 So I will, Bonnie, are we all good on your end? Yes, we're good to go. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome to our 1215 session of the April 27th, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsantacruz.com. All council members are participating, participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home to view today's city council meeting. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in at the beginning of the item, you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. And I would like to please ask the clerk to call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council members, Watkins. Here. Callentary Johnson. Here. Proclamation declaring the week of May 2nd through May 8th, 2021 as Professional Immunicable Clerk Day week, excuse me, week, and I'd like to just read a few items off the proclamation just briefly. This is a Mayor's Proclamation. Whereas the Office of the Municipal Clerk, a time-honored and vital part of local government exists throughout the world. And whereas the Office of the Municipal Clerk is the oldest among public servants. And whereas the Office of the Municipal Clerk provides the professional link between the citizens, the local government bodies, and agencies of government at other levels. And whereas municipal clerks have pledged to be ever mindful of their neutrality and impartiality, rendering equal service to all. And whereas municipal clerks continually strive to improve the administration of the affairs of the offices of the Office of the Municipal Clerk through participation in education programs, seminars, workshops, and the annual meetings of their state, province, county, and international professional organizations. And whereas it is most appropriate that we recognize the accomplishments of the Office of the Municipal Clerk. And whereas as one of the only departments open during most of the pandemic, clerk administrative staff, members of the public, both in person and over the phone. And whereas during 2020, when a worldwide pandemic hit, our city clerk and deputy city clerk worked tirelessly to make the transition to virtual meetings of the city council and commissions as smooth as possible while maintaining an open public lobby to provide uninterrupted service to the public while following COVID-19 protocols. Now therefore, I, Donna Myers, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz do hereby proclaim the week of May 2nd through the 8th, 2021 as Professional Municipal Clerks Week in the City of Santa Cruz. In recognition of the exemplary dedication to public service and expand appreciation to our city clerk, Bonnie Bush, deputy city clerk, Julia Wood, and the amazing staff of the City of Santa Cruz City Clerk's Office. So congratulations, Bonnie, Julia, and all the clerk staff. You guys do make this place work and you make us work. We couldn't do any of this without you. So many, many kudos to you all and very, very proud to proclaim this week. Municipal Clerk, thank you all very much. 2021 as Psychedelic Assisted Therapy Awareness Month. We have today Allie Faduccia, co-founder and executive director of Project New Day. And Allie, I will read the proclamation and if you have a few words, we'd be happy to hear from you. Just get this. This is the Mayor's Procurement Domes, Chronic Depression, Severe Anxiety, End of Life Anxiety, Grief, Cluster Headaches, and other debilitating conditions are present in our communities. And whereas the use of psychedelics has been shown by scientific and clinical studies and traditional practices to be beneficial to the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities in addressing these conditions as well as personal spiritual growth. And whereas clinical studies and research in the United States, Canada, and Europe have shown the safety and efficiency of psychedelics for treating a variety of mental health illnesses going back to the 1960s. And whereas the food, excuse me, and whereas the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was founded on April 8th, 1986, to further the research on psychedelics as medicine and psychedelic practitioners celebrate the healing power of psychedelics on world bicycle day on April 19th. And whereas psychable is committed to being a trusted and comprehensive community dedicated to connecting those interested in legally exploring psychedelic-assisted therapy with practitioners and bringing together generations of indigenous healing with Western medicine. Now, therefore, I, Donna Meyers, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, do hereby proclaim the month of April, 2021, as Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Awareness Month in the City of Santa Cruz. I call upon all citizens, government agencies, public and private institutions, and businesses to commit to increasing the awareness and understanding of mental ailments, the need for appropriate and accessible treatment options, and the transformative power of psychedelic-assisted therapy for all those suffering or looking to improve their mental health. So, Allie, I'm happy that you're here today to join us. And I'm not sure, Allie, if you'd like to say a few words, but we would love to have you speak if you'd like to. Welcome. Hi. Great. We're going barking in the background during the meeting. The City Council of Santa Cruz for putting forth this proclamation, we're honored to accept it on behalf of Project New Day in our site, Psychedelic.Support. We feel like this is a very important move to help people learn more about the research studies that are currently ongoing for using psychedelics as treatment for mental health conditions. And we're doing a lot of work in the community now to raise public awareness around best and safe practices so people can make responsible and safe decisions if choosing to engage with psychedelic therapies. So this really says a lot of the City Council to continue to advocate since the decriminalization of these substances last January 2020. And we are excited about the possibility of these treatments becoming more widely available in the coming years to address some of the more serious and treatment resistant conditions that we know trouble a lot of people in our community. So thanks so much for bringing this forward and we're going to continue to do our part to help people access treatments as well as good care through our leading provider directory at Psychedelic Support and our nonprofit Project New Day. So thanks so much. Thank you very much, Allie. Thanks for being here today. I'll move on to our next item, which is the item number eight, which is the Mixed Library Mixed Use Project Update. Our presenters today will be Amanda Rotellen with our Principal Management Analyst with the Economic Development Department and Bonnie Lipscomb, Director of Economic Development for the City. Bonnie and Amanda, welcome. Well, thank you so much for... I'm just gonna put my presentation. Everyone see that all right? Here with you today. I have a lot of updates to give you about the Library Mixed Use Project, but we underway last year. And as you know, the project includes a modern library, housing on the upper floors, you know, Council directed that there be a minimum of 50 affordable units, but we are really hoping to maximize housing on this site. And then of course, we've got parking consolidated into a structure with no more than 400 spaces. Have related to the Library Mixed Use Project is this update about funding that we received $500 million for affordable housing from the California Housing and Community Development Local Housing Trust Fund grant program. And this funding will be used across three city-led affordable housing projects, as you can see there, Pacific Station North Pacific. So that was really exciting news that we've gotten in the last couple months. A meeting with Congressman Panetta, Council member Cummings set up that meeting and Vice Mayor Brunner was also able to be there. And we had an opportunity to share with the congressman a little bit more about the project and talked him through it. And I'm sure Cummings and Vice Mayor Brunner can speak to this too, but he was very excited, very engaged. He asked really good questions and really seemed excited by the opportunity in particularly affordable housing and the resource that a modern library can really be for a community. So that was a very exciting development to have participated in the Downtown Association, Downtown Recovery Big Plans for the Future webinar, which had a number of different projects that brought a number of different projects happening in the downtown that kind of give updates. And this was a really exciting opportunity to really frame the Library Mixed Use Project in the larger picture of everything happening in downtown. There were updates on both Pacific Station North and South, the Pacific Front Laurel Development and other housing developments happening along the river in addition to the Warriors Arena. So that was a really good opportunity for us to share more about this project and really within the larger context of all the really exciting things that are happening in downtown right now. And then really getting to the meat of what we've been working on behind the scenes, we've released two RFPs just this month. So the first one we released was an RFP for a master consultant, which is our Affordable Housing Developer Partner. So that went out earlier in this month and is due, as you can see there, May 12th. And this will be the partner that helps us to really pull together the Affordable Housing piece, helps to figure out what the project's gonna look like, how many units we're gonna have, what funding do we need, they'll help us to pursue additional funding and really make that housing component really starting to come to life. And then the second RFP we released was for the master architect. And this will be the design team that'll help us to design what the exterior of the building really looks like and then they'll have a real hand-bond role to play in designing the interior of the library. And next steps and kind of where we're at. So last fall, as you know, we hired on the owner's representative, Griffin structures, April, as you can see, I'm very proud to have that checkbox there. We released two RFPs. We'll be looking to bring on both of those teams, both the Affordable Housing Developer Partner and Master Architect sometime around June. And then our goal is to launch a community engagement process around design this summer. And so there's gonna be a lot more coming before you and just a couple other time frames there that can kind of help to wrap your head around where we are in the process. And then as always, there's more information. I'm working very hard to keep our project page updated cityofsandercruise.com slash mixed-use library. There's a button on there that says project updates. I've highlighted it for you there in green. And that's just a great place for the community to go to get up-to-date notifications on what's happening. And I'm posting there quite frequently every time something happens, it goes up on that page. And then the second set of updates I have for you are on the site reuse and envisioning process that we launched this month. We're working with the project for public spaces and groups for architects. And this is sort of our engagement process so far. We had a couple of stakeholder group engagement meetings. So we met with 14 representatives from nine different groups. Yesterday and Sunday, we hosted two community workshops. We had over 135 people sign up and 80 people attended those meetings to provide input on uses and activities that they would like to see on the site. And we also set up a project webpage that has updates, next steps, three tasks of all the things that have taken place so far. And where we are in that process, this is a little difficult to see, but this column says March, April, May. So the yellow circle that we have here is what we just finished, so those workshops. And we have a number of other community engagement opportunities that we'll be bringing forward. There's gonna be a survey and then we're creating a pop-up sort of in-person engagement opportunity. And that will allow us to be a little more nimble and flexible about where we're able to bring that engagement and who we're able to engage. My goal is to really partner with other organizations and we can put a kiosk in the library or out in the community. So it'll allow us to get a little bit more engagement from different demographics and people who may not have been aware of some of our other opportunities. And then the goal is to return to council on June 8th with a report out of the whole process and then some recommendations for you to consider. And again, the project webpage there and there's lots of them. And that is my super quick update. Happy to take questions or, you know, I'm also always available if you want to email me things. So I'll defer to you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Amanda. Happy to have, we're right on time, so I'm happy to have any questions from council members. We do not take public comment on presentations, but if there's any council members with questions. Yeah, I just have one question for now. And I guess I'm trying to route my mind around the work around this engagement process and kind of the other pieces that are moving forward. And so I'm just wondering, is this part of the, this is not part of the master, it is. No, I'm sorry. Okay, so yeah. And so those funds are coming from, are we using funds for, people are asking where the money's coming from to do this engagement process and some of the other aspects. So I'm just wanting to be able to answer questions about that. Are interconnected and one is dependent on the other. They are very separate processes. So we hired a group for architects and project for public spaces for an outreach and engagement contract around visioning for the library site. And that funding came out of economic development budget. The funding for the library mixed use project is a separate project that divides costs between measure S and the parking fund and the affordable housing trust fund and other ED sources. So those are very much separate. Their budget is separate and the funding sources they come out of our staff. That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure I was. Yeah, no, thank you. That's super important to clarify. So I appreciate the opportunity to do that. Questions from council members? Being none. Okay, onto our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsanacruz.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items the council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be opened for public comment during today's meeting are numbers 12 through 40 on the agenda. I'd like to ask council members if they have any statements of disqualification today. Being none, I will ask our city clerk to announce any additions or deletions to the agenda today. And there are none. Great. This is an announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda item 40 today. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in towards the end of item 40. Okay, I'd like to call on our city attorney to provide a report on closed session. Mayor Myers, members of city council, this morning the council met in closed session at 10 a.m. to discuss the following items. Let me, one second. The first item was public employment. The council discussed the city manager recruitment in closed session. Second item was a conference with labor negotiators pursuant to government code section 54957.6 involving the following groups, FIRE, IAF, FF, local 1716, fire management, OE3, mid manager and supervisor employees, SEIU, local 521, and unrepresented employees. Council met with its chief negotiator, Lisa Murphy, in their direction. There's also an item on your after name agenda that relates to this discussion. Third item was a conference with legal council involving anticipated litigation. Council met to discuss one item of potential initiation of litigation. And then the fourth item was real property negotiations. Council met with its negotiator, Parks and Rec Director Elliot to discuss the property and potential lease for the homeless garden project. Lastly, the council met with its legal council on an item of existing litigation. That is the regents of the University of California at all versus the city of Santa Cruz. Matter is currently pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. There was no reportable action at the meeting. Thank you, Mr. Kandadi. We'll now move on to item number nine, which is our city manager's report. And I'll have city manager, Martin Bernal, make his report. Thank you, Mayor, City Council. I've got two updates this afternoon that I'm gonna ask be provided to you. One is on the COVID-19, the latest on COVID-19 from our party. And then secondly, Slee Butler will provide an update on the San Lorenzo Park encampment and the new global intervention and status of that. So I'll start with Chief Hydro giving an update on the latest on our COVID situation in our county. Thank you. Welcome, Chief Hydro. Hi, Mayor, City Council. So I have an update on COVID and I'm gonna start with showing the slide that's worldwide cases. And I think it's 16 months ago. I think if you were like me, you were watching this going, we were 10,000 or 100,000. We hit a million. That was a huge milestone. And worldwide, we're approaching 150 million cases. And that's really significant. And obviously, within the news, you can read about other parts of the world, specifically India that are growing. So we're not done with this, but I do have some, we have kind of a good news, bad news. As far as where we're at, we can go to the next slide. Going in the right direction. And specifically the number of COVID deaths has not increased all that much since my last update two weeks ago. The bad news is that I was optimistic that we were going to be moved into the yellow tier today. And we just missed the metrics for that. And so our next opportunity for that will come in two weeks. And I'm optimistic that we will hit that benchmark at that point. But our cases are holding fairly steady in the county as a whole. And we are moving in the right direction. It's just, we're not done with it yet. Next slide, please. The change that we've been having here in the county or it's a rolling 14 day average. The last update two weeks ago, that 14 day change was minus 20%. We're now at minus 32%. So if you're looking at graphs as far as growth and decrease, this is the right direction. So as a whole, compared to other parts of the nation and the state and the world, we are heading in the right direction. But I would caution everyone that we're not done with this yet, even though the news is optimistically good for us here locally. And the next slide, taken from the California COVID website. And it shows the number of people statewide that have been vaccinated. And here locally, over 75, we've got about a 90% vaccination rate. And they are moving pretty aggressively with giving vaccinations to anyone who's eligible. And there's been 237,000 doses of vaccine given out within Tana Cruz County. Now, obviously that's not the entire population because of the single dose and the subsequent follow up for the two shot for Moderna and Pfizer. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine had a few really negative impacts in a really small group of people. And today they rereleased it after looking at the numbers and what was going on with that. So that vaccination is going to be a pathway out of this. In India, one of the issues that they're finding right now is that they have about 20% of their population was vaccinated and they also had a huge fortune to their population that early in this pandemic got COVID. And so they were kind of thinking that potentially they had that herd immunity. What they're finding now is within that people that did not get vaccinated, they are getting COVID now from a new variant that's much more virulent and transmissible. And so that's why they are where they are at right now. Their population has about 20% that's been vaccinated and they're having a huge surge for almost a million cases in three days. And so that vaccination component, if you've had COVID in the past, you may not be protected against getting COVID again, which is really the kind of message wanna give out to everyone. Next slide. So with that being said about vaccines, all California's 16 and over are eligible for vaccination. And the two portals that you can go to are myturn.ca.gov or to sanacruzhealth.org. One thing with the my turn is if you log on to that and you enter into it, it may say that there's no vaccination appointment available. Keep scrolling down. There's a number of other entities that have vaccinations available. And we're now to the point here locally within the Bay Area and within Santa Cruz that we have the supply to meet the demand. And now the challenge is finding people who are going to get vaccinated. So we need to push that message. So my turn, when you go there, they say there's no appointments available. Keep scrolling down. They've opened it up to a number of different agencies, whether it's a hospital, whether it's safe way. There's a number of different mechanisms for you to get vaccinated and it is available. They're also optimistic that the under 16 crowd, the vaccination should be available by the end of May, beginning of June. And so that will get that other population-based fits here within our County. So we're doing really good, but really need to keep urging people to make an appointment even if you've had COVID, get vaccinated. And that's what will get us out of this, you know, where we're at right now. And then next slide. And then lastly, I know I'm a broken record on this, but you're washing your hands, wearing a mask, keeping your distance and just don't go out if you're sick. The CDC is releasing new guidelines about what vaccinated folks can do for masking and whatnot, but really these very simple things, even with or without a vaccine, are going to help us. And again, you can go to sanacruzhealth.org for local information or my turn for state information about where you can get vaccinated. That's what I have for you today and I'm willing if you have any questions and more to happen to answer this. I see Council Member Cummings has his hand up and then Council Member Watkins and Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Thank you, Chief, for that presentation. I was just curious with regards to moving into the yellow tier, I was just wondering what, did we not meet that prevented us from moving into that tier? It's an adjusted quartile as far as at risk population number of vaccines in comparison to the overall positivity rate. And we missed it by just a few tenths of a percent. So we have to stay within that tier for those metrics for two weeks. And so that's why we're not moving forward tomorrow. I was like I said, I was optimistic that it was going to happen, a little disappointed that it didn't. But given where we could be in relation to other parts of the world and the nation, we're doing well, we're just not doing as well as we'd like. Thanks. Council Member Watkins, thank you for the presentation and for your work on this. Just to make sure I heard you correctly. So you're anticipating by May June, under 16 will be eligible or they're anticipating under 16 will be eligible for vaccines? Yeah, that's the latest information from the County Health Officer that they're hoping to have the guidelines and the vaccination rollout for that age 12 to 16. Once you get younger than that, there's some developmental issues as far as your immune system and probably better off asking a pediatrician or a doctor about that, but they are looking for under 16 for the end of May, beginning of June, which will target that population that's been missing out so far. Great, thank you. Ontario Johnson. Thank you so much. She's had a good presentation. I know that we continue to have a robust public health sort of effort around how to stay safe. Do you know of these efforts around getting vaccinated? Now that we have the supply that we need locally and at the state, what's being done to push the message for vaccination? Well, I think this is part of it, but also this is coming from the County Health Officer, the State Health Officer, and also what they call their MCEs, which is the multi-county entities. So, Dignity Health, PAMP, Kaiser, they've rolled us out into CVF, Safeway Pharmacies, and they keep pushing that message to get vaccinated. I know that the county is also really targeting what they call homebound, and so those are people who may not be able to travel to a clinic. They're going to travel to them, and so they're trying to identify that group. And what they've done is taken a very targeted approach to those who are most at risk, either because of age or medical conditions, try to meet their needs, and now they're trying to get the general population, and so that message is that getting vaccinated is what will get us through this with as little impact as possible. I know that when we were first moving out with public health campaigns around how to stay safe, the county funded some organizations in South County through the Community Health Trust to get culturally responsive messaging out, so I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for that, but that's probably a question for the county. Might be a question for the county. I believe that they were funding Salud Parlihente and some of those entities that are actually healthcare providers, not necessarily a city entity, but they were trying to target specifically some of the farm workers because they viewed that as a high risk, and so they were trying to be language appropriate, culturally appropriate, and trying to overcome some of those barriers, so they could vaccinate that population quickly. Thank you so much. Sorry, Council Member Golder. I was wondering if there's been outreach or if there's been vaccinations available for the homeless population through the HPHP or what percentage of that population specific numbers as far as who has been vaccinated within that population. I do know that the county has targeted that population specifically and has done outreach, and my understanding is a significant portion of those who are willing to be vaccinated had been vaccinated. At this point, they have this supply, 16 and older, and so that is a group that they were specifically targeting earlier on, and so it's available, whether or not that they have been able to vaccinate that entire group. I don't know the numbers, but I do know that they've made significant outreach efforts to that population specifically. I can add that what I've heard is that it's been offered, particularly to those in the encampments, but there is kind of a high rate of not accepting it, which is a bit of a concern, is my understanding. I don't have the precise number, but there is a bit of concern about that. Any other questions for Chief Hydrick? Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, we missed the tier also, but thank you for all the updates. We appreciate it, Jason. We'll have Lee now. Thanks, Martine, and good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm Lee Butler. I'm the director of planning and community development and homeless response to the city, and everyone's aware of the federal injunction in San Lorenzo Park, and our need to allow campers to remain at that location. In an effort to conduct maintenance and increase usability of the upper park area, we suggested at the last federal court hearing that if the judge was not willing to release the injunction, that we could move individuals who were camping in the park to the lower benchlands area, and the plaintiffs in the case and the judge agreed to that. So a couple of weeks ago, we noticed that area, the benchlands area, to vacate that area so we could begin preparing it. That occurred, and as of yesterday, we began moving individuals from the upper San Lorenzo Park down into the benchlands area. They moved about 40 people yesterday, and we've issued 100 vouchers. So today, we're looking to do another 40 or 60 people and have them relocate down to the benchlands from San Lorenzo Park. There's been a lot of outreach to those individuals, and so that move was really successful and smooth yesterday. We are planning on closing the upper portion of the park on Friday, so that's cleanup. This is not intended to be provided direction regarding having camps available, or excuse me, having, for the capitalizing on the resource that we have there at towards a focus on safe sleeping in sanctioned areas. The next federal court hearing for this is on May 13th, and I'm available for any questions you may have. Is there any questions on these items? This was mostly focused on San Lorenzo Park. Can you give us a very quick update on Highway 1 and 9? Sure, absolutely. So we are continuing to coordinate with the county, the state, both in Caltrans and HP, the California Highway Patrol, and we're meeting with them regularly. They have requested some additional information about outreach statistics from both us and from the County of Santa Cruz outreach workers, and so we're providing that. So they are moving forward with the steps so that they can close that area. Timeline, or is it still sort of to be known as it kind of rolls out? It's still to be determined, but they are working towards gathering that information so that they can have a definitive timeline. But we're providing that information as they request and expect that Caltrans is going to be, and they do expect that they will get the green light from the Caltrans folks as well as the governor's office. And I think, in fact, I think they've already gotten a green light from the governor's office. So they're collecting information to make sure that they've got all the background information for when they go out and request that people move. Great, thank you, Meef. Council member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a question. I know that we've provided direction for staff to kind of work on developing the safe sleeping sites and the storage program and that there's an ordinance that's going to be coming back on May 11th. And I'm just wondering if you can provide an update on whether there's updates on what kind of outreach has occurred with the community on the development of the ordinance and kind of where those safe sleeping and storage programs are at in terms of outreach that's been done with service providers, RFPs, anything like that that's occurred since last meeting. Sure, so we are including an update on that as part of the May 11th agenda report on the ordinance. So you'll have some additional details related to that then. But just very briefly, we have been working on the RFQ and went through some final questions that we had. We've also been coordinating with the county. At this point, we are not going to release the RFP, excuse me, RFQ as a joint release with the county. That was something that we were discussing with them. But we really want to move forward quickly. This is a, the RFQ is a critical path item towards getting those safe sleeping sites up and operating. And so we have pulled some of the information that was county specific out of the RFQ. And we were just this morning working through some of the final revisions that we have for shipping that off to the city attorney and our risk managers. And so we're expecting that that will be out and pending that attorney review, roughly in approximately two weeks we'll be releasing that RFQ. And then we have also been talking about what is that outreach component going to look like. There is going to be an overlap in timing in terms of us going out to the community while the RFP is out there. And I think that that is, excuse me, RFQ is out on the street and I think that will be helpful because that can inform the information that we receive back. And it also, we may be able to issue if we're hearing information that is helpful that some of these service providers may know, we could issue an addendum to the RFQ, for example, and say, hey, we heard this great idea in the community. If anyone has thoughts about this, then that could be included in the response to their request for qualifications as well. So we are designing that outreach effort right now and we'll have a few more specifics before the May 11th. I don't think that any of the outreach itself, maybe some of the targeted outreach, but not some of the larger outreach. We probably won't have that ready before the May 11th, but we may have opportunities to speak to some of the specific service providers in advance of that May 11th hearing. And then just briefly as it relates to the ordinance, I know that there's a lot of interest in community members wanting to weigh in on that before it came back. Is there, and I've gotten some emails and been contacted by members of the community who are wondering how they might be able to weigh in or what the process is and where things are at. And so if we're getting those communications, what's the best way for us to either, who should we direct those concerns to or are there opportunities for people to weigh in and how can we get this information to people? We will be, we are happy to post the ordinance on the website when it's available. The ordinance, the council has directed changes to two primary sections, 6.36.040 and 6.36.050. That is in the allowable areas and the prohibited areas that are identified in the ordinance. And essentially the council has said that camping will be prohibited in all areas when location for sleeping can be provided. So when we can direct someone to a sleeping location, to a shelter bed, to a managed encampment, then they would not be able to camp anywhere else in the city. So the ordinance is actually fairly simple, simpler than before, except there are some nuances that we're still working through in terms of the language itself. So if we have that information available in advance, we're happy to post it. We are still working through that right now in terms of some of those specifics, but it is feasible that we will have that posted and we can post it on www.citiesandcruise.com slash homelessness. And there'll be a link to the information on that page. And just to add also that it's also coming back obviously as a, well not obviously, it's coming back as it's first meeting at the main meeting. So there'll be the issuance of the agenda reports and the agenda packet like there normally is. And then there'll be a second meeting that we'll be able to do in two weeks after that. So there's a number of opportunities for the public to weigh in as well as during public sharing to some extent. Thank you. Any other questions for Lee on these items? Seeing any hands. Okay, great. Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Marcee. Okay, so we will move on to number 10, which will be, I will now call in the clerk, city clerk, to provide any updates to the calendar. Time for item number 11. This is council memberships in city groups and outside agencies. This is the time for council members to report out on actions at external boards, committees and joint powers authorities meetings. For future meetings, please come prepared to provide an update on any meetings or actions that occurred since the last council meeting so that the council and public can be informed. So I will look for council members. Why don't I start with council member Brown and I'll just have you guys go from there around the circle here. Okay, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm going to start with the regional transportation commission for last meeting, we had a bit of a stalemate. So we're in limbo here regarding accepting a business plan that was developed to consider the cost of building and operating light rail system, passenger rail system on our right of way. And because that has already been adopted as the alternative, the alternative, preferred alternative, excuse me. And so we are now going back to discuss it again in our next meeting. This is a pretty important issue. We have an item on our agenda for later today. So hopefully you've seen that. So we have a split RTC, a split among the commissioners and it'll be revisited. So if for people who are interested, watch for that at our next meeting. The area agency on aging, I, a couple of months ago, announced a meeting for the master plan on aging process launch, our local launch. And I'll just say again, the state has now, the state is in the process of developing a new master plan on aging. And this is really like very, very new thing. It's pretty exciting that there's a recognition in this way that all of these programs and systems can be better coordinated to serve our seniors at the local level. And so that launch actually got postponed and it will be happening on Wednesday, May, I think it's the 18th, 19th, excuse me. Wednesday, May 19th, check out the AAA website if you wanna participate and you can also contact me for more info. The, oh, I participated in a forum to discuss the UCSC LRDP Environmental Impact Report and I was there on behalf of the City County Task Force on UCSC growth along with the advocate who is funded through the city and county to coordinate our work. And we had a lot of, it was a great conversation in many ways. It was a lot of speakers who talking about different aspects and so it was pretty wide ranging. There is a video of that which you can access and I'm happy to send the link for anybody who's interested. The last item I wanted to mention, although I kinda wanna give Vice Mayor Bruner the opportunity to report on this if you want to because you put together such an amazing overview, written notes on the visit that we had to the building trades, construction council, several apprenticeship training sites. And so we were able to see what's happening at the electrical workers and the sheet metal workers and it was really, I'm just gonna say it was really fun and we learned a lot and I'm gonna let Vice Mayor Bruner talk about the rest of it. And I think that's all I got, thanks. Okay, thank you Council Member Brown. I've got Council Member Goldner next. No, it's in front of me. And I'll try to send it on the County Stripe IC funds. And he shared that provider to childcare providers serving 172 children, the amount range from 1,300 to 5,000, that was a really wonderful. We have distributed $20,000 as dollars. A little bit of surplus as we haven't had our camps to the, that we've had in the past. So there's some discussion around the surplus funds. We did discuss a potential partnership with the SEADS program, which is a program that invests, that opens up a bank account for every child born in Santa Cruz with a $50 account that goes towards a college fund. So we talked about what that partnership looks like. Council Member Watkins and I serve on that SEADS committee. And let's see, we heard from Superintendent Chris Monroe from Santa Cruz City Schools about their summer camp program. They received some funding from the federal government to do some care in the summer, not many hours. So we're looking at what partnerships could look like there. And our City Summer Program's Activity Guide has, it's gone live, so thank you to the Parks and Rec Department. So the English and Spanish registration is this weekend. And there's opportunity for blood. Nelson will be available for people who need internet access. And there'll be Spanish speaking support available. And that's from eight to 12 this Saturday, May 1st. Highlights, and I'll let Council Member Golder and Watkins add anything to that if I missed. The other meeting that I participated in with Mayor Meyers is at the Metro since middle of March. So that's really good news. We have 62% of the Metro workers vaccinated and the team is actively working on increasing that percentage. We are continuing to increase our bus capacity and we'll reevaluate when the governor announces the green tier of what that'll look like when we're in the green tier. The intent is to go to full capacity by the time that college and university students are back in the fall. We have our fourth electric bus, which has arrived in our county. And so there's a lot of training for bus drivers and we're hoping to put that bus in circulation in the fall in the right direction. We went from about 17,000 a week in March to over 23,000 a week, the week of April 17th. So it's not the rate that it was clearly, but it's heading in the right direction. So those are my updates for the Metro Board and Mayor Meyers, if you have anything to add. I think you covered all the main points. Yeah, thank you. Okay, I've got one more update. It's been a wonderful month of being engaged with the community. I met with the staff of the Youth Action Network and they have been doing some wonderful stuff. They're in a four phase planning process of really the Youth Action Network used to be the Youth Violence Prevention Network. They're really restructuring it. And without going into all the details, the main focus is really looking for opportunities to enhance youth leadership and youth voice in particular around community and city and county decision-making processes. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for partnership there. They will be hosting a kickoff event in the fall and they hope to come to each of the jurisdictions, including our city, to make a full presentation of that. Right, great. Thank you for those updates, Council Member. I will go ahead and call on Council Member Cummings now. Please. Thank you, Mayor. Items that occurred one was the commission adopted a draft resolution approving the extraterritorial service agreement involving the city of Scotts Valley and properties on Pippinway and Bellflower Way. So this extended the sewer services from Scotts Valley on to those adjacent properties that were outside of their steering influence. The next was that we adopted a draft resolution approving the draft budget for fiscal year 2021-2022 positioned on 1581. And that bill, it made a minor non-subsistence of changes to the Cortese-Knox-Hurtsburg Local Government Reorganization Act of 2000. And then the last item that we had at our meeting was appreciation for Commission Clerk Debra Means. Commission Clerk Debra Means had served as the Clerk of Lafko for 19 years and has now moved on to retirement. And so we had a nice little ceremony to extend our appreciation to our 19 years of service on Lafko. In addition to Lafko, the Council Ad Hoc Revenue Committee has been meeting almost weekly at this point in time. And over the course of the last month, we had a number of discussions, but to kind of bring it folks up to speed with where we're at, we have identified a polar who will be pulling the community on more or less if we move forward with a courtesan sales tax increase, like what that revenue would go towards. And so we've been discussing a number of different items related to infrastructure homelessness. And so that as we continue to refine that poll, which we've been working with the polar to identify the appropriate questions and to ensure that the poll is gonna be able to help people identify what they'd like to see the funding go towards as far as prioritization. That poll will be going out, I think in the next couple of weeks so we can get feedback from the community on if we were to move forward with a sales tax increase, what would the community like to see that funding go towards? And hopefully in the next coming weeks and months we'll be able to bring something to council as far as kind of what our next steps will be with regards to a revenue measure. And Mayor Meyers and Vice Mayor Brunner have both been in those meetings and so if there's anything I missed, please feel free to chime in as well. And then looking at the safety meeting, so I think that the Zoom, so if there's members of the public who would like to participate or would like to view the public safety meeting, it will be occurring tomorrow at 5.30 and you can find the details on the city's website and cityofstanacruze.com. And that concludes, actually there's one more item I wanted to mention. As a community member I've been working with the Criminal Justice Council's ad hoc safety committee and I just wanna let members of the public know that we developed a survey that went out to all, every law enforcement agency in the county, so Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz, Capitola, the Sheriff's Department and Watsonville really asking about different types of policies that relate to use of force and bias. And also we sent that survey to probation. We received responses from all those agencies so every agency participate in the survey and we'll be having another ad hoc meeting on the 30th in preparation for the next Criminal Justice Council meeting which will be on May 13th. And so we'll be pulling those results together and determining steps forward but ultimately our goal will be to have some kind of report that will be released to the Criminal Justice Council, to the broader community around aligning public safety policies across the... Thank you, Council Member Cummings. Next up would be Vice Mayor Bruner. We'll be reporting on the two by two committee we met and we had a lot of discussion on coordination on services. This is for those experiencing homelessness and are unhoused folks in the city but coordinating on services and connecting to county services including release of info form to county services, public property management and how that relates to services and coordinate with services and clarifying those roles and responsibilities more. Looking at short term and long term they were able to update us on and Mayor Meyers sits on this as well so feel free to add on but massive structural funding across California and looking at county, for example, their budget, a quarter of the behavioral health budget is on in-person hospitalization. Talked about things like drug and Medi-Cal is great but the counties don't have to come up with a 50% match. So they're looking at net fiscal year, a lot of reductions and pots of discretionary funding to help cover. So they're working on going through their certain pots is my understanding and because we brought up some of the mental health and substance use disorder treatments and services needed in addition to housing and the different types of housing needed and outreach efforts, including getting people to enroll in Medi-Cal. So expansion of eligibility staff and the idea of a shared vendor pool for the city and county and how it relates to, for example, storage options which could align with the full of vendors, managed encampments and working with the US Integrated Agency on homelessness to help bridge any collaborations. Let's see what locations to use for what purpose and what funding. Also looking at exit resources. They mentioned about 300 people a year have been helped from homelessness to housing. So how can we keep on that path if not increase it? And looking at resources of rental assistance, soft skills to get into housing, not having shelters be like a place for people to get stuck. The resources needed to move to more permanent housing. So shelters, transitional housing, transitional age youth housing, permanent supportive housing, low income housing and resources for public property like a management team, an outreach team and what else? We also talked about a joint plan on or just the emphasis on working jointly and articulating what the funding needs are in order to give direction and make decisions and with resources for county and city knowing that it's all limited and setting those priorities. Mayor Meyers, you can add anything else to that if I missed anything. Vice Mayor is that the council will have a special meeting on May 18th. Excuse me. I think it's May 18th. Yeah, May 18th will be a presentation. From five to six p.m. And the county will be presenting the countywide plan to the council as well as a proposal for some change in governance as well. So just wanna let the public know that that's from five to six on May 18th and that'll be a special city council study, excuse me, a special city council meeting with county staff coming to do that presentation for us. That's the only thing. I think you've got everything else. Yeah, thank you. We did the building trades. We did an apprenticeship program tour. All council members were invited. They will be having future dates. This past Saturday, council member Brown and I were able to go. It was a great tour and very informative and met some really interesting people and our understanding of the apprenticeship programs three in Coralitos. It was my first time leading Santa Cruz and it was the Coral EW Electrical. Their apprentices received education through Hartnell College Enrollment and attend two nights a week while working out in the field with a journeyman and gaining that out in the field experience and earning a living wage. They also received health insurance, retirement benefits while in the program. It's a five year apprenticeship program and they're really encouraging women to join as well. They've had women throughout the years but really trying to expand that. The top was the sheet metal workers, local 104 and learning skills like architectural design, CAD detailing, being industrial, kitchen, HVAC systems, et cetera. Five year apprenticeship program, also working in the field with a journeyman while attending classes two times a week. We were there, one of the third year apprenticeships was there and someone that hadn't gone to preschool and was in scouts with my son. So it was nice to see that progression. There were other apprentices there that spoke of their stories and the program. The next stop was the Plumber. They learned medical cast installation, welding, rare certification and all of the school locations we visited were very hands on. Took a lot of pictures, it's very interesting. They also have a lot of math and they have some interesting stats by zip code in terms of metrics and data of who's in their programs and there's also a pre-apprenticeship program. That's a good way for people to see if it's a good fit. One of the interesting stats they said is it used to historically be primarily people out of high school around age 18 that would enter into these programs and now they're seeing a chef into more older apprentices, 26 to 35 they're just really trying to build the workforce in this way, so it was very interesting. Also, we had a city manager sub revenue, the ad hoc revenue committee meeting which council member coming spoke to. And so Donna, I will let you speak to the rest. Okay, thank you, council member. I mean, vice mayor Brunner. I'm here on council member Watkins and then I'll go left. To council member Brown, I saw your hand at the door. Yeah, sorry, council member Brown. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to add two things. So it was actually Castorville. I know there, I get them in unincorporated North Monterey County and they have a huge industrial area there that's where they have space. But the other thing I wanted to say was that for those of you who didn't go to the boxes, you don't know if you can see it here. You probably can't see it with my green screen. We have two boxes that were made by apprentices in the sheet metal program. So that was pretty awesome. And I actually just remembered a third thing. The, one of the reasons that the folks that we talked with said they believe that the later entry into the apprenticeship programs was in part related to the elimination of industrial trades programs in the high schools. And so they've been working with the workforce investment board and I believe the county office of education in Santa Cruz as well as Monterey and then Hartnell and Cabrillo to try to fill in some of the lost pipeline that no longer exist. And so that was really good to hear as well. For adding that, council member Watkins. Great. Yeah, no, thank you to my colleagues for all of their work in the community outside of our meetings. Thank you also to the update around visiting the different trades and all of the work that's happening there and just really an exclamation mark on wanting to continue to stay connected on trying to get career pathways and opportunities for our workers here. I think a lot of what I was going to talk about has already been covered by my colleagues who share these various committees with me. The only thing I would add to the city school committee is the potential partnership between the city schools and the city parks and parks department for after school programming and really trying to look at how do we extend the day for our families and students in a way that allows them to have a really fun experience after school as well. And so hoping that that partnership will come to fruition and not only provide a good experience for the kids but also support the working families that could use a little extra care. And I know council member Golder is part of that. So thank you council member Golder for what you do in education. The other thing is in regards to our public safety meeting tomorrow, I just really wanted to highlight one thing that's on the agenda, which is redefining public safety. And it's really exciting. It's something I learned about in Sacramento and our communities are really having an open conversation about really what to their community members think about when they think of public safety. And so we're all on the same page with shared definition of language. And I'm really excited to have that conversation tomorrow. So I just sort of wanted to highlight that as one of the agenda items that we have. And then lastly, I just wanted to highlight also what's on our agenda and it's the proclamation that declares the month of April as Child Abuse Prevention Month. It's in the agenda packet. Just wanted to kind of speak to that and really thank our family and children services partners my partners at the Children's Network really looking to raise awareness about child abuse prevention but ultimately look at how we're creating conditions for families and students to succeed in the first place. So really exciting work happening around those social determinants of health and thank you mayor for the proclamation declaring April as Child Abuse Prevention Month. And I think that's where all these might updates. Okay. Thank you, council member Watkins. And my, most of my updates have been discussed. We had a downtown management corporation board meeting a while back now. Actually, one of those outcomes will be is actually on our agenda today, the downtown POC program. And so the downtown management corporation continues to bring work with the Economic Development Department and property owners and tenants downtown to through downtown association and other partners to really focus on some of the needs downtown in terms of getting downtown reopened, getting some really neat and creative ideas going with some of the empty storefronts that are currently empty but hopefully a little bit longer. And so yeah, the downtown management corporation has just been doing really great work the whole month as has the downtown association on really just visioning downtown and what we can be, we'll be doing over the next couple of years to really get downtown up and running again. So some really great work coming out of that group. And our next meeting is on May 20th, the downtown management corporation at 830. The only other thing I guess I will just let's make sure the public knows as part of the subcommittee on the city manager recruitment is on the city's website. Under the news tab, there is a whole section on the city manager search and there's a community survey. So please get on there and provide us your feedback on our next city manager. I believe we'll be taking input on that survey through May 1st. So we've already had hundreds of people respond but please go ahead and do that yourself and let other folks know, post it on Facebook, et cetera, help us get this out so we can get as many people from our community as possible and answering that survey. It's really important for us to help us with our hire of our next city manager. And with that, I think we will call this item complete. So thanks council members and vice mayor, everybody for your updates. Really good, great stuff. Okay, we are running a tiny bit early so if folks are up for it, maybe we'll just take a 10 minute, we'll come back at 1.45 and just take 10 minutes to get some water and take a quick break. So we'll be back at 1.45, everybody, thank you. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. I did text council member Watkins. So these items are 12 through 30 on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. Now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items 12 through 30. Instructions are on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the cues saying you have been unmuted. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to comment or pull any items? Comment on or pull any items. I will look for folks. I see council member Golder and then council member Brown, council member Kandari Johnson and then council member Cummings and then vice mayor Ritter. Okay, council member Golder. I'm just wondering do we need to pull item 24 to make a change based on what we talked about? Yes, we do. Recessions? Yes, so 24 will be pulled. Thank you. Council member Brown. Yes, I have one question, 12 and 13, 27. No need to pull. 19 and on 23. Question, comment on 23. Okay, we're coming. Appreciation for item number 18 which is the resolution denounced in Kate Crimes and bigotry targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And so just again, want to continue to extra bring in this forward and for all the work that we're doing to try to end hate crimes and discrimination in our community. Thank you, council member. And I also have a comment on item number 21 of our consent agenda. So we will take separate action on that. We do have several items that have been pulled for either questions or comments. And I'll go ahead and start with the items at least as far as I was able to take them in order for comments. And then we'll go to the items that there are questions I would imagine for staff. So for comments, I had item 17, public, the nomination of reappointment of Carol Bird to the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. So I had a note that was to be pulled for comments. And I believe that was Vice Mayor Bruner. I have sat with her on this board and she is a very valuable asset to everyone to know that the Housing Authority Board of Santa Cruz County, San Juan Batista and the City of Hollister, Santa Cruz is one of those seats. There's also a seat for Watsonville. There's a seat for the Community Action Board, age 62 and over. And I'm very happy for the City of Santa Cruz seat for another term. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Bruner. Next will be item 18 for comments. And this is a resolution denouncing hate crimes and bigotry targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And I believe just comments on this item. We're coming. I believe you pulled this item. I made my comments earlier. Okay. Council Member Brown. Thanks. I just wanted to thank my colleagues for being willing and open to talking with members of the API community to address some of the questions and concerns they had or not concerns but additions that they wanted to include. And thank you so much for doing that. I know they really appreciate it. That and I just have a statement here that Kiko Minami wanted me to read because none of the coordinators of their group effort were able to get off work to be here to give this thank you. This one and just so everybody knows this the group that brought this did end up doing a survey and they had 33 responses. So and incorporated all of the, you know, the comments and so it did take a little time. And I really appreciate again, Council Members for being willing to and the Mayor for being willing to, you know, take that time. So I have just a very quick statement. So Dear Mayor Meyers and Council Member Calentary Johnson and Council Member Watkins, thank you for working with members of our local API community to develop a resolution against anti-Asian hate. We appreciate your patience as we work with city staff member Ralph DeMarket to include our voices and historical background into the resolution. The inclusion of our local history of anti-Chinese movement is particularly significant. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the city to support our API community into the future. Thank you, Kiko Minami. So thanks for me and thanks from them as well. Thank you. And I'll also just make a comment. I just want to also thank all the community members who met with us and Council Member Calentary Johnson and Council Member Watkins, Ralph and Laura Schmidt, our Assistant City Manager also were very, very involved in this as well as some of our community members and elders in the AAB who I know also met with council members. So it's such an important resolution and I'm just very pleased with the time that we took to listen to the community and I hope that really the intent is that this is just the start of a more broader relationship with the community and we really want to work hard on these issues, obviously in Santa Cruz. So just wanted to say that. Other council members comments on item 18 at all. Good to go. Okay, great. We also have comments on item 19 and I believe Council Member Brown, I believe you pulled that. No? That was me, Calentary Johnson. Okay, Council Member Calentary Johnson. Great, thank you. First I wanted to thank my colleagues, Council Member Brown, in coming for putting this resolution forward. I wanted to further draw out one portion of the resolution that speaks to the wealth gap across our county and just highlight some additional data around population and per capita income. So the city of Watsonville, I'm gonna look at my notes to make sure I get this right. The city of Watsonville is made up of 81.2% Latinx and 15.2% white and their annual per capita income is 20,869. City of Santa Cruz is 21% Latinx, 61.6% white with an annual per capita income of $39,653. City of Capitola, 24.9% Latinx, 64.8% white with an annual per capita income of $41,438. And the city of Scott Valley is 10.6% Latinx, 78% white with an annual per capita income of $56,176. I know that's a lot of numbers that I just put out there but I think it's really important to really specifically highlight these numbers. It shows the significant inequities across our county and the rail transit option gives us an opportunity to reduce some of these inequities. We won't solve them, but it's an opportunity to reduce them by increasing access to jobs and education and reducing household transportation costs. This really is a social, environmental and transportation justice issue. So I just, I want to thank my colleagues and bring the data out further and support us continuing to explore all options. So thank you, council member. Next I have item 21 was pulled for comments. This is a resolution recognizing tobacco waste as a public health and environmental threat. I believe that was, go ahead, council member coming. First, I just wanted to expect my appreciation of this resolution coming forward. And I just wanted to put it out there for the council and maybe if there's other council members who are interested in working on pursuing, because part of this is pursuing policies to mitigate tobacco waste. And one, thinking about some of the waste that's generated through the tobacco industry, plastic lighters, plastic disposable lighters are a big form of waste that comes from this directly associated with smoking and is a big impact on our oceans. And so if there's interest with other council members, I think it might be worth us working with other nonprofits like Save Our Shores and other groups, but maybe considering moving forward with trying to create some kind of policies around plastic lighters, given that people who want to smoke can still use matches which are biodegradable. There's also refillable lighters that could be sold in lieu of having these disposable lighters. And that may be another area that we can create policy to address some of this ongoing plastic waste that really ends up in our oceans and our environment. Thank you, council member. Council member Watkins, did you have a comment on this one? Yeah, I did, thank you. Yeah, I just want to extend my gratitude to my colleagues who also brought this item forward and my appreciation to our partners in the county and Tobacco Health and Public Health and their work on this as well. And there's a Tobacco Education Coalition which could be a really great space to have further conversation about additional policy recommendations as suggested by council member Cummings. And also in light of the fact that emerging tobacco products which is the baking products and then they're disposable. So it's I think an ongoing battle really. And just really wanting to really highlight how at the local level it's so important for us to be incubators, to really advance policies that are aligned with our values and hopefully get some state traction because we're not the only community impacted by tobacco waste. And nationally it's the issue. Internationally it's the most and I will hopefully not, but my understanding is that it's the most littered item on the planet is cigarette. What they do to our environment is don't take snow, has any requirement to do anything about this product that has and have no disposable outcomes for it in a really healthy way. So I think there's so much opportunity for us to advance policy that's going to support the environment and can ideally move away from having these toxic cigarette filters in our oceans and in our seas and impacting our animals and our communities. And then just also want to highlight that we had a event recently where there's some folks who actually met in Santa Cruz and they created something called the cigarette surfboard and they took all of these from the beaches and created reuse for them around these really beautiful and somewhat discussed designs within the surfboards and just trying to raise awareness about the impact it has on our ocean. So although this is a small action to try to raise awareness to have us as a local jurisdiction say that we want to see policy change, we're going to take it to the state and ask that the mayor send a letter to our representatives to share our concerns and hopefully we'll lead to eventual policy change that will impact not only the city of Santa Cruz but other communities like ours. So don't wanna miss this opportunity to speak to that and just thank all the folks that do the good work in our community to clean up the tobacco, the cigarette filters, but also just around awareness and prevention. So those are my comments on that item. Thank you mayor. Thank you council member. I will also just shine in. I just wanna thank the Tobacco Education Coalition. They helped guide the language on this and we've been working with them for a couple of months on this. So really helpful and also recognize our city attorney's office. They also helped put this resolution together and so they did a lot of research for us and so just wanted to thank both of those and their input on this. I have item number 22 and then item 23 as the next two for comments. 22 for the public is the theater business license taxes and I believe that was, whatever council member pulled that, please go ahead and raise your hand. Council member Cummings, okay. Yeah, it's kind of a joint statement on the two items. So both of these items reduce the theaters and for businesses that sell alcohol, primarily the ones that are on site consumption because they've been impacted by COVID and I know I mentioned it a couple of times but just thought it would be worth bringing up. And I'm not sure the best way to move forward with this but last year we were receiving a lot of correspondence or we received correspondence, I should say, from people living in the beach flats around parking and the impacts that they were facing because of parking. And I know it was brought up at the previous meeting, determining whether or not we could allocate some of the revenue from the parking fund to help with different services and different issues that may be occurring in the beach flats. But I'm wondering if we might be able to agenda a separate item that would allow for a waiving the parking fees for residents in the beach flats community for the 2021 summer. Those passes are generally only about $30 per resident but given that many of the low-income residents who live in these areas have experienced significant impacts from COVID-19. It would, I think it would be helpful for many of these residents if we, if the staff were recovering from the impacts of COVID-19. And so I don't know if that needs to be a motion. I mean, maybe the city attorney could weigh in on how we might be able to get an item like that agendized. And ideally, if we could have it at the second meeting in May, that would allow us to pass something before parking enforcement begins after Memorial Day weekend. That's to be agendized for action at a subsequent meeting. And I'm sure what is all entailed in that but I see the city managers coming on. Yeah. Yeah, so what I would refer back to is the council adopted policy of when looking at adding items to the agenda to have three council members sponsor an item and to be forward onto the agenda and of course, working with the mayor to agendize those items. So it would be just a standard approach that we have for any item that needs to be that council members want to sponsor onto the agenda. That would be working with public works and parking, I assume, or team to understand. Yeah, certainly. There's a background information that is needed. Council members can definitely work with staff. I think they're working with the staff here in my office, whether it's Ralph or myself. And then we can work with the appropriate departments as those information. And we understand that the council members is interested in just bringing forward a proposal that would look at the setting aside revenues from the parking fund for the purposes of subsidizing or paying for permits for residents of the beach area, which is a, as the city attorney mentioned, it's a completely separate item. That's what's before you, what does a rate increase in parking rates? Actually, what's before us, that's business license taxes for theaters and then the reduction in the alcohol sale permit fees. And so the reason why this came up is because we're reducing fees for these businesses. And then, but for our lowest income residents, if there's something that we can do to support them as well, you know, if we can have a discussion around that. That's right. There's another item on your agenda today on the parking rates in the beach. That's why I was referring to that. So, yes, yes. And so we just have to be agendized. Council members can work with staff and then like any other agenda item, you'd have to have the pre-counseling response for it and then work with them here to agendize them. Was there any other questions on 23? I believe someone had a question on 23. I had it. Yeah, thank you. I had a sort of comment question. I'm glad to see that we're supporting our local businesses in this way. And this is sort of a comment question for Chief Mills. I noticed the DUI increases as that was alarming. So I'm wondering if Chief Mills can speak to how we are on sale vendors so that they can follow best practices and policies and not over-serve, not serve our minors and help address the DUI numbers. Yeah, thank you. That's Council Member Conletary Johnson and good afternoon, Council and Mayor. We regularly work with the Alcohol Beverage Control Commission on edgards that are complying with the best practices and the law. We also run stings occasionally on those locations to make sure that they're not serving minors or over-serving other people. They've also allocated one person in our department as the Alcohol Enforcement Officer so that anytime we get a problem at one of the local liquor establishments, it gets funneled to that person for us to work with code compliance and others to make sure that we're paying attention that's needed to some of these establishments through education, but as well as enforcement, whatever it takes to make sure that they're compliant. And then also we work with the California Highway Patrol. They do a post-DUI arrest survey to make sure that if we're seeing that there's a particular bar, for instance, that has had some problems that we contact those bar owners and we do so on a regular basis where we talk about them over-serving people and the people getting behind the wheel and driving. So in looking calls for service, we do a variety of things to make sure because alcohol's such a risky behavior when people are intoxicated. Thank you, Chief Mills. And I believe in the past, your department has worked with community prevention partners, the county-wide drug and alcohol prevention effort and has done some positive upstream approaches, including recognizing merchants for responsible behaviors. So thank you for that work. Thank you, Chief Mills. Thank you, Council Member. I have questions on three items. Number 12, number 13, those were all questions requested. I think it was Council Member Brown. Thank you, which is the same question for items 12 and 13. Now this is the extension of the emergency declaration. I am just wondering because we aren't getting in the reports any information about what criteria, if any, I'm sure there are criteria. What criteria are being used for making a determination about this extension? What the plan is for moving out of the emergency mode, it seems like we are, we have a lot of emergencies, but I'm not sure that they're necessarily directly related to COVID or the fire at this point. So I just like to hear your thinking on that. Number 13, Bernal. I see Tony. I can start off again. The, and Tony came in and also Chief Haiduk can also weigh in. The part of the rationale for it is, well, first of all, we do have an existing county and state health emergency in place. So it's consistent with what the county and the state has in place. So this is not any different. And so that's to be consistent with that as a practical matter. And then in addition to that, in order to be eligible for female reimbursements of all the expenses that we're incurring currently with this fact and will be incurring during this public health emergency, we need to be able to have it in place. And so that's the other rationale again in order to take advantage of female reimbursements. And that really are the principal reasons to respond to the active emergency that's currently in place at the county and federal level. I suspect that once the, those declarations are removed and we would follow suit. But that's my understanding of it. And I don't know if Tony wants to add more or Chief. I would just add that particularly with respect to the item number 13, the fire emergency the primary rationale for that is to to continue to remain eligible for potential female reimbursement. So that's the primary issue driving that resolution. And I don't really have anything to add to what Martin said with regard to the COVID emergency but I'm happy to answer any further questions. And you had also asked a question. I wanted to ask a question. Council Member Brown on item 27, which for the public is Highway one and nine intersection improvements, a budget adjustment? Thanks. So I have a question related to the project itself and it seems like now is probably a good time to ask it. So, and I've been, well, I'll just ask the question. So I assume that there's been some traffic management planning around the construction phase of this project. And I'm just wondering if there's information that's already been developed around it like a traffic management plan. And if so, could we, would it be possible for council members to get a copy of it and just know what's happening? I mean, this is, this is right now we're not really thinking about it this way but it is going to be a major disruption and we're going to start getting tons of questions from members of the community and complaints, I imagine. So, having a way to respond to those with some level of understanding about what's happening would be really great. So we'll hear all the quirks of Mayor Myers, Mayor City Council. Mark, I'll just jump in here for a second here. Caltrans is mandated, we have a mandated traffic control plan throughout the entirety of the project is divided in about six phases. The majority of the work that will be disruptive to the actual traveling public is going to be night work. Positive thing, at least we can do that there because it's not located right in the middle of the residential area. So, and as you mentioned, this will be highly disruptive when the work will be going on but I anticipate that the majority of the really disruptive stuff will take place at night and all those traffic restrictions, traffic handling restrictions are in some of the contract documents that have been approved by Caltrans. So I'd be happy to get you what we have. I mean, a lot of the details will be fleshed out during construction. Obviously there's a lot of things that, a lot of unanticipated things that can happen. I'd be happy to give you at least give you a framework for traffic closures and whatnot but the majority of that is at night time. Thank you. I appreciate that. I didn't ask to suggest that I want you to put a whole lot more work into this. But so- Oh no, I put plenty and I'm happy to do more. So yeah, just like some basics and you know, I think just when it starts, when it's happening it's going to be important to be able to- Sure, yeah, Caltrans typically what they do is they'll give us an honorable look of time when we can set up traffic closures and when we can have them down by. They only work that to my knowledge will be taking place during the day we'll just have shoulder closures and certainly not on the main on the main line there. But yeah, I'll get you whatever information I have. Yeah, I said a follow up comment I was just going to suggest to you if there's any information that when the time comes it might be worth having some information on the city's website. So if that's on the public works department's website but so that way if members of the public are contacting us with concerns around congestion or if they have concerns around how construction is going to impact traffic we can direct them to that site and there's some talking points available or just some information that can help the community understand when those impacts are going to occur and when construction is going to be taking place and how the city's going to mitigate a lot of those impacts. So as we have a viable schedule from the contractor and things are really beginning to move we will keep our website updated and I know the PIO for Caltrans District 5 will also have the information on their website because it is two state routes. So but we will absolutely make an effort to keep everybody informed. Thank you. Okay. That does it for all the questions and comments on that. I had one question on item number 14. Okay. Item number 14 is the minutes and I just had a question and maybe this could go to the city manager or city attorney. I think there was some confusion around the motion that was made at the last meeting. This is the temporary outdoor living ordinance item. Within that motion items number three and four, number three was restrictions on daytime encampments with implementation of a daytime property storage program and number four was enforcement of nighttime prohibition to be conditioned on availability of alternative shelter options and to be deferred until item one is accomplished and safe sleeping programs are operational after which the city would prohibit camping in all other city areas other than city permanent indoor shelter, safe sleeping locations and managing cabinets to be run by non-profit faith-based community and county partners. The thing with item number, with both of these items there's been some confusion because some people have reached out and asked if the city doesn't have an ordinance in place, what are they enforcing as it relates to restrictions on daytime encampments with the implementation of a daytime storage program and in the nighttime prohibition and so I just wanted to see if we can get some clarification is this largely gonna take place when an ordinance is passed or what would be enforced and when would that occur because I think some people envision that we've been moving forward with creating for example the storage programs and if those programs are created and then they'd have to impose restrictions on daytime encampments but we don't have an ordinance, is that legal? And so I just wanted to see if we can get some clarification around when enforcement of daytime and nighttime encampments would be occurring and what that would be in conjunction with. So I'll be happy to take a crack at that one. My understanding and this goes back to the meeting in March where I think the first meeting in March when the council introduced the amendments to chapter 636 that were later adopted with direction to bring amend modifications back and my interpretation of the council's direction at that time was and continues to be that we will have an amended ordinance in place and in effect before we'll begin enforcement. So assuming that we're able to get programs operational before that's great but we need to have the ordinance in effect in order to effectively enforce it. So to add just a little bit to that. So essentially the directed come forward is not in effect because the legislation to make that happen hasn't been approved by the city council. So that will happen at your next meeting when there'll be a first hearing with respect to the here referring to the daytime storage program as well as the nighting portion. So that is not in effect currently because again no legislation's been adopted by the city council. Okay, well I just like to express last meeting and I think that helps clarify our members of the public. Did you have a note first of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda with the exception of item number 24 which has been pulled. Now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes. You see two people in the audience with their hands up. And so this will be just for items on the consent agenda except for item number 24. And I see three. Okay, I'll go with Santa Segal first. I just wanted to thank the council so much. I have so much appreciation for you including the resolution on light rail in this week's agenda. You know, a lot of people in this county ran on an activity platform but the Santa Cruz city council is actually following through. And so I just wanted to really thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you for calling in. And next is Peter Bache. Bache? Hi, Peter. Oh, Eric. There you go. Can you hear me now? We can. Hi, Peter. Good, hello. How you doing? Hi, everybody. Thanks. Let's see. I wanted just to say thank you for talking for the community from Beach Flat. I want to have such an echo. Is that better? Anyway, try to give input with the phone issue and just trying to dial and raise their hands with star nine, star six. There's been several times confusion and also they're in the middle of work like right now. So I just want to talk for them because throughout these months and throughout this pandemic the garden has been goldmine. It's been a great pressure valve. Like, you know, a lot of people when they couldn't go out to work, they just, their garden was really just like the place to be outside of their only room. A lot of times I have one, two families in one little room. So the garden and of course the street, but the garden was kind of like just a place, you know, ventilating their frustration and also obviously we're having a meeting on May 6th if I believe with Robert Acosta from Parks and Recreation and we'll have a meeting and there'll be a great news and they've been asking already for almost a year like what's going on, what's going to happen and this is a wonderful news and I appreciate what you all did for it. Thank you, Peter. Next up I have phone number ending in 1810. You know, I, on item 18, I am concerned to divide the nation over race and widen the existing racial divide stewing anti-racist racism to justify a Malcolm X blank check, Marxist, anarchist, violent revolutionary war on America. Homosity of violent attacks on Asians from what normally were very low levels. Identity finger pointing, including by the leftist propaganda monopoly machine known as the MSN, who never tires of stewing partisan lies, it desperately wants us to believe late in racism by whites or premises is responsible, which needs instead either dispassionate analysis based on real card facts or better still, just stop that. You don't need to be Lenin's version of useful idiots and then one paragraph, because it simply states you're on condemnation of any violence directed toward Asians, but you just can't resist pushing the leftist dogma. Now, many people, MSN press desperately wants to sell the Atlanta shootings as a hate crime poster, but so far the FBI says it wasn't. I know it, and violence is not about racism or hate anymore, they're rapes about having sex or sexism. Race is a bad, not excuse for the violent ones. The most widely-opered, represented by people in America are black male criminals, but most all of that violence is already directed toward other black people whose skin color is now relevant statistic. If you must, search Blacks assaulting Asians on YouTube or consider a well-known white deal of activists was arrested recently for an Asian dog, 28 crime charge plus a malicious harassment in Seattle in March, not white supremacy and not really the same as any of these historical comparisons. I don't care what the racist attacker is because the only important thing is they are dangerously violent, but if it comes out to deal with the current realities, I examined the study done by the New York Asian Bar Association and I conclude it was very similar to this resolution as an ill-relevant leftist-regarded history lesson. The actual number of acts of violence is still minuscule compared to the anti-racist violence emitted outside the BLM. Thank you. Okay, next we have caller ending in 7496. Just press star nine and you'll be unmuted. Council members, this is Matt Ferrell. I just want to thank the council for its support of moving forward with the rail business plan and funding for environmental work to evaluate next steps. I think it's a critical opportunity for economic development of the region and for green-trees. Development of the region and for green transportation and social equity. Thanks again for your support. Thank you. I'll bring it back to the council now and I'll look for, we will go ahead and I think Lisa Murphy, our director of HR. Lisa, do you have an update on item 24? I believe there's some language. And then Mayor Meyers, we just need to do a vote on the remainder of the consent agenda. Yep, sorry about that. Head in, look for emotion on the remaining items of the consent agenda before moving on to item number 24, which has been pulled. So I'm now looking for emotion on the remaining items on consent with the exception of item 24. And I see council member Cummings and then council member Colder. I'm happy to move the consent with the exception of item number 24. And then also just wanted to express my appreciation to the Seaside Company for working with the city to extend the lease of the past years, those extensions work for three years and this one's for five. And given that this is a really huge benefit for the community, I just want to express my appreciation between the ongoing relationship between the Seaside Company and the city for the use of this land. I'll call the... Great, council member Watkins. Aye. Number 24, that was pulled by council member Golder and I believe our HR director, Lisa Murphy, here to present that item. Thank you, mayor. Good afternoon, mayor. Council member Lisa Murphy, your human resources director. Item 24 is the approval of the early termination of the cost reduction agreements with the various bargaining units, the city manager and the executives. We reached an agreement with all of the units to remove the furlough. However, we did not reach an agreement with the supervisors, but I am confident that we will and we'll be able to bring back an agreement at the May meeting. In addition, there should be before you a revised agreement with the SEIU unit. And I would like to be able just to highlight what those differences are. If I could take a moment and share my screen. I'm in yellow. In addition to the language, we are adding to this agreement the ability for SEIU members to continue the furlough if they decide to do so. That's a number one and number two, how they can do that. They can either go voluntarily unpaid or they can use their paid time off to make themselves whole. In addition, the directors and department heads and supervisors are asked that they respect the needs of these employees who may have childcare, elder care, or other time conflicts due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which point these off the furloughs off. However great it is, please, we wanna honor that and grant the request for that opportunity to utilize the furlough time or pay time off. And then finally, they're just going to have to notify me so that we can make any operational changes that may be coming no later than May 3rd. And these terms and conditions have been accepted by the SEIU members. Union, excuse me. With that, that concludes my additions to this particular item. And just remind you that when you do make your motion to please remove the supervisors from that motion. And that concludes my call. I will go ahead and see if there's any questions on this item. Otherwise I would look for a motion. Excuse me, I'll take it out to the public comment next and then we'll look for a motion. Any other questions? Vice Mayor Bruner, did you have a question? No, okay. Okay, I'll call you when we, okay. I'll go ahead and take this out to public comment and not seeing anyone in the audience with their hands up. So I'll bring it back to council for a motion on this item. And I see Vice Mayor Bruner and then Council Member Golder. I'm happy to move a motion on item number 24, approval of early termination of the cost reduction agreement with various bargaining units minus the supervisors unit fiscal year 2021. And the second by Council Member Golder. There's, second. Sorry, Mayor, there's also a resolution that needs to be included. Part of the motion. Okay. Should I state that as well? Yes, please. Yes, yes. And to adopt a resolution approving the early termination of the 10% furlough for the executive and represented employees and the city manager effective May 14th, 2021. You're great. I'll make one additional comment. It should be recognized and thanked for the employees that had chore the city to help us through this recession. And I can't express my gratitude to the employees and my fellow colleagues and us for agreeing to these concessions. Thanks as well to all of our employees who took these furlough work under really stressful conditions under COVID-19. So just really want to recognize your work over the past year and really pleased that we can get this done early. And so thank you to Director Murphy also for your work on bringing this to us. And with that, I have a motion by Vice Mayor Brunner and a second by Council Member Golder. And I will go ahead and ask for a roll call vote. Do you want me to repeat the motion Bonnie or do you just write out a gender report? Do I need to repeat it? No, just declare unanimously. We'll now move on to our consent public. These are items 31 through 35 on our agenda today. For members of the public who are streaming, this meeting is, who are streaming this meeting, if you want to comment on items 31 through 35, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a Council Member for further discussion. Are there any Council Members who wish to comment or pull any items on our consent public hearing? These are items 31 through 35. I will go ahead and bring these out to, and I see we have one attendee who would like to comment on these items. Number ending in 1810 please. Three, oh wait a sec, I'm gonna trough my sound. Seething, but I'm not paying for otherwise because sites under construction don't yet pay property taxes. I'm not occupied with people paying utilities or sales taxes, you know, paying their way of instruction. Do you tell me exactly what city-provided child care services are these developers receiving that they're not paying for? I can tell you, absolutely none. Your resolution justifications are socialist, welfare-resist, re-eution nonsense. You are just reaching into their pockets with no logical defense for your action. It is the Bill Clinton defense. When asked why he had sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, he replied, because I could. That is your justification, because I could, using the monopoly power of project approval like the mob might. This and many other developer fees are questionable as to their justification or monetary amounts. This one has zero justification. Yes, it's really, really sad. Who is a fault there? Not the developer. Maybe you need to find another pocket to pick that is not so obviously unjustified and tyrannical. I don't think the city should be charging any developer for this, but your faulty idea, they are responsible, it's double faulty by excluding 100% affordable developers because, and I admit this is a prejudice, cats that people who occupy such structures are more likely to require socialized childcare services, not less than other market rate developer occupants would. As to police and fire, I don't know if I can talk about that here, but I suppose it's possible construction site might need police for trespasses of medical emergency and arson. But I would guess the occupied buildings, especially during a reconstruction, don't generate a lot of police fire response. And the amount charged seems like the full amount charged per capita for every citizen of Santa Cruz. I can't go on about all these other fees discussed last meeting because they're off topic here and somewhere to last week, who can address six different fees in two minutes, but they all have issues. Again, this seems like a shameless and no justification, so it's a muddy grab. Thanks. Thank you. I'm now gonna look for a motion on the consent public hearing. This will be for item 31, which is the second reading and final adoption of the Beach Area Parking Meter Rate Ordnance Updates. Item number 32, which is the second reading final adoption of ordinance number 2021-09 amendments to the municipal code chapter 16.01 to align city code language with the recently council adopted 2021 interim water shortage contingency plan. Item 33, which is the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 2021-10 child care impact fee and resolution setting the child care impact fee. Item number 34, which is the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 2021-11 public safety impact fee and implementing resolution setting the new public safety impact fee. And finally, item number 35, which is the 2021-22 housing and urban development action plan. I look for a motion on these items. Council Member Watkins and then Council Member Golder. I'm sorry for the sound in here. I will go ahead and move our consent public hearing items, items number 31 to drive by the mayor. Okay, great. I have a motion by Council Member Watkins, seconded by Council Member Golder. And I'd like to ask the clerk to please take a roll call vote. Council Member Watkins, Callentary Johnson. The street tree master plan. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Okay, I will go ahead and ask for a presentation by our staff. This will be Travis Beck, Superintendent of Parks and Leslie Keady, our urban forester. Welcome Travis and Leslie. Here they're on. Good afternoon, Mayor. This is Tony Elliott with Parks and Recreation. I'm just gonna try to reach out to Travis and Leslie here. So just one moment. Okay, honey, I misread. We are late, aren't we? Good afternoon, Council. Hi, Travis. Welcome. Thank you. I'm afraid this item has popped up sooner than our team is ready to present on. Okay. I see that Chris Berry and Rosemary are on. Is it okay to go out of order? Take 30, yeah, then you can reorder it, yes. Okay, Travis, we'll go ahead and do item 37 and then we'll come back. I'll get everyone lined up, thank you. Great. Okay, I will go ahead and ask for item number 37 to be brought forward. This is the Federal Endangered Species Act Incidental Take Permit for Operations and Maintenance Habitat Conservation Plan. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comments and then return to council for deliberation and action. I see we have Rosemary Menard as the presenter and I also saw that Chris Berry was on the line. Hi, good afternoon, Mayor and Council. It's really my pleasure to be here today and introduce an item that has been a long time coming and I just wanted to make a couple of introductory remarks and then I turn it over to Chris Berry who's got a brief presentation for you on this item. Mayor Myers, what we call some 20 plus years ago when the city started working on this activity and I don't think we have too many items that have been on the burner cooking, if you will, for 23 years as this one has done and has obviously required staff to nurse it along through the thick and the thin and imagine how many different federal administrations there were during that period of time and the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs of whether people are for these kinds of things or against these kinds of things over those many years but I do want to really acknowledge and congratulate the Water Department staff who started on this long before I came here for achieving an outcome that I think is a long-term certainty relative to our operations and maintenance and the kinds of things that we do every day that requires that we interact with the environment and some of the protected species that we want to be careful of. So with that I'm going to turn this over to Chris Berry to tell you a little bit about it and then the action here is for you to authorize the city manager to accept an incidental take permit for the Fish and Wildlife Services Operations and Maintenance Habitat Conservation Plan for the city activities. Okay, with that to you Chris, aim on the screen. I do too. Also I'm doing the typical zoom shenanigans here and pardon my fumbling through this but thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk today about the operations and maintenance habitat conservation plan. Are you seeing my presentation? No, we're just seeing you right now Chris. Okay, well I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully I share the right screen. Okay, I'm getting better at this. It only took a year. Okay, thanks again. I'm going to be real brief here. There's a, it's a long and windy road and I could ramble on for quite a while about this but I'm going to try to keep this brief and give you a chance to ask questions. So in short, this is a 30 year permit Federal Endangered Species Act compliance for the City of Santa Cruz Water and Public Works Department. So I think it's notable that we started out with all the city departments that had any interaction with endangered species and we ultimately ended with just key activities engaged in by the Water and Public Works Departments. And I think that's noteworthy because for a long time we've had and sometimes our activities are not well aligned. And I think this has been a good vehicle to try to bring them into better alignment than they were in the past. So I think that's positive. I'll also say this is the other HCP. We have the Imagine as some wanted HCP still out there. There's quite a lot of overlap but these are species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has jurisdiction over and I will get into that a little bit more further in the presentation. Again, it's a long term permit, 30 years. So I think we have our work cut out for us in terms of this commitment but also as Rosemar alluded to the changing staff not only will I not be here in 30 years but we'll have different regulators. So we're gonna, I think one of the biggest challenges just to sort of reveal some stuff I'm gonna talk about later is that we need to be thoughtful about how we implement this in terms of our project management and record keeping and organization and just make sure that we're really on top of that because it's pretty unusual to have a 30 year obligation like this. Again, multiple species. We started out a long time ago with sort of a dream list of all the species that we thought ought to be included that the city ever interacted with and thankfully we had a little bit of a reality check and carried that down over the years. I think another message along with the departments being aligned is that there's opportunities to leverage other natural resource protection goals with this effort. Either our drinking water source protection goals or otherwise. And again, I'll get into that a little bit more as we go along. Along with doing this presentation today we have done presentations at international and state conferences, the County Fish and Wildlife Advisory Commission. There's been quite a lot of outreach. I will say that because it's been such a long process and maybe that folks have sort of forgotten about it or they're wondering why they haven't heard more about it but there has been quite a lot of outreach and then there's of course been the official Federal Register notice that invited public comment and review back in September which you see a screenshot of right there. Some of the activities that we're covering are the big ones that Water and Public Works are engaged in that have the potential to affect listed species and some non-listed species, species that might be listed in the future. And of course those are the ones that probably come to your minds being flood control, water diversion and maintenance. And lots of other sort of nuts and bolts activities that the city engages in on a daily basis where we like a pipeline repair here where we actually had red-legged frogs in the bottom of that pit and we had to work with our maintenance crews to figure out a way to appease both our federal regulators and make sure we kept the water flowing to the North Coast farmers. So it's not all as glamorous as the title Habitat Conservation Plan. It's really down on the digits, trying to make compromises and meet sometimes competing goals with some of this stuff. So here's our list of the finalists and our covered species list. Again, I think we had a list that was over 30 species when we started. We paired it down to the ones that we really do have an effect on and that have resulted in big project delays with some of our work over the years. And I won't give you the details on where they're all found, but if anyone wants to talk offline about this stuff, I'd be happy to do that. Incidentally, when we first started, we were considering species as widely as sea otters, pelicans, an extinct beetle that used to be found in Santa Cruz 100 years ago. So we really did make a big effort to pair this down and make this a more manageable list of species that we're getting coverage for. So lo and behold, on January 25th, we got a permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I won't say how many years the draft document has been sitting in their email box, but it actually caught us a little bit off guard that we got the permit on January 25th. We were, of course, grateful, but if you notice there's a couple typos in the document, that's because basically we finished this up with a draft document. And lo and behold, as I said, surprisingly I got a permit in my email one Monday morning or I think January 25th was on Monday. Anyway, it was a big surprise to get this permit after 20 plus years. And Mayor Myers remembers well, I'm sure thinking that the process was taking too long back in the early aughts. She was the project manager back then and is well familiar with some of the travails that we're working through a permit like this, whether it's the, what activities are recovering or what department doesn't have long-term funding assurances or what federal regulator is getting in the weeds about things or what have you. So it's really a great pleasure for me to be able to present this to the council with Mayor Myers being seated where she is because she has that unique connectivity to this process that's really valuable and I appreciate it greatly. So what are we doing for the conservation strategy? We're first and foremost, we're trying to avoid and minimize our effects on these species. And the big thing that of course you all have heard about is in-stream flow improvements. And that's one of the things that overlaps most with these species and the anatomist cell monitors that we're also getting take authorization for in the other HCT. But then there's your sort of run-of-the-mill construction maintenance best practices. Those are things that are typically already involved or already included in other permits that we have. So they're not really new to us. We're just formalizing those for the next 30 years and getting take authorization, which will presumably excite some of our permitting in the future and also give us a little bit more certainty about what the standards in those permits might be over the long term, which is really pretty important when you're planning a big capital project. You can't have a shifting regulatory landscape that you're dealing with. And then we have this compensation for remaining biological effects. And that's basically the stuff that we can't offset our biological effects for the buoyancy minimization. You have to figure out a way to do off-site mitigation or somehow otherwise compensate for those effects. So this is another win-win collaborative benefit of this project where we're doing the Albany-Tigerbele mitigation. Thankfully, Parks and Rec has been very cooperative and we're working with them to do some work on the Moor Creek Preserve, which for a long time has been planned, but there hasn't really been resources to do. And that supports the work that they're doing elsewhere on the Moor Creek Preserve. That's to basically mitigate for impacts we have related to our North Coast pipeline. And I'll speak a little bit more to that long-term obligation later when we talk about the cost of this permit. The other thing that we need to get, we need to compensate for remaining effects is for red-legged frog. And that's again, because of our pipelines, they run through lots of red-legged frog habitat up the coast and while red-legged frogs are prevalent up the coast, they're reduced probably more than 90% of their range is no longer occupied. So it's kind of a big deal, both for the red-legged frog and the tiger beetle. We have the potential to affect 10% of the world's remaining population of tiger beetle, I'm told. So this is really kind of a big deal. Some of our obligations, this is a third-year permit, which is probably scary to a lot of us. I'm feeling pretty good about things, but I asked our attorneys to lay out a flow chart of how we go through evaluations of projects and what our permit obligations are, just to make it clear that in some cases we do have some expedited permit and in other cases we still have permits that we need to get, but we obviously need to implement the conservation strategy and I should apologize because we've already started to implement it without getting your authorization. We had a 90-day deliverable when we got the permit and frankly to be able to do that we had to start literally the day after we got the permit. So we've already started to implement this on the more creep-preserved reporting. There's a ton of data management. A lot of internal outreach, we talked about external outreach earlier, but there's gonna be a lot of internal outreach similar to what we've done in the past for general environmental regulatory compliance purposes, but there will be, it's not a night to do anymore, it's a need to do. So we will have to put a little more rigor into our staff training. Funding assurances, I referred to that in terms of what departments were part of this earlier on, but funding assurances actually is part of the permit. So you have to show your ability to fund all your obligations for the life of the permit in order to be granted the permit. So that was a big piece of this. And then of course staffing, we need staff to do all this and we, of course, we have a lot of obligations as you all do, so we're thinking about staffing as a big deal and especially with the anatomy of some on an HCT coming up, we'll be considering very seriously how we're gonna staff this. You probably saw in the staff report, it's about a $2.7 million commitment over the term of the permit. Most of that is due to staffing, but also the tiger beetle mitigation. However, the tiger beetle mitigation can potentially be avoided once we determine whether we actually need to disturb tiger beetle habitat with North Coast rehab efforts and there's a good potential we can avoid that. That may not mean that we stop that effort and may just open up some other opportunities in terms of a safe harbor agreement and alternative funding opportunities to continue the work that we're doing with parks out at Moore Creek. And again, a lot of the stuff and stuff we're doing anyway, we just don't have the 30 years of assurances. So a lot of the costs that went into the funding assurances analysis were things that we were already planning to do. So it isn't like this is a new $2.7 million obligation. It's just a rejection over at 30 years, what it will cost for us to do stuff that we were mostly doing anyway. And then hopefully there's gonna be some savings if we have expedited permit conditions and more certainty with what those conditions are over time. Presumably that will help us save on project design. It will help us build things sooner, which of course is generally good because prices seem to just continue to escalate. So I will say that because this was a municipal applicant driven process, our funding assurances analysis was somewhat less rigorous than had it been otherwise. Also because our remaining effects are not huge. Fish and Wildlife Service was not super concerned about our ability to pay overtime, which was helpful certainly. So that said, I will just thank you for listening to me and thanks to all the folks that helped with this. There was a massive team of consultants and other staff and Mayor Myers and our former water director, Bill Coker and my former boss, Terry Tompkins, who started this in 1998. There are lots of hands went into this. So anyway, it was a good team effort and I look forward to the next 30 years of implementation. So with that, I'd be happy to take in questions. Thanks, Chris. I will look for council questions and I just wanna thank you and congratulate you. I know this has been a really long haul. Chris and I spent a lot of time crawling around in the mud trying to find these animals a long time ago. And so Chris is really, I mean, for my fellow council members, certainly a world that I work in and there are very few cities that commit to this kind of conservation oriented work in their regular operations and date. And so this really set us again in a very solid place around the values that we have about our environment and about the unique species that make up Santa Cruz. So just really wanna recognize Chris and the whole team. We have some of the best biologists working on this and really this is really a standout situation with us as a city to commit to doing this. And I know Chris will be bringing the Anagymus cell-monad work forward as well. So it's pretty exciting for us biology geeks to see something like this come to fruition. Even though it took 23 years to get a 30 year old. It's a good lesson in patience. I will open it up to, let's see, council member Brown and vice mayor Bruder. Thank you for the very thorough but condensed report on this habitat conservation plan. I did read through the plan and it's just fascinating all of the work that's gone into this and I can only imagine how it felt just when you saw that email in your inbox just kind of happened. So I'm just, I'm really glad to see this coming to fruition as well. My question is about the assessment of what this might do to change our access to North coast water. So will, I guess, and it varies, it depends on the year. So I know there's no definitive answer but will this change the amount of water that can divert from North coast streams? And like, do you have any sense of what that might be? I'm not to say that I don't support this. I'm absolutely supported. I'm just wondering what it means. Yeah, that's a great due diligence question, commissioner Brown, and certainly for folks that understand the way the Endangered Species Act works, you would know that fish and wildlife service needed to be aligned with the National Marine Fishery Service when they issued this permit. So that was literally one of the last things we had to iron out. And I, it's sort of an interesting experience to have had because it was this big contentious issue which was resolved as literally a sentence that basically said the minimum flows from the Anatomous Salmon at HCP will be the minimum flows for this HCP, which was enough for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to feel like they were getting protection for Tidewater Gobi and Steelhead, or excuse me, Tidewater Gobi and Redlegged Frog primarily. So yes, it will affect our ability to take North Coast water in the future. Those commitments are the same commitments that we're making in our water rights project right now, as well as our Anatomous Salmon at HCP. So, but yes, this is the first time we've made a long-term commitment to any sort of flow agreement like that. And interesting, learning about the San Francisco popcorn flower and Western-covered species list was very fascinating. My question is if you could maybe speak to the request for the doubt you mentioned that was highly unusual and why 30 years? Yeah, thanks for your question, Commissioner Bruner. But 30 years is actually not unusual for Habitat Conservation Plan. In fact, sometimes they're 50 years. It's just unusual for the city to make a commitment of that duration. In my experience, which is almost 30 years now here, we've never in my knowledge had a permit that was a 30-year permit. So I guess for me, that's meaningful in a way because A, it allows you to do more good things for the environment and provide more certainty around your operations. But it also begs the response to actually have some continuity and institutional knowledge and build a program that other staff can plug into. And I think that's, I wouldn't be a good manager if I wasn't thinking of that down the road because obviously I'm not gonna be here forever. So against my natural inclinations, I'm trying to be a much more organized and thoughtful long-term planner at this point, knowing that we have a fresh slate, so to speak. And now that we have this fresh 30-year commitment, I just wanna be sure that everyone understands that and that we're setting this up and ready to go and have people be able to move forward with it after those of us who worked on it in the past years move on. So could I just add one thing to that, which is that I think that the benefit in terms of endangered species compliance is a long-term certainty you get with one of these long-term permits. And so by negotiating the agreement kind of upfront, you do set a set of terms of conditions that allow you to build that into your planning. And when you're a water utility, that kind of certainty about what your flow agreements need to be or what actions you can take, what actions you can't take relative to your operation or your construction projects, these are things that are really valuable to know upfront rather than to go down the road through a section seven consultation with every single project and have it be this way, this administration in some different way and a different administration. So that's a real driver behind the length of these permits and why they're valuable, particularly in a water utility kind of funding. We're lucky to have a water director who's actually developed an HCP and implemented an HCP as well. That's pretty rare that we have that much depth in-house among city staff to have the mayor and the water director and myself working on habitat conservation plans. So we're set up pretty well for success there, I feel. You're on mute. Mayor Meyers, I'll take this out to the public now. I see one person with their hand up and they end in the phone number 3346 is your last four digits. And if you could press star six, you'll be unmuted. I had raised my hand for the street tree master plan before you switch the order. So I'll wait for that one to make comments. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I will bring this back to the council for deliberation and action and look for a motion from, let's see, I've got council member Cummings. Are you, do you have additional discussion or are you ready for a motion? No, I just wanna express my appreciation for all the work that's been done on this over the years by all the different people working in the water department have come and go and Mayor Meyers, we worked on this long time ago and I'm happy to move to authorize the city managers to accept the US Fish and Wildlife Services incidental take permit number TE89655D-0 providing incidental take coverage under the Federal Endangered Species Act for various aspects of the city's ongoing water and public works operations as described in the operations and maintenance habitat conservation plan. Council member Brown. I'll second that. That's a huge thanks to all those involved. Great. We have a motion then by council member Cummings seconded by council member authorized city manager to accept the US Fish and Wildlife Service incidental take permit for the operations and maintenance habitat conservation plan and could we get a roll call vote please? Council member Watkins. Aye. Street Tree Master Plan. This is item number 36 on our agenda for general business for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item of by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. I'll turn this over to our presenters, our staff and presenters today. That's Travis Beck with our superintendent of our parks department and Leslie Keady our urban forester. Welcome Travis and Leslie. Travis here on mute. Afternoon again, Mayor Myers and members of the council. Thank you very much for your flexibility. This afternoon as we assembled our team and to discuss the Street Tree Master Plan to get it started I wanted to take just a minute to introduce our team and our presenters today. Of course we have Leslie Keady our urban forester who pushed this plan through on top of all of the regular urban forestry work in spite of all the challenges of 2020 and 2021. We're also joined by James Scheid who's a forester with Cal Fire and they are the grand tours who provided the funding for this project. Very grateful for their support and Jimmy will say a few words in a moment. And then the presentation, the bulk of the presentation will be conducted by our consulting team from Davey Resource Group. We have Tina McKeon who's a board certified master arborist with Davey and also Rachel Fitz who holds a doctorate in plant pathology. And so we're really lucky to work with them on this project and they brought a lot of experience in doing similar projects and other municipalities. Tiffany Wise-West is also available if we have questions as she was a key collaborator on getting this grant and administering the project for us. So with that I'll turn it over to Leslie to give us some background on the project and how we got here. Good afternoon council and public Leslie Keady urban forester. So I worked with Tiffany in the Climate Action Office and we obtained this Cal Fire grant. Originally the grant was to do the planting of 500 canopy trees in the community on public property and then to do a complete inventory with the Davey Resource Group to inventory all trees in parks and along streets and publicly owned excluding the green belts. Tiffany and I overestimated how many trees we had on public property in the parks and in the right of way. And so we were left with a little bit of funding. So then we requested of Jimmy's group here at Cal Fire to be able to appropriate the remainder of the funds over so we could create a policy document for street trees. This is the first policy document that we have in the forestry program that captures the resource value, see an objective and quantifies the benefit of our urban canopy on public right of ways. And it's just a really good opportunity to have some policy that unites all of the different departments that we work with together to actually have a document on hand that supports the inventory that we did and also sets as a baseline so we can have funding for other forestry documents and programs and other grant opportunities as they arise. So I'm here to answer any questions but our Davey Resource Team is primarily going to do the presentation. And then I'll let Jimmy here talk briefly on the Cal Fire process and the value of this plan that we have. Okay, I think that's me, right? Thank you. Yeah, oh thanks. I appreciate being here virtually. Just as a bit of background, our Urban Community Forestry program has had grants in existence for about 20 years now and in the last few years we've had a more robust program that has largely focused on what we consider to be disadvantaged communities and low income communities. That said, the city of Santa Cruz while maybe lacking some of those was able to competitively submit a proposal that we found to be of great value. And while having that application approved and a grant created as one thing to actually implement those goals is quite another. And as Ludley alluded to, there were certain expectations at the onset of the project which Sten Morved as a savings was seen. And with the last year of time that they had on this project having an extension granted to the city they were to make good on what remained of those funds to make sure they worked on spent. So they planted those 500 trees and had conducted that inventory that were very useful for moving the program further in the city but to then take that a step further and to reallocate those remaining funds to create the Street Tree Master Plan that'll be discussed here in a moment was very advantageous to them and something that in the timeframe given I'm really proud to see come to light my hope is that after the council and those that are gathered are witness to the presentation ahead they'll realize the value of that tool not only in terms of assessing what the inventory laid out in terms of the different attributes of the urban forest but what those quantifiable values are what those trees mean in terms of dollars and cents to the people that live and work in Santa Cruz. And so I just hope that the council will pay it mind and ask any questions of me if needed or those that have worked on the plan but in terms of it being a tool that I hope that the city continues the reference for its own vision but also to implement the goals that are contained there and to realize that without proper investment in this kind of program in the tree services and the urban forestry program and those that work and are related to it in the city it's hard to see the return on value of just simply planting a tree or saying that your community is green minded. There are real dollars that grow on trees and these come from making that local investment. So I think you've forgiven me the opportunity I'm happy to answer questions at third time and if not again I just hope that much value comes from this presentation, thank you. So with that we'll turn it over to the folks at Davey and I will bring up the slide show. Can you all see the presentation? Don't present your view. Don't present your view, yes. I've seen other people have this difficulty. And we're only seeing a part of it now. I think if you press from current slide it usually... How about now? I still have your notes, yeah, the presenter view. All right, give me one moment I'll sort out the technical difficulties here. Travis, I also have it if you want me to... Give me one more second, thank you, Bonnie. Okay, Bonnie, why don't you go ahead and bring that up and our team can cue you. Thank you for the introduction. I'm Rachel Fitz and my colleague Tina McKeon is also here and we're representing Davey Resource Group as Travis said. This presentation is to introduce the Street Tree Master Plan and we'll discuss the Street Tree Master Plan development process, give an overview of tree benefits, summarize the Street Tree Work Plan and Planting Plan and highlight several of the goals for the Street Tree resource as well as the entire urban forest. Next slide, please. We have completed a resource analysis summarizing the structure, composition and benefits of community trees, a tree canopy analysis and a background in operations review that systematically reviewed existing policy and regulations, regulatory documents as they relate to trees including municipal code, the general plan, eight specific area plans and other documents such as the climate action and adaptation plans with the current funding, staffing and maintenance levels as well as stakeholder views and objectives and the project includes and where in the stage of the final plan on city properties areas were not inventoried but are included in the overall canopy cover. Of the 9,742 street trees, around 85% are maintained by adjacent property owners per municipal code. Next slide. And support many other organisms. They provide wildlife opportunities for food and nesting areas. Trees reduce air pollution by intercepting fine particulate matter and gaseous pollutants. They reduce stormwater runoff into streams and the ocean. They also buffer noise, calm traffic and improve pedestrian safety. Trees enhance property values and other aesthetics. Next sliding eye tree eco. In total, street trees have sequestered tons of carbon. They also provide around $44,000 in environmental benefits to air quality, stormwater and carbon sequestration. Each year the street trees with those of similar size and health would cost $36 million. This is just the benefits mentioned on the previous slide. Cannot be quantified such as those to wildlife, property values, public health and welfare. Next slide. These of the street tree resource. It includes annual work plans over the next five years. It prioritizes the maintenance needs of all street trees and programs. And it programs the highest priority because I see the slides aren't showing up on your screen as they should. So. Are fixed? Yeah. There's a few little funny symbols that are showing up, but. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. We'll keep going. The city of Texas receives $150,000 annually for street tree maintenance. The funds are used for reactive maintenance of street trees and regular maintenance for trees in the downtown area and along some of the main corridors. Of the 1,511 city maintained trees, the majority are in need of regular maintenance. If the city were to complete the program work, the annual budget shortfall is around $327,000. Then 231 trees maintained by adjacent property owners, about 5% are in need of priority pruning or removals. Property owners responsible for the care of a street tree in need of priority work will be sent informative notifications. The current annual planting budget and dollars for all street trees. If the city planted approximately 750 trees each year and provided subsequent structural pruning, the annual planting plan budget shortfall is around $211,000. Next slide, please. The street tree master plan provides 22 goals to enhance the street tree resource and has consideration for the entire urban forest, but is not an urban forest master plan as mentioned before. The goals are further expanded upon through comprehensive objectives and actions. A plan is important because it can better ensure that resources are in place to adequately manage the street trees. It details information on the street tree resource and can be presented to the community to allow residents to choose to support this resource. If the benefits are a value and the investment area, it aims to use recommendations. It provides avenues to attain more proactive and forest vision. These focus areas emphasize protection for the urban forest, continued collaboration among city departments and community engagement and stewardship. Next slide to create a city-wide street tree planting plan to expand opportunities for street tree planting and to retain large trees. We discussed in the work plan there is a budget shortfall for the management of these trees. The plan identifies some strategies to generate funding for more proactive management. Next slide. The focus area urban forest policy and regulation has seven goals. Goal 11 is to promote tree protection. The objectives explore enhancing methods for cost recovery and case tree removal or improper tree maintenance. Also continuing to implement tree protection during construction and exploring revisions to municipal code. Goal 12 is to strive for uniformity between city plans, policies, guiding documents and departments. The objective is to continue to communicate and coordinate with other departments. The existing area plans have all been incorporated into the street tree master plan. Goal 14 is closely related. This goal aims to enhance the aesthetics and function of the urban landscape. It emphasizes incorporating trees in development and redevelopment projects. Also finding solutions to allow for trees in areas with hard scape limitations and incorporating trees to improve parking lot shade and stormwater capture. Next slide has seven goals. Goal 17 is to expand tree canopy cover and the resulting environmental benefits. Goal 18 is to celebrate the importance of urban trees. This can be accomplished through celebrations, activities and designations. Goal 20 aims to promote community engagement and stewardship of the urban forest. The objectives are to continue to provide multiple methods of outreach to engage a greater proportion of the community and to enhance citizen and volunteer engagement and care for the urban forest. This is the final focus area and concludes our brief summary and overview of the street tree master plan. Thank you for your time and we welcome any questions you may have. Next slide please. Great, thank you, Rachel. That was great. Go ahead and see if I have any questions on the material presented so far. Council member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. I just want to express my appreciation for all the work that's gone into this. As a biologist when I first started grad school, when I moved to Santa Cruz in 2007, there's a lot of interest in trying to get more cities to plant trees and to expand kind of these tree planting programs across cities and Santa Cruz given its commitment to environmental sustainability and conservation has really been continuing to lead the way with these kinds of programs. And so I'm just really excited to see this before us today. And I want to thank everyone who has worked to get us to this point for everything that they've done. I did have one question and this is just maybe for the future, we could maybe get a memo, but it'd be interesting. I saw on one of the graphs the kind of percent between vegetation as it compares to impervious surfaces. And it'd be interesting to know. And so for example, I think just adding that together, it's roughly close to 60% of the, or grass and low-lying vegetation. It'd be interesting to see how this compares to other cities of similar size to kind of see where does Santa Cruz fall out and how much actually vegetation versus impermeable surfaces. I think that it would just be interesting to just want to thank everyone for all the work that they've done on this. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Golder? Campus is due to the eucalyptus in town. And I mean, those are long-lived, they're problematic in some places. Some people say they're non-natives, they're invasive and they are in some cases. Do we keep maintaining that population or do we slowly convert those types of places eventually if those ukes start to break off and die? What's kind of the going from sort of an urban forestry kind of, I mean, I've had big eucalyptus removal, but that's really around restoring, repairing around a nabbed in the fish stream. So just curious like what is kind of the urban canopy or urban street tree sort of mindset on eucalyptus? If there is one. They may be able to address that. Yeah, so, you know, blue eucalyptus, you know, there's a very bifurcated set of opinions on that canopy. And I think that there's a large percentage of our urban canopy that especially in the green belt areas and riparian areas that is blue gum coverage. And so I don't think ourselves in parks and rec, or the fire department is on any mission to eliminate that canopy. I think that there would have to be some significant environmental review done in order to use those eucalyptus growth populations and replant with natives. Also, there's a significant amount of funding that would have to be required. And then gaining a consensus with the public is also going to be quite a challenge because it would, in essence, in the short run be denuding some of the areas that are currently providing habitat with raptors and canopy coverage. So I think that with some discussion and policy and if we can unite those bifurcating opinions between people that want to save them and people that would rather see those restored to Oak Woodland, I think obviously it would be a good long-term goal to have some target areas, to start attritioning out some of those into more of an Oak Woodland or a healthier riparian community. But there's obviously a lot of politics involved with that, a lot of environmental review and really just the funding and our ability to manage what we replant with and make sure that those new trees actually grow. Otherwise, we don't want to remove anything unless we can actually sustain the new trees to where they actually provide adequate canopy. Thank you, understood, yeah, it's a difficult one. So I'll go ahead, if there's no other comments or questions by council members at this point. Council member Cummings, did you have another question? Did I have one more question. I'm wondering maybe if there can be a little elaboration on kind of how property owners might be able to deal with some of the impacts of some of the street trees. So last year, my landlord reached out to me because there were city trees that have been planted that now they've grown pretty large and have started to buckle the sidewalks that are outside of their adjacent to the property. And through our conversations, he expressed that the city created policy in the past that makes the responsibility of maintaining those sidewalks the responsibilities on the property owner, even though the trees were planted by the city. And I'm just wondering maybe if you can elaborate on that a little bit and what kinds of programs are in place for property owners to work with the city if city trees that are planted are then resulting in having negative impacts on the adjacent properties. Take this also. So outlined in our urban forest or not urban forest, but our street tune has to plan. You know, I would love to have enough funding to where we take over the maintenance of street trees in their entirety, repair sidewalks and oversee that pruning. So we actually have consistency in how our canopies maintained. I think in the short run, the best we can do and you'll see that on your upcoming budget. I know with COVID, et cetera and the lack of tax revenue, we're looking at some significant budget shortfalls into the upcoming fiscal years projecting ahead. But you will see, city council will see in the parks and recreation proposal the continuation of funding to support the heritage tree grant. And I think that that program is critical in assisting property owners with replacing sidewalks, doing root pruning and pruning a lot of these significant trees that are in our public right of way. So if I have that funding, then I can at least do reimbursement of the property owner maintenance obligations. I think also just educating folks that are responsible for maintaining their trees that we don't necessarily just wanna cut these trees down. We wanna do root pruning and then other strategies that are outlined in the plan to actually be able to retain as much canopy coverage in the right of way. So we recognize those benefits and realize those benefits of trees for stormwater, et cetera. In not all cases do we have to cut down and replace trees. I think root pruning is a viable option and there's other strategies also. I'm not an attorney, of course but it is my understanding that this is state law and that property owners take care of the public right of ways and that our community has adopted a very standard state law. But it would be my hope as the program continues to grow and we implement some of these strategies, goals and policies that are outlined in this 3-2 plan that we actually are able to obtain some more funding and that way we can assist property owners or ultimately have a goal of taking over more trees that are in the right of way. Great, thank you, Mark. Tony, did you have anything you wanted to add on that? I would just add that it is the property owners liability if somebody trips on a broken sidewalk in front of their property, whether it's raised by the street tree or not. So it's in their best interest to get that repaired. We're happy to work with the property owner to get them a proper permit. And if there's a way to save or trim the tree, we do work with Parks and Rec on that. But it's pretty common throughout the state is to have that responsibility on the property owner. So. If I could just add to that. That the state law places the responsibility on the property owner to maintain its sidewalks in good condition and repair. The provision that assigns liability for failure to do so in the event of an injury is pursuant to the city's municipal code. And the city has an ordinance modeled after other ordinances that have been adopted by other cities in California. But the liability transfer is city ordinance, not the state law. Thank you, Tony. I'll go ahead and bring this out to the public. We are starting to run out pretty late. I've got, thank you for your patience. There's the person with their phone number ending in 3346. Just press star six and you'll unmute. If you can hear me, council members? Yes, we can. Oh, perfect. Perfect timing also. I'm a resident of Walnut Avenue, a homeowner. And I'm calling to ask for your help with renewing the street tree program and the matcha plan. Those of us that live on Walnut, we love and appreciate our Ficklemore London Plain trees, but they are such a nuisance that every two to three years they need major trimming. Big branches come down, not only on the sidewalk, but into the road, which I know is a big liability for the city as well. In fact, last night a tree land the size of a man's thigh, I'd say fell and hit a car and shattered its sunroof. So these limbs are coming down. They're very dry. We constantly are having our sidewalks pushed up by these roots. And this happens because it grows so much that it happens every couple of years. It seems like the concrete is pulled up yet again. So we're just asking, the city did plant these trees and Leslie will tell you that there were not the appropriate tree to plant on such a city street because of the damage that they do. We're simply asking to renew the program to help us share in the financial cost of maintaining these trees, which is thousands and thousands of dollars between the sidewalks and the limbs that need to come down. We just hope that you can continue to work with us. I'm sorry that more people have invoked their opinion about this on wall that I just found out about the meeting a short time ago. So I know that my fellow neighbors on the street feel this way too. We're constantly battling with these trees. So thank you for listening to my comments. I appreciate it. I'll bring this back to the council now for deliberation. And I would look for further deliberation or a motion on this today. Council member Cummings and then council member Watkins. Thank you, mayor. Yeah, I'm happy to move to approve the street tree at master plan unless there are any other amendments that need to be made. I'll go ahead and second that. Okay, great. We have a motion by council member Cummings seconded by council member Watkins to approve the street tree master plan. And Bonnie, could I ask for a roll call vote, please? Yes, council member Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Passes unanimously and thank you to the staff and great redirection of all that funding to do this. So super exciting. Congrats to everybody. Thank you. Thanks very much. Number 38, which is the West Cliff Drive adaptation and management plan, a public works plan. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. And today's presenter is Tiffany Weiss West and Tiffany is our sustainability and climate action manager. And I'll turn it over to Tiffany now. Thank you very much, mayor. And good afternoon, mayor and city council members. Tiffany Weiss West, the sustainability and climate action manager. Can I confirm that you can all see my screen, please? Very good. We are before you today to talk about the West Cliff Drive plan that's before you for adoption. We've been working for, since we first obtained this Caltrans or three years ago, collaboratively. We have an internal team, public works, parks and rec and planning really are the core team, along with a 17-person technical advisory committee of which mayor Myers and city council member Cummings were both members of, made it closely with key stakeholders. So West Cliff Drive plan as you've seen the slide before is part of the resilient coast initiative, which also includes the local coastal program amendment, which will be expected to be adopted in the fall by the end of the year, the complementary work. The project was completed by December of last year. Grateful to integral consulting, our primary consultant on that project for the technical work that really, as you have seen is integrated throughout the plan itself, the appendices and a number of hyperlinks to some of the deliverables that I'll share, to document the community's vision for future resilient coastal management in the face of climate change and in proactive way to manage our coastline of an ongoing conversation around climate change and coastal management that will be continuing through time along with community engagement. So this is just the start of what will be a long-term commitment to this kind of work. We have brought forward a number of deliverables over the last two years that we've updated council and the commissions on everything from the comprehensive existing conditions in future vulnerability assessment to the adaptation strategy analysis. You will see the socially vulnerable populations impact assessment also integrated into the document, as well as the robust engagement that we completed to support this project, including the virtual reality, which is also summarized in the census document. We had the conceptual transportation alternatives report, a funding and a benefit cost analysis. And then of course the project and policy recommendation, all of which can be found at the website, citysantacruz.com or slash resilience coast. And as I said, we have really been integrated into this plan document. I know you've seen this slide before, but I do want to emphasize the extensive engagement that's taken place since early 2019 with over 1500 touch points in the community on the resilient coast initiative in a variety of formats. Thought it would be helpful to just kind of put a who, what, where, why, when. Chapters one and two, the introduction and context really set the why we're going about doing this, the regulatory environment and so forth. Chapter three are the plot project planning considerations, really the how we are going to do this. For example, if we are going to upgrade a sea wall, this tells us how we do so to incorporate things like living shorelines, as well as think other habitat enhancements like bird purchase and things like that. So it really spells out the how, as well as the future conditions that we are projecting in terms of erosion. So the considerations that are really important to the project. Chapter four, excuse me, it's really the meat of the plan, the what, and I'll be sharing more about that in the next slide, as well as the goals and objectives that were developed collaboratively with the community for the project and for coastal management of West Cliff Drive. Chapters five and six really spell out that's management practices and potential policies for larger projects. So that's more of the how. Chapter seven contains the illustrative future transportation concepts of which we are recommending one of the alternatives. They'll talk about more. And chapter eight is really the project review and authorization procedures, which is where we get that streamlined process for our maintenance and more minor projects that are specified. And then chapter nine is the capital improvement program. It really specifies the when and how much it's going to cost. So it's programmed out over several capital improvement program periods out through 2033. And we're looking at a cost of about $19, $20 million. And I'll talk more about that in a moment as well. So really the meat of the projects that have come forward in this plan, there are a number of cord or wide projects. So I thought I would start with those. We are recommending transportation. The plan includes, I should say, transportation signage and striping improvements that further communicate a West Click drive as a class three bikeway. Going along with that, some parking management strategies to encourage maximum public access and promote parking turnover, which could include things like time limits, hours of operation, residential parking permit zones and potentially user fees. So that would be something we'll be embarking upon in the near term to look at for implementation. Some addition of formal bike parking, which is indicated in the project by project, zone by zone project list. We also are calling for a comprehensive stormwater outfall and pipe televising. So what that means is actually put a camera in the outfalls to inspect it into a condition of the pipe. And then a commitment to replace failed pipes that are 44 stormwater outfalls on West Cliff drive. Also a sand management feasibility study that would be corridor wide looking at is there the potential to place sand, say at Pyramid Beach and then benefit from that littoral drift down coast? Of course, there's a number of things that need to be looked at with that. So we are calling out that study. We're also calling out maintenance and upgrade of existing coastal protection structures, everything from restacking riprap to replacing non-engineered structures that are failing with actual retaining walls or other wall structures. We also have a suite of parks and rec improvements, projects, site furnishings, things like trash receptacles and bike racks I've already mentioned, potentially benches and interpretive signage. You'll see the next item is actually master signage plan and design standards. We need to think about not just the interpretive signage but the surf instruction signage, the corridors signage in terms of speed limits and things like that. So a comprehensive signage plan and design standards. Also natural restoration planning. This is areas where we could remove ice plants and look at other areas which have been identified on maps in the plan where there is potential for natural restoration. And also the creation of scenic overlooks, so small ADA accessible scenic overlooks along the multi-use trail. And so those are really the corridor wide projects. And then just as an example, I'll show zone three, which is really lighthouse point. We do have specific zone by zone projects as well. For example, here at lighthouse point, you can see the, we're calling for conducting a study of the cave at lighthouse point and we'll also be looking at feasibility analysis of what do we do with the lighthouse at that point. So as you can see, there are a number of other zone specific projects that are called out as well. And of note in zone three and in a couple other areas, you see all this green area that state parks property and you'll notice the green dots, there's a five and two. Those are areas where state parks is interested in working with the city on those projects and encouraged us to keep them in the plan even though it was their property. And they have a number of different projects going on to improve accessibility at different lots right now. So really close coordination with state parks. All out in the plan, the coastal change, Charter's monitoring program and development of a funding strategy. And we have already begun working on that to better flesh out our triggers. We're working with partners like UCSC's Coastal Science and Policy Grab Program right now actively working on this. USGS, Scripps, NOAA, nonprofits like Save Our Shores and Save the Waves. All these groups are already making coastal observations whether it's by camera or live. Could they potentially be leveraged for a comprehensive monitoring system in addition to the city's annual inspection of coastal conditions, the future televising I mentioned and some of these future studies that are called out which will definitely be things that we monitoring for Charter's. And really the goal here is to create an efficient and cost effective monitoring platform to help us track our Charter's to initiate between the short term projects that are called out in this public works plan and more medium and longer term projects. I think that's important to remember that the lifespan of this plan is 10 to 15 years. So everything that's contained in it is to be implemented within that timeframe. And I do want to emphasize that there is not a project called out in the next 10 to 15 years that calls for going to one way on West Cliff Drive. I know that's been a question in the community and I just, I want to be clear about that. With that said, we're not precluding that as an option in the future. So just wanted to make mention of that. Lastly, we have an NSF grant that's pending right now to help us develop out this coastal monitoring and triggers and there's nearly as I said a $20 million price tag. And as part of the interim recovery plan process we'll be developing the funding strategy which really will be a combination of grant funding, philanthropy and potential new revenue streams as well as prioritizing grants to pursue to implement this plan. So that brings us to the recommendation and it is important to remember that this is the beginning of the coastal resiliency planning process and not the end of the planning process and that these policies and plans will continue to evolve over time as science evolves, trigger points are approached and the public input evolves. We did have a unanimous recommendation from Transportation and Public Works Commission just six weeks ago in March for council to adopt the plan. And it's also really important to remember that the city we need to adopt the plan today. The CalTrans reporting period closes at the end of the month and we need to satisfy our grant obligations with this adopted plan. With that said, our next step in this process after adoption is to begin the coastal commission process and there could be minor revisions to the plan based on that process. So with that, I'll conclude my presentation and I know that the public works and planning folks are also on the line in case you have any questions. So I'm happy to take any questions that you might have and thank you so much. Thank you, Tiffany. Thank you for the presentation and thank you for the work on this really exciting plan and really the approach to it was very unique and I would imagine we'll become quite a model for places around not just California, but around the world on how to look at adaptation and sea level rise. So thank you for all your work in doing this. I will go ahead and open this up to council member questions and then we will take it out the public comment and then we'll come back for additional deliberation and action. I see council member Boulder has her hand up. For everybody that worked on it, I know it was a lot of work and I appreciate that and thanks for being available to answer questions for me and I know one, I'm glad you clarified one. What is the class is, go ahead Clay transportation planner, bikeways to complete fall into four different classes, blame like what you see in front of the boardwalk and a bench as well. So it's minor signage and striping and it's appropriate and reflective of lower speed and lower volume roadways of which was measured as. I think we have both on our street actually. I've seen on all community members was so much concerned about the removal of ice. Thank you for that question. You know, the recommendation to remove the ice plant, the ice plant when it becomes a major erosion can. So we can achieve the, I think what some of the folks are saying as well, it's mature ice plant, it secures roots, secures the soil and we can do so with proper restoration and eliminate that potential for that fluffing that happens when the ice plant becomes saturated. On the hunger and the cold can even answer it, but we had the meeting last week and we talked about protecting the search. Well, mine most definitely at Mitchell's Cove, what's being called out is the design and there will be a very robust engagement process along with that, but a design of the sea wall, not the construction, but the design and that certainly will be part of that analysis at lighthouse point. That's why we want to, in 2026, also to the cave as well as the feasibility study of what do we do with lighthouse point because, you know, does filling the cave change anything? Does, you know, what, how does this happen? And we just don't have the information to answer that, but the surf groups have been really great and engaged in this process to leaders from the surf community participated actively in our technical advisory committee. So it's something we're really attuned to. Okay, I swear it's my last one. My last one is has there been any talk? This idea, so no, it's not part of this. Thanks for the presentation. And I know that in your plan, the signage is included and there was a great example last week and I think it was Australia's world class protected surf. And I just wondered if that was also included in that and or those considerations really calling out the surf opportunities there. And then the third was regarding the alternate routes. We've received a lot of community input regarding that. And I just want you to what it means to approve alternative routes one and two. And I even heard there was an alternative three, but I wasn't sure what that was if there's only two and what that means in approving this with those alternatives or if we can, I know you have a Caltrans grant deadline and you're trying to get this approved now, but we received very concerned emails from community members wondering about that piece of it and wondering, I'm wondering how that plays in moving forward to maybe if you could speak to that. Sure, yeah, our engagement goes for and against a one way concept. And how we have proposed this is that alternative one which is the enhancement of signage and striping is what is contained in this plan. We do mention that a medium term possibility is a one way option. And in fact, the illustrative transportation concepts to present what that could look like, just as a, so with that said, to just to be clear, we're not recommending and we don't have in this plan a project for going to one way. However, that is a long-term needs to happen and design process. We are going to be having that ongoing conversation with the say design of Mitchell's Cove, with the looking at lighthouse point. And so I know that it has the perspective from a standpoint of traffic operations and so I'll let Claire touch upon that as well. One way on West Cliff would be a, I would estimate a multi-year community engagement process prior to moving in that direction. It would not only be the two and a half somehow miles of West Cliff Drive, but it would encompass almost the entirety of the lower West side because West Cliff right now as it is in the two directions of traffic school enable lots of ways to get to and from where you're going. In converting to a one way, we would really need to look at traffic calming, partial closures and other holistic tools with almost every street in the lower West side that would involve direct engagement with all of those neighbors and neighborhoods. And as we know, when you do these projects there are winners and losers and it would take a lot, a lot, a lot of time and work on that. I'd also anticipate that it would take an iterative design process and a significant amount of budget just to move forward to consensus on that project if we could get to consensus which I think is a lofty aspiration for this project. I said it adopting alternative one today as we move forward does make those incremental improvements for cyclists and pedestrians and does not preclude them from in the future council directed at this time I would say directing work on alternative two would take our very small but mighty team away from the other critical projects that we're working on implementing right now namely the rail trail line which we are really hoping can be our number one priority to really improve safety for our multimodal transportation system. To do that engagement to identify the resources that are needed. So I think that's important to remember as well. And vice mayor Brunner I just wanna get to your other question. You mentioned three different routes or alternatives and I just wanna clarify that so that there's absolutely no question about what's going on there. And so when we did our conceptual alternative analysis one way and these were alternatives that were called out in our grant that we needed to look at in addition to the one way traffic alternative we also looked at reconfiguration of Westcliffe Drive in the case of a catastrophic event that would make Westcliffe Drive impassable. And this was conducted to inform community engagement and the development of the plan and there were three routes shown can't remember the third one should not have been shown as a potential street for rerouted traffic since it's not one of the best detour routes there's issues with that. So that was something that we acknowledged after the question came up in November and we corrected that. And so I just wanted to make sure that that's clear we're not there are no projects contained in this plan that call for any rerouting at all. This was something that we try to evaluate early on but there are no recommendations. So just to be clear there's the alternatives regarding the transportation itself and then the three rerouting routes that were looked at just to be clear about what we're talking about. Okay. And so you would mention that the transfer commission voted unanimously to adopt the plan and one of the emails we received was from the chair regarding alternative route two. And so that's where I just wanted to get that clarification. It seems that if we adopt the plan it's automatically adopting alternative two. No, that is not the case. Alternative one. And yes, we went to transportation and public works commission to ask for a recommendation to city council to adopt the plan and we did receive the unanimous recommendation to recommend a council to adopt that. It is alternative one which is the striping and the signage and not a one way alternative. Thank you for clarifying that. And two would have further without direction from he, as Claire said we are going to need to come to some community consensus on this and there will be an iterative design process with that said again as I mentioned that some of the projects that are called out in this plan like the Mitchell Cove Seawall design like the Lighthouse Point Lighthouse relocation or feasibility analysis. This will also be something that will be discussed in the context of those projects. Thank you for answering the question. Thank you. I see council member Brown has her hand up. Just a quick follow up Vice Mayor Brunner asked that question that I was most interested in but I'm wondering if you could and thank you so much for the report and the presentation and all of the work that's gone into this and thank you for raising the plan moving forward the process moving forward will have many, many points at which community can weigh in. I'm sure you are well aware there's very strong feelings being transmitted to us and I'm sure there will be as we move forward. So I'm wondering if just within that there's going to be community engagement this is a long-term process is do you have like a sense of and I know there are many variables so I'm not asking you to predict the future and say what's going to happen when but just kind of how this might proceed in terms of opportunities for community engagement. Talk about what you're thinking about that. Well, I did just mention the Mitchell's Cove and the Lighthouse Point and those I think are the two most prominent projects where community engagement is you know, it will be robust. The other piece then is developing out the triggers and monitoring program which we're actively doing right now and you know, is there a trigger that would be developed that would initiate and you know, that could be something like a rate of erosion say or what not that for us to go to that as an alternative, you know, again we don't know and we're not trying to assign time horizons because we're trying to utilize these triggers. So that will be another piece that you know we really are trying to fast track the development so that we have a good understanding of what coastal change looks like and that we're able to be proactive versus responsive. And so I would say that that's the other area and I didn't mention when I was on that slide but we're thinking about bringing together cameras that exist, the buoy that just got deployed potentially community sourced science previously known as citizen science to catch, you know, take snapshots in frame and do post-processing to understand what, okay, what does change look like because you know, we need to rely on perhaps some new technologies but there's a lot of existing observational technologies already focused on our coastline that we can leverage to be proactive. So thank you for your question. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to follow up and say so I obviously understand that I guess I'm just trying to get, you know get as much information into the public hands as possible since we hear about this and there's so much speculation when there's not information in many arenas. So I really appreciate, you know you're thinking about this and sharing your response and all of the work and I'll probably follow up with you later about some specifics. Thanks so much. I have Council Member Watkins. I think most of my questions have been asked already. So maybe mine's more of sort of a comment slash question but first just really want to compliment that the team who put together this report and this document, it's really thorough and wonderful and just really contextually speak to how important it is for especially coastal cities to be thinking this way and planning for these types of changes that are really inevitable and how much is out of our control really in terms of climate change and adaptation and the decision points to make a mitigation and to sort of change our environment. And so I just appreciate the trigger points that have been outlined and kind of working from that place of trying to do the best we can to anticipate plans but not be able to predict exactly what will happen but I think extreme weather events and increased sea waters will be something we're gonna be addressing no matter what. I guess my question would be at this point would be when we're as a council and community make sure that we're not, that this is actively part of our planning or updates or more related to the next item in terms of thinking about recovery but if we're not centering a lot of our work on this I think we're really missing the ball and we will be stuck in a place of constant crisis response. The question would be then will there be regular updates as to where we are to the council on how we're gonna move forward with the plan how do you anticipate this further being communicated to all of us in the community? Certainly, thank you for that question. We of course need to come to council with what the approach is and the status of our coastal commission hearings and so forth. So that will be the near term. Also with respect to the interim recovery plan resilient coast is called the implementation of this plan is called out as a priority in the interim recovery plan. Very, I think someone may have mentioned the green jobs and green economy piece and we're trying to keep those jobs local. And then the last piece, so I think you'll be hearing more through the interim recovery plan implementation as well as the funding strategy development. We will be looking at a suite of funding strategies again from grants philanthropy to additional revenue and of course any of that would come to you and we can certainly bring the overall approach which would be in the context of the overall interim recovery plan implementation approach to council as well. So I see it as a project by project update in addition to the coastal commission process and the IRP process. And I guess my last question slash comment would be I think that there is obviously a new or a restored interest especially at the federal level to have investments in infrastructure and we know how hard both you and Claire work on a regular basis to seek grants in addition to doing your day job. So if there's an opportunity for the council to provide extra support to you and to our three departments to pursue those grants, please I guess I would just express my interest in wanting to have that brought forward to us because it's hard to do it all at times and we don't want to miss opportunities to receive additional funding to do this really important work. Thank you for that support. And I do know that the city manager's office is leading an effort to bring on potentially a team to help us with both prioritizing and also pursuing as you said, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of federal opportunities as well as state opportunities that come up and we want to make sure that we're capturing all of them and we've already kind of begun that work. We've already kind of begun to forecast state and federal opportunities that are coming out but they need to also be considered within the entire interim recovery plan so that we can prioritize and start going after that stuff. So thank you for your support on that. Yeah, we will, you know, it looks like we're going in the right direction to get the resources we need to pursue that, that kind of funding. That's great, thank you. Mayor, I think you're on mute. I am, I call that dog mute because always managing those little barks behind me. I'll go ahead and dig this out for public comment. I see we have one person in the audience and the phone is ending, phone number ends in 1-884. You can press star six and that will unmute you. Good afternoon, council. My name is Gina Cole. I'm with Bikes Santa Cruz County. As with all of you, I wanted to acknowledge the work that went into this plan and the expertise and experience that all of the folks that worked on it brought to this particular plan. It's so well put together and so well thought out. I encourage you to approve this resolution. I wanted to point out that there is a photo from one of our favorite events, Open Streets included in this report. Thank you for that. And that's a piece of the plan too, is for tying into goals from previous transportation plans and transportation work plans, was to encourage activities like that and we're really hoping that we'll be able to do that in the near future or later future, but sooner than later. I also wanted to point out that in the plan, at age 12, when you're talking about tying this plan into transportation goals, that, I'm sorry, I'm not there yet. Again, community activities were part of it, but the other activity that was part of it was encouraging commute routes that ran along the existing rail line. And we're glad that that made it into this plan as well. So I thank you for your foresight in considering pedestrians and cyclists. I do always have concern about folks riding fast on the recreation trail. I would hope that the marking of the road with the class three markings would encourage folks to feel safer riding in the road way everyone's safe on that multi-use path. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you. Next is Phil. Please press star six to unmute yourself. Can you hear me, Mayor? Yes, we can. Mayor and council members, this is Phil Boutel, the chair of the Transportation and Public Works Commission. I'm speaking here, of course, on my own behalf, but I just wanted to clarify the intent of my letter and one to say that on one hand, I apologize, I didn't mean to cause a campaign by this. I just wanted to keep this on the radar and ensure the time that Dr. Weiss has brought this climate adaptation plan to the commission. Overall, we've been completely supportive and she's been great at clarifying that, while this was a CalTrans grant, this is a climate adaptation plan and not meant to be an independent transportation plan. I think my ask in that letter was, I'm asking you to follow the Transportation and Public Works Commission's recommendation to approve the plan as that recommends, but then also pull that alternative to as an additional, like let's make it a transportation plan. I think that Clare Globally did a great job of outlining that it would be a big lift, but it's a lift we have to start at some point. Let's not wait a number of years until we kind of are forced into it by adaptation. This is a choice we can make to start that process. It should take years of public engagement and probably some money and let's go figure out how to chase some grants so that in a few years, we're ready to have those big public meetings and we're ready to go through the design, et cetera. I think this is about prioritization and I hope that we can, now we've seen these beautiful renderings of what West Cliff Drive can be. So let's have that conversation about do we want it as a community. That was all I was after. So thank you, Dr. Weiss-West for this and thank you, Mayor and Council. Thank you, Commissioner. And next up I have phone number ending in 80836. Please press first six. You can hear you. Thank you. I'm happy to hear that any one way planning is years away, but in response to Phil's letter that went out yesterday along with a couple others, I'm speaking now because I disagree about the concept of one way West Cliff. It's certainly nice that we have the big volume of information about coastal preservation methods and I'm pleased like everyone else and thankful to all the people involved. And yes, we should have a treasure for that inventory. But the plan to make West Cliff Drive one way is misbegotten, not because it would make bicycle and pedestrian usage safer, it's misbegotten because it would punish people like me that live in the nearby neighborhoods and send all that traffic down our streets. We have an experiment where that happens all the time when West Cliff is closed. So it's also misbegotten because this decision about one way traffic is absolutely nothing to do with sea level rise, as a couple people just pointed out or to responding to it. It's basically a transportation decision and it would basically punish one part of our town, those who are within one to four blocks of the beach in favor of those who presently take their cars out on West Cliff Drive. Sadly, it's because nobody is recognized that what we don't want is that automobile traffic along the coast at all. Nor do we want to funnel that traffic into our neighborhood streets. The two aspirations are equally important and I think you just recognize that. They're very good ideas about how to provide attractive transportation along the coast without having the carbon belching traffic at all. I can imagine a tomorrow where smart automated electric vehicle take people to and along the coast and no personal autos are there at all. Sure, I can visualize that and I know you all can too. And of course, all the bikes and pedestrians are there too and it's safe for everybody. So it's actually really cool that there's an interactive map shown there and it shows that only sand is gonna be under water in 2050, so let's get on the plan. Thank you. Okay, that's it for our public attendees or our public comments today. I'm gonna go ahead and bring it back to council for any further deliberation or for a motion. And this is for the West Cliff Drive adaptation and management plan and we are looking to a motion to adopt. Oh, okay, I see council member Watkins followed by council member Boulder. Unless there's any other questions, I'm happy to move the recommendation and make a motion to adopt the West Cliff Drive adaptation and management plan, a public works plan with minor modifications as authorized by the city manager. Goodie. And council member Folder. I just want to clarify, so you're going with the recommendations with option one. The one that's in the staff report. And I have council member Contari Johnson and then the question. So we have a motion at a second and further questions by council members with comments. Thank you, Mayor Myers. No questions. I just wanted to take a moment to thank Tiffany, Claire and everyone who worked on this, the commissions. I was really impressed with the level of community engagement, the intentional and I think the underrepresented groups by zone, those charts were very telling and it's clear that the decisions, well, I imagine that the decisions moving forward and all that assessment and all of the community but I just wanted to acknowledge that process and thank you guys for the work. Thank you, council member. Council member Cummings. Sentiments that were just expressed by Contari Johnson and by the colleagues. As a member of the tax, I just was fortunate to be able to see how much work was really going into this and I really want to thank all the members of our community who participated in the advisory committee and the tax that worked with us and especially thankful for Tiffany and all the work that she did to bring this forward to us today. One of the things that Dr. Wise West really emphasized was trying to connect with underserved and underrepresented communities in this and so I also want to really appreciate her intentionality for trying to reach out to those communities and ensure that their voices were heard. And so this was a lot of, it was a big lift and it was really one of the things, the plans that we brought forward from another plan that we brought forward that had a significant amount of community input and so I just want to appreciate all the work that's gone in to bring this forward today. Thank you, council member. Okay, we have a motion by council member Walkins and a second by council member Colder to adopt the West Cliff Drive Adaptation and Management Plan with minor modifications as authorized by the city manager and I'll go ahead and ask for a roll call vote. Thank you, mayor. I just want to clarify that the recommendation doesn't include the adoption of a resolution but there is a resolution. I was gonna ask. Okay. Approving the. There is a resolution associated with adopting the plan. We need to recognize that resolution or the motion is. Yeah, it would just be to adopt resolution adopting the West Cliff and then the staff recommendation. I'm happy to make that part of the motion to update the motion to the resolution to my language. Great, thank you. Okay, let's do a roll call vote. All right, council member Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson, vice mayor Brunner. Congratulations to me and you guys did a great job. So thank you. Thank you very much council. And with all these great last three items we'll now move on to item number 39. We're hopefully gonna get caught up. And this is item number 39 is the reenvision Santa Cruz interim recovery plan update for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. If this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by the staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Our presenter today is Laura Schmidt from our assistant city manager. And this is on reenvision Santa Cruz interim recovery plan update. And this is to accept the first quarterly progress reports and provide feedback as desired. Welcome, Laura. Thank you, mayor and council members. I'm Laura Schmidt, your assistant city manager. I'm going to share my screen and give you a brief presentation here today to as the mayor said, get your first quarterly update on our progress as it relates to reenvision Santa Cruz building a future for everyone together our 12 to 18 month interim recovery plan in response to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. So what we've been up to since the end of February is we've been furthering the recovery plan, adding some definition and filling out the meat of the skeleton. And we're here to report for the first time on accomplishments related to the focus areas as well as the performance metrics that you all identified in an approved in November to track our progress. The two things that we have focused on offline are putting together a quick two page summary that gives the reader an overview of reenvision Santa Cruz and outlines objectives for each focus area. The other thing that we've done in response to council member feedback was put some categories and further clarification around the list of projects. And we've also refined and reduced the list. Those are fiscal sustainability, downtown and business revitalization and infrastructure. And you'll see in attachment one, the objectives underneath each one of these areas as well as a high level summary that gives you an idea of what reenvision Santa Cruz is all about. And that's our two page handout for our community members to be able to quickly understand what we're focusing on and trying to achieve in our recovery. On the fiscal sustainability side, we're really trying to rebuild our city's strong financial foundation while maintaining amazing, excellent customer service and our service delivery of our core services, improving the quality of life in our community and building resilience to face the challenges that are gonna continue to come during this pandemic and any other emergency that seems to be getting thrown out of these days. The other thing that on the downtown and business revitalization, our second focus area is really investing in our amazing, diverse, locally owned business community and all of the great things that you see in our community that you wouldn't normally see in another community as far as chains and box stores. We have a lot of unique and diverse businesses here and focusing on the downtown but also as a center for housing, commerce and transportation and ensuring an equitable recovery for all of our community. Our final focus area is infrastructure and this includes their traditional infrastructure but also looks and focuses on improvements to facilities, systems and our parks and open spaces so our natural infrastructure not just our built infrastructure. And we really wanna focus on resiliency, climate adaptation and supporting here as well a high quality of life. The other work that we did during the break is for each one of these focus areas we define project categories. So within fiscal sustainability we further broken down and organize those projects related to efficient service delivery and new and improved home and sources. And then within downtown and business revitalization we're focusing on downtown reinvestment, economic recovery and resiliency and affordable and market rate housing. And finally in infrastructure you'll find our green economy and workforce project. I'm terribly sorry if you can hear all the sirens. Emergency hold for no one. Our parks, recreation and open spaces and resiliency and improvements. So you'll find those project categories are reflected in the way that we've organized the projects in a little bit more detail and then the full project list is in attachment for of your packet. So that's the work that we've been doing. The actual content of today's agenda item are our accomplishments and our first reporting on our metrics, our first baseline report on the metrics. So attachment two will give you our full progress report and you'll see a narrative organized by our focus areas and our project categories of all the amazing work that staff's been working on and coordinating over the last few months since we adopted the plan in November. And I just highlighted a subset of some of the accomplishment. So with the end fiscal sustainability we've launched various floor cost recovery fee studies you saw coming back to council that and also adopted in the second public hearing today were revised and new development fees and that range from sewer to water to development fees with childcare impact and public safety. Council member Watkins had asked about grant writing. The city managers and Tiffany had alluded to this. The city manager's office has successfully received approval from all of the departments for a pilot concept where we will go out for a request for information and we've already done that for a grant writing managed service and that will give us an overview of all the different grant opportunities in the city and at the city wide perspective and we have amazing pockets of people within each department that really pursue grants and get a lot of them. But when you look strategically across the landscape there's so much more available out there and we just don't have the capacity to do that nor do we have the subject matter expertise in this area. So we're in the process of putting that pilot together to do a working with a partner company to do grant writing managed services as well as a strategic landscape analysis of where we should be focusing and what we should be going after and then picking the ones to go after going after them and winning and getting some additional grant money for the city. We're also in the fiscal sustainability area making a lot of progress on recreation programming plans and marrying that programming plan with revenue policies. So that's in our parks and rec department. In the downtown and business revitalization there's a ton to choose from here where you've got, we launched a while ago and are continuing to support and expand the business loan program. The outdoor expansion program that we temporarily launched in connection with COVID is continuing and ongoing and getting solidified. And then planning and community development I think was here a meeting or two ago to launch the downtown expansion plan formally. We've done housing and inclusionary ordinance updates to help with that affordable and market rate housing progress. And then we're working on objective standards for residential development proposals as well. And then the next agenda item on your list today will be a great one in this space that economic development will talk to you about a COPS program. On the infrastructure side you just saw the West Coast drive out a vegetation plan and you approve that. And that one is an ongoing project in the infrastructure space and we'll come back to you for additional reports and progress. We also initiated a framework for workforce development and all the amazing things that we could be doing in that space. And then on the water system side we have a backbone reinvestment program that was adopted. And then you also know that you adopted the Wharf master plan and we're continuing to develop and pursue those items within the Wharf master plan. The full progress report for these accomplishments and more with more detail are in attachment to of your packet. So you adopted 13 based 13 metrics to track the recovery for the city of Santa Cruz. These are items that we thought we could impact as it relates to could our actions to help us see and move the dials on the 13 metrics. So just some notes as we go through the list. The comparison year that we used used was our last standard fiscal year which was fiscal year 2019. Fiscal year 2020 has impact of COVID numbers. So to compare it would not in fiscal year 21 to 20 would not have given us a good comparison. So the comparison year that you'll see in the report is 2019. The period as well that you're looking at right now is July through December. Rather January through March is not in this baseline report that we're giving you because the data was just not available for some of the metrics. So you'll see January through March during the next report in from us. We have one metric that staff is recommending to eliminate but we're recommending a replacement metric and you'll see that in the report as well. And then next quarter one of the things that we'll be working on and Tiffany Wycliffe is helping is suggestions regarding how do we apply health and all policies, equity lens to these metrics and incorporate equity into the metrics that we're doing. We could not get that put together in time for this report but we are working on it with staff and we'll report back into you with suggestions during our next quarterly report in. The full metric support is in an attachment three and then I've got screenshots and we'll walk you through those. And then I'd like to walk through the actual metrics and what their numbers look like, get through the final slide and then open it up for questions because I know these numbers you'll be like, oh, what about this and what about this and what does this mean? And we've got the departments on the line to be able to help out with some of those questions. So at the top of your attachment three of the metrics, we have two that we translated into graphs, commercial vacancy and sales tax revenue. And you'll see on the commercial vacancy front that our vacancy rate is up by 23% in the six month period that's reported. So that's pretty substantial. The other thing that we did is because of these six months weren't impacted by fiscal year 20 for sales tax. The report does look a little interesting in especially the second quarter when you compare the sales tax of year 21 to the sales tax of fiscal year 19. They don't look that far off, but that was due to a reporting change in sales tax. So we added fiscal year 20 in this instance to show that we have indeed lost on the sales tax revenue front. This is the top half of your metrics report, business licensing, business licenses renewed, commercial vacancy rate, business closures reported. In the instance where we have two separate pieces of information within a metric we did A and B. So on the closures reported, it looks like it's reduced. So that would lead you to believe that we had less, that we 50% less business closures, but we all know that that's not true. And this is self-reported by the businesses. So staff realize that that probably isn't an accurate reflection of what's actually happening out there. So they came up with based upon their research and talk with other agencies to look at utility terminations. So when you look at utility terminations, the increase in business closures is 33%. So as businesses close down their utilities, we capture that information. And then here's where you see the decline that you would expect during the pandemic. Number of permits issued, we have planning applications. We broke it out between planning applications and building permits. So we are down in those areas as well. This is the metric that new housing units that we're recommending to eliminate because between fiscal year 19 and fiscal year 21, we see an over 400% increase. And the housing units reflect units that have completed construction. And that can be so volatile, depending upon any given month or quarter. And if a large development comes online, then you'll see those numbers spike. So a staff piece together and came up with total valuation of building permits issued as a potential alternative metric for you to consider. And these permits capture mostly the residential, almost all of the residential, commercial and industrial construction activity in our area. So that's an indication of overall investment. And when you look at that revenue and the valuation of it, we're down 54%. So that is the recommendation by staff as a replacement metric. Going on to the next group, transient occupancy tax, you see a decline in 30%. Self tax revenue, you see that increase of 5.75%. And that's why we included the fiscal year 20 bars so that you could see the difference. And that this is probably due to a change in the way that the state is timing the distribution. On the ad tax side, the startling 96% reduction and admission tax, this has a lot to do with the closure of the fan and cruise beach boardwalk. Our general fund reserve, and this is an entire year. So we cannot parse out quarters on this one where it's a 27% decrease one year to the next. Our general fund capital maintenance budget and this is like, how are we investing on... So if you look at the infrastructure side intuitively, you know that investment in that area would be reflected in our general fund capital maintenance budget. So that was one of the reasons why we are capturing that. And again, this fine necessity needs to be an annual number. And we had about 1.5 million designated in fiscal year 19, zero designated in fiscal year 21. Maintenance of parks, open space, the labor hours per acre for a fiscal year budgeted versus actual. So you'll see in this one, budgeted, they're budgeted down less by 5% between fiscal year 19 to fiscal year 21. But conversely, they're budgeted as less, but the usage of our parks and open space has surged. So while the usage has increased, our maintenance budgeted and our maintenance actually done has decreased. So this is a concern area for us where budgeted down 5% and actuals is down even further by almost 14%. Maintenance of recreational facilities. So this is not an open space. This is for actual rec facilities, the labor hours for 1,000 square feet for the fiscal year. We have the budgeted number and for each fiscal year is the same. And then parks and rec staff is currently working on our process to measure actual hours to be able to report that back to you. I want to thank a lot of people that put all of this together. We obviously have our employees who are on a day in and day out basis contributing to the accomplishment and the changing of the dials that you see in our metrics reporting. They're the ones that really make this all come together and have us be able to actually re-envision Santa Cruz and recover. We also have specific departmental staff who have been working with the city manager's office to give us report content, gather the, especially the metrics and the data behind what you've seen. We've had department heads also help out a lot with the report content. The questions of, okay, we have this data. It doesn't look right. Help us research it some more and give us an idea to go back to the council to make a recommendation or a change. And then finally, we had a subset of department heads who were the re-envision sub team and they really have spent a lot of time working with the city manager's office and focusing on getting this to come to life. It's pretty easy to put a strategic plan together. It's not easy at all to actually integrate that into our day-to-day work, be able to explain to council and the community what we've achieved as it relates to those focus areas and then show the actual data behind it. So that team has been amazing. And then I also wanted to specifically thank Elizabeth Smith, our communications manager and Ralph America, our principal management analyst and the city manager's office who have done a ton of work on this. So re-envision Santa Cruz, building a future for everyone together. What we're asking from you today is the motion to accept our first quarterly progress report on re-envision Santa Cruz, our 12 to 18 month interim recovery plan. And if there's any feedback you'd like to incorporate into the recommendation for us to make any adjustments, we'd appreciate that as well. So with that, I can cycle back to any slides or question areas that may come up. Thank you so much, Laura. The presentation was great. Nice to see the cool colors in the graphs and everything you guys put together is really nice. It's a really nice way to sort through a lot of information. I'll go ahead and see if council members have questions regarding the report for the materials in the packet. Council member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor and thank you, Laura, for that really good presentation. When I was going through the report and specifically in the sections where it kind of lays out the table, the one area that I'm very much interested in is kind of the workforce of development in the green economy. And I'm just wondering if you might be able to speak to kind of any of the specific efforts that are gonna be implemented around workforce development. I mean, there's a number of different sections where it's kind of listed. I just wanted to see if maybe you had some more specifics on what approach staff is gonna be taking it with that workforce development. I was looking on the list of participants and it looks like Rosemary is not on here. I don't know, Tiffany, if you have any additional details, one of the key things that Rosemary did on behalf of the larger city, which was amazing, is put in for a civic spark fellow to help begin to outline the plan and the steps as far as workforce development and the things that we will be doing. I would need Rosemary to be able to help me answer the more details of that. Our very fine note. Thank you, Bonnie. Well, you actually answered it for me, but I will just add to that that we're kicking off a working group tomorrow with Tiffany and Rosemary and folks of the city that are working on these initiatives. And we're actually also meeting with the county tomorrow afternoon to talk about the apprenticeship program that we're hoping to start as the city and design it, which will be part of the scope of the civic spark fellow starting in late this summer, early fall, as well as the funding that the county has that supervisor Trinity set aside for workforce development. So we're gonna coordinate on all these with the workforce development board and the SEDS group at the county and work internally with the city to move these initiatives forward. Really helpful and extremely exciting. And I have to say I'm excited about all of it, but in particular about the grant piece. So thank you for moving forward with that, as well as putting in the help in all policies metrics with maybe two like zeroed in, but I had a question on, it's not appropriate to ask it now, I can hold it for another time. I had a question, I was curious about the cannabis ordinance amendments and coordinated efforts to basically enforce illegal cannabis activity and what kind of property that would generate I was interested in hearing more about it and how much funds we can get from that and where there's what kind of partnerships are happening. And if right now is not the time to go into that level of detail, we can follow up. Council member Rick, I'll turn it up and I'll give you a high level and then feel free to reach out to me separately if you'd like some more details. Essentially, we met the police identified that the county has been going up enforcement that had different penalties and it was a very straightforward structure based on the number of plants and the weight. So if you're doing an illegal grow, for example, they would go out and they could easily count and just take photos of like you have a hundred illegal plants like this is how much you owe. And so they were able to eliminate a lot of the appeals and they were able to where they were estimating certain things like, all right, well, you've been in violation for six months and penalties could be based on that six months of timeline. There was arguments, well, those plants aren't six months old and so it got complicated. They went to that specific approach and they have had way fewer appeals of their violations that they've had. So it's made that process go faster and they've been able to really identify here's exactly how much it is that you owe and we've got the documentation to show it. So we're looking at restructuring that and actually partnering with the county because they already have a unit that is set up that does this. In fact, they identified a location within the city limits and at least this was how it was called to my attention. They identified a location within the city limits and they reached out to say, hey, are you undergoing any permit process for these guys and we've got this location, we said, no, we're not. So then they went there and that, at least on the planning side, initiated the conversation. So they would then, we would then partner with that group at the county to assist with the enforcement and they would be able to, we could cover some of those costs that they have but then the violation revenue would come into us. So that's essentially it in a nutshell. Great, thank you so much. Maybe I'll follow up, I'm interested in learning more. Sure, thank you. Thank you, Council Member. I have Vice Mayor Bruner. Thank you so much, Mayor Myers. Thank you for the update and now I want to get a light blue blazer recovery design grant that went out the card. Will there be updates on that? We'll come to council with updates on that. We did receive 60 submissions to the call for artists. So it's pretty exciting. And we have, yeah, it's really exciting. And we have over 36 panelists who are going to help us review and it's a whole cross-section of artists, downtown organizations, other stakeholders, business representatives, just sort of across the community who are really gonna help us look at all these proposals and come up with the shortlist for the book of ideas. So we will come back to council and report on that to you and we have a pretty robust process. Thank you, I just loved that idea of incorporating the arts in its many forms into the recovery process and specifically with, yeah. So thank you for that. Thank you, Vice Mayor. And as I was leaving my home today and I looked down what I was wearing, I'm like, did I subconsciously dress to coordinate with my presentation? Could be. Any other council member questions on this item? Not seeing any. Well, Laura again, I appreciate it. And it's really nice to, it's just nice to be able to check it. There's so many big projects and so much work going on and you guys are just doing so much that it's really nice to sort of have it all condensed in a fairly short format. I think it gives us a great tool to talk to people about what's going on in the city and also just provides a really great way to kind of see the overlapping with regards to the three priority areas. So it's really helpful to see it in this graphic, graphic, graphic pool kind of layout and a little more engaging in the Excel and all that. So appreciate the conversion. And all the questions that you guys had, whether it's something that is currently in our first narrative report, or more details about workforce development, give me a little bit more about the cannabis side. We just launched the art program. Those are the types of things that even if they don't show up in the narrative report, they're on that list. So that was kind of, that's the way for it to prompt you and to be able to ask us, well, what about this one? If it didn't make this quarterly report, what's going on with it? So this is exactly the type of interaction that we were hoping the reports would invoke with you. So we appreciate that. Great. Thank you. I'll go ahead and take this out for public comment. I'm not seeing any hands raised at this point. So this will be on item number 39, the interim recovery plan update. Okay, I'm not seeing any. So I'll take it back to council and I would look for a motion to accept the first court and we require your support. And I see Vice Mayor Bruner followed by council member Cummings. Yes, I'd like to make a motion to accept first on the city's re-envision Santa Cruz strategy, a 12 to 18 month interim recovery plan and provide, well, we've provided, see. I've recommended, thank you. Thank you for all the work. And I'll second the motion. Okay, thank you. So we have a motion by Vice Mayor Bruner, second by council member Cummings to accept the first quarterly progress report on the city's re-envision Santa Cruz strategy. And can we have a roll call those please? Council Member Watkins. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Boulder. Thank you so much, Laura. We've got one more item tonight. And I think we'll power through and get this done and then we've got oral communications. So next up is item number 40, vacant storefront activation pilot program downtown Tops. And this is a budget adjustment. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, this is an item you want to comment on. Now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Our presenter is Rebecca Unitt, David McCormick and Bonnie Lipscomb, all from the economic development department. And this is to authorize the creation of a vacant storefront activation program in downtown San Cruz. Adopt a resolution of proving a budget adjustment and economic development trust funds to fund the six month pilot program and authorize the city manager or his or her designate to execute in the form approved by the city attorney any leases, licensees or any other such agreements, documents or administrative duties necessary for the implementation of the downtown Tops program. And I'll turn it over to Bonnie. Thanks mayor and good afternoon mayor and members of the council. It's good to see you again. I'm really excited to kick off this item. Rebecca Unitt and I will be giving the presentation. I'm going to just provide sort of the initial context for this program and how this fits into our larger recovery efforts. Laura obviously just finished a great overview of our interim recovery plan and this is part of that plan. So I'll give that context of what we've kind of done so far through the pandemic and then Rebecca is going to go into the details of the program and then we'll conclude by sort of going back to sort of what the timeline next steps are and then the recommendation. With that Rebecca if you could go to the next slide. So you've seen this slide before I'm just sort of bringing it back because we are moving a little bit along the timeline. March to May of last year we were really in survival rescue mode and immediate needs, deferments, our own sort of city leases. Some of the kickoff programs were vitalization programs we had including our microloan program into the stabilization, more substantial assistance, SBA loans and now we're into just starting the recovery and rebuilding and 2021 and beyond and I'll go into just a little bit of detail on that. Just to review, I don't want to go into the details of these, you all have seen them before but these are some of the efforts we did city-wide. So it's not just our department, this is across the city with support across the departments including the city attorney's office. Residential and commercial eviction moratoriums, rental assistance, rent deferments for city tenants, city utility and parking fee payment flexibility, alternative city pack, pay schedules, the city executive order, delivery fees, insurance and right out the way just to name a few. That we were working on in addition to that and sort of that middle zone stabilization and just start the room and for businesses out there we still have some of those elements particularly if you need hand sanitizer we have that for refills. We kicked off over and really it's been pretty amazing to see the number of businesses that have already repaid our resilience microloan program. We have almost I think a third that have repaid that funding already which is pretty incredible. Our temporary COVID outdoor expansion program where we have over 90 businesses participating currently we are actually working on the permanent expansion program hope to bring that to you early summer sometime in the next couple of months. Our virtual program which really takes retailers across Santa Cruz who don't have an online presence really works with the entrepreneurship program at UCSD to get them online so that they can have an e-commerce business and then of course the holiday campaign collaboration with the downtown association shop Santa Cruz shop local and all of the shop local campaign which we're continuing round two now going forward. And then rebuilding as I mentioned that developing the permanent Parkland program launching which we did last month the expansion of our revolving loan fund made possible through the grant that National Development Council apply for on behalf of the whole county so we can leverage that up to a really expanded flexible financing for businesses that need up to four and a half million five million within our city. Ongoing shop Santa Cruz campaign and banners and this one's also reflective of the economic recovery council recommendations for us to coordinate on countywide. We've been meeting with ERC and businesses across the county to really share in some of the recovery efforts for consistency from the loan to the shop local campaigns and hoping to be able to see some of this in both English and Spanish countywide. City Arts Recovery Design Program as Council Member Bruner mentioned is up and running and a partnership that we have with SBDC, the Clicks to Bricks incubator accelerator for retail is really an expansion concept of the get virtual program. So we're excited for that to be launched soon of getting businesses online and providing them business support as they go forward. And so then we turn to sort of the downtown pops and a vacant storefront activation program and Rebecca's gonna go into detail but I wanna provide just a little bit of context of why downtown, you know, obviously the pandemic has hit the entire city but when we looked particularly at the downtown economy we realized that the downtown really stands alone. Not only is it the heart of our community where we have the greatest concentration of businesses. We also have the greatest concentration of businesses in a very dense area. And along Pacific Avenue is where you see that greatest vacancy rate and you really experience some of the biggest impact. Obviously that door expansion that many of the restaurants have been have really helped to activate our downtown streets. But if you look, we have, I think it's over 18 vacancies on Pacific Avenue alone. It's really high in the downtown and we really wanna support those businesses. You have that impact of when you start to have a number of vacancies people, you know are going to impact their experience when they come downtown. We wanna really help our existing businesses thrive and help that long-term viability of downtown and sustainability. When we look at sales tax in addition to vacancy rate you also see the largest number of businesses with the biggest sales tax decline over the last year. It's over 31% in the downtown that's really reflective of those vacancies and those businesses that have had to close. Our interim recovery plan that you approved last November really reflects that. Focus on the importance of our downtown for our community and you really said, you know this is one of our focus areas that we really need to put a lot of effort around recovery. So attracting and retaining businesses and supporting long-term investment in downtown is really what this program is all about. It's reducing some of that risk particularly for new business ventures. It is a really tough time to start a business a new business during the pandemic. So this reduces the risk for those businesses and it provides a little flexibility and enables property owners landlord to take that risk because they know they're at least going to get a minimum rent guaranteed by the city. So I won't go into the details of that but I did wanna put that context of why downtown why this program now and how that fits into our larger recovery efforts. And with that I'll turn it over to Rebecca to really go into some of our program goals and then some of the great. Thank you, Bonnie. Rebecca unit, business liaison for the city of Santa Cruz. I'm really excited to give you an overview of this program that we've put together. So downtown POPs are vacant star fund activation program. We have three major goals here with this program. First and foremost, helping to stabilize the downtown is one of our core commercial areas in the city. We're really looking at finding a way to support businesses towards a permanent installation in the downtown through some of these temporary activations. A major factor in a successful commercial district is having a low vacancy rate. And then fortunately we've suffered a lot of losses in the downtown as a result of the pandemic. So being able to fill these spaces is really gonna create the vibrancy that the existing businesses need and can build off of. And then looking at reducing barriers to entry. As Bonnie stated, it's a really risky environment right now for new businesses to get started. So if we can help lower some of those barriers and create some stability for potential businesses, it's gonna be a really good resource to them to get underway. And then we're looking at maintaining downtown, creating that exciting and dynamic post pandemic retail environment, hoping to get some fresh faces into these spaces, getting entrepreneurs that maybe haven't been able to access downtown and Pacific Avenue because of the high rental rates or just not having that long business experience, being able to give them an opportunity to test out their concept here on Pacific Avenue. And similarly, really encouraging local entrepreneurship, attracting women and people of color business owners into these spaces, and giving businesses an opportunity to really test pilot some of their concepts where they might not be able to get their foot in the door with the landlord previously, just if they don't have that experience. To give you a picture of what we're dealing with downtown in terms of vacancies, some of the closures that we've experienced, this map shows about 18 St. Pacific Avenue alone. And it also shows 37 vacancies in the downtown as itself. So I've highlighted a few of our Pacific Avenue vacancies here just to give you a picture of what these spaces look like. Some of these have been vacant prior to the pandemic, have been long running vacancies. They could really use that reinvestment and activation. Some of them are the results of the pandemic directly, just businesses not being able to hang on. And then we also have opportunities like some of our brand new development at 1547 Pacific that opened during the pandemic and didn't even have a chance to really get their feet underway. So looking at which of these spaces makes the most sense for this activation and the property owners that are interested in taking part of this program, being able to fill some of these holes and really support the businesses that are on those blocks by giving them some good new neighbors that they can partner with. So the concept here for the downtown pops is what we're calling a master lease program. So with the master lease, the city would be the lease holder with the property owners participating. We would have a lease with the property owners that allows us to sublet those spaces to individual tenants. And it would also provide indemnification of both parties, which is really important for the property owners and for the city has lease holder. We, you know, our ultimate goal in downtown is to have long-term tenants to use and the property owners absolutely want to have that as well. So being able to have the opportunity if a permanent tenant comes along to be able to free up a space that we might be using for this program for a long-term tenant, we're gonna have that in the lease agreement. Once we have those leases executed, we're issuing an RFP for prospective tenants and we would execute license agreements with those tenants to sublet the space. We're here to have a six-month lease on these spaces, which will give, it'll run from June, or sorry, July through December. So it'll give us the great summer season and into the holidays, which is really the peak time for downtown that we need to have some coverage and activation in there. The city will be collecting rents on behalf of our sublet tenants and paying it to the landlords and we'll be monitoring the tenant sales production and doing percentage of sales lease for those spaces. And then we'll show you some examples here of how our percentage rent and our minimum and maximum rents work to really illustrate how this format goes. I'll get into those details a little bit further. But on the tenant selection side, we're looking at creating an online application process similar to what we've used for our other programs, the temporary outreach expansion program, as well as our micro loan program. We'll have that available in both English and Spanish and we're gonna be doing a lot of outreach to broader community partners, really trying to get a very diverse applicant pool here. And we'll also be sure to provide one-on-one support for businesses who might need assistance with the application. If they don't have access online or if they just need more help figuring out how to apply, we'll be happy to provide that assistance. And then in reviewing the applications, we'll have a panel of representatives from the Downtown Association, the Downtown Management Corporation, as well as our Economic Development staff. And we'll be looking for candidates that are a good fit and are ready to move into a space and we'll look at the appropriate locations of what we have available that'll meet their business operations. We're really giving priority here for women and people of color. And then if businesses that do apply are not eligible for the program, we're going to help them be ready for the next round if there's another opportunity that opens up, if they need assistance with their business plan, we can help connect them to the SBDC. If they need any other resources, we'll find them the right fit for what they need so that we can help them be successful. And then also consider other options if they're maybe fit for a longer term lease or something like that, we can help get them connected in that way as well. Really want to be driving strong businesses into spaces where they can be successful. I'm an example of how this could work with a 1500 square foot space. So if we have 1500 square foot space, the city is guaranteeing a minimum rent of $1 per square foot. So that would be $1,500. And then a maximum monthly rent to the property owner of $2 per square foot for a total of $3,000 a month in rent. And just to give you some perspective on that, our downtown retail rents are typically around $2.70 right now. They can be upwards of $3 or more. So $2 is a pretty fair rate considering the circumstances that we're in right now. So in this example, we've got $45,000 gross income from the business, 5% that'll collect us $2,250, which equals to about $1.50 per square foot rate. And so to get to that $2 maximum amount, the city would then guarantee $750 towards that gap. An example of if a business is sort of having an overperforming month or a very successful month here, if they're collecting $65,000 in gross income, our 5% of sales would be $3,250 or $2.17 per square foot. So over our maximum rents of $2. What we would do in this instance is the city wouldn't need to provide any guaranteed rent because they're already covering that. And instead, we would be collecting that $250 reserve surplus there and holding that in account for the business to either be able to apply to their rent later on if they have a low performing month or be able to hold that for them if they need for their long-term growth. So we can help if they're looking for a longer term space, we can help hold that money and they can be able to use that for their next step. And then in our final example here, this is just that case where they're having an underperforming month, but we do have that reserve available. So as an example, they were only able to bring in 23,000. So their 5% of sales is $1,150. So the city provides the dollar minimum guarantee and we can provide the reserve of $250 that they had. And so they're able to get up to a rental amount of $2,900. So it's just under that $2 max, but we were able to cover a bit of that gap with the reserve that they had from prior month. And so I will turn it over to Bonnie for the timeline in my steps. Thanks Rebecca. So an overview that is just like many of our programs during the pandemic, we're trying to get up and running pretty quickly. And we do see the importance of looking at a six month timeline, both for recovery, but the idea that we're trying to reduce the risk, but we want to evaluate the program starting in month three, month four. And if there are businesses that are doing really well, we don't need to be supporting them and making it the difference or we probably actually already haven't because we haven't needed to subsidize, but we also don't need to be in the equation. So we want to be able to, for those businesses that are doing well, have the business negotiate for future lease terms directly with the property owner. So this is really a sort of a stimulus program and recovery program. And that's really what it's geared towards. So we're really looking at for the month of May, if you approve this today to finalize the lease template and the license agreement, which we would most likely use that format for our subtendents. And we secure the locations from property owners. We've been in discussions with the majority of the property owners that have vacancies downtown, we received some really good feedback about the program as well. And then we've also informally been obviously both working with the Downtown Association and the Downtown Management Corporation and just getting feedback from prospective businesses and entrepreneurs who have heard about this program and are really interested to apply. So we'll have the formal process of soliciting and securing tenants. Rebecca went through the details of what's involved in that. And then our goal is to hit the ground running at the beginning of July with initiating the six month leases. We'll start reviewing, as I mentioned, October, November, the performance of those leases and then come back to you to sort of tell you kind of how the program's going, what our initial recommendations are for the program if we recommend any of them to be continued and what's happening with the businesses. So that's our overview of the timeline and the next steps over the next six to eight months of the program. And next slide. And so the recommendation before you today, which the mayor read at the beginning, is to approve the program for Downtown Santa Cruz, approve the resolution, approving the budget adjustment for the program. And I'll stop here just a second to just mention the ED trust fund. And if you're not familiar with the ED trust fund, I know a number of you are, but for our new members on council, the Economic Development Trust Fund was created in the wake of the dissolution of the redevelopment agency. And it was specifically created by the city council so that the city that we can continue to invest in our community and economic development projects and initiatives in order to create jobs and provide tax revenue for the community. So this is a fund that specifically set aside for economic development initiatives. And this will be our proposal is to come from this fund to fund this program. The range for that program of up to 200,000, it could be substantially less. We wanted to give you the maximum of what the program could be, depending on if all of the businesses in the program performed extremely low, which we aren't anticipating. And we had to provide that maximum guarantee of a dollar per square foot for all of the leases. We wanted to make sure that we were fully covering the program, but we do expect it to come under the total program costs that we're asking for the budget adjustment. The funding is available on the ED trust fund. And then finally, we're asking for a motion to authorize the city manager's designee to execute any of the leases license agreements or related program documents to continue on this program under our pretty tight timeline. So that's the recommendation before you today. And Rebecca and I are happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you, Bonnie and Rebecca for that great presentation. I'm gonna go ahead and see if there are questions from council members. I see council member Cummings, council member Cullentary Johnson, council member Watkins, council member Brown and vice mayor Bruder. Thank you, mayor. And I just wanna thank some of the property owners who's businesses are in vacant, but it'll really give some people who wanna give their businesses a shot and opportunity to try it in a commercial space. And it's so exciting for what potentially may be to come and that the city can help support small local businesses to kinda launch themselves. So it's really exciting. And I just wanna express my appreciation as well for really explaining why there's so much an emphasis on the downtown. Something that I was kind of wanting to better understand and you all explained it really well that it's where we're seeing the greatest thing and two rates. And so I just really wanna appreciate great highlighting that so that, especially when members of the community are reaching out to us so we can give them a clear answer as to why there's so much focus on downtown businesses. I did have two really short questions. The first question is I was wondering is there any, well actually I'll ask that question next. I was just curious how many, because you all mentioned that there are 18 properties that are vacant. And I was just wondering how many of those, the people who you've done outreach to have expressed interest. I know that some of those properties that are vacant are gonna be demolished when the Laurel Street project goes up. But I was just curious if there are other, like how many of the property owners are really interested in this program. Yeah, thank you, Councilmember Cummings, for that question. We've had a series of stakeholder groups in the downtown with brokers and sort of representing the property owners to just sort of get a sense of how receptive are they to this program and this concept and overall they're very receptive. So at the beginning we were talking about, we hope to be able to enter into anywhere between eight and 12 leases over this period which we think will make a big impact in the downtown. So we've had a really good response. So we're pretty hopeful that we'll be able to do that. Thanks, and then I was just wondering if there's any type of business that's being targeted. So, I know there's retail and there's like restaurants and food service. And I know that there's also discussions around, well, retail hasn't been doing so well. And so I'm just wondering if there's any, you know, does any attempt to target or whether it's just gonna be open to any and all kind of businesses. So I'm gonna let Rebecca answer that, but I will say as part of the RFP effort, we're gonna be encouraging the greatest response so that we can look at, what are these creative ideas? Sort of similar to the CART program. CART program is like, we're opening it up. We have ideas of our own and we've certainly received some ideas on working with some of our creative partners both at the Downtown Association, Downtown Management Corporation who also had some great ideas. And then Event Santa Cruz and some other folks out there. So we've been, a lot of things have been percolating, but we don't want to discourage people from applying because we just think that creativity is what's needed right now during the pandemic. We will be vetting the proposals that come in with what's in the downtown so that we can sort of have this complimentary use. With that, I've probably said too much. I'm gonna turn it over to Rebecca who may have some specific ideas to share. Yeah, thanks, Bunny. I think very similar to what Bunny was saying, I think we're really interested in creating a good mix of business types in the downtown. So complimentary retail to the businesses that we already have there. We've always had hopes of having children's toy stores there. We've had a pop-up of that over the holidays. Just things like that that are maybe filling the gaps that we don't already have downtown. And then the experiential retail and the experiential businesses is really, so people have exciting ideas like that that we can get behind or definitely looking for those. I think whatever we can get into this space with a really quick zoning process and get them up and running is gonna be good, but definitely can create some creative ideas. And I think we've always had a really interesting food business industry here. And so if there's opportunities for a pop-up restaurant, things like that, or any of the sort of artisan food makers that we could get into spaces that could be a really fun thing too. So just looking at what people are proposing and how it fits within the downtown. Tell us some of your commentary, John. Bonnie and Rebecca for the work on this and the presentation. I love the innovation and thinking out of the box. I had some follow-up questions. I'm really excited to see the focus on women-owned and people-colored businesses. And I'm just wondering if you could share a little bit about what that targeted approach, what that targeted outreach approach looks like and sort of along the same lines, what are some of the criteria that the selection committee will be looking at and what would make someone ineligible? I heard you speak to that, Rebecca, that it's someone's ineligible. And so those are kind of lumped together and then I have another question. This is targeted outreach. Definitely looking at some of our community partner organizations that maybe aren't in the traditional business support atmosphere. So we tend to really look at our chambers and the DTA, which is a fantastic partner because we're going to be relying on heavily for this. But looking at the NAACP or Biosynitos or Community Bridges or any of those partners that are really reaching a broader audience than we might reach within just our sort of business support silo and just trying to get entrepreneurs from outside of our normal networks. And then in terms of the eligibility or sort of what we're looking for in the application process, typically in these processes, we'll ask for some projections of what they're going to be looking at in terms of sales, what capital they already have at the beginning to help them get started just so we can know that they're going to be able to make the rental rates with how we've got it structured. They're going to be able to have sort of a good on-ramp to get going. They have a base level of financial readiness and then that they have a concept that they've thought through and they've thought that together. And Bonnie, I have no comment to add. Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is that depending ultimately on the spaces that we have, it's also what is that complementary use that also works for that space? So for example, there are a few spaces, multiple tenants that have a non-compete cause. So there may be a great idea that we can't fit in a space if we don't have the right space for it or if there's a non-compete cause for that type of use. So we're going to be looking at it and that's why it's really exciting to have the opportunity to have multiple spaces. So hopefully for those ideas, we can find the right space for them. But there will be just by the virtue of the number of spaces and the uses, some limitations that do govern what we can select for the spaces. And I'll also say another partner that we have that we really relied heavily on during the pandemic has been the Economic Recovery Council and all of those participating businesses across the county and a support organization. As we're working through the Recovery Council recommendations, we'll be looking at those as well and coordinating with them to provide support across the county on this. Okay, great. And then my other question is, so it's a six month pilot for that business if successful and if they've met the metrics to stay beyond the six months, transitioning them out is, if any, but what is the role of the city in helping those businesses that weren't so successful to find a landing place? Just to clarify, because I'm starting to answer for if they were successful. So maybe I'll just actually approach both. So if a business is really successful, we don't need to be in the middle. We don't need to be in the equation. So as we're evaluating three, four months and if they have hit on their return as $2 or greater, there's no reason for us to even be engaged anymore because we're not subsidizing anything. So we would encourage at that point, and that's why we have built in there those termination clauses of 60 and 90 days, is that if they're doing really well, we'll start that process and saying, coordinating them with the property owner landlord and really encouraging them to have a lease going forward on their own. If it's a business that's not doing so well, that's part of sort of what we do in our partnership with SBDC now. And try to get them that additional business support to see if that can bring their sales up. And that'll be part of what we come back to you next November, December with sort of an evaluation of the program, seeing if they met with SBDC, if their sales in this brief period were able to increase because of that, what their plan is, and then we might make some recommendations for a longer period or might get them into some more support services at SBDC. Thank you so much. I have Council Member Watkins. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you to our Economic Development Team. And just for bringing this to us, I think it's so awesome and really a great opportunity to incubate potential. And that's fantastic, as well as we kind of envision our downtown. And we know downtowns need that periodically. And this is one of those times. Probably no surprise to you is one of the things that I have, maybe a question or sort of an idea around is that if we're gonna target women, particularly women of color, we have to support them with their childcare needs. And it's hard for them to see themselves as being overgeneralized, but for many people who are struggling to stay home as well as to pursue entrepreneurship and have kids without childcare, it seems really difficult to imagine that being possible. And one of my, how we could potentially see if some of the vacant spaces could be pop-up after school or childcare facilities, potentially, and or other locations and really trying to complement and encourage of those female entrepreneurs. And by doing so, I think what really offer a lot of opportunity and support for them as well as to encourage the childcare industry, which you know is really struggling as well. So I don't know if you had any thoughts about that, but that was something that kind of came to mind when I was kind of hearing the presentation, particularly the target population that we're speaking. And I had another question, but it escaped to me. So it'll have to come back to me. So I was just, I was just on that one, but welcome your thoughts and or we can have further discussion later. So I'll just give you my initial thoughts and then Rebecca may have some more detail. So part of our prioritization is for Pacific Avenue. However, there are many more vacancies downtown than just Pacific. And obviously on Pacific, we have the retail requirements for that ground floor retail. But I do think that there could be an opportunity, particularly if we had a council direction to include looking at a companion pop up around childcare. We would focus it, our preference would be to focus that off specific, but in the downtown. Perfect. Well, I'll go ahead and at the time make that as part of the motion. And I did remember my last bit. And I'm speaking on behalf of my 10 year old daughter, who was saying how she'd love to see an indoor or some sort of place where you could have a skate park in our downtown, particularly an indoor one. She said, it's like if it's raining or whatever. And as a big specific, she said that would be rad. So I know that kids don't really feel they can have a voice in this, but since I have one who has shared with me this like many, many times, I'm speaking on her behalf. So this is very zangely. And that's it. Council Member, Council Mayor Bruner and then Council Member Callentary-Johnson. And I'll take it off for public comment. Thank you. And I first, I'll just second Evie's request. That's a really great priority. And I know how awesome it is for these skate parks that we have been able to develop in Santa Cruz. Okay, I have two questions, I think. I was really glad to see the priority for women owned and BIPOC owned businesses. And I'm wondering if, it sure would be nice to think about living wage jobs, well-paying jobs as part of that as well to prioritize enterprises that intend to pay living wages. Obviously, economic activity and vitality is measured by activation of those sites. And I think that's really important and certainly sales tax revenues, but also by income generating opportunities for workers. So I would hope that we could maybe include that as well in the priority, just in terms of preference. We have a living wage ordinance on our books and we have for almost 20 years now, actually more than 20. And so we do, and we have made a commitment, I think just more generally through health and health policies and questions of equity that we want to attract those kinds of jobs. So I think it would be great if we could at least put that in there and make it clear that that's a priority for us. And then I have a, so that's a kind of a question if there's anything that you wanna say about it from the staff's perspective before we move into deliberations and a motion. And then the other question I have is related to the rent, the question of the downtown property owners, because I guess I'm wondering, so the intention is to support the businesses. And I think that's absolutely critical right now. And so I do wanna, you know, to support this. I'm wondering though how, so some of these businesses, these storefronts have been empty either for a while now or have never been occupied. And somehow the developers are not, or excuse me, the property owners are not losing, they're not being foreclosed upon. There's, you know, so there's some indication that they're able to carry on in this context. And so I'm just wondering how that works in terms of subsidizing business, you know, property owners that may not need it. I've said this many times and, you know, I will say it here in this context that, you know, I think that our job as a city government and elected representative is to represent the public interest. And I think that increased economic activity certainly is in the public interest. But I also, and so, but I'm not sure to what extent that should involve subsidizing, you know, property owners, commercial property owners rent. So I, you know, I just feel a little uncomfortable with it. And I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, and I know there were some in the staff report, but just how you're envisioning that there are kind of differences in the different property owners ability to kind of manage with a lower or, you know, reduced or no rent. I'll just make a few general comments. Again, Rebecca may have some additional thoughts on this, but for the majority of the spaces that we're looking at, we are also focusing on some of the smaller spaces, which tend to have some of the higher turnover in the downtown. Some of the larger spaces are a bit of a challenge. And unless we look at doing license agreements and having multiple subtenants in there, that could be an interesting concept, but it's also an unusual concept. And it's one that many landlords and property owners aren't really gonna be willing to take a risk on, because one, they don't have expertise in that area, or it's not a traditional tenant, you know, to have to really handle or manage multiple tenants in a space. So I think we're looking at some of these non-traditional ideas, and it's not necessarily a matter of subsidizing the owner, it's all about reducing the risk so that they take that opportunity, and we really establish what could be some long-term viable options for the future of retail in the downtown. So I think we're doing a little experimentation, really trying to go creative, and really stretch the envelope of what can be possible in some of these tenant spaces as we move forward. I mean, Rebecca mentioned it earlier, we're looking at some experience for retail. I mean, we recognize that downtowns are changing with the impact of online sales. So we're looking at what can be some non-traditional ideas or concepts that landlords, when they look at the surface of it, if it's not a tried and true, they're gonna be a little risk-adverse on that front. So that's where we're putting some of our focus for this going forward. Obviously, we're balancing that because we're very conscious of, particularly in this time of the commitment of city revenue. So we are really trying to balance that. But we're also looking at the majority of the spaces that are going to be a good fit for pop-ups. And that's not every space in the downtown. So it is really going to be a balanced approach. There are some spaces that may just not really, unless we can come up with a super creative idea, be a really good fit for this program. Thank you. So I just, I appreciate the response. And I'm trying to just grapple with the tension there between supporting these potential new businesses and the creativity and the innovation that we obviously would love to see in that part. So I appreciate your response. And I also just wanted to say that I am, I really support the idea that Council Member Watkins brought up about childcare. And there may be other uses in some of those spaces, maybe off of Pacific Avenue, that would be important for other purposes for community needs. So thanks. Yeah. Thank you for that. I just had one other thought on this that we've sort of talked back and forth. That's also as part of the thinking that went into establishing the maximum monthly, you know, square foot at $2 a square foot. There are some landlords right now in the downtown that are getting potentially more than that. So we're not an option that someone's going to jump on and be like, oh my gosh, here's all the free money. I mean, from an owner already, we are setting it, what we think is enough to get interest, but it's not something that is going to be in itself compelling for property owners who may have had long-term vacancies. Thank you, Bonnie. Next, I have Vice Mayor Brunner. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rebecca and Bonnie for the I've received correspondences. Brown has brought up in, it could, you know, the concern of it to property owners, but I really have to say that I'm really glad in the presentation, you kind of took a step out and showed that this is a piece in the whole picture of a lot of the community support programs and the current small business support programs. And that this, you know, I think it's in the, that this supports those small businesses and the health and wellbeing of the neighborhood in addition, you know, to the properties when they're vibrant and activated, we see a whole lot less of, you know, some of the conditions that are downtown and it really helps the small businesses that are hanging on by threads right now. We, you know, I keep track of the businesses as part of my job and even though we have more vacancies downtown, 17 of those businesses have left downtown during the pandemic. And, you know, some of them moved consolidated to their other locations, some went to online only, others closed down completely, you know, and I think it was Council Member Cummings brought up the Laurel Pacific Front Development that has started there. So, you know, we had six businesses on the 800 block of Pacific Avenue just there that had to leave, you know, they were on limited leases and some moved avatar imports, for example, moved down the street further in Pacific Avenue. But, you know, this has so much potential and I'm glad that all those little details were worked out in terms of the length of time, the six month pilot program, the tenant reserve fund, all of that. And so maybe some of the questions I've received is you could just quickly talk about downtown commission, downtown management corporation, downtown association and the difference there in those three and why it was not brought to the downtown commission or why that was not mentioned. You take it to the downtown commission but historically the downtown commission has is largely responses to the downtown parking district. And so I think over recent years we've been really engaged with them I should say actually even during the pandemic without their expansion program but typically it is around sort of the parking district and in fact the public works department staff that commission and a lot of what they approve on are related to transportation and parking specific issues. So that's why we didn't take it to the downtown commission but we're actually are happy to, you know, sort of set it and give a presentation to them. I will say sort of the overlap we have with the downtown management corporation and the downtown association is that some of the commissioners on the downtown commission are also downtown businesses and are very familiar with the program because we've had really active outreach on this with the downtown association and with the downtown management corporation. The downtown management corporation and I'm looking at you council member Bruner but I know you know this I should just look in general but the downtown management corporation is a property based improvement district in the downtown and it includes representatives of property owners and downtown businesses and then the city representatives and it's an assessment district that actually helps support and funds the ambassador program that the downtown association runs and the downtown association is a business improvement district and that assessment is paid by business licensees and the business assessment district that businesses pay to be part of that and it's largely a management marketing and it's part of the budget at the downtown association so they're really focused on downtown and marketing downtown where I would say the overlap with the downtown management corporation is it's often additionally focused on safety and security and sort of larger property based concerns. And any assessment fees that would be assessed on these properties during this program who would pay that? If though it would work the same as it does now so the city would not pay those fees if the property owner it's interesting right now because many property owners will pass those on to the tenants but not all do so whatever the system in place that's worked now that would be the additional charges if those are passed on to the businesses that they pay now. So for some properties they do as far as the downtown management corporation for those property based assessments they pay those on behalf of all the tenants and sometimes then that becomes part of their camp fees so their common area maintenance fees so those would still be what the tenant would pay on top of the rent. So the city is coming in and we are guaranteeing a minimum up to a dollar per square foot for rent but we're not paying any of the other related fees. Great, thank you. And just to add on that we can, we would prorate as well for the shortened time period some of them are annual fees and so we can prorate those so if they're only paying for the portion that they're using. And council member Watkins mentioned her daughter Evie. I've had the same dream for 1117 Pacific Avenue, the old logos building for a roller skate rink. So, but yes, I know that some of the smaller locations are being identified for this program and really on that equity of diversity and business types and women and BIPOC community entrepreneurs. So thank you. Those are the end of my questions. Thank you, vice mayor. Okay, I will take it out to the public now for public comment. And I see that we have two callers, one ends in the number one, four, two, four. Please press star six and you'll be unmuted. Hi, this is Jorian Wilkins calling in from the Downtown Association of Santa Cruz. You can hear me? Yes, we can. Oh, great. Well, I'm really heartened by the enthusiasm of the council in your comments and definitely appreciate the initiative of staff and proposing this exciting recovery initiative for downtown earlier that we really believe this program will help fill downtown vacant spaces which have increased by over 20% last year. This program is needed to keep our neighborhood activated and vibrant, discourage the negative behaviors that are attracted to unoccupied space and to enable our community's entrepreneurs to bring their energy downtown to be part of a building. The heart of Santa Cruz will be in the next generation of community businesses. In short, we represent the existing businesses who are already have lived through this pandemic and it's a lot easier to run a thriving business next to another thriving business. It's a lot harder to run a thriving business next to a ported up window. So thank you very, very much to staff and the council. Thank you so much for calling in. Next up is caller ending in number 0030. Next and you'll be able to speak. This is Rafa Sanamsel. First off, I just wanted to say the downtown POPs program, that's what it's called, sounds really great. It seems like a really good opportunity for our community. What I wanted to add was, I would hope that there is a way for us to look at trying to provide more opportunities for folks to get out of their cars and for new businesses who maybe wouldn't necessarily be able to afford some of the parking fees that they normally might have to pay. In the course of this pilot program, maybe there's a way for the city to explore eliminating some of the parking fees that might have to get paid. For example, if a storefront was converted, had a different use type or something like that. It just seems like this is a good opportunity to explore, offering opportunities for businesses that wouldn't necessarily be able to afford to succeed without some parking pilot programs. And it could be a way to help explore the possibility of decoupling the costs of parking for businesses from the use space. We might end up having to have just certain types of businesses that can sit downtown because of the kinds of fees that those businesses have to pay. And if there are ways to have alternative structures for these businesses to test out what they're doing, I think that's great for- Thank you. Okay, I will bring this back to council for deliberation and we'll look for the motion here. I'm going to grab my agenda. So I will look for a motion from council as the council member Watkins and council member Calhari Johnson. And again, this is the vacant storefront activation pilot program downtown Pops and three items to the motion. Council member Watkins. I'm happy to move the recommendation as presented in the agenda report. Shall I go ahead and read that, Mayor? Yeah, please go ahead. Okay, so my motion would be to authorize the creation of a vacant storefront activation program in downtown Santa Cruz to adopt a resolution approving a budget adjustment from the economic development trust fund to fund the six month pilot program to authorize the city manager or his or her designee to execute in a form approved by the city attorney in elices, licenses or other such agreements, documents or administrative duties necessary for implementation of the downtown Pops program. And then I have one additional add to the motion, which is to direct staff to look into the reuse of other vacant space for pop-up childcare. Mayor Calhari Johnson. Jim, and just want to add the comment, just made me think as we're thinking about businesses and types of business we want to attract that it would be great to think about a family oriented environment that youth can run. So just an easy comment made me think, yes, let's think about the families in youth and what would attract families downtown. Thank you. Great. And Council Member Brown and then Council Member Cummings. I just wanted to ask the maker of the motion if you would be willing to add a preference for businesses and enterprises that intend to pay living wages to their employees. We're fine with that. And Council Member Cummings. Yeah, this is just a comment that there might be consideration in some of the, if there's spaces that are maybe not on Pacific Ave, but the art vacant in the downtown area that there might also be consideration for nonprofits that are looking to provide day services for homeless individuals because I know that Recovery Cafe has been interested in trying to find space possibly in the downtown where they can provide day services and provide people who are experiencing homelessness somewhere to go. And I think it could be really beneficial for the downtown if we had a place for some people to go to so that they wouldn't necessarily just be stuck kind of wandering around downtown and occupying some of those spaces. So, and it's an opportunity for those individuals to get connected to services and receive support and potentially, you know, can better, and I just wanted to put that out there that if, I know that Recovery Cafe has reached out a number of times and they might be interested and I hope we can consider somewhere if they may be able to open services and be a part of this program. And also it would be a great pilot since it's just six months. Before we, yeah, because I think, especially with activation and a safe place for families and kids, and I think there could be a storefront with potential for retail if necessary, it's possible to have a pop-up like that. I mean, I know it's sort of a different type of use, but could that also be a potential pop-up opportunity? So you've been talking with Event Santa Cruz about some non-traditional sort of experiential that concept of how do you activate space and potentially bring people down to downtown that don't normally come downtown, you know? So something like that could be something that has a level of interest. So we just have to balance that with leveraging the funding that we have in the program and that minimum rent, because we're trying to balance getting the most leverage and the most spaces filled with the funding that we have. So we kind of need to look at that, but one of our, which we didn't go into detail here, one of our goals also is to help activate. And part of a larger effort that we've had in the downtown for some time is that activation of public spaces. So whether it's indoors or potentially outdoors, we've been looking at both and looking at what are those, what are those really interesting and creative ideas? And certainly roller skating is one of those. My daughter recently has taken up roller skating and just goes everywhere. So I think that's resonating with a lot of folks right now. So I think that's something that we'd be happy to look into. And she would get mad at me if I didn't say, it was actually for skateboarding, because she was like, oh, okay. The roller skating is great too. That is, as you're exploring the potential for that, there's the, we did in partnership with the parks department, I think it's at the Grant Street Park right now, but there could be ways to leverage and partner parks services and programs and partnerships beyond what we have in mind. So anyway, thank you. Okay. That's my last comment, Mayor, thank you. You're muted, Mayor. We have motion, oh, I'm sorry. Council Member Brown, did you have another question or comment? No, you're good. Oh, no, I just didn't lower my hand, sorry. Okay, no worries. We have a motion by Council Member Watkins, seconded by Council Member Calantari-Johnson to go with the staff recommendation of authorizing the creation of a vacant storefront activation program in downtown Santa Cruz, adopt a resolution improving a budget adjustment from the Economic Development Trust Fund to fund the six month pilot program, authorized city manager and his or her designate to execute any of the forms of leases, licenses and agreements as necessary to implement downtown pops program. There was also direction to staff to look for the potential for use of downtown vacant storefronts for childcare services and to express in advertising materials the intent for people who are supporting a living wage as well. I think that captures everything. So we'll go ahead and ask for a roll call vote. If I could just ask for clarification. Council Member Cummings, your comment about consideration for non-profits looking for day services was that just a comment or were you asking to put that in the motion? That was a comment. And I guess I should just ask city staff would, does that need to be a part of the motion or would could non-profits be considered currently as the pop-up understands? We hadn't contemplated that particular use when we were brainstorming, but we certainly were thinking non-profits in general could be eligible depending on what they were proposing for the state. Yeah, I think it's just a comment. I don't think there's a need to include in the motion because it sounds like it's already covered. Okay, great. Do a roll call vote please, Bonnie. Council Member Watkins. Aye. Council Member Johnson. Can you say that again? You were muted, so thank you. Vice Mayor Brunner. The next item tonight is oral communications. So thank you Bonnie and crew for that wonderful program and I have the feeling it'll be wildly successful. Thank you, Mayor. And if I could just say one last thing, I just wanted to acknowledge some of our partners and staff who worked on this. I did mention at the beginning, obviously the Downtown Association, the Downtown Management Corporation, but many of our businesses, stakeholders have given us so much feedback on how to go forward and do this. So I just wanted to acknowledge them and thank them. And then particularly thank Rebecca Unit and actually David McCormick, who wasn't part of the presentation today, but was definitely behind the scenes, brainstorming and coming up with some really great ideas of how to make this program successful. So I just wanted to acknowledge them and thank you, thanks to all of you for your support. Thank you so much, Bonnie. Okay, so the next item we have is oral communications. Mayor, can I ask one final question? Yeah, let's... I was just curious, Bonnie. So when this program gets rolled out, where, like what website or where should people kind of go if they want more information? I'll let Rebecca answer that. Information on to santaacruz.com and we'll make sure to link to that from the main city website. But yeah, we'll be sure to send out to the council that webpage when it's up and running for you all. Thank you. Great. Okay, we'll move on to oral communications tonight and this is a time for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if you want to comment during oral communications. Now is the time to call in. Oral communications, instructions are on your screen. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on today's agenda. And I am looking at our attendees today. I am not seeing any hands. So with that, we will adjourn the meeting. Thank you everyone for attending today and we will see you in a couple of weeks. Good night. Thank you. Bye bye.