hen that might be coming this year. Well, I did you want to... And believe me, before we go into further discussion, me and the Rena numbers that are put together are put forward by the state is really difficult in this high cost housing county of ours. So I get it and I sympathize with everybody that's involved in this for trying to make this goal. Go ahead, please. The code modernization is part of the sustainability update package and we expect to be at the planning commission with that in the July timeframe and to your board before the end of the calendar year. Okay, thank you. And the report states that I think it was 744 or 57%. Load of moderate Rena numbers have been allocated since 2015 and with two more years to go or 47%. There are some good programs that are outlined in the housing element, but the county has not historically been able to reach the schools. What other programs can be added to the housing element to improve that outcome? Is there Ms. Levine, Acting Planning Director? Thank you. We will be preparing our next housing element in 2023. So over the course of that year, we're going to be doing the research, developing those new programs. We do think there are some more innovative things that we can do in addition to what we already do and it's necessary to do some new and different things and we'll be developing that and putting it into the proposed next housing element. Thank you. And this might be hard to say, but to answer about how does the county's progress, as I said, it's very difficult in this high cost area that we have in meeting its arena obligations or allocation. How do we compare with other counties in our region or throughout the state or like size counties? I think it's fair to say that most communities struggle to meet their targets and communities generally do not meet their targets. So in some ways they're aspirational, especially in this next cycle. Having said that, HCD is going to be quite rigorous with all of us about making sure that we have capacity for larger numbers and programs that will incentivize larger numbers. So with all of that, I think we'll do better than we've managed as a community so far, as far as providing housing. So some communities are a further percentage of the way toward meeting their goals. Some lesser, it depends on such a mix of things, including market forces over which a community has no control. So we all work on the part of it that we can affect and then part of it we just simply can't affect as a governmental agency. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I'm Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thank you. I want to thank you for all the work you're doing with the planning department and quick question. I hear the categories for income, extremely low, very low, low. And when I, it's extremely low and an actual category where the state of California has actually got that, because when I'm talking with AMBAG, they have very low, low, but they don't have extremely low. So I get a little confused between that when I'm working with AMBAG and our county. Thank you. Yes, Supervisor Caput and it's Susie Anise. I'm the principal planner for the housing section. So yes, we understand people do get confused about the RENA requirements related to extremely low income. So this is an official income level that the state publishes an income limit for. And it is part of our objectives in the housing element. However, for the purposes of the RENA tables, extremely low is included within the overall very low income target. And at least past guidance from the state has been that we should assume that half of the very low units that we are assigned are supposed to be extremely low. Having said that, they understand that it is very difficult to finance extremely low income units. The main way that this is done generally is by building units where you have a project-based voucher commitment. So those commitments come from HUD and the local housing authority. So where we do have those project-based vouchers, that's where it makes development of extremely low income units financially feasible. Without that, it's pretty difficult and pretty rare to be able to restrict a property or units to that income level, but they are in the allocation goals. Okay, and then maybe while you're there too, when we're talking about actually living in a place, let's say somebody very low income, especially in Santa Cruz County, we're talking about low rent. Is there any possibility that they can actually buy a home now? That's a real tough one. You know, the American dream of owning a home for somebody with a low income. Is that gone? It's not gone entirely. We do currently have a Habitat for Humanity project and we're currently actually closing escrow on some of those homes. And some of the buyers in those projects, generally speaking, tend to be very low income. The current project that Habitat is building out is not restricted at the very low income level. It's restricted at the low level. However, a lot of the buyers that we're seeing qualify and be approved to buy those units are actually in the very low income level. Historically in the past, it was much easier than it is today to get very low income units in a for sale project. Even then they were mostly in subsidized 100% affordable projects. But today, even for those nonprofit builders, it is very difficult to make it pencil at the very low income level. But the approach that I think most communities take is you try to provide as much rental housing as you can that's affordable at the very low income level. And then you provide those home ownership opportunities at low and moderate and work with those families to hopefully help them sort of be able to move from the rental housing into a for sale unit as their income grows. If you can work with them on career development, job development, things like that, then hopefully they can get up to that next level and buy a home at some point. And then I've been pushing for years for more low income housing and all that. With the state mandate, the state expects so many units to be built county wide. And I guess what I've been arguing for years is if South County were to build 100 units and the rest of the county doesn't, all the state sees as the 100 units for Santa Cruz County. So when the state has a mandate, if all of the affordable housing is in one district, the whole county gets credit for it. Is that correct? I suppose theoretically, yes. Although if you look at our past projects, I think historically they haven't had districts. I agree. I'm not criticizing the other districts right now. I'm just trying to clarify the credit for the county. It doesn't matter if it's all in one district or it's spread out, right? Well, there's different places where the state reviews our performance. When we come to a new housing element update process, they're reviewing our performance at a variety of stages in the housing development cycle. So it's not only about the units you actually complete, but it's also about what our zoning allows and what our general plan allows. So they would be reviewing something that is in the housing element called the sites inventory. And that's a listing of all the properties throughout the county that have any kind of residential zoning or residential development capacity on them. And I think when the state's reviewing those that sites inventory, they would certainly probably bring it to our attention if they found that all the residential zoning was clustered in one geographic area of the county. Fortunately, that's not currently the case. So I don't think we'll have a problem there, but if it was, I think they would probably raise some fair housing concerns. Yeah, it's better right now than it was in the past. We still need to get more. If we're gonna have 100 units down here in South County, we need to have 100 units in the Santa Cruz and north part of the county also. But anyway, it is better right now than it was in the past. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any further questions or comments from members of the board? I've just a few questions myself. I noticed that we built 31 low income, non-dead restricted affordable units. I'm just curious, are these affordable by design units? Are there other elements in place to ensure affordability? Just kind of curious about our toolbox here. If not using de-districtions, how do we maintain affordable units? Those are mostly ADUs. Okay. And we categorize those into either the low or the moderate income categories based on a survey of what kind of rents we're seeing out there and how those compare to the affordability limits. Okay, so is it based on- It's a square footage. Yeah, we look at square footage in a number of bedrooms and do a little comparison and look at what rents are out there on the market and then compare those and put those in those non-dead restricted categories. And then I was surprised to see so few applications for this progressionary permits this last year. I mean, if I read it right, seven applications for a total of 19 units. Why do you think there are so few housing applications for these discretionary permits in 2021? Is this a column before us to the storm or is it an odd year? Or is this just that difficult as an environment to build? Right, in the past, we had been reporting in that table in that category, the number of building permit applications received, but we received clarification from the state this year that all they wanna see in that table is just the number of discretionary permits application received for the creation of new units. And so those are the number of discretionary permit applications for the creation of a new unit above what would be allowed on the property today. So that varies from year to year and those are the numbers from this year. You might see that go up and down from year to year because it kind of takes several years for some of those projects to make their way through the permit process. I would just add that I think the pandemic also threw people for a loop a little bit. We got contacted by quite a few developers who are exploring this or that type of development. Maybe it made it a little more challenging for them to do their due diligence or the financial scenarios were a little bit more confusing particularly if you're looking at mixed use project development because all of a sudden, okay, are all the restaurants closed? Nobody wants to finance a project with new restaurant space, for example. So we know that there's a lot of applicants sort of waiting in the wings and actually or who have actually moved forward into that discretionary process as of 2022 but these numbers are reflecting 2021. So I do think that was part of it. Okay, thank you. Let's just read how the R Combining District actually has kind of streamlined process as well. And so with the Nye Pro Tiva site, roughly five acres in Live Oak, you know, the fact that that has the R Combining District and has for many years now and housing hasn't been built there. I mean, is it fair to say that that's not a desirable site for housing after all? What I have heard from housing developers is a couple of things. Hey, there are some questions about how desirable it is just given it's kind of a sort of quasi industrial location right along the highway. But also, you know, at least in the past, I think the prior property owner wasn't particularly receptive to inquiries about buying it. I think it's transitioned to a new owner since that time. So I'm not sure about this owner, but in the past, I think maybe they were hoping to develop it themselves. It's always a little hard, you know, when you have, particularly if you have a large family that owns a property and there's multiple family members who have to agree to a sale, that can be the case with some of these larger sites. So that can slow down the process of, for example, an experienced housing developer being able to acquire that site. Mr. Thank you. And my final question is, you know, I understand our arena goals are aspirational and indeed we have a ways to go through we're going to meet the cycle five goals. I mean, I think, you know, with about 600 units left to build in two years, I would have to be the 300 units per year, which is basically more than double we've met in any of the years so far. You know, if we were, if this board were actually to say, you know, we're going to get this done, what would it take to actually meet these renails? I mean, what kind of, what would we have to put in place to theoretically make that happen? Do you mean the rest of our cycle five goal? Yeah. We took some, we made substantial progress on policies in the last couple of years. And I think part of it is that we now need to give those policies some time to be utilized by individual developers. So the framework is in place from that point of view. I don't know whether there would be, well, our sustainability update plan identifies some parcels that would make good mixed use, zoning, higher density option parcels. And if those were to get through the process, then we would have more inventory of property that's zoned for more housing. And that I think would be a very helpful step toward making those renail numbers. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Caput, did you have an additional question? One quick, one more question. What is the salary range or income range for moderate income right now? The word moderate sounds like, well, middle class, right? But I'm wondering how many people actually fit in that category. So the current upper limit for moderate income for a household of four is just under 135,000 per year. Keep in mind that's the gross pre-tax income. So people's actual take-home pay would be slightly less than that, but that's the gross household income limit for moderate. The median for a household of four currently is just under 112,000 for a household of four. Okay, so the moderate and the median are, they're different. Yes, moderate is 120% of the median. Okay, yeah, what I'm getting at is that in South County, the average income is lower than, you know, the other parts of the county. So that's the categories are very important. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. All right, are there any members of the public that wish to address us on this item? Seeing none here in the chambers, does anyone on Zoom or the telephone? Yes, we have one caller on Zoom. Marilyn, your microphone is available. I appreciate the staff report. I know a lot of work goes into it. However, we have more unhoused people than ever given by the last two years policies of putting over a million small businesses out, destroying them, shifting the wealth upward, driving people out of their homes who can't, don't have work anymore. This is deliberate policy plans and it's a basic human right to have food and shelter and employment and this system isn't meeting those rights. I remember in high school, studying history and reading about the depression of this year and the recession of this year. All the time and I was struck in 1966 when I visited this former Soviet Union and my second cousin who was living there when she said, they paid 5% of their income. It was adequate pleasant housing, 5% of their income for rent. So, Habitat for Humanity is doing something but it's a drop in the bucket of the needs. We need a different structure of a system that provides for everyone. And I'm reminded of this bumper sticker I had when I was teaching. It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber. That goes for providing for other needs in the community like housing and parks, et cetera. When money is siphoned out for all this, trillions of dollars into nuclear and military budgets. Mathematically, you don't have that money left for real needs in our community. Thank you, Ms. Garrett. We need a different structure of a system that provides for everyone. Additionally, you approved all this. All right, I'll now return it to the board for action. Unless there's a, sorry, was there anyone else on? There are none. Okay, now I'll return it to the board for action. I'll move the recommended actions. Okay. Okay, we have a motion by Supervisor Friend and a second by Supervisor McPherson. There are any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Supervisor Caput. Go back. McPherson. Aye. Supervisor, thank you. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. All right, thank you. Then the general plan annual report being accepted in file and staff will submit that to the governor's office. That concludes item 12 and our morning agenda. I will officially close the public hearing on that item. And the board will now go into closed session. County council, are there any reportable items from closed session? No. All right, then we will now move into closed session. We'll be back here in the chambers and on Zoom at 1.30 PM for our afternoon session. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It is 1.30 PM, March 22nd, 2022. And we will resume the regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Here. Coonerty. Caput. McPherson. Here. Koenig. Here. Thank you, Chair. Supervisor Caput is online. Okay, thank you. And please make a note when Supervisor Coonerty joins us. We'll do. All right, we will proceed with item 16 to consider a report by the Human Services Department in partnership with other county departments and local jurisdictions to take urgent actions to reduce the risk of evictions and homelessness among county residents after the end of the COVID-19 statewide eviction moratorium on March 31st, 2022 and direct the Human Services Department to report back on number four, August 23rd, 2022 as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Human Services. And for a report on this item, our Director of Human Services, Randy Morris. Yes, hi, good afternoon. Chair Koenig and board members into everyone watching and a few people in chambers, pleased to see here to have comment about this. I'm here with Dr. Robert Ratner, who's the Director of our Housing for Health Division. Both for this item and next item, a broader report in on homelessness. I'm gonna make some introductory comments and then turn it over to Robert who will go through a formal PowerPoint presentation. I wanna underline that as the Director of the Human Services Department, as you said in your comments, Chair Koenig, this is truly a collaboration amongst many county partners. I wanna highlight our CAO's office, but I also wanna recognize the presentation this morning from planning and their role and their important role in partnership on dealing with housing and the rena goal discussion this morning. But also the funding that is in front of the board is a shared funding streams that we have with our healthcare agency. But we made a decision to present this because of the link to the second item today on homelessness that we're managing in the Housing for Health Division. I also wanna recognize we have other public partners that are only referenced broadly in the materials that we have at least three of the four cities who are formally interested in participating in this, at least programmatically, if not financially. So some of them have items tonight on their council meeting. So we are in conversation with city partners.   As complicated as it has been to enter COVID, exiting COVID is creating a new set of challenges, which is protections that have been placed for some vulnerable members of our community. And that's the topic today, is what can we do as a local county government given some of the complexities of state and federal laws and funding streams that are winding down. I also wanna highlight for your board and anybody in the community watching that we coincidentally have a meeting scheduled tomorrow with a number of local service providers and advocates and city partners pending your board's approval of the action today to immediately begin discussions about executing a contract to get services in the community to help the population who are concerned about that might lose their housing if they don't have supports that we think should be put in place. So we are planning to immediately begin conversations about potential contracting. I do wanna share, I think it's my responsibility not only as a human service director, given everything we do is to serve vulnerable populations, but the housing for health report that's coming up next, that there's a balance for trying to strike here, which is recognizing some immediate help that we think we can offer should your board approve this action does not change the horizon issue that the distance between people's ability to afford housing in this community and particularly the impacts of the pandemic and challenges with people finding enough income to pay for housing. We have to be practical about everything we're trying to do cannot just be a short-term intervention. We have a much larger issue to deal with in this community and everywhere, which is the lack of affordable housing. So wanna be pragmatic about the action in front of you we think is a nice bridge, necessary bridge to help avoid a bigger cliff, but we still have a larger issue beyond the cliff, which is what to do with anybody we can help what to do if they can't afford the housing they have is still an ongoing issue. So we're gonna talk about that. We hope this presentation is helpful. We hope members of the community here in chambers or on live can please chime in. There's a lot of advocacy. We wanna hear their voices. We did our best to integrate their ideas and recommendations into the actions today. So this is our best effort to be partners with the community who've been doing some good thinking as well. So I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Ratner now who's gonna go through a couple of PowerPoint slides and give a little more specificity than what I just shared in my introductory comments. So take it away, Robert. Thank you, Randy. Thank you members of the board and thank you members of the public for joining us for this session today. These are really challenging times given the pandemic and the housing crisis and appreciate that a lot of county departments and stakeholders in the community have come together to come forward to the board with some recommendations on what we can do in the context that we're all living through now. I'm gonna go through a few slides and then wanna save time for public comment and questions from the board. You got it. So one of the key things that I wanted to share with those that are tuned in is that housing is key program is a statewide program that we at the county level agreed to participate in. The U.S. Department of Treasury had made funds available at both the state level and the county level and the board had approved of two of our Santa Cruz County specific allocations being transferred up to the state to support the housing is key program. One of the benefits of us transitioning some of our locally allocated funding to help with people falling behind in the rents is that we're taking advantage of the state funds. So combined, our funding that was allocated to us is around 18.8 million. And then we're getting additional state funds to help cover some of the back rent that people in our community owe. That particular program known as housing is key and there's a link in the slide deck is tied to a statewide eviction moratorium that was established through California policy and legislation that allowed for people who are struggling with their rent in California and including Santa Cruz County to get support to cover some of that back debt before landlords and property managers could move forward with eviction proceedings. So that eviction moratorium ends March 31st. So there's still a window of time between the presentation today and the end of this month for people to get their applications in and getting their application in is really key to making sure that if people do end up needing to go to court because of an inability to pay rent, if they've submitted an application and that application is still pending, there's an opportunity for that to come up in the court proceedings for people to be able to make the case they're waiting for that payment. So getting the application in right away is critical. I wanted to highlight a few of the things on this slide. This is a data snapshot in our County like how many people from our community have applied for assistance and these numbers get updated on a weekly basis by the entities that are managing the program at the state level. But as the beginning of March, we had over 3,500 applications to put in that in the contact if we think every application represents one renter household, that's close to 10% of the renter households in the County as a whole. We're asking for financial assistance to pay back rent and over $55.6 million were being requested for back rent, utilities, et cetera. The state program at the time that we took the snapshot here, 22 point million of that was approved for funding and the state had issued $15.1 million in payments. So there is a backlog of requests and payments that the state is working to process as quickly as possible. And one of the things that we're recommending is that we at the local level really make sure we're partnering with landlords and tenants to make sure they access the funds for applications that have been approved and we support them in getting that check cut to cover some of that back rent. As you can see only 13, well close to 1,400 of the applications have been actually paid out to date. So I wanted to highlight that we've had tremendous efforts from a group of organizations at the local level. The state refers to them as the local partner network and that's state term for contracts that the California Housing and Community Development Department established with local organizations to help tenants who are struggling to pay their rents and utilities to get access to support. So we have three major entities that got funding from the state through the US Treasury and State Resources, California Rural Legal Assistance, the Santa Cruz County Local Network Partnership which is a consortium of multiple organizations, community bridges help bring together to help address the challenges faced by tenants and then 2-1-1. So they all have independent contracts with the state currently and some of them have gotten extensions of those contracts to support people at the local level. State law and consultation with County Council, we really looked at are there things we can do locally related to the end of the eviction moratorium and the California moratorium made it very difficult for local communities that didn't already have tenant protections and moratoriums in place to continue to extend those. So we've concluded that's not a real viable option for us to recommend a given the input we have from County Council. So what can we do to help address this tremendous need in the community for people who struggle to keep their homes and jobs have been lost and people are struggling with childcare and rents are going up. So one recommendation we have is let's treat this as part of a COVID emergency. So we have in the Health and Human Service Agency authority to move forward with executing contracts quickly to address emergency situations related to the pandemic. This has really floated up for us in our department as something is directly related to the impacts of the pandemic. So we wanna be able to get into a contract quickly to expand our local resources to support the tenants who've applied. We wanna use the wisdom of other entities around the country that have done research on what really helps people who are at risk of eviction and what really helps people who are struggling to maintain housing. So elevating those best practices in the contracts that we would establish and then really working to avoid people actually going through a process where they get a formal eviction that will show up on their credit report. If you end up with a formal eviction, finding housing in a tight housing market gets even more challenging. So can we set up our resources to prevent people from getting to that place with mediation, conflict resolution, legal assistance to prevent a formal eviction. So what we're proposing is bringing together funds from actually three different county agencies. The planning department has some emergency rental assistance funds. We have some administrative funds in the same category and then the health service agency has some public health infrastructure funds that they feel like could be applied to this situation because the loss of housing could have tremendous public negative public health impacts. So we're seeking approval from the board to move forward with getting that $500,000 that as quickly as possible to help meet the community needs and support that local partner network to help all those applicants who've applied for funding but have yet to receive it. And then after they get the funding, many of the households are gonna need support to be able to keep that housing. Randy alluded to this in his introduction. The big picture is that the housing affordability gaps, gaps between people's incomes and the cost of housing is a major issue nationally. It's really significant here in Santa Cruz County and the shortage of housing production and inflation that's impacting all of us and COVID-19 are all contributing to that gap between what people can afford and the cost of housing. So I think we need to keep in mind, state and federal advocacy on those issues is gonna be important coupled with local support for creating more affordable housing to address this issue over the long term. And then helping people keep their housing as a really wise investment. We're gonna talk later about our six month update on our housing for a healthy Santa Cruz plan but one of our four pillars is prevention that we collectively agree is really critical and it's a lot easier and more effective to help families and individuals to keep their homes than once they lose it to help them get back into housing. So if we can make this investment now and reduce the number of people who are getting displaced or lose their housing, I think it's a really wise investment. So some of the principles we wanted to propose for this $500,000 investment is really focusing on those applicants that we're seeking funding from the state, the 3,500 plus individuals and making sure there's good follow-up with the state officials and the households at the local level. Trying to build upon the collaborative structures that have developed during the pandemic and fund them in a way that can keep them going beyond this moment that we're in. Minimize the amount of the money we spend on general administration so we can get money to direct services and financial assistance to the households that need it. Make sure we're documenting our efforts to reach out to people who applied for the money and the success of our outreach efforts. Try to make it as easy as possible for people to know where to go to get help because it can be really complicated to understand the funding and the rules. Try to maximize our impact in the community by avoiding duplication of efforts and making sure that we're all working in a concerted way and then documenting the impacts of our investments on helping people to keep their housing. And priority areas for helping households these tie into the best practices around eviction. Let's make sure we get those funds that are available at the state level to our landlords and our tenants here. So we as department staff wanna work with our local network providers to really tighten our communication with the state and get those dollars coming out here as quickly as possible. We wanna focus not just on getting that money but we want people to be able to sustain their housing. So if you have $10,000 back on the first slide of back rent and utilities you've gotta make sure you can sustain that housing over time. So people may need help with applying for employment or public benefits. So I think our services really need to be geared towards helping people sustain the housing not just paying the back rent. And then like I mentioned earlier avoiding those formal evictions through mediation, illegal assistance. And we're a very unique county in that we still have a self-help port that can help people who are looking for assistance before they get to that formal eviction. So building on that network that we have in the court system I think is also really critical. And I think that's it. And I'll just close out by repeating something I said at the beginning. We as county can't commit to any city action but I do wanna underline there are three cities two who have as a matter of public record materials for their city council that they're exploring augmenting these funds and considering braiding their funds with us in one city who doesn't have a city council action but is prepared to invest in it. So I mentioned we have a meeting tomorrow. You just wanna queue up that if your board approves this action we have all those players ready to be at the meeting tomorrow to really try to turn this round as quickly as possible. And we're open to any questions you have or public comment or whatever the right order is. All right, thank you, director Morris and thank you, Dr. Ratner. Are there questions from members of the board? Yes, Supervisor McPherson. Just thank you for the county staff and the nonprofit agencies that have worked together these past two years to help identify housing and employment needs and so forth and the services especially during the pandemic. We know that everybody's facing really tough times as the state ends at this eviction moratorium. One question I had is there a particular reason we're not getting a report back sooner than August? If we were to provide additional direction to come back sooner or say in a month or so is that feasible or I know these timelines and things have changed and they've got deadlines too but is there any way we can, what we could do? Is there anything we can do to get that report back sooner? Well, ultimately my job as department heads say I'm here to be of service to you and ultimately what you decide, I think in all candor there's a couple of factors in play. One is the ability to turn around a report with metrics and deliverables and the impact of something. The time it'll take the contract in place, the community organization to get the services, report back to us and get a report to you really ends up bumping up into then this is my candor we're then in budget season preparing to give our full budget to you and then it bumps into our next six month report which is where we hit on the six month report and that said if it is meaningful given this is a lot of money and it's an urgent issue to come back sooner we can we just saw it as tied right to finishing the budget season. We'd have a reasonable amount of time to have a meaningful report and we could fold it right into the next six month report on the overall effort to prevent homelessness in the second item today. So that was our thinking. Yes. You just have a fuller, a more complete report of if it stays at August then that right? I think based on the volume and the numbers and the time it'll take to turn this around and getting a report in an analysis and a meaningful feedback. I think you will have a richer and more robust report on what the impact was. If you ask us to come sooner, we'll certainly comply. I just think it'll be a little bit early on in the cycle and that's why we sort of timed it to that thinking. Okay, thank you supervisor McPherson. Further questions or comments from members of the board? I'm just interested in hearing the community feedback on this item. I appreciate it. Okay, I had a couple of questions. First, I seem to remember, I think at first we received about $16 million from the state for this. I mean, it's good to see that that number has gone up and that nearly $19 million has already been allocated and 21 million approved, but with 55 million requested, I guess how much more can we reasonably expect to come into our community? I mean, 30 million, 25 million, what? Yeah, that's a great question. So looking at the local allocation we've received from the US Treasury plus the state funds that they set aside for our community, we could get up to 36.4 million. And if the US Treasury and the federal government decided to deploy more of the resources because not all states have been utilizing all of their treasury funds, in theory, the state could have more available. So it's one reason why I think people who need the support should get their applications in. The 36.4 million's already written down in contracts we have for our community. And if we can support the state and getting the money out, I think we'll have a good case to make with the federal government that we could use some more funds to close that gap even further. That's encouraging. I mean, that looks like roughly half of the application or half of the funds requested could be paid out. So that's great. My other question is I know you looked at along with County Council opportunities to try to extend a local eviction moratorium, but because state law precludes that, we are not recommending that we move forward at this time with that. However, would there be other opportunities to create a general ordinance around evictions that could provide some greater protections or relief for people in this case? Not for this population of folks, unfortunately. If you're directing your attention to folks that owe rent from March 20th, 2020 through March 31st, 2022 that field has been occupied by the state. Your board does have the opportunity to adopt additional just cause eviction prohibitions for other reasons and for other populations of individuals, but not this population that we're discussing today. So if our board adopted a general ordinance that increased the payer quit notice from three days to 15 days, would that apply to everyone except for the population that owes background between this period or because it's a universally applicable, would it be okay? Yes, but I would have other concerns about adopting an ordinance to change payer quit days from three to 15 because there's a state statute directly on point on that. And so we would have to do another preemption analysis. We don't just have the ability to operate on our own completely in this area because there's a robust state statutory scheme that covers landlord tenant relationships. And so we're able to operate where the legislature gives us leave to do. And according to our police powers in areas that are left over, but unfortunately with regard to this group of folks, the legislature has taken over the program for these folks. Okay. And as you said, we're further restricted by other acts of the legislature in general in this area of the law. Yes. That's all my questions. So we will now move to public comment. The member of the public who wants to address us on this item, please approach the podium. Thank you, everybody. It's good to see you all in person. Thanks for the time today. We just first wanted to thank the staff for their support and the recommendation of this $500,000. It's gonna be a meaningful impact to help us, both in the local partner network, but also the other project we've been working on, which is the eviction defense collaborative that we started in November with funding from Packard and sunlight giving that provides eviction defense support to many different families already impacting 54 families as of today. We at no fault of us board supervisors here or providers are in this kind of predicament where we have the eviction moratorium ending on the 31st and we have 2000 families that are still anxiously waiting for the funding to be allocated for them. And I think that we have a moral obligation as a community to look at different solutions that will help prevent and or deter evictions moving forward. Some of the items have already been addressed in what the difficulty is, but I think there's other opportunities to implement mandatory at least notification of mediated services prior to submittal of unlawful detainers that could be presented to our local self health court as well as our courts locally. And I think there would be a lot of support around just letting people know that there's an option outside of civil litigation or outside of filing an unlawful detainer. I think secondly, I know that the legislator was going to caucus and this was gonna be an item that we requested to be placed. But I think moving the chair to submit a letter both to the governor and to the legislator to provide a legislative solution would help every local official not have to be in this hot seat, which is knowing that there's gonna be people in their communities that will be potentially at risk of eviction. And will allow us the time that's needed as local partner networks to get the money out to make sure that people's applications are filled and to make sure that we have all the information that the state needs to report back to the US Treasury. So with those recommendations, I hope that you consider that in today's action. Yeah, for those who don't know that's Ray Consino from Community Bridges who's been phenomenal and helping us with this. Ray, you didn't identify yourself, come on. Save in five minutes or five seconds. Hi there, my name is Tonya Switzer and I'm Community Bridges family resource collective operations manager and also the program manager for the local partner network that you spoke about earlier. We welcome the staff recommendation to support eviction prevention work that we are engaged with alongside the work that we're doing with the housing is key program. We know as you also do that the best prevention to houselessness is supporting people to stay in their homes. Community Bridges has been the lead organization for managing the housing is key local partner network for Santa Cruz County. March 31st will end the state eviction protections for applicants to the housing is key program. As of March 15th, 3433 Santa Cruz County residents have submitted applications and only around 41% or 1,424 applicants have been funded. The majority of applications come from female lead households, 58% and Latin families, 43%. Without significant investment in policy intervention, many of these homes will face eviction. The goal of the program, the housing is key program is that all eligible applicants that have active applications in the system by March 31st of 2022 will be funded. From an eviction prevention standpoint, the issue is related to the following. Once we enter into April, landlords can legally evict tenants for nonpayment of rent, even if funding to pay that rent is pending in the system. So we are likely to see tenants being evicted while landlords will still in retrospect receive rents that the tenants were evicted for. For these reasons, we urge the board to take action to support extended eviction protections for any county resident that has an active housing is key application in the system by the application portal closure of the end of this month. The applications we work with are our county's most vulnerable. They seek. Thank you, ma'am. Is that it? You're out of time. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Anyone else in the chambers that would like to address us on this item? Is there anyone on Zoom or the phone that would like to address us? Yes, there are multiple. Jacqueline Tuttle, your microphone is available. Hi, I'm Jackie Tuttle. I'm representing from Temple Bethel. I live in the city and I'm here speaking for COPA leaders as well. We're a broad-based organization. We have 23 member institutions across our county and Monterey County. I want to appreciate the two speakers before me. You've said many of the things I was going to say. We want to thank our county leaders for engaging together with people throughout the county. I'm very excited to hear that you have a meeting tomorrow because just as the speaker before me said, it is the immediate need of these people in our community who even if they may get their back rent to pay will be evicted. And we are very concerned about people losing their homes. As people have said and we know, it is much harder to get back into a home once it is gone. We commend you to work on these contracts quickly, support the idea that prevention is the best practice. We want to avoid formal convictions and commend our local service providers for doing very much with not so much. We are concerned that the money that you are looking at sounds like a lot of money, but we are not convinced that it is going to be enough. And we like you are concerned that the state has not held up their end of this bargain by putting the money out there and not getting it out to all of our constituents with enough time. We appreciate the county and city partnerships and we hope that you will continue to recognize this emergency. We've met with a number of supervisors and city council people and we really appreciate your attention to this very pressing problem. Thank you. Ms. Tuttle. Vav Hirschfield. Hello supervisors, thank you for time to speak. My name is Vav Hirschfield. I'm the program coordinator for an organization called Tenant Sanctuary where a renters rights education organization based in the city of Santa Cruz. And I believe the COVID pandemic layered some crises, layered crises on top of other crises, the severe lack of affordable housing to low income renters was present before the pandemic and it continues to today. And though we're in a different phase of the pandemic, the BA2 Omicron variant, which is more transmissible than the original Omicron variant now makes up nearly a quarter of cases in the US, the danger of infection is not over and renters in Santa Cruz County are still struggling with the economic impacts of the past two years. So in this context, funding for eviction prevention services is welcome. It's also long overdue. Services like a guaranteed lawyer make an enormous difference in eviction case outcomes. And I'd encourage the board to look into studies out of Boston, examining the impact of guaranteed representation for tenants and eviction proceedings. Many tenants cannot take advantage of rights granted to them under the law because they're unaware of those rights and lack support to assert those rights in or before court. However, I have to be frank in saying that services are not enough. Lawyers, rights counselors and mediators can do a great deal to change outcomes for tenants, but laws protecting tenants in this county leave much to be desired. I recently spoke with a renter who's being asked to move out of their home with only 60 days notice and is receiving only one month's worth of rent and relocation assistance. Most people I speak to about looking for new housing mentioned that their searches take four to six months. Additionally, one month's worth of rent is vastly insufficient to pay for moving costs, hotel stays and security deposits. Frankly, Supervisor Koenig's idea of expanding just cause protections beyond what state law currently provides would make a truly massive difference in the lives of renters as we continue to grapple with the housing crisis and COVID pandemic. The board has an enormous opportunity here to increase the impact of investments and services by providing powerful tools for service providers to better support community members accessing those services. Thank you, Mr. Hirschfeld. There are no other speakers on Zoom. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. Supervisor Caput, you're on mute. Got it, I'm muted. Okay, you know, this is a very stressful topic we're dealing with. All of us are going through a lot of stress but what I'm looking at is can you imagine all the stress that maybe a mental income family has when you're facing eviction?  How many of those do we know are single moms with kids that are possibly facing eviction? I don't know if he's going to harm us to get there. We have any idea. This is Randy. I want to make a general comment that I realized upon reflection and I was thinking about some of the public comments. We didn't say the following. Robert and his formal presentation and Supervisor Caput, I'll get back to your question in a minute. It takes time and energy and resources to document everything that's going on right now. And I want to take a minute to parse out the difference between those matters that make it to these service providers where they can start speaking to your question Supervisor Caput who is needing help, who has contacted you and then to the issue of quarks. We know the number of formal evictions in process are low but the issue that I hope we can purchase with our network partners is getting answers to your question Supervisor Caput really understanding who these 3,500 people are and the big issue I see in human services is how often people informally without knowing they have rights end up agreeing to leaving their housing not knowing they have rights that the court would give them or these service providers could help them. So I'm hoping that part of what we will be able to do by putting some money into this effort is documenting what's going on, having concrete answers to what your questions are and really being able to track how the formal evictions happen and never make it to the court numbers that we can see that are small because I do think a lot of people feel pressured out not realizing they have services and supports available. So I'm hoping that helps us Supervisor Caput have a more detailed answer to your question back to the report back so we can share more about who these people are and what we were doing, what their issues were. I think it will tell us an important story looking forward. You're right, I realize that money is not going to be there and it's a big stress on the landlords too if they have to pay for all the upkeep, maybe they have to put a new roof on or whatever, they don't have any money coming in. But do we know also how many are in South County? A general percentage of Ballpark figure. Supervisor Caput, thank you for the question. I actually don't have the number committed in my mind but I do know that the vast majority of the applications are coming from the unincorporated in Southern parts of the county. So the city of Watsonville has the largest number of applications that have come in to the housing is key program. And as Randy alluded, that's only the people that know they can ask for help. So we don't have a way of knowing how many other households but the data seems to indicate there's a significant need in the Southern part of the county in your district. You bet. And again, we're back to the money. Let's say I'm in a home and I'm paying my rent and I'm working and I can barely make it. There's no way when you're living in a place to then call up section eight. I've been on my own, I've been paying everything and then now I call section eight. There's only so much money from section eight. Can they step in and pay the rent? I don't know. I'm asking tough questions because I don't have the answers and I don't expect you to have a specific answer but do you have any idea how that might work or section eight could actually step up and again, money, pay for the rent. That's a great question. About one in five households that are eligible for section eight in Santa Cruz County actually have it and there's a very long waiting list that's been closed for many years for people who are trying to get it. So I think that's an area where several speakers alluded to the opportunity for state and federal advocacy. I think expanding rental assistance at the state level in a directed way and continuing to support what candidate Joe Biden was pitching expansion of the section eight program is another place where we can make a difference but that level of resources I think would require federal and state investment to really close that gap. Yeah, and I realized there's only so much money again, section eight, if they had a pot full of money, they could step in but they have a limited amount they can actually pay. And then again, in Watsonville, we have the problem of undocumented, you know, where do they go for help? That's always been a tough one. And then of course the blended family where half of them are citizens and some are undocumented. So there's a fear factor also, they go forward, they're afraid they'll get deported or something or half the family get deported. So it's a tremendous amount of stress. We do offer counseling, I believe, at the mental health facility on Freedom Boulevard. Can we ever refer them, you know, families to that facility for counseling for especially the kids, right? If they need it. And that last question, Supervisor Caput, I think our community partners do a really excellent job of linking people with resources. The state has invested in something called Cal Hope, which is a COVID related emotional mental health support line that then links people to local levels. So I appreciate your question. I think getting the word out to the public about those resources is helpful. And anything we can do to reduce the mental health is often related to any health issues are often related to the level of stress that people are experiencing. And the housing stress that you've raised and we're talking about today is a contributor to health problems. So anything we can do to reduce housing stress will have a positive impact on health. So having those health resources available is great. And I think moving forward with trying to get as much as we can do in terms of local community resources to support people would also be useful. Especially, yeah, I know, sum it up, you know, we're all under a lot of stress from different issues that I just, with an eviction and everything like that, we could push people to the breaking point where they just can't handle it. And that's a sad commentary on what we're facing today in our society. Thank you, Supervisor Cabot. Yeah, yeah, so I just want to first, I want to take a moment and appreciate staff for their work on this and figuring out how to address this impending crisis in our community. I want to thank the community organizations that have done the hard work on the ground for the past two years to reduce the impacts in our community to the most vulnerable and also to the community advocates who have been active and reaching out to us and making sure that this issue gets the attention and resources it needs. It's a frustrating situation because we're spending $500,000 that can otherwise be spent to further assist vulnerable populations on a problem that was sort of self-inflicted by the state not running this program as effectively as possible and making sure that they got the money out before the deadline ran. So I'm supportive of the recommendation. I do want to make sure because it is money that could be spent for people who are currently experiencing homelessness or other vulnerable populations that all the factors that Dr. Ratner laid out and the criteria and priorities are addressed to make sure it's spent as effectively as possible and gets to the people who need it in the most effective way but spending money to prevent people from becoming unhoused versus trying to then have them unhoused and then trying to solve it on the backend. It's a smart investment for us. It's an even better impact on that family and the overall community. So I'll move the recommended actions. Second. We have a motion by Supervisor Coonerty and a second by Supervisor Friend. Any further discussion? Second. I had another question for County Council regarding this request from Mr. Cansino about mandatory notification of the option for mediation. Is that something that's within, something that we could include in our local just cause ordinance? I mean, I understand we don't have an ordinance before us today and we're gonna have to put one together or rather amend the existing one. Yeah, if there are ideas I'm happy to work with you, I would wanna take a look in more detail around that and not answer from the dais about whether or not it would be an effective tool or whether it would be available but totally can work with you or Mr. Cansino to figure out whether or not that would be something that would be doable. All right, thank you. Yeah, I understand that the city of San Cruz just cause eviction ordinance is a little bit more robust than ours here in the County. So that's something we can look at as well. And also just wanna make sure I understand correctly. I mean, if someone actually follows, if an eviction proceeding all the way to the courts, as you said, they would be able to demonstrate that they had a pending application with the housing is key program and that the judge may look at that favorably and not move to evict immediately. Yeah, thanks. I think to make that real Supervisor Cooner, we gotta work the relationships here with the courts and the self-help laws there to make sure that we have that awareness among all the key players and that we've got the local partner network to really help people to access those funds. I think Supervisor Caput mentioned this is an impact on property owners, small property owners are also really struggling. They've got their own bills to pay and if the checks aren't getting cut. So it's kind of how do we mediate and balance that reality and avoid getting a formal eviction? I think we often portray property owners in a negative light, but many of them are also struggling. So I think that the local partner network and our staff are really committed to trying to get that reality to happen. And I think our self-help center and the judge who oversees a lot of the evictions here are really committed to making sure we're not evicting people just for this delay and state payment. All right, thank you. I mean, it seems like this is the action that we can definitively take today. And that is an entire community. We should continue to get the word out about due process when it comes to eviction so that everyone understands that. And I'd be happy to work with County Council looking at our just cause eviction ordinance going forward. So if there's no further discussion, Burke, roll call vote, please. Supervisor Friend. Hi. Coonerty. Hi. What's happened? I'm a person. Hi. Koenig. Hi. Thank you, Mr. President, unanimously. I might say that I think we can hear some background noise from Supervisor Cap. All right. Well, thank you. Good news for those funds. And we'll now proceed to item 17. And we have once again, Director Morris and Dr. Ratner to report on this. Item 17 is to conduct a study session on housing for a healthy Santa Cruz as strategic framework for addressing homelessness in Santa Cruz County, six month plan implementation and related updates, accept and file progress reports on policy goals and program updates, authorize the Human Services Department to apply for a California Interagency Council on Homelessness, Family Homelessness Challenge Grant and direct the Human Services Department to report back in August of 2022 on the next housing for a healthy Santa Cruz six month framework implementation cycle and related program updates as outlined in the memorandum of the Director of Human Services. Director Morris. Okay, round two, very related. So here too, I'm going to make a few other introductory comments and turn it over to Robert to give a formal presentation from the PowerPoint. Just to say a touch more about the comments you made, Chair Koenig, introducing this topic as a reminder, probably not to your board, but to the community listening, we are operating under a three year strategic plan that your board approved and all four city councils approved. It is the collective impact framework we're operating under and we believe it has been a reason why we have been successful in competing for and receiving a number of grants because we actually have this framework and we can show the federal and state funders that we are working together and we have a plan. This is the second six month report under that framework, which means we're at the one year mark and pivoting into year two of the three year strategic plan. I do want to recognize as was your introductory comment, Supervisor Koenig, quite a bit of words and the materials are quite a bit more. So I do want to invite to the community and anybody who's watching that the materials are very intentionally put together because we made a promise when we stood this division up and committed to moving this plan forward that we would do everything we can to be as transparent as possible with this community, with our elected officials. And having spent over three decades in human services, a referral to the issue of housing and homelessness. This is my first opportunity at the stage of my career to be an administrator directly over the issue of homelessness. Unlike Dr. Ratner who's been working in the field for many decades directly. And I have to say, I've learned quite a bit about how complex this ecosystem is and how difficult it is to explain in sound bites and short sound bites in a public hearing the true complexity of the issue. So I just want to recognize that we have done our best to put in full transparency in the materials that the public can read.  Robert's presentation will be even a more distilled version of that, but please for those who are really interested in engaging this topic, we hope that you find the materials meaningful because they do really delineate what we're looking at, what we feel like we can manage and what the outstanding issues are. I want to share that, you know, I mentioned earlier three decades, I have seen a number of public policy challenges and this is one of the most severe humanitarian crises I think California, the country and certainly this community Santa Cruz County is facing. It's visible, it's extreme. The previous presentation spoke to just one moment that things could get worse. And for those who don't know, these are some things that strike me. California as a state has the number one per capita rate of people experiencing homelessness in the entire country. Santa Cruz County as a community, who when you look at city data across the state of California, the city of Santa Cruz has the fourth highest per capita rate of people experiencing homelessness. And as you will hear in Dr. Ratner's presentation, it links to the previous report we just gave and the planning department's discussion in your board's really good conversation with planning about rena goals. A recent report highlights that the County of Santa Cruz is the number one least affordable County in California for renters. So there is some complex set of issues in front of us. And I want to say one thing that really jumps out at me. The word homeless gets used and it almost gets thrown out as if it is the aggregate describing every single person in a community that is struggling with housing. And what usually comes forward is an image that is named with the word homeless. And that is what people see in encampments with people struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues. I wanna make sure everyone is aware that is less than one fourth where the actual number of people are experiencing homelessness in any given community in Santa Cruz County. So I think we have a lot of work to do to explain better what we are talking about rather than just using the blanket word homelessness. And as a matter of public policy, I really wanna highlight something that strikes me when the questions come now that human services department is managing this division under Dr. Ratner's leadership. What can we do? Government can make an impact on populations who experience homelessness. And I just wanna highlight two. One is mentioned in the materials, veterans. If you go back to the 1970s and look at how many people who were veterans were homeless and today, public policy at the federal and state level has enacted that made it much easier to minimize the possibility that someone who served this country and is a veteran would be homeless. And the second, developmental disability. There is public policy when you look back over the last 30 years and you see what happened with people experiencing mental health issues and substance use issues versus somebody who has a developmental disability. And there are public policy reasons why there are not people with developmental disability who are homeless, yet there are people with serious substance abuse and mental health challenges. So public policy can address these issues, but it requires the federal and state government to intervene as they have on veteran issues and developmental disability. So my final comments I wanna share is I have the opportunity and the privilege and I would even say the responsibility to look at what I manage in human services and compare the work we are doing in the housing for health division that Robert will report on with all the other mandatory programs we run. We are organized and funded by mostly federal and state funding to address poverty in our public assistance programs, unemployment and our workforce development board and welfare to work programs, abuse and neglect in our foster care system and adult protective services system. And all of these programs require interactions with federal government and state government but there are three things I wanna end my comments on that strike me that are profound and meaningful and worth more dialogue that are different from all the other human services programs. The first is the role of a county. There is no federal or state mandate that says a county has to have an office and before our CAO Carlos Palacios was appointed and said, well, I wanna do something about this. This county did not lean into this as much as it has and then moved it to human services and counties throughout California are struggling who should run this? Is it the CAO? Is it health? Is it human? Is it planning? So it is confusing when you don't even know what county entity and there's no regulations that drive us. The second city, I have never in my three decades experienced something where the role confusion between the role of a city and a county is pronounced as it is on this issue of homelessness. I came here as a new member to this community and it is truly a tale of two cities. The South County Watsonville probably in large part thanks to our CAO Carlos being two decades as city manager there is really good relationships and communication with Watsonville on homelessness even though the issues are still difficult. But in the city of Santa Cruz in my first year here was very, very strained and the community watched a fight playing out between the city and the county and I'm very pleased to report we've turned that relationship around and the county and city are working really well together but boy was it a lot of work to get there. So the role of city and county is very profound and pronounced and not very well defined if at all by the state and federal government it leads it to the local to figure out. But the last comment I wanna make and then I will turn this over to Robert is I in my career have never seen a public policy crisis that requires us to have another member of the team more so than ever and that is our community. We cannot solve this issue if we do not have a relationship with the community and I think the rush to have to pull together pull solutions and plans and the funding and the pressure to sort of move ideas forward without enough staff and without enough opportunity to engage and under the crisis of COVID has certainly highlighted the community's understandable frustration that to address an issue like homelessness rushing things through we have to do where we miss funding opportunities but the community understandably is frustrated that we don't have find or make the time to engage the community. We are not gonna solve this issue unless this community and us can work together as government and community to figure out the citing issues. There is a long history of three decades here of finding reasons to block citing issues for shelters and affordable housing. I think that played out in your arena discussion this morning and we look forward in the second year of the three year plan figuring out a way to invest more deeply in community conversations because if we don't figure that out I think we're just always gonna be polarized and frustrated and chasing our tail. So I hope that in this next year we can have a more proactive relationship with our community and we take our role in that and we understand some of the issues that have played out in the last six months that pushed us to rush some applications forward. So we hope that materials Robert will present today will highlight where we are. And I just wanted to share those introductory comments from what I'm seeing. So I'll turn it over to Robert to walk through the formal presentation now. Thank you, Randy. So what's hoping to do with the formal presentation is give an overview of the materials that were submitted with this board item which included kind of an overall landscape view of how we're doing on the goals articulated in the framework and then six separate attachments and the slide presentation has six areas where I'm gonna go through really quickly that relate to those attachments. One is the update on where we are in the six month period that we're reporting on July through December of 2021. How are we doing on the goals we articulated in the framework and what's the data that we have available telling us? How are we doing with reaching our shelter goals, our COVID related sheltering programming and our efforts to help people who are in those COVID related shelters to get into permanent housing? We've talked to Fairmount this afternoon about housing affordability gap and homelessness and there's some few slides that talk about that and how those connections wanted to try to create greater transparency around the funding landscape related to housing and homelessness and the complexities associated with it and the gaps between what we propose doing in our framework and the funds that are actually available. And then there has been a request from the board and others in the public to learn from one example of funding that we've had in this community homeless emergency aid program, which is state funding and how do we use those dollars? What lessons did we learn? Brandy alluded to this a little bit on the quote at the bottom of the slide. One of the things that's not clearly articulated in our framework, we talk about hope but I think one of the major challenges and thinking about how do we address this issue is the sense of belonging that we as human beings need. We need to feel like we're connected with others and welcomed in our community. And we can fund shelter and housing but if people don't feel like they're welcomed and they belong in a community, that's a major contributor to people not being able to land in a stable situation having home. So for me personally, one of the big challenges I think over for our team over the next six months is how to help all of us understand the humanity of people who have lost their housing and their individual stories and that the basic human need to be connected with others. And that's a huge part of recovery and getting back into housing. So I'm personally really committed to working on that over the next six months. So in terms of what did we accomplish over the last six month period? We had reported at our last update on 11 key milestones that we wanted to accomplish. And I believe we partially or completely hit nine of those 11 milestones. A few of the things that I think are worth highlighting as accomplishments because of the work of the county leadership and our partners we've been able to secure state and federal grants that we weren't able to compete for, I think very well. So we've secured over $7.7 million in competitive grants over the last six months period with our rehousing wave effort for folks who are in our COVID shelters. We've helped 107 households get into permanent homes and hopefully can get over at least 160. I'd love to get us to 300 before the end of the fiscal year. We partnered with the health services agency and I think they presented to the board about their Healing the Streets program. And we're really working closely with them on helping to build out that outreach team that includes housing, health, behavioral health supports. With support from the board, we submitted for project home key applications to create more supportive housing distributed throughout the county. And then the prior round of home keep funding from the state of California, we didn't submit any applications. So I'm really proud of the work that multiple departments did to get those home key applications submitted. And we should hear by the end of the month from the status of those applications. And I'm also hopeful we have a lot of great partners who are exploring other future home key applications. The governor's budget included another round of home keep funding to create more shelter and affordable housing. And as we go through the presentation, I think it'll become clear that as staff, we feel like we need more of both. We need more shelter and more affordable housing. We've made a lot of progress and we have room to grow in terms of data collection, just being able to get regular reporting and understand what services are being provided and their impacts. And we also helped to pull together a point in time count, which is the basis we're using for monitoring how we're doing on our framework goals. So we had a count end of February and we'll have the reports on that point in time count in the summer. So at our next report back to the board, we'll have the full report then on the status of that point in time count. And then we made some significant changes in terms of how we organize our coalition and our governance. The federal government has an entity they call the Cochum of Care. And there's a lot of rights and responsibilities that this Cochum of Care body has in relationship to federal and state funding related to homelessness. So we've actually formally shifted from calling our Cochum of Care the Homeless Action Partnership to the Housing for Health Partnership to be in sync with the name of our new division and to reflect that we've really tried to change how that board is structured. Supervisor Koenig and Supervisor Coonerty are now on the policy board and we've got a great array of leaders who are really committed to addressing this issue. So I'm hoping that will help us have a bigger impact. And we recently updated our website as well. So now there's a Housing for Health Partnership website where we're trying to be more transparent and consistent with our communication. This next slide is a view on how we're doing on our goals and these are from our original framework that the cities and the county have adopted. So in terms of temporary housing that includes shelter and transitional housing, our goal was to have 600 beds available and currently we're over that amount but a large portion of that, a significant portion of that shelter capacity is because of the one-time COVID resources. So we'll get to this later in the presentation concerned about when those resources dry up, how are we gonna sustain that capacity? Rapid rehousing is a kind of intervention where you provide temporary rental assistance with services to help people who are homeless get into housing and support their rent for a period of time and then hopefully they can sustain that rent over the long term. We're behind in our capacity with rapid rehousing. The state California Department of Social Services has put out some additional money that will lift our capacity a little bit over the next six months but we're not gonna be close to the 490. So we would need significant more resources to get there. Permit supportive housing, we've actually made a lot of progress due to the pandemic resources that have gone to the housing authority and our partnership with the housing authority. We've got a lot of new housing vouchers and with the board's approval of our rehousing wave, the vouchers plus the services is how we create supportive housing. Our challenge as has been talked about before here is with vouchers, you still need housing where people can use the vouchers. And so that's continuing to be a struggle for our service partners to fully utilize those vouchers. And then the work that I do, there's two kinds of supportive housing refer to scattered site where you're using subsidies in the private market and you're really dependent on the private markets availability and willingness to have tenants who have these vouchers come into your unit and rent those units with services versus built units, which is project home key type projects, supportive housing where you're building with an intention, a project that is under construction now and Capitola Road is helping create more housing with a clinic space with Santa Cruz Community Health and Los Tiantas. That's an example of there's some supportive housing unit. So those are built units. And I think we could use more of those built units. And then the last part of the framework, we set a conservative goal of meeting our arena targets for very low income affordable housing. Most people experiencing homelessness are an income level below very low income housing. So I think it's particularly conservative to set our target around the very low income. And we're struggling as a community to get to those goals that goal of 734 new very low income units is an eight year goal. And we have till the end of 2023 to get to that target and we're at 105. On a positive front in that area, I think a lot of projects that are in the pipeline that have been approved and are trying to secure final funds, maybe we'll actually start construction and get building permits in the next couple of years so that we can get closer to that 734 goal. Another part of our framework is not just building capacity but how can we make our programs more effective? And the two areas that we are looking at in the framework are reducing lengths of stay but not just reducing the lengths of stay and having people return to homelessness but reducing lengths of stay and increasing the number of people who exit to permanent housing. And globally, this slide shows you a general trend is that we're off target where people are staying longer. We've seen slight increases in the number of people exiting to permanent housing from shelter and our transitional housing and rapid rehousing exits have gone down a little bit or stayed mostly the same but people are staying longer and programmed largely because I think there's fewer options in the housing market for folks. I still believe there's things we can do to improve our outcomes in this area and we're gonna keep working with our provider community to do what we can to help reduce lengths of stay and increase the number of people who are exiting to permanent housing. And then our overarching goal, the green arrow here shows that our framework called for just under just over a thousand households and January 2024 would be experiencing homelessness. And that's a data from a point in time count a single day and the blue arrow shows where we are in the given month according to our HMIS data. So according to that data, we have over 2,500 households experiencing homelessness in a month and in the summer, we'll know more about where the point in time count is in general, the trend is in the wrong direction. It's hard to see with this scrap but in the summer of 2021, we started to see an uptick in our HMIS data among people experiencing homelessness coming in for services from agencies that use the data system. And particularly concerning to me is seeing uptick in seniors, people 50 and older as well as households with children during that period of time. So I think we need to look at this prevention issue we talked about earlier and making sure we're really focusing in those populations. Looted to this earlier, the shelter capacity over time. So our framework goal is 600 before we started implementation of the framework. We had a baseline of four and 40 beds. The maximum we had was over a thousand during COVID with our one-time resources. We've been scaling back as our COVID resources are in decline that capacity. And in the absence of any interventions and finding new locations and identifying operators for sites we may drop below our framework baseline. If we don't take action and our team is really working on that with other people in the community so we can get to our goal, the 600. And we've been budgeting resources, one-time resources from the state to try to fund that but it's really about location and operator where we're struggling with shelter programming. And then this is a slide about how we're doing with our COVID rehousing wave efforts. We've got three amazing teams with wonderful people who are doing care management and housing navigation. So we have a county team, a boat services and housing matters. Over 259 households have been served by those programs with 309 people. We have a real estate partnership program with the boat where we're working to use those housing subsidies in partnership with private real estate market owners. We have a relationship with the community action board where we have centralized flexible funding to help people with security deposits and furniture. We have this amazing partnership with the housing authority and the Vets Hall Board of Trustees has also contributed to the whole effort. And as I mentioned, we have over 100 households that moved into housing. A lot of people have gotten subsidies. So there's actually a significant process to apply for and secure the subsidies. And now we're in the phase of the work where people have gone through that process, they've been approved and now they've got to find units where those subsidies can be used. Housing affordability gap, Randy alluded to this earlier and I read a report every year that comes out from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and it looked more closely than I normally do at some of the data. And I focused on the Santa Cruz County data and I was really struck by and wanted to share with the board and the public what came out for me in reviewing that. So there's one statistic that they report on on an annual basis. And if you look at the community of renters in the county and their average wage as a renter household, how many jobs at that average wage are needed to afford a two bedroom apartment? So in 2021, it was 3.4 full-time jobs. That's the highest in the state. And that went up from 2020 where it was 3.1 jobs. So the trend line is in the wrong direction for addressing homelessness. We wanna see that gap closing. And the ways to do that are increasing people's incomes or reducing the cost of housing at the local level. So we really need to address this issue collectively if we're gonna make progress on homelessness, particularly people who have been in this community for a while and are at risk of losing their housing because of this gap. And the earlier presentation, we talked about the connection between housing stress and the housing affordability. And this is a little graphic that we put together to try to explain the connections between the lack of affordable housing and people living on fixed incomes, renter protections. And then an event in one's life, a housing stressor where most of the money to address homelessness is in this blue category of addressing housing stressors. And not enough money and resources and time is going to the precipitating factors. But we need both. We need to address those housing stressors, but we need to address the underlying precipitating factors that make housing a real challenge. But when people have housing stress, they are displaced from our communities. They're living in unsafe overcrowded situations. The stress of not knowing if you can afford to live where you're staying the night really impacts people's health. And then when folks lose shelter altogether and often lose a sense of belonging and connection, the health impacts are pretty well documented. So we really want to try to address the green issue more than we have been so that we have fewer of those kind of health impacts over the long term. This is a slide just comparing how we're doing as a county compared to other central coast counties with our arena housing goals. And a colleague in the planning department wanted me to encourage members of the public to participate in conversations around how do we really design our general plan to encourage more multifamily affordable housing development? So a lot of folks who are in, just in the issue of homelessness don't realize that the general plan of how we build up our community really impacts the ability of developers to create more affordable housing. So I agree and encourage people to participate in that effort to really weigh in on the general plan and how housing fits into our overall plans for our community. Essentially what this slide shows is that Santa Cruz and our very low income is ahead of San Benito. According to this report, this is through December of 2020. Had not produced any very low income housing permits. Santa Cruz 105, but Monterey and San Luis Obispo have hit a higher level. And one of the things that I learned from some of my mentors is well, go and find someone who's doing it better and find out what they're doing and see if you can apply that here. And so this for me, this exercise is okay, what can we learn from our neighbors? What can we learn from other communities around the state that could be applied here to help us get closer to those targets? Cause there is, if you look at the data statewide, there's significant differences in terms of how communities are doing relative to those goals. So I think we can learn from places that are further along than we are. Wanted to provide a basic overview of how much things cost. I think I have heard in the year and a half that I've been here like, where did all that $10 million go? And I think people don't often realize because housing is so expensive, our interventions to address homelessness are pretty expensive. So this is a slide comparing the different kinds of interventions we often think about when addressing homelessness and how many people would be served. So comparing a hundred slots across each of these interventions, $720,000 for outreach that doesn't necessarily have, that's to connect people to resources and services. Shelter beds actually cost more because we're providing food and there's more staffing often needed to run a shelter than the other two interventions which are getting people into permanent housing and subsidizing them. The difference between rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing is how long we fund the services. And the rapid rehousing is typically six months to 24 months and permanent supportive housing is intended to be ongoing levels of support for people with disabilities and seniors that need that level of care and support to keep their housing. Nope, that's just it. Thank you. And so this slide attempts to look at what are our framework goals and how are we doing in terms of funding? So we estimate the need for around $77 million a year to reach all the goals in the framework. What we have currently available is around 37 million and of that 22 million mostly state funds is one time money. So we have a big gap in terms of resources needed to fully implement the plan and the materials we submitted with the board item show that we've got a lot of different funding sources to manage. And I think at the federal and state level the ways in which dollars are getting committed to this issue are incredibly inefficient and require us to spend a lot of administrative and staff time managing complexity for multiple funding sources. We have over 40 different sources we're managing in our division. Almost done. So one of those funding sources that we had managed was the Homeless Emergency Aid Program. It was funding that this was the first time the state across the entire state committed to addressing homelessness. And I think a big reason that happened is the 14 largest cities in the state were feeling deep frustration around the lack of state response to the visible levels of homelessness in their communities. And it was framed as an emergency need with a level of unsheltered people and communities. And because it was an emergency the money got put out in a rapid fashion. And I think the state has learned and counties and local communities have all learned from the experience of this funding. Most of the money, sorry, not most of the money. The money got distributed to two entities, large cities which we do not have any in Santa Cruz County that met the criteria for large city allocation and the COC is the Kinchum of Care. And the Kinchum of Care is a separate entity from the county. So I think one of the areas where there was some confusion and struggle was how are we deciding under the Kinchum of Care how this money gets invested? Those decisions were made and with interest we had close to $10 million available and where did that money go? Most of it went to funding shelter before HEAP was available. The publicly funded shelter in Santa Cruz County was mostly winter only shelter. The HEAP funding allowed that shelter to be year round capacity. And that's something I hope we can sustain. The funding didn't include the kind of housing related navigation or case management that a lot of staff had hoped for. And I think that shows up in the outcome. So just shelter only without those services to help people get into permanent housing means that people will stay in shelter or may end up back on the streets. And the HEAP funds served over 3,100 people but of that group only 342, I shouldn't say only it's a success to have 342 people move into permanent housing but we want that number to be bigger over time. We want our investments to have as big an impact as possible. So monitoring collectively our investment strategies relate to outcomes is something that I'm really committed to and trying to move money in ways that get us the best outcomes for people in our community. So lessons learned from the HEAP funds a lot of new innovative programs got set up infrastructure needs, accessible shower facilities and buildings got created as a result. We helped smaller organizations build up their capacity and mobilize their volunteer and small staff resources. We helped meet some emergency health and safety needs for people in the community. We've got a pattern going of year round funding for shelter that I hope we can sustain. And then we expanded use services for people between the ages of 18 and 24 who are struggling with housing. Areas where I think we can improve we need to have services linked with the shelter to have an housing exit focus and keep them as low barriers possible so people can come into shelter. We need to link together our investments. So we have to make sure that we can thread together if we're investing in outreach how does outreach link to shelter and how does shelter link to helping people get permanent housing? I think we had a tendency with the HEAP funds to give a little bit of money to a lot of different organizations. So the lack of a deep investment in particular programs I think made it difficult for organizations to really get to stable staffing and outcomes. So I think we need to look at deeper investments in organizations over the longer term for them to build their capacity. And then our data, our HMIS data we can do a better job of collecting information on what's happening, what the needs are and what the outcomes are from our investments. Next six months we're gonna get the point in time count data. This is a list of some of the priority areas we're launching our new consumer care structure. We're gonna follow up on those home key applications and hopefully submit some more. Street outreach efforts have launched. We just talked about the eviction and homelessness prevention network that we're hoping to build with our community partners improving data, wrapping up our COVID shelters and getting us to a stable baseline shelter capacity. Working with our partners in managed care Central California Alliance there's major opportunities for us to partner and get services resources for people experiencing homelessness who are on Medi-Cal. And then centralizing our funding for flexible housing assistance to help people return to home if it's outside the area help with security deposits, application fees those things can be real barriers to people getting back into housing and we can make that effort more efficient. And that's our update. Sorry, I went a little longer but happy to take questions and open up for discussion. All right, thank you, Dr. Ratner and Director Morris questions from members of the board. Sure, Mr. Chair. Yes, Supervisor Coonerty. Yeah, so thank you for the report and as always sobering. Can I ask, so the board set as a goal to end children, local children being homeless and the numbers as you pointed out are going in the wrong direction. What are the short-term and intermediate steps we can take to at the very least reverse this trend and then get it going in the right direction? Yeah, thanks for their question, Supervisor Coonerty. One of the things that we're contemplating to staff and absolutely open to ideas is I think that our work has not partnered well with the school districts. And I think we have data from the school districts that indicate households that are struggling where there are children who may be doubled up and back up a little bit. The definition of homelessness from a school district reporting perspective is different than one we typically use when we're reporting on homelessness. So people who are doubled up or in situations where they're struggling. So I think there's opportunities for us to go a little bit more upstream and tighten our partnership with the school districts to identify children who are unstable and safe housing situations and who are frankly literally homeless as well. So with our challenge grant we're seeking board approval to submit an application. My hope is that we will be able to partner with our school districts where we see the most number of students experiencing homelessness. I think the other area where I feel like we can make some progress is the state has put some more funding through the Department of Social Services into addressing family homelessness so we can expand those programs. And we also are now able to work with some special vouchers for homeless families that the housing authority has set aside to help connect people to resources. And then I think more broadly we just gotta keep working on the housing affordability issue particularly for families. So when we're looking at affordable housing development are we building two-bedroom and three-bedroom units that can accommodate families as well as single adults or smaller households? And then related to the shelter conversation I think finding an operator in a location and prioritizing which populations we wanna serve. When I last presented I on the topic of ending children's homelessness I shared what it would take to build out a new family shelter so that there were no children on shelter. And it's a significant investment of funds but it's also the location and finding an operator who are willing to operate the program. So as we reflect on the money we have available and prioritizing what kinds of shelter capacity we wanna have for what populations I think that's an area where under the consumer of care we can really look at where do children and families fit into that grander scheme of things. Okay, I appreciate that. I've been, yeah, hopefully there's an urgency because as we know that any traumatic events that happen in childhood and especially early childhood have lifelong impacts. And so getting, as you say, getting upstream and be preventative is always important being preventative especially with that vulnerable population I think is essential. My second question is, I mean it, as you mentioned that the churn of our shelter beds and our other beds is essential if we have 400 shelter beds and people stay there a year we have 400 shelter beds if they go every, if they're only there for two months before they find more permanent shelter then we have what 2600 or 2400 shelter beds. And, but as you mentioned, one of the challenges is finding places for those folks to go and finding places in Santa Cruz County is gonna be extremely difficult even if we were meeting our arena numbers it would still be a very, very challenging environment. And when we convince landlords take section eight tenants usually that's taking workforce housing off the market and people who are just one economic rung above being at risk of homelessness. So it creates an additional challenge. And so, I often talk about this but helping people find places where the jobs housing balance is more resilient and sustainable is key. How are you finding working as other shelters to do especially ones in the Bay Area that I've visited where they actively talk about finding people places outside the Bay Area to establish, to find more permanent housing? How is that effort going here? Yeah, I think it's a common struggle across the state. There's a general migration of people with lower incomes to cheaper parts of the state. And now I recently listened to a program about Fresno County feeling like we've got all these people coming from other parts of California here with lower incomes and taking up our housing market. So it's a statewide issue and there's the general migration because of the cost of housing and other factors. People are leaving the state and as a long-time California resident I hope we can do better. And there's the reality of the moment we're in right now. And I think that a lot of our shelter programs and our rehousing wave staff are talking to people about we've been, I'll just give an anecdote for example, of a conversation I heard, we've been waiting for this, you've been looking for six months for a place here are you willing to look in Santa Clara County or Monterey County for a housing unit with your voucher? One of the benefits of the particular vouchers we got from the housing authorities that they are portable and typically a traditional Section 8 voucher you have to use it for at least a year in the community where it's issued. So that flexibility has allowed a staff to really work with people to find locations outside of the area. We're in the process of reevaluating our coordinated entry system for assessing people's needs and their histories around housing. And part of that process is finding out where do people have housing before? Where do they have connections? Can we get people connected back with family or friends or area where they're support? And historically we didn't, we used another assessment called the VI Spadat that weren't directed at those kinds of issues. So we're trying to shift towards questions that lead to action and really support people. And then I alluded to a goal we have to centralize our flexible funding. I think we've made it really difficult for our providers to access funding to help people to relocate out of county or to pay for deposits or application fees. So I'm hoping if we centralize that money get more transparent about how people can access it that we'll be able to help more people. And I think it's an ongoing training and conversation area. There are definitely providers that have developed more knowledge and skills of what's going on in other communities around the country in California. I think we can share that locally and have some more impacts there. Supervisor Coonerty, I'd like to connect the dot and from my introductory comments to your two questions. Just my observation, mindfully you've been here a lot longer than I have. I think that in my introductory comments I spoke to how absent information and communication with the community, the default image community has when they hear the word homeless is an image that is not a child in their family doubled up at risk of losing their housing and somewhere. So I think one of the answers to your questions are communication, education. I have a feeling we will have less struggles with citing issues when and if we can be more proactive in communication about target populations because usually community are not as concerned about helping children and family keep housing and having affordable housing available. So that's one comment I wanna make, very mindful, absent those details, people rush to the conclusion that it's the most severe image they see and that's what they're worried is gonna come to their community. And the second comment I wanna make, I've only been in one other jurisdiction, I got to see a little bit of how much money was put into shelters and the secondary gain of having a shelter system funded adequately to be successful in what you often call churn but actually help people get services and get support to move on is then that community sees and the broader community experiences a shelter resourced well being a value added and an asset as opposed to a place they just worry about where people come and just leave and come and go and the struggles that play out in that community. So I think there's a secondary gain of deeper investment and a successful and effective shelter system. I think it potentially will change the image of what a shelter is but we haven't invested deeply enough. So I hope that that's a connection point as well if looking for we can be successful. Yeah, and let me just say, I mean, I think the resources for family shelters is a real challenge. In my time on various boards, I think every, dare to say, I think it would be a unanimous vote among the Board of Supervisors or most city councils to cite a family shelter in any neighborhood in Santa Cruz County because we all see the need and can differentiate between it. I think what we need is the resources to both build it and then operate it going forward but I don't think, I think we could mobilize to get support for family shelters and overcome any opposition. As we've seen in frankly, in the Salinas of Alley where that's proposed Project Homekeep project is getting solid support from people because they wanna help that particular vulnerable population. The final thing I'll say is, I think in the list of things that are driving homelessness, as you say, it's not driving all homelessness or even a majority of homelessness but the impact of methamphetamine and opioids and especially impacting the most visible and impactful parts of homelessness in our community has to be called out as a major driver for that specific sub-population and needs a coordinated response from our other health divisions that focus on substance use because that is, you know, the people I know who I grew up with, who I see visibly homeless and experiencing homelessness in Santa Cruz County are the drugs where the primary driver in that homelessness and continued homelessness and until we reckon with that as a community and then provide services and also do what we can to get methamphetamine off our streets, we're gonna continue to see very visible impacts on people's lives and families and the community as a whole. And I just wanna, and I'm almost 100% sure you're aware of the supervisor community, but for the whole anybody listening to this, the former mayor of San Francisco are now governor, experienced this long ago and it is no surprise that he and his health and human service secretary Dr. Galli have put forward this proposal to address the very issue that's plaguing the entire state called CARES courts. So whether or not that makes it through the process, it's a very vexing issue, but I just wanna recognize that that issue is known all the way up to our governor who has shown to bypass legislature and just say this is a priority as a governor to find some way to intervene on this issue that's getting worse. So just wanna appreciate the state understands and our governor understands is trying to push forward legislation to sort of move that needle on the issue that is most visible and most disturbing to many people. Absolutely and let me just say, I think there's a government certainly role to play in this on both the enforcement side as well as on the treatment side and we have to play that, but it's also as you mentioned, this is also part of a broader community challenge. We need families and schools and teachers and churches and nonprofits and everything else to really address what the leniency around drugs that Santa Cruz has that has created a real problem in our community that we need to culturally and address if we're gonna get serious about helping people in need. Thank you, Supervisor Coonerty. Supervisor Caput. Yeah, thank you. Is this just for questions right now or can I make a statement? You're welcome to make a statement. Okay. Yeah, Supervisor Coonerty asked a lot of questions that he was really hitting on very important parts of what's going on. And what I'm getting at is we all know, or most of us know, very good people. We see them at church, we see them at school or we see them at the grocery store. And they ask, what are you doing about the homeless? I've got somebody sleeping on my property and I've got somebody, what are you doing about the ones on the riverbed? What are you doing about this or that? And there seems to be a lack of compassion. And what I wanna thank the Human Services Department for is they have a lot of compassion. I wanna thank you guys for all of that. My response to people that say, I get them out of here, it's almost like they expect them to disappear and never appear again. We don't send them off to Siberia here in this country. We don't send them off to Gulags. And okay, what are we doing? And we're offering them beds. We're offering them food and shelter and clothing. We offer them showers, laundry, counseling. And we refer them also to the rescue mission down here. The women's shelter that just opened up in Watsonville, which is a wonderful facility. The Salvation Army now was running a great program, but they're talking about maybe pulling out or for lack of funding, which you can't be at a worse time. So the whole thing about this compassion part is most of us are one big push from ending up in the curve, ending up in the street. It could be a bad health issue or illness. It could be a bad marriage. It could be a death of a loved one or more. It could be addiction like supervisor or community talked about. It could be bankruptcy and various other reasons that were also susceptible of ending up being homeless. So we're not totally looking at this from the outside. We're also looking at it. What are we gonna have if something happens to us? And the thing that I worry about and what I really care about are safety nets that we offer to the homeless is I've got five kids, right? And maybe I'm gonna be able to last and somehow survive everything and my wife and I won't end up homeless, right? But how about all five of my kids? So are they gonna all have a perfect marriage or are they gonna have an Aussie and Harriet family when they grow up, which is finding it's very hard to find. So this safety nets that we're talking about and the compassion we're showing is actually gonna help our children or our grandchildren for that matter. So just keep doing up the great work you guys are doing with human services and keep showing that we do care and we're trying our best and we're trying to handle it. We need more help from the churches. We need more help from the nonprofits and everybody, we're in this together and we're not only talking about the present time but we're talking about the future and the next generation. So that's it. Sorry for the lecture. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Are there questions or comments from? I don't know if that must speak. Yeah, I'd like to make a couple of comments too. I can say that in my eight plus years on the County Board of Supervisors, I have never seen such a detailed and comprehensive description of what we're facing and the scope of this issue, which is humongous as you have stated. It's far fetched and it's gonna take a community wide effort to resolve it or surely help get to some solutions and many in this community are really frustrated as we know with the lack of progress that's been made and I think that's probably insane by every community in California and probably throughout the nation. We're not the only ones, but for decades, the solutions put forward have been well-intentioned and provided safety net services, but yet there's more people than ever that are falling before the cracks and are homeless. And what's different about what you're presenting is that it's clearly defines the core contributing factors which were how we're linked but the distinct and complicated one that we have to fit for each one of them to make this whole thing work. It's really the first time in my memory that the resource issue has been addressed so clearly. As you might have remembered a couple of years ago, Director Morris, I said, let's get real of what we really can do with what we have. And we just have seen their need is in the estimates of $77 million and we've only got $47 million. So we've got what, 2,500 homeless that are identified. And then there's a great number more that are just about ready to get there if we don't do something and keep them in a house. So I just think that this approach of what we're talking about, what you're talking about and presenting is right on target. We've got to do what we can do to keep as many people that are just ready to get, lose their house, to keep them there and then go from there to get more people in their houses. We have a very, very complicated situation here. As was mentioned, we have the highest house prices comparatively in the state and what it forth highest in the nation. It makes it very difficult but to take this comprehensive community wide approach is the right way to go. And I really applaud you for giving us to where we need to go and get us in that right direction but also to give us a reality check that we're not going to be able to serve each and every person that's homeless. We would do whatever we can with what we have and we will because we have this good plan of attack. So I want to compliment you on presenting this and getting a new path forward of how we're going to address this issue of housing in Santa Cruz County. I just want to take the minute mindful I'm speaking to a statesman who spent a lot more of your career in elected office. I'm at a point 30 years in my career I have a couple of lessons learned that I hope apply to this moment that I want to share. Human services and I'd say health as well have a mandate to try to serve very vulnerable people in local communities. And I've seen this story play out many times and I'm hoping it plays out here with this issue. The community is rightly so very, very frustrated and 30 years in government I've come to realize it's really hard for even somebody who's really plugged in to understand where do I point the finger? Is this the federal government's fault? Is this the state? Is this the county? Is this the city? I hope the materials for those who have time to read them illuminates it's actually all of it. But what my hope is is when I look back at where public policy reform and government actually did a good job and intervened and moved a humanitarian crisis to significantly less. It often was because like what we're doing here and this is where my hope is we actually have some good data we're teasing things out we're being realistic about expectation. I think taxpayers are willing to invest if they know it works. But right now most communities don't have any confidence if they invest taxpayers money it's gonna do anything because everyone is just pointing fingers. So I hope that this framework with detailed reports we're giving the honesty and the transparency begin to show federal officials, state officials as you as our elected officials our city councils. There is a pathway to solve this. Here's the resources needed. Here's what we can do as a county and here's what we need the federal and state governments do then we can get better organized where to apply pressure. Right now nobody knows where to and just everyone's yelling. So I am hopeful that we're at the beginnings of being more clear on what the issues are and what we need to do solve them and then we can work together on advocating where we need to advocate. I don't think many communities are in that place right now but we're getting closer. So I hope those materials highlight we're trying to be very honest and transparent about what we see as staff. The renewed focus and it's good to see it. So thank you again. Thank you Supervisor McPherson. Any other questions or comments from the board? I see none will open it to the public. If you'd like to address us on this item please approach the podium. Hello, my name is Alexia Martinez and I'm one of the community members for a proposed new bill transition project in Aptos on Park Avenue. We as affordable housing advocates feel it would be a travesty if the property owner developer at this time, Novan would be able to bypass the normal development review processes and bypass the normal environmental review processes by paying a fine to opt out a public funding requirements of AB 140 which was introduced in 2021 to provide timely and permanent transitional housing. If there are no significant liquidated damages to prevent construction or delays and there is not a significant penalty to opt out of the proposed transitional housing project which is in favor, seems to be in favor of a market value project. The property owner and developer Novan would stand to make millions of dollars at taxpayer's expense and this seems to be a predatory development. We've looked forward to your timely response to our concerns and these additional concerns and we continue to wait for you and home key to build an honest relationship with your community. However, as of today, the most pressing concern and question we do have is during this review process that's happening actively right now, there is little to no history referring to the past EIRs and reasons for unapproved development over the past 20 to 30 years because since my meeting with them, the development department, Sheila and Joyce Drake from your principal for recent DRGs. February 28th at 9 a.m. I was confused about how the APN numbers lined up and was working with them to try and decipher how to read that. As of today, if you go on your GIS website, the numbers have been changed again and the history from all those previous APN numbers are not readily available to say Sacramento office or anyone else around here who wants to look up those APN number histories, they are not available now and it seems oddly convenient during the time when we're approving this process that that pertinent information is not available. Why is that? Thank you, Ms. Martinez. Hello. My name is Chris Tafiar. I'm also in district one. I understand and I respect what you guys are doing is a huge challenge. And you talk about our empathy and stuff, we have had a front row seat to seeing what homelessness is about and we are educated on it. That really is what my concern is. I'm hearing about this and hearing about the affordable housing and stuff like that, but and it is a huge challenge. We live in a very expensive area to live here. Our area in particular is kind of semi rural and a nice area and we like it. There's a reason we chose to live there, not down here in Santa Cruz. Now that being said, it appears like, for example, this project home key with Novan development has got really pushed through really quick. Now I'm a property owner, I'm a homeowner and I guess the bad word landlord as well in this area. And homelessness is kind of a bad word now. So unhoused is the new word, I guess, or whatever, but we don't think it's right what happened. There were numerous other concerns, environmental concerns, endangered species concerns, infrastructure concerns, the water. How the heck did they get access to water? Anybody that's tried to build in this county, anybody that's tried to just improve their own property, the people even just trying to rebuild their homes from the CZU fire, they've gone through nightmares. And I'm talking, I went two years just to build an ADU unit and still headache. How did this guy, Novan, get pushed through so fast? Because you write homeless and COVID on an application and all of a sudden boom and now all the churches in our neighborhoods and anybody with any large property or businesses are getting approached with these developers because they found a green light ticket just to produce low income, high density housing in our neighborhood. And you say you don't think that affects our property values or the crime rate and all that really does. And that is not my concern, I'm not classist. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm just letting you know, you need to look out for us too, the people that actually live here and pay the taxes here and vote it because it does matter. And you know what, I wake up at 330 in the morning and find my wife crying in the living room upset because she's worried about what's happening in our neighborhood, sir. And I didn't get a chance to address you at the last one because she's formed out upset crying. Sir, I'm happy to talk to you later. Thank you. Is there anyone else here in the audience who would like to address us? Seeing none, is there anyone on the phones or Zoom? Yes, we have two speakers, Sir Cagno, your microphone is available. Hi, good afternoon. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, my name's Sir Cagno. I'm gonna talk from a few of the different hats that I wear. I'm on the mental health advisory board and we present to you every once in a while. I'm a director of a local nonprofit recovery cafe, Santa Cruz, a consultant that helped with setting up the Vets Hall shelters and also I helped run the winter shelter a few years ago for AFC in the Salvation Army. I wanna applaud the work done by Randy and Robert's staffs creating this presentation and report. I support the framework moving forward and I'm proud of the services that Santa Cruz offers, the compassion mixed with fiscal responsibility to deal with a human crisis in our community. In moving forward, I wanna point out one aspect of any strategy that we use. With the engagement, I find that there's a challenge with the engagement of those who are actually experiencing homelessness. A lot of them don't wanna stay in shelters. We've modified things to go closer to a low barrier idea, but I think we have a definite struggle in our shelter populations, in keeping people safe and providing professional services to them. I worry as somebody from the Mental Health Advisory Board, the number of people getting kicked out of shelters for behaviors which are based on behavioral health challenges. We had very strong equity values within the core framework, but within our shelters, there is no grievance policy as of yet that actually goes and moves through the shelter and moves towards the county if the grievance wanted to go high enough, even though there are county contracts. When I was running the shelter for AFC and Salvation Army, I was helping run it. We had 550 people come through one winter and I had to kick out 50 people because our staff couldn't manage it. We never... Suzanne Thomas, your microphone is available. Thank you. My name's Suzanne Thomas. I live adjacent to the proposed property that is under review for Home Key Funding on Park Avenue in Soquel. I just want to express my concerns about the project, not that I am against providing affordable housing and providing homes for those who are challenged in finding affordable housing. That is not my concern. My concern is the project as it is proposed and the location of it. And they effects upon the fragile environment that it is going to be built upon, including the runoff from the impervious surfaces into the riparian area. And also the lack of disability access, if we're providing housing for veterans and others who maybe have mobility challenges, they're egress and ingress into the property because of the slope and also the sidewalks are not accessible to them to get to the convenience store which is quoted in the project itself and also to end this up. Also the speed and the lack of transparency that the County went in submitting this application to Home Key, even though you aren't mandated by law to involve the community, I think as a matter of trust and as a resident and a voter in this community, we all had a right to be involved in this and perhaps a better project may have come out of this whole situation. Thank you, Thomas. There are no other speakers. All right, then I'll return it to the board for action. Motion would be in order. I'll move for approval. Second. I'm motion by Supervisor Caput, second by Supervisor Coonerty. Any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk roll call vote please. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Coonerty unanimously. Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of our regular agenda for today. Our next, the next regular meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors will be April 12th, 2022 at 9 a.m. in these chambers and via Zoom. Meeting adjourned.