support and a car which I finally got. So I'm doing so much better, making my appointments, my classes and my meetings. I stress but on time because the bus service doesn't help as much anymore. So again, thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all your continual help and support and for the positive attitudes. It all makes a difference in my life and has changed and saved my life. I just wanna say that this client I've saw for over a year at Main Jail in Blaine, she is a success. Thank you and thank you to Monarch Services. There were a number of people who participated in the task force, really made a difference. Sharing stories, sharing your story, sharing the stories of the organization and what women go through. And your willingness to step forward and be part of solutions and these recommendations. Really makes a difference. Good morning, board. My name is Delphine Burns. I'm also with Monarch Services, also here to share on behalf of a client who could not be here this morning but wanted her story shared. Our client came to Santa Cruz to visit a friend. During this visit, she went out with a group of friends and at the end of the evening, her friends decided to go home. Our client said she would like to walk home to enjoy more of the sights of Santa Cruz as a visitor to the city. During her walk, she was assaulted and raped at a park. She went to the closest store with torn nylons, clothing ripped and was yelling for help. She scared the customers and store owner due to her yelling and they called law enforcement. She was then arrested because a mom at the store press charges due to her child being scared by our clients yelling. She was then incarcerated and told about Monarch Services by other incarcerated individuals. She requested to meet with a Monarch advocate through the crisis line and then shared with us that she was scared and shared her story of the rape and arrest. She did not know when she would be released. She was then released unexpectedly on a Friday evening with the clothes she came in with despite telling jail staff that she needed fresh clothing because of the rape. She did not have a cell phone or any identification due to her purse being lost at the scene of the rape and was therefore unable to contact us prior to her release. She ended up calling from a pay phone and we were then able to shelter her for the night, provide her with clean clothing and provide transportation to return her to her hometown. If she had not had Monarch as a resource, she would have likely had to sleep on the streets, which would have been extremely dangerous and re-traumatizing. So this just speaks to the importance of our recommendation of providing shelter and providing resources to those who are released unexpectedly. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Cheryl. I'm with Encompass Community Services, Adult Behavioral Services. I've had the opportunity to sit in the JAG meetings at the much later part of the task force meetings. And I must say that it's been an honor to see here have a little voice to contribute and be a fierce advocate in championing reforms for women who are incarcerated, women who are suffering from substance use disorder. And with that, I wanna say a big thank you to the board for this opportunity to be a part of it. Thank you to Susan and we're not gonna stop. For us, we're always gonna be there. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Alyssa Tambora. First, I wanna thank Dr. Susan Green for just her incredible work. I am an adult child of a previously incarcerated parent and I'm here to support the recommendations of the gender, excuse me, justice and gender task force. Specifically, I'm here to urge you to adopt a diversion program for primary caregivers as an effort to reduce intergenerational trauma associated with incarceration. I wanna just share a little bit of my experience. I was one of the children that got lost in the shadows with my parents' incarceration. And I'm one of the children of incarcerated parents that could have benefited from these recommendations. Children impacted by incarceration are victims of the criminal justice system and it's our responsibility to reduce their trauma as much as possible. During my parents' absence, I suffered through sexual and physical abuse, food insecurity, economic instability, behavior problems, interruption of my education and housing instability. When I was 15, I became homeless and became pregnant as a result of a sexual assault while literally sleeping on the streets. I dropped out of high school and turned to my own drug and alcohol abuse to cope. To say that life was overwhelming would be an understatement. Today I'm 26. I have a healthy, happy nine year old. I'm a student at UC Santa Cruz. I graduate this year and I'm applying to law school. And I can tell you that though my circumstances have completely changed and life has gotten better, my experiences as a homeless and pregnant teenager sleeping on the streets when my parent was incarcerated will stay with me forever. They have truly traumatized me. My experience is not unique and that's why I'm here. To speak for those children of incarcerated parents that are living through these experiences right now and do not have the opportunity to be here. The children who have incarcerated parents deserve to be considered, deserve to have connection with their parents and deserve resources to thrive. I can tell you from experience and this is my point that prevention is key. The recommendations from the Justice and Gender Task Force have the social impacts, excuse me, have the potential to make substantial impacts in the lives of families impacted by incarceration and I strongly urge you to adopt them. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for sharing your story with the Task Force. Hi, I'm Monica McGuire from Coralitos and I'm here unhappily representing dozens of families I've met personally and hundreds I've learned of that have nothing to do with the justice system but because of the court system are separated from their children. Parents regularly are told child only needs one parent and you're gonna pay child support. That is harming dozens of families I can bring to you to meet you. I don't because I've learned in the last four or five years you stopped including public testimony as part of the record of these meetings. I think if you would please reinstate that public testimony is included in your action minutes. You could have a lot more data of people who have come. I've witnessed people coming here on most of these subjects and the fact that they aren't findable in the records, the written records isn't helping us. When this many people show up and give their heartfelt stories, their near disaster and disastrous stories they can be added to the record please. This is very important as well. There are countless ways that you asked about where the money could come from. I have observed with the families that I've helped as a health and healing coach who are wrapped up in multiple systems of our health and human services, family court services, over and over the DA, all of the offices that say their hands are tied. This county doesn't care about doing anything about domestic violence is what I've been told. I understand that's not the view of individuals. That's the view of systems that haven't done this kind of beautiful working together. And I'm so grateful that you've listened as carefully as you have because you do have power to have more say in making sure that the tens of thousands of dollars currently being spent keeping parents from their children could be solved with a few hundred dollars to make sure that there's services to keep children with their parents, adults as well. I have multiple cases I could bring to you and we are very hopeful that you'll keep looking at all of them. Thank you so much. Thank you, good morning. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I live in rural Aptos. I wanna thank Dr. Green for her excellent work and all of the presenters this morning. I remember Dr. Green's original presentation and it was hard, it was hard to listen to. And so I am really glad that that has come forward with these very reasonable recommendations that the county adopt and I urge you to do so. There are some that I think can be done right now and would cost nothing. Something as simple as the release time when women or anyone is incarcerated or released onto the streets in the early morning hours in the evening, what are we doing here? We're just setting ourselves up for recidivism. Why don't we have clothes available for these people? The story of the young woman coming in, having been raped, didn't even get a change of clothes. That doesn't have to happen. That wouldn't cost much. We can even connect with the churches and have something there, some sort of support, but not just turn them back out on the streets with nowhere to go, no phone, no way to contact people that can support them and in the same clothes that they were wearing when the crime occurred. That's a simple thing that doesn't cost anything at all. I also wanna point out that the county has an interagency center that the taxpayers are paying a lot of money for. Why don't we make use of that? Why don't we take these people who are traumatized there and help them with counseling, clothes, connections? Let's make use of that. It's on the tax rules and it was reported in the strategic plan. It's not being used. Let's use it. I also wanna speak a little bit about the actual safety in the jails. We've had unfortunately some rapes that occur within the jails. Let's work on stopping that right now. These people have already been traumatized, these women, and here they are being raped in the jails by law enforcement. That's unacceptable. I also wanna speak to the issue of the rape kits and the forensic lab in this county, the lack of it, it was taken away and now women have to go to San Jose in order to have the examinations for the rape kits that will help them prosecute and get some justice for the crimes that they have endured. Let's change that. And I understand that that will possibly change in 2023. Let's get it here now. We need to do that. It used to be here. And we need to restore the dignity and the safety of these people. When women, especially women who are perhaps more vulnerable are released from jail, let's give them a voucher to a hotel where they can be safe. Thank you. We'll bring it back to the board for a motion. Chair, I wanna thank again everybody who participated, groups that didn't get mentioned, Encompass and Casa who were here who played key roles in this effort, our human services department, and others who made this task force process so rich. I am grateful for them, even though we didn't hear from a lot of speakers from those organizations, but they played a critical role. I think I'll just hearing from Dr. Nule about what's in the RFP for our medical services at the jail, it sounds like that the language there is inclusive of us being able to do the medication assisted treatment. We can take a look at it in more detail and if it's not, we can supplement it. And when it comes time to get a contract in place, we can get it aligned. Okay, super. And it sounds like the work of the CAO's office and bringing departments together will better define, and so we'll get that report back in August. Therefore, I would move forward all the recommendations from the task force on justice and gender, and would ask our county administrative office, officers to move quickly to bring an ordinance to establish the commission on justice and gender and offer our appreciation to everyone involved. Okay, we have a second. Second. We do. Okay. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposition? None. Passes unanimously. We'll take a 12 minute break. We'll come back at 11 for the zone seven and then we'll do item eight and nine. Yeah, exactly. You need a roll call for zone seven? Yes. I'll pick it off. So I'd like to call to order. The Santa Cruz County Board of Directors for Flood Control and Water Conservation District, zone seven for our January 28th meeting. If we could begin with the roll call, please. Director Leopold. Here. Coonerty. Here. Kepit. Bannister. Millicich. Here. And chair, oh, non-voting members, Ponce, Siri, Gonzalez. Chair Friend. Here, and we do have a quorum. We'll come on to, you can come up. You can sit on the seat. Yeah, we give you a sign and everything. I will begin on item two here, which is the consideration of additions or any changes to the agenda. Were there any additions or changes to the agenda today? No, none additions or. All right. Thank you, Mr. Strudley. We'll move on to item three, which is rural communications and opportunity for members of the community to address us on items that are not on today's agenda or within the purview of zone seven. Senator. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of rural Aptos. I again ask that the general geographic delineation of zone seven and other flood control zones be clearly described on the agenda for members of the public. You all know them, but the general public does not. And that would help people understand this process and the flood control zones in general. I also learned over the weekend, I went to a program in Aptos about the history of flooding in Rio del Mar and learned that some flood control zones are not assessed. And so I find that curious that some are and some are not. And I think it behooves the flood control district to really discuss that and bring some equity across the board to the different districts for assessments. Thank you very much. Anybody else like to address us during oral communications? Mr. Strudley. Yeah, Chair Friend, I'd like your permission to provide the overall program management report in the oral communications. Please. I am happy to report to you and the board that we have some of you already know, but we now already have the director's report from the Army Corps of Engineers. So this is right now is a very historic time with this project, 53 years in the making. We are finally out of the feasibility phase with the Army Corps of Engineers. So it's a time for us to celebrate and to look forward to hopefully much different future and path with or without the Army Corps. We hope it is with the Army Corps, but I'll get into that in a second. This director's report is incredibly important, not just because of what it signifies on the federal pathway and the fact that it opens up some potential design funding from the Army Corps, but this is what unlocks the subvention funds from the state of California. And right now our calculations put our subventions allocation at somewhere a bit north of a hundred million dollars. And thanks to assembly members Stone, Rivas and Senator Bill Monning, who wrote AB 489 for us, our subventions funds can be used in advance of the Army Corps, which is not typical for that program. So it means we're not completely beholden to the Army Corps to move forward with this project. So that's, it's a very big deal. I wanna thank you all on the bore as well as others out in the audience, people from passboards and staff are working so hard on this for many, many decades. It's really a significant turning point for this project. More on the federal pathway. So I'd like to thank Chair Friend for organizing a somewhat rapidly planned and impromptu trip to DC that occurred on January 7th through 10th. So I had heard whispers from some of my colleagues that the work plan window, it's a 60 day window that opens up after the federal appropriations package for the Army Corps is signed by the president that allows for competition for work plan funds. I had heard that that work plan process was going to unfold through the month of January with the Army Corps. And so I had worked over the holidays and with our advocacy consultant and with Chair Friend to schedule a trip for us essentially the first week back after the New Year's. Lo and behold, I land down in Dallas on a connecting flight and my phone is already lit up from communications from our advocacy consultant, Chair Friend and others that the week and literally the day that we are flying out to DC is when the Army Corps had their pencils to paper for the work plan allocations. So the timing could not have been any later to do that trip. And thanks to Chair Friend and his wifi on the airplane it became very useful for him to communicate with our advocacy consultant up in the air as well as his staff and Deputy ASA, Vance Stewart to talk about the merits of our project. And we were told some mostly promising things that our project was going to be competing for work plans which is good because they didn't give us a no. They didn't say it's not going to compete. And they've definitely told us those kinds of things before with this project. So we had a very good trip in DC. We had some very good conversations with the Army Corps as well as with OMB. Our project still does not rank well against all the other projects across the whole country but I think the chances of us securing work plan funds that Congressman Panetta helped argue for through appropriations language that basically aligns with our project that we have a pretty good chance of getting the allocation of somewhere around $1.5 million from the Army Corps to start design. So that's a very good thing as well. We should hear about those work plan allocations sometime in the month of February and no later than February 20th. And it'll probably be a little bit sooner than that. On the state path, last Friday I went up and had a visit in Sacramento with one of the deputy directors of Department of Water Resources, Gary Lipner. He is in charge of flood management and dam safety. We shared some basics about our project with him since we had not yet had a chance to meet him since he was appointed to that position. We discussed with them our subventions allocation, the Coastal Flood Risk Reduction Grant Program, a solicitation for that program will hit the streets sometime this next month and other potential avenues of funding. They have had some email communications with us on that. They're relatively supportive, if not very supportive. And in fact, last month when we invited Chris Turnell, one of their other deputy directors to the flood prevention authorities legislative conference, he and his staff on a preparatory phone call to that meeting actually described our project as a showcase project. So the state describing our project as a showcase project is a very, very good thing indeed. And so I hope that we can secure additional funding either directed or competitive above and beyond our subventions authorization to move this project forward and that's what we're doing. On the local side, we are still pursuing formation of a joint powers authority to finance and implement the project as well as to oversee long-term O&M. We anticipate standing up that joint powers authority sometime over the next several months. It was originally hoped that we could get a board item into the proposed agenda for, or excuse me, the proposed meeting for March 10th that's on the consent agenda. It may be that we need to call a special meeting because we may not have everything arranged in time for that March 10th meeting. So I just wanted to alert the board early. Every month that goes by in this process counts. And so for us to miss the March 10th and try to have that information come to you and the June budget hearing meeting may be a little on the late side. And so I just wanted to alert you all to that potential for a special meeting need sometime this spring. Other than that, we are pursuing a CEQA. We are having our notice of preparation has went out and we are having a scoping meeting at the Watsonville Civic Plaza Community Room on February 10th at 6 p.m. Notices are being circulated and going out through mailings to members of the community. So there's a wide distribution of outreach for that event. And we are following a path that will hopefully complete CEQA in a little over a year, which will be timely for our subventions, authorization, other state funding needs. So with that, that's all I have. Thank you. So move on to, are there any questions on that? Move on to item. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. I have one question. In regards to the February 10th meeting, is the mailers that are going out to district two in the Watsonville, are they bilingual mailers? So there is a link on the mailer that provides bilingual information for the scoping meeting. So mostly information is English, but there's a reference to bilingual information. We also have a translator service at the scoping meeting. The mailer itself is not bilingual? Most of the content is not, but a small portion of it is so that folks that speak Spanish can reference information and find other information on the project. If you could just repeat the time and place again. It's February 10th at 6 p.m. in the community room of at the Watsonville City Plaza. Do we still have, go ahead. Oh, I just wanted to add, I appreciate the leadership of our chair and the work in going back to DC. I know that takes you away from the work that you do here every day, but it sounds like this was a very fruitful trip at an auspicious time. So thanks for making yourself available and getting this done. Thank you. We still have oral communications. Ms. McGuire. Yes, thank you. This last point, I want to underline it. I think that's an excellent question. Why wouldn't it be fully translated in Spanish? I ask that you deeply connect with that question. It doesn't have to be this moment, but thank you for bringing it up. I also want to bring up a couple of items that, because this is general oral communications, right? Specific to zone items that are within zone sevens per view. Okay. Sorry. Because traffic prevented me from getting here on time earlier, I thought it was redistributed, but I want to just bring up, so often there are mistakes understood in that the candidate form last night, Mr. Friend said that he's a supporter of broadband and my husband Carl Merritt, who's doing the... Is that a curiosity? What does this have to do with zone seven? I guess it's basic to the overall that we have the need to take a look. Broadband does not have to be wireless. It just came up in this gentleman's report, which made me think of it. He was thinking the wireless on the airplane, but down on the ground here, we would like it to be otherwise, and that's important to say. But the thing that's more appropriate to the flood control water is that the really difficult thing to keep watching the Soquel Creek Water District go forward with injecting treated toilet water as opposed to doing the more obvious thing, which I've heard from talking to lots of people as the need with flood control water to treat it so that it's safer, so it doesn't go out into the ocean, into the bay, and harm the bay. But clearly treated storm water takes less treatment than toilet water, and that we have set the dangerous precedent in this county already of allowing that program to go forward, despite the Soquel Creek Water program that is, to go forward, despite the there's ample evidence in Watsonville that the water table has risen to well above sea level right next to Soquel Creek Water District, and that's evident at a public meeting just a couple of weeks ago in Santa Cruz, and as a county, we are watching people unable to continue to afford living here because all the rates are going up. All our rates in Soquel Creek Water District have gone up two to three times, not all, too many of us, in just the first of 10 years of eight to nine percent increases, and they say that's not even counting the costs of the Soquel Creek Water 200 million after debt service. So when we take a look at it as a county, it's super important to ask you to do the common sense question, how on earth could treated toilet water be more expensive, especially once injected into the ground, than just treating this flood control water and making sure that it's allowed to trickle into the ground for the extra safety and verification that Mother Earth does to clean water, especially in light of the very real evidence that we don't have the saltwater intrusion that we're told we have. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else on something relevant to zone seven on oral communications? Okay, we'll close oral communications and move on to item four, which is the approval of the zone seven board minutes. Does anybody have any updates to the minutes? I'll move to approve. Second. All right, we have a motion from Bill as such in a second from Caput. Anybody from the community like to address this on the minutes? All right, see none. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? I'll pass unanimously. Move on to item five, which is the action on the consent agenda, items six through eight. Any comments on the consent agenda from any of the board members? Anybody in the community like to address this on any of the items on the consent agenda? Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. I do see that there is an emergency appropriation to replace two culverts. And to that end, I would again like to see some controlled flood action allowed in rural areas in the agricultural unused areas that are followed for groundwater recharge, much as what is being done in the Central Valley with good success to recharge groundwater. And again, I urge you to connect with Dr. Dahlke from the University of California at Davis and bring a presentation here for flood control and groundwater recharge. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else on this item? These culverts, if not replaced, would undermine the integrity of the levee, which protects tens of thousands of residents. So I think it's probably behooves us to actually move forward with this. Is there a motion on the consent agenda? I'll make a motion to approve. Second. So a motion from Bill Sitch, a second from Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. Move on to the regular agenda, which is item nine. The Board of Directors of the Flood Control District, Zone 7, to consider nominations for the Board of Directors Chairperson and Vice Chairperson as outlined to the member of the district engineer, Mr. Strudley. Thank you, Chair Friend. Members of the Board, in conformance to the rules of regulations of Zone 7, this is the meeting at which you elect a new Chairperson and Vice Chairperson. At the staff level, I would recommend that we retain the existing Chair. It's been very effective with our DC advocacy along the federal pathway as well as our advocacy with our state funding pathway as well. And we would also recommend that the Vice Chair represent the city of Watsonville so that we can represent that area. And so the incumbent Vice Chair would be the recommended choice to retain. So the recommended action is consider nominations for the Zone 7 Board of Directors, Chairperson, Vice Chairperson, and ask that you elect a Chairperson, a Vice Chairperson for the 2020 calendar year. Director Caput. You bet. Do we need to have public comment first? Yeah, but I'll make a motion to do that. I don't want to change horses in the middle of the river. So, okay. Or on the levee or anything else. I would second those nominations. All right, so we have a motion to second for the nomination. Anybody from the community like to address us on item 10? We do have a comment. I'm sorry. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. I just do want to point out that Supervisor Friend is up for re-election and there is considerable opposition. I am running for Second District County Supervisor in the Second District. And so I would like there to be made clear that if he is not re-elected, who would be the Chairman? And I assume that would be you, Supervisor Caput. Thank you very much. So while we have a Vice Chair. Yeah, that's right. Well, actually, this term would last until my term. I mean, you don't get rid of me that easily, Mr. Steinbruner. Even if the election in March is a different way, my term goes until January of next year. Every January, we actually fill this position so the Board would be choosing at that time a new Chair and Vice Chair. We have a motion and a second for those nominations. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously and that will end the zone seven. Can I bring up a point? Continued public hearing. Okay, number eight. We'll now move on to item number eight on the regular agenda. Continue public hearing to accept certification of voting results for the County Service Area 48 and adopt a resolution approving new assessment rates for fiscal year 2020 memorandum of the Director of General Services. Hey, how are you doing? Good, thank you. All right. Thank you. Good morning, Chairperson Caput and members of the Board. Michael Beaton, Director of General Services. I am here today to report on the ballot assessment results for CSA 48 County Fire. On October 22, 2019, the Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution allowing ballot assessment proceedings to begin to allow property owners of CSA 48 to vote on a proposed service level enhancement for the CSA 48 area. Property owners were provided with more than 45 days to cast a ballot. In actuality, ballots were mailed 70 days prior to the due date. On January 14, 2020, the Board held a public hearing to hear public testimony to the proposed assessment and called for a final submittal of any ballots. The hearing was continued to today to allow for tabulation and certification of the results. The election staff have tabulated the ballots and received 2,764 valid ballots, which were tabulated by elections department. Of the ballots returned, 1,525 ballots were yes votes, 1,239 were no votes. For awaited total votes of 56.29% for yes, 43.71% for no. There were also 28 ballots that were deemed invalid and not counted for a variety of reasons, including lack of proper signatures, lack of voting yes or no, and in some situations voting for both yes and no. The tabulation results confirmed the majority of the ballots submitted were in the affirmative, meaning that the CSA 48 ballot assessment proceedings did pass with the majority support of the property owners of CSA 48 voting yes. Today's recommended actions for the Board include accepting the certification of the vote results and adopting a resolution levying the assessment rates for fiscal year 2021 and direct the general services department to retain submitted ballots for two years. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. In the audience today we do have elections department as well as Chief Sherman representing County Fire. Mr. Chair, I want to thank the CEO, the general services and our consultant, Clifford Moss for their tremendous teamwork in getting this tremendous outcome very much needed. County Fire is needed fire equipment for the rural unincorporated area for many, many years. And now we'll be able to bring that up to national standards. A large percentage of this rural area is tier three fire threat which is one of the highest. And so it's very much needed and the ballot measure was needed to address the need for personnel as well as new equipment. And it's very much appreciated by the people that's going to be benefits we've all experienced or seen we haven't experienced but we've seen the tremendous fires and how they've hit California. Some in this, in our county to a small degree but this will prepare us much more for the protection of Santa Cruz County residents. Thank you all very much. Chair, I'll just add, I appreciate the work of our staff and providing information of this. I really appreciate the volunteers who helped and talked to lots of people to help this get passed. And it's a great vote of confidence in our county fire system that people are willing to do this. And it's going to make our community safer. So thank you. We need a motion. I'll move the motion. Yeah, we're going to want public comment. Yeah, public. Yeah, we're going to want public comment. You want to say open the public hearing? It's open to the public to comment. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I heard someone say it. So I jumped up. Before the opportunity went away. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of County Service Area 48 in the rural area of Aptos. I think there were a lot of other people that were here to speak on this earlier this morning but could not stay. So I want to register a formal protest. I think this new tax is not necessary. If your board would take the initiative and the leadership to use even 10% of the $18 million in state proposition 172 money that this county gets every year, it may even be more this year. It is irresponsible not to use even 10% of that money to dedicate to funding county fire when, as you say, it is such a critical need. When you say the risk is so high, why aren't you giving any money from the $18 million that comes in every year and more at all? You give zero to county fire. Zero of Measure G, half cent countywide sales tax money, passed because it was stated in the ballot language, it would fund fire. Zero of Measure G is going to fund fire. Now you come and ask for yet another tax on top of already what people are paying, the usual $159 to fire flow units. I have a message on my answering machine that I've kept the day before the January 14th hearing. An elderly man called up and he said, I don't know what I'll do if this passes. My assessment will be $1,800. Now the way this was all calculated is nebulous. The information changed throughout the whole voting process, the amount of information on the county fire website changed. I observed, and you have this in my email, I observed most people voted right away. So they did not have the benefit of that new information that was added during the process. This is not legally defensible. There were changes that were not made public. The SCI use always rounded up the acreage to the nearest whole number, even if it was a 10.1 acreage. It was rounded up to 11 acres. That makes a huge difference for people who are being charged at vacant land assessments, at commercial land assessments, at agricultural land assessments. And how that was all figured out was never explained. And when people asked, we were given different answers by the person in the CAO's office. This is not legally defensible. What is the appeal process? It isn't even mentioned in this flyer that was sent out with a ballot. No language at all about the appeal or resolution process. This is not legally defensible. Please defer any action on this until these critical questions and problems are addressed publicly. Thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? I'll bring it back to the board. I'll move the recommended action. Second. Passes. We have a first and second. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Any objection? None. Passes unanimously. We have item number nine. Consider report and presentation providing an overview of initiatives to reform the state's Medicaid program through the Medi-Cal Healthier of California for all proposal of the California Department of Health Care Services as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Health Services. Okay. Welcome. Good morning. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Mimi Hall here with the Health Services Agency. Yes. Okay. And I have with me here today Stephanie Soninshine, the CEO of the Central California Alliance for Health, as well as Emily Chung, who is our whole person care lead within the Health Services Agency and Public Health Manager. You might want to get a little bit closer to the microphone. Sure. Okay. How's that? Oh yeah. Okay. Thank you. Good morning. And thank you for having us here today, Honorable Board of Supervisors and Chair Caput. Let's see. There we go. So we're here today to talk with the board and inform you of a large transition happening in the delivery of Medi-Cal Services in California. So we're here to talk about a new state initiative Medi-Cal Healthy California for All. And some of you may know it as CalAIM, as it was previously named. And what we'll be providing today is a general overview of the new state initiative. We will be talking about some of the items that we're doing, some of the processes that we're falling to partner very closely with Central Coast Alliance for Health, along with their other two member counties. And really talk about the fact that what we're looking forward to is a significant transformation in health care overall. I'm pleased to have Ms. Sanensheng here with us because it's really important to have our managed care plan as a partner. And our role as the county is to work with the alliance and look to the future to see how we can best provide the services that we rely on providing in partnership together to best serve the Medi-Cal population as well as the larger population. So what is Medi-Cal Healthy or California for All? As I mentioned, it was formerly known as CalAIM and it's a multi-year healthcare reform initiative. It's probably one of the biggest changes to Medi-Cal we've seen since the ACA and California opted to expand Medi-Cal to a larger population. And it's driven by California Department of Healthcare Services. One of the primary goals is to improve Medi-Cal population quality of life and health outcomes. To support this, some of you may have noticed that the governor's budget supports this initiative with significant annual budgets, which probably still won't be enough, but $450 million over five years for enhanced care management, $115 million over five years for in lieu of services, which Ms. Sanensheng will get into momentarily, and $600 million for plan incentives earmarked for the next two and a half years. So this whole Medi-Cal Healthier California for All was actually launched off work that California Department of Healthcare Services did in partnership with counties, managed care plans, and many other partners. In 2018, the state convened a Care Coordination Advisory Committee. And the reason they did this is that, as you may know and those that we serve in Santa Cruz County experience, there are several sources of care, several systems that people have to live through. And oftentimes, we find that our beneficiaries and our residents are navigating through many, many different layers and organizations just to access care. So Department of Healthcare Services actually came to Santa Cruz County and we were one of the site visits that they did to help inform them of some of the challenges as well as potential solutions to streamline the delivery of the healthcare system here. So that effort by the state back in 2018 set these guiding principles that you see before you. I'm not going to read through them one by one, but it's really clear that the idea is to streamline services, enhance the experience that individuals have through the healthcare system, and reduce costs all towards a healthier community. So MediCal Healthier California for All is something that built off these guiding principles and is the next step to transition California. The three main goals of this initiative are to identify and manage member risk and need, move MediCal so that it's a more consistent and seamless and streamlined system, and make sure that we improve outcomes, quality outcomes, and drive a really major transformation in our system. So this is a big deal and the alliance as well as all the healthcare system partners and the county will be impacted. But we also know that although the next few years of managing through this transformation will be difficult and will take time and energy and partnership, we're all committed to that. And all of us understand that we're embracing these three key goals because they mean a healthier community. One of the other key things I wanted to mention before turning it over to Ms. Sunshine is that MediCal Healthier California for All advances several key priorities in the Newsom administration. So some of the changes that you may be hearing about actually help support services that address the social determinants of health, the root causes of homelessness, increasing behavioral health care access, addressing children that have complex medical conditions, and also addressing both the growing number of criminal justice involved populations as well as our aging population. And this is something that really hasn't been done at this level before in terms of how our state addresses MediCal. So the opportunities that we have before us are pretty dramatic. All of you know that the county has participated in a whole person care health pilot and we have the opportunity to transition our lessons learned and some of the infrastructure that we have put down, especially in terms of data collection and data sharing to transition the work that we've already done into the future work of MediCal Healthier California for All. We're really excited about an opportunity to work with the Alliance as well as other partners to expand population health strategies because you don't improve a community's health by working alone or just working from a plan standpoint, but you do it by working together with your entire community. We're looking forward to being able to build upon the existing county and county contracted delivery system and to make sure that we as a community and a local jurisdiction are well engaged as well as the plan representing three counties. We have Emily Chung who sits on one of DHCS's stakeholder work groups and Dr. Vanessa de la Cruz who sits on another behavioral health work group and Stephanie and myself also stay apprised and participate in the state stakeholder work group calls. And you'll find out at the end of our presentation there's also an opportunity for members of the public as well as you as governing entity members to comment on the impacts that MediCal Healthier California for All may have for all of us. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Stephanie Sun and Shine to talk about the Alliance's perspective and impacts from this initiative. Okay, thank you. So thank you for your time and attention this morning. I'm really pleased to partner with the county on this presentation to talk with you about this really dramatic system transformation that's being proposed that impacts people with MediCal in California. So just by way of context I thought it would be important just to tell you who the Alliance is because some of you may be very familiar with our organization and some may not be. So we are the locally governed managed care plan for people with MediCal in Santa Cruz, Monterey and in Merced counties. We serve about 330,000 people through that tri-county service area with 63,000 of those people here in Santa Cruz County or one in four county residents are covered by the Alliance. And we work closely with many providers in the community to ensure the delivery of care for our members and the county health services agency certainly has been a key partner both in the delivery of care and then as they have navigated the whole person care pilots and certainly with their focus on behavioral health. So what I wanted to talk with you about this morning as we think about this broad system transformation that will improve outcomes for people with MediCal is really highlighting those two areas of emphasis that will have the most impact on the county and the Alliance and have immediate impacts and positive benefits for the people that we serve. But first just by way of providing you with reference to how much the state has proposed in terms of changes for the system. So what you see on this slide are those proposals that serve DHCS's goals of managing member risk and improving member outcomes. And so it ranges from things like health plans, launching an annual population health management strategy for all of the populations that they serve through a longer term vision of full integration of plans, looking at long-term planning for foster care and looking at better transitions for those people who are exiting incarceration. And so this is a big bold set of proposals. What we're going to highlight today are those in green enhanced case management and in lieu of services. And I'll double back on those proposals in just a moment. The second set of proposals really are at the state's goal of offering a consistent and seamless system. And so those proposals are really intended to reduce those silos of care that people experience. And so Ms. Hall made reference to this earlier and it's in all of the state materials. And really what we're all trying to grapple with is that someone with Medi-Cal may navigate six separate systems in order to receive all of the services that they need. And so what the state is looking to do is to minimize the number of interactions that an individual has to have to get the care they need. They're also looking to ensure that care is consistent across the state so that someone with Medi-Cal can go from Santa Cruz County to Monterey County to Orange County and receive exactly the same set of services and in a consistent way of delivering those services. And so the state has a big vision for that. And so these are less of a focus for our conversation today but just so that your board understands that when we talk about a seven to 10 year roadmap because really that's what this is, that a lot of this work is in these areas focusing on a consistent and seamless system. So going back to what I had mentioned about enhanced case or care management and in lieu of services, one of the key components of these proposals is that by July the health plans are required to submit a transition plan that would inform DHCS how the health plan will partner with counties like Santa Cruz who have already launched a whole person care pilot or counties that don't have a whole person care pilot to ensure that by January 1 the health plan is ready to deliver an enhanced case management benefit to its entire population. So the go live proposal for this statewide benefit is January 1 of 2021. It would replace those services currently administered through a whole person care pilot or a health homes pilot. It really is a holistic approach to delivering to the needs of the target populations. NCQA is the National Committee on Quality Assurance and they have standards both for population health management and for enhanced care management. And so what the state is looking to do is to have all health plan programs track to these nationally recognized standards. Right. So let's have a consistent system. And so initially our efforts here with county partners is really to understand exactly what's happening in whole person care. Who are the key providers of care in the county's effort and how do we ensure that we maintain that system going forward? We don't want any care interruption for the people that are currently receiving services. And we want to build upon what's been built to ensure that we can expand that delivery to all those in our county that need it. There are mandatory populations contemplated by this proposal and you see these here on your screen. Plans could propose additional populations and I think in our conversations with county partners at this time, our initial launch would focus on those populations that the state has defined as the most needing of immediate attention. And I think those are ones that our county partners have also focused on. One component of the enhanced case management benefit is the opportunity to offer people something called an in lieu of service. And an in lieu of service is a service that's not currently offered as a benefit in the Medi-Cal program, but could be provided instead of something else. So an easy way to think about that is could you provide some type of housing assistance as opposed to an inpatient hospital stay for someone who didn't qualify for a covered facility but could be discharged from the hospital if there was something available. And so the state is contemplating this suite of services that health plans could offer in lieu of others. And these are supposed to be up and ready to go for people in January of 2021. Again, some of these services are currently contemplated by work that the counties have done with whole person care. They may also be covered in the targeted case management benefit that the counties are covering. And so us making sure that we are looking for those opportunities which aren't currently represented or funded and then continuing those on that happened in whole person care. So partnering closely with the county on that. And there's a list of 13 optional services. So there are 13 that health plans may offer. We're not required to offer all. And again, this will require some assessment about how do we support that which is already underway and not take on those which have separate funding. The two that you see bolder ones that the Alliance has experienced through our grant program and funding. So we're currently offering medical respite here in Santa Cruz County. And we're also doing meals and medically tailored meals. So those would be obvious choices to advance and like I said, we'll be talking with the county more closely about those that are in the whole person care to ensure that we can try to continue those as well. These are really important services because these are some of those gaps in care when you're thinking about the social determinants of health. They're not directly medical care. But if people had access to these kinds of services, it is likely that they would have a better long-term outcome. And so this is something that we're really excited about in terms of the opportunity for our members. So this slide is very busy. And I wouldn't expect that you would get all the detail. But the reason that we included this is just to make sure that you see the length of time. So there's initial proposals in 2021 that are quite labor intensive, both for county staff and the health plan staff. Obviously for those people who deliver care to our members, most importantly, there'll be a significant lift in the last six months of this year as we look to plan for implementation. But this system transformation that DHCS has come forward with is transformation. It's big and bold. And it's really a seven to 10 year timeline, I would say. And so that's the purpose of this slide is just so that you get grounded. And there'll be an initial push this year, a big implementation in January, and then our work collectively with the county will continue for years to come. So as I've been talking with people about the Medicare, healthier California for all our formerly Cali and proposals, the thing that I come back to, and it's the thing that Ms. Hall emphasized, is that our local priorities here in Santa Cruz County really align with the state's goals. Much of the work that's been happening in the healthcare space in this county has been focused on helping to identify and manage member risk. How do we identify where people may be having a negative impact before it happens and put programs around that person to avoid that impact? All within I towards really, can we improve the health and wellness, not just sick care or acute care, but really how can we have a healthier population? And then that idea of making the system work better for individuals so that we're not asking a family to navigate six silos of care to have one individual person cared for. That's goals that we can all get behind. And so those are really exciting things to consider. Also, these are just proposals, right? So these came out late October of last year. The state has this very extensive work group process that Ms. Hall referenced that goes through the end of February. The feedback from those work groups will go back to the Department of Health Care Services and it's likely that they would refine their proposals and refine their time frames once they have some really good insights as to what's happening across the state and the feasibility of implementing these. And so it's just these things could change. That said, we've started early to convene a local stakeholder work group. And so we've already met with all three counties, behavioral health, health services, directors to start talking about how do we identify what's working in the whole person care pilots and make sure that we can carry that forward. How do we have a really well informed transition plan so that we're ready and we don't have an interruption in care in January and we'll continue that work with an eye towards having as much clarity for our transition plan by May or June of this year. And so I'm sure updates will come forward as needed. And again, this is a multi-year effort. So this initial push is on enhanced case manage, but there will be much more to come over the next six to seven years to really transform the delivery system here in California. So looking forward into the near, mid, and long-term future, because as Ms. Sun and Shine mentioned, this is a multi-year effort. It's not something that's going to happen overnight or even in the next two or three years. We have a shared commitment to move forward into the next steps that this will require. Medi-Cal Healthier California for All is, as was mentioned, it's big and it's bold and it's transformative. And it's important for us to look at the impacts to county operations, but also to the larger Medi-Cal population. So as was mentioned, the Alliance serves all beneficiaries in the Medi-Cal plan. The county has a responsibility, and we also have other areas of service that impact those outside of Medi-Cal. So the work that we're doing within this incredibly huge system, both in California and at the local level, is going to help us inform our work beyond the Medi-Cal population, but working towards overall population health. And we both realize, as organizations, as well as with our other community partners, that we won't get to that place without working together. Some of the more operational or granular things that we are doing is the Alliance took the forward step of convening all of the counties. We meet on a regular basis as three counties across different service areas, and the Alliance has committed to when their transition plan is submitted, and then following that, the population health plan, that it's going to be one that's arrived at a consensus with their partner counties. As I had mentioned before, there are ways for your board and for interested parties to stay engaged. There is a Medi-Cal Healthier California for all website at the dhcs.ca.gov website, and there's also an email setup that is still called CalAIM, CalAIM at dhcs.ca.gov. So at the local level, we're staying apprised, and I'm sure that you as supervisors may be getting updates as well from CSAC and other organizations. So our goal here today is really to give a big general overview of this initiative, how it's going to impact us, but really that it's really up to us how much we want to be engaged in providing feedback to the state, but also working at the local level to ensure that those that we serve in the county population benefit as much as possible from this opportunity. And with that, I'll open it up to questions, and Emily Chung, we consider our subject matter expert because much of her work in whole person care is still applicable as we transform that work into the next phase of a healthier California for all. So I just want to say this is, this work is one among many initiatives that are going in a constantly changing healthcare environment, and in an environment within the Alliance where you have essentially three very different sort of medical systems within the three counties. And so I've really appreciated Stephanie and Mimi's leadership in trying to figure out how we fit into this larger piece, and in fact, made sure that as always, the Alliance was driven first and foremost by its values and its commitments to its members, and then figuring out all the complex regulatory and changing environment that we existed both at the state and federal level. So I appreciate you going around and trying to bring people up to speed and make sure that the community understands what's coming. Thank you for the presentation. The Alliance is an amazing organization who does incredible work over three counties, and it's been very thoughtful and paired with our Forward Thinking Health Services Agency. There's a lot to accomplish here. There's a lot to digest also in this presentation, and so I just had a couple of questions. We already have a whole person care project, but at least my understanding, and Emily will correct me if I'm wrong, is I think that project serves about 660 people. And so what I'm imagining, at least based on this presentation, is we're talking about a transformation of the system for those one and four Santa Cruzans who receive medical services. Is that correct? The state is intended that the whole person care pilots across the state help to be the start of the system and infrastructure. So we're basically whole person care counties. We have a head start compared to those that didn't, because we've had a chance to test and innovate and build some infrastructure around data sharing. So if you look at the targeted population list for the enhanced care management, there are additional populations that were not included in whole person care, such as vulnerable children. So the hope would be that the current whole person care beneficiaries would be transitioned in some way through this new benefit, and that what we've learned can then help scale to the other target populations with the collaboration with the Alliance. I think I'd like to add an additional comment in that yes, there was a finite population defined by whole person care, and the purpose of that was to pilot test over the course of this project, what works and what doesn't, and apply those lessons learned to a future transformation, which is now here. The other thing that I think is really important for the board to understand about whole person care is I would say almost half of our efforts were infrastructure, putting in a data infrastructure, a health information exchange infrastructure, a data sharing infrastructure, knowing that whole person care dollars were going away and not knowing what was coming next, it was important to us as a county and all of our partners to have lasting IT infrastructure that would serve us well for the future of healthcare. I know for the original grant on the whole person care that we talked about using technology as a way of allowing patients to check in without having to go to clinics and everything, is that something that we would see expanded, didn't work? I don't know what the results of that was. Sure, we have implemented telehealth devices, we're calling it tele-friend, that are deployed to the clients in their home setting to monitor and provide them daily content. Whether or not that would get expanded or continue on with the new benefits is unclear, but they are a tool that we have now and have learned from. Whether they're effective, we're still evaluating that, but we have some great stories of clients who've really benefited from having the devices. We are able to catch some of their symptomology sooner and change their trajectory on different treatment plans. So there have been some minor successes and we'll learn more over the next few months as we wrap up the evaluation of that. Okay, I'll look forward to that. If I could, just going back to the initial question, because you asked what would be the impact to the 63,000 people that we serve in Santa Cruz County, and I think that what the state is looking for there is that the health plan would be assessing populations as a whole, and so while ECM is focused on the same population that's served by the whole person care pilots, that broader look at how do you manage population so that for those members where you're just maintaining or preventing, that you have a plan for that, while you're also advancing care for the really medically complex. And so it's a charge for the health plan to change the way that we do our work. Great, well, and I know just from my limited time on the Alliance Board, the efforts that go to around quality care and measuring success and incentivizing good practices is key, and so being able to build on that will be very successful. Well, as we look at this slide that's up here right now about mandatory populations, these are all incredibly important populations, but I know we've done a lot of work and this board is somewhat as focused on transition age youth. And do you see them as part of these mandatory population or should we be thinking about adding that as a population? Yeah, I think that depends on are you looking at a specific population of transition age youth? And so there is an effort to assess what's the next iteration for kids who are exiting the foster care system, and so concurrent to all of this planning, the state does have a focus in foster youth and transition planning for foster youth. And so I think that we want to see what the state is finding from that initial work because there's work groups that are focused on that. And then again, more broadly, I think for us locally to be considering from a population health standpoint, if we think about half of the Alliance members are children, zero to 18, and so what is that plan for people is they stop being a child and exit into adult care, whether they have a complex condition or not, really trying to get down into that, different than enhanced case management, it'll be a different approach in terms of the model of care. And so when you say that there's a work group working on this issue, is that part of the group that's going to come back in February and then we'll inform the DHS standards or guidelines? That's a longer-term plan in terms of the seven- to 10-year timeframe with the state's focus on foster youth. You could be in the entire foster youth program in that 70-year time frame, so I hope they move that forward. You know, one of the things that seems very interesting about this is the in-lube payments, right? I mean, that's one of the real drawbacks of our whole-person care grant was the lack of housing assistance. And the fact that we might be able to charge some of these pieces for the in-lube payments seems to be a big breakthrough I don't know what the current statistics are, but I believe probably less than 10% of the membership at the Alliance uses 75% of the services. 8 to 75, yeah. And so housing, there's a lot of people with homeless issues of homelessness and also behavior health and substance use disorder. These in-lube payments seem like a real forward look at maybe able to address some of those pieces. I couldn't tell from the list that you put up there whether there was housing transition and navigation services, and then there was something called housing tenancy and sustaining services. Does that mean there could be long-term rental support for people, or is it just short-term support? I haven't examined each of those proposals in depth, so I don't know what the state's scope is with regards to that. I don't know if, Emily, you have... Yeah, I can speak to that. Participating on the state work group for enhanced care management and in-lube services, we've dove deep into these proposals. And the in-lube services, numbers one, two, and three, are meant to support the populations you're talking about, those at risk for homeless and who are homeless, who could benefit from actual navigation. So in whole-person care, we have housing navigation. We see that as a potential transition of service for us with the new benefits, or the new option. The housing tenancy and sustaining services do not cover rent. So deposits would be the one time getting somebody in to help them establish their housing. Ongoing housing would be dependent on whether they have SSI or vouchers or other sources of income. So the state has made it very clear that DHCS and Medi-Cal would not cover continuing rental. Assistance, so rent, that is. But the housing tenancy and sustaining services would be having staff that could go out and ensure that clients have their activities of daily living supported, wellness activities support with ensuring that they can stay housed once they have identified their housing. When you say stay, help them stay housed, what does that mean? That could mean landlord negotiations. So if there is a dispute with them, landlord, there could be staff that could be hired to work with the clients and work as intermediary with the landlord that could help, that could include helping with cleaning and maintaining their household. So the challenges that individuals who are transitioning into housing for the first time after a while can be challenging. Just that adaptation of how do I go shopping? Where do I put, where do I clean? So providing that level of day-to-day service might be part of that. Well, I mean, I'm just looking at it from a resource perspective, is what we need is supportive housing, right? And so is there some piece of this that can be with the SSI or the Section 8 or the VASH voucher? Could you put together a small housing project, a big housing project that had a combination of these things because it does get to the social determinants of health and the long-term care and reduction of seeing them in the ER, et cetera. Yes, I think that the housing, tenancy and sustaining services are meant to complement permanent supportive housing. This does not pay for that supported housing itself, but that would be part of that team-based care that I think that this whole proposal is meant to get to going to the whole person, that those services could work in collaboration with permanent supportive housing and help to leverage those resources. Well, last question I'll ask, there's a lot of here. You could go deep into this. I appreciate that healthcare is going to be on the ballot this year, right? I mean, at the national level, there is one party who's trying to figure out how to expand health coverage. And there's another who claims to have a program, but 10 years have gone by without one. And when we've seen their program, it's about reducing the number of people on healthcare coverage. So with a program like this, it seems like the November election has a huge effect on the success of this transformation because I imagine a lot of this is funded with federal dollars. So what, if you could look in your crystal ball to sort of not to predict the election, that's our job, not yours, but how do you do a major transformation like this when you don't know a year from now, January 2021, who's going to be in the White House and what their commitment is to providing insurance coverage for vulnerable populations in this country? I think that is the question that you hear CEOs, especially of local health plans across the state grappling with. The way that we're approaching it at the Alliance, we were just talking about this, as I greeted Ms. Hall this morning, is you really have to kind of work in parallel universes. And that's why I ask people to focus on the goals of this proposal. The goals are right. And so we can marshal our resources and do effective planning to improve outcomes for the people in our communities that receive medical coverage. And we should do that. We have really skilled, talented staff at the Alliance who are dedicated to our mission. And so we do our planning and we execute. And in the event something changes in November, then we shift. And that's the best you can do. We can't have decision paralysis because there's so many variables. And I can say that easily. It's not easy to do. But I think in an environment like ours, where we have a local plan, where we really truly partner with our county and with our providers here to ensure that people get access to care, you navigate those issues. So that's my response when I'm looking on those. The lifetime of the Alliance is a great example of that about creating systems, watching things change back. Flexibility is critical. Transform again and then roll with the punches. If we have the good connection with county health services and our non-profit partners, you can do this bobbing and weaving as the federal government tries to figure out what it is they want to do long-term and make a long-term commitment to healthcare funding. Well, and I think that one of the really exciting things about our service area is that the Alliance are lucky in each of our three counties to have really strong county partners who are committed to the people that they serve. And that's always the focus of every conversation. And there's true partnership there. And I think in Santa Cruz County, the work that's been done on the strategic plan is really exciting from a partner perspective where you're trying to navigate all the variables that are coming forward because the county knows what it's focusing on. And so that pivot that might need to happen is easier if we're clear about what people's priorities are and where they've allocated resources and how we would measure success. And that's present here. And so, you know, from my perspective, that's really exciting work that's been done and I think helps us navigate the uncertainties that are coming. Well, thank you for your work. I appreciate this presentation. I look for more information as this matures and it's clear where we're all we're going and figure out what comes next. So thank you. And I'd like to add a couple of things on this because I don't think you can overstate the importance of what is happening here in the state specific to this program. As my colleague had mentioned, I mean, this broad-based attempts at the federal level to eliminate all sorts of programs for disadvantaged populations. The state's going a different way. Actually, in November, I wrote an opinion piece arguing that CalAIM was the most important thing that the governor and the legislature could do to increase coverage for vulnerable populations in the Sacramento Bee because it's the kind of reform and transition into a system that actually all health care should be provided this way. I mean, if you actually look at these things, they shouldn't be revolutionary. I mean, they just make sense. But they're revolutionary within a siloed system and I understand that. But I think that we can create a model in the state of California using this system irrespective of actually outcomes in the election because it's not all cost-based. I mean, some of those are systems reform that just require, well, they're just systems reform. Systems reform doesn't always require significant infusions of money, even though I give the governor a credit for the amount that he's giving in and I agree with our director that it's never gonna be enough. But I think that the community should recognize, I mean, the alliance has been doing this for a long time, but the community should recognize that this, what's going on with CalAIM or whatever it's called now, I guess it got rebranded to a name I won't remember. But I couldn't tell you what the aim stands for either. So I mean, but either way, that this actually, that this policy proposals is really probably the most significant improvement in a Medicaid-based system in the United States in its history since its creation in 1965. So I think that this really is a big, big deal and the fact that you're taking the leadership on it. Anything that our county can do to continue to lead as the alliance has, but can do this. Because I think that there's an interest in regional models that become state models that become national models right now because nothing's functioning at the national level, irrespective of the election. I just wanted to compliment you on caring about these populations that I mean, they're just even the Supreme Court decision yesterday. I mean, really, they're just not being cared about, right? So to have this sense at our level that we're doing something, I appreciate what you're doing. Thank you. Good afternoon, board. My name is Monica Martinez. I'm the CEO of Encompass Community Services. And I thought it might be helpful to give you a perspective from a provider lens. Encompass Community Services is the largest community provider that's funded by the county, and we provide a variety of substance use disorder and mental health services to thousands of medical recipients in Santa Cruz County. And really we see ourselves as addressing the social determinants of health, right? So all of those societal factors impact long-term health outcomes. And over the last several years, we've been undergoing a lot of work, a lot of transformation that I'm excited about because they really align with the direction of these proposals from the state. We've been working really hard to integrate our 40 various programs into a more person-centered, a whole-person approach to services. We've been really focusing on our quality outcomes, on evidence-based practices, and on using data. And it's been difficult. There's been a lot of disruption and a lot of changes in public policy coming from DHCS over the last several years. And it's really been pointing towards this direction, these new proposals that's within the healthier California for all. So we've been working closely in partnership with the Health Services Agency, so we really, really appreciate the partnership from Behavioral Health and Public Health. We also appreciate our partnership with the Alliance, as well as other county departments like the Human Services Department and the Probation Department to really help the providers like us build the capacity to be prepared for many of these big changes. So really, we are watching these proposals very closely. There's still a lot of questions about how this will impact our day-to-day work. We don't have those answers from the state yet, but we will be working and involved in all of the stakeholder conversations to make sure that we're prepared. And really, thinking about this as an opportunity to expand resources, expand services for people who are most vulnerable in our community and really start to look upstream and get ahead of some of these big chronic conditions because if done right, this is a really awesome opportunity to improve services, but we also recognize many of the risks that come with such big change. So we look forward to being a partner and a collaborator, and we appreciate your attention to this. Thank you. Anyway, go ahead. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Any negative? None. Passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Congratulations. We'll adjourn till 1.30. I believe we have no closed session, right? No closed session today. Okay, so 1.30 it is. Totally. Continue with item number 11, public hearing to consider an ordinance and urgency ordinance amending the county code, chapter 7.73, 12.02, 1310, 1401, 1710, regarding accessory dwelling units, ADUs and CEQA notice of exemption and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Caput, supervisors. The purpose of today's public hearing is to present a proposed ordinance updating the county's accessory dwelling unit rules. This ordinance has been written with the purpose of complying with state law, which took effect January 1st. The planning commission reviewed this ordinance at its January 8th meeting and has recommended approval. The proposed ordinance also reflects coordination with the coastal commission staff. So as you may know, just for a little bit of background, Santa Cruz County has had local regulations allowing accessory dwelling units for many years and the county views ADUs as a key strategy towards meeting our regional housing needs assessment or RENA with infill development in existing neighborhoods. Recently, the state has introduced multiple rounds of legislation aimed at stimulating more ADU production by relaxing development standards and streamlining ADU project approval. In 2017 and 2018, the county's ADU code was updated to comply with new state legislation. Hold on for one minute. If someone have their phone on or something, we're hearing a lot of other talking going on. Okay, all right. You could hear someone's walkie-talkie or phone going. Apparently it was outside. Okay, I'll continue. Now you have our undivided attention. In 2019, six new laws were passed related to regulation of ADUs that aimed to further encourage and streamline ADU construction. These laws went into effect January 1st, 2020. Three of the laws, AB 881, AB 68, and SB 13 require updates to the county code. AB 881 includes updates to the ADU review process, allows ADUs in multifamily and mixed use dwellings, and modifies certain ADU development standards. AB 68 modifies the rules for junior ADUs, also known as J80Us. The county has not previously chosen to explicitly define junior ADUs in our code because our existing code allows for this type of use already with a limited food preparation area. However, at this time, the state J80U code has been modified in such a way that it makes sense for the county to incorporate regulations for J80Us into our local code. SB 13 introduces a five-year ADU code enforcement amnesty program. And then AB 587 enables local agencies to have an ordinance that allows for separate sale of ADUs with specific restrictions. The Planning Commission recommended that the provisions of this law also be incorporated into the proposed ordinance. The other two laws that were passed this year, AB 670 and AB 671, do not impact the county code. And text of the operative provisions of AB 881, AB 68, SB 13, and AB 587 are included in the packet. Okay, so I'll now summarize the content of the proposed updates to county code. So first, in terms of ADU location, ADUs are now allowed in all zone districts and general plan designations that allow residential or mixed-use development. Previously, ADUs had been limited to lots with single-family dwellings, both in the state law and in county code. So this is a change. The red text indicates the zone districts where ADUs are now allowed were previously they were not allowed. And then J80Us or junior ADUs are limited to locations where single-family dwellings are allowed. So those are the zones shown in blue. ADUs are now allowed in both single-family and multifamily lots with different types of ADUs allowed on each lot. ADUs can be detached from the main dwelling unit or attached, can be new construction, such as additions or detached structures, or conversions from existing space in the primary dwelling unit, garage, or accessory structures. A new type, the new type of ADU to understand with the new laws is the junior ADU. This ADU type must be attached to the primary dwelling unit, must be converted from existing space in the primary dwelling, unless they're constructed concurrently with the primary dwelling. J80Us are also different from ADUs in terms of size. They have a maximum of 500 square feet and amenities. An efficiency kitchen is allowed rather than a full kitchen and bathrooms may be separate or shared with the primary dwelling unit. For single-family dwellings, one ADU and one junior ADU are allowed. The county effectively allows this, as I mentioned already, with our definition of dwelling unit allowing for limited food preparation area. Staff is interpreting the rules for single-family dwellings to apply to lots with two or more detached or semi-detached dwellings as defined in the county code. In other words, a lot that has two single-family dwellings existing would be allowed to have an ADU and a JADU for each one of those single-family dwellings. And then for multi-family dwellings, which are defined as attached units per county code, up to 25% of units can have conversion ADUs, which are created from areas that are not currently livable space, such as storage rooms or garages. In addition to this, up to two detached ADUs are allowed on each multi-family parcel. The state rules regarding maximum size for ADUs have also changed. The state law allows local jurisdictions to set smaller maximum sizes for new construction ADUs as long as we allow one bedrooms and studios to be at least 850 square feet and multi-bedroom ADUs to be at least 1,000 square feet. The Planning Commission recommended this tiered system be used on parcels that are smaller than one acre. So that's what you have in the proposed ordinance. Maximum size for detached new construction ADUs on lots larger than one acre would still be 1,200 square feet. And for attached ADUs, it would be 50% of the primary dwelling. Let's see. Junior ADUs, as I mentioned before, are limited to 500 square feet. Both conversion ADUs and junior ADUs can include a new construction addition of up to 150 square feet. And that's from our current code. And then regarding setbacks, all ADUs are now subject to interior side and rear setbacks of four feet. And the front and street side setbacks of the zoning district continue to apply. Regarding height, the state law dictates that maximum height limits may not be set below 16 feet. So the ordinance proposes that ADU height be the same as zone district standards with lesser heights required for detached new construction ADUs as well as ADUs above garages within the urban services line. And this is in keeping with the existing county, the existing county code modified slightly to meet the new state law requirements. Regarding floor area ratio and lot coverage, the ordinance retains the existing 2% FAR and lot coverage allowance for ADUs. And also now per state law allows an 800 square foot ADU regardless of lot coverage and FAR. But includes a provision that ADUs that are exceeding FAR lot coverage must be limited in height. The proposed ordinance provides that in the seascape beach estates combining zone district, which is a coastal special community, ADUs must follow the same structure setbacks and height defined by that combining zone district. Regarding parking, junior ADUs and conversion ADUs do not require parking. New construction ADUs require one parking space subject to certain exceptions. Some of these were already part of the county code and other new exceptions were added this year in the state law. Notably now if an ADU is within a half mile of any public transit stop, regardless of frequency, no parking is required for the ADU. The state law also now allows that when a garage or other covered parking is converted to an ADU, the parking for the primary dwelling does not need to be replaced. ADU laws do not override the coastal act. And therefore the county is able to propose different regulations inside and outside the coastal zone. And so that's why we were proposing different regulations for the seascape beach estates community. And also for parking, many parts of the coastal zone are impacted in terms of parking. On-street parking is often shared between residents and visitors. Parking supplies often constrained. And this is especially true in the visitor accommodation hot spots, such as Davenport Swanton, Live Oak, and Sea Cliff, Aptos designated areas that were identified when the vacation rental ordinance was established. So for this reason, the Planning Commission recommends that within the coastal zone, conversion of the covered parking areas to ADUs would require replacement parking for the main structure. And then also in the designated areas that I just mentioned, ADUs within a half mile of a transit stop would not be exempt from parking requirements. In terms of occupancy and sale, we are now not allowed to require owner occupancy of an ADU or primary dwelling between January 1st, 2020 and January 1st, 2025. However, we must require owner occupancy on parcels that have JDUs. And these are two different sections of state law that have these different requirements. Short-term rentals are now prohibited on ADUs statewide, and we already had that in our county code. And also the provisions of AB 587 have been incorporated into the proposed ordinance, allowing separate sale of ADUs under specific circumstances. Regarding approvals and fees, ADUs and JDUs must be approved or denied within 60 days from the date a complete application is received. And this is different from our current rules, which are 120 days, so it's halving the review time. And this review timeline is not required if the ADU is built concurrently with a primary dwelling unit, is located in a non-residential or mixed use zone district or requires a coastal development permit. And JDUs are now explicitly held to the same review timeline as the regular ADUs. There are also reduced fees for ADUs. New in the state law this year, ADUs less than 750 square feet are no longer subject to any impact fees. Also impact fees and utility fees charged for ADUs must be proportional to ADU size. So regarding enforcement, a couple of updates, non-conforming zoning condition now cannot be required to be brought into conformance as a condition of approval for an ADU. And then also, as I mentioned earlier, under SB 13, an applicant may request a five-year delay on code enforcement for an existing ADU. This provision only applies to ADUs that are in existence prior to our county code being updated at this time. And this provision of state law sunsets in 10 years. Okay, so with that, staff recommends that your board conduct a public hearing to consider the proposed ordinance amending the county code and local coastal implementation plan regarding ADUs, along with the CEQA notice of exemption. An urgency ordinance is also recommended so that the provisions of this ordinance can go into effect immediately upon board approval outside the coastal zone. The permanent ordinance would go into effect 30 days after board approval outside the coastal zone. And then within the coastal zone, the ordinance would go into effect after coastal commission certification. That concludes my presentation. I have a couple of questions, and I'll start by thanking you for the presentation and recognizing that the state across the board is definitely modifying housing regulations and taking away some local control on the ADU side, I think that we don't mind as much. But I did have a couple of questions specific to our situation. One of them is that the board had taken an action to eliminate fees on 640 square foot. Well, what we define as a one-bedroom in our code. So do we have to make any modifications? Can we maintain that since that's a fee statement on a size to encourage a certain size? Because the 850 square foot, that's pretty big. I mean, they're a large part, they're large areas of both Sylvester Leopold's district and my district, where that's the size of entire single family homes in the urbanized area. So do we have to make any changes on how we address, at least from the fee side, or can we incent smaller ADU construction still through our fee structure? Yeah, so we don't need to make a change to our fee structure regarding the 640 square foot rule because that rule applies to planning review fees and permit review fees, whereas this rule regarding ADU 750 square feet or smaller applies to impact fees. Okay, 700, I'm sorry. And then also we've put in a maximum size on smaller parcels of 850 square feet to 1,000 square feet, again to incentivize the smaller ADUs. Okay, I mean, it's still pretty significant on these small parcels, I mean, we'll see, but whether they can fit, I suppose. Can you walk me, I'm confused on the sale component of this. It really doesn't, it just doesn't make sense to me yet. A, why I would support it, B, what the value would be and C, the mechanisms by which it would happen. I'm just confused about how a nonprofit developer could come in and build an ADU or if you could just walk me through it a little bit more, I'd appreciate it. Sure, yeah. And for your reference, AB 587, the text of that bill is in your packet. I believe it's the last attachment. So, my understanding is that the, this bill originated from Habitat for Humanity and they were actually working with the city of Santa Cruz and requested help to separately sell ADUs on properties in the city and it was determined that that would not be allowed unless there was some change to state law. So they ended up going through that route to get that approval and the way that the sale works, it's a recorded contract between a qualified buyer and a qualified nonprofit corporation and then the property is held in what's called a recorded tenancy and common agreement which includes a number of things. The qualified buyer and the each qualified buyer has an undivided unequal interest in the property based on the size of each dwelling that's on the property and then there are a number of restrictions on resale, affordable restrictions on the sale and conveyance of the property that ensure that the property will be preserved for a minimum of 45 years as low income housing and will be sold or resold to another qualified buyer. And that's all recorded in a grant deed. Yeah, so that's the basic process. Since it's being recommended to us and even though it was an optional item under state law, can you walk me through why you think it's a good idea? I'm not opposed to it. I'm just sort of lost as to why we're trying to encourage lower rate rental components. It seems odd to move into the for sale world. Somebody trying to cash out in a situation ends up becoming a deed restriction for 45 years, obviously a long time, although it's not unheard of and affordable housing requirements. It just seems like a strange change. And so I just want to know what the philosophy was from planning staff is to recommend here. If I could maybe add, I think the idea that where this came from is that nonprofits are trying to that are working to provide affordable housing, both both in rental and in ownership. So in situations where you have owner occupied units, it would be another way of encouraging owner occupancy for lower income people. And I think that's the concept of what we're trying to, we're recommending the planning. We didn't have it in the ordinance at first and the planning commission thought it was a good idea to add in that option. Just one additional comment. Kathy Malloy, the planning director. I think habitat for humanity is kind of singularly unique because they build for sale single family homes and they want to be able to maximize the utility of that single family lot and put an ADU on it. And whereas someone else might be able to do a tenancy and common agreement between two buyers that buy the whole thing themselves. I think habitat wants to be this third party that they're independently coming up with a TIC agreement between the house occupying household and themselves, not between the two occupying households. So I think it's it's kind of an accommodation for a fairly rare circumstance that habitat for humanity is able to pull off. So if it plays out the way that you're presenting, I don't have an issue with it. If it plays out where we're starting to see that this is happening throughout the neighborhoods, I think that this would be something I'd like to revisit. My last question then deals with the code enforcement component. I didn't see the threshold at which we couldn't do enforcement. I mean, I assume that we still have every police power associated with things that we deem to be unsafe, right? I mean, these are just and functionally non-conforming structures, which everything in the county already is. What's the level of non enforcement that we wouldn't be able to do or we would or wouldn't be able to do? Yeah, in terms of the non-conforming conditions. Correct. Yeah, it's specifically regarding non-conforming zoning conditions. So for instance, if a building is taller than what's allowed by current code, but you're changing more than a certain percentage of it that would usually trigger us to require them to bring the whole structure into conformance with zoning requirements, that would no longer be allowed in your state law. But building safety, any kind of code enforcement things related to health and safety would certainly still be enforceable. Thank you. Sorry, John. No, I appreciate the question, especially about the separate sale. And that was slightly confusing to me. And I wasn't thinking about Habitat for Humanity. I was just thinking about how screwy it could get in neighborhoods and what would actually be the process for getting it done. I was glad to see in these revised regulations the piece about the parking both in the coastal zone and outside the coastal zone. I think that those distinctions make sense, especially in impacted neighborhoods as you identified. I also appreciate the sensitivity based on the discussion we previously had about heights of structures that we still have those restrictions of the little walls 20 feet and the roof could go up to 24. I appreciate that there was thoughtfulness in putting that in there. The question I have about owner occupancy in this five-year window. I don't think that's necessarily a great thing, quite frankly, especially because we'll never be able to control what gets built there. But the state law does not allow the ADU to be a vacation rental, but the home could be a vacation rental. That's correct. Well, I'd be interested in hearing from my colleagues because I think trying to place some restrictions so we actually build the housing stock is a good idea. And I get what the state is trying to do is they're trying to incentivize production of housing by saying we don't have to be owner occupied. So let's identify that as a good. Putting restrictions on the property so we actually get housing seems to also be a public good. And so I'd like us to add restrictions that if they get one of these ADUs on there that none of the property can be used as a vacation rental. And if the board is supportive of that, I'd make that in the. Thank you for the work on this. And thanks. It's it is relatively clear. I mean, there's a lot going on. And I imagine that this is a churn that's going to be happening for a while. I do believe that the county has looked to adopt these regulations and think proactively about how we can be prepared to increase the stock of ADUs. I appreciate the work of staff. Yeah, thank you. People often ask us, what are we doing about affordable housing? Probably this is the most significant thing we are doing. And the state is really pushing the envelope on us. And to the point where it has been mentioned, it's a little concerned about if they're how much they're invading our land use discretion. But we'll we'll deal with that as we go along. I'm, of course, my fifth district includes the Santa Santa Rosa Valley which has septic limitations and other considerations that make how high density housing almost extinct up there or impossible. And I think that ADUs are the best way for us to add housing up there. But how would the elimination of a lot size limitation effort affect one acre rule? We have that like no other district, I think, in the Santa Rosa Valley. I've got a couple of questions, but probably that with the elimination of the lot size limitation affect that then? It wouldn't it wouldn't affect it directly. So ADUs don't contribute towards density generally. There's a section in the county code regarding septic systems that properties with septic systems must be at least one acre. But ADUs are always going to be located where there's already an existing or planned dwelling. So there wouldn't be it wouldn't be a new property being subdivided or created to create the ADU. Also in terms of the environmental health requirements in our county code ADUs are not considered to be separate dwelling units. They're right, but nevertheless the environmental health department requires that septic systems are adequate to accommodate the additional fixtures associated with ADUs. So for some applicants property owners that may come in and want an ADU on their property that's on septic they may this may be a constraint for them because there's there's still that requirement that they have to show that they have that capacity. Trying to speed up the time factor too that's going to well that's going to take a lot of effort cooperative effort then I can see that. Excuse me and we um in Sentiments Valley you know in the Santa Margarita groundwater uh agency or just now uh getting into uh some hard decisions on what we're going to do this ours is due January 2022 in mid county was what was done um with their um with those you know we know one in mid county now we don't know what Santa Margarita is going to come up with but could that have an impact on the application for an ADU or a junior junior ADU I mean if there's we look at septic systems but I'm thinking of water too is that how is that addressed or um I'm not sure you know if we have a thousand more ADUs in Sentiments Valley it's going to have an impact on the water supply uh so I'm just trying to wait maybe we'll just have to wait and see but I'm not sure how that might apply. Um yeah I'm not I'm not sure um I do know that for you know any any new ADU that's proposed has to be demonstrated that um that there's capacity for the on on a property that's on a well or something has to be demonstrated there's capacity for the ADU but um for uh water connection fees um those you know those fees are required for certain ADUs um as well. Yeah I I I guess the one thing I would add about the groundwater management agencies and the sustainable groundwater plans is that there there's a real interrelation between our general plan population estimates and what they're planning for we have to coordinate those things um because ADUs are um a very strong and important part of the tools that we use to build new units um they don't they're not going to add to the growth more than we are already planning for we're not it's not a situation where we're going to exceed our population estimates in fact our our growth is going down our rates are declining we're not building as much housing as we we thought so environmental review um review happens on septic and and fortunately those are some of the same people that are also looking at the sustainable groundwater management plans and and if there was a restriction it would come up and during the review of the of the unit. On the the reduction of the parking requirements uh being the half mile uh walk to a transit station or stop what about the considerations on special places like highway nine where where it's not safe to walk or are those considerations addressed? That's an interesting question um they're not addressed in state law state law is very clear that it's one half mile walking distance no matter what the pedestrian infrastructure is so um and it's any transit stop regardless of transit frequency so it could be argued in some cases someone might not actually walk to that bus stop yeah well yeah it would probably be a concern when some of these come up in the center on the valley along highway nine i would imagine which is a special situation uh in this county i think um and maybe you've answered this but um how does it work um to separate an ad u from a main residence for the purpose of selling ad u you probably pretty much answered that but um yeah um you know i'm not an expert in this topic but my understanding is that it's a it's called a tendency in common agreement where the two um property owners are kind of joint property owners um of unequal shares of the the property depending on the size of the dwelling would there need to be a lot line adjustment in that situation excuse me um no there isn't my understanding is that it's still one property um so not not two separate um parcels and um there's just two owners um on on that same property and was there a discussion on the impact on property taxes and all and on this i mean just in general about um does it cut down the property tax for the main unit and or share it with the other one or how does that um for these sale for sale uh there wasn't a discussion about that and i'm not sure right i think it's speculation right now too but okay thank you sure um so one is this the quantity of state law and the complexity of state law has been overwhelming and i appreciated your efforts to simplify to make clear what we're changing today i'd encourage you to maybe post this to the adu um this this presentation to the adu page um so that people have a clear idea of what the rules are going forward and what's what's being changed by state law and what what we've changed um i guess my second question is how much with the passage of these state laws have you seen an increase in homeowners coming in and asking about doing this or is are people have people been waiting for this to pass like what's the market response to um to these state laws um yeah i would say as the person with my name on our informational worksheet i'm getting a lot of phone calls um uh yeah and a lot of people have been waiting until january to submit um applications for adus with the knowledge that um especially the development standards um are changing for instance the the setbacks the forefoot setbacks um the ability to construct an 800 square foot adu regardless of your far lot coverage those are those are two big ones as well as the parking um reduced parking requirements and have you gotten a sense as to uh are these sort of have these been homeowners or is there a uh are these investors or these um sort of uh or have we now built a marketplace of contractors who are going to just turn these things out and they're now calling you i would i mean the the people that i've been dealing with who have questions are really a mix of property owners um architects contractors developers um yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see what the what the market response is and then sort of see where see where things are working and where things continue to struggle okay thank you my name is malin morelis and today is a good day for housing in santa cruz county thank you guys for your work on this as well as the state and implementing this now to be fair i came to you guys a couple of times three years ago and said that the state is changing the adu laws in a way that we can build more of those among those are we now have the had the opportunity to allow multiple adus per parcel and during those three years the board took no action on this and rents continue to increase far faster than wages so myself and several other members of the community went up to the state met with our assembly members met with our senators and said hey this is an awesome opportunity we love this our board is not taking it up help us so they did they came through and they said all right well now you can have a junior adu now you don't have to live on the property if you want to build one of those and the big thing that they've been telling me and i want to share with you guys and everybody here that these are the minimum standards that we can adopt that we can do a whole lot better these bills are being proposed by people in san francisco and berkeley where people have tiny lots three thousand four thousand square feet so if you have a tiny lot on the beach they can build the same number of units one main house one adu one junior adu as somebody like myself who has over a hundred thousand square feet of billable property we all know that land is precious out here and it's hard to get to develop so please guys i encourage you work with me work with us too so we can come up with a plan so that we can get more of these at a reasonable density that's not going to destroy our community or anything like that there's all kinds of opportunities here with that i have dance teams in a homeowner in uh sand dunes of valley and as mcpherson pointed out um the uh i'm sorry the uh some of these new rules not we're not necessarily going to help those of us that are in septic systems uh the state under gavin newson is getting very aggressive at least rhetorically regarding the need for county and city jurisdictions to all they can to make building adus easier to accomplish san francisco's county is seriously below state mandated benchmarks for new housing in the county to make matters worse the county is already in trouble with the state regarding the county lamp local area management plan report there's some hope that the lamp report will be finally accepted by the state this year sometime but the state has delayed it before the new adu rules and codes do not make it easier for those in rural areas and septic systems while the new five-year grace period for code enforcement correctly exempts codes that relate to environmental hazards not all codes that fall under environmental health jurisdiction relate to environmental threats for example many folks in septic systems are required to include an expansion area for their leech field this is an area that stays inert with no environmental impact for 20 or 30 years until active systems need replacing the county could include those on septic systems in one of two ways or both one include environmental health codes in the five-year grace period on code enforcement except where such codes would actually pose an immediate threat to the environment and two negotiate with the state to formulate a new grace period that allows those in septic systems to use county rules instead of state rules until the new lamp report rules are agreed upon between the state and the county the state cannot enforce any new housing benchmarks in the county if it is the state itself which is holding back new construction because of their delay in approving the lamp report and delays are occurring many septic designers and professionals are not helping property owners design their state their system is that a warning okay design their systems until after the lamp report gets approved so we are all stuck waiting while the state comes down on the county for not building enough housing with all the open space in rural areas available for potential building of ad use this puts an unreasonable constraint on the county's ability to meet benchmarks it also stops those of us trying to build ad use from doing any building at all please as county supervisors consider that environmental health codes should be considered and partially included in these ad u code updates so that the county can meet their benchmarks and property owners in rural areas can be included with the rest of the county when it comes to the ability to meet those benchmarks thank you i'll bring it back to the board during the conversation my colleague shared with me some language that's a in our existing vacation rental language that seems to address the issue about the other house oh oh really okay i don't know the exact section uh it's 13.10.681 g currently three and proposed as four repeat it one more time because i see the county council is 13 10 681 g it says in no case shall i vacation rental or any other short-term rental use of less than 30 days be permitted in an ad u or jadu a property with an ad u or jadu shall not be eligible for participation in the vacation rental or hosted rental program oh yep that is in there so i think that you know what i think that must have been put in there on the last round of updates yeah yeah yeah no it's there's been a lot going on on this part of the code and so i uh uh it made me think about it when when i read it and my colleague pointed out that we'd already thought about that so okay i'm grateful for uh the hard work we did before and am i am i reading it accurately yes county council um you can't speak more than once sorry i know i would i would be prepared to uh make a motion to adopt the recommended actions i'll second yeah i'm satisfied with that language yeah uh let's see uh how long is your comment very short make it real quick my property in particular has an ad u but i'm also permitted to allow a bed and breakfast as an agricultural um and now if you adopt this that's going to prevent me possibly from being able to do that which is something i would be very sad about you know if i'll be prevent people from building ad use yeah as i stated earlier we're trying to build the stock of housing that people can live in um so uh i appreciate the conundrum that it may place on you but i still think as a policy it makes sense to have that if we're going to allow um uh these ad use we're going to try to expand them we're actually trying to expand the housing stock um not the uh rental abilities of short-term rental abilities so i would call the question okay all right uh so uh we have a we have a motion by leopold seconded by friend second by friend okay all those in favor hi any opposition none anonymous that takes us to uh item number 12 12 public hearing to consider accepting coastal commission modifications to recent amendments to regulations regarding the permanent room housing combining zone district affecting the general plan local coastal program land use development and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the planning director thank you okay thank you um chair caput supervisors um so um just briefly um in august 2019 your board approved general plan and county code amendments to create a permanent room housing district in order to recognize conversions of visitor accommodation and care facilities to housing in december 2019 the coastal commission held a public hearing and they voted to approve the county code amendments and voted to approve the general plan amendments pending text modifications to clarify uh that permanent room housing would not be allowed in the coastal zone on properties that have a general plan designation of visitor accommodation the reason for this being that this conflicts with a policy of the coastal act um that visitor accommodation uses must be prioritized over residential uses um so the purpose of today's public hearing is for you to consider these coastal commission modifications um staff analysis indicates that the modifications provide for um consistency with the coast with the coastal act uh staff recommends that your board adopt the resolution accepting the modifications and direct the planning directors to submit this resolution to the coastal commission for review and acceptance at an upcoming coastal commission public hearing comments questions none none okay open it up for public comment if we don't have any uh then public comment will be closed bring it back to the board for action i would move the recommended actions second second okay first you got them uh second okay uh all those in favor aye those opposed none that brings us the 12.1 uh which was item 26 i believe on the consent agenda and supervisor Coonerty sure so uh i i don't think this should take too long but i wanted to check in because um in the uh updated report we saw for at least um for the cultivation side of the house it seemed as though there were relatively few approvals and given the goal of 70 i just counted out the business days and you basically needed to do a an approval every business day between now and june in order to reach the goal and i recognize that some of these are batched together but um but i had concerns about whether we're gonna reach the goal i hear i have some concerns about what i'm hearing from the industry about how long it's taking and that time is putting some smaller businesses out of business and so i wanted to get a sense as to what we need to do to um to expedite this i think our expectation was is that if we sort of moving into ca that it would be almost a turnkey uh sort of situation um because you already had commercial ag and it's a different growth and clearly that hasn't been the case so trying to figure out what's going on and what we need to do to to have things um approved more quickly so i'd like to uh go through the presentation about the first quarter report and then we can discuss some of the issues that we've encountered and some potential changes for the board to consider is your microphone on uh is that that yeah lights on okay yeah um so we'll start with retail activities um our 12 retailers have continued operating with no major compliance issues this year one retailer is in the process of relocating and another has remodeled their location we've had um some issues with advertising that has resulted in the issuance of two citations and at the end of the second quarter we received uh 1.4 million in canvas business tax which represents 49 percent of the projected taxes for the fiscal year and an overall increase of seven percent from the last uh from the last year so i've broken down the non-retail update into the following slides uh let's begin with use permitting and licensing and at the end of the year there were 31 use permits applied for of which seven were approved three additional use permits have been approved this month currently seven additional use permit applications are scheduled for submittal uh by march 1st with three more applications pending scheduling um five licenses have been issued and three additional have been issued this month and are awaiting pickup based on the seven use permits approved those represent a total of 24 potential licenses which will be issued upon uh meeting the use permit conditions of approval with regard to compliance activities we had 28 compliance inspections in the first quarter and 60 uh inspections in the third quarter compliance inspections fell behind in the first quarter as staff resources were stretched thin due to enforcement efforts um we have seen a great trend with our operators who have increased their compliance activities these this increased efforts corresponds with the rollout of the state track and trace program and have resulted in overall decrease of 92 percent of corrective actions issued over a 12 month period um based on concerns expressed by the board we've summarized the cannabis activities in the c and m zone districts we currently have five sites in the permitting process two approved use permits uh one of which was approved last week so that's why there's a slight difference from the slide here um one site is currently being built out now these five sites have a total building envelope of roughly 60 000 square feet and this is equivalent to a potential canopy of 33 000 square feet originally the cannabis ordinance included language restrict which restricted canopy to 100 000 square feet in these zone districts before the cl o was required to provide a report to the board on whether this limitation should be adjusted with regard to non-retail taxes um we've received just over 677 000 which is a 127 percent increase over the same time period last year and this represents a total of 78.5 percent of the projected non-retail cbt for the fiscal year enforcement activities for the first two quarters included a total of 65 search warrants a little over 13 000 pounds of processed material seized almost 25 pounds of canvas concentrate um 27 firearms and 141 000 dollars um seized throughout the enforcement efforts um we've also intake in just over 200 000 dollars based on case settlements associated with um canvas violations so we are seeing that the state agencies are proposing changes based on Governor Newsom's recommendations the three state licensing agencies will be consolidated into a department of cannabis and many of the goals expressed by Governor Newsom in the press release were focused on streamlining the permitting efforts at the state level and we see the potential for significant revisions to the regulations as this streamlining occurs um there was also significant changes to the tax remittance policy at the state level and those are underway those changes um with regard with regard to the goals of 75 licenses if all 31 use permits are approved that would be the equivalent of 81 licenses to be issued which is roughly equivalent to 222 state licenses currently there's the time gap between the use permit approval and licensure and that's based on the conditions of approval and we expect all licenses to be issued in 2021 now to address some of the concerns by Supervisor Coonerty there's a considerable difference in the licensing program from its conception to now my understanding of the county program when I began is that each county license would correspond to a single state licenses state license and this is not the case now as the county licenses are issued based on one license per entity per location this can result in one county license representing numerous state licenses currently the 31 use permits that we see will be 81 licenses in the 222 state licenses so that's that gap and I believe that this disconnect of a one-to-one initial ratio versus the licensing goals is something for the Board to consider another issue that we in the CLO office and the planning department are continuing to see are incomplete use permit applications we've exhausted our efforts internally on trying to provide a comprehensive set of instructions to all applicants and I think those efforts have been warranted but we have not been able to break the legacy of local consultants submitting incomplete work to get a sense of what the county wants to see in their application the reason I'm confident in this internal work that we've completed is that we've had use permit submittals deemed complete on the first round by three consultants who it's the only use permit application they've submitted two of those consultants were prepared by civil engineers who don't do land use work just by following the checklist of information that we provide and so we're still seeing this disconnect with our local folks versus some of the people stepping in and just using the instruction guides that we've worked so diligently upon and then lastly you know we're always considering or we're always looking to improve the use permit and the licensing process some of the items we've identified which could improve the licensing process include potential changes to 7.128 one of which is removing setback requirements for indoor cultivation for non-conforming residential structures within the CNM zone districts currently there's one non-conforming residents which is resulting in five potential administrative use permit reviews or level three use permit reviews becoming zoning administrator approvals and of those two have been approved and the one residents they haven't shown up to either of the use permit zoning administrator hearings so there's the potential to add self-distribution license and this would allow cultivators to drive their harvested cannabis to a distributor or processor without requiring a distribution structure and by not requiring the structure cultivators would not be subject to the commercial fire standards including the 20-foot wide roads fire hydrants and fire sprinklers and this increases security at the site by reducing the amount of people who are required to access these sites also can I ask if that happens and it gets dried or processed in Monterey County who gets the taxes it would depend on if that entity is related to the processing entity because ultimately if the processing entity is the same in our tax code we wouldn't apply taxes but if it's a different entity it would the taxes would be applied to the person here if it makes sense yeah I mean so I get the you only get you can be two of the three and we don't add on the tax but essentially if you're growing it here and then selling it out of Monterey you're you're essentially selling it to a company in Monterey County so you would be responsible to pay taxes based on that sale so oftentimes a cultivator will sell their product to a processor for an unknown amount of money until that processor then sells it on their behalf okay so I grow I grow whatever asserted pounds let's say for the second discussion 10 pounds and I take it to the processor that my colleague here has in Monterey when he processes it down to whatever it is and their packaging and he sells it that's when we get our taxes yes because the so what the processor sells the 10 pounds for they're going to remit x number of dollars back to the cultivator you in this case and the taxes would be based on that money that you actually collect yeah okay just plain to the stereotype yeah and then then the processor would also pay taxes in their county for the money that they made based on the services they provided which is the trimming the drying the storage and what if I what if I have what if I'm a processor from a cultivator and processor and my processing is in Monterey County then you would only pay taxes to Monterey County okay so I had a couple questions you mentioned that there's a number of them in process except for unfulfilled use conditions and I'm wondering if if you have if you give us some idea of what those use conditions are that are that are proving to be difficult to fulfill they vary widely but I think the clearest one is access to sites including fire roads and fire sprinklers they're oftentimes costly engineering there's a lot of upfront engineering and it has to go through the building permit process which can take quite a bit of time to get through the approval process generally speaking plans are not deemed complete on the first round of building permits so there's often two rounds of of review before anything's completed and then with weather conditions what they are nobody does grading work in the winter so and you said if we adopt this self-distributor that that may deal with some of those pieces about roads well it would it would provide our cultivators in some of the mountainous or rural most rural areas the ability to move their product to a processor or a distributor more easily and potentially you know they're not going to be paying people to drive up to their site but the whole thing with the self-distributor that is useful versus our current code is self-distribution we wouldn't require a structure for that where the state and the state doesn't require a structure for this limited activity of self-distribution so that would eliminate the need for fire sprinklers and for access roads on a purely outdoor site oh for a purely outdoor site yes but that would also potentially be for commercial ag sites as well yes yes it would allow any operator the ability to move their product to a distributor or a manufacturer it doesn't allow them to move it directly to a retailer I appreciate the information about the the number of use permits and how that relates to licenses and how the licenses are equivalent to state licenses that gives us some idea appreciate that distinction it's I'll just say for myself it's part of my growing understanding about how all the system work do we have any idea about what this means we look at the tax piece but do we do we have information about employees you know those 222 state licenses is that 20 employees is it 100 employees is it a thousand employees at this time we don't have direct information about that that's not part of the application in any way that is not yeah that'd be it would be it would be fascinating to know that information I would support us moving towards to us at least considering language about the self-distribution in order to continue to move this forward at least understand about what that means and have a little bit full or more full discussion about it yeah oh yeah yeah so there were a couple other potential changes that we wanted to bring to the board's awareness so there's potential to change multiple pieces of county code to identify cannabis cultivation as an agricultural activity which is what it's defined at in the state at the state code specifically in the food and agricultural code sections 564 and 54004 this could streamline the process for our existing commercial agricultural operators as agricultural activities it would be the crop swap that you guys have have discussed it would allow us to streamline the use the use permit process because we effectively don't need a secret determination we can put in there that a secret determination is not necessary this is what's done in Monterey County at existing greenhouse facilities and at other locations throughout the state or other localities throughout the state and this also by us defining it as an agricultural activity to match the state code it exempts agricultural activities are exempted from the SRA road standards as noted in the public resources code so you wouldn't need to have commercial road standards applied to farms that are just cultivating cannabis it wouldn't apply to facilities that are doing any manufacturing because that is a commercial activity and the SRA road standards would apply and those are the standards that were recently adopted by the boards which includes the 20-foot wide road standard any others one potential update would be to add to change the use permit review level for cottage licenses from a level five to an administrative level and this would reduce the time to get these approved we'd need to restrict the operational requirements to drying and storage drying and storage in a non-combustible structure and to outdoor cultivation only these operations would need would be required to be primarily managed by the occupant of the home on site similar to our home occupant or home occupation standards and we'd only allow one vehicle to be used at the operations similar to the home ox standards also the cottage level license is 500 square feet or less yeah so the cottage level license the the justification for this really is the fact that medicinal cultivation can reach up to 500 square feet which we have no insight on as the county in terms of who's doing medical and not so this adds to neighborhood health and safety because our sheriffs know about it we actually have oversight we know we have compliance on the site we know what's going on and it's the least if we craft the language properly with very clear operational compliance requirements for these sites and build out requirements it would be the least cost prohibitive method to get into the commercial cannabis industry for some of our smaller growers I appreciate this information and my suggestion actually for the future and when we get these quarterly reports is to not put on the consent but to put on the regular to get a report and any suggestions as you move through because you know as we try to try to get this right and achieve our goals that we've that we've set out it's it's it's going to take some massaging over time and learning from other jurisdictions finding out what they're doing and and really assessing this and so it may not be controversial but it will be educational yeah I think the question of if you could do something else what would what would it be I think you've just answered that you we talked about the revenue that's been coming in is there any indication what is the the additional costs this has been to the county I mean I'm trying to get a net net figure if if it's costing us more to it and we're we've been focused on a lot of them enforcement understandably but I just you know the cost to the county as well as the revenue that's come in from this new industry well if you remember the cannabis business tax goes right into the general fund so we don't we don't look at the program that way because that revenue goes directly into the cannabis into the general fund but I could certainly do an analysis for you of what what are the actual costs particularly the enforcement costs against the cannabis business tax if you want that kind of analysis yeah that'd be fine thank you I guess my the final question I have is the goal is to issue 75 licenses but if the conditions of approval are so great that people aren't I mean of all these licenses how many people will be growing this summer ready to go realistically based on the economics of growing here versus other places or giving up and growing at all that is a loaded question and I wish I had a great response for you I think that of the use permits that are approved of the 10 that are approved I believe all of them will actually be their sites will be operational to some degree there's one which is a larger facility that has let's just say a few hundred thousand square feet of operational space that has the highest bar in terms of conditions of approval to be met and they they face the biggest uphill climb in terms of meeting the conditions of approval currently okay so I mean I the goal is to issue the licenses but the real goal is to actually have businesses up and operating so figuring out how do we get there is where we should be what I'd be interested in I think there's the potential to streamline when people can be operational in existing commercial agricultural spaces versus what we've done right now and I think that we could potentially look at that and get people operational within those CA zones as soon as they meet their security requirements and possibly restrict commercial activities such as manufacturing or distribution on those sites until the fire requirements are met I think that could be a way forward I mean there's a certain things that you can do in the CLO office and then there's certain things that have to happen in planning right I mean so there's my hands are tied and the hands of the whole CLO office are tied based on the way these conditions of approval are written because oftentimes they're written as all these things must be met before a license can be granted so trying to stay in line with each other within this building but I do believe there may be a opportunity to allow people to be operational faster while meeting the county's goals and the health and safety needs of the community I'll open it up to the public for comment anyone would like to speak Hi Darren Story strong autonomy and core leaders to answer your question we have anywhere between 45 and 65 employees we're one of the larger operators we still don't have our use permit we've submitted three times Sam's doing a great job trying to help you know guide people but there's new conditions that come through almost every time you submit most recently the third time we submitted they asked for a geologic hazard assessment which wasn't previously asked for the first two times so they're kind of moving the goalpost I've had environmental health asked me to sign up for a hazardous management business plan which we did three years ago and I kept giving her receipts like yeah we're one of the only ones in the program they keep asking for the same thing so not everyone's dotting their eyes and crossing their t's it's unfortunate because it costs us money every single time we go back and forth you know architects and and attorneys aren't cheap obviously so that sucks but we are able to stay afloat and we're I think we're responsible for about 60 percent of the non-retail taxes in this county so far and we'll continue to grow one of the things I do want to get ahead of and work with you guys on though is that there are other jurisdictions we have to be aware of that are getting very aggressive trying to attract businesses to their localities and they're getting tax rates some of them are down at one percent and they're trying to get them to zero I know long poke is at zero and that's a big growing area so in order to continue hiring people and rehab in the greenhouses and making sure the work we put in don't end up like the flower growers which by the way I think the cannabis actors in this county are pretty awesome most of them are bootstrapped and self-funded and they're building IP and building brands so I don't necessarily anticipate it going the same way as flowers did those were all just wholesale commodities and no one branded themselves so no one knew what flowers they were buying and whole foods are safe way it's going to be a little bit different I think with cannabis but we do want to get ahead of the pack and be ready for federal legalization and we want to keep as much operators in this county as possible and keep building the economic prosperity so we need to be extremely aware of what's going on with the other jurisdictions and their tax rates and be able to give us incentive to you know grow our employee base and and keep building the local communities and hiring we have a lot of strawberry workers that got laid off because strawberry growers aren't doing so well and they're moving a lot of production down to Mexico so you know this is this is a way to build our communities and and keep doing it right and I appreciate everything what's the what's the pay range for folks at your place those 65 employees well it depends on how good you are but 15 all the way up to $35 and the managers are they all get two weeks vacation health insurance they're all on salary our payroll last year was about 1.4 million that doesn't include workers comp and everything else that goes along with it that's just pay the wages so we're getting there slowly but surely and the the the three stops that you said that you kept on getting additional requirements do you have any sense of the cost that's been so far that you've spent on that yeah that's the unfortunate thing obviously you know we're paying taxes as well and I feel like the cost to get the use permit and then do the building permit is is a lot more than anybody ever for for saw coming it's just because they keep moving the goalpost I'd say we probably spent an extra 50 grand last year just in all those extraneous costs that people don't see you know that's that's an employee you still haven't got on the permit we still don't have a use permit it's crazy we just it's just this GHA we're waiting for now everything else has been met and and we're like Sam said like we're one of the most difficult sites to get permitted because it's large yeah thank you good afternoon supervisors I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this item my name is Robin Bolster Grant former cannabis licensing manager now an attorney in private practice a good chunk of my practice involves counseling folks trying to get them through the regulatory scheme for commercial cannabis I think the numbers and Mr. Laforti's report reflect the daunting path to legalization faced by my clients and many other folks throughout the county I think the projections for licenses are simply unrealistic based on what we're seeing the regulatory process is simply to onerous time-consuming and expensive for most folks to enter the legalized market most distressing to me personally though is to hear from clients that they feel betrayed their sense is that the county doesn't want cannabis here I don't believe that I wouldn't have taken on the job as cannabis licensing manager if I if I did and my years in the planning department have taught me how hard permits are to obtain for any commercial business trying to operate here but the layers of complexity and challenges faced by the cannabis industry make their plight unique from the difficulty in obtaining and maintaining bank accounts insurance and any type of conventional lending only add to the often impossible task of transitioning to legalization I've sent letters to each of the supervisors outlining what I see is the major obstacles to licensing of non-retail cannabis business along with some ideas for tackling those obstacles at the top of the list is the lack of a single staff member or agency that is responsible for deciding policy questions waving or mitigating other agency requirements someone with the authority and the responsibility to make final decisions the common refrain heard by someone navigating the system is you need to talk to somebody else about that I can't make that call these businesses need somebody to make that call the state's streamlining efforts should be instructive the last point I want to make is that the promise of making CA land a priority for permitting and licensing is not coming to fruition in many cases CA land is the most difficult and presents the most challenges for permitting and licensing most of the properties have never been subject to use permit process and bringing these sites up to current standards requires applicants to prove the nature and extent of ag production that existed in many cases for generations the idea for crop swap and streamlining that process is the only way to make CA truly what it was meant to be the place to grow I asked that you review my letter and ideas for making changes I want to close by saying that the problems I've outlined and that we have experienced are in no way a reflection on the dedication the hard work the integrity of all the folks involved I know all too well the pressure they're under to do the right thing and to implement a variety of county policies they have my utmost respect and appreciation thank you Ms. Bolster Grant you made a comment and I saw you shake your head when Mr. Laforte thought that those 10 licenses would actually be in operation this summer could you give us any information you could share with us why you think that may not be accurate I think as we've been discussing the conditions of approval well so the folks that have been issued licenses different than the folks that have obtained use permits right if you've gotten a license you're pretty close to there and a lot of those folks I think will be operational to some extent it's the gulf between the use permit approval and having anything in the ground it's ginormous the conditions the building requirements all of that is taking an inordinately long amount of time and some of that is because as Darren indicated the ball's changing we had one small example where Chris Walters from Cal Fire went out to do a pre-inspection of a site gave it the thumbs up when the folks got their comments back from Cal Fire said we can't support this project and it was clarified and smoothed over but those are the kinds of disconnects that we see from a variety of different agencies and a disconnect between again the use permit approval and finally getting a pass to start growing thank you thank you good afternoon I'm Jim Coffes happy new year to you guys haven't seen you for a while five years ago I got up here and I said that this issue will never be solved until it's looked at from an economic development standpoint not a law enforcement standpoint and here we are today and we've seen the report that the law enforcement activities associated with cannabis are growing I mean we do the sheriff's office is conducting you know 65 search warrants have been issued this year it's almost one a day that the sheriff's office has been involved in the looks as if the fines that are being assessed are subsidizing the cannabis licensing office but that's a story that will repeat itself for years and years to come unless and until we start looking at this as a business for an example I learned in the hall this morning that or a little bit ago that there are 41 hemp producers in the county now hemp is cannabis you know call it hemp but it's cannabis and so we have 41 people that are growing hemp you know and they none of them were growing hemp a year ago and that happened just like that let me also take a little time to kind of explain what's going on in the state the cannabis trade in this state is near collapse the there are companies big and small are going out of business every day daily we've got some major distributors that are going out of business there are receivables are in the millions of dollars there is a very strong chance that there will be an imminent collapse that there will just be the house of cards will just fall and a lot of producers will bear the brunt of that because they've extended product out into the supply chain and they will never see a dollar for some of that so it's really dire the state recognizes that things are bad they're making efforts at the governor's office to consolidate the permitting process at that end they're also looking at reducing taxes it should be noted that this month taxes in this county are going up on cultivators and producers that is going to continue to drive people out of the county thank you Jeff Nordle just checking in I just came to the meeting to see what's going on because we're all coming in our own little bubbles now and it's hard to tell what's actually going on at the state and county level but from what I heard about the crop swap or just considering cannabis as just another agricultural product very much support that concept I think at this point a lot of the drama and such and the fear of the the skies falling as we legalize cannabis is is fading and and yeah would love to see cannabis just treated as though we're growing tomatoes or any other crop and once we're in the system then again this was the old concept we were always talking about in the beginning of this cannabis phase is once we're in the system we're going to have eyes monitoring the system or those operations so I know myself I had to go get a pesticide applicator's license they're going to come out inspect us we're going to have health inspectors county inspectors state inspectors so we're going to be in the system so if a bunch of people are allowed to grow cannabis here in this county we're going to have multiple entities keeping an eye on them so getting more people in the system that path into the system seems like that is a wise way to go we can actually have some people make a living here with cannabis actually grow very quality cannabis we have a lot of people who really still care about the integrity of this plant and just the sky's not going to fall if we have a bunch of people growing cannabis with multiple entities monitoring and keeping an eye on them instead right now my sense is a lot of people have given up on even trying to get a license and they're just going back to their black market ways and that was the fear in the beginning that if you make it too hard we're just going to have this thriving black market and I think that's what's going on so the more people we can get in the system I think that's the way to go at this point so thank you maybe if anyone else wants to speak line up so we can just go for hi I'm Jujie Tyroller and I have a cannabis business it's a manufacturing business in the first shared kitchen in all of California and that's thanks to Santa Cruz County so I want to thank you all for participating in that because that was a huge political event that happened I wouldn't be able to have a business if it wasn't in a shared kitchen because of the cost I have been it's awakening vitality is the actual name of the business and we have a brand called pure plant herbals so why I'm speaking today and why I had other friends come thank goodness Jim forwarded an email to say that this meeting was happening there are so many illegal businesses out there I'm not part of that so when somebody says hey can you like rat somebody out I I don't know about the the illegal part of it but I know it's what's keeping us from making money because I was part of a collective early on and we were selling the same products and now it's getting harder and harder with the dispensaries that we have because we have so many in this county and the cost of doing business is way too expensive in the county as opposed to the city so if you're having a 2% rate for a manufacturer to pay and then they also have to pay in the county it's 6% and in the city it's 2% and we're seeing cities all over the place like Oakland lower their price to that 2% mark or sometimes like we heard a 0% and it is a huge jump to move from 5% to 6% it actually represents about 17% increase and that's just what went down and on a somebody who's a small producer I'd like to become a big producer but that's never gonna happen for me and in a lot of businesses it won't happen for and all that product that's on the shelf and all in storage it's like that's all gonna be gone it will go to waste I really wanted to make medicine for people I hope it I can return to that and I hope I don't have to leave the county that I've lived in for over 27 years I'm also a homeowner and a huge taxpayer and I'd like to continue paying taxes just not to that rate so that everybody else who doesn't pay those taxes they are the ones who are winning at this deal why don't we bring them in lower the tax rate so that instead of one business we have 50 businesses paying that 2% and then you're way over the 6% hope I'm not making it too complicated but we're taxing taxed on every single level cultivation manufacturing distribution and then at the dispensary it's too much that's about it thank you for listening I'd like to ask you a question I understand exactly what you're saying around taxes and I find a lot of validity in that I want to ask you about enforcement so having a legalized market part of it is also having enforcement of the non-legal actors and so the enforcement report that you've seen here shows a number of enforcement actions against those illegal operators as a manufacturer you know some of the places that there's been enforcement actions have been legal manufacturing is that something you'd like to see us continue or is that something I'd like to find a way to invite the people who are breaking the law to become part of the system so that it's not just a punishment and then they get they pay their fine and then they get right back into it under some other name that's what I'd like to see yeah I agree thank you well we'll we'll close public comment bring it back to the board yeah I've one who I wanted to have a lower track structure from the start but is there is there any way we can measure that we have a high tax or maybe the highest I think of what some similar operations or counties have done I know we've always emphasized local control as well so we have our tracks is there any way we can say we did lower it to from five or six to two or three or whatever I just I don't know how we can ever measure what you know what the could there would there be a increased revenue I mean historically or or comparatively throughout the state it seems to be or it doesn't seem to be that with the lower tax rates they're getting more revenue or we can definitely provide the board summary of various canvas business taxes around around the area and throughout the state we've previously provided it for multiple counties and cities within Santa Cruz county and the immediate one the ones immediately surrounding us immediately adjacent so we can provide that to the board okay so well I'll just move the why don't I move the recommended action and then ask that the CLO return with identified potential changes to 7.128 and the county code in order to simplify this process I would second if you're if that's clear look to the everybody okay on that all right we have a motion in a second all those in favor I hi any opposition done it passes and then if we have it a motion to adjourn we don't need one we don't you're the chair you can do whatever you want yeah there