 Well, according to one of the clocks, it's time to start. The other one were a little early. Anyway, a call to order the September 29th, 2020 special meeting of the Board of Supervisors. Will the clerk please call the roll. Yes, good morning. Supervisor Leopold here. Friend. Supervisor Friend. Supervisor Coonerty. Hold on, I might be muted here. Give me one second, please. Let's try that again. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. McPherson. Here. And Chair Caput. Here. Okay. We're gonna have a moment of silence and prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. But before I wanna acknowledge Supervisor Ryan Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. As we engage in this moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance, I'd like to ask everyone to keep in their hearts and minds Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did so much for so many people in this country. She was a trailblazer, she ensured rights and was one of the great Supreme Court justices of all time. We should all honor her contribution to this country. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Okay, please join us. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic of our God indivisible with liberty. And do we have any revisions? Chair Caput, there are no revisions today. Okay, thank you. Now we'll go to agenda item number four, public comment, today's agenda. Comments are to the topics on today's agenda. If we could go three minutes, okay. Hey, good morning. Good morning. I believe my comments somehow fit into this agenda which is much shorter than two weeks ago which was over 980 pages. An heir does not become a mistake unless you refuse to correct it. Now John F. Kennedy didn't state who he learned that from but I really like that. So you know, tips to become a better conversationalist. Lesson 10, ask people questions that give them an opportunity to talk about themselves. For example, what the hell is wrong with you? So this might be an example of why I'm divorced. I don't know, could be an example of another, a couple other things. I'm actually here to talk about a couple other subjects. I wanna see what's going on with number 10. I'm just really glad that individuals like myself and others can stand here and talk. I think that's critically important. So that's enough for now. Thank you. Good morning, Chairman Caput. Gary Richard Arnold. Encourage people to rewind their machines and take some notes so they can verify what I'm talking about here. World Health Organization was set up basically to create a world government. The man's name was Brock Chisholm. In fact, he states the statement is to break all ties to religion, family, cultures and homeland. The WHO, the World Health Organization today is run by a red Chinese person married into the hierarchy of the Chinese Communist Party. We find that they are imposing attorney under world government using naturally or man-made disaster. People only need to look at the report from Iron Mountain. It was Agenda 21 that came from the Futures Forum, which you'll see on one of these screens here, Bruce McPherson and Sam Farron. And this is from the Pajaronian. And they talked about the organizers wanted to control all the reading materials. The ghost of Jovis Govals seemed to be there. They only allowed a few questions. They pulled literature from people's hands, et cetera, et cetera. This was the beginning of Agenda 21 that was adopted by this Board of Supervisors under the United Nations. Included support from the New Haven United Nations Association. It's strange that Zach Fran worked for two people from secret societies from New Haven. And both those people are now red Chinese lobbyists. We find also that there's an anonymous donor to Agenda 21. We also know that Margaret Lopez is being supported by an unknown, anonymous billionaire that is outrageous. You guys should be persecuted for conspiracy. And that includes red China. We see that Ryan Coonerty went to the London School of Economics as regionalization of AMBAG, the support for Agenda 21. We've got the Resource Center for Nonviolence Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments, which is no more than a Soviet. The Resource Center for Nonviolence, which has an interchangeable quality, interchangeable members, again, Ryan Coonerty, Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, what they want to do here is what they did in the Soviet Union. Leon Panetta is filthy deep with material going to a communist Chinese agent. That same agent was honored by the Community Foundation itself. They have a huge Lacey Memorial Foundation in honor. Supervisor Caput. Supervisor Caput. Over here. I just wanted to remind the public that this is a special meeting. And although I didn't want to interrupt the previous speaker, I think it's confusing for the other speakers when folks don't follow the rules that you set out and you said it earlier when you were opening your remarks to have the public comment on things that were on this agenda. And so I just wanted to remind folks that this is a special meeting and public comment should be limited to things that are on the agenda. On the agenda. Okay. Point of order. Ground at the County Council is wrong. Good morning. I'm going to try to get this in in three minutes here. I'd like to alert the Santa Cruz County Board about toxic emissions released from the building's structure fires that have produced carcinogenic gases which lead to reproductive birth harm and various other amounts of ailments. A lot of us were exposed to these gases. These gases are common in building materials with polynuclear aromatic compounds found in asphalt roofing and resinous tarpaper installed inside of roofs and walls. Petroleum byproducts have been in our homes as toxic dump stations. When a fire occurs, it affects everyone on planet earth. Structure fires that paralyze with these chemical compounds produce greenhouse gases with a warming potential thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide. And these gases have a potential to stick around for decades. And so we're all exposed to these. So the unethical composition and orchestration of the tactical business structure such as the trade associations like asphalt roofing environmental council representing these material manufacturers requires illusion and the safety and regulation. And so historically governing authorities have been continually lobbied where manipulation is met with passive resistance, subliminal awareness and dissociative accountability. These trade associations lean towards a report from 1985 which didn't include any combustion science for emissions discovery. To this day, they don't report this product data. The indicators of climate change in California report endorsed by the governor office of environmental health hazard assessment and California EPA in 2018, two years ago states that wildfires and emissions from fossil fuels are the leading causes of greenhouse gases but they completely failed to identify these structure fires as some of the worst contributors. And so intensive exposure of these gases has occurred in the front lines with the Cal firefighters and evacuating residents with localized exposure in nearby communities and neighboring counties and also of concern because we have the most toxic air in the world as it was recorded locally. So due to COVID-19, there's also no chemical cartridge respirators available in local stores and have intensified the risk factor exposure significantly. So a call made yesterday to nurse practitioners in the area at a childbirth center near Dominican hospital said they'd been very busy with 10 births per week. This is probably not unusual. This is one place I've informed several midwife agencies in the area to open up the conversation with their clients and the supervisor at the ABC supply, one of the main distributors with these roofing building materials that are riddled with these chemicals in the area that will take position to change his inventory. And so I moved the board to surpass environmental legislation and health legislation set up by the state of California. I propose an initiative to sponsor funding to do toxicology studies on exposed pregnant mothers and children in the county and to learn other counties to take up the same initiative. I moved the board to immediately adopt emergency act to prevent local merchandising of materials containing polynuclear aromatic compounds. Further, I moved the board to revise building code to adopt higher ethical practices by developing code around fire safety standards that are finished up. I propose that a new local code should eliminate or limit these combustible materials containing PACs and building designs and support education to architects and builders in regarding these decisions. Further, I moved the board to establish a reproductive health council with toxicologists to help push these measures forward. I've left my statement over here. Please review it. My contact information is available. Okay. Thank you for the clarity. So I'm here because I'm going back to work next Tuesday. So I'm not speaking on an item on the agenda. Am I, I thought this was a regular count board meeting, is that okay? If I, how long will it take you? Two minutes, three minutes. Okay. Thank you very much. So my name's Denise Ellarick and I'm a constituent of supervisor friend. And I'm just here to talk to the board a little bit about the opioid overdose crisis. And I've sent an email just today. Today, excuse me. So what you follow the recommendations of your public health department to the flaw, you know, flawlessly regarding COVID-19. And I appreciate that despite any blowback from the community. That is what is saving lives. All the stamps on the floor that say clean hands, save lives, that's true. And you're doing an amazing job. I super appreciate your support of Mimi Hall and Gail Newell and everybody. I would love for the board to transfer that same amount of support for other areas that will address things like overdose. You've seen the CDC recommendations, the number one recommendation that they also require, they suggest during this pandemic is to remove barriers to syringe services programs. Barriers such as people coming in that don't, they're a new participant. They don't know how anything works. They come in and they don't have any syringes to exchange. They leave. They don't wait. They won't go to the clinic. They have had a negative experience. You've lost that contact and they've gone home. That's sad. They also, when we, I hear all the time from people that I meet with that we need to incentivize syringes and they need to be valuable and the opposite is actually proven to be true. We need to encourage people to get rid of them, get them out of their position, get them out of the community, get them out of circulation. It'll take time to educate the community. We've been educating the community for about two years because people come to us with two and three thousand syringes and we just don't have them. And we say thank you for bringing those in. What do you need for a week? So needs-based doesn't mean give you everything you need. It means are you going on vacation? Are you supporting yourself and a friend or do people ask you for clean syringes? We need, what do you need? And that's a very different mindset than arbitrary fixes on numbers of syringes that people can come in and exchange. Another thing that is happening in your program which I support and I love and I love your staff and I love the volunteers is people come in not knowing about the cap of syringes and they come in and they exchange their 100 plus 100 for each two people, so a total of 300 and they depart with used syringes because they now have value. People are afraid and they're hoarding them and they don't want to let them go. That's not wise. So we need to disincentivize them, get them out of the community and the way to do it is proven. Thank you so much for your time and I apologize and thank you for the exception. Thank you. I'm glad everyone else speaking today is talking about health because that's what I'm here to talk about as well. As some of you may be aware of there are researchers in Florida have come up with a nearly 100% cure for COVID and that includes vitamin C, zinc, anti-inflammatories and anti-infection agents. And interestingly enough within the last couple of months I know at least a few people have come in here and brought up vitamin C and zinc specifically to the board, to Gail Newell. And so we were ahead of the curve here. So we have some very, very intelligent people in this community. Maybe it's time we should start listening to them because it took researchers in Florida this entire time to come up with something that people here already knew. So here we are faced with tremendous amounts of toxins that have been released into their local environment and thank you to the gentlemen who brought up the reproductive harm. This is no joke. These things when they vaporize in these incredibly hot fires are something that everyone's breathing and one of the most vulnerable part of society is a pregnant mother because those cells are reproducing very quickly to make a new human being and they're very prone to picking up these toxins. So that's why reproductive harm is such a huge deal. So I'd like to ask the board to consider reaching out to the wonderful wealth of knowledge that we have in this community, not only for our bodies, but also for our environment. There are people who know how to do bioremediation in the soil using fungus and other types of things that don't harm anything and actually can help to rebuild and suck the toxins out of the soil and create inert substances. So we know this and we would love to share it with you guys and we would love to see these things implemented within our community to reduce some of the toxins that we're all being exposed to and that are gonna make their way into our waterway, especially now that we're pumping water back into our aquifers. We're in a tremendous danger of taking these new toxins that are in our environment and pumping those into our pristine, once pristine aquifers. So this is a very serious matter and I hope that you guys can take advantage of the incredible wealth of knowledge that this community that's so health oriented and so environmentally oriented has been collecting over the decades. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, no one. Chair, I wanna remind you that we have to keep it to the items that are on the agenda. Are you, it'll be related to the budget? Morning, Board of Supes. My name is Michael Stewart Duffy. I'm from 2613 Monterey Avenue in Soquel and they had me staying at Pageant House for a while and then when I came home from Pageant House, I happened to notice that all kinds of stuff was missing like X-Men number one signed by Stan Lee, also amazing adult adventures, number 14, the first appearance of mutants in the Marvel universe and a bunch of other comics and a large painting of Swamp Thing which was like six feet with all kinds of insects on it. I mean, I had an artwork and stuff that was at the house and when I came home, all of a sudden mysteriously all this stuff is missing. Talking about millions of dollars of stuff because the stuff adds up. Antiques and comics and stuff. And I tried to write down the stuff but it's like overwhelming, especially when they say that they're there to help you out and all they really did was get rid of my washer and dryer. So I really, I was expecting help and instead I got stuff stolen. And I don't know exactly, you know, whether I go to you guys to start up the court system or whatever, I mean, it's... Thank you. I've had problems in the past, but this is ridiculous. Thank you. I don't know exactly, like other times, you know, you get stuff get confusing when it gets on a government level. Okay. But I would appreciate it help, you know, because the cops came out and they didn't do anything. So the sheriff's department didn't do anything. So it's like there's no place to go. And so I just thought I'd do this in times of, okay, thanks. I'm hoping that you have my name on the agenda. I'm Anne Hanley and I wanted to talk to you about being displaced by my landlord and under threat of eviction. That she one day, being in the piece of my home, came to me with a packet of fumigation papers. She did this last year. I vacated to make room for her to fumigate her building. By her written notice, orders to leave, by her, cooperated. I did again this year. I moved personal belongings into storage to comply with her, met her deadline, got out. But because I didn't give the fumigation papers to her fast enough because I sent them to Legal Aid to get some advice, she threatened eviction. I take threats very seriously because that's my home. That's my safety. That's where I'm supposed to be safe. Now, I take issue because I've been displaced. So they have ignored repairs that I've asked for. I asked for them again this time and putting them in writing. I don't deserve to be displaced. I have worked very hard in criminal justice and court reporting. My mother worked for the state attorney general's office and my father was US Marine Corps, 30 years and worked for our government. We are an honorable family. We were well respected. I grew up in military bases across the United States. We are morally encoded to do the right thing at all times and I don't wanna engage my landlord. I've asked her to stop leaving and posting daily notices on my door because it's imposing to me. There's no reason for it. Fix the plumbing. If the bathtub is backed up and there's bad plumbing, please fix it. It's that simple. So this is considered to me. I feel harassed. I'm definitely displaced. I don't trust the landlord anymore because when people threaten me, it doesn't feel like a safe place for me. And by the way, when I was badly beaten and raped last year or back in 2013 and it was recommended by medical doctors that I be relocated, the DA's office ignored it. They didn't even help with that assistance at all. No one helped. I'm not relocated. And within this last year, my break lines were tampered with. The mechanic said, what happened to your break lines? We don't know. Whatever was in there did not belong there and it doesn't get there by itself. Someone had to put it there. So we know my break lines are tampered with. My home has been broken into my new home like Capitol Gardens when I was making the reports and law enforcement turned the other way, the Capitol Police. My house was burglarized. The landlord stole my car. Bruce McPherson, the Sentinel newspaper mocked me. The reason that I get housing assistance is because to all of you, you must understand that nobody could work as hard as I did. Put in 18, 16 hour workdays every day of my life for four years with no results. There is corruption and nobody wants to look at it. So I hope that the first thing we could do is stabilizing my home environment and get relocated to a safe place. That's what I'm asking for and I'm gonna need all your help to do that. Thank you. Is there anybody downstairs or any web comments? The community room is not open today, but there are no web comments. Thank you. We can move on to the next item. Chair Caput, so we're on item five. I think we're on item number five. Yeah, so. Which is, consider the 2019. We'll go on to item number five and consider the 2019, 2020 and year end financial budget report and direct the County Administrative Officer to return by December 8th, 2020 with a budget update for fiscal year 2020, 2021 and a forecast for fiscal year 2021, 2022 as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Following the staff presentation, we'll have questions from the board. So good morning, Chair Caput. So Christina Mallory, the County Budget Manager is joining us by teams and we'll be presenting the presentation. Good morning, Chair Caput, members of the board, Christina Mallory, your County Budget Manager. So I'm gonna give you a brief overview and highlights of the year end report from 2019, 2020. And actually I'm gonna go ahead and share that, Christine. If you'll bring that down, I'm gonna share the presentation. I'll make it easier to walk through. Okay, Christina, give me one second, please. So we're gonna cover the year end and how the end of the year will compare the County expenditure as compared to the final actuals and the general fund financing. And then we'll also take a look at the 2021 adopted budget, the actual overall expenditures compared to what we presented in August. And specifically we'll look at the general fund where your board has the most discretion. We'll look at the financing for the year. We'll look at contingencies, reserves, and we'll talk about some of the challenges that we still face. So here you'll see the 1920 County budgeted expenditures compared to the adopted 1920, compared to the estimates that we presented to your board in August. And then we of course had our year end actuals. And we typically our actuals are less than budget. We have expenditures that are obligated into the year that are unspent, that are carried forward and re-budgeted into the new fiscal year and added to the 2021 budget. So we had approximately $61 million that was unspent last fiscal year and almost $56 million is being carried forward to 2021. And here's where your board has the most discretion. We're always monitoring very carefully the general fund. This is how we into the year 2019-20 compared to the estimates. So you'll see there the adopted budget, the estimates and the actuals and the change from the estimates. The general fund financing is made up of carryover fund balance from the prior year and the general revenues budget, which is where we bring in most of our sales tax and property tax. And that makes up the total general fund financing, which is offset by the net cost from the various general fund departments. So overall, we had about a million one less from the general revenues budget available to us, but we had about $6.2 million less spent by the departments. So we had a savings overall before encumbrances of $5.1 million. And then of course, our encumbrances come first. Those are obligations that the department's made during the fiscal year and those are carried forward. So essentially we had about $1.1 million better. And you'll recall that when we put the original budget together, we had a balanced budget in 1920 and we weren't using our reserves. And as a result of COVID and the reduced general purpose revenues, we were faced with a possible shortfall of about four and a half million dollars. So because we ended the year better by a million one, we only had to take $3.4 million out of reserves to reconcile the budget at the end of the year. And here you'll see a summary of the county budget expenditures for 2021 compared to the revised budget, which was presented to your board in August. The increase in the total budget is offset by increased revenues from the general fund of almost $41 million, which came from the COVID-19 response costs that your board approved during budget hearings. We're receiving about $20 million, $21 million from the CARES Act to help fund our COVID response for this fiscal year. And in addition, we are leveraging some FEMA funding and Office of Emergency Services funding from the state of up to almost 19 million. The additional million dollars is provided from a rebudget of incomplete costs from 1920 and adjustments your board made during budget hearings. And then you'll see there that we had major changes in our staffing. That was one of the changes in order to sort of reconcile the budget. We made reductions to offset our reduced revenues. Which resulted in a reduction initially of almost 88 positions. And then your board restored just a few positions during budget hearings of about four and a half positions about that. And then here you'll see the general fund financing for 2021. This is where of course your board has the most discretion. And you'll see that we had fund balance we thought we were gonna have before COVID hit when we put our original proposed budget together. We thought we were gonna have about four and a half million dollars in savings to carry forward. And of course, and we had a sort of a balance plan with very limited changes to the department budgets. And then COVID hit and we had to realign our budget based on the reduced resources that were available to us. The department's made reductions and we also have received a furlough from all of our bargaining units to help offset some of that. And we are taking money out of reserves. 9.3 million is what we'll be taking out of reserves to help fund the general fund financing needed for all of the departments. Now you'll see there in the final adopted and the auditor will speak about this in the next item. It's about $4.1 million greater the fund balance that's being carried forward and taken from reserves. Four million of that are the encumbrances that roll forward from the prior year. So they're just, they're restricted, they're part of the year in fund balance, they're carried forward and they're made part of the part of the budget in 2021. So overall you'll see there, we're taking a total of $16.8 million out of reserves. 3.4 million as mentioned is covering the 1920 shortfall. 9.4 million is covering the financing needed for 2021 and 4 million for the encumbrances carried forward. And here's a summary of our general fund contingencies and our reserves. After all the adjustments during budget hearings and year end, the general contingencies are there to help address the shortfall in any revenues or expenditure estimates. And it's almost 1% of expenditures or $5.4 million. This is relatively the same as what was presented because we ended the year a little bit better. We put a little more money into our general contingencies to bring it up to close to the 1%, which is what your board authorized during budget hearings. And then of course we have our restricted contingencies. Originally we had set aside funding in restricted contingencies for our mid-year adjustments, emergency repairs. We needed to set aside a million and a half for the realignment funding. The state may have a pull a trigger if they don't receive additional funding from the federal government. And so we have that money set aside to assist the departments in the event that happens. And then we knew we might have another emergency, but we didn't realize we were gonna have one so quickly. And we set aside about a half a million dollars in restricted contingencies for emergency response. Now we know that's not gonna be enough based on our preliminary estimates, but at least we have some money in contingencies to assist us with the emergency response for the fire. And then of course, here's a summary of our reserves. We started off with our proposed budget back in May. We had about $57 million in reserves. With the revised budget, we thought we were gonna have to take up to $14 million out of reserves and have just under $43 million available to us and drop our percentage down from 10% to 7.5%. And then our final adopted budget because things were better by about a million dollars, we only had to take 13 million out of our reserves leaving us about 44 million in our reserves, our committed and assigned reserves, which is about 7.2% of the general fund revenues. Now our policy is to have a minimum of 7%. So we are above the policy, but our goal had been, and we had achieved our goal several years ago of 10%. So it'll be important as conditions change. And as we get through the next few years in the emergency response and the restoration of our revenues to restore some of our reserves back to the 10% level. I also pointed out here, because it's a straight formula, if you take into account the fact that our revenues have about $40 million of one-time revenue for the COVID response, if you take that into account and remove that on the formula, our actual reserves are closer to 7.7%. And despite overcoming the financial constraints presented by COVID-19 and balancing the budget through department reductions, including some layoffs and a furlough of 5% to 10% of all of our county employees and the use of some one-time revenues and $13 million from our reserves, the county still faces several challenges. We're gonna need to monitor expenses and revenues very carefully this year. Our contingencies are less than the 1% of expenditures that we'd like them to be. Our reserves are now at 7.2% instead of 10%. And we know that we don't have enough in our reserve, in our contingencies to cover our fire response costs. And we have no funding for COVID response costs beyond December 30th. In addition, the county will see a reduction in general purpose revenues beginning this fiscal year due to the calamity assessments associated with the fire and the loss of property. It's estimated the general fund will lose approximately $450,000 this year and ongoing until the rebuilding occurs. As a result of the fires, it is likely that we'll face an additional emergency with a debris flow and it is unknown how much will be required. And you're gonna hear more about that later today. We know that our actual revenues may not match our estimates. We've done our best with our COVID revenue estimates and we'll be monitoring that very carefully. And we hope that the department budgets that they put together that they'll be able to stay within those budgets and their costs won't increase beyond what's been budgeted. So it's recommended that your board accept and file this report and we will return December 8th with a fiscal year 2021 update. And we'll be providing you a 2021, 21-22 preliminary budget forecast after we've gathered information. We will be providing you periodic reports with any updated information, especially as it relates to the fire and any impacts there. And that concludes my report and I'm happy to answer any questions. Okay, are there any questions from board members on this side? We'll start with Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Ms. Mowry, for that excellent presentation as always. And I don't have a question, but just a comment that while we have been very responsible and I appreciate the fact that we've been able to get some CARES Act funding, it's clear that the budget situation is still precarious moving into the coming year. There are so many unknowns with the natural disaster that occurred, the dangers of what could occur this winter and just the continued unknowns and general economic instability. So I appreciate you pointing that out. I think the board definitely takes what you're saying to heart and I'm glad that we had established the reserve that we have, I'm glad we had taken the actions we had leading up to this, but it's unclear where we're going to be in 12 months based on some of these challenges. So I think that we definitely have a large hill to climb. Ideally, we would get some federal assistance as has been proposed within Congress that would really help alleviate some of these challenges that not just our community, but communities across the country are facing. But absent that, I do know that the board's gonna have some, continue to have some tough decisions to make at least in the coming year, but thank you for your leadership and your presentation on this. Thank you. Supervisor Coonerty. Thank you, Ms. Mallory for your presentation. I too want to appreciate the boards before I arrived their commitment to increasing the reserve. And then over the last couple of years, our commitment has and the staff's real work and sacrifice this year in order to make sure we maintain fiscal stability. And I am worried about future natural disasters and an ongoing pandemic obviously and the economic crisis that follows. I don't have any questions other than with the, with the natural disaster, we are reimbursed by FEMA at 75% of costs. Often the state steps in and picks up part of the cost share of that remaining 25%. Have we heard from the state and do we know the status of that aid to the fires and their impact? I have not heard anything. I know we have put in a request to get the answer to that question. We believe the state will come up with funding and provide a share, but I don't think we've received official notification of that yet. Great, thank you. Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, again, thank you, Ms. Mallory for that sobering report. But the thing is that I will could repeat what Supervisors Friend and Coonerty said. We're dealing with some unknowns and most pressing factorist course is that COVID-19 money is going to be eliminated. We think we don't know what might happen after December 31st of this year. That and the reduction of property tax assessments that we know is coming as well. And that's the least of our worries for those who lost their homes. But things are not gonna be better revenue-wise for some time to come, I would imagine. So I can't think the state which is in some financial problems is gonna be able to help us out too much. Good question by Supervisor Coonerty. I would be anxious for a positive answer from the state, but I don't know that they're gonna be able to do much under the circumstances. I too wanna just say thank you to the board for building up the reserve that we had. There's gonna be, we don't know what's gonna happen this winter if the rain should come in that fire ravaged area of the fifth and third districts in particular. So we have some probably big challenges ahead in the winter and that's another unknown. And so we're doing the best we can with what we have and facing some real unknowns of what the future might hold. So I do appreciate your straightforward oversight of our budget this year. And we're going to be hearing about going into this current fiscal year in a moment. But I just wanna say thanks to the county employees who nobody liked it, but they stepped up to the plate and the furloughs had taken place and we're going to be able to continue to provide many of the services that we were previously. And that's very important. Health services in particular are in desperate need. And I can't tell you how much I do appreciate the county employees and the firefighters and everyone who has helped us fight this battle. Of natural causes, but also to help us get a grip on our budget that we have. And it's gonna be a tough year as we continue through 2020, 21, but I think we're in a place that we can meet it if we just work it together. So thank you very much again, Mr. Mallory for your presentation. Thank you. Supervisor Leopold. Thank you, Chair. I too wanna express my appreciation to Ms. Mallory and all the financial staff throughout the county. We've asked a lot of people this year as the situations have changed in a sort of a historic proportion of the number of times we've had to go back and get out the eraser and try to figure out how to balance the budgets given the ever-changing situations. I think the experience of the board, having gone through the Great Recession, proved to be incredibly helpful in the multi-year effort we did to build up our reserves. That has provided a effective shock absorber to this terrible shock that we've received this year or multiple terrible shocks that we've received. It's gonna be important for us to maintain that discipline that we showed in those years of building the reserve as a way to keep services out to the public and be able to rebuild our financial foundation as the economy gets better. I think the, I also wanna join my colleague in expressing my appreciation to every county employee who participated in the furlough that has been important for us because we have a shared goal of maintaining services to the public. This board has an adopted set of budget priorities and keeping services available to the public is one of the top priorities that we've identified. And so we've done a lot of work to make sure that we could keep those services and try to limit as much as possible those cuts to the administrative services. I think that the coming year, there are lots of different things that could happen. Some are naturally occurring. We're gonna hear today about the debris flow and we'll get some idea of what impact that will have on us financially. Some of it is manmade and what happens in the election and how the next presidential administration looks at supporting state and local governments will also have a huge impact. And lastly, we all have a personal role that we can play in helping improve the county's fiscal situation. The COVID crisis requires us to follow some simple rules in order to keep our case numbers down. And by keeping the case numbers down, we have a better chance of being able to be able to reopen parts of our economy. That means wearing masks. That means staying six feet away from people who aren't in your household. That means washing your hands frequently. We can all do this. We've shown here in Santa Cruz County that we have the capability of doing it. And if we keep to it, especially as we enter into the winter season, we have a chance of continuing to move through the state's blueprint for a safer economy and being able to return some services if our case numbers are down. So there's a role for everyone to play here. The county employees, our county staff and management, the community at large. And we hope that we have an administration that actually cares about local governments. So thank you for the work. I look forward to as we continue to make it through this year because we're not, I don't think we're done yet. Thank you. I want to thank you for your report. Also, it's very difficult to put a budget together or propose budget with unknown numbers. When we're talking about getting money back from the federal government or getting money back from the state government, we can only guess. Is that pretty much what we're doing? Where we have declared situation and we know that the federal government, the state stepping in, we've provided those estimates. So we have a pretty good idea. I mean, there may be some costs that will be disallowed, but we've included what I believe are very reasonable estimates of those reimbursements. I think they've been very good estimates too, but at one time it looked like we were going to have less money than we have now. Is that correct? That's correct. We did in the year about a million dollars better than we thought based on reduced costs last year. The departments all did their best to reduce their costs wherever possible. And we brought in as much revenue as we possibly could and we did in the year a little bit better. And I don't know, it appears to me that the best job to have right now is working in the US Mint printing money. I mean, they're printing money that it really doesn't exist. We don't have it. So it's a debt that's growing for the federal government and the states. So anyway, I hope the printing presses keep printing up the money. Thank you. Chair, I just want to remind you that we have historic low rates of interest and now's the best time to borrow to help out people during a crisis. So the federal government could be doing a lot more. That's true. Interest rates are real low on borrowing money. I'll open it up for a public comment on this topic. Is that okay? Sure. Good morning, Stu. My name is James Ewing Whitman. You know, I came in here yesterday to look at what was going to be on the agenda twice. The first time I'm like, oh, this is pretty short. What's going on here? And I did receive some help in the building across the hall and I really appreciate that. I don't know how to recap this, but I believe my understanding is the budget for this County is somewhere around $750 million a year. And I know in 2019 that the County took in over $560 million just in property taxes. So how does that relate to what's going on? You know, Santa Cruz County doesn't have to print their own money. They've got a lot of income from the homeowners who are paying taxes to this County. So how is that money being used? That I don't really know. I know two weeks ago, I certainly didn't look through very much of the 980 pages of legislation and bureaucracy that was passed, but I did spend some time to look through various areas and things that are what of interest to me as a problem solver. I've been a builder for more than three decades and a contractor for almost three. So, you know, I'm not quite sure what to say because there are who knows what's really going to happen, but it really depends on the media that you follow. And if you take a step back from Santa Cruz County, just being one 10,000th of the world population and you look at other things that's going around, there's potential for this not to be a very good winter. So I do appreciate all the comments of the supervisors. I took some notes, you know, just be interesting and just be great if we can all work together in greater ways than we ever have before. And I guess that's all I have to say. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I think it could be, this supervisor first and about the property tax revenues, I think that was way overblown at that point. I understand it's difficult to understand these budgets, but I think it's not in the 500 million, it's in the 150 million category. Ms. Mallory, is that correct? Yes, yes, that's correct. Supervisor McPherson, you know, when the taxpayers pay their property taxes, the general fund or the local share that we keep locally is only about 13 cents on the dollar. So we get about 13%. And if you look our general purpose revenues, the general property taxes that we receive is about a hundred million. And that's provides them the funding for our most discretionary net financing for all of our departments. And the other 87%, I guess that's the schools and cities and everything else, right? Yes, the majority of that goes to schools. And those special districts get a share, schools can share. Okay, thank you. Chair, I would move the recommended actions for this item. Okay, do we have any web comments? We have no web comments. Thank you. Thank you. We have a motion. Is there any more discussion or do we want to second the motion? Thank you. Okay, first. Okay, will the clerk call the vote? Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. A person. Aye. And chair Caput. Aye. We have unanimous vote. Approval. Thank you. We'll go now to item number six. Consider resolution adopting the fiscal year 2020-21 budget for county funds and special districts governed by the Board of Supervisors adopt a resolution establishing appropriation limitations for the county and the board governed special districts approve transfers of appropriations related to the prior fiscal year cancel various appropriations due to insufficient funding or contingency balances that exceed legal limitations and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the Auditor Controller Treasure Tax Collector who we have right here. That's quite a title right there. And that brings us to the report. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning chair Caput and members of the board. Edith Driscoll the Auditor Controller Treasure Tax Collector and with me also this morning is Laura Bowers the Chief Deputy Auditor Controller. I wanna take this time to thank Christina Mowry for the first item on your agenda which explained the budget in detail. The item before you now is the final Santa Cruz County budget for fiscal year 2020-2021. Your board received and took actions on the proposed budget in both June and August. For background, California government code 29088 requires the board approve the final budget by resolution no later than October 2nd of each year. The adopted budget adjust the revised budget presented in August 2020 and includes changes resulting from the fiscal year-end closing process and changes authorized by your board during budget hearings and summarized in your boards concluding and last day actions. I would like to specifically acknowledge both the budget team in the CAO's office as well as Laura Bowers and her team for all their hard work. Laura has a brief presentation to highlight the budget document attached to your agenda today. And I will kick off with the agenda. So the areas we're going to highlight is again as mentioned previously this is a very large budget book and we wanna at least give you an overview as you review it. The budgeted appropriations will discuss distribution of government funds the various county revenues by source and then a reconciliation between your last revised budget and this now final budget we hope you will be adopting. Thank you. Thank you. As Edith mentioned, the auditor controller is required to prepare the final budget and the forms formatting and content are in accordance with the state controller guidelines. This table presents budgeted appropriations in other words, budgeted expenditures for fiscal year 2021. The data from this table comes from the schedule one in the budget book. As you can see, we prepare the budget for not just the general fund but also special revenue funds which include housing funds, the road fund and others as well as what we call less than county wide funds which include the library fund and the county fire fund. Details for the governmental funds are presented in the schedule nines of the budget book. Additionally, this budget includes special districts and other agencies that are governed by the board of supervisors such as county service areas for roads and recreation. Details for the board governed special districts are presented in the schedule 15s in this budget book. Internal service funds are business type activities such as the information services department that serve other departments within the county. Details for the internal service funds are presented in the schedule tens of the budget book and lastly enterprise funds are business type activities that serve county residents directly such as the county disposal sites and sanitation districts. Details for the enterprise funds are presented in the schedule 11s for the budget book. This chart shows the distribution of expenditures by function for the governmental funds which include the general fund and special revenue funds. As you can see, the highest percentages of the governmental fund budget are allocated to health and sanitation, public assistance and public protection which is consistent with previous years budget funding. This chart shows the budgeted revenues by source that support governmental funds which again include the general fund and special revenue funds. The two highest sources of revenue are aid from other governmental agencies which represents funding from the state and local government followed by property taxes. Please note that revenue from other governmental agencies generally has restrictions on how it can be spent. This last table shows a reconciliation between the revised budget presented on August 18th, 2020 and the final budget that we're presenting to your board today. This table is reflected in the board letter that accompanies this budget. The revised budget estimate estimated a net county cost of about 9.3 million while the final budget presents a net county cost of about 13.4 million. This variance is primarily made up of the $4 million in incomerences meaning the contracts and POs with vendors for which the county is obligated to pay in fiscal year 2021 that carried over from fiscal year 2020. That's the last slide. All right, as outlined in the board letter, we ask that you approve the recommended actions. This concludes our presentation. We're available for any questions. Thank you. Chair, do you want me to ask a question or two? Thank you for the presentation. It's, these charts are always helpful because it always appears to people that it's easy to find something within $950 million. They're a special project but when you look at how this is carved up and cut up, you realize the restrictions we have on so many of our programs. Even when you look at the pie chart of how we spend the money, that health and human services, public assistance, we are really an arm of the state government and we are fulfilling their duties and we're required to pay a maintenance of effort to keep those going. But we don't always have a lot of control over what those are actually, or how they're actually used. I think that this, I think these kind of presentations also help not only us to understand, but the public understand and your ongoing work to provide resources online. So people can understand how the budget is very useful for people to understand the complicated nature of county budgets. And I wanna recognize you and your staff for trying to do your best to create the best transparency for the work that we have and the budget that we approve. Thank you. Thank you for your work. Supervisor McPherson. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And for that presentation, I just hope we can, it turns out as good as we see here. As we have said just a couple of minutes ago, there's a lot of unknowns and the contingencies that we need to carry on our obligations that we have, we must do those. And I really do appreciate all the work that's being done by all of our financial team in the county to make us as whole as we can be under the circumstances. It's a very difficult time. And I think that with some unknowns that are coming, I just hope we don't have another catastrophe of any source during this winter, if it brains hard, but I think that what you have presented is reasonable and realistic. And just hope for the best that we don't face another crisis as we move forward in this COVID pandemic. Come to an end or some kind of a cure in the very near future. That's gonna be very critical for all of us. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to the whole financial team. Okay. And Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. I don't have any questions, but just that extra thanks again to the entire team down there. I know that this has been an, well, the year's really just getting started as far as the challenges we're about to have. I appreciate the work you've done leading up to this and that you're continuing to do. Okay. Any other questions or comments? Okay. Thank you very much for the report. This budget is even more troubling than we had 10 years ago with the housing costs and the collapse of the housing market. But it's kind of like a moving target. Is there, are you finding it? It's very difficult to have a budget when you have a big fire that happened and then we have the COVID-19. And if something else happens, this whole budget has to shift. So I don't know, how do you hit the moving target? Well, if I can respond to that, you do it based on the most reasonable estimates you have and the documentation that you can obtain. So when the fire incident began, similar to when COVID began, I was asked to designate a specific fiscal team out of my office to be dedicated to tracking that information. And I have one accounting manager who's doing that for COVID and I have our internal audit manager is doing that for the fire. In fact, her whole team is dedicated to working on gathering those costs. And you're going to base your budget on the most reasonable information you have. And we've always been a very conservative county and we have continued that into this budget. You're about, okay. Anyway, thank you very much. You're welcome. And we'll open up the public for public comment. Anybody in the boardroom would like to speak on this topic. Yeah, thank you. I commend Leopold for talking about the pie charts to be at least some kind of visibility and transparency, but I disagree with the amount of transparency that is given to the public. And I suggest that the internal financial team actually releases data specifically accounting data so that these transactions are traced. And so they're publicly available for people. And then that way people in the community can participate with the transparency given and also potentially he could have community members saying input for certain estimates and stuff and seeing if they line up with professionals in the industries. So if you're getting estimates from say a cleanup crew that's going to remove toxins out of the environment, you could have other excavator crews chime in on it and see if those costs line up. So the mythology could be improved about the transparency here. And I think that's a critical way of really opening up and providing transparency to the public. I don't think that internal issues such as getting gathering estimates and all this can be considered transparent when you just provide a pie chart. So I know there's other records and I'm not just deducing it to that but I do think as far as transparency goes to really move everybody forward in this because if you do have public chiming in on this, there's a lot of professions out there that can provide cost comparative estimates. So it doesn't need to stay internal like this. That's my... You know, I agree with that with the transparency but is this all of this 394 pages, the public can... Yes, I did forget to include that final comment. The budget for the last 12, if not 15 years is all available online. And I would like to highlight, if you were to open the budget, I just opened it to page 262, one of the schedules. The state government mandated format is that we list the actuals column, the estimated column, and then this year's recommended column. So because of timing, I can't exactly include in this budget book last year's actuals, but I've got two years back actuals. And then we'll be coming back to your board in about two, three months with the final fiscal results from this year's June 30, 2020 budget. So we do provide that information in this document. And as far as the transparency, they can, the public can... Correct. The entire document for 12 or 15 years is all available online in various locations on the county website. Both your board's location, I believe, as well as my office's location. Chair Caput. May I add that we also have an interactive budget tool online that allows the public to drill down into more detailed information by department. It's very useful and contains a lot more of the information that is being asked of right here. So I encourage the public to go online, go to the budget documents on the county's website. There's the interactive budget tool. Thank you. Is it possible that the public can have access to the transactions made rather than the sum of transactions per department? Anyway. My office is always available for discussions as well as the CAO's office. Okay. Thanks. Okay, thank you. I appreciate this circle providing more clarity to how the money is spent. And maybe there was some humor in the room about the entities that actually print money for print US dollars. My understanding as of about two years ago, that was $85 billion a day. It's a lot of money to print. So we have this budget that is as transparent as it can be. I'm gonna go off tap off topic, but on topic about what I've observed, particularly after this lockdown. My understanding is the current president put $2 trillion into improving the wireless. And because I can read and I read the health orders, I realized that I could be out and about as a journalist and as a contractor. And for several other reasons. A great deal of infrastructure was added to during that time. So maybe my math isn't correct, but if that $2 trillion were divided by the population in the United States and Santa Cruz County is 1,500th of that, that's $4 billion. So there's a lot of money being spent and what is it actually being spent on? And what is, there's just a lot of other conversations that could be happening in this room because there's just things going on that are not being discussed. But I appreciate the openness that we do have in this room. Thank you very much. Seeing as the entire country has so much debt, one can imagine that individuals also have debt. And I think this basically goes back to the fact that as far as I know, public schools don't teach in high school or anywhere else, budgeting. I think most people in this room, aside from council members and other officials, looking at these slides on the screen have virtually little idea what any of it means. So it's all fine and good to make it transparent. And I think everything should be transparent about the entire thing. This is our money and every single dollar that comes into this county comes from the citizens of this county. So we should see every single dollar that is spent. So as far as drilling down, I appreciate if all that's available. I was a little bit uncomfortable about the answer as to what's available as far as the details go. But more importantly than that, what I came up here to say is that it's all fine and good to have transparency as far as the budget being available. But how about an actual opportunity for the public to be able to see and learn how to read the budget? How to learn how to read the budget? I've got quite a bit of background in looking at paperwork like that. And I have no idea what I'm looking at. I don't even know what it means. So all these abbreviations and terms, I have no idea what it's even referring to. So I can guarantee you I'm not alone that it's basically useless to make it public because nobody knows how to read it. So I would propose that it could even be just done once. It doesn't even have to be done more than once, but an actual video made or presentation where somebody comes in and explains everything, takes questions, gives answers, and that video can be watched by other people who are interested in learning how to read the budget. The questions that naturally come when the public is faced with something like that, it's like a classroom. The best instructors in the classroom are sometimes the other students because they ask the questions that everybody else is thinking. So I would propose let's actually make sure that the citizens of this county, your constituents, understand how their money is being spent. And I think from there, as someone else said, start to bring in some other great minds. We've already seen some incredibly great minds over the last few months in this room coming up to speak at this microphone. People who are really educated on many, many different topics. And you guys can't do everything. Your job is not to do everything. Take advantage of the resources that we have in this beautiful county of ours and start to reach out to the people who can really help and make this place thrive again. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Sean Conley. Just wanted to make one comment regarding transparency of budget. So I was just looking for one specific detail, specifically related to the budget being allocated from Prop 172, which is for additional sales tax for public safety. And I really couldn't see on the county website where that money is being spent. From a high level, it looks to be that Santa Cruz County was only providing one half of 1% of the amount towards fire protection. The rest going to other things related to public safety. I couldn't find the details on that, but I've compared that in the past to other counties and Santa Cruz is woefully allocating less money out of that budget for fire public safety. And I like the county to reconsider where they're putting that money. And also for transparency, provide details about where the specific money is going. It doesn't have to be down to like who you're doing business with, but what does the fire chief's training have to do? Where is that money? Because that was the only line item that I could see in the budget going related to fire public safety. The rest going somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, hi, Becky. Good morning. I have to do this or I'm not gonna be able to breathe. And I've been assured it's okay. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I'm a resident of rural Aptos. I'd like to thank Mr. Connolly for his comments about Proposition 172, public safety monies, a half-cent statewide permanent sales tax that was voted in by the voters to help fund public safety, which includes fire service. As he said, only one half of 1% of this county's Proposition 172 money, which totaled $18 million just last year. Only one half of 1% goes to the fire chief's association. It doesn't go to fund county fire. We don't know what it funds because there's never been an audit. There's never been a request to see what actually happens with the one half of 1%. I'm sure it's being used well. But for transparency, we need to know. I'd also like to point out that measure G have sent sales tax for the county that was sold to the voters to fund fire has not given any at all to fund fire. And that needs to be addressed. You sold it to the voters at a time when they were all, we were all worried about fires in Northern California. Zero of measure G, half-cent sales tax money in the county is going to fund county fire. This is unacceptable, given that what has happened. You need to take responsibility and fund county fire with prop 172 money and measure G. Where is the measure G oversight committee that was promised? I don't see anything about that at all. You also need to really look at cutting waste. What about the facility on Claire street that the county rent leases? It's a very expensive piece of commercial property and it's been admitted in the former reports that it is not being used. That is supposed to be a special safe place where victims of child abuse can go and be interviewed safely but it has been admitted in your documents that it is not being used at all and probably isn't known about. So that's a big piece of waste that could be eliminated. I'd also like to say that the service centers are a good idea, but they're closed. Essentially the one in Aptos, the Mid County Safety Center is close to the public and there's a lot of money going there to support that structure that is not serving. I'm seeing that I saw that in the amended budget for the DA and probation. What does that do to serve the people? It's a huge waste of money that at this time needs to be cut back. I again want to urge you to fund full time the county's manager for emergency services. That needs to come back and I hope that that has been done. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nobody else, any webs? There are no web comments, thank you. Thank you, bring it back to the board. Chair, I would move the recommended actions and express my appreciation to the staff for the work that they've done. Second. Any other comments by board members? Okay, we'll call the roll, call the vote. Supervisor Leopold. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And Chair Caput. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. And the last item is number seven, which is consider presentation and report on post CZU lightning complex fire debris flow hazards as outlined in the memorandum of the deputy county administrative officer and the director of public works. Low and welcome. Good morning, Chair Caput and members of the board. My name is Carolyn Burke and I'm the senior civil engineer in environmental planning. I'm here today with Ken Edler, assistant director of public works to speak with you about a deadly post fire threat that many have not heard of before, debris flows. The photo that you see on the title slide was taken in the upper watershed of Maloski Creek near Boulder Creek during a multi-agency post burn reconnaissance to evaluate San Lorenzo Valley Water District infrastructure. As you will learn during this presentation, the steep burn slopes and debris filled channel shown in this photo illustrates a set of conditions that is primed to produce devastating debris flows during even short duration rain events. Unfortunately, this scenario is repeated on steep slopes throughout the burned area and the resulting debris flow threat affects not only homes on hillsides or within the burn area, but also homes on flat ground a mile or more from charred slopes. Their unpredictable nature and powerful force make it imperative that we act swiftly to save lives by educating our community on the risks of debris flows and the only effective means of protection, early warning and evacuation. As noted earlier, our main objective today is to educate constituents about a likely unfamiliar geologic phenomena referred to as debris flows and spread awareness of the absolute destruction of debris flow can leave in its wake. We will first learn a little about the physical processes that lead to debris flows and how the chances of a debris flow occurring are heightened after a fire event. Next, we'll explain the risks to life and property associated with debris flows and highlight the reasons why a debris flow cannot be ridden out or fought or escaped by those in its path. The only way to avoid this hazard is to evacuate and evacuate early. This will be brought home with the deadly debris flow scenario that unfolded in Montecito and Santa Barbara County in 2018. We will wrap up with an overview of the county's response, including risk assessment, evacuation mapping and communication plan in the coming months. A debris flow occurs when high intensity rainfall saturates loose soil, rock and other debris such as fallen trees, high up in the mountains creating a moving mass that travels down slope. The left image is a diagram of what this looks like from a bird's eye view. This mass gets larger as it travels down the slope with the mud rock slurry picking up cars, houses, people and anything else in its path. As the mass gets larger, it also gets faster and can reach speeds upwards of 30 miles an hour. The huge mass does not stop when it reaches the bottom of the slope but instead flattens out spreading and depositing debris and mud in all directions. The area covered by this debris is often referred to as the alluvial fan. Due to the speed of the mass, this area of deposition can be miles from the starting point of the debris flow. The right image on this slide is of the town of Montecito in Santa Barbara County and shows the alluvial fan left by a debris flow that occurred after the Thomas fire in 2018. As you can see, the burned hills in the background that produced the debris flow with mud rocks and debris still carving channels over one mile away. Unfortunately, debris flows are not new to Santa Cruz County and occur during all types of rain years with devastating results, including lost lives. The two lower photos show the aftermath of debris flows that occurred during rain events in more mountainous areas of the San Lorenzo Valley and North Coast. Not only did debris engulf the homes but they were knocked off their foundations and you can see in the photo on the left, a tree has also pierced the rear wall of the home. The upper photos show a debris flow that occurred in Davenport in 2010 above Newtown. As you can see from the relatively gentle slopes, it is difficult to predict when and where the conditions will be just right to create a debris flow. They can occur where they never have in the past and can revisit previous sites. Fire increases both the likelihood and severity of debris flows in several ways. First, wildfires burn trees, leaf litter and other organic matter, which leaves a waxy residue on soils and makes them effectively water repellent. This means rainfall does not percolate into the ground and instead all the water is delivered directly downslope. This results in a larger amount of water reaching mountain drainages all at one time. What is collected in those mountain drainages is also influenced by wildfire. Burned slopes devoid of roots and organic matter whose structure and moisture would typically hold the surface soils together begin to erode even under dry conditions. This eroded material along with fallen trees collects in small drainages and soils throughout the mountains as you can see in these photos. Then the rain hits. When it comes to debris flows, the most dangerous type of rain event is one that is short but intense. This leads to large volumes of water being delivered downslope almost instantaneously. When such a rain event hits post fire, larger volumes of water coming off water repellent slopes quickly saturate the larger amounts of loose soil, rock and debris and drainages and soils creating a semi liquid mass that travels downslope as a debris flow. Efforts to determine the probability and locations of potential debris flows began weeks ago with dispatch of the Cal Fire watershed emergency response team referred to as the Wirt comprised of personnel from California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and California Geological Survey. The work conducted a rapid evaluation of post fire debris flow hazards and their potential impacts to life safety and property. Their assessment included both field reconnaissance and computer modeling to arrive at a preliminary estimate of where debris flow likelihood has been increased as well as identification of residential and infrastructure targets at risk of being impacted by debris flows. The left image is a map developed by the Wirt that shows their estimates of debris flow probability for each drainage segment in the burn area. As you can see, the highest probabilities are in the Western burn areas which correlates with higher burn severities. This should not be confused with the areas of highest life safety risk which are defined by both the increased probability of debris flow coupled with their potential to hit existing homes. It should also be noted that the Wirt mapping is preliminary and it's currently being refined by local staff as will be explained later. One issue identified early on by both Wirt and County staff was that Wirt burn severity estimates were likely lower than field conditions due to the fact that their estimates were based on aerial surveys that showed green tree canopies where the understory had actually been severely burned. This means that the probabilities shown on these maps should be assumed to be higher than listed. The illustration on the right shows watershed basins in the Boulder Creek area included in the Wirt report due to historic evidence of debris flow activity in the form of existing alluvial fans or areas where debris has been deposited at the base of the drainage in the past. This is only one example of a scenario that is repeated throughout the North Coast, Davenport and other areas of the San Lorenzo Valley located within or down slope of the burn area. As noted in our last slide, people living down slope of the burn area have an increased risk when their homes are located in or near drainage channels, on or below a burn slope and at the mouth of a drainage channel. Here we have an illustration of a high risk debris flow scenario that is repeated throughout the burn area. The arrows are showing drainage and debris being deposited into existing drainages. The slurry flows down slope striking homes within the drainage channel before fanning out to strike homes in the neighborhood on flat ground at the mouth of the channel. It may be difficult to picture how a home may be positioned literally in a drainage channel, but it is more common than one might think as these are typically seasonal drainages and not raging rivers. The lower photo is of a burned home site in just this scenario. A small seasonal drainage channel runs to the left of the home site and through a culvert in the foreground, both of which are currently buried by debris. You'll note that there are larger rocks strewn throughout the photo. These are actually evidence of past debris flows that have deposited rocks from the upper watershed throughout the drainage. Due to the life safety risks described earlier in this presentation, as it sits, the burned home site cannot be reoccupied even on a temporary basis. In the background to the right, you'll see an existing home that will need to be on alert this winter and heed early evacuation notices. It is important to educate residents in our affected areas on the unique risks posed by debris flow and why unlike fires or floods, there's no way to fight or ride out a debris flow in place. Early evacuation is the only sure way to survive a debris flow event. Debris flows are triggered by high intensity, short duration bursts of rain. By short, we mean on the order of 15 minutes. Typical forecasts predict rain totals per day or per hour, but more sophisticated modeling is required to predict systems that could produce these quick bursts. The high intensity rainfall that can trigger debris flows occurs in the upper burn area, which may not be the case at lower elevations where many debris flow targets exist. That means a resident on flat land at the mouth of a drainage may look out their window and see sprinkles, totally unaware that a burst of rain high in the mountains above is generating a debris flow that will reach them within minutes. Even if a resident somehow knew a debris flow was starting in the upper watershed, they still would not have enough time to evacuate due to the speed with which debris flows can travel more than 30 miles per hour. Once you can see or hear a debris flow, it's too late. Finally, due to the unpredictable nature of debris flows, residents cannot predict their risk of being impacted based on their history with the property. As we have shown, the risk of debris flow already exists in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And even if your home has been safe for the past 30 or 50 years, we are now grappling with a post-fire burn scenario that we have not seen in decades longer. The threat is real and it is worse now than ever. The only sure way to keep yourself safe from debris flows is to evacuate and evacuate early. The importance of early evacuation by residents was made clear during the devastating debris flow that hit the community of Montecito and Santa Barbara County on January 9th, 2018. The photo here is of the recovery effort in the aftermath of the event. And while it shows the physical devastation left in the wake of the debris flow, it does not begin to describe the horrific scenes encountered as the tally of lost lives mounted over the coming days. Like Santa Cruz County, Santa Barbara County was in the final days of the fight against the Thomas Fire, which ravaged 280,000 acres, including the hills above Montecito. A report was also prepared for the area's downslope of the burn zone, which identified the increased debris flow risk for the community of Montecito. The county worked quickly to establish evacuation maps and coordinate with federal and state personnel to monitor weather forecasts. And for the first time in Santa Barbara County history, an evacuation warning was issued for a storm event. The evacuation warning was issued more than 24 hours ahead of the anticipated storm, giving residents ample time to get out of harm's way. Unfortunately, only an estimated 28% of residents in the evacuation area heated the warning before the debris flow hit on January 9th, 2018, at 345 a.m., while most residents were sleeping in their beds. The debris flow began in the mountains above Montecito and ran all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 425 structures were destroyed, totaling 450 million in damages. Highway one was buried under feet of mud, slurry and debris that rescuing personnel described as quick sand. 21 lives were lost, and two are still missing and presumed dead. In the face of such devastating loss, one can only ask how this could have been avoided. County staff have been in contact with Santa Barbara County officials to learn how we can educate our constituents to be prepared and escape such a disaster. Going to pass it on to Kent Edler. The map shows on this slide how far debris flows can extend beyond the fire area. This is the Montecito debris flow in Santa Barbara County. On the map, the area above the red line is the burned area, and the light blue areas along the pink hatched areas are the locations of the debris flows. The dots represent affected structures with red being destroyed and orange having major damage. The debris flows extended over two miles below the burn areas. The picture on the bottom left is of Highway 101, which was closed for 12 days. And the picture on the right shows typical debris that hit a house. And some of the drainages in Santa Cruz County have debris up in the swells that looks just like this. County staff recently met with Santa Barbara officials, and they stressed the importance of the following. Debris flows can extend out many miles. Early, consistent public messaging is a must. Evacuation preparation must be done early. And people are less likely to evacuate for a potential debris flow, especially if they previously evacuated for a fire. Santa Barbara County did a survey after the debris flows and found that 75% of the people evacuated for a fire, but only 28% evacuated for debris flow. So they strongly stress we need to get the message out that debris flows need to be taken as seriously as a wildfire. We included this slide of rainfall totals from October 13th, 2009 to stress the urgency of the issue. Santa Cruz County does sometimes get significant rainfall early in mid-October. There was a similarly sized event in October of 2004 as well. But again, we want to stress that it's not about the amount of rain in 24 hours, it's more about the intensity over a short period of time. The county is taking many steps to protect lives. The county geologist is leading a team of geologists in the field right now to map the debris flow hazards and expand on the word report. They're also identifying structures at risk in the hazard areas. We're also getting help mapping from the California Geologic Survey, as well as the USGS. On the evacuation planning side of things, we've already been having local multi-agency coordination, which includes Cal Fire, local fire protection districts, the Sheriff's Office, Caltrans, the city of Santa Cruz, the San Lorenzo Valley Water District, state parks and county departments, including public works, planning, environmental health, GIS staff, health services, and the Office of Emergency Services. The National Weather Service has also been brought into the conversation because determining when to evacuate is just as important as where to evacuate. Fieldwork on the mapping effort should be done this week and we'll be meeting with Cal Fire and local fire districts next week about mapping and development of evacuation zones and evacuation planning. Part of the evacuation planning is also thinking about where to stage emergency response vehicles, which includes heavy equipment, fire trucks, ambulances, et cetera. As we get into the planning for evacuations, we'll be talking about how to make the maps available to the public. We want to get those released as soon as possible. We're already having conversations with the National Weather Service and we'll be having frequent conversations with them throughout the rainy season regarding the events that could trigger debris flows. Public Works flood control staff are also working to fine tune our rain gauges and we're also working with the San Lorenzo Valley Water District and the City of Santa Cruz to tie their gauges into our monitoring systems. We're also going to be having discussions about how to get the message out when a call is made that evacuations are needed. When communicating to the public, it's important that we do it in both English and in Spanish. And that the risks and evacuation plans are clear. For communication, we'll want to use social media, town hall meetings, board meetings like this, press briefings and other avenues. We're already working with the county's PIO and we'll continue to do so on the most effective ways to get the message out. When we get shelter locations ready, those will need to be publicized as well so people will know those options are available. Whenever possible, we need to issue warnings and evacuation orders as far in advance as possible. And obviously we need to do our messaging in clear terminology. It's also important to message what, it's also important to message to the public what they can do. First, evacuation is the best thing to do. As Carolyn mentioned, debris flows are fast and occur without warning. We haven't seen a fire of this size in many decades and the hillsides are going to behave in ways that people have not experienced before. Also, people reoccupying damaged homes and other people with existing homes downslope of the burn area should contact a licensed professional geologist to get an assessment of their property. People should sign up for emergency lurks such as the app called Code Red and pay attention to weather forecasts. Some people may be evacuated multiple times so it's good to have a plan. Residents should be prepared with what they want to take with them and know where they're going to go ahead of time. Next is to stay alert and heed evacuation warnings. Finally, we'll do our best to warn people but don't wait for someone to tell you to evacuate. If you don't feel it's safe where you live, leave. This also applies to areas that are outside of the evacuation zones. So as far as the next steps, we're going to continue to communicate our mapping efforts and we'll get those out to the public as soon as possible hopefully within the next couple of weeks. Oops. Evacuation planning is an ongoing effort. Public messaging has started but we're really going to ramp up that when we have the maps, we're going to ramp that up when we have the maps completed and work with the county's PIO on the most effective way to get the message to the public. And finally, we'll continue to update the board on these planning efforts. That's the end of our presentation and we're available for any questions. Well, thank you for your frightening report. Mr. Chair, Supervisor McPherson, I don't know if we wanted to hear from the, well, let's hear from the public first. Go ahead. Thank you. There's okay. We'll hear from the public first. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Is that a vote? So I'd like to focus on what could be done in prevention methodology concerning native ecology in the steep terrain, steep terrain. I understand that it's hard to access but is there any native species cover crops that could establish an expedient understory with aggressive root formation? Karen? This is your chance to provide testimony. So that's one, that would be one question. And then I guess I would say if we could establish a botanist and herbology council to identify species for the best, yeah, species in the region for the climate zone and maybe consider bioswells or net retention and steep terrain and perhaps hydrated seed mud ball mixes that could be delivered via aerial. There is helicopters working and fighting the fires, dropping water. Perhaps there is also some kind of seed ball formation saying that we could drop in the steep terrain where it's not really accessible so much for workers to get up there and physically plant. So I guess that's some considerations that I would say instead of just focusing on an evacuation maybe we could also look for prevention in these matters. Thank you. Hello, my name is James Jining Whitman. I think this was one of the best presentations I've seen in this room. It was great. I really liked the comments of the first gentleman. You know, to kind of cut to the chase, what can the public do? Evacuate? You know, let's look at the big picture. I mean, Santa Cruz had some pretty tremendous fires about five weeks ago. About three weeks ago, the whole West Coast burned up. You know, I've spoken before about the causes of these and they're man-made. You know, to not do your own research is to really be in a denial of what's going on and I invite the public to do more research. And once again, it worked together. I mean, two weeks ago I spoke about what's gonna happen to mitigate this. So we don't have these floods, you know, but this stuff is planned and it's deliberate. So once again, I appreciate this presentation and I appreciate the other gentlemen's suggestions for remedies and maybe there'll be some added information for what's actually happening and what individuals are actually doing besides designating to evacuate because that's the big planned agenda. Anyway, thank you for your time. Thank you. Hi, Sean Conley. One of the things I'd like to learn about is what things can be proactively done to amend the areas that have been burnt. Specifically, there was some mention about hydrophobic soil. So can we rake the areas that have been burnt to help a water absorb into the soil to help the water table? So I'm looking for more things about proactive stuff rather than the warning systems and try to help prevent these slides. So looking for more information from the county and experts on that. And also what can be done as far as, you know, I'm up on the ridge in Bonnydoon out of my house right now from the fire, but just looking for what can be done to help, you know, protect our area, but also downhill. I'm in the headwaters of the Felton watershed. So also interested in what are some specifics on soil like if we're on decomposed granite, what does that mean for us? Some educational things that we can get from the county. Would appreciate it. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the Redwood forest and I appreciate your presentation. I want to point out that Santa Barbara is a completely different habitat than Santa Cruz County mountains. We have redwood trees. The Latin name for the coast redwood is Sequoia Sempervirens. Sempervirens means always living. The redwoods are very resilient. We've seen that. I've seen that because I live in and among them. In 2008, in the summit fire, we saw the effects of fire on the hillsides. My son did a science experiment about hydrophobic soils and I never saw this level of attention to debris flow at that time, even though Coralitos is also very populated. So I appreciate the concern, but I have not seen any modeling for an El Nino winter or anything like that coming in. So I feel it's wrong to be scaring people like this. Warning, yes, but scaring people and actually telling them that their sites cannot be occupied even on a temporary basis. Why don't we instead be giving them lists of things they can do, as the former speaker said. Is it wise to disturb the hydrophobic soil so that water does come in on your property and to seed it with native grasses and things? What my son and I saw in the Coralitos Mountains was very, very quickly the area recovered. It was stated that the roots are gone. That is not true in a redwood forest. The roots are there and we will soon see sprouts coming. I wanna really encourage that more involvement from the Resource Conservation District be discussed and the information that that wonderful organization can give to people for free. I don't think sitting around waiting for evacuation orders and discussions of them is a prudent thing. People need to take action and taking action helps relieve their anxiety that they've still got and will have for many years about the fire. Banning them from their property and telling them just to evacuate if they don't feel safe is not anything that gives the people the power to take control of their own lives and their own property and that's what we need to be doing. My concern here is that the boundaries I see of this evacuation fits the boundaries of the Great Park. A dream child of the Sempervirens Fund that is headed up by Fred Kealy. And my worry is that you're going to force people off their property. That website, the Sempervirens Fund is already rounding people to quickly snap up and buy these properties to create the Great Park. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Mark Strudley. I'm the flood control division manager here at the county and I wanted to provide a little bit of information in response to some of the prior comments given. I think we all feel that it's admirable that people want to take care of their properties and be proactive in response to the fire and what they may perceive as hazards to them this winter. The reason we as well as other agencies are strongly recommending the evacuation as the method of choice to deal with what's probably in front of this winter is because there's lots of things that people are talking about doing to the soil or planting vegetation and that largely is not gonna solve the problem. As the presenters mentioned, the fire creates a waxy layer and that waxy layer is actually below the surface of the soil. And so while it might be possible to avert some of the raindrop impact by planting grasses and things, it's not gonna prevent that water reaching that waxy layer in the subsoil and then that slab of soil letting go and causing it to brief flow. And it's because of that combined with the highly unpredictable nature and time and space of where mudslides and debris flows are gonna happen. That is what's leading us to making these recommendations and walking down this path of developing a very careful evacuation planning protocol in coordination with a variety of agencies that are gonna be ultimately responsible for dealing with these evacuations with boots on the ground. So I just wanted to provide that and we're all thinking about all the things that people are talking about but there's only some real viable solutions in front of us to make sure people don't die. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Bob Locotelling. I am a fire commissioner from Boulder Creek Volunteer Fire Protection District. I'm here basically for myself but I do represent the district. I was directly involved in the fire back that started around August the 16th or 17th. And first of all, I want to comment on the information that was presented here by the geologists and their staff. And one of the things that's most important in dealing with any type of hazard is protection of life. And so the point that we're talking about in terms of getting people out of the way, evacuations and what have you, we've just had experience doing that with this forest fire. That was a natural cause. And it went quite smooth. So I think to that point, I think it's very important that we do have a plan for evacuations. But to stop with that is not the answer here. I do not believe. And I would like to see the county with help from other state and possibly federal agencies become more proactive and helping to mitigate some of these possible scenarios that we're taking into consideration here and talking about in regards to having people evacuate. We've had experiences. I mean, Montecito is a beautiful area. We're all familiar with it. It's down on the coast like San Lorenzo Valley is and this fire area along the coast. But it is different terrain. And some of the folks who came up here, I thought made some very good points that I've actually thought about. And so I would like, I wanna be part of the solution and contribute in terms of finding a solution. And one of the things that we have to go back, we have history right here in the area that we're talking about in regards to these slides that we have been presented. Going back all the way to 1947 with the 47th, which burnt a lot of the same area that this fire did. Coming out a last chance, going down into Scott Crick, coming over the top, going through Lockheed, which then was a different ownership down the coast to Empire grade. Let's gum the head of the California fire down in Felton, the Cal Fire. Used to tell stories about how that fire was coming. Is that beeping for me? Am I almost done? Or do I have a little extra time here? Am I done? Yeah. Well, I think there's three things I wanna leave you with here. Rock it up. Okay. And that is, I like to see it be more proactive and finding a solution. Second, prioritize the areas of most concern and just hit those areas that we need to have help. And I'd be happy to work with you folks. I know San Lorenzo Water District. They're whole watershed we're talking about here. So we're not only trying to save houses, we gotta save the watershed so we can have houses after this whole thing goes away because we have to have water. And the third thing is to mitigate these areas. Thank you. You're welcome. Any web comments? Yes, we have three web comments. The first one is from Forest Martinez McKinney, Dear Board of Supervisors, in addition to the communication platforms provided, please consider collecting emails in a list served for direct communication with affected communities, such as was implemented by the Cal Fire for the CZU incident updates. Also, will the county be providing sandbags and sand to local residents? The second comment comes from Christina Salinas. If you are in a debris flow path, how will this impact your permitting issues? And the third comment comes from Jessica Peters, Dear Board of Supervisors, please consider the overall impact that more restrictions will have on those already suffering from the loss due to the CZU fire. The decision to disallow residents from moving back onto their property should not be left up to a single building inspector without recourse. Thank you. And that concludes public comment. Thank you. Thank you. That little loss. Chair, go ahead. Well, there's one more. There's one more. You'll have to put your mask on though. Okay. This is actually our county geologist. And I'm hoping he might be able to say a few words about mitigation approaches. I'm Jeff Nolan. I'm the county geologist. And I wanted to address the comment regarding potential impediments to rebuilding rapidly. We've put together a program to actually waive a lot of the geologic requirements for in-kind rebuilds. I've put together a format for a screening tech geologic analysis. So we'll be all that's required for the majority of the rebuilds. There will be some places where there's a life safety risk. So the screening study has been designed to specifically identify sites where we think there's an imminent life safety hazard. And it's only those sites that are gonna be required to have greater scrutiny. And those are the only sites where there will be some impediment to immediate rebuilding on the site. We've, I've tried to reduce the requirements just to the point of where we're specifically protecting life safety. And most of the other common requirements for geologic hazard assessment are being waived. Now you probably wanna call on Supervisor McPherson. He's the one waiting. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the comments from the public. Our time is short and we're at the mercy of Mother Nature who hasn't treated us very well lately. But can we anticipate where the worst sites are? I mean, Mr. Locatelli and some of the fire folks up there as well as Cal Fire and all, I think they, I mean, are we looking at how we can address mitigation of where the greatest slopes are, the degree slopes? And if so, can we identify the structures that are at risk and notify those property owners specifically? Maybe we're doing that, but I just wanted to find out if we're, if that's the way we're addressing this, find out where the worst spots are and try to address that first. And then are we address, are we talking to the property owners in that area, in those areas? And I have other questions as well. So that's what the county geologist and the geology team is doing right now. They are actively field mapping areas, the whole burn areas, areas below the burn areas along the Highway 9 corridor, North Coast, Bonnie Dune to determine the areas that have the highest hazards and the areas with the biggest risk, the structures with the biggest risk. So they're out there doing that now. We don't have that information available yet. Their field mapping should be done this week and we'll be reviewing the maps and digitizing those early next week. Okay. Will we use the zone haven application for evacuation? So we're meeting with, I have a meeting tomorrow set up with Chief Larkin and the GIS staff and also the regional 911 to go over our use of zone haven and other apps like the code red app and so forth and use of reverse 911 to get the message out. And then I think you had another comment about meeting with neighborhoods and so forth. And it might be a good idea for us to meet with the supervisors of districts three and five on maybe a watershed by watershed basis and meet with those and we're more than willing to meet with those folks with your staff and go out there and get them get the message out. Great, I think that's absolutely necessary. That'd be great. To do as soon as you get your report done and you said that you're, are you kind of completing that this week, did you say? The field mapping is getting completed this week and then we'll be finishing the digitizing of it and wrapping up the maps and then we'll be having preliminary meetings with the fire agencies and Sheriff next week to review the maps. And then then we'll start messaging that out and meeting with your office. So I would imagine that something like that would have to be complete before we allow any kind of temporary housing because we surely don't want it in a debris flow area to allow that. Is that part of the reason we're going to be doing that and getting it done as quickly as possible to notify those property owners? Addressed it permitting. Yeah, so thank you. So the field mapping that's happening right now is for evacuation purposes. And the County geologist has also been looking at for longer-term permitting and rebuilding purposes, which areas would need further input from a geologist to clear them from the imminent life safety risks posed by debris flows. So those are going to be pretty coincidental in those mapping efforts. And yeah, and so folks who would like to temporarily reoccupy their homes in those areas will need to be in contact with a consulting geologist in order to provide that clearance that life safety risks are not a concern before occupying those parcels. Okay, thank you. This might be directed to our geologist, Jeff. Is there, with the corrective work that we may be able to do, is there any time then we can find out, well, this is safer now that it's not susceptible to a slide area? It probably would go on for some time, I would guess. But is that true that you could do some work and then say, okay, this is a lot more steady or secure than it was before, or, you know, last month, last year, whenever the case may be? Well, yeah, there's kind of two answers to that. One is because of the fire, there's an elevated risk at a lot of sites that probably weren't very risky previously. The other thing is that there really is a lot of uncertainty in this process. We've, the USGS and the California Geologic Survey have come in and prepared probability maps to show how elevated the risk is at certain locations. We, they've looked at rainfall intensities that may initiate landslides, but we won't really know what's gonna happen until it starts raining. That's the bottom line. So I think in the early part of the winter, we'll be more conservative. There's gonna be rain gauges deployed around the area, so as the winter progresses, we'll have more rainfall data and be able to correlate that with the actual landslides that occur. So I think the way to think of it is gonna be an evolving program that as time goes, as the winter goes on, we'll probably get more precise and be able to define, if we have evacuation areas, to define them more precisely. Good. And one other question. I saw on that Montecito map, it looked like there were, I don't know, seven or eight major debris flow areas or canyons, whatever. And I, when I looked at the map briefly of Santa Rosa Valley, it looked like there were many more. Have you ever had that kind of a comparison? I mean, do we have more of those steep canyon-like slopes in our area in Santa Rosa Valley and third district up in their area, the mountainous area on the coastline, than did Montecito? Yeah, we do. We do. Part of it's the number and the part of it also is the size of the basins. We have probably more basins than they do. A lot of them are smaller, but we also have a number of basins that are comparable in size to the ones that produce the debris flows in Montecito. Okay, thank you for your answers to questions. And I look forward, I know everybody does to getting some data and some information as soon as possible. People are anxious, they want to move, but they don't want to move back into another disaster. That's for sure. So I might have more questions later, but thank you for answering those questions. You might want to ask Supervisor Coonerty. Sure. Okay, well, any other questions by board members? Yeah, Mr. Chair. Thank you for this presentation. And I think I want to just emphasize that the Resource Conservation District has been out meeting with property owners and neighborhoods. They also have been doing webinars online that are saved to YouTube so people can watch it and understand what they can do with their own properties. But given the size of this fire and the complexity of these different hazard areas, I think we're really gonna have to focus on the preventative evacuations in order to save property. I remind people that the Thomas fire, like two people were lost in the fire and then 22 people were lost by the mud side. And it's gonna be an incredibly dangerous situation. And I take seriously the comments that preventative measures at this stage as we head into October are gonna be limited. So we're gonna need people to evacuate in order to make sure that we keep people safe. So I wanna thank those who made the presentation. I look forward to working with people. I think it was a good idea to work with people by district and then within watersheds to hold specific outreach efforts so that people can understand which watershed or that they're in or hazard area they're in. And we can work with specific people, folks along that. We're also gonna have to ensure that there's a communications infrastructure set up because in many areas, in both the fifth district and the third district, people may not have access to phones or internet. And obviously if we wanna run evacuation systems, it's gonna be critical that people have those, that communication infrastructure in place. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. It seems very clearly that given the experience very recently and the statistics about the number of people who chose to ignore the evacuation orders, it makes you do have to make this big to make people understand the risk that they face. I wanted to ask whether there were lots of suggestions here about things that we could do or should think about doing right now, reseeding and everything. Has that been used in other places? Is that a tool that's available to us? Would the ground even accept that kind of work? I think as Mark Strudley alluded to it, and given the urgency of how soon the rains are coming, there's really not much that can be done to this season to do things. Given the size of some of these watersheds, I mean, some of them are in the range of 100 acres up over a thousand acres. And if you multiply out maybe even a quarter of an inch of soil loss in those areas, that's a huge amount of soil coming down. And there's no amount of K-rail or things like that, there's sandbags that you can set up that's just gonna become part of the debris. So at this point, and that's why we really are focusing about the evacuation because it's just, the soil is burned and it's bare and it's already raffling as we speak. And maybe after the rainy season, you could, the issue of reseeding could be taken on in a more aggressive way. I mean, what does that mean? Reseeding is tough. We have 86,000 acres that burned. So in a lot of its private property, so what we have seen from other fires in this county is that the vegetation does start to sprout back up, but it doesn't happen immediately. So the debris flow risk does go down over time in the next couple of years. It'll certainly go down, but again, we're really focusing on the immediate hazard that's up there. Looking at the long-term weather forecasting, this could be a La Nina year, which would mean less rain. Is this, if we don't get a lot of rain this year, what does that mean for our next year? So Jeff's coming up to. I just wanted to reinforce something that was said as part of the presentation and that is that the debris flow risk is related to short-term intensity and not the total amount of rainfall that you're getting. So we could have a very dry year. It would only take one storm to cause the kind of disaster that you saw in Montecito. What I've heard is that the actual rainfall intensity in Montecito that kicked all that off was close to half an inch of rain in five minutes. And in the Santa Cruz Mountains, that's the kind of event that happens every year, dry year or wet year. Got it. All right, that's helpful for me. I appreciate it. Well, I think these are good steps moving forward. Obviously communication in neighborhoods that are going to be affected will become very important. So thank you for your work. Mr. Chair, I want to add some deep appreciation for the presentation of everybody today and the expertise of our county geologists and our flood control manager, because really what we're hearing is not a situation that's possible, but probable. And I think it's very important that we maintain this level of transparency with the community. I understand the desire to narrow the messaging or the focus on what could be predicted to be the hardest hit areas. But realistically, as was even seen during the fire event, predicting where the specific hardest hit areas is very difficult to do. I think that it's in the community's best interest to just have all of the information we have and the recommendations that our experts can provide in order to make the best decisions for the safety of their own families. And I recognize that that's a pretty significant scope of community and of people. But this is the second phase of the disaster that has been moved into is the realistic component of flood and mud slides that occur even outside of a fire event in our mountainous regions every couple of years. So I think that it would be prudent upon both the county and the community writ large to really internalize the information of how high the level of risk is. There really is no downside to an over preparation or risk mitigation. And in this case, I think it's really important, especially for those that live, not just in the burned out areas, but downstream of it due to flows, really anticipate this as a probabilities opposed to just a possibility and prepare accordingly in that situation. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good, you're welcome. Any other questions? Supervisor Coonerty? No, he's already asked questions. So I don't, but there is no action except accept and file this report. That's correct. Well, there's no action on it. Thanks. I'm not sure if maybe the CEO wanted to say something. I think the action was just to accept the presentation. We need a motion is I guess the question. And I would make that motion. The action was to receive the presentation. Okay. First and second, okay. Go ahead. Supervisor Leopold? Aye. Friend? Aye. Coonerty? Aye. McPherson? Aye. And Chair Caput? Aye. Motion passes unanimously. That'll conclude our meeting. We will have a session. It's more of an informational session, right? There's no closed session today. You're right. There is. There's no, there is not. There is not a closed session today. Not even a report or anything. We'll have a meeting. Okay. That'll be fine. So the next, the regular meeting of the board of supervisors will take place Tuesday, October 6th at 9 a.m. I want to thank everybody for coming today and hope to see you in about a week. Okay. Thank you. Should we take a 10 minute break?