 Call to order the April 24th meeting of the Board of Supervisors if we could please have a roll call Supervisor Leopold Coonerty Caput here McPherson here chair friend here, and if you could join us with the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silence, please Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Good morning Mr. Palacio, so are there any revisions to today's agenda? Yes, there are a number of revisions to the consent agenda. Item number 15, staff requests that this item be deleted. Item 29, additional materials. There's a revised Board Memo replacement packet page 237. On item number three, there's additional materials revised attachment A, a replacement packet page 326. On item 42, staff request this item be deferred to June 12, 2018. On item 53, there's a revised Board Memo replacement packet page 770. That's it, thank you. Thank you. I want to ask Board Members if there's any items they'd like to comment on or pull for additional discussion. Good morning, Mr. Advisor Caput. Nothing to pull, but I'll make a comment. It's good to see on item 34 that we're trying to fill positions, two full-time psychiatry positions, and with the opening of the new mental health facility off of Freedom Boulevard in Watsonville, this will be a big help to having people to be able to drop in and talk to counselors or psychiatrists if they have mental health issues. It'll be a big help to both North County and South County. So really looking forward to that. And the building is being built right now, and it's a beautiful facility and a great asset to South County. And then another one that would be on item 51. It's good to see that work is going to be done on Hazeldale Road, and I share that with District 2 Supervisor Zach Friend. The dividing line goes right between there. And we're going to finally get some funding and some money for Hazeldale Road and also funding for Hulahan and College Road, the intersection there. It's been a problem for years, and some of this is going to actually make it a little better, and that's going to be a big help to traffic in that area. So thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Good morning, Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. I have several items I would like to just comment on. Item number 29, the quarterly report on measures to reduce the number of people held in jail before trial. This is a relatively new program, and it's one that the probation department carries out is they have a risk assessment before they might put somebody in jail. And it's my understanding that they've saved $6 million in 2017 with this program. It's increased the number of clients that the probation department has to oversee from about 35 to, I think, to about 120. So that's more pressure on the probation department, but the long and short of it is I think it's a well-run program. It's proven to be successful and very economical as well. I also wanted just to mention on Item 34 that was mentioned by Supervisor Caput, the reauthorization for submittal of a grant application for us to increase the amount to receive, to get to hire psychiatrists and so it's a very, very serious problem that we have here and it's a serious problem throughout the state and nation, but this is not easy. We'll probably discuss this more when we get to Item number 57 on the regular agenda, but this is not easy to draw qualified psychiatrists to this area with the high cost of living and so forth. So it's an issue that we just have to address and I think we'll hear more about it later today and this morning. Item number 43, I'd like to acknowledge and accept the climate action strategy and your report. We had some very good suggestions, a number of them, but nine major suggestions that came from on the Commission on the Environment, Fish and Wildlife and others also discussed this and it includes capital improvements, the impact of our addressing climate action issues, the importance of it to the economy and I think it's something that we should really make sure that we include in our discussions for our long-range strategy too. The report from the Commission on the Environment in March 26, or what was it, excuse me, February 9th, the Fish and Wildlife Advisory Commission was March 26, but there's a series of recommendations and I think we should have those addressed when we discuss our long-range strategy plan for Santa Cruz County. Also on item number 51 that was mentioned, it's really good to see, approve the road maintenance and rehabilitation account that we have and we can just be very thankful that the legislature passed and the governor signed Senate Bill 1. This is going to amount to this county about over $4 million, almost $4.3 million for road improvements and as Mr. Caput said, there's some roads that are addressed in his district as they are on each of ours, Mine and Able Road, Bear Creek, Lompeco, Jameson Creek. These are critical projects that frankly wouldn't be getting done as quickly as they are getting done without the passage and the implementation of Senate Bill 1 so I just want to repeat the critical nature of that that if a referendum should come in November if that should pass to nullify Senate Bill 1, we won't be getting these types of funds for our road improvements in Santa Cruz County and I'm also glad to see on item number 52 our call for bids on the project for guardrail and striping and pavement markings. That's really an important safety factor and I'm glad we're moving ahead with that. Thank you very much. Thank you, Survisor McPherson. Good morning, Survisor Coonerty. Hi, good morning. I have just a couple items to comment on. First is item number 21. Supervisor Leopold and I bring a letter in support of AB3 which is to move the gun buying age to 21 for certain long guns. There's a little loophole in state law and this could be an important effort to keep our communities and our schools safe. And then three items that are really, really exciting opportunities and I want to just appreciate the folks who are working so hard to make them happen. First is item number 24 which is child care subsidy program, Ellen Timberlake and David Brody at first five. It's a complicated movement of moneys but at the end of the day what we're doing is increasing access to child care for low income families and as people struggle to make it work in this community, child care is a really important component and so thank you for bringing that effort forward. Item number 41 is the ADU subsidy program which is this board move forward on a program to give forgivable loans to people to build ADUs of $40,000 if they're willing to keep that ADU affordable for 30 years and I think it could be a really great way to both increase the amount of affordable housing in our community but also allow many folks in the community or maybe seniors and aging in place to continue to age in place and have a place for a caregiver, family member or just somebody in the community so it could be a win-win. And then speaking of win-wins and Supervisor McPherson brought this up on item number 43, the climate change strategies. I want to really appreciate the efforts that we're making. This has a potential to lower our carbon emissions and save taxpayer dollars and create green jobs so it's a triple bottom line or triple win and many of the strategies are outlined are great and I want to appreciate staff for moving forward so quickly on so many of them including our roof as we speak. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Good morning, Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. There's a number of items on today's consent agenda that I want to comment on. First on item 20, I urge support from my colleagues to have us work with County Council to review our policies and procedures to ensure that we are working towards full equality for all people who live here in Santa Cruz County. I recently attended a National Association of Counties Conference and learned about the Human Rights Campaign Municipal Equality Index. It's an opportunity for us to take a look at our policies to ensure that our understanding of equality as it has evolved over the years ensures that our policies have evolved. And by looking at a work plan and figuring out how we systematically look at our policies to ensure that we are not discriminated against anybody based on who they love that I think it's important for us to do the work to make the changes to the policy and submit to this effort so we can not only promote equality here in Santa Cruz but also have a way to measure our work against other communities in California and throughout the country. So I would urge support for that as well. On item number 21, Assembly Bill 3 is an important piece of legislation. When we have seen the multiple shooting tragedies this week, last week, every week we wonder what it is we could be doing. And California does have some very good laws when it comes to guns. And this bill with the support of Sheriff Hart would help close a loophole to ensure that young people don't get their hands on guns as a way of protecting to make sure that we don't have additional gun violence in our community or in any communities in California. On item number 24, this child care subsidy pilot plan, I'm really glad the leadership of our departments and our community partners. We may remember that last year we had family members come here to support legislation that would allow some flexibility around child care subsidies. This enacting that vision by being creative about the way in which we build these plans and ensure that child care is available to as many people as possible is really helpful and I want to recognize those who are here and those who worked on this. It's a great addition to our community. On item number 29, which is looking at the quarterly report on measures to reduce the number of people held in jail before trial, I want to thank the probation staff for putting this together and sharing this information for us. It is good that we've had a pretrial program here in Santa Cruz since 2006. It has consistently shown its success and not only have we saved lots of money for not keeping people in jail who otherwise wouldn't need to be there and aren't a threat to the community, but the high level of success in terms of making sure that people come for their trial dates and are held accountable shows that this program is a great success and to see that we're moving in the right direction with the judiciary to accept the recommendations from our probation staff shows that they are maybe beginning to understand the success of the program as well. So I look forward to continuing to receive these reports. I think it's an important part of our criminal justice reform efforts and it helps make us stronger and I believe it reduces recidivism. On item number 38, I'd like to just defer this item until our next meeting on May 8th. There's some clarity about whether this park is in this park district and we'll have to be able to get information so if we could defer this to our May 8th meeting. On item number 41, which is my house, my home program, I think this is a good program. I'd like to add an additional direction that we receive an annual report during budget hearings on this program. I think it would be worthwhile to see how this is working out. On item number 43, which is our climate action strategy annual report, there are a lot of good measures in here. It's clear from this that the county with its own properties is taking big steps by adding solar, putting in electric chargers, trying to help people live differently and save lots of money for the county. Obviously, of course, the turning on the light bulb of the Monterey Bay community power, led by our own supervisor, Bruce McPherson, is a great step forward in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and I think as I support my colleague also taking a look very closely at the recommendations from the Commission on the Environment and I also think it's going to be important for us in coming years as part of this annual report to look at what we're doing to build resiliency for the county because one thing we know and there was an article in the paper today that we're going to see greater or more extreme storms, that the likelihood of that happening is great. We've already seen these storm surges on our coast and needing to build our resilience to these storms is going to be an important part of our life as it won't be the anomaly, it'll be the norm here in Santa Cruz County. On item number 48, which is a dissolution of lowly old county service area 54, Summit West, I want to appreciate Pat McCormick and our local Lafko for doing a municipal service review for pointing out that this CSA is no longer needed and to getting rid of something that's on the books. So thank you for your work and I hope the Board will support that as well. And lastly on item 51, I especially want to appreciate our public work staff because the roads that are on here are critical to lots of people but there's also been a focus on our rural roads with these funds, some of them are stored damaged, some of them the storm has contributed to the damage and the fact that we're getting this money out to roads that haven't seen a lot of work in many years is part of our promise that we made to people if we had money we would actually get to their roads. So thank you for public works for including those roads in there. And with that. Thank you, Supervisor Leopold. This is a point of clarification on item 41 for the additional direction. Is it just for the My House My Home program? Is it for also the entire ADU Forgivable Loan program? The whole one. The whole thing. Okay, so it's for the whole item. Thank you for the clarification. You got it. So I'll just speak briefly also on item 41. I think this is a big step forward in working toward additional home affordability within the community. I think that the ADU Forgivable Loan program and the work, the great work that's being done by Mr. Foster and all Habitat for Humanity can make a real difference for people within our community. On item 43, which is the climate action strategy I'd like to thank David for his great work on this item. I'd like to actually provide additional direction. Speaking to what Supervisor McPherson had mentioned, we received a very thoughtful letter from two commissions, but the letter from the Commission on the Environment outlined nine priority areas. And I would just like a report back on basically where we are in those areas and what's feasible to do on those areas at some point after the budget. So at some point in the fall that would be convenient for staff recognizing that they've got a lot of other work that they're doing. But I do think it would be important to stress those nine areas of concern. And I'd just like to take the time very briefly to thank Public Works on the flood control work that they're doing in Rio del Mar. Item 55 addresses this. We've had a number of community meetings on drainage down there at floods. Pretty much every time it rains down there. So any work that we can do, people are going to appreciate. But they've been doing a lot in getting grants as well as doing all the engineering and design background work to get it ready for flood mitigation. And even though a lot of this happens behind the scenes, I just want you to know that the people in my district really do appreciate the work that you're doing to help bring that to a more safe ending. We'll now open it up for the community. This is your opportunity to speak on items that are on consent. If you have anything that you'd like to address this on consent, please feel free to step forward. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. My name is Sharon Papo. I'm Executive Director of the Diversity Center, an LGBT organization in Santa Cruz County work where the hub. And as you may know, our county in many ways has a reputation of being a liberal and accepting place. However, at the Diversity Center, we know that there is still a lot of work to be done from the transgender woman who walked in recently who had been raped while hiking in a trail and was afraid to tell the police what had happened to her to the youth who was not safe in their foster care placement. There's still a lot of work to be done. And I want to thank Supervisor Leopold for your leadership in bringing forth this item. This is one easy and critical thing that you can do today to help our county be more accountable and also to shine a light on what is working and also to shine a light on our areas of growth. The Human Rights Campaign's Municipal Equality Index will give us this information. So thank you for hopefully approving this today and the Diversity Center where we're always here to be your partner and to help you in this effort. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Good morning, Sheriff Hart. Welcome. Good morning, Sheriff Rand, Board of Supervisors Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner. And I just want to thank Supervisors Leopold and Coonerty for item 21, which will authorize the Board of Supervisors to send a letter of support for AB 3 to the state legislative delegation and to the bill's author, Assemblymember Bonta. AB 3 will prohibit anybody under the age of 21 from purchasing or transferring ownership of a firearm. AB 3 is not going to end gun violence, but it is a measured step in the right direction. In unincorporated Santa Cruz County this year, since January 1st we've had six shootings. We've had one in Boulder Creek, one in South County, and four in the Soquel Corridor from Dominican Hospital to 41st Avenue. We've also had two interrupted shootings where my deputies stopped a car full of gang members who had guns who were about to do a shooting. But we've had six verified shootings and included in those are two homicides and with one homicide in South County on Friday and one at the Emerald Bay Apartments two and a half weeks ago. Prior to that we had two homicides in the last five years. We've now had two in the last two weeks. And so the perception may be that the recent gun violence is gang related and some of it is, but some of it isn't. I met with the family of Yvonne Villalobos. Yvonne was murdered at the Emerald Bay Apartments two weeks ago. Yvonne was not a gang member. He was not a gang member. And by the way, there's a lot of good people and a lot of good families that live at the Emerald Bay Apartments. And he had two jobs. He had a young child. And the only thing he did wrong that night was he happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was sitting on a step outside of his home eating some food with his girlfriend when somebody inexplicably walked behind him and shot him in the back of the head two times. So his family is obviously overwhelmed with grief and there's no explaining why this occurred. Last year across our country, over 30,000 people were injured and 15,000 people killed by gun violence. Nearly 4,000 children were shot and either injured or killed last year. There were nearly 350 mass shootings in America last year and over 300 police officers were injured or killed. An estimated 22,000 more people died from suicide by gun last year as well. So law enforcement and policymakers such as yourself and legislators, we need to do everything we can to take some action and to keep our community safe. So I want to thank you for supporting AB 3 and have a good day. Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. I'm going to speak to 41. My name is Renita Pomeroy and I'm part of your House Your Home program in Santa Cruz. I'm having, thanks to David Foster who initiated this program, I'm having a ADU built in my backyard. I'm a senior. I'm a homeowner. I had an unlegal unit in my backyard for kind of forever that was there when I bought the house and most recently I had, well I've had for the last three years a family friend living there who is disabled. She's also section eight. She had absolutely nowhere to go and I said yes, let's do this. And then of course things changed rapidly and I needed to either sell my house or figure out a way to put an ADU in and I just had three land consultants over and I figured out I could not do this on my own at this point in my life and I thought, oh I don't really want to sell. So it was about two weeks from putting my house on the market and I saw in the paper your house, your home and I called, I applied for it and it is really remarkable. So I did qualify for it. It's being built. It's going to be done. This summer that's what I hear and it not only is an amazing program, my section eight friend, longtime family friend has a home and she was not going to have a home very shortly after that. So anyway, I just want to thank you for your time and for letting me speak. Okay, thank you. Thank you for sharing that story. Good morning, welcome. Good morning, I'm Brenda Moss, Executive Director of Senior Network Services and I just want to speak to 41 also. We're neither explained perfectly. It's such a great program and Senior Network is part of it, working with the seniors going through this process but I'm just here to say thank you for stating how important it is. I think you've articulated it quite well and we hope it carries out throughout other areas and throughout the country. So thank you. Thank you for the work you do in the community. Anybody else would like to address us on consent? This is your opportunity? Yeah. Good morning. Marilyn Garrett, part of wireless radiation of their network. Before I comment on the consent items, I have a question of clarification. On item 56, closed session, says about threat to public service. There'll be an opportunity to comment on that item right before we go into closed session. And what time is that? It'll be after our 10.45 item. We'll be the closed session item. And people will comment just before. Thank you for that clarification. And then item number, let's see, I wrote this down here, 45, almost $150,000 for consultation services for the LIVO library and X project at Simkin Swim and Community Center. That seems like a lot of money. And I don't think that's an appropriate place for a library. That's my opinion. Whoever does a consultation, I want to submit this Wi-Fi and the library convenience or health hazard. It is a health hazard. Any consultation should recommend. No Wi-Fi for the safety and well-being of library patrons. Also, items 31 and 32 are recommendations by the Sheriff Corner, totaling almost $159,000 for tracking upgrades in software, file on cue and digital on cue and forensic advantage laboratories information management system. That's a lot of money. It seems like anything digital or software gets all the money they want. And then I'm looking in contrast under health and human services, items 35 and 36, reduction in domestic violence, prevention contract by $10,000 and Walnut Abnew Family and Women's Center by $20,000, reduction contract and homeless services center by over $6,000. This total is $36,000 reduction in services I consider beneficial contrasted with this giveaway of almost $160,000 for questionable needs contracts. Whatever your rationale, the priorities are wrong. It's disproportionate. We need more health and human service priorities and to support the well-being of the community, not more policing. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Good morning. Good morning. Top act to follow. My name is Maria Correa and I am, I come here today on behalf of Article 57. I know the Mental Health or Behavioral Health Advisory Board is going to present a report. So this is specifically on items that are on consent. So it'd be items up to item 55. 55. So when can I... You'll be able to speak to item 57 immediately after oral communications, which is consent oral communications and item 57. So not too long from now. Okay. Yes. So please don't leave. We want you to comment on it, but just not at this moment. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome back. Morning. My name is Victoria Salaxander. I'm a civil society activist. And I want to be able to talk on light item 20 regarding the diversity of Santa Cruz County. And I want to be able to thank Leo Poles, Supervisor Leo Poles for your leadership, including the LGBT community. I wanted to let members of the public know that I'm openly bisexual. And I want to be able to say this, that this is a good thing. I want to support Sharon, the executive director, Sharon Papo, recommendations. And I do appreciate that. Also, I want to be able to, I want to be able to pull real quick a light item on the public and justice safety, a light item 29. We can dispute this later on. I want members of the public to be able to weigh on this. A light item 30. And then regarding the human, human health and services, pull 34, 35 and 36. We'll talk about that. So members of the public are able to weigh in on the political issue. Regarding the Brown Act, we have a right to pull what we want. But I want to be able to talk on a light item 21 regarding assembly bill three. Chairman Friend, I want to ask you right now that you please not send that letter. I want to be able to let members of the public know that I'm an avid Second Amendment right supporter. I believe that people should be able to bear arms. And I want to be able to allow people to give their guns to their kids, right? In a time of political uncertainty. And also, I want to be able to talk on light item eight. Carlos, I would ask that you fully announce this when you're talking about this, the details regarding the ordinance. Members of the public should know exactly what it is, not abbreviated, but an actual ordinance, you know, annunciating and communicating to members of the public exactly what this ordinance is about. Not an abbreviated one because it misses a lot of details. And I think it's imperative as we go forward. Also, regarding the claims filed against the county, light item nine, ten and twelve. I'm going to say this. I know that you guys want to protect the establishment from liabilities. Carlos, I ask that you please reevaluate these claims because there's a lot of abuse going on. And I see this constantly. So I ask that you come at a right and reconsider these. Light item nine, ten and eleven regarding the rejection of the claims because a lot of people are not coming forward and doing this just for the giggles. There's a lot of abuse going on. And these are the trying times. And they're imposing this arbitrary rule and it's very disrespectful. We need to clean up this political community. And you guys are great men and we need to do great things in this county. Thank you. All right. So 29 will be 60.1. 30 will be 60.2. 34 will be 60.3. 35 will be 60.4. And 36 will be 60.5. So it won't be for about five hours, Mr. Alexander. We'll now move on to oral communications. This is an opportunity for members of the community to address us on items that are not on. I'm sorry. We actually should vote on that, shouldn't we? I would move the consent agenda as amended. Second. We have a motion and a second. The amendments deal with item 38 to deferral 41 is the annual report and budget hearings of 43 is the additional direction. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. Now it will be oral communications. Good morning, Dr. Leff. Welcome back. Good morning. I'm Arnold Leff, county health officer. And I just wanted to share with you the fact that we did have one case hospitalized of Hanta virus pulmonary syndrome, which is a very unusual infection. It comes from rodent droppings and it is endemic in counties throughout California. We will be getting a press release out later today, basically encouraging people to be very careful when they're cleaning out their sheds and other areas where there are potentially wild rodents around. So I just wanted to alert you to that. I don't know if there are any questions around it, but apparently there are. When you say rodents, you're talking about mice and rats. That's correct. Mainly the deer mouse, which tends to have carried this virus. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Leff. Does everybody else like to address this in oral communications? Items that are not on the agenda, but within the purview of the board? Morning, Ms. Mason. Good morning. Thank you for having me here. We wanted, in the Office of Economic Development, to thank you for the proclamation that is going to be celebrating National Small Business Week from April 30th through May 6th in order to address small business needs as part of our economic vitality strategy. One of the goals was to put on a seminar or conference for the businesses. And that third annual event, the 82% Micro Business Summit, is getting ready to come up on Friday, May 4th at Cabrillo College, where we'll be hosting 250 businesses for an all-day education event. I want to thank Supervisor Coonerty, who will be doing the welcome address for us. And Supervisor Friend, who provided our welcome in the program this year. It's been great to have the supervisors involved in that event every year. Thank you again very much for the proclamation. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you on the radio. Good morning. Welcome. I heard you. Chair Friend, members of the board, I'm Kimberly Peterson. I'm a program manager here on behalf of the Human Services Department. And I'm here this morning to thank you for your proclaiming the month of May as CalFresh Awareness Month. As you know, CalFresh benefits can help individuals and families purchase healthy food and stretch their food budget. As you also know, the department has been working toward increasing CalFresh participation among eligible households. I'm happy to report that our CalFresh participation has increased. In 2017, according to the California Department of Social Services, over 71% of eligible individuals in the county participated in CalFresh. That's an increase of 14% from 2015. In freedom, participation's at 100%. Almost half of the individuals receiving CalFresh are children with nearly 10% between the ages of zero and three. As you may recall, last year, we were using geomapping data to target outreach in specific areas of the county where a high number of residents were likely eligible for CalFresh but not accessing the benefit. Within the three zip codes where we focused on 906.0, 95062, and 95076, CalFresh participation increased by a total of 45%. Unfortunately, though, we do still have work to do. In 2017, 10,676 residents were eligible for CalFresh but did not use it. We continued to search for ways to remove barriers to access. The Human Services Department continues to collaborate with the Second Harvest Food Bank and other community-based organizations to raise awareness and educate residents about the benefits of CalFresh and good nutrition. We continue to utilize the GetCalFresh.org smartphone application process and receive the majority of our applications electronically. Additionally, GetCalFresh.org may be used by participants in all of our programs to electronically submit verifications and documents expediting the benefit process. We continue to conduct outreach through the county and during May some of our outreach sites include the Aptos Library, Santa Cruz Connect, the annual May Festival in Davenport and Farmer's Markets in Felton, Live Oak and Watsonville where there will be a double market match for the month of May. With the market match, CalFresh recipients who spend $10 will receive an additional $20 for market purchases. Again, I want to thank the Board for your continued support of CalFresh Awareness Month. I want to thank Second Harvest Food Bank, Code for America and all our community partners for their collaboration and support in our outreach efforts. And I especially want to thank our EBSD staff for their commitment and dedication to making a difference to reduce food and security in our community. Thank you and we have some CalFresh bags for you. Thank you for your work. Morning. Welcome back. Thank you. I'd like to be here to help you launch CalFresh Months today. You know, it's just chock-a-block with a myriad of activities. You know, everything from farmers markets, triple bucks to the CalFresh Forum. You know, a number of you like to attend that every year and just so much more. CalFresh is the largest nutrition and health program in Santa Cruz County. As well as the biggest economic development program that drives employment and drives business opportunity in this community. Second Harvest and the county have a long, deep and robust partnership. Second Harvest was founded by the County of Santa Cruz in 1972 as the first food bank in California, the second oldest in the world. And now there are over a thousand food bank distribution centers around the globe. We are pleased to contract with you to provide CalFresh outreach and enrollment and application assistance. I wanted to introduce you this morning to a few special members of our team and ask them to stand up. This morning we have with us Sandra and Yosseth who are our two top CalFresh outreach specialists and their wonderful intern Antoinette. So, and they just make so much special magic happen with the families. They provide an extraordinary level of compassion, commitment and follow through to enroll families to CalFresh. And as a testament to their dedication, this last quarter our team increased application approvals by 17%. In addition to CalFresh outreach, Second Harvest also provides a safety net to those who may not be eligible or who have too much month at the end of their benefits and their money. Food insecurity is the number one driver of the rapidly rising levels of diabetes and health care costs in Santa Cruz County which have increased by over 250% over the last 20 years to over $2.5 billion a year in Santa Cruz County alone. And CalFresh is the number one nutrition and health program in the county. So I just wanted to thank you for your leadership and building a healthier community through good nutrition. Thank you. Thank you, Will. You and your team really do phenomenal things. I appreciate it. I just want to say that I'm really appreciative of the information seeing the growth of the program and the fact that you're not satisfied with these increases but are still working to reach the people who haven't been reached by this critical program. Thank you for your work every day on the front lines. Thank you to our staff for keeping this at the forefront. I really appreciate it. Is there anybody else for all communications? Thank you to the Second Harvest Food Bank. And this agenda item, didn't you just cut $6,000 from the CalFresh budget there, number 36? Just cut $6,000 from the little amount they get. If I understand that correctly, I'm puzzling. So, I've been here many times about the dangers documented health impacts, surveillance impacts, violation of our human and health rights from wireless microwave technology, which is hitting us all the time. Sheriff Hart gave a very moving account of this tragic death of Emerald Way apartments and that kind of violence you see, somebody gets shot, person's dead, horrific, but we are also getting shot up with microwave radiation that is detrimental. You know it, over the years you've been provided DVDs, substantiation. You know one here can say, gee, I never heard that was a problem. And here's an indication that it's an acoustic meter that's detecting the various sources of microwave in here from the antennas on the roof to the Wi-Fi. Another documentation has just come out. The Nation magazine, I think I gave you excerpts of the interview and the Nation magazine of April 23rd yesterday. I just got a call from Bookshop Santa Cruz that they are holding a copy for me. It's called How Big Wireless Made a Sink That Cellphones Are Safe A Special Investigation The Disinformation Campaign and Massive Radiation Increase Behind the 5G rollout. One of the people quoted here is scientist George Carlo who wrote a book called Cellphones and Visual Hazard in the Wireless Age in 2001. It's one of the many books I have. And he in 1999 was hired by the industry basically to prove cellphones were safe. He sent a letter to the industry chieftains reiterating the industry funded wireless technology research. Some quotes. The risk of where neuroepithetial tumors on the outside of the brain was more than double than cell phone users. There was an apparent correlation between brain tumors occurring on the right side of head and the use of the phone. Thank you. Nation magazine April 23rd. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome back. Morning. This is a victorious Alexander civil society activist. I want to be able to let members of the public know in Santa Cruz County residents. Good morning. I want to be able to say I want to be able to thank the chairman chairman friend. I want to be able to thank you for not talking the executive sessions a part of the consent calendar. I do appreciate that because that is a very important part of the general public. I want to be able to fill out the committee and I want to be able to take a look at the general public around act. I do appreciate allowing members to weigh in on the political issue. But I want to be able to start off with eliminating members of the public to what it is to be a good flag waving Americans because we are good people, right? We are good people and we're going to be good about this. I love reading my Jewish political writers, right? I am now. And Martin Bueber, I love them, good and evil, really eliminating. And Martin Bueber has a really great quote and I love this. For the prophetic insight teaches that a human community can only truly exist in so far as it becomes a true community of human beings. Recognizing the legitimacy of what is other, according people like myself, the threat from down below leadership, right? In my constituents, according to identity and community. And I want to be able to say this when it comes to community justice it's important that we find justice. And they're talking about the CalFresh, right? Everybody is able to enjoy the CalFresh. And Emily Timberlake, Alan Timberlake, I apologize, Alan Timberlake, I apologize for this, right? As an activist, because everybody knows I got a sixth court of appeal. I've been ran out of Santa Clara County because of my doing this. Coming in here and doing this. Offering my public criticism. Criticism irritates because it stands above what it criticizes. I want a better political community for the threat from down below leadership It frees my bank account, asks to strip me and just keep oppressing me. When I come over to this county, we got our own oppressors right here. They want to deny me CalFresh and, you know, the humanitarian aid that is needed. Sergeant Fisher has a body camera right here and they're obstructing justice. The Sheriff Department and the DA's office, I want to let members of the public know that he has a body cam, and he literally socked me, he threatened me, and yet they don't want to provide this while they're trying to take me through the malicious prosecution. Chairman Friend, I don't want you to be embarrassed of my humanity, because I'm not embarrassed. You understand me? I would ask that you guys do something about this and push up on the Sheriff Department, the DA's office, and let them know the Excorporatory Evidence that you need to provide that. Thank you, Mr. Alexander. Thank you. Is there anybody else like to address this during rural communications? All right, see, then we'll move on to the regular agenda. The first item of the regular agenda is to consider a report from Mental Health Advisory Board regarding its biennial report for calendar years 2016-2017. It's outlined in the memo of the Director of Health Services. This was something that the board had requested to come back to us, and we're looking forward to receiving our report today. Please feel free to come forward. Good morning and welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Steve, members of the board. I have a confession to make. I love Santa Cruz. I deeply love Santa Cruz. It is great to be here this morning. Thank you. My preferred pronouns are he, him, and his, and I am humbled to be of service to our community, and it is a great honor to have been chosen to do that. I am currently the Chairperson for the Santa Cruz County Mental Health Advisory Board. You have received our biennial report. I'd like to use my time here instead of recapping that report, but to share with you highlights. Who we are, what we are doing, our plans, issues the community has brought forward to us, and ideas that we've heard that might address those issues. I'd like we have members here today, both present and past, to introduce themselves. You guys? Maria Correa. Well, you can't introduce yourself from there, so just they can stand, but we can't hear them on TV or people can't hear them at home. That's the issue, so they need to be at the microphone or not. Oh, maybe they can come up and introduce themselves at the end. Yes, that's right. Is that acceptable? Thank you very much. For the past 17 years, I've been blessed to do work with the Youth of Santa Cruz County. I'm currently employed with the County Office of Education Alternative Ed as a health educator. I work amongst great leaders, like Superintendent Michael Watkins, Fer Sabat, and Johnny Rice. And I teach the reproductive health education at all of our alternative and education sites, about 22 of them, including Juvenile Hall. We are compliant with the California Healthy Youth Act. We are AB 1227 compliant, which is the intimate partner violence and sex human trafficking prevention awareness, as well as including parts of alcohol and drug awareness. And SB 48, the FAIR Act, which in the entire curriculum is inclusive and representative of everyone in the community. This has shown me the huge impact that collaboratives have had on our youth. The groundbreaking work done in restorative justice, led by Fernando Geraldo, Chief of Probation, or the inclusive education awareness led by the Safe School Projects, a collaboration with the Diversity Center and the Santa Cruz Community Foundation. I'm also a consumer of behavioral health services. And with that support, I'm able to be successful in serving my community. I'm better able to enjoy and navigate my journey in this world. We are a board of 11 members. It includes one member of the Board of Supervisors, Greg Caput, and 10 members that you have nominated. Six of those 10 members are consumers or family members of consumers of behavioral health issues. As a board, what we've done this year is we face some challenges. We have mostly new board members. We currently have one vacancy. And recently, Rick Martinez, the deputy chief with the Santa Cruz Police Department, stepped down and we no longer have a representative that works with local law enforcement. We've addressed the grand jury issues and we are now in compliance. We completed the 2016 data notebook that focused on children's and youth behavioral health issues. We also completed the 2017 data notebook that focused on older adult services. In January 2017, we made a site visit to Seventh Avenue Center. And in August 2017, we participated in the Twin Lakes Church, a community gathering on mental health by tabling and hosting two workshops. This past weekend, both board members and Santa Cruz community members attended, and this is gonna be long, the California Institute for Behavioral Health Solutions training sponsored by the California Association of Local Behavioral Health Boards and Commissions. We've had several presentations to learn more about the needs and services in our community. We wrote a letter of support for the Mental Health Client Action Network, also known as MHCAN. And we received monthly reports from both Eric Rerner, the Behavioral Health Director of Santa Cruz County Behavioral Health and our Board of Supervisors representative, Greg Caput. So what are we doing? We are actively welcoming community members and seeking their input during public comments. Our community comments often become agenda items in future meetings. This is to help ensure community members have a supportive place to share their concerns and issues. We've started the planning process for a retreat that will be hosted in July. It will be announced and open to the public and will be part training and working on a strategic plan for next year. Our committees. Our jail committee meets monthly with corrections Chief Deputy Steve Carney to learn about the roles and responsibility of jail staff and document areas of concern affecting behavioral health issues. Our site visit committee coordinates with sites and our boards members to visit behavioral health service providers. Our outreach committee, whose goal is to increase community awareness of mental health advisory board. Our community engagement community works to destigmatize behavioral health issues in our community. Our bylaw community is currently working with county council to update our bylaws and our nominating ad hoc committee nominates board members for the position of chair and co-chair. So the issues that the community has brought forward to us and instead of, you know, don't just come with problems, come with ideas. So here's some of the issues that our community has brought for us and some of the great ideas that we are seeing. What we have been doing hasn't been working and it gives us great pride to see the progressive thinking and proactive approach this county leadership is taking. The work that's been doing, been done at South County facility is indicative of this. While major construction and renovation take place at the Fress Freedom Crestview campus, service continues uninterrupted, done with new building techniques, green and two historic trees have been saved. So how do we address the behavioral health issues facing Santa Cruz County and still keeping Santa Cruz Santa Cruz? So an issue that's been brought up, increased availability of full spectrum of care ideas. We are very excited about the homeless outreach, proactive engagement and services, the HOPE, which will actively seek to help those access services like whole person care. But after they receive care, we were faced with one of the biggest issues we see across our whole community, access to housing. And now that, and how do we face this growth without losing what makes Santa Cruz so beautiful? No one comes here for the traffic. Issues, housing at different levels of care so that we can keep community members in county. Older adult housing is in crisis and the population is growing. Cognitive issues in older adults like dementia and Alzheimer's does not qualify one for receiving care. So ideas that are coming up, the tiny home village model. We're seeing construction on issues like that. Mixed use zoning, ideas that have come up around 7th Avenue in Capitola. The homeless service center, where one can be safe and have access to support and services. Groups like 180 2020, working with both renters and property owners providing a little extra support to both in order to help the clients retain housing and stay sheltered. Housing first model, evidence-based housing models. Your house, your home have all been shown to be effectiveness. That was part of the AUD that you guys described earlier. There also could be a local hospital that may have vacant rooms and because it's not earthquake compliant for a hospital, they might be looking at the short-term fiscal benefit of tearing it down and making medical offices. But if there was a possible way to rezone as something else that has different compliance needs, we could instantaneously have 18 more beds in this county. Other issues, reducing stigma around behavioral health. PTSD in our non-documented community. Cassandra, and I'm not gonna be able to say this last name, I'm sorry about that, but she is replacing Elisa Nahara as the new senior behavioral health manager and her new expanded duties are gonna include working with the Community Engagement Mental Health Act, working with new approaches and ways to engage and inform the South County community members and forming a suicide prevention test force. Issue, isolation, keeping supportive places that help access and support growth of peer services like MHCAN, Second Story, Mirapolo Wellness Center and NAMNI, the National Alliance on Mental Health Issues. Illness. Support peer certification and show the dedication of your support, like the fact that all the positions that the federal services are staffed. They open more hours and they now have the ability for drop-in appointments. Issues. More transparency and oversight in children's protective services. Safety in our schools. Mass school shootings. Youth suicide and behavioral health stigma. Bring idea, bring behavioral wellness to schools like the student ambassador program. Mass school shootings will not end by putting more guns in schools. Our school resource officers need to be approachable role models to our youth. We, however, if we could train our youth to be aware and compassionate of their peers, to see a student isolated, distressed or bullied as unacceptable and give them the tools to support and advocate for them, to teach our youth that we are all responsible for our community we live in and how to have a voice that is heard. We plan on continually building our relationships and awareness that includes participating and supporting the focus groups and the quarterly town hall meetings. And finally, we are interested in changing the board name to reflect the direction the community is going in. From the Santa Cruz Mental Health Advisory Board to the Santa Cruz Behavioral Health Advisory Board. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else that like, are there any questions of the chair? And Mr. Alexander, just so you know, this is a report from Mr. Alexander. I'm talking to you. So this is a report from a county commission. He was given 10 minutes. So please don't make those motions from the back. No, it's good to be informed, but it's also even more important to be polite, right? All right. He is polite. Well, you weren't paying attention to what he was just doing. So if there are any questions of the chairman, please Mr. Chairman, thank you for the outstanding report and for the work that you're doing. I think that Supervisor Caput does have something that you'd like to add to this. I just want to thank you for all the work you are doing and the transition from the previous members to the most of the majority of new members was very smooth and done very well. That's partly because of what you've done, but if we can introduce the other members real quick, then we're part of that transition. Maybe just come up and say your name and whatever you would like. And the previous member too, sure. Hi, I'm Rebecca Mills. I was appointed to the board last year and a number of new members have been appointed since then. I'm the chair of the jail committee and I appreciate all your support. And I know we have a lot of mental health needs in this county and we really, one of the things that we learned at our training was that they're looking for innovative ways to approach problems that are chronic across the state. So I hope that we can find some ways of doing that here locally. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Mills. Go ahead. Hi, Beck. Hi guys. My name is Beck Phillips. I was appointed by Zach Friend last year and I've been really excited to start working around women's issues and mental health issues, especially around the areas of suicide and high school. So with this new person coming in, we're really excited to see how we can partner and get some real work done here. Thank you. Thank you, Beck. Morning. Hi. Welcome back. You're a very big part of the transition. Yes, indeed. So good morning. My name is Maria Corri and I come here today. I have to say I'm really impressed. This was such a wonderful report. I certainly don't regret having recommended Mr. Cabanas for the chair position. He is doing a great job. So I'm here in support of the board. I am this board's immediate past chair and I was a board member for nearly eight years appointed by Mr. Leopold. And I stayed on through health and family crisis, but finally had to step down last fall. During those years of service, I learned a thing or two about matters pertaining to behavioral health, not only locally, but also at our state level. Having also been a member of CalBHBC, or California Association of Behavioral House Boards and Commissions, an association with members from all over California. Above all, I realized a daunting task that comes with being a board member. As you know, our behavioral board, previous mental health board, faced some tough times in past years, but today it is at a much better place with not only a nearly full membership, but most importantly with a group of very dedicated individuals. Last weekend I saw Mr. Cabanas and Ms. Mills at a training offered by CIBHS, California Institute for Behavioral Health Solutions at Redwood City. They strive to learn and understand the duties and responsibilities of their board and carry them with awesome aplomb. Bravo, and you'll always have my support. And thank you very much to you all, and especially to Mr. Caput for your leadership to the board, that's very important. And I'll always be a member, although I'm no longer on the board. Thank you, thank you for your long-term service. Supervisor Leopold, do you have a question or a comment? Sure, I wanna thank you for the presentation of the board and I wanna appreciate the leadership of all the members of the Mental Health Advisory Board. In poll after poll here in Santa Cruz, mental health services constantly is featured prominently because people see some aspects of mental health in our streets every day, and they want us to work on innovative solutions to be able to address it. So I appreciate the work that you do to help work with our staff as we try to expand our services in the community and make sure that not only do they work well, that they're patient-centered, and that they can really make a difference in our community. So thank you for your work. It really does make a difference, and I am awed by the breadth of work that you've taken on. Thank you, Supervisor Leopold. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, to repeat much of that, you're correct Supervisor Leopold, but I think that it's really good that we as a society and our Santa Cruz County community have come to recognize that there are severe mental health needs in our community and throughout the state and nation. It's, I think we're addressing the problem and recognizing it like we never have before, and it's a good thing, and it's because of people like you that bring it to a highlight. We need some new strategies. We need some additional facilities, but I can tell you that we're gonna be as committed as we can under the circumstances to address this issue. It's a very serious one, and it's really what all good people want to see a resolution be reached, and I think we're working toward that end with the good help of people like you, so thank you very much. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson, and we'll now open it up to the community. Is there anybody from the community that'd like to address us on this report? This is just a consideration report. There's no action item. Thank you for the report and your work. It's extremely important, and people want comments from the public. The chairperson of the advisory committee, I'm sorry I didn't get his name. Great job. Talked about reproductive health in part, and so I'm going to submit a couple of documents. I also gave them to him for this agenda item. This is a picture of a pregnant woman on a laptop in the illustration of the fetus within her belly here, and it says the future question mark, cognitive decline, brain tumors, DNA damage, calcium efflux, early Alzheimer's, breast cancer. These products were not pre-market safety tested, so there's a strong correlation between exposure to this toxic radiation and mental health, developmental health, reproductive health. And also documented that way is the Barry Trower declaration that he submitted in a lawsuit urging the removal of wifi from Portland schools, brought by a father whose child was being injured by the radiation. And part of what he says in here, his expertise is microwave radiation weaponry from working in the British Secret Service in the 60s and 70s, and you can see him on YouTube as well. One of, and this is very well substantiated, one of the things he says, intricately related to what we just saw is that in his training in the military during the Cold War, experimenting on those they considered the enemy, he learned more of the extent of microwave radiation weaponry that was about 30 different pulse modulations of microwaves. They could affect about 50 different ailments in physical and mental functioning through entrainment. And I learned entrainment is where we go into rhythm with these artificial frequencies around us that interfere with our natural signaling. So these are two important documents. This one also referred people to looking up Dr. Merkola's interview with Dr. Klinghart on the relationship of autism to the exposure of the mother. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. Thank you. Is there anybody else, specifically on the Mental Health Advisory Board? Yes. Daniela Report. Yes, Victoria Salaxander. And I want to be able to share with members of the public that I do suffer from PTSD and it's real. And I do want to apologize, Chairman Friend. I didn't know that the last speaker was talking on light item seven because the billboard right here didn't show that. So in here it doesn't stipulate that it's gonna give a Tim in the presentation. He'll be nice if the clerk can stipulate that so members of the public can know that. But once again, I want to be able to say this, just dealing with the mental health services here. And I want to let members of the public know, particularly people of color in the Mexican community, the establishment always want to submerge the people in this false political reality. And speaking liberating truth to political power is important. I experienced this mental health services and I'm not knocking that guy down, but to this day I gotta drink CBD, living water and smoke weed in order to deal with my PTSD. And I'm not ashamed of it. I want to let the cannabis community know that, hey, as a political leader, I smoke cannabis and I'm proud of it because it helps regulate me. If I didn't do that, I'll probably be running amok. I'm not ashamed. Everybody knows I'm a good talker. Everybody knows, hey, I come in here with my panache and my charisma. I want to say this, I can't get services here and that's shameful. And when I'm being abused by cops that want to come in here and have no crisis intervention training, Sheriff Fish, right, abusing me, violating my civil rights, right, in the county council and the DA's office and the sheriff department want to withhold the exporter evidence, it triggers my PTSD. So I can't trust the establishment whatsoever. That's why I don't even come to you guys and ask you for anything. I really don't. McPherson, I came and I talked to your aide. She was really wonderful. I look at you like a father figure. I really do. You're a good person, man. And I want to be able to say this. I went to the Scotts Valley Cinemax. I want to go see a Madness. I can only imagine a Christian movie. Mr. Alexander, remember biennial mental health report. At least bring it back, brother, just do me a favor. Bring it somewhere back so I can keep you talking. I do appreciate the interruption, but I want to be able to say this. I'm tying it back to the PTSD. I had a backpack. They're violating my fourth amendment. I had a Mexican hat on. They want to tell me, hey, we need to raffle through your backpack. Everybody else was bringing purses and all that. They want to deny me. That triggered my PTSD. They call the Scotts Valley police on me, right? Triggering my PTSD, right? And just mistreating me. How am I going to get help when I can't get mental health services at the mental health services here when I'm in exile? I can't go watch a movie, a Christian movie, right? I can only imagine a community where it's free from harassment, where I'm able to deal with these political issues or these political ills in a real frame of mind. Thank you. Good morning, welcome. Good morning, gentlemen, Pam Rodgers-Wyman. I'm the director of adult behavioral health services. I just want to thank the local mental health board for their presentation today. There was a grand jury report a couple of years ago that made some recommendations to the local mental health board. And this particular board has taken it to heart and has worked through item by item to rectify any of the concerns expressed in that report. But beyond that, what I found about the current local mental health board is that they are wanting to collaborate. They're working closely with staff to learn as much as they can about the existing sources, gaps in services, and educating themselves. And we really appreciate them as a partner for the work that we do together for the community. And I wanted to thank them and congratulate them for being here today. Thank you, thank you for your work. Is there anybody else who'd like to address us on this item? All right, you just want to finish up as a staff? Go ahead if you want to fit in. Thank you very much and I love Santa Cruz. Thank you. It was an outstanding report and I'm glad that we received it. I'll make just a quick comment. I want to thank the whole mental health advisory board for teaching me so much. And actually helping me out as far as getting involved in this advisory board has been a wonderful experience. And I really enjoy going to the meetings. It's a good time. So I just thanks a lot. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Thank you. That was an outstanding report. Thank you. We'll now move on to item 58 just as a note. After item 58, we'll take a brief break before our 1045 schedule item. Item 58 is to consider a report on AB 109 outcome evaluation conducted by resource development associates and direct probation department to return. April 2019 with a report on progress towards evaluator recommendations as outlined in the memo of the chief probation officer. We have the Santa Cruz AB 109 evaluation recidivism memo. Good morning, Chief and welcome. Good morning, Chair Friend and members of the board. I'm excited today to present the findings of our RDA Resource Development Associates AB 109 evaluation. This has been a work that the RDA team and my staff have been focused on for the past, actually nearly two years now. And so I'm gonna introduce those findings to you. So the evaluation has had four phases. Phase one was evaluation planning that really consisted of a group of stakeholders, treatment providers, my team, the evaluation team, really identifying and determining what elements we wanted to focus on with the methodology would be. We did a data capacity assessment. Phase three was the implementation and process evaluation. And we shared that with the board last year. I do wanna comment on that. That was very valuable for us and we've moved forward on a number of the recommendations primarily to one of those is developing a portal of for information sharing in order for our AB 109 clients to receive services in an expedited matter. So we call it the warm or hot handoff that's really helped us in real time track clients. In addition to that, we are focused on opening a probation resource center, a consolidated service center. And what I'll talk about today is phase four, which is the collective impact or the outcome evaluation. I wanna first just lead off with defining what recidivism is. For many, many years, there was no really a common definition of recidivism believe it or not. And many of us defined it differently. So it was hard to really compare county to county, compare our county to statewide data, et cetera. So the BSEC I think is about four years defined recidivism. And so recidivism is defined as a conviction of a felony or misdemeanor committed within three years of release from custody or committed within three years of placement on supervision probation for a previous criminal condition, conviction. Among the those with three or more years following the release from custody in Santa Cruz, 47% were convicted of a new felony or misdemeanor offense based on the state definition. So that's 47% for those with three or more years. I would like to know it is noted in the recidivism memo that was attached in your packet that for all AB 109 population since 2011, the recidivism rate is 31%. But that includes individuals who've been only a year or less than a year has passed and those. So it's a little bit different. So let me just show you what types of offenses or classification of offenses that were committed and really divide those between felony and misdemeanor convictions at the one, two, and three year mark. So most of the offenders, and that's what the data tells us statewide and across the country are re-offended within the first year, 60% re-offended of those that do re-offend. It's a small population, but that's the first year is significant. So you'll see a year one misdemeanor, 16%, those that re-offended had committed misdemeanors or were convicted. 11% were felony, 73%, no conviction. Two years into it, we have 61% still no new convictions. And you can see that number of slightly increases for misdemeanor and felony. And in three years, we have the 47% conviction rate with a quarter of 25% of all the AB 109 offenders being convicted of a felony. So a small number and those felony crimes are definitely something that we're focused on as well as of course the misdemeanor, but felonies often involve the violent type of crimes that the community is concerned about. Fernando, can I ask, when you say conviction, how does that relate to probation or parole violations? It doesn't include probation or parole violations. It's adjudicated offenses, they're new. So a violation would be a technical violation of a term. Let me also simply put, it could be meet with a probation officer three times a week that any, if a person like yourself didn't meet, you wouldn't, that wouldn't be a new conviction, but a probation or that could be a technical violation, but it wouldn't be a new criminal offense. So these are new criminal offenses. But if they are, and I get that, but if they are, if they end up committing an offense, but then essentially are just sentenced to go back into jail on the previous probation, on previous probation terms, a violation of the probation, would that be considered a conviction or would that be considered a, wouldn't be considered a new case? It would be a technical violation of probation, although a technical violation could still result in incarceration or even a commitment to state prison, in some cases. So violations aren't being tracked here, although we do track that information as well as arrest data, but this is just. I mean, I'm wondering if there's a way to call out or from the data, understand, not showing up to a meeting is one thing. Committing another seriously, they're misdemeanor offense and then pleading out to go back and serve what you were, maybe a long term that you were on probation for because you're an AB109 or parole for, right, would be a real impact to the community. So we could look at that data and present it in the future, because we do have it. It's important because it was complicated and folks coming to agreement to even define what recidivism was, a lot of those elements were on the table, do we track violations, do we track arrests, but this is what we landed on. But we know an arrest is significant as well, but these are convictions that have been adjudicated where they've had due process and before a judge. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So let me, this is probably something that was asked, or still is quite a bit. How do we compare to other counties? Because every county in California is experienced realignment, which really introduced a whole new, I'd like to say, if you consider it, a bicycle, a bunch of new gears. We've been stuck in a single gear for a number of years which has just been prison as an option. Realignment gave us a number of new options. The most recent 12-county study found that 56% of the PRCS, which is a post-release community supervision population and 54.9% of the 1170 recidivated within two years. And this is for the Public Policy Institute of California document that was released in December. In Santa Cruz, the combined two-year recidivism rate was 39%. So a much, much lower, which is a good indicator. And I think that also serves to provide us a baseline which we had for a recidivism rate compared to these 12 counties. Can I interrupt just for a second? Is there any reasons or programs that maybe you're gonna get to that that we have implemented here that makes us 15% better 20% than the other 12 counties? Well, there was a, I'm not sure if it was PPIC, but a couple years ago, an organization examined each of the counties Community Corrections Partnership Plan and approach to realignment. And they really separated into two distinct approaches. One was more treatment-focused oriented, restorative oriented, spending their dollars in treatment and intervention services and supervision. And the other were more rarely punitive frontline, just suppression and actually building more jails. That's where some counties decided to spend their money. We were, I think we took the smart approach, it was really more therapeutic treatment oriented, supervision alternatives. So they cited that those that were more treatment-focused were showing already better outcomes. So this was a couple years ago. So we were happy to be in that camp and supported what we think works. Of course we have work to do, too. Does that answer your question? Okay. So let me show you the types of convictions following the release. And this in no way diminishes any type of crime a person has experienced. But 56% of those were property, nonviolent crimes. 34% were drug-related crimes. 4% were weapons crimes and 6% were violent crimes. So you see that the over 90% were drug-related and property and nonviolent crimes. And many of us know that drug-related drug issues, substance use disorder and property crime tend to go hand in hand. And that's a community-wide issue that we're struggling with. And many of us have experienced the property crimes that are included in this area, which is smash and grab from your car window and your driveway. Those are issues that are not just occurring in Santa Cruz but statewide in terms of recidivism. So this is the summary and the findings that are really important for us. 47% of the Santa Cruz AB 109 individuals were convicted of a new offense within the first three years following the release from custody and replacement on supervision. Approximately half of the new convictions were for felonies and 94% of all new convictions were for nonviolent offenses. Our recidivism rate in Santa Cruz County, another reason to love Santa Cruz, our rates are significantly lower than available in comparison data in California from the 12 counties that were studied recently. Our reconviction rates were higher for the PRCS and 1170 split populations than a straight population. Our PRCS and 1170 population, they are generally considered through our assessment at high risk to recidivate. So they have a lot of criminogenic needs, very challenging population with many needs. They were highest among individuals assigned to substance use treatment and education and housing support. So it's a challenging population to begin with. So I really wanna to really acknowledge my staff for all the work they do with these individuals. Kind of, yes. Can I ask about that? Cause it was shocking to read that clients who participated in reentry, planning, housing support and substance abuse all had higher likelihoods of recidivating than clients who did not participate in any programs. Yeah, that's a great question. So that's sort of a bracing thing, but that's because these folks were assigned to it. It wasn't, this isn't people who are opting in and out of these. There's a group of folks in this population that really were lower risk that we really didn't initially refer to services because we just didn't want it. They were, they had going stable home environment working and so on, but that's not a lot. These individuals were the individuals that we determined through the assessment that these needs were high. So we would consider that the fact that they recidivated, we were not surprised because of the high intensity of needs and multiple needs and mental health, needs, substance use disorder, criminogenic thinking, social support and so on. So the data for those that reoffended while receiving services does show that a high number of them were receiving reentry planning, but much of that it has to do with a couple things. First, their high level needs, but secondly, and it was found in our implementation and process evaluation, the challenging time that we've had and we're getting a lot better at it than getting people to services right away, right after court, right when they meet probation and one of the other reasons we want to do a consolidated service center. So in order to, I mean, is there a way, understanding, and I think it was mentioned in the report that it's hard because you can't have a control group, but are there similar high-risk folks in other communities that we can see what their recidivism rate is? And then ours, because I get if you're gonna have this high-risk population, they may recidivate at a higher rate, obviously than even other AB 109ers, but in order to find out whether these programs are impactful, what's the other group that we can look at to demonstrate success? And that was the big, you know, actually, I hoped, but I've learned a lot through the evaluation process to isolate that variable narrowed down. It's, from what I understand from the evaluators, it's almost impossible to look at one program and determine that that program had a significant impact, one way or the other, given the multiple needs that each of the individuals have, which is based on, well, of course, their amenability to receiving services in the first place, their risk level, and all these other variables. And so I think, you know, something like that would be, I think, very costly, and I'm not sure if it would be fruitful. And I'm not talking about, because this really bundles reentry planning, housing support, and substance abuse treatment. So it's sort of a bundle of services. I'm not asking to pull out which one, but I'm trying to understand is this bundle of services reducing recidivism? Because sort of from the straight analysis, it says it's not, right? Because you have, because as the report says, they're recidivating at a higher rate. Now I understand these folks may have higher needs. So are there higher needs individuals statewide or in another county that we can look at and say, well, our bundle of services, even though they're recidivating at a higher rate, they're recidivating at a lower rate vis-a-vis these other folks as a bundle, not specific services, but in a bundle of services. I'm trying to understand how do we get to success? I think I can only generally answer that really compared to the 12 other counties where our recidivism is lower, even at the two-year mark where it's 55% say and ours is 39. And I think the report, I don't think we included in the pack of the PPSC report, really does talk about the different approaches to realignment, which I mentioned basically too. So I would say that our recidivism rate being lower than the others in our approach using these services is actually having some better outcomes, but I can't definitively say it's this or that. Well, and then my other one was, and I was surprised this wasn't in the report, was to show, since we've been doing this for six years and presumably we're getting better at aligning services to individuals each year, or we should be year over year seeing improvement in the recidivism in reducing recidivism. So I didn't see that in, I saw it for this for over six years, but the AB 109ers from 2012, 2013 should do better than 2012, 2014 should do better than 15, 2015 should be better than 14, and are we able to see that from the data? We didn't dive that deep into the data, but we have that data. We have the reconviction data, and it would really be based on, do we wanna look at, if you started in 2012, do we look at it one year or three year? So I think that's something that we could take a deeper dive with, I think, and of course look back at my staff and our analysts and see if that's a problem. Thumbs up, it looks like we can do that because we do have that data, but we didn't do it for the purposes of this particular evaluation, but these are good questions, and I think that we can go back and see how we compare. We, I think we are bold in wanting to do an evaluation and really look at how we're doing and compare ourselves really to ourselves, and then of course found out that we comparatively to other counties we're doing okay. So I think the basis of this is to establish that baseline that three year recidivism rate, but continue to move forward and see how we can do better. So we've learned a lot, and the data in, if you've read the recidivism memo, some of it's complicated, trying to understand the inferential analysis and the ratio and so on. And let me just say, I just want to say this support raised a number of questions, but I mean, there's a reason why our probation department is a national leader is because you're going, you're working from data, you're doing this analysis, you're bringing outside resources, and I in no way want to diminish the fact that you're doing this and looking, I just as a policymaker to then take this and take it to the next step, trying to sort through some of this has been challenging and some of the findings have been a little bit jarring. And I have a lot of questions, but I want to appreciate you and your staff for really taking this on. We appreciate that. No, and it's great to thank you for your leadership in asking these questions. If they are not asked, they won't be answered. And so we're trying to stay ahead of it and try to answer some of those. So we appreciate that and we'll look at that. It's very important. I mean, this is a significant investment. And as I said earlier, realignment gave us many more options before it was just prison probation. And now we have a number of options, local commitment, straight sentence, and so on. And so we're still learning how to use those additional gears, if you will, in a criminal justice system. So we're seven years into it. And I would expect that seven years from now or next year and the year after, we'll be doing a lot, we'll know a lot more and we'll be implementing what we find. And I'm going to ask, just my colleagues, I'm going to ask that we, because we have a presentation, time-certain presentation coming up. And I have more questions to sort of and potentially direction working with you all on what the next steps will be. So I'd ask that we, I'm going to be asking that we defer this for a couple, for till the next meeting, just so we can work through some more questions without taking a lot more time today. Well, if there's a request to defer now, I'm trying to think about this from a procedural standpoint. If there's a request to defer now, we would end the additional conversation on this, wouldn't we? Or do you want to continue to receive the report? You just want to, so you want to continue the item. I believe I had one, well, one more slide. Oh, I'm sorry. So yeah, so it's going to be to continue the item, but I think some of the researchers here today, so I didn't want to, I didn't want to cut short any of my colleagues' ability to ask questions around this. Okay, so just keep going with the presentation. Just know that what'll end up happening at the end of this is that we'll continue for additional discussion moving on to another meeting. Got it. But go ahead. So recommendations from the evaluation, clearly we need strategies to improve early service engagement, and then we're exploring that to effectively prevent reoffending. And that really could include the one-stop Resource Center that I've talked to, I think many of you about providing easier access and coordination of services. And really, what's a significant challenge and one of the reasons this report was delayed a bit is really trying to collect and data and get data from the various stakeholders that we work. There's a variety of reasons for that, but we hope to expedite that and be able to just be quicker at getting the data that's needed to answer many of these questions you have. So thank you for your time. Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. Thank you very much for the presentation, for the work of the consultants and the staff in putting this together. You know, it's hard to track that, what you can't measure. And these efforts through this evaluation process starts putting, helping us understand. And it's part of a large mosaic in which the probation department is operating in. There's been the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. There's been the Results First Initiative. There's been numerous efforts to really start honing down to how we, what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, and what will work the best. And it's, and so this is just another peak. This is another part of that puzzle piece. And it provides some interesting information. My colleague called a jarring. There are some things that seem counterintuitive. And so it's helpful to have some data to look at it. It's also useful to be able to look at this compared to the statewide PPIC efforts, because that gives you some idea that by some measures we are doing better. We were probably doing better before realignment along some of those measures, but we should continue to strive to do better. Obviously one of the things that jumped out to me was the idea that people on straight sentences tend to recidivate less than those on split sentences, which means they spend some time in jail and sometimes under supervision. I wonder if you could talk about that because this is one of the counterintuitive pieces. Yeah, that very much stood out. And it has stood out statewide, but the explanation for it, I don't know if it's simple, but it's really the complex relation between supervision and reoffending. And it has to do with the individuals that had a split sentence were supervised, and rather intensively, because this is the AB 109 population, smaller case loads. They have search and seizure terms and they're known to our law enforcement. They're from our community. So these individuals are often searched, they're stopped and for good reason and often find sometimes firearms, drug paraphernalia, other things that lead to charges. So it has to do with the high surveillance. So the straight sentence folks who don't know how to have any supervision aren't supervised, don't have search and seizure terms once they're done. So we don't know. I mean, I would hope that they're not committing any new crimes, but I'd venture to guess they possibly are, but they're just not being supervised. They're not being stopped by our partners. And we really believe that those convictions of the split sentence folks are actually increasing public safety because we're in many events, perhaps preventing something that's even more harmful to the community. Yeah, I appreciate that. And that is one analysis that you could give to the data. I mean, there has been a lot of work by our probation department over the years to try to figure out ways to reduce technical violations. And it seems very unusual to me that those who are getting the straight sentences appear to be doing by our measures slightly better than those who are receiving services. Now, when I look at those who were receiving services, it was less surprising to me that those that were actually receiving services tend to recidivate. I don't think that's an indictment of our services. I think it really calls out the great need that some people have. When I look at housing as one of the services they received, you know, if you don't know where you're sleeping tonight, it can lead to all sorts of problems, involving substance use disorder, mental health needs. But it sort of highlights criminogenic behavior because you're trying to figure out how you're gonna just make it through the next 24 hours or maybe the next eight hours. So that's a sign to me. It's one of the signs that, you know, issues like making sure that we have transitional housing for people coming out of jail might work better for us if we had those resources available because you take away that level of need and you can also provide services. It's part of, it's akin to our housing first strategy with many of the homeless. I also have been concerned over the years because I think our community corrections partnerships made a really important decision early on to highlight treatment as part of our response to this change in the law. And I thought that was very helpful because you can't expect change unless you're providing resources for people to make those changes. But we have consistently underspent our treatment dollars if not every year, almost every year, that we've had that resource. And I think what this report to me shows is that we need to loosen the controls slightly about how we provide those services to not make it difficult to receive services but instead make it easy to receive services and try to get an error on the side of giving services rather than the error on the side of not giving services because we have that surplus every year but yet we know that those services are our best opportunity to help change behavior and reduce recidivism, which ultimately promotes public safety. So I asked the staff to sort of take a look at that and work with our service providers to figure out how that can be done. So the hurdle is smaller so people can access those services more easily and reach out to folks. I also, I had a little hard time in this and I know my staff is to talk with your staff about the numbers. It was kind of, there were times where I got a little lost in numbers and I'm not gonna spend a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly the 280 is compared to the 723 compared to everything else. But it would be best in the future to have that more clear in the report. Understood. I don't think it, it doesn't necessarily detract from what the basic messages of this is. So I think, what I look at this report is it gives us that baseline data about our recidivism. We, through our results first initiative, we know what that cost us. Something like $42,000, $42,000. So, you know, if we can move, if we can move these a couple percentage points, we're actually saving tremendous amounts of money, not only ourselves, but the community. So that's why I think airing on the side of treatment is better than not because the payoff is much bigger than we would have otherwise. I think this also gives us a chance to look at this over time. As you say, if you look at this in seven years, now we have a baseline rate. We are consistently trying to improve the kind of services that we offer. We are trying to use real evidence-based practices. We have tried to provide the money through analysis and using that metadata of the University of Washington to get some idea. I know we're working with fake tax men from the East Coast to figure out dosage and whether we're providing things. So I think that there is a complicated model here with lots of different factors. I also think that we need to ask ourselves the question is should we work with the judiciary to think about more straight sentences or should we be looking to invest more resources into more probation staff? To be able to have a manageable case load that could provide the supervision and services for the people in need. I think that we as the policymakers have to make that decision through our budget process, but also working with our partners because that fact still stands out pretty strongly to me. It's a very bright line. Yeah, and we talked about that in terms of the resources and capacity for our staff. That's our priority has been of all our caseloads first and foremost has been the realignment population, that this new population, they still consider it new and we're learning a lot. But they come at our role as probation officers and my probation staff, they're like coaches and they're trying to help individuals do a triathlon yet they don't know how to ride a bike or swim or run a mile. So that's how they come to us and we first got to teach them the tread water that takes time, learn how to. So it's a really, really, it's tough and I would encourage anyone to spend some time over at our office or with a probation officer and the clients because their needs are enormous. So if you think of it like that, it's very challenging. And of course, this data, we're so data-driven, we're also asking staff to do a lot of documentation and data which can take them away from actual supervision. So it's a tough scenario. So resources are always, I think would be important and help for sure. Yeah, well I know that I'm sure I'm not the only supervisor I've heard from staff who's just talk about tough caseloads and when you look at this data, it makes you ask that question. The last thing I'll say is I'm glad to see this One Stop Resource Center moving forward. I'm hopeful that that in collaboration with our community partners that we can get people into these services more quickly. And but it comes back to my other point which is loosen the purse strings a little so that people can access these services as quickly as possible. Thank you. Are there any other brief comments from supervisors recognizing that the intention here is to actually continue this item? Yeah, I know that we're gonna continue. Are there, I just, well congratulations on your successes to recognize nationwide but the recognition that you, there's some improvements to be made too. But is there anything within the framework of 109 and others that inhibits you from getting some results or highlighting some needs that you might otherwise not get? Is there anything that's restricting you from saying, boy, I wish we could ask this or? Well, you know, I think, you know, resources are, to do, to take a deeper dive into this evaluation, there's a cost or to my staff it will take their time to extract out like the 2012, 2013. So that's just time and effort which takes away from other things. So will we have better results? I can't guarantee it but I would imagine so. Resource in terms of supervision for these individuals but not just realignment folks but the other, we have a lot of other folks that the community is concerned about and on our caseloads that want them to be supervised appropriately. So I think I know this took an enormous time from my team of analysts and just the adult staff to just help put this evaluation together. So those are typical things that could inhibit further progress but I think what stands out though is really that I think I said earlier that we want, we're willing to examine how we're doing and our partners are, we're at the table and willing to do that because when you do an evaluation, you can expose some areas of deficiencies and also areas you're doing well. So I think that's probably the something that really stood out that everyone was willing to jump in and do this. Thank you. Briefly. Thanks. And I want to turn on the microphone. Mike. Yeah. How something, let's say somebody doesn't show up for a probation interview and talk. If they never show up, does it, how does it go from? Well, technically that would actually stay as a probation violation and if they didn't show up after attempts, we do go out and try to find them and we have a great program that like goes out and says, hey, you should show up. Otherwise there's a bench warrant issue. There's a warrant for their arrest and they're brought into custody and so ultimately that's what would happen but a technical violation more often than not isn't turned into a new criminal charge. It's handles the violation. There are charges, new charges, new arrest on fresh charges the opposite way that can be, that we're asked to just file as a probation violation. That's the way it usually works. What percentage would you say, you know, a ballpark figure or probation violations just by not showing up? Far fewer than in years past because our jail utilization study, for instance, examine the number of individuals on probation that were coming through the side doors on technical violations for a failure to appear or abscond warrants and that was a small number and there's been a lot of work that we've done with our partners to do what we call the RAP program, warrant reduction, arrest, abatement advocacy program where when someone doesn't show up we don't have a knee-jerk reaction and just issue a warrant. Depending on the case, what we'll do is we'll notify our partners, can you go find this individual? Because sometimes they're just fearful for a variety of reasons as showing up and that averts a lot, a lot of warrants. That we used to have an issue with that. We have far, far less. Thank you. So we do need to open this up to the community. I feel like if you're gonna continue the item, then we should probably cease our conversation about it. We have an opportunity for members of the community to address this on this item, recognizing that it will be also continued to our next meeting. Thank you, Chief. Welcome back. Victoria Salaxander, civil society activist and I know what it is to be on probation. I know what it is, members of my community, the Mexican community, right? We're a segment. We're not the whole, but we're a segment. And I wanna speak on behalf of the Mexicans. If you wanna reduce the recidivism rate, right? When you look at the director and you look at his staff, they're all Caucasians, the top brass. Hey, you turn this over to me. Under my leadership, I wanna make sure we're gonna have Mexicans that are gonna identify with other Mexicans and accord them identity and community. They're gonna come back and they're gonna try to complete their services because Mexicans know how to take care of their own and make sure they get through the legal system. When it comes to this one-stop shop, this is the same program that's bleeding over in Santa Clara, man. You're not fully me. You know, the reentry center is all about false generosity. The American public wants to be able to find game for employment. I never heard the county board of supervisors talking about anything about game for employment. You're denying the people economic self certainty and the ethics of self-fulfillment. And this is shameful. The people don't want the false generosity. They wanna be released from the shackles of the probation department. It's already bad that the DA's office is corrupt. We already know that the harassment court is corrupt. And then you guys wanna harass the people because you guys are very disrespectful. When I was in there, you guys were really disrespectful to me. I'm a community leader. And I would say is, hey, when we take ownership of the probation department, I stockpile that with Mexicans to rule over Mexicans. They're gonna come back and they're gonna be able to do that because they're gonna be sensitive to the poor whites and to the blacks. You understanding? And I'm gonna be able to say this. Maybe one or nine, dude, it's just a waste of money. The people don't need all this. We're dealing with the DA's office and the harassment court. It's just all corrupt. And no one's keeping no one accountable. Like I said, I got thrown out complaining about the re-entry center and about the public defender's office. I brought that blob dolly, right? I want members of the public know what that gorilla mask would have faced because they're taking good law of Biden citizens and having them clean their county parks or streets and their buildings in Santa Clara County. And that's a brutal exploitation that's not needed. And I wanna say this, Supervisor Leopold, I do appreciate your leadership on this issue. You're speaking to the Mexican people. And I want Mexicans to know that this man is a good man. And I wanna be able to say this, Bruce McPherson, you're a good man. Supervisor Capin, you're a good man too. We need to do the right thing. Carlos, I'm not ashamed of my humanity. I don't stand for my people. I don't stand for the American public. I say defund this people and start fumigating the DA's office. And that's real because the threat from down below is real. We're tired of the political shenanigans. Stop funding these people. The American public need liberating policies so that they can get on with their lives. And they can find gainful employment. I do appreciate your leadership, Chairman Friend. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Alexander. Is there anybody else that'd like to address us on the AB 109 outcome evaluation? Good morning, supervisors. Karen Delaney, for the last five years, I've been the chair and now the co-chair of what used to be called the AB 109 data committee. And I served on my first jail overcrowding task force in 1986. When we're looking at the AB 109 results, we should be so proud. Our control group, since AB 109 is about state prison convictions, what used to be state prison convictions, there are a few things where California's dead last in the world. Recidivism rate and mass incarceration. Dead last not just in the resourced world, but on the entire face of the earth. Our California's recidivism rate in 2017 was 70%. So in the last five years, we have flipped the rate. Now does that mean that we can't improve? No, we are working really hard on improvement. For the last six months, while this evaluation has been going on, we've been working with probation to do service mapping and look at some of these data. I think we should be so proud of what we've accomplished and redouble our efforts to work on the mix. And part of what we need to do is be serious about learning how to use data in a smart way and a smart on crime way. And being better about how to tell a story because the reason that we are dead last in the world on this has nothing to do with criminal justice per se or the crime rate. The crime rate has continued to fall each and every year but it's the way people's fear of crimes have been manipulated over the last 30 years by unscrupulous people in politics. And in some cases, because it sells a lot of media papers and that what we need to do is up our game in how to help people see that we can make great changes, we can make serious progress, we can keep the community safe and restore justice. And this is a great start. We are gonna be looking at service mix. Correlation is not causation. So some of the things that seem counterintuitive it just means we need to explain things better. You can look at the rate of deaths in hospitals is far higher than the rate of deaths outside of hospitals that doesn't mean you shouldn't go to a hospital if you're sick. So some of these things have very simple explanations but we as a people have been too long in the fear-based personal story mentality. So I really encourage us to stay doing the hard work of reform to learn how to do a better story, to have a both and we can both celebrate that we have one of the lowest recidivism rates. We're doing best in California and we can continue to do better. Thanks. Thank you Mr. Lany. Sir, anybody else would like to address us on this item? It's gonna be continued again. Thank you. Welcome. Good morning board. My name's Nicole Cadel and I'm a community organization representative. I'm also an individual with lived experience in the criminal justice system. And while I can't speak for everybody who's had contact with the Santa Cruz probation department I can speak for myself. And though I don't know what the one ticket is in terms of services that we offer our client and what works in terms of keeping people out of those doors into the jail. I know that in October of this year it'll be five years since I've stepped back into the jail. And because of our partners at the Santa Cruz probation department and the services they offer with their AB 109 dollars I didn't recidivate. And I can't say that that's gonna happen to everybody but I know that it worked for me. And the programs and things that we continue to provide in this community continue to work and I have so many friends who were given an opportunity in a new life because of this department and because of those dollars that we're able to address and send to our community through SLE funding and SUD treatment services and reentry services through friends outside. I know so many people who have been given a chance at a better life and they've taken that chance and they've really been able to invest that back in our community. So I thank you for continuing to give us this opportunity. Thank you to the probation department and the amazing staff who literally helped me create a better life for myself with these services for my friends and for this community because in the end we're all better off for it. So thank you. Thank you. All right, I'll bring it back to the board. Also you could probably work with the chief over the course of the coming before the next meeting but would you have a motion on this? I'm going to continue this to the May 8th board meeting. You have a motion? Second. Second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed it passes unanimously. The board will take a 10 minute break. We'll be back at 1110 and we will start at 1110 for our firefighter of the year presentation. We're going to go back into session here. I appreciate you guys understanding that we're running just a couple of minutes late today. I appreciate your patience, especially for the families that are here. Today we're here on our presentation awards for the Santa Cruz County Fire Department firefighters of the year, which is always a wonderful honoring that we do here. The board of supervisors are extremely pleased to provide this opportunity to publicly recognize County Fire Department career firefighter and volunteer firefighter of the year. And I would like to invite career firefighter Sean Adams and volunteer firefighter Alex Lehman to step up to the podium. But before I give out any proclamations to you too, I would like to offer an opportunity for County Fire Chief Ian Larkin to come forward and tell us a little bit about both of these outstanding firefighters. Chief Larkin, welcome. Good morning, chair, friend, members of the board, Mr. Palacios, members of the public, Ian Larkin, Cal Fire Unit Chief and Santa Cruz County Fire Chief. So I'm honored here to be able to stand before you with our two firefighters of the year, career firefighter of the year, Sean Adams and volunteer firefighter of the year, Captain Alex Lehman. I'll just give a brief words of why we chose these two individuals to be our firefighters of the year. Fire Captain Sean Adams, Sean is being recognized for his hard work and dedication. He's been an integral part of our fuels reduction and forced practice work throughout Santa Cruz County. Fire Captain Adams was one of the first, or was the first Cal Fire resource at the scene of the bear fire and provided exceptional leadership and coordination on the initial attack efforts and was also instrumental in the rescue operations of the injured firefighters that occurred on that fire. He is regularly patrolled the firefighter and met with citizens several weeks after the incident, providing reassurance and education to the public. In addition, his positive working relationship among the local Santa Cruz County fire agencies have made him a commendable ambassador of the County Fire Department. Firefighter of the, career firefighter of the year, Sean Adams. Volunteer Fire Captain Alex Lehman. Alex is being recognized for his dedication and support of the Santa Cruz County Fire Department and the Loma Prieta volunteers. He has spent countless hours in developing EMS and low-angle rescue instruction, assisting with driver operator instruction, fundraising for new apparatus and equipment, and most recently developing a new volunteer response tracking system for the County Fire Department. He is a tireless resource and an invaluable individual for the County Fire Department. Volunteer firefighter of the year, Alex Lehman. I'd like to give an opportunity for board members to make brief comments before we torture these poor two individuals and give you an opportunity with an open mic to actually speak, so. But if you get out of hand, we'll limit it to three minutes. So, Supervisor Caput. New bed. Thank you for all of you, for everything you do. When a big fire or something breaks out, it's you guys that are going in and usually helping people go out and get out of an area. And I've seen in our city in South County, Watsonville, money was able to actually hire more firefighters for the city of Watsonville with a quarter percent sales tax. And for the first time in years, they actually have enough personnel for two in and two out. And how important that is. So maybe just a quick question. How important is it that we can, and what we can do to make it where you have two in and two out as far as when you respond to something? Can I ask any of you? Staffing levels are always a paramount to how we perform our job and how it helps to safety. So obviously, yes, the more people we can have it, it helps out immensely. And it is policy for going into the structure fires and being able to help people out. You bet. Thank you. Yeah, again, thanks for all you do. Really wonderful. It's a pleasure to be here with you. As a supervisor representative in the fifth district, I just can't tell you how much I appreciate your initial response and being the first one there. It could have been a little, literally a disaster up there. And thank you for being there first. I mean, I appreciate everything each that you have done, but that bear fire could have been a tremendous, well, a little natural disaster for Santa Cruz County if you wouldn't have been there early and often. And I do appreciate that often because it's nice for you to go back and reassure them and let the folks know. And I think it's allowed those, the folks in the Santa Rosa Valley to be more aware of what they need to do to help you in responding to a fire from just road improvements to signage, whatever the case may be. But what you've done is truly remarkable and much appreciated. Thank you very much. And thank you for your services too, as a volunteer. Appreciate it. Well, I wanna congratulate you both. You know, 2017 reminds me of the song that said I've seen fire and I've seen rain because we saw lots of both those last year. And firefighters become incredibly important on both those. I know that we've been fortunate in the mountains not to have anything beyond the bear fire, which could have been a horrible circumstance, but through the quick response of our firefighters, we were able to contain that one relatively quickly. And with the rains, we saw a lot of accidents and a lot of people in need. And I'm just always impressed by the unique collaboration we have in county fire between our career firefighters and our volunteer firefighters. And I wanna thank you both for your work. I know Captain Layman better because he serves in the Loma Prieta Fire District. And I've known him for 10 years. And I know that he's actively engaged with the community. It isn't, his volunteer fire responsibilities are so much more than just responding to the calls. You're always there if community functions, you're always engaged. And the recent community efforts to raise money to purchase new water tender is a direct result in that community engagement and people seeing their volunteer firefighters as part of the community. So thank you for doing that. And our career firefighters also have become part of our community and are always engaged. And the have the work that you've done after the bear fire, just trying to connect with people and help them out is a sign that this is more than just a job. And so I just wanna acknowledge your work and thank you both for the contribution you've made to our community. I wanna thank you both. And I also wanna just take a moment and thank your families who are here today and all the families of firefighters for sharing your firefighter with us, for understanding the risks and the strange hours being called away and the many different things. It's an incredible gift you're giving to the community of both your service and the commitment from your family to be a part of that community service. So thank you very much. So on behalf of the Board of Supervisors, we have two small tokens of our appreciation which are these proclamations. Captain Adams, I appreciate the work you've done within my district in Aptos and Corralitas throughout the course of your service. Captain Lehman also appreciate your service to the Fire Advisory Commission as Supervisor Leopold's appointment. Both of you exemplify what's best in the fire service. So please give them a round of applause for all that they've done. Oops. That was the part I wasn't looking forward to. Wanna go first? No, really. Either way, yeah. Just a couple of words. First off, thank you everyone. This is a wonderful honor. Of course, I wanna thank my daughter, Jen, our family, representing the family and then all the county firefighters, the Cal Fire firefighters, without whom, you just don't get this award on your own, right? It's a collaborative effort, so. And thank you all for recognizing us as well. Thank you. Yeah, I'd like to second that, especially on the aspect of family, if it wasn't for my wife and my family, I wouldn't have been able to do the duties of my job and do it as well as I can, so, and did. Again, I'd like to thank management for, not for putting me up here, but for nominating me and having the faith in me, so once again, thank you everybody and I appreciate it. Thank you. Just one additional note, Fire Captain Adams is actually serving his last tour of duty this week as he is set to retire on May 1st after a long and distinguished career with the department. All right. Congratulations. Can you introduce, I'm sorry, the other firefighters want to thank all of you because you're all a team, you're a family, so if you could introduce all of them, I don't, I hate to put you on the spot. Sure, I'll just have them all stand up as I introduce them. I have a division chief, Rob Sherman, he's our operations chief at Ben Lomond Conservation Camp, deputy chief, Jake Hess, who oversees the county fire department and state operations, battalion chief, Brian Ham, who is from our North Division in San Mateo County, oversees daily operations there. Aldo Gonzalez, battalion chief here in Santa Cruz County. Let's see who, Mike Harris, he's our safety battalion chief for Cal Fire in Santa Cruz County Fire, who else I got here. Chris Walters is our Santa Cruz County fire marshal. Anthony Anderson is our training officer for Santa Cruz County and the state, Colleen Baxter, she's our fire prevention, works in our fire marshal's office as a fire prevention specialist. Andy Siegel is a volunteer captain at our Las Cumbres station with Santa Cruz County. And I think that's it. Thank you all for the work that you do. There'll be a reception in the fifth floor conference room. I did forget one important person. Jenny Petrus is our, Yes, yes. Our keeper and staff. Thank you chief. Thank you chief. There is a reception that'll be held in the fifth floor conference room in 510, so I encourage all of you to participate in that. The board's gonna continue on into a closed session item, but we do appreciate all the work that all of you've done and we do know it's a small token of our appreciation, but we do think about you a lot and we hear a lot of positive things from all the members in our community. So thank you for your work. The board will have a closed session. Will there be anything reportable out of closed session council? No. This is an opportunity for members of the community to address us on the item in closed session. Is there anybody that'd like to address us on item 56, which is closed session before we adjourn into closed session? Yeah, like regarding the closed session, I wanna say this, the information on the light item agenda package back there, it doesn't, I really don't even know what the information's all about that you guys are gonna go in there. I understand from the last time that the county council Dana talked about, but it's not really much that we have so that we can have some traction on. So it's just very dubious. And then also I wanna be able to comment on that non-sequitur statement right here, the threat to public services or facilities pursuant to government code section. We heard about this and you guys embed that right here. This is new. Some of our members of the public know government section code 54947. And that's the same stuff that they use with Standing Rock activists that were out there protesting. So now what they wanna do is if it's a water treatment plant, if it's a cannabis- So Mr. Alexander, just to clarify, we have to provide the code section as to why we're justifying going into closed session, which provides sort of a general concept of what closed session is about. That's why that's there. This isn't a new insertion. This is specific to what we're doing today. Okay, so I do appreciate that. So I just wanna elaborate that. I just wanna eliminate members of the public. The language here is meant to the threat to public services and facility pursuant to government section 54957 needs to be redacted, needs to be deleted and doesn't need to be state that. And I wanna say this, members of the public should be able to protest any county facility that they deem is a threat to their public health. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Is there anybody else like to address us on closed session before we go into closed session? All right, the board will adjourn into closed session at this time. And we'll be back for a 1.30 scheduled item after this. Good afternoon, everybody. We'd like to welcome you back to today's board of supervisors meeting. We now have item 60, which is a public hearing to consider proposed ordinances amending County Code Chapter 7.128, 13.10 and 16.01 related amendments to the general plan local coastal program for licensing and land use regulations for commercial cannabis cultivation, manufacturing and distribution activities as outlined in the memo of the planning director and CAO. We have attachments of the ordinance and an attachment on the resolution of the CEQA general plan LCP cannabis amendment, the best management operational practices and the enforcement plan. Good afternoon, Ms. Bolster Grant. Good afternoon, Chair Friend and members of the board. I am Robin Bolster Grant, the cannabis licensing manager for the county. We are pleased to be before you today to present the proposed licensing program for non-retail commercial cannabis cultivation, manufacturing and distribution. I do have a brief presentation for you. From the timeline here, you can see that the process of getting to today's proposed ordinances has involved many hours, many stakeholders and adjusting to changes at the state level, as well as new direction from your board. Starting with the C4 process, we're coming up on three years since we've been, we started talking about what this program would look like. This is a brief snapshot of some of the major changes that are before you today for consideration since the original draft ordinance was studied during the environmental review process. Some of the highlights here include our direction on CEQA with site-specific review for each application, co-location, master plans and the cottage garden license category. I wanted to briefly walk through some of the licensing program details. Because the licensing regulations and the land use regulations work hand in hand, the information here is not going to be an exhaustive list, but it should give you the major highlights of the licensing program. And we'll start with cultivation. So these are the zone districts where cultivation would be allowed under the draft. This is fairly consistent with the original zone districts that were proposed with the exception of the elimination of quarries from the end zone category. These are the minimum parcel sizes that correspond to the various zone districts. Again, this is fairly consistent with the original proposal with the addition of the cottage garden category that was proposed by the planning commission. Here are the various canopy limits that will be allowed under the proposal in zones where cultivation activity is permissible. Because we now allow co-location, you see the two columns. There are maximum canopy limits for either a single license or a co-location license parcel where that is available. And we have incentivized where that makes sense to allow co-location where we can get more folks on a single parcel and minimizing the degree of development. And then the same information for the other allowable zones. Again, this is cultivation, single license, and then co-location. And you can see that we don't allow co-location for cottage license types. There are a number of other cultivation restrictions, including setbacks, restriction on activity in the coastal zone, plus the one mile buffer, grading restrictions, water conservation requirements, et cetera. All of that is a little bit more detailed than I wanted to provide in this brief presentation, but we are certainly available to answer any questions you have about the specifics. Moving on to manufacturing. Oops, lost the G there. There are three license types for manufacturing, which correlate to the different types of processes from infusion all the way to class three, volatile extraction. And then the allowed zones, depending on the license class, locations may be restricted in terms of where these activities can take place. Again, there are other restrictions associated with manufacturing operations, though this is not a complete list. The second bullet point I would actually add, there are no ethanol or CO2 manufacturing in RA zones. That also applies to special use with the ag or residential general plan designation as well. Less than five acres, right. And then finally, quick look at distribution. Distribution is the movement of cannabis materials in any form from one licensee to another. Distributors may also package and label products. And we have two classes, self-distribution and then distribution for your own products and those of other licensees. Again, depending on the type of distribution operations, locations may be limited where these activities can occur, other restrictions. Again, we have restrictions on the coastal zone plus the one mile buffer that only within existing legal structures and distribution in A and RA zones must be ancillary to license commercial cultivation on the property, as you can see. So we believe the ordinances before you today reflect the previous direction of the board input from other boards and commissions as well as many stakeholders and the best efforts of the staff to develop a cannabis licensing program that considers the many different and sometimes competing needs and desires within our community. As we have said many times before, we do not believe this is the final stage in the process but rather the first step down a path that will require many other refinements as we gather more information and experience with the legalized cannabis industry in Santa Cruz County. Should you approve these ordinances today, we would return on May 8th for a final reading and then commence work to implement the licensing program. We therefore ask you to open the public hearing to accept comments, adopt in concept the proposed ordinances, schedule a final reading and take other related actions as noted in the staff report. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Bolster-Grant. Are there any brief questions from board members before we open up the public hearing for comment? You have a brief. Supervisor Leopold. Just a brief question. This has to do with the enforcement plan question and there was a question about the date and I wanted to give you an opportunity. Thank you, yes. When I put the enforcement plan together, I designated April 30th as the date by which all anonymous registrants had to declare that would be a little onerous. So I would ask that you allow that I change that to 30 days after adoption by your board of the program and that would give folks who have been waiting and wanted to see where the program landed, whether they needed to move or not. We wanna give them some buffer. And when you say 30 days after adoption, does that mean first reading, second reading or? Second reading, adoption would be, yeah, second reading. Second reading, okay. Essentially the effective date. The effective date of the ordinance. Right. But it still needs to go to the Coastal Commission, correct? So what's actually defined this correctly? Is it 30 days after, is actually a legitimate ordinance, which would be after a Coastal Commission certification or is it 30 days after our second reading that you're intending this to be? Considering we don't know, I would, I don't anticipate a huge number of changes, frankly. It's possible, certainly. Since we don't know exactly when the Coastal Commission is going to take action, it would be my preference to close that sooner rather than later. I don't know if Council has anything. The ordinances as written are bifurcated, so they are effective outside the Coastal Zone during the interim after they're adopted and before Coastal approves. So I think it's reasonable to say 30 days after adoption that would be the effective date outside the Coastal Zone. So we're basically talking around June 8th. And you'll put that on the website or so people know. I would, absolutely. We'll publish that and we have all those folks on our mailing list, so they will all be informed and given time. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Are there any other questions where we open up the public hearing? All right, we'll now open up the public hearing. This is an opportunity for members of the community to address us on this item. If you wouldn't mind lining up, I know there's a number of you that like to speak. Can I get a sense of how many people want to speak on this item just so I can be a sense? All right, then we will do two minutes for every speaker. Please do line up. We welcome and encourage you to speak. Thank you. Also, on a quick note, we did receive all the association's letters, the people that did send in those letters, also from the city of Santa Cruz. We did receive your letter earlier today just so people are aware of the fact that those letters have been received. Great, definitely welcome. Zepe in the city of Santa Cruz Water Department and I sent my letter a little late this morning. Sorry, just wanted to make sure you all received it. I'm just passing around a copy as well. I just want to clarify some comments that we proposed to the Planning Commission back in March and we're subsequently subsequent actions and clarify the language that we had intended versus the language that actually made it into the packet today. So I'm just going to read the first two paragraphs here. The city of Santa Cruz requests that the Board of Supervisors direct the cannabis licensing office to modify the best management and operational practices to require cannabis licensing staff to verify that the supplier of water has the legal authority to sell bulk water to the final destination. As it got interpreted and as it's currently written, it's that the cannabis licensing office will verify that the water hauler has legal authority to sell water and the distinction there is that currently a water hauler licensing for the state of California is for treated potable water. Anyone can haul water for irrigation purposes, untreated water for construction purposes and we've had some issues in Santa Cruz with haulers purchasing water from suppliers upstream of us and selling it outside of the designated allowable place of use for that water. So it's a potential issue and that was just a distinction that we wanted to make sure that possible could be put in there. Currently a water purveyor would have to have a valid water right and in that water right there's a defined place of use where that water can be used without that distinction then theoretically a water hauler in Santa Cruz County could buy water from a groundwater supplier or from a person with a well and deliver that water to outside of the area. So we wanna make sure that distinction is made. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Good afternoon and welcome. Hi, thanks for the opportunity to speak here. My name is Robert Zaremba. I'm a resident in Boulder Creek. I wanted to come up here and speak with you guys about taking the recommendations that's been proposed forward to you guys from Green Trade. That we've come together with a very strong organization coming up with reasonable recommendations for the cannabis industry here in Santa Cruz and I hope that you take those all into very strong consideration. The other thing that I wanna speak with you guys about is the urgency to get this ordinance passed as soon as possible. As it is right now that there's going to be some layover between the time that your ordinance passes and many of our temporary licenses for the state of California are going to expire which means there's gonna be a period of time that for my company that I have which is the Healing Cabinet Distribution Company since I have to work regularly with the state with every order that we do from our company and every shipment that we do everything has to be monitored and I will have to close my doors for a period of time as it is now because of this time period that's gonna be between the second reading and from when I'm allowed to actually apply for my state or the permanent license. And so just to let you guys know the longer you guys delay on this or the longer it takes is there gonna be the longer period of time I'm gonna have to close my doors and I will probably have to send all my employees to the unemployment line temporarily which hopefully we won't have to do. Okay, thanks for the opportunity. Chair. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome. Hello, my name is Wendy Killingsworth. I have a copy for everybody. And if you could use the microphone, Wendy, that'd be great. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for your time on this matter. I've been a resident for 48 years, raised my family here, lived in Boulder Creek for the last 23 years and I'm asking that you please allow new cultivators a chance to do business with you. You used to have the requirements that we've been doing business since 2013. That is very unrealistic for me. Being a family person, it wasn't doable for viable for me to apply for a license five years ago. Now is a good time for me to apply for a license and I'm just asking that you please allow new people to step up and do business with you and you have a copy of my letters of reference. I've been doing business with this county, my whole adult life, and I would like to continue. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, welcome. Copies. Hi, thank you for the opportunity to talk to you guys. First off, I'd like to thank everybody for all that tremendous work that's being done to get a workable system in place. My wife and I have been, we're residents here, the property was been owned for over 20 years. We're looking for an RA, outdoor grow, organic. Like I said, we have over five acres and I've just got a couple of questions and a comment. Regarding the dates listed like farming, existing farming prior to 2013 or application of a license prior to 2016, I can understand that under a couple of situations what I was wondering is are we trying to limit the number of new people coming in just so they can grow? Or infiltrate the area somehow and they're not really residents. We could put a residency minimal on that like you have to bid in a residence for a year, five years, 10, 15, whatever. Once the conditions are met and I always cite inspections and conditions have to be met, but once they're met, my thinking as a cannabis is like any other crop, we should be able to grow it, farm it just as we would. The more legal growers that we bring into the fold, the more safety I think there is for the environment. There's fewer hazards, potential issues are addressed up front and can be corrected. Cultivators are made aware of potential fire hazards. They're reminded of forbidden things like pesticides, rodenticides, proper land use, et cetera. And the last thing regarding setbacks, if it applies to the cottage is new, but I saw the setbacks on there, 1,400 and 200 was talked, that kind of thing. When we're talking about setbacks and you're talking about a cottage, you've only got two and a half acres, that's 115 feet from dead center of a square cottage grow to the property line. With an RA, it's only 233 feet. So anyway, thank you for taking that in consideration. Thank you. Good afternoon, welcome. Good afternoon. My name is Tom Bird. We are a retired residence in Bruce McPherson's fifth district and lived there for over 20 years. We've been cultivating medical cannabis since 2010, donating a major portion of our sungrown, organic cannabis flowers to WAM, Veterans Alliance, and to Santa Cruz residents who are suffering from Parkinson's disease, the effects of Agent Orange, various forms of cancer and for children suffering from epilepsy and autism. We grow non-psychoactive cannabis. In other words, no one gets high from our products. We paid $500 registration fee, assuming that the amount would be applied towards a license fee. We have since found out that it's not so and now need to pay the same fee as does a larger canopy farm operations, $800 and then $2,500 in addition to the state license fees. It's simply prohibitive for cultivators of small gardens like ours. We respectfully request that a sliding fee scale be developed to accommodate the cottage garden category. This will enable us to continue to provide medical cannabis at no cost to those in need and who have limited financial resources. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity. My name's Christine Jennifer and I'm the president at Suncrest Nurseries, Inc. in Watsonville and I'm gonna read this statement. We believe it is necessary to have a clear distinction between nursery cultivation and flowering cultivation in the definition of canopy, a separate nursery license in congruence with state definitions. As a plug and liner supplier of young plant material, Suncrest Nurseries along with other nurseries must maintain a mother stock in order to propagate. The mother stock never flowers and shall not be sold. The current county definition of canopy does not provide sufficient clarity for a cultivator or county officials to accurately and consistently calculate the canopy size. Nursery cultivation is very different than flowering cultivation as we have different needs, different consumers, different customers, different markets and so we believe we should have a different license, producing only clones, immature plants and seeds. In conventional farming nurseries already have a separate nursery license and the definition of canopy needs to be rewritten. We believe some of the benefits of that include that stacking young plant material in greenhouses will limit use of natural light, increase energy use and cost, improved regulatory ease, fewer problems with co-location of multiple licenses, improved efficient use of resources. It's much harder to maintain and self-regulate a crop if it must be separated by walls or distance, excuse me, on the property and safety. As walkways, aisles, rows are necessary for safety and crop maintenance and should not be counted as part of the canopy so this additional and needed space should be excluded, excluded from the canopy definition. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome. Hi, Pat Malo, I'm with Green Trade Santa Cruz but I've also served on the C4 committee and also was a founding member of the RCSE group who ran the referendum. These maps I have right here illustrate a specific point that we had to make two years ago, hence the two year old maps, of what the different setbacks from habitual or habitable structures, sorry, it's been a long morning already, look like. And so the first one is with no setbacks and then you can switch thing. And then we start seeing at 100 foot setback from the structures, areas start going gray and the next one is 200, getting grayer. 300, grayer still. And then the last one, since the last time this idea came up that it was proposed 600, not 400 and we didn't wanna go get new maps, this is the point of what it looks like at 600. And the point of all this is that, we were in the C4, we discussed a lot of these issues. We discussed that not all parcels were perfectly square and when you start hitting different real life examples of what different parcels look like, that these 100, 200, even to 300 start excluding a lot of the folks that we're hoping to get into this. On top of the other exclusions that we have that are represented there, like the coastal zone, et cetera. And so what I have is a letter that Josie Roberto wrote about these issues specifically. I think all of you got this in a packet and email. Her and Cricket couldn't make it today so I picked up the maps from her house and thought we'd come up and show them to you again. Nick and I carried these very same maps two years ago, almost to the day. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. Milo. Appreciate it. Good afternoon. Hello, thank you for having this hearing. My name's Jeff Insand from the Live Oak area. I also own a parcel down near the Buena Vista Dump. I was looking at the buildability of my parcel. I came across what I thought to be kind of a catch 22 with the requirement for indoor growing. However, it had to be in the existing structure. I feel this is, I understand it as an attempt to limit the cultivatable parcels. However, I feel it's not fair and favors those with existing buildings. It excludes any parcel that may be ideal for cultivation but not having an existing structure. Again, this rule appears to be arbitrary and inappropriate as to the intent of the new law. What I recommend is striking this arbitrary rule or at least allowing an exception whereby an application may be evaluated on an individual basis. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon, welcome back. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. I was very heartened after the last board meeting that the cottage license has finally made it. That's something that I've worked very hard for over these past number of years and something that I truly believe in. And that really is what the history of cultivation in Santa Cruz started from. When you consider that there was a survey done that showed that the majority of cultivators in Santa Cruz were cultivating on parcels that are very small, obviously, that shows you a great need to help those longtime heritage farmers continue on. And so when the cottage license finally appeared on the ordinance, I'm just thrilled. However, adding the additional setback eliminates almost all of them. And I hope we're gonna have some real discussion here today about the economic impact that this is going to have on our county and the people who, as of January one, are losing their ability to survive in this county. So I encourage you to please think about the people that are here that have been good actors. There aren't complaints against them. I myself paid the $500 registration. I have a 100 square foot grow in my garage and that has paid my taxes and my mortgage as of January one, even though I have, and I've only sold to dispensaries, I've paid my taxes. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Mike Rotenbaugh. I would definitely echo that lady's comments, but want to speak more broadly about the January one 2013 eligibility requirement. Essentially, that is going to kill the craft cannabis industry in Santa Cruz County before it can even start. It essentially, you're only allowing cultivation licenses to the largest grows, or to grows that have been existence continuously and commercially, whatever that means, it's not defined, for the past six years. You're completely shutting out any new entrance from the business from what we can consider to be no rational purpose. It's discriminating between large businesses and small businesses, again, for no rational purpose. There must be some less discriminatory ways to accomplish whatever goal you're trying to accomplish, but the way it looks to the public and to a lot of us who own land in the mountains is that you're simply voting in favor of large grows and precluding with setback requirements and with eligibility requirements any small businesses from entering this space. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Roland Yardsoff. I'm a cannabis farmer with 25 years experience. I wish to address the nursery issue. Under the state licensing scheme, every category of cultivation has a maximum square footage of canopy limit with the exception of nursery, and that is for good reason. The signed value per square foot of a canopy of flower is more than 20 times that of a nursery square foot of canopy. So in order to be viable, the state, for a nursery to be viable, the state has chosen, and I think quite correctly, to have no limit on canopy for nursery. If someone attempted to have a competitive nursery in this county, they would have to compete against other nurseries and other jurisdictions which have no canopy limit, which means they would be competing against a business entity that is able to make use of scale of economy. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, Ms. Krau. Welcome back. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity. I wanna just mention, just a historical perspective, is 25 years ago, when I first came here after being arrested, well, Jim Hart was part of that, Al Noren's team. The first and second time we were arrested, all kind of began here, and 25 years later, we're still talking about the same thing. I'm grateful for the strides that we've made, and I know it's been a phenomenal undertaking. And considering compassionate access, and I really was pleased to hear you moving toward that last few weeks ago, there are some considerations that we really need to address and to at least begin to think about. I met with the BCC of some representatives from the BCC a few weeks ago, and there was a kind of key strategy that we're trying to approach for compassionate access, and that's to reduce excise tax, perhaps allowing counties and cities, municipalities to deal with considerations of taxation on their own, and to eliminate or to affect state taxes and fees. So I think that there's a consideration, maybe a letter to be written. The BCC is not a taxation arm or branch, it's a licensing branch, but they can create a license that is exempt or creates an exempt category, and they agreed whether or not they will do it, I think they need a push. I wanna ask a question about how when the pharmacies take over medical, which is not that far away, genetic modification is part of that strategy. GMO, Monsanto's already genetically modifying for Monsanto slash Bayer, they call themselves Bayer, take two, Safe for Children. And I think that we need to think about what will happen, both what will happen for compassionate access and what's going to happen with genetically modified cannabis. This GW Pharmaceuticals has license to distribute in the United States, and Donald Trump's talking about it. When he's talking about it, we know it's big money. So. Thank you, Ms. Grohl. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good afternoon, Mr. Coffes, welcome. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for having me, and thanks for all the work that you've done and that the county staff has done on this. I think that you're about to take a pretty significant step in the 50 years that I've been an observer and the cannabis policies in this state and nation. And so I think some congratulations is in order. However, I would echo the sentiment of Robin earlier that what's happening today is we're taking a first step. Green trade will continue to advocate for more inclusive ordinance. We think that this step you're taking today will be a significant step forward in terms of about half the producers in the county. And so half or more of the producers in the county are still left out. And I'm particularly interested in this woman's comment about those people who did not register, who have never cultivated cannabis before, but who now since it's legal and above board and out in the open, might consider it. And I think that the board needs to consider that as well, moving into another phase of this ordinance as quickly as possible so that we can bring more people into the regulated system. So I appreciate everything that you've done. I fear that we're not going to become strangers anytime soon. And I look forward to more progress and thanks again. Thank you, Mr. Coffes. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Leflora Cunningham Walsh of Boulder Creek, Mr. Rick Fiersen's district. First of all, I agree with a lot of what has been said, especially the questions in regards to new cultivation, even though it doesn't particularly apply to me, I'm still interested in us fleshing that out as much as we can, as well as I was very interested in nailing down the time of the anonymous applications and making sure that that is very clear because as someone who's come that far and even as we've all sat in this meeting together, I think we appreciate the time we've put in and no one wants to miss because of just miss wording on the deadline. I'm very happy that the cottage industry has been brought front and center a little bit and that some of the issues have been addressed. The setbacks is not something that necessarily applies to me, so it hasn't been brought to my attention, but in solidarity with my other cottage industry, I'd like to say let's make that work for the people who are truly concerned about it. And I would just like to say I'm mostly here advocating for my parents who've lived in this county. My dad's lived here since he was five. And I want to make sure that the $500 that they put in to apply gets applied to something and that we're not seeing a whole bunch of more fees stacked up for basically something that's supposed to help them in their retirement and if it's something that hinders them in their retirement, that hinders what they can do in this county, what I can do in this county, how much I have to help them. And so I really want us to see a generational success in this program so that everybody from all the ends can be really successful. And thank you very much for everything you've done and I look forward to the rest of the meeting. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome. Jack Alger, I'm a partner in a farm in District One in Mr. Leopold's district. And I just want to say that we're here in solidarity with just the reconsideration of the new setbacks because we're a 20 acre farm that has been a traditional, a very old apple farm in that area for a long time. And even with 20 acres, three, two, three, 400 feet of setbacks puts us out of the playing field. So I just wanted you to say hey and please reconsider. Thank you. Excuse me, how long have you been growing cannabis on that site? A few years now. And have you ever had complaints from your neighbors? Never. Have they ever contacted you about the order? I don't think there's been any issue whatsoever. In fact, we have a great relationship with our neighbors and we want them over to our place often, you know? Okay, thank you. Yep, thank you. Good afternoon, welcome. Are there others that want to address the fact after these two speakers? Please do. I figured there was, there were. Yeah. Hi, my name's Aziz, I live in District Four. And I'm here kind of about the setbacks. It's affecting a lot of people. It's affecting people in the mountains. It's affecting people in commercial ag. And especially in commercial ag, there's an expectation to be subject to agricultural practices and odors. I don't know if you've driven past any of the lettuce fields. They smell pretty bad. So just take that into consideration. It may not completely wipe everybody out, but it's gonna wipe some people out. Some people's parcels are gonna completely disappear. So thank you, thank you for everything. Robin, you're awesome. And see ya. Thank you. Good afternoon. Hi, I'm Dave Rubin on the board of Rural Bonny Dune Association and on Coalition for Environmental Santa Cruz. I've been sending you all various reports and emails and recommendations and comments for two and a half years, representing not commercial interests but neighborhood and environment issues. I confess, I haven't read the latest version of the recommendations. I was swamped with a preceding one. But going back, as of a few months ago, there were only a few counties in the state that allowed commercial growing on residential RA-type properties on less than 20 acres. I'm not sure if that's changed or not. Our cottage grows two and a half acres would make us, in that regard, the most lenient in the entire state. So I urge you not to make us too lax. Thank you. Good afternoon, welcome back. Hello, everybody. Good to see everybody's still on the job. Eric Hoffman, CESSC. First, I'd like to start by thanking you. I think the legacy for all five supervisors will be the central, the coastal zone plus one. With the hotbed of biodiversity we have there, we're one of five areas in the entire United States that's known as a hotspot. And to protect that in some form, I think is an excellent thing. And I applaud you for doing that. I'd also like to applaud you for appointing the people to the Planning Commission who took time out to absorb a lot of material very quickly and did an excellent job in refining the ordinance with recommendations that you mostly approve on the areas of discretionary use of staff in making decisions and tightening up the entire picture. I think that was an excellent move. And I applaud you for both appointing them and then also agreeing with them. An area of, I'd like to address real quickly some of Patrick Malo's comments, which I was on the same committee with him. I think the discussion on setbacks was all about trying to get areas fit into small pieces of property like 2.5 acres. We've been now going with a five acre minimum. So I think if you think of it in that terms, the 400 feet does not sound so vindictive or strenuous. The problem with setbacks in general were on C4, which is predominantly dominated by grow people. The idea was to get as much space as available in small acreages, but there's another issue there. There's people living near it and the 100 feet and 200 feet. If you look at any of the other ordinances in the state, you won't see those small setbacks because for a simple reason, the odor will be overwhelming. So you either have to address the ordinance through some other means in terms of the odor, which has been or do something else about it. To others. No, we need to, I appreciate it. Thank you for understanding. Good afternoon and welcome. Hello, Board of Supervisors. Joshua Rich from Responsible Cultivation Santa Cruz. And thank you staff and thank you the tank. I want to thank the Board for all the energy and the time that this take in to go down the path and to get to an ordinance finally. I want to start off with the setbacks and just kind of to review what we did here. So we have the 300 foot setbacks and then this is the 600. So this is just kind of gives you an idea where we're setting with the 400 foot setbacks. If you want to show that to the audience too, Eddie. Thank you. So I'm just going to read something quickly. We took seven real life examples from parcels that are currently in the County's Cannabis registration program. We downloaded a map of the parcels from the County GSI map and measured a 400 foot setback and a 200 foot setback from habitable dwellings on neighbor in parcels. Neither 400 nor 200 foot setbacks leaves any room on the 2.5 parcels. The two 5.5 parcels were almost wiped out with the 400 foot setbacks. There was a reasonable room with a 200 foot setback. The eight acre parcels leave no room with the 400 but reasonable with 200. So this kind of just was trying to demonstrate that how the setbacks do affect. And so the gray here is basically essentially no cultivations able to take place on the gray areas. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome back. Hi, I'm Bob Strickland from Bonnie Dune. Cannabis odor is a major complaint of people living near cannabis sites. Outdoor grows generate odors for months during the flowering season. Indoor grows generate extremely obnoxious odors when the greenhouse is vented. I know from personal experience inventing a 1200 foot square foot, 1200 square footish greenhouse a quarter mile away makes it impossible to open the windows in the evening. Denver and Santa Cruz both have regulations limiting neighborhood noise pollution. Denver also regulates odor pollution from various sources, including cannabis. Please specify cannabis odor limits and olfactory meeting to enforce the odor limits. Without specification, odor pollution enforcement is a fuzzy area. With specifications, the CLO can determine if the odor is above or below the specification and respond accordingly. Either the neighbors don't have a legitimate complaint or the cannabis site will have to make changes, move indoors, reduce growth size, et cetera, to reduce the impact to the neighbors. Specifying cannabis odor limits is better for neighbors because it limits exposure to odors, is better for the industry because it eliminates unwarranted complaints, is better for the county because it eliminates trying to enforce fuzzy guidelines. Denver has a nuisance odor that's specific and olfactory meeting in place detect one part, nevermind. Santa Cruz, if Santa Cruz doesn't allow cannabis around neighborhoods, Santa Cruz must specify cannabis odor limits. In the last meeting, there was an analogy made to Gilroy and the garlic. There's a big difference there. In Gilroy, the garlic was there decades before the people moved in. This is the case where the people have been in Bonny Dune and the mountains for 50 years and now we're moving cannabis in. So we're changing the nature. If you don't give us some defense for, and give Robin the tools she needs to know whether it's a legitimate complaint or not because if people are living in and around cannabis such as where you guys have one right across the street from each other, the RAs are going to complain. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome back, Mr. Nordahl. Hello, thank you. It's exciting to be here on this historic day or what seems like it could be a historic day. Thank you for all of your work and help on all of these issues. I would like to say in solidarity, I think the setback 400 feet is extreme. It doesn't affect anything I'm personally working on, but I can definitely see, especially for the cottage folks that that makes most folks virtually impossible, mathematically. But if things go according to plan, we do have an ordinance. I just want to let everyone know that this is just the beginning. Right now as we speak, I'm receiving emails from the state, alerting me that my temporary state licenses are running out in less than 30 days. So I hope we can keep momentum here and I really hope that we can collaboratively work with the county here during this transition period so we can all stay in business without having to shut our doors. So thank you very much. And again, this is exciting. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome back. Hi, Trevor Luxon. I would just quickly like to draw some attention to a new provision in the most recent draft, restricting the combining of adjacent parcels to reach a minimum parcel size in RA and SU's owned property. It's very, very common in this county for properties to actually be multiple parcels that have been joined together. This provision was never included in earlier versions of the ordinance over the last three years. It's really caught a lot of people off guard. I'm aware of people who have SU's owned properties that are over 25 acres that are actually made up of three eight to nine acre parcels and therefore wouldn't qualify to cultivate. And it just, it seems like there's no real logic to it. And that's it. Thanks. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome back. Joe Smith. So Cal, I was delighted when I saw that you put the cottage garden in as we've asked for smaller parcels. So thank you for listening to your constituents. However, but then I saw the 400 foot where I live in the mountains. And I think most of the cottage people are in the mountains. You've probably heard it from other people here today. Look, the mountains come down like this. It's full of trees. There's a flat bench land, then it goes down and there's more trees. Most of the houses are gonna be planted in that flat area. So consequently, it's very difficult, and virtually impossible to be 400 feet from anything. I'd urge you to go back to the 100 feet or give us an option. Say 100 feet, if you get it signed off by the neighbors, which was your original thing. But the 400 feet just puts everybody right back out of business. I mean, I feel like Roseanne, Rosanna Dan, it's always something. Yeah. So thanks for the two and a half acres, but please do something about the extension. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome back, Mr. Schmidt. You understand that. Good afternoon, I'm a chair of friend, members of the board, Kirk Schmidt. I'm a grower on CA land in the Pajaroa Valley and I'm also speaking on behalf of the Farm Bureau. We appreciate all the work that you, the planning commission and the planning staff have done. They've been particularly, the staff has been remarkably receptive to concerns that commercial growers have on CA land, both within and without the coastal zone. And remarkably, we're down to one issue. And that is the definition of canopy. The definition that the county has proposed is identical to the state's definition with the exception of two words, except nurseries. And there's also a definition in the state that is defining nurseries. And on their website are different ways to show how you can segregate your mature plans for your nursery plans from a regulatory point of view. The state scheme is to allow nurseries as a separate license. Indeed, all of the county proposed licenses line up identically with the state licenses. The specialty cottage in the state is a CG. Specialty is an RA. We get down to small is an ATP, et cetera. Medium is CA. And the only thing missing is the nursery category, which is a separate license. As other people who have been before you have pointed out, there's a true economic reason why nurseries should be separate for mature plants, both because of their cost and their value is much lower. And also so that they can maximize the growing area for their mature plants for sale. And I encourage you to make this one final change by inserting except nurseries in the definition of canopy and adopting a definition of nurseries to supplement that. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Schmidt. Good afternoon, welcome back. Hello, good afternoon. I'm Nicole Lagner with Clark Newbert. I just wanted to say that I know a lot of folks are worried about the timeline for their temporary state licenses. And I have recently learned that the CDFA is considering allowing people to extend their temporary rather than having to apply for their annual. So I think one way you guys can do is to extend whatever local authorization you've given to folks who are on the path to licensure during this process. It sounds like that might help a lot of people in this room, although that does not apply to businesses that have to apply through the BCC, which would be the first person who spoke about his distribution business. And then I also just wanted to say that hopefully, I know you've worked so hard on this ordinance, but the tax issue, it's gotten a lot of press. And it should definitely be something that all local governments are considering, because when it gets to be so prohibitive, the illicit market just thrives. And I'm sure you've been noticing the trends in Oakland and Salinas and Monterey. They're all considering how they can reduce the tax burden so that the people can comply with all of these grand steps to regulation. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome. Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Sam Rashkin. I'm from Carmel Valley in Monterey, California. I'm here as an economist and an analyst. I do not have any clients or projects in Santa Cruz County. But what we do have is data. And the data that just came out of Oregon for 2017 shows legal production of cannabis at 1.1 million pounds. And the legal consumption was 350,000 pounds. And what's happening is it's a crop that can be produced very quickly and very efficiently. And I worked with some farms in Monterey County. And what the last speaker said is correct. They're looking at lowering the tax burden, but partially because the prices are plummeting. My farms are producing at $200 a pound. And they're projecting $50 a pound three years out. And I'm encouraging you to open up as many of these restrictions as you can to encourage people to apply because most of them aren't going to make it anyways. It's really sad, but it's true. The burdensome paperwork and the fees and everything else is going to disqualify a lot of people. Secondly, folks, this is Santa Cruz. And we're not talking about patients anymore. And we started it right here. There needs to be a farmer to patient model somehow. So I'm encouraging you to open your minds. If you look at the data, so if you look at the actual data we have out of Monterey, there's not a lot of complaints about crime or traffic or smell. It's a very well-regulated business run by very smart people who care. So thank you very much for all you've done. If you can, we remove the setbacks. Folks, this is a conditional use permit that can be pulled for any reason. So bad players can be removed instantly. And we have the power to do it, but we have the power to do good today, too. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome back. Hi, Phyllis Strickland from Bonnevue. I have two points I'd like to address. One is manufacturing with ethanol and CO2 in RA zone districts, residential, agricultural. I just think that we're going towards a model where we're introducing commercialization into communities that have fought commercialization over long decades. And it's an important issue. And once you open this door, that residential nature of that community goes away. So I would urge you to follow the cottage industry guidelines and eliminate the CO2 and ethanol from the manufacturing allowed in RA zones. If I had my preference, I would increase the acreage minimum as well. The other thing is enforcement. And I think that probably everybody in this room can agree that there's a lot of fees, a lot of registration, and a lot of rules. And if the enforcement against the black market and prioritizing that against really bad actors and large growers does not happen, then you've let down the community. So I would like to see a lot of money upfront the first two years just really hit it hard. And then we'll see where it is. But it's really not fair to all these folks who have tried so hard to get these licenses and comply to not really make a concerted effort to really hit the bad actors. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome back. Thank you. This is Victoria Selle Alexander, civil society activist. And I want to let public know that I suffer from PTSD. And I'm a medical marijuana user. I want to be able to remind members of the public that the American public enjoys celebrating success and achievement. And we have to allow the American public to continue to endeavor and develop this burgeoning market. The cannabis is very important. And Santa Cruz has always been liberal, and I love Santa Cruz. And I want to be able to, the American public, like I said, we need liberating policies. They're going to help this industry in putting people to work. It's a good thing. And I want to be able to say this, that you guys are, this is a great county and you guys are great men. We have to do great things. And the great thing that we need to be able to do is we need to be able to have these liberating policies within the 100 buffer for all structures. So it gives everybody an opportunity. A dress gone rider, they do a magnificent job of creating berries. Santa Cruz has an opportunity to shine and teach the world what it is to cultivate cannabis. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else who'd like to address us after this individual? All right. Hello, I'm Gene Brown. And my agency is Pacific Cannabis Insurance Services, two of the things most businesses hate is taxes and insurance. But they're necessary evils. I'm up here just to let you know that these are good actors. Everyone who I'm involved with, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Watsonville, all over, they are doing the right thing, ensuring their crops, ensuring their businesses, just like any other business. You're looking at worker's comp, general liability. Now we have to have surety bonds for each and every license and permit that's coming. And by the way, someone just said they're running up against a deadline. So please, help these businesses thrive. So hard to do business in California as it is. So keep that in mind when you make these decisions. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you all for waiting, by the way. Hi. Good afternoon. Claire Machado, former co-compliance investigator here for about 10 years, been in private practice doing land use consulting. I've watched this process in the county and others. I want to applaud your staff and everyone who's worked on this ordinance, including all the commission members who have spent a lot of time. I appreciate the fact that you've opened up in the RA area parcels over five acres and larger parcels. From an enforcement perspective, and forgive my drafting today, because it's not quite to scale. But I just wanted to show just a basic graphic. The top square represents 1,000 square feet by 1,000 square feet, relatively the size of a five-acre parcel. Parcel is a little over 200-foot square in a perfect case-square scenario. When you deduct a 200-foot setback from all around that square and that fee of acres, then you're only left with an area of 600 by 600 square, which is three acres. If you have a 400-foot setback, you're left with a smaller area of only 200 by 200 square. So if you apply a 400-foot setback, you're reducing a five-acre parcel to a one-acre potential. 200-foot setback, same five-acre parcel to a three-acre potential. If you apply that to a two-acre parcel, a 400-foot setback wipes out that whole parcel. A 200-foot setback would allow you half of that parcel. So just as a small graphic in a perfect world, that's what your current regulations allow or don't allow. So for the smaller producers, the cottage producers on 2 and 1 half acres, they really don't have much area, although we appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you very much. And just as an important clarification, it's from another habitable structure, not from the property line. You're drawing a property line graph, which is significantly different than from a habitable structure, as, by the way, the maps that were shown are from all structures, not habitable structures, that Mr. Malo had and others. That is a very significant difference than what's being considered by the board, which is from a habitable structure. You could be much, much, much further away from where another adjoining habitable structure is. And I think it's important that the community recognize the difference of what has been proposed by the board. But I just thought that I'd provide that clarification. I appreciate that fact. But in many cases, more often than not, they're actually closer to a habitable structure is closer to a property line than that from a development perspective. I appreciate it. But your depiction was from a property line. So I wanted to make sure. Yes, sir. OK. Thank you. That's correct. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Welcome. Good afternoon. Thank you. My name's Darren Toskey, farmer in special use and CA. Couple things. Definitely the nursery being separated is really important for us in canopy. That's a huge benefit for us competing with other counties and having a viable market for Santa Cruz. I know that's been talked about a lot. Setbacks, too. I've worked in a few counties. And for the most part, I've seen setbacks aren't an issue. It's case by case. So if we could come up with a reasonable thing, like let's say 100 to 200 on 100 even. And then if it was a case where it was pressing on the neighbor, they could sign off. And that would, as you can see today, help a lot of people. Another major thing for me and a lot of the mountain farmers is having a house in special use and RA, which we've been farming in the mountains, as you guys know, for years without that CA, you don't have to have a house. I mean, we have more problems in ways in CA with crime and stuff than we do necessarily in special use, where we have gravity feed solar systems that are really appropriate for smaller development and less impact. So at the minimum, having a grace period for all these people and see in SU and RA of a structure or special cases is very viable to those regions, which grow really nice plants for Santa Cruz County, the mountain regions, versus CA, we got to put them in a greenhouse a lot of times to protect the crops from the client. I mean, climate, excuse me. So having provisional time and a grace period for RA and special use is crucial to people. To develop our beautiful properties, and it's going to take time and money, as you know, to build it like some of the nice vineyards we have in the mountains where the climate is best. Thank you, too, for all the work. This is awesome. Thank you. Is there anybody else who'd like to address us? All right, seeing none, we will close the public hearing and bring it back to the board. What I'd like to do is first just begin with questions from each board member, and then we'll move on to people that would like to make modifications to the actual proposed ordinance. As a reminder, the board already voted on this proposed ordinance and concept, in essence, a couple of weeks ago. So my hope is that there aren't major modifications to it, which also do delay the process. There were discussions here about the need for expediency, but any major changes the ordinance today will delay this ordinance and more. We'll start with Supervisor Caput and just work the way down the line for questions specifically or comments specifically, but it won't be time for motions. The comments will be later if the questions are now. Well, you can do questions and comments now, but the motions part, because I believe some people will be looking to modify the proposals in front of us. I think we should do after all the questions and comments have been made, so go ahead. All right, I'm pretty good with what's proposed here, but if we see a change in the motion, that's what I'm concerned about. I wanna make it clear for residential ag areas, we are talking about, we're talking about questions that were brought up. It's a 400 foot setback that we have in the report. That's from dwelling to the actual growth of the marijuana, is that correct? Yes. Okay, it's not from the property line. True. Okay, so then that brings up a problem if somebody owns a acre, we'll say a home on a residential ag property. People do wanna move out to the country, and they don't wanna have a lot of problems when they live there, but they also might wanna build an additional living habitable dwelling, and if marijuana growth does come in on the adjoining property, they would not be able to build an additional dwelling within that buffer. That's not accurate, this is not a restriction on the neighboring property owner's ability to use their parcel. It's meant to protect folks from the impacts of a grow, and there may be situations that come up like that from time to time, and we would do an analysis in conjunction with the cannabis licensing official at that time to determine what the best result could be out of that situation, but it wouldn't automatically, the existing rules we have right now would not automatically prohibit someone from building an ADU on their parcel because there is a cannabis grow on adjoining lot. Okay. Does that make sense? And that grow, all right, let's say someone builds an additional dwelling next week. The 400 setback would apply to that new dwelling that's being built. Well, then I think that the existing operator of the cannabis farm next door might have arguments that the person was basically coming to a quote unquote nuisance at that point. I mean, these are the issues that are gonna have to be fleshed out over time, and all of these licenses and land use permits are discretionary, and they're reviewed on a yearly basis, and so there are gonna be times when folks aren't gonna agree about, there's gonna be times when something is set in motion, and then properties are gonna be sold amongst people, and new people are gonna move in, and these are things that are gonna have to be dealt with over time, I think. It's very difficult to deal with all of the potential hypothetical situations when you're, you know, when you're basically preparing the meal to be served. Sure. Yeah, as compared to entitlement, which once we give an entitlement, that stays with the property. True. It would run with the property then. The cannabis grow, if somebody puts it in, then sells the property, they would be able, the next person or the next person would be able to continue that, or not continue. No, the system is created so that you need both a license and you need a land use approval, and so it's correct that once you get the land use approval, one might argue that they have entitlement to grow on that parcel, but nobody ever has an entitlement to a license. Okay, okay, that's good. And then, well, we're talking about, again, neighborhoods, residential ag, less density, of course, than maybe a city neighborhood, but again, people do move out there for certain reasons. And maybe we're talking about a buffer because of odor, we're talking about it because of changing the environment of maybe the neighborhood they're moving into. So that's a real concern of people that I've talked to that live in certain areas, one particular area and near Watsonville, and with the pressure to have more and more people moving into the county and some of them moving into residential ag, we're protecting the property rights of people that want to move into neighborhoods. So anyway, I'm arguing for some actual 400 foot setback from a property line, but anyway, that's what I'll propose here, maybe on the motion. But the other would be tax distribution. It's clear from all the maps that a lot of the tax money that's brought in is gonna be from district four. And then that money's gonna be split five ways evenly throughout the county. But if one area is generating more tax money, I think that area maybe should get more of that money. But there's no way of doing that, I guess, right? I've looked into it and it seems, I don't know. I mean, the benefit of the burden we're talking about here. This is a general fund and so like there's same thing could be said about sales tax and adult tax and so forth. And so it's distributed by the board, county-wide it. There's no, we don't do Citus distributions within the county for general fund purposes. Yeah, but I do see with other tax money disbursement, they'll go by like we'll say with measure D, it's road miles. They'll say, okay, more money is gonna go because there's more roads in a certain area. How about more money goes to an area that generates most of the money? You know, again, that's a formula. District four is gonna have a big part of the burden here. And I just wanna make sure that we get our share of benefit but and also with less problems because the pressure is to build and to grow in district four. I do wanna be cautious and be careful that we're talking about the matter that was noticed here today. And be careful that we don't stray too far and start talking about taxes and things like that and get into a place where we're talking about getting into a Brown Act issue or something like that. So before your board today, I think it would be good to stick with the ordinances that are before you and maybe postpone that conversation regarding taxes to a time when it's on your agenda for discussion. Something like that. I can understand that. I just wanna make it clear. Definitely set on this 400 foot setback. I don't wanna see it shrunk. I don't wanna see it any smaller or any kind of maneuvering on it. And my biggest concern now is I do wanna protect the environment of the whole county and I know the way that it's going, it's being destroyed. So but if we pass something that is workable here and enforceable, we can protect the environment and also protect the people that live within the grow areas. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to acknowledge again as we have in every one of these meetings the work of the Planning Commission, the Planning Department, our Cannabis Licensing Officer and the Cannabis Cultivation Choices Committee or C4 for all the work they've done to get us to this hopefully answer after three years of real deep study. And I'd like to acknowledge that the cannabis industry, the reality of it all is going to be a vital part of our economy now in this county and you've heard particularly from some of my district that deserves not only protection but I think promotion in the best way that we can do it. The ordinance isn't perfect to everyone but I think this is a very good ordinance that works to protect our small but celebrated small growers, our environment and our wildlife. I have a difference of opinion from Supervisor Caput and I'm not directing these at it but this is the way I see it and this is not a motion but just from the input we have item seven incorporating the revisions on setbacks. I think it's clear from the maps that we've seen that the 400 foot distance just isn't the answer. And I think we have three basic choices. One that we could leave at the 400 foot mark but with discretion given to the Cannabis Licensing Officer to allow 100 to 400 foot setbacks. I think we can accept the C4 recommendation that was 100 foot minimum based on parcel size or we can go back to the 200 foot setback that was included in the previous version. And we're trying to address the issue of order here and I really don't think we're getting a good handle on it and I'd recommend staying with the 400 foot setback with the allowed discretion of the Cannabis Licensing Officer with a further, and again I'm not trying to get ahead of ourselves in a motion but included in this I'd like to see us make sure that we have staff collect a map on order complaints and report back to us annually at least and then staff continue to investigate the effectiveness of these nasal rangers if I call them. I guess is that the right terminology? I don't know but for lack of a better description I don't think this is going to delay the process and I think it allows for needed flexibility that we have as we begin, we start up this organization. I don't want to see a lot of people become criminals because of a foot or two or something and I think that there's going to be some instances where discretion is going to be very well received and should be. That's, so my basic thought is that we should have the 400 foot that allows 100 to 400 foot setbacks of the discretion of the C.L.O. But so I'm, excuse me if that's not a motion but I'm just, and then the Item 10 Incorporating the revisions that address the Cottage five excuse me Cottage five, Garden 2.5 acre. We have had requests in the recent days and at the last hearing to that, to require the level five review of these applications but I'm concerned that we don't have the staffing to really conduct the surge of these applications. I think we kind of answered this question before but I want to make sure that we have that we, I suggest that we keep the level four review and not the level five and I just want to make sure I'm more clear on that. I think it's, I would like to, I'd hope that the County Council and the Cannabis Licensing Office would work with the state to allow existing and relocating businesses to move forward to apply for state licensing while ensuring the process for CEQA. Some people are getting caught in the middle here and time's running out and under that same item, there's an option that would be to allow for an additional percentage like 25% of nursery plants that would not count against the Canobie cap. I think that might answer some of the concerns of the ag industry. I'm just not here to try to give everything everybody's asked for but to be reasonable and to see how we can make this as workable as possible. And so I would like to see us land on 25% that would be allowed for nursery stock. As part of the enforcement plan, this, there's been a lot of talk about the revenue that this is going to bring in and I agree that I think maybe our tax decision was too high but we'll see how that works out in the years to come or a year to come but I would like to recognize too, although we're gonna have a lot of revenue from this, there's gonna be a big cost. I mean, we're gonna have added deputies and law enforcement, we're gonna have an additional code compliance investigator, seems environmental health is gonna require additional staff. So this isn't going to be a net net game of gains, financial gains, it's going to be, the enforcement plan is critical and I would like to see that the enforcement plan discusses the interagency body that we'll meet. I'd like this group to report annually again to the board with information including the impacts on fire, water, wildlife, health and safety and criminal justice. This would be in addition to the report regarding the number of permits issued and pending so forth. The civil penalties issue too is we have civil penalties ranging from 2,500 to 7,500 dollars and I think after the third violation of a provision within one year, why should a cultivator be allowed to renew his or her license? I think this is gonna be an enforcement issue. If they don't do it the first time, well, okay and then we go back the second time, third time, hey, you know, we've given you your chance and we wanna give you your chance as best we can, but. And then just as I do, as you know and I think I know we all were very sensitive to the compassionate use component, but we do have to wait and see what the state might do in this regard, so I see that. I just wanna remind people that that's on the minds of the board and the city and its legal water issue. I might wanna hear back from you about how that seems to be a legitimate request to me that the licensing staff verified the supplier of the water has a legal authority to seek bulk water to the final destination. I don't know if that adds more on your plate than you really need right now, but. Does that? So Loretta and I had some conversations about the city's comments on the licensure of a water purveyor. Currently the way the ordinance is written, non-potable water actually wouldn't be available to be tracked onto a site, except in an emergency and the BMOP, the way it's written, does have some requirements for licensure of the purveyor. We have, however, talked with the state about including some additional language regarding the legal ability of a purveyor of non-potable water to provide water and if your board directs us to bring this back for another first reading we would include some additional language. So would that delay this whole process then further alone? Our opinion is that it's okay as it is. We don't need to make this change because it's already restrictive in terms of what water can be used, but if we come back for other reasons that we could include a clarification to allow non-potable water to be used. It's an option. Just add on to that. The BMOP is gonna be adopted by your board via resolution, so we can make changes to, it wouldn't hold up if you want to make changes to the BMOP. If you wanna make changes to the ordinance, it would hold things up, but if you wanted to direct staff to make changes to the BMOP to comply with the suggestions that have been made by the city, we could do that and return on May 8th with those changes to the BMOP and it would not hold things up. I think we can address it in a short time period but I don't think it's the right thing to do at this point. Thank you for that non-motion motion, Supervisor McPherson. I was gonna say. Well, I mean, right? We know what your motion's gonna be, so, Supervisor Coonerty. Sure. So a lot of my questions just got answered. I guess, Supervisor McPherson's comments about the nursery, 25% and the nursery canopy, is that doable and does that cause another first reading or is that? Both, it is doable and yes, it would cause another first reading and it also, it's not the recommendation of staff to go with that and I wanna make sure that everybody realizes that. Staff's recommendation is to accept the ordinance the way it's drafted but we've provided your board with options in case you wanna do something different. Okay. So there's that. I guess on Supervisor McPherson's discussion of setbacks, I understand the concern from people in the community and the pushback that I don't think it was intended to sort of wipe out so many parcels. However, odor is a major, major issue and it will be a termination. Just to come back to you, you would have the discretion to either terminate or not renew a license based on odor complaints? Or modify. Or modify. Add mitigations, even reducing the canopy, moving the canopy if necessary and just a reminder that we're only talking about outdoor for the 400, just I don't know that that's been. Right, yeah, we're only talking about the outdoor and I think it's gonna be one of the reasons we went for the larger setback was an idea of trying to get people on both sides, some sense of security, but that if they're sort of adequate encouragement for people to comply and that you have the discretion and ability to revoke a license based on odor, that's a barrier or change or modify. That could be, that's a very important tool and I wanna make sure you have that full authority. Okay, I think the rest of my questions got answered. Are there questions Supervisor Leopold before we move into the motion phase? Yeah, I have a couple of different things that I would say. First of all, I think we're at a good point because the areas where we still have disagreements between what is proposed and what has been talked about is small and even some of the greatest critics and the greatest supporters didn't even make it here today because they generally where we are is we're in a relatively good place and it's a reflection of many hours of testimony, many hours of meetings at the commission level, at the C4 level, in the community, community discussions. And so to me, that's the process working. So I think that where we have some disagreements here is it could be closer to the margins. I wanted to get some clarity because there were some testimony, you made a remark at the beginning and then there was some testimony about a couple of things that I just wanted to get clarity on. The level five requirement would be for RA zone parcels that are not getting a cottage grow and A zone parcels. The rest of them would be level four. It depends and SU with the residential TP, so there's still a pretty good chunk of- So SU would also require level four and TP. Level five. Level five, sorry. I'm trying to get clear on that. There was testimony and I wanted to get clarity on about SU if someone owns multiple parcels of SU contiguous, but as the case was made, eight here, nine there, 10 there, do we treat those as three different parcels if they're owned by the same person and therefore limiting their ability to- There's nothing that prohibits any property owner who owns multiple adjoining properties from actually combining them, like going through the assessor or the planning department and physically combining them. They obviously lose some development capacity moving forward. So that exists, but to treat them as a parcel without physically combining them was taken out. That's right, for the SU and RA. Yeah, that's unfortunate, but it seems it works against someone who's assembled some parcels to be able to do what they wanna do. There was also testimony from a woman concerned about CO2 extraction or ethanol in RA zones, but I thought that we prohibited that in the RA zones. The way it's written right now, it's prohibited on parcels less than five acres. But as a point of clarification, you can't do something less than five acres, so the motion that you changed from 10 to five just meant that it's available in all RA now from the last meeting. It's potentially a cottage grow conceivably the way the ordinance is written now. A cottage grow could have that activity. But not with this five acre, sorry. So prior, if the five acre restriction wasn't there, a cottage grow could conceivably do those other types of manufacturing activities. All right, so the testimony wasn't exactly correct? Not precise. Okay. One of the things that during the course of these many, many meetings of discussion, there have been some comments from board members commenting on the new farmers that are part of cannabis. And we've had someone from the Farm Bureau come to us a couple of times talk about definitions and trying to get something that has a definition that relates to agriculture. And I'm trying to figure out why we're not still in sync with our common agricultural practices. It seems to me, we're pretty close on the canopy, but this nursery piece is not there. And I'm trying to figure out why we're not taking the suggestions of the Farm Bureau. I mean, it's a policy decision, certainly. The concern as we have expressed in the past was simply not wanting to have an expansion of development that would incorporate multiple types of grows and stages of grows. We really just wanted a box. And it would be up to the individual cultivator to figure out what fit into that box. We've made it advantageous for folks in CA who co-locate within existing structures. There's virtually no limit to the canopy. So in those cases, you could have a nursery, you could have multiple types of cultivation activities. But again, I mean, I understand both sides. I look at things from an implementation and enforcement piece and it just seemed like it would be hard for us as a land use matter to try to figure out who was, without having a nursery license type to sort of figure out what was what. Yeah, I wonder if Mr. Schmidt could just come up for a moment. I just wanted to ask him a question, because the way I understood it, at least from the farming representatives, is that there's sort of a clear chart of nursery versus canopy. And so I respect that there's lots of things I count on our attorneys to do. And I have a great deal of respect for all the work that's been done, but here's a guy who grows plants. And Mr. Schmidt, I was wondering if you could just say a little bit about why the definitions we have now don't work. The, it's one thing to propagate a plant and another thing to raise it to maturity. There in other areas of commercial agriculture, we have companies throughout the Central Coast that only raise seeds to transplants and sell them to other growers. In the flower industry, which used to thrive here, we had people who would raise nursery stock to sell to the rose growers who would grow it up to maturity and sell the flowers. And their separate approaches, their separate fertilization techniques, and there's clearly different light demands. The state of California has two separate licenses and has diagrams on the CDFA website since they're separate licenses, showing how you have to designate them as separate areas. So they're not co-mingled. We're not, the CDFA doesn't want you to co-mingle the mature plants with the immature plants and goes to great lengths to show you how to designate it on the maps that are required as part of their application process. And the current definition of canopy, if they were to include this 25% piece, would that work? As Supervisor McPherson has suggested. No, I understand that and that's appreciative because it gives additional space so that if I have 22,000 square feet on CA land, it would now expand by another 25%. I'm not quite sure how that will line up with the way the state wants you to demarcate the nursery license that you would have to obtain and the cannabis cultivation license you would have to obtain for what Santa Cruz County sees as one license. Right. And maybe that's a question for a council about. Yeah, I wanna make sure we're using the same terms and talking about the same thing and that we're not mixing the definition of nursery with the definition of immature or non-flowering plants. Those are two different things and we don't have a nursery license. Your board has not created a nursery license here within the county. And so when we start using state definitions of nursery and intermixing with what we're doing, we're not really talking, we're talking apples and oranges and to answer your earlier question, what does it look like on the ground? The problem it looks like on the ground is when a person in Robin's office wants to go out and do an enforcement action or even to do an inspection, they wanna go out there and be as efficient as possible and they wanna look at the box and they don't wanna get into arguments with folks about, well, my immature plant stock is over there. So let's go take a look at my immature plant stock and say, okay, wait a minute, now there's a flower on that plant right there. Does that mean that it's no longer an immature plant and why isn't that flowering plant over in your box that is supposed to contain mature flowering plants? So there's complexities from a logistical nature that the state isn't concerned about when the state is creating its rules that we're concerned about on the ground. But again, it's all up to your board. Your board can make whatever policies and decisions that you wanna make and will implement and will faithfully implement whatever those decisions are. And I've never doubted that in any way, shape, or form. I'm just trying to, where my comment is as do, when you give this example of the immature stock and the flower, I'm not sure whether a farmer would say we would never allow a flower there because that causes some other process. I won't pretend like I know. That's the difference in the definition of in the state definition of a mature versus an immature plant, a mature plant is flowering. And we basically didn't want to get, don't want to create a system where we're basically just cutting off our nose to spite our face when we go out to do enforcement. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to find. No, I get that. And I guess the question for Mr. Schmidt is do, with these immature stocks, do people let it go to flower or do they move it? Because once it gets a flower, it has changed. Any ordinance is adopted is based on the presumption that most people will strive to obey it. And since the state has this as a separate license, they will strive to obey that and that only immature plants would be in the nursery area and flowering plants would be in the cultivation area. I can't, I don't want to surmise what someone who with illegal motives would do. Yeah, well, I mean, that's not our purpose. I just didn't know whether that immature stock going to flower, whether that causes some problem for the rest of the immature stock. I think the immature stock, if it's before it starts to flower, would be moved. That's what I would think, too. But my attorney is concerned that that may not be clear. So that's what I'm trying to get to. I guess the question for our counsel is if the state has a nursery license and we don't, what happens for the person who is raising seed stock or these immature plants, these clones, right? We've heard testimony for clones. They would get a cultivation license here and they would apply for a nursery license with the state and that would, that could coexist. Even though we only have one type here, they could have two types from the state. That's true. The last question I'll ask and thank you, Mr. Schmidt. If we made changes to either our canopy definition or a nursery definition, would we not be able to do a first reading here today? No, we would not be able to do that. Those are significant changes. We would need to come back for another reading. However, what we could do if your board is concerned about these issues is you could do a first read and a second read on this ordinance and direct us to do more work around this issue and come back and maybe make changes to the ordinance three months from now, four months from now, et cetera. We can keep working on this. As we've said multiple times, this is a work in progress and we expect that we're gonna be bringing back additional things for your board to consider over time, not just related to this one issue. The last area which I'll talk about is the 400 foot setback. You know, I voted against this last time because I don't think that there's, well there's no science connected to why 400 feet as compared to 200 feet as compared to 1,000 feet. This is really a fear-based part of the policy over the concerns of the possibility of smells. And I don't, I don't wanna downplay the fact that some of these plants stink, right? And some of them are even prized for their smell. But to have a policy that seems incredibly restrictive with this large setback, it just doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that as the point I made last time, which is, you know, a pesticide could be sprayed 200 feet from that habitable structure, but we're not gonna let a flowering plant grow. It just, I fail to see the value of this part of the policy. Maybe with discretion that works, but I like the recommendation that came from the 100 plus hours of meetings from the C4 committee that included both cannabis and neighbors and the lawyer and former planning director. I mean, we tried to include a lot of voices in that. They spent a lot of time on this issue. And it seems to be a better way to work it rather than setting this, what I would consider arbitrary number. To that point, I wanna make sure that you and the other folks understand that that exception is in the current ordinance right now. So there's a 400 foot setback, but it can be lowered to 100 foot, depending on the discretion of the license official with a level five hearing review. So we wouldn't have to make changes to the ordinance in order to implement what you're talking about. Yeah, I get that, but I think that someone brings it, says I need a less than 400 feet. Now you have to do a hearing and then you put the zoning administrator right in the cross hairs of a completely unrealistic goal, right? Which is you have neighbors who have fear, not fact, expecting 400 feet and a licensing official who has fact and close examination and you're saying, and we're gonna get, it's gonna be like a cell phone tower thing. It's like people are gonna have some expectation about something and in the end we're not gonna, we make a decision that will be unsatisfying because we've set an arbitrary limit that's not based on any fact or evidence or any idea that 400 feet is gonna cause any lesser problem with smell than 200 feet or 1,000 feet. We just don't, we don't know. And the idea that we have one year license, which gives us a chance to actually have real information and say, yeah, it was really bad for a couple weeks. That's real and the other part of it is guesswork and I think that's a bad way to make policy. Those are my comments. All right, thank you. I'll be brief so we can get to the motion side just in general just so the community knows. I'm supportive of the proposed ordinance. I think that this has been a significant process of compromise by all sides in order to get to an ordinance that works. The board's stated goals have never changed from environmental and neighborhood protections with the desire to provide adequate access. And there's still many within the environmental community that feels that this ordinance doesn't do enough to protect the environment. And I think that to the point that there's no science behind the setbacks, I think we could make an argument that the entire process, while very thorough and vetted, has a capriciousness to it where one could argue that all of the acreage minimums are arbitrary. All of the setback requirements are arbitrary. The taxation is a best guess. This whole thing is trying to make policy in advance of knowing what the externalities will be as a result of the policy. We don't have a history in this country of other models that we can look to to say this is what worked. The difficulties we're having in Colorado work into Washington, including the economist that spoke of oversupply but then advocated for additional supply here, which is a very unique, because I thought that economics 101 was matching supply and demand, not having additional supply when there's lower demand, but maybe I flunked that class. But the idea is still the same, which is that there isn't really, we don't know how this is gonna play out. We should be honest with the community about that. We don't know if the policy is gonna be, the regulations are gonna be overly burdensome, or we don't know whether it's going to not protect the environment and neighborhoods enough. We don't. And I think that the commitment that the board should have is that we be flexible over the course of the coming 12, 24, and 36 months to look at everything that we're doing. But on the flip side, I think that it's also responsible to have a policy that does try and confine things in an enforceable and reasonable way so that we don't have a lot of other issues that would be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle for the not. I mean, I recognize the economics of it. I recognize that this is something that's ingrained within this county, but I also recognize that environmental beauty, agricultural protections, rural residential protections, I don't see why they're given less weight than the discussion of what makes people a bunch of money. I don't understand that, I haven't understood that for three years in this discussion. So I do think that there is in general a sense that we should recognize that we're making a policy that we don't know what will come about of this policy. It's an imperfect process. That gives me pause, but it doesn't paralyze me for making a decision on this component. I think that the degree that the fact that we've reached an element of compromise here, there are definitely things in this ordinance I'd like strengthened. I could go through a whole large laundry list. I just don't really know that at this point, after this many hearings, after this much public process, this much, now's the time to just say that we should make changes and go through another first reading and debate that time, get a whole other set of interest groups that don't like a change. I was made at that time to come in and make the same arguments in a couple weeks and delay, delay, delay. I think there were at a point that we need to move forward recognizing it's an imperfect policy made though through a thorough public process and we're gonna be learning together, moving forward on this and hopefully it's something that's good for the county moving forward. And I think that we've done a pretty good job on that. Now I think what we should do is move toward people that wanna do modifications with understanding that functionally, any modification you make to this means that it delays this process for those that are concerned about that. Supervisor Caput had said that he was not interested in making any modifications. Is that correct or proposing a modification to the proposal? And I can explain that. You can put me on the timer if you want, put me on the screen on the timer. If only. Okay. Oh, this will. Okay. At one time, if I understand it was 600 feet was one proposal right? Can you use the microphone? Supervisor Caput, please. Thank you. That's correct. At one time it was a 600 foot buffer. At one time that was suggested. These buffers have honestly gone through so many changes in regard to so many different pieces of infrastructure where you talk about municipal boundaries, schools, you know, drug treatment facilities, residences. So it's been, you know, 600, 100, 400, they've all been considered. It remains 600 for a school. True. Right. Okay. I'm gonna just go back and I'm gonna do this quickly because I wanna hear the other comments too. If we go back a couple of years, the motivation in this room was mostly compassionate use, medical use and whatever. And in less than a year, the motivation seems to be on a lot of people's mind. It's about more money. It's about being able to make more of a profit. I'm sorry to see that change or shift. Not everybody, but it seems to be a shift in the argument. The farther away that a neighbor bothers you, the less complaints you're gonna get. So what I'm getting at is neighborhoods and protecting neighborhoods for people really moved out to get away from problems. And if you leave them alone, they're gonna be okay. The closer we pack them in and the closer we have encroachment, the more complaints we're gonna get, the more strain on public safety sheriffs and everybody and the whole process. So a bigger buffer is a reasonable thing to ask for. And if you look at what we're talking about now, all the concessions that we're giving seem to be going towards the grower who wants to grow more rows of cannabis, marijuana, to make more money. And very few concessions are given on the part of those neighbors that are living out there and saying, hey, leave me alone. I moved out here. I wanna enjoy my life. I don't wanna have to be battling with all this. So what I'm saying is it's a balancing act of benefit, burden, and also concessions. I'm saying a little more concession for the people that just wanna live out there and a little more concession, 400 feet to me is okay. I mean, at one time I was for 600 feet, but that's a concession for the ones who wanna grow. And hopefully when all this works out, we're gonna have less complaints and we're gonna have more people complying. And we're not gonna have people that are out there destroying our environment. So that's where I stand. And hopefully that's where we are. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Is there a proposed modification to the ordinance you'd like to make today? Just to make clear then, we can leave it at the 400 feet, but as it is now, you have the discretion that's correct. And I do not like to put you on the crosshairs either, but to be fair with a level five hearing. So it's the discretion of the Candidate's license officer with a hearing. The concession would be brought back to us though. Is that correct? No, no, to the licensing officer. And if they wanted that discretion to reduce it, then it would go to a level five review. Otherwise it's level four. Depends on the license type, but yeah, right for cottage, for instance. Okay. So we don't really have to change that under the circumstances, I believe then. But I would like to keep map and data on the order complaints. Do we have that, can that be added as a direction without extending this? I wanna get this thing done. Can I ask, does a point of clarification? I mean, this would not modify the ordinance in a way that would be substantial, but are there any privacy issues, are there any legal issues with keeping a map specifically of where the complaints are that would be released publicly, or is it something that would be general enough that it would be okay to have on a. To keep a map and a running log of complaints and where they are. Would it be the complaint that would be mapped or would it be the grower that would be mapped? Yeah, no, no. Because the grower's got a discretionary permit, that's one thing that isn't as big of a concern, but in our standard code compliance process, we don't just out people that file complaints, and we wanna encourage people from filing complaints where there's a concern and not feel a concern that their information's going to be made public. Without specific direction from your board, I think that there's no way that we would be releasing the individual names and contact information for complainers. We would treat that consistently with the way we've treated all of our other code compliance policies. My, what I'm thinking about is whether there's a concern with creating a map of businesses that have been complained about, and I really don't think that there is, because these businesses are coming into the light, they're being treated like every other business that there is, and to the extent that there are complaints or problems about them, it seems like they're as fair game as the Chinese food restaurant down the street or any other business that we have in the county. Okay, thank you. So, would you like? I'm not, yeah, I'd like to still, we have to collect that data. It seems like that's fine to do. One of the other things that, after the third violation of a provision within one year, I don't think a cultivator should be allowed to renew the license. Would that have an impact on? Yes, it would have an impact on the coming back, but from a practical perspective, the licensing official has discretion to yank somebody's license after one violation. Depending on the nature of the violation and how egregious it is, they don't have to go through a progressive type of a process like that. And I think you've vested the discretion in your licensing official to make those kinds of determinations that if somebody is having a problem four times in a row with the same issue, eventually that's gonna be the result. And I'm gonna guess that on many situations, it's gonna be the result before they get that far. Right, okay. I don't think that's necessary. I'm not ready to make the motion. I'd really like to have somebody else talk about this, but I think some of those questions have been answered to my satisfaction. So when we do make a motion, though, I believe that there'll be additional direction associated with it that would just require an annual report. What I wrote down, please let me know if this works for you, Supervisor McPherson, is to have an annual report on the impacts and complaints, it seemed, because you talked about firewater, number of issues, but I think if we'd probably define it as impacts and complaints, then I think that that would provide discretion for the staff to come back to the report that works for them. That's correct. Okay, Supervisor Coonerty. I'm not sure where to go here, but I guess, I mean, in order, in the interests, let me make a comment, which is, we are on the cutting edge, other counties have moved forward, Monterey County moved forward in a very specific way, in a very targeted way, with only a few properties. We are trying to figure out how to recognize our historical grows and cannabis community and balance that with a new economic and regulatory reality. And so, I think what we all have to understand is that this is an interim step, and that any changes that we'll learn as we go, and the licensees we'll learn, and hopefully not too many will learn in a way that it causes them to have their license revoked, we will learn what regulations work and don't work, and then we can start to see whether we need to expand or contract this. So, I'm sort of, at this point, in the interest of getting this going and getting folks into compliance, I think I'm ready to move the staff recommendation with the idea that I'll entertain additional directions, but if people want to make changes, they can do so after adoption in order to, as we learn more. So, there's a motion for the recommended actions. One second, though. There's a second from supervisor, Caput, other, supervisor Leopold, I know you're interested in modifications, so. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in getting to square one, which is that we have an ordinance that staff can start working on, that cultivators can start working on a license. I would like staff to work with the Farm Bureau on the question of the nursery definition and the possible nursery license type and to come back in August with a report back about the possibility of looking at having a nursery license type. I think that makes sense. That's a friendly, that's a friendly amendment. I would offer that as a friendly amendment. So, there's a friendly amendment been proposed, as a seconder, consider that friendly amendment to have that come back in August, just as a report back, to see whether there's action from that point. It's a report back, not a change back. It's not a requirement to flesh this out so we could actually decide what we wanted to do it. And as long as I understand my second still, it's a 400-foot setback. Correct. And we're going by the staff recommendation. Correct. Nothing added, nothing subtracted that I don't know about. Yeah, so theoretically. Nothing to do with tax. Yeah, normally that question's asked before you second that motion. But to be fair, the answer to all your questions is yes, but so are you okay with that, with the report back in August on that issue? Okay, so the friendly amendment's been added. Part number two? Yeah, there's a lot that I support in this ordinance and I think the 400-foot setback is not wise and I understand my colleague's suggestion that there's a lot that we don't know. But I would say that where we don't know, we should look at our existing practices and try to follow them. And if we would follow our existing practices, we would say can't be worse than pesticides and they have a 200-foot buffer. And so I would do that, but I'm not sensing that there's support on the board to do that. So if I vote for this ordinance, I will grudgingly accept that and hope that we get a report back that maybe we could look to modifying that to something that's actually reasonable. We have a motion and a second. I'd like to ensure that Supervisor McPherson's request for an annual report on the impacts and complaints, including odor, fire, water, a number of other issues he raised is something that's also a part, friendly amendment? That's a friendly amendment. You're okay with the annual report? I just want to say, I agree. I'm grudgingly going along with this whole thing too, just to make it come to an end. And I'd like to make a friendly amendment based on Council's comments that in the second, as part of the resolution, the BMOP has the language that the city of Santa Cruz is requesting, so it doesn't impact the ordinance, but it's specific to the resolution. So just confirming that that would not impact a first reading issue today. It would be handled in the resolution. We could tighten up the language as requested, correct? Yes. Correct. Okay, so would you consider a friendly amendment as well? Absolutely. Okay. A motion and a second with some minor modifications. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. Thank you all. I'll give just a minute to clear the room. We actually do have a couple more items that I'm sure that you are all dying to hear about, but we have some pulled items from consent that we would like to address as well. I'm just going to go like this. Thank you guys. Thank you. All right, everybody, if we could quiet up a little bit. We've got some additional direction to go. Everybody, we have some additional items. We are going to move on to item 60.1, which is pulled item 29, which is to accept and file a quarterly report on measures to reduce the number of people held in jail before trials, recommended by the Chief Probation Officer. Mr. Alexander, you pulled this item. Yes, I did. I was able to peruse the light item agenda and really scrutinize that. They're submitting this for acceptance and I'm going to say this, just seeing the language and stuff and the lack of community involvement in shaping these policies. I would ask that we reject this and allow faith leaders and community leaders to add input into measures that will reduce if people held in jail before going through trial. I would say is that the probation department should have a measure of control where they have a site and release. They can release people that aren't probation and release them. And not only that, but then also the jail. The jail needs to have a site and release also program. So when people are coming through there, when they arrested me at the G.A. office, you know how long I stayed in jail and they told me I was going to be site and release. It took me 12 hours. So it just showed me how unaffected they were. They released me at like two o'clock in the morning with no buses and nothing just left outside. So I would say is that the report is not adequate because there's no community involvement in the report. And light item 30, are we on the number 30? No, no. Okay, sorry, sorry. All right, so we have to take this item on its own. So is there anybody else who'd like to address us on this item? Item pulled 29, which is now 60.1. Seeing none, we'll close that item and bring it back to the board. Move approval. Second. A motion from Coonerty. A second from Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. We'll move on to item 30, which is now item 60.2, which is an acceptance file report on the recommendations contained in the jail utilization study report that's recommended by the sheriff corner, Mr. Alexander, you pulled this item? Yes, once again, I read the report. And I wanna inform members of the public there's no community involvement. So we got the sheriff, we got the probation and it does have language where the court, it was very important that the presiding judge participate in this because in Santa Clara County, they have a just as a public safety meeting where members of the public can try to at least weigh in. When there's no community involvement, these once again, functionary bureaucrats are drafting up these policies that don't really help members of the public. What it actually does, this is the clever way of the slave management, people of the emissary population that are just being managed here, managed there and just being mistreated. And these policies are not really designed to help the people. We need community leaders, we need faith leaders to help shape these policies. So I'm asking to reject this policy and I'm asking for members of the public to push up on the County Board of Supervisors with moral force and ask them to do the right thing. Thank you. Thank you. I think we need like to address this on this pulled item. Move approval. Second. Seeing none, we'll move back to the board. We have a motion from Supervisor Coonerty, a second from Supervisor Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. We move on to the third pulled item, which was pulled 34. Now 60.3, ratify authorization for submittal of grant application to the Central California Alliance for Health and the amount of $300,000 to offset costs of recruitment salaries and benefits for two full-time equivalent psychiatry positions and take related actions. As recommended by the Director of Health Services, Alexander. I do apologize. I pulled the wrong one, so I'll yield the floor. Thank you. Okay. Well, this item was approval. Does anybody like to address us on this item? Seeing none. Second. We have a motion from Supervisor Leopold, a second from Supervisor Coonerty. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. Now you pulled 35, which is 60.4, which is approve amendments to CalWorks Domestic Violence Prevention Contracts with Monarch Services. Reducing the contract amount by $10,000 for a new amount of $52,550 and with Walnut Avenue Family and Walnut and Women's Center, reducing the contract amount by $20,000 for a new total amount of $47,000 to align contract budgets with demand for services and take related actions, recommended by the Director of Human Services, Mr. Alexander. Yeah, yeah. When it comes to the emissary population that are depending on food stamps, because the CalWorks is people that are receiving the food stamps, when you got the Humanitarian Services, the Health Department working with this domestic violence issue, it's overlapping with the courts. The courts are already providing all these services and there's a lot of programs, community-based programs that are providing that and it just seems like the money is just, you know, I want to be honest with you, the Human Services Department is constantly in there just trying to hustle more money. Thank you. Is there anybody else who'd like to address this on this item? Seeing none, move back to the board. Move approval. Second. We have a motion for the recommended actions from Supervisor Coonerty, a second from Supervisor Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. The last item was item 36, which was now 60.5, which is approve amendment to the CalFresh Employment and Training Contract with Homeless Services Center, reducing the contract amount by $6,332 to a new amount of $181,712 to conform to available federal funds and take related actions, as recommended by Director of Human Services, Mr. Alexander. Yes, so once again, going back to the Human Services Department, these are humanitarian services that need to be provided, but when it comes to the Health, the Human Services Department and the Director, when it comes to helping the emissary population, they're exploiting the people with these brutal exploitations. They're actually having these programs, these providing employment readiness services, and the way they're gaining the people experience is having them go through this Catholic charity program to go clean graves. And the emissary population shouldn't be acclimating if you guys want to exploit them, or like Santa Clara County, paying the living wage, paying for failing wage so they can pull themselves up. I'm not knocking down the CFET, but when it comes to the Human Services for the homeless people and the people that are on GA is that they're abusing these programs by exploiting the people. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else that'd like to address us? Just as a point of order moving forward, you could have made those comments during the consent calendar. It's your right to pull, but I just wanted to note that it didn't strike me that anything that you did was necessary for pulling the items. I do apologize. There's other civil society activists, for whatever reason, they were not able to show up. We did consult regarding these, and they said if I was here, they wouldn't be able to speak on it, but they're having trouble, so I do apologize. Okay. Thank you. Is there a motion? Second. We have a motion from Supervisor Coonerty, a second from Supervisor Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. That will end today's meeting. I'd like to thank the Sentinel and the Community TV for covering, and we'll be back here on May 8th.