Okay, is the city clerk ready? I am, but I only see you and Councilmember Calentari-Johnson. Okay, I will begin as I pull up my notes if city clerk is ready. Okay. I am ready, but we do not have a quorum. Okay. I will begin. Good morning and welcome to our 9 AM, May 25th, 2020. Special meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. And I would like to ask the clerk to please call roll. Thank you, Mayor. Councilmember Calentari-Johnson. Present. Boulder. Currently absent. Coming. Here. Brown. Here. Present. Vice Mayor Watkins is absent. And Mayor Brunner. Present. Thank you. Today's presentation is part two of the city's budget presentations. We will receive presentations from the remaining departments that we did not get to hear from yesterday. At the end of today's presentations, I will call for public comment on the departments who have presented today. Today we will be hearing from economic development, planning and community development, and public works, police, city attorney, parks and recreation. And I think that's it. I will now, and I will after each department call for council questions and comments after each presentation. So with that being said, we are anticipated to be here until about 5.30pm today. And I would like to begin by calling on Bonnie Lipscomb, director of economic development to give a presentation on the economic development and housing budget. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor and members of the council, Bonnie Lipscomb, director of economic development and housing. And I'm going to share my screen. And today's presentation will be presenting the fiscal year 23 economic development and housing budget for the city of Santa Cruz. And I want to first just start off and say thank you to all of my staff. Everyone had a hand in preparation of today's budget as well. Specifically I want to call out Catherine Mence and Tiffany Lake who pulled this presentation together. So this would not be possible without their support. First going to start off talking about some of our core services achievements. And as we talk through each of the core services, business services, housing development and preservation, infrastructure development and asset management and arts and culture, we'll talk about the accomplishments as we go through each of those. I will say overall economic development is a very small department. We're roughly 2.9% of the net general fund budget. And that's possible because we do work across a lot of different funding sources and as well as our funding sources specifically for housing and then grant funding. And then we still have redevelopment bonds that we're moving forward with some of our CIP projects. We also have our economic development trust fund which is a small 1% of the TOT revenue that comes in to help us move forward with many of our infrastructure projects as well. I will say overall we've been very busy the last few years, the last couple years specifically really working on economic recovery efforts for the city. And you'll see that as we go through some of the following slides. Specifically focusing on business services, we do support business creation, permitting technical assistance and promotion of small businesses. A couple of the photos you see there from our recent small business summit with small business development center that was at the mall. We do other events and coordinate other events like the new tech meetup with Santa Cruz Works and other events across the city. We do convene business leaders, we collaborate regionally on economic development initiatives and we do promote business growth through financing incentives, beautification grant like our facade improvement program, this one you see of the buttery and site selection efforts. Typically some of our business services accomplishments over the last year is our shop Santa Cruz campaign. We also have over 100 temporary outdoor dining permits through our program. We will be in the process of transitioning that we've been working on the permanent program for the last six months or so and meeting individually with businesses prior to the expiration in December. We've launched with national development council an expansion of our pre-existing gross Santa Cruz loan program but we were able to really partner during the pandemic with our neighboring jurisdictions to launch a countywide gross Santa Cruz loan program and we're really proud of that collaboration. We've also assisted and provided assistance and retention efforts to more than 300 businesses in the last year and then through our downtown pops program and related efforts. Secured five spaces through the program, three pop-up activations with more to come in the works and then one business relay paid it through support related to the program. Looking at some of our housing development and preservation, we do obviously affordable housing creation. This is a rendering of on the far left of our taxation south project which we'll talk more in just a minute. We also do affordable housing preservation, monitoring affordable housing units within the city, a couple thousand units every year and then community development programs from community development block grant home some of the funding and funding assistance we have with some of our community partners like Housing Authority of Santa Cruz County and Community Action Board for a couple of our housing assistance programs. Specifically on some of our housing accomplishments, securing American Rescue Plan Act funding over a million of CDBG in home through our annual action plan really taking advantage of some of the state ordinance, state legislative changes by updating some of our housing related ordinances and obviously working on that with planning and then securing several large grants for affordable housing. Again, this is the pack station south groundbreaking, which was last week. This project, which is now underway is over 70 is 70 units of affordable housing. It includes a new home, a new downtown home for a Santa Cruz community health center and deans is providing low cost medical and dental care for Santa for the Santa Cruz community. We will have a sort of a retail, hopefully a cafe component on the corner to really help activate that lower Pacific Avenue. And then as you can see a Paseo that connects as part of the downtown plan with the Riverwalk and specifically, you know, on this project. We and I'll get into that in a second, but we've been able to secure some major grants really help pay for some of those public infrastructure improvements. We have over 20 million between two grants totaling over 51 million that specifically for infrastructure improvements and lower Pacific Avenue improvements related to these housing developments. So we're really excited about being able to implement the original vision as part of the downtown plan related with these two affordable housing projects pack station south and pack station north. We've also secured 350,000 through state HCD relocation funds that we've been able to put into the creation of affordable housing 1.2 of the state permanent local housing allocation that matches our own affordable housing trust fund. This is a permanent source of funding going forward. I will say this allocation is over five years. We get roughly 300,000 a year for that. And we do have to come up with a five year plans, which five year five year increments we plan sort of the next the next allocation. And then we applied for and were successful and actually two rounds, but for included in the current fiscal year 22 budget, we have 5 million that was secured as a grant fund match to our affordable housing trust fund through the local housing trust fund at through HCD new funding and fiscal year 23. We applied for and received another $5 million grant match second round to our affordable housing trust fund. And additionally through the American Rescue Plan Act, we secured another 1.3 million through HUD. So quite a bit of funding that we've been able to secure and really take advantage of being in that sort of both developer hat and partnering on public private partnerships being in a position to be very competitive for state and federal funding sources. On our infrastructure development and asset management side, we do a considerable amount of master planning. Here's an example, you know, the Wharf master plan. We've also done this for the Tennery Arts Campus Ocean Street corridor. We do these and obviously work work closely with planning on a lot of these efforts, but do a lot of economic analysis. I'm really looking at it from the lens of promoting economic sort of vitality and prosperity and prosperity in Santa Cruz. We also do a lot of real estate management and managing the city's assets, as well as looking at the city as a whole and looking at future opportunities. So the middle photo shows the Tennery Arts Center, which is what city owned asset one of our former redevelopment now housing successor assets and a real opportunity we have going forward is looking at what you see in that sort of pink, purple section, looking at the Caltrans own property as a future opportunity for a mixed use affordable housing project. So working with our legislators, working with our council and our, you know, our city leadership to really help secure these new opportunities to create affordable housing in the future. And then finally, we do manage, you know, over 80 leases and license agreements across the city for city owned property, manage those tenants do contract administration and leasing property and kiosk for city use. Recent awards, I mentioned these, I won't talk too much about them, but securing actually over 52 and a half million between these three grants for two of our two of our main affordable housing projects in the downtown on Pacific Avenue pack station south and pack station north. And of that 52.5 million, you know, 20 million of that is specifically for infrastructure and the balance of that over 30 million goes straight into the affordable housing creation that the actual construction of the affordable housing. And then additionally working with some of our partners in the city, including Tiffany wise West and public works. We secured a million dollar epic challenge award through the California Energy Commission. So specifically in sort of designing and modeling a state of the art energy and water sustainability infrastructure for pack station north. Some of our recent sort of accomplishments on the infrastructure and asset management side through pandemic recovery. Specifically looking at the photo that you see here is of Midtown Fridays of really trying to create these activation and vitality of some of our areas and see own assets. This is again a former redevelopment agency on asset. This is the east side what we call the east side parking lot. And we're excited to be kicking this off again with event Santa Cruz this June June 3rd for another long period of Midtown Fridays. So we're really excited about that. We are in the process of finishing up. It's been a very long haul the Del Mar storefront is going in I think later this week and we should be finishing up early next month and be ready to lease out that space as well as some renovations that we did to our kiosk at campus, you know, we're getting really close back to pre COVID rental revenues across our leases at the city which is really great to see but we also have been as a city entity in a position of support during the pandemic. And so that's something that we will come forward to you in the months ahead to look a little more closely at that. Then we also received economic development administration grant for just a little under four million to do the last sort of vision that was for the tannery arts center campus which is the dance building. So we've been working closely with leadership at the tannery arts center campus on moving forward and what that new center would look like. The arts and culture side we have a number of and this is our newest program is the city art of recovery design pilot grant program. This is a close collaboration with the arts council. We also have the Santa Cruz equity collab was created around the Black Lives Matter mural. The tannery world's dance center Black Health Matters a friend initiative and then the sponsoring of the Seawall Santa Cruz. This is the last the last salmon I think which is one of my favorite favorite murals in the downtown on the backside of the Soquel garage. But through the Santa Cruz sponsorship of Santa Cruz Seawalls we were able to help support the creation of 18 city murals citywide within three weeks which is a pretty incredible accomplishment. Also want to reaffirm the recognition of the importance of the creative economy. That's why one of the reasons arts in economic development. This study which is already kicked off by the arts council does have funding from the city of Santa Cruz to our arts program. It's going to take a place over the course of the next year. The last time this study was done was in 2014. And we're really excited to be to be a part of this effort and really important to show what that direct impact is. The other photo that you see is actually the first completed the mariachi eternal with UCSC which was performed at London Nelson which is one of the first completed projects of our card program. Arts program accomplishments. I mentioned Seawalls already our card pilot grant program. The mural shown here is Kaia Koopman's Let's Solve the Dissolve and worked also through on Stormdrain mural at Poets Park and as I mentioned the Black Health Matters of Frenda. Want to just talk briefly as we move into our budget about our department team. This year we have 14.5 positions authorized but 1.5 of those those are in the light blue were vacant and actually we were slated to delete one of those positions but we do have a request to fill those positions as well as add a development manager specifically on the housing front to really help us move forward with the really complicated affordable housing projects development projects we have underway as well as the management of the affordable housing grants and other funding sources that are that are helping us move these projects forward. This is our team and as I said they've all pitched in in helping prepare this presentation and obviously in doing all the all the work that we do and I'm just I'm really honored to be a part of this team and all the work that they've done over the over the last year and with that I want to acknowledge our new name Santa Cruz Economic Development and Housing. Obviously housing has always been a critically important part of our department but sort of acknowledging that and expanding our name that reflects more the proportion and the the emphasis on the work that we do and particularly the work that we have underway and going forward into the future with the recognition of the importance of really creating housing in Santa Cruz and that need that we have in our community. Looking quickly at our budget our total expenditures our total revenues are 10 million and you can see the majority of that is through our affordable housing trust fund our home funds less than 2% of our funding comes from the general fund and we do have quite a bit of work across these areas on the housing and community development front. Our total expenditures for this year is six million and you can see the breakdown from business services housing community development project support and personnel. As we look at overall funding this is sort of our CIP funding sort of a snapshot for coming forward later new grant funding affordable housing trust fund ED trust fund and former redevelopment agency bonds we do not have any general fund in our CIP projects that we have going forward. If you look at the middle column for fiscal year 23 that 12 million is our new funding across the funding sources that I just briefly mentioned across grants ED trust fund and and former redevelopment agency bond funding. Our budget reductions this year we proposed we're identified 86,000 we are moving forward with these with the exception of the allocation of graffiti program staff at 19,000 we're not going to to do that portion this year and we are not moving forward with recommending the annual funding to the arts council we're keeping that one points the 1,700 in in their budget without that reduction this year but we are reducing some of our planning services facade improvement funding as well as some of our contributions to the get virtual website program that program is still ongoing. With that I'll wrap it up and happy to take any questions that you have. Thank you director Bonnie lips. That was a very thorough and quick summary and great presentation. If you could go back to that last reduction side quickly. Thank you and so let's see what do you these are all the reductions that you're you've identified. These are the ones that we identified and through a meeting a staff meeting with the city manager's office and sort of talking through these we agreed to move forward with all of these reductions with the exception of the very first one which is the allocation of graffiti program staff this is what we allocate the work that we do administratively on our end for the other departments and allocating for for example if a graffiti is in a parks you know so it's sort of our internal allocation we're not going to do that piece and charging that to other departments we're just going to absorb that through our existing team and then the other piece we're not moving forward on is the reduction the 1700 in reduction to the arts council okay so the the new total is about what 60 66,000 yeah i'd say yeah 60 63,000 roughly okay thank you i will now bring it out to council members for questions comments i see council member Cummings go ahead honey thanks for that presentation um it's great to hear about all the good work that's happening all the funding that's getting secured i'm just wondering and maybe um you can circle back to this question but um i'm just curious you know it seems like there's funding that's going there's a lot of funding that's moving around as it relates to the affordable housing trust fund and i'm just kind of curious about what is kind of like the guess what's like the balance right now if you take into account and what's been allocated towards the various projects that are you know underway and what we've received i will say actually all of our affordable housing trust fund is allocated right now and that's largely a result of the type of funding that's coming in to match our affordable housing trust so for example when we do the rounds of the five million that we did for the local housing trust fund we had to match that with our affordable housing with our affordable housing trust fund and on top of that we had to allocate which projects it was going for in order for them to award us the funding so when we try to leverage our funding we often have to commit it to a specific project so we do right now have all of the current funding allocated across that's coming in to the affordable housing trust fund that's currently in i should say across pack station south pack station north and the like the for library affordable housing mixed use project but i will say we do have ongoing funding sources that that will be coming in this year that aren't yet allocated so we do have some funding coming in some small amount of funding coming in um that's part of a development agreement on 555 pacific avenue um we do have funding that will be coming in on inloothes or development fees that will come into the project we don't have those budget yet because we don't quite know what the timing of those will be but as that funding comes in that funding will be will be available and that's important and i'm glad you brought the question up because we will be coming to you at some point in the next few months looking at some really important and critical private privately led projects really looking at the city on whether or not there can be a waiver of a certain of number of city fees and so you know we want to support all those projects to the extent that we to the extent that we can we do have roughly i think it's 650,000 that should be coming in within the next six months off the circles the arid circles project and we were hoping to have that available for the natural bridges for housing authority project and but there are some other privately funded projects that are really hoping to have their fees either waived or deferred and so we're looking at those and looking at ways that we can help that where possible but that's going to is going to be a major decision point for you coming forward in the next few months right and then i'm just curious uh how the um you know we launched a small business um small business microloan COVID-19 program and you know a lot of businesses took advantage of that and i'm just curious are we starting to see some of i mean it's a bit you know it really was intended to help small businesses and you know as they recover slowly pay that back and so i'm just kind of curious what the status of that program is yeah so we had two different programs we had one early on like really early on in the pandemic where we quickly got out 50 loans 500 000 and the majority of those at least half of those have already been paid back a lot of them were bridge funding and by and large we should go back and look at the number of those visits but i believe by and large they're all still open and running active businesses which was really the intent is to keep these businesses alive provide some much needed emergency sort of capital whether or not it's paying you know paying for payroll just keeping those doors open during the pandemic what we do see right now particularly as we look at vacancies in the downtown and through our recent broker breakfast that we had with the downtown association last month is that while there's still a number of vacancies particularly downtown when you look at that because that's where we have the greatest concentration of businesses in a in a you know sort of core area there's a lot of leasing activity underway right now so i do think that we are going to be seeing a lot of the remaining vacancies be filled in the months ahead and folks are are feeling better about you know about the year ahead thank you councilmember Cummings is that complete your questions yes okay councilmember Calentari Johnson thank you thanks so much Bonnie for the presentation and all the work it's it's amazing to see it synthesized in this way there's so much that's been done i just had one question about the the reductions um so in particular i was i was curious about the get virtual website marketing program i know that there are pretty small programs sort of a shoe string budget what happens to their capacity to to fully implement with our cuts and how are we working with them to help them get some other resources yeah that's a great question i i just will say i absolutely love the get virtual program and that collaboration that we have with ucsc and nada when it first started and was really kicking off we were the main um sponsor of that program and then during the pandemic we gave it additional funding so and and that was critical actually during the pandemic for helping some of those businesses quickly get online when they no longer had a brick and mortar you know access point for the community so get virtual was critical it's still a really important tool but they have a step they're a little more established now they don't need us as the main funder so we are still a providing funding it's 10 000 in our budget it's just not the same amount that we had previously when we were really trying to make sure that this program stayed afloat and provided that resource critically for businesses who didn't have online platforms or that e-commerce tool so we we still are a big supporter of the program okay thank you thanks so much for all the work thank you count uh councilmember calentari johnson councilmember brown i thank you mayor and thank you bonnie for the overview it was great to see um all of the wonderful work that's happening and just so impressive the funding that you've been able to leverage for affordable housing projects so and just can't can't thank you enough for all of your work and your team mall and minnie team um i just have one question and i feel like i already like i've asked this and i can't remember the answer so i'm just gonna ask again um wondering um about the economic development trust fund in the um fund balance recap in our budget it's my page 49 you'll know you'll i don't think i need to refer you to it but it's page 49 it's um number economic development where am i at 136 fund balance and i said we have uh projected other financing uses 1.3 million and i'm i'm just wondering what that allocation was about it's about half of the trust fund balance hold on i have staff coming in because i don't i can't find that page and i'm sorry i'm sorry i was gonna send this to earlier for yesterday and i just ran out of time but um i thought it's not yeah can you repeat that number please it's page 49 it's item it's the public um it's the economic development trust fund it's um fund 136 okay sorry just quick quick debrief there okay it's a rolling up of two programs um that we're continuing and expanding next year um 500 000 of that is um anticipated for potentially another round of loan funds recovery funds and um and then we have as part of that of doing the permanent outdoor expansion program we wanted to have a loan fund available um which would have a forgivable element for those doing outdoor dining expansions recognizing that that transition from temporary outdoor dining um to permanent is costly particularly as we're looking at having uniform having an option to have a uniform design in the downtown specifically and the estimate of those is between 40 and 70 000 so we wanted to have an opportunity to have uh forgivable loans a portion forgivable uh loan funding available to help finance that over a five-year period and then if they keep that their business open for that period they would have a portion of that forgiven each year so it's it's to really move forward with some of our economic development programs and financing tools that we have available in the budget thank you that was my only question okay great thank you council member brown uh it looks like that concludes our council questions uh thank you so much for that presentation and um i will continue on to the next department thank you thank you mayor thank you council okay i will now call on lee butler director of planning and community development to give a presentation on planning and community development's budget thank you mayor brunner and council members good morning i'm lee butler director of planning and community development let me get my presentation going here all right can you all see my screen yes thank you all right um i've got about uh 15 minutes here and i'm going to go through the five things identified here our core services our team the budget our achievements for last year and our goals for this coming year um our mission is to enhance quality of life safety and civic pride for our community by providing land use and development guidance through responsive respectful and efficient public service so let's dive into those in land use and development we've got long-range planning current planning and building working on those aspects we have in community we have community engagement components and we have of course our plan review permit issuance and inspection functions in public health and safety we inspect rental housing to ensure the safety of that we respond to code compliance issues we work with tiffy wise west on sustainability issues like green building practices such as the building electrification and we inspect construction to ensure structural integrity escape and rescue emergency lighting and a whole range of other safety measures with respect to efficient delivery of our services and quality customer service we are shifting to improve and interact more in the digital realm so working on online and electronic plan review and submittal services while still recognizing that it's important and helpful to be able to talk with some of our customers face to face so here we are talking with some of our customers in our permit center and of course we do lots of plan review in the office and in the field as I mentioned that those paper copies are shifting to electronic more and more and then of course we're conforming confirming that the plans are matching what's getting constructed out in the field you can see here some of our team at work looking at rebar and electrical and structural and so forth we've got five divisions in our department we've got 36 FTEs full-time equivalents in the upcoming budget that's proposed between administration advanced planning current planning building and safety and code enforcement divisions and here are the individuals on our team who work hard day in and day out to serve our community they've done a lot of great work this past year and really have a great team here we are together as coming together not on a screen for the first time this was the first time we were together not on a screen in a long time so it's exciting as we're able to do that again jumping into the budget we have about 7.5 million in our total budget for the fiscal 23 request the vast majority of that 83% is in personnel about 17% is in supplies and services and those supplies and services the biggest chunk of those are in advanced planning and in building where we've got consultants to help us with some of our work let's take a quick closer look at our revenues and expenditures compared to the past few years let's look first at revenues the red lines on the top here are actual numbers so in 21 we had about four million and in revenues in 22 this is as of Monday and so that can go up and it will go up before the end of the fiscal year and depending on when some of those big projects we've got a few big projects that are about to pull building permits so those could hit later this year and bump us up pretty substantially but we do expect that with some of the big projects that we have in the pipeline we are going to see a bump in revenue in this next coming fiscal year looking at personnel you can you can see that there has been an increase in personnel costs and i'll talk there is one additional position that the council has previously approved and i'll talk to you about those positions in a moment and you can see here in the services and supplies in fiscal year 22 we actually had a bump and that was due in part to some grants that got funneled into those services and supplies and you can see in 23 we are back down but slightly higher than 21 and we are planning for some additional costs associated with our housing element in that fiscal year 23 services and supplies budget as far as budgetary solutions go the biggest one was one that the council approved last month and that was an increase in our green building fee that's going to bring in that's anticipated to bring in about 170 thousand dollars annually in additional revenues and then we did also end up having reductions in our administrative division in the services category about 44 thousand and we spread that out to limit the impacts and i'm happy to talk to you about any of those if you like but you can see some of the things here with some of our tim staff and office equipment and so forth we we are reducing our community tv budget but we do expect that we'll still be be fine with respect to having plenty to televise the planning commission on at each meeting this coming year jumping into the personnel changes i'm going to talk about these first three together because they're tied together and as we move towards more electronic planner review and online services we need our team to have the technical skills to support our internal customers and customers out in the community with these digital services so the planning community development technician would do just that they would assist with project intake they confirm that the required materials are provided they're going to set up projects in blue beam and our permit tracking system and then they'll troubleshoot with customers if they're having difficulty in that process and in getting their plans submitted or in accessing the online information that we're providing and so we're looking at at changing the title we have a code compliance technician right now and they are focused in rental inspection and code compliance they would still work in that realm but to provide that flexibility and to provide potential coverage options we would change that to a planning and community development technician and then we would add a planning and community development technician that would assist with building and planning and then on vacations and so forth and cross training with with cross training those two would be able to cover each other we would at mid-year delete an administrative assistant too so the thought is essentially that we would have an essentially an upgrade of our positions and admin too would be dropped a planning community development tech would come in and then we've got the lateral with the code compliance tech to planning community development tech the last thing i wanted to point out on this slide we'd be adding a code compliance supervisor and the the council approved the senior code compliance officer with the sidewalk vending ordinance and in consultation with human resources that individual would really be supervising both our internal staff and our our contract staff in enforcing the sidewalk vending ordinance and so we've changed that title to code compliance supervisor versus a senior code compliance officer the next slide here is just i mean we're going to go through some of these accomplishments but i just wanted to point out that with all of these re-envisioned Santa Cruz categories as well as our interim strategic plan with infrastructure downtown support, fiscal sustainability, equity and so forth that we really hit on all of these categories and so i'm going to jump in to some of these here with some statistics starting off we're expecting to issue over 1700 building permits this year and we're fielding over 8 000 calls or individuals in our permit center i want to flag that one for you because that's actually a reduction and this this 8 000 calls that's just to our main admin line and as we're going into this electronic plan review a lot of these customers don't have to go through our main line anymore they're able to to get these services through our online portals and so that number is down we're keeping close eye on that to see how that to see how that goes but that is an indicator that people are getting directly to the people that they need to get to at first and they're able to do some of their business without calling in we expect to have nearly 11 000 inspections completed between building and code and rental and then our building permit valuation is over 56 million and again there could be a substantial bump in that if we end up with if we end up with some of those big projects hitting this year the pipeline housing stats right now this is this is from preliminary review that's been submitted through construction we have about 813 affordable housing units 224 of those are supportive housing units and over 2,300 units in the pipeline so let's jump into some of the projects that we had substantial milestones in this past fiscal year 831 water i'm going to run through these quickly you can ask me questions later but i think you're all familiar with these 831 water 55 to 82 affordable units there out of 140 that passed through SB 35 a lot of work on the team went through that but no building permit submitted for that 130 center that has 35 very low income units and over 200 single remock agency units that was approved in planning earlier this year and they just submitted their building permits last week so we're excited that that project is moving forward expeditiously and PAC South Bonnie talked about that 70 affordable units there we processed the coastal permit and issued a grading permit we're ready to issue the planning permit or excuse me the building permit for that Pacific Front Laurel our building division has been working hard on the inspections out there and you can see that building beginning to take shape that helped facilitate the PAC South with the land dedication they had there 350 ocean that project was completed completed construction so all the inspections were done and that has over 60 D restricted affordable units there 314 Jesse 50 affordable units there and coastal permit was processed this year Calvary Church that one has 65 affordable units and that one is nearing building permit issuance as well and then la quinta that has 60 rooms in that hotel and that construction was completed so all the inspections were finished this year looking at some additional stats so far this year the multifamily projects we have approved 519 multifamily units in the planning division in current planning and 223 or 43 percent of those are affordable units so that's that's really impressive and that is a reflection of some of the great work that not just our team has been doing but economic development and and I have to mention you know all those projects on the prior page these are really team efforts between our not only in our divisions but public works economic development water fire police review these plans a lot of work across the city goes into this and so it is certainly a team effort a few initiatives we implemented some new fees public safety child care and code compliance we made a lot of progress on our electronic permitting we brought in blue beam as consultants are really kickstart the baby steps that we had been taking towards that and we are expecting full implementation of that next year which i'll get to in a moment we've got our land use and management sorry our new land use management system the vendor selection is under way there and that's a real partnership with information technology group and then we updated our green building fee as i talked about lots of of progress on policy initiatives objective standards are going to planning commission next week for the first round we expect to have those we're going to have multiple rounds at the planning commission and then expect to have those to the council later this summer we made some substantial progress with our local coastal program that hasn't been updated since our new general plan was adopted in 2012 we had a public review draft that was released we brought that to the coastal commission and we are pumping the brakes right now as we were responding to a bunch of the coastal commission comments but we have made some substantial progress there and want to keep that progress going as we address the coastal commission comments we've got a housing element rfp that went out and i've got some respondents we're hoping to bring that contract to you next month and get that process underway the downtown plan expansion you'll be seeing that on June 14th with respect to the preferred land use alternatives and then the sidewalk vending ordinance our team was instrumental in the enforcement components with police and code compliance primarily and then also with the permitting components in conjunction with parks and others some of our goals for next year keeping a lot of those advanced planning things moving we've got some really big milestones coming up for those we do want to have full bluem implementation this coming year we want to we're bringing on that consultant for our land management system and then we are expecting to complete a new building fee study so that we can help better align our fiscal sustainability in that regard and with that i'm available for any questions that you may have okay thank you for that in-depth presentation you're welcome i will bring it out to council members for questions and comments i see councilmember Cummings thank you mayor thanks for that presentation and it's great to see that you know of the units the multifamily units have been approved that you know 43 percent that's a really good achievement and hopefully we can exceed that you know each year and and set goals for ourselves to get more and more with that ratio of affordable to market rate housing in our community um i had a question about one project in particular which is the hotel that's being built on riverside in the brand over in the beach flats there's kind of where i mean that thing's been going for like four years now um and a lot of you know projects have you know started and finished and that thing's just still kind of slowly making its way along and i'm wondering if you can just speak a little bit about kind of what's what that project is and kind of what's why it's been taking so long so that will be a marriott hotel and that project has undergone a number of shifts in the general contractor and they have they have finally started making some substantial progress i'll tell you that project was under construction before i started here almost five years ago and it's proceeded in fits and starts and i'd say more fits than starts but it i i will say i i've asked recently about that and i will say our team is hopeful that late this summer they will be ready to issue a certificate of occupancy and um you know this has been a long process so i i i don't know if other things are going to come up other things can come up but that's what we are hoping for that they will be ready at that point and um yes that that's a good example of how in our department sometimes things out of our control will actually create expenses for us over many many fiscal years right so even in a regular project you know these big projects will be 18 24 months of construction so we might get pacific station south this fiscal year but we'll still be spending that money in fiscal year 24 not next fiscal year but the fiscal year after that right and so there is a lot of carryover and that particular project has taken a particularly long time but we're hopeful that very soon we'll have that ready to get occupied and similarly i'm wondering if you could speak to also uh where the um lava here used to be sure that that's stalled out during covid but then people have been asking like there's this giant hole in the ground and what's going on yes yeah so thanks for asking about that councilmember Cummings we they did they did stall out as you know um you know covid created hardships for a lot of different businesses and that was poised to move forward and actually had building permits issued back just before the pandemic and they have recently started that backup they have finished up some of the demo work that they have out there and they are finishing up some of the groundwater testing and sampling so that they can proceed with that construction and the commencement of the construction of the hotel itself so we do anticipate that happening the the actual construction beginning in the very near future as as they are ramping up and there was a there was a time frame in there where it it it stalled due to the pandemic i think that's all i well i do have one more question you know with inflation going up um and the cost of everything going up that also impacts you know workers because of the fact in you know our departments because um you know people are impacted with the cost of everything going up has there been any consideration of increasing any fees to account for the increase of inflation so um we do want to do a new building fee study this coming year we budgeted for that and um actually our hope is and one of the things that we've talked about with other groups other departments here is that we make that more comprehensive looking at the process that we undergo in public works and in water and in fire and our various development review partners economic development how those folks also play into that entire development review process and so we're our plan is to actually partner with those different groups and um complete a fee study so that we can increase our revenues to to be closer to cost recovery we do have you know some of our services are not cost recovery you know we've got code compliance services for example where you know if someone um has a violation uh someone calls in they complain we go out and we work with that owner to fix it if they do that then there aren't any fines or anything associated with that and so those are not going to be cost recovery but we do want to um get our development review services aligned as much as we can with uh cost recovery so that uh the people that are benefiting from those services are the ones that are paying for the service okay that's all my questions thanks thank you thank you council member Cummings that was also one of my questions on the uh building fee study and what that entails and and what that um what would that cost be is that and how often do you do that so it's it's been some time since we did that what what it entails is um essentially we bring in a consultant that does an analysis of our time spent on those activities the costs that our department has um both internal as well as with consultants and the time that we spend with customers and then they adjust the costs for building permit applications and so both for plan check and for inspection services they adjust those accordingly to hopefully better align with our cost recovery efforts and there would be a similar process that would happen with public works and others so you know we route our building plans to all the different review departments and then they also have some of their own permits that they do for example you know public works will have an encouragement permit if someone's closing a sidewalk for construction and so i'd like to and we've talked about doing this um talked with mark and others the other department heads about doing a more comprehensive study and that's where we anticipate heading um with this fee study is is really getting more bang for our buck what that you you asked how much that study costs um i would say that typically if we were just doing building um i would estimate that would be somewhere between 30 and 45 000 um we could get some economy of scale if we are um if we're working with other departments and so you know how much economy of scale i'm not sure but um we've we've budgeted um for that in our services and supplies for this year so we expect that we'll be able to accomplish that with the funding that we have thank you you're welcome uh let's see council member brown thank you mayor thank you lee that was uh great overview as well um good to see all of the projects that are happening and um let's see i have so some of my questions have been answered but just following up on the um please schedule and the cost recovery um it was so i know that we adopted a full cost recovery policy that council did a while back i i'm fast i can't remember if it was 2018 or 2019 somewhere around there um but so i'm really glad to see that this is moving forward in a comprehensive way the idea of really getting a handle on what um full cost recovery looks like and where it's possible um and the bar chart was really helpful too just looking at that in your presentation as you talked about it to show um how those the kind of revenues can be uneven because they the revenues from permitting come in when permits are pulled you know at various points in time and so it doesn't kind of correspond with the cost of you know running the planning department uh and doing all of the other functions so that it was really helpful to just see that and think about that and i'm wondering if that's um something that is like how does that work i mean that's is that a real challenge for you all to or if as you budget does it kind of just work out that you get it covered so great question thank thank you councilmember brown um yes it is a challenge and yes it works out um and i'll tell you briefly how it does is um you know one the revenues that we get go into the general fund right so we're anticipating all right here is um here is the workload that we've got coming up because we can predict that based on where projects are in the process and we can say all right are we going to need to have more consultants um this here and and sometimes we have to come back to the council and say hey um we need more consultant budget because we got these big projects that came in and we're sending them to plan check we don't have the ability to process them and within the within the expected timelines and we've got um one plan checker right now plus a green building specialist who works in that realm um and so a lot of our um applications a lot of our plan check applications go out to a third party and depending on what we get in sometimes sometimes we get surprised right a a project will come along and they won't have talked with us at all in advance and so what we do when we're when we're predicting our revenues is we we take all of our known projects and say when is when is this going to come in for building permits the middle when is it going to come in for that and when are they going to pull their building permits um and sometimes that doesn't always align you know somebody something happens and someone doesn't pull their permit but then somebody else comes along and we say hey we knew nothing about this project and they're ready to submit um so um that's where it somewhat balances out and it it's kind of an art and a science we we do talk with all of the developers to it's a kind of project out um but then sometimes we do need to make those changes but you know the revenues right now are covering the the costs for some of the projects that paid last year um because we're still doing those inspections and so it's kind of a carryover from year to year um at one point we were we were carrying over our consultant budgets we've actually switched that because it's it's actually better for accounting purposes and so that's why you might see some additional so a need to increase some of the consultant services but that helps us really understand like all right here's how much we're spending each year instead of how much was carried over from last year and how much was carried over from the year before that thank you that's that's helpful so just a follow-up to that in terms of the the study itself and kind of this the steps moving forward for council to take action do you have a projected timeline for that I know it sounds like a lot of work it is a lot of work one of the things that I will tell you I am nervous about just being upfront is that um our land management system is also going to take a lot a lot a lot of work from our teams as they're you know really pulling apart not only our procedures but also the um the how that translates to our tracking system and how we um log each of those steps and what information we need to track for reports like our budget report and the statistics that we send to the department of finance and housing and community development and so forth so tons of work there fortunately some of those efforts align well right dissecting the process for that works with who for the land management works with dissecting the process for our our fee study that said they're both heavy lifts and there are some very independent components so I would say best case scenario we will have that study early you completed early next year we've got a draft RFP together I would like to get it done a lot of cities end up doing that towards the beginning of the calendar year so that they try to hit the start of the new fees at the beginning of the fiscal year I'd like to avoid that busy time if possible but we also need to make sure that we're not overloading our team with heavy lifts on the land management system and heavy lifts in the fee realm at the same time and so we'll know a little bit more about the specific timing when we bring a consultant on board for the land management system and understand that but I do want to get that RFP out in the near future we need to coordinate with our colleagues in the other departments and so that that could create a little bit of a delay but fall I'm hoping we would start that and it usually does take a few months of work to to get it done that's really helpful thank you and then let's see I was glad to see mention of the local coastal program because I didn't see it in the goals in our Finder budget and so I was going to ask about that but I appreciate that you mentioned that and then my last question is really and I I think I'm I think I know the answer but I just want to make sure in terms of the upgrade of positions and the dropping of the admin too in particular that was a position I see is being dropped that's not is that an actual person who's working in that position is that potentially a layoff or are we looking at somebody moving so so we do have a vacant position as an a to right now okay and we do need to consider how that recruitment occurs and you know we we do anticipate that it would be an internal recruitment I can tell you that and so a twos across the city would have that opportunity to potentially move in and so even if that position were filled you know there there could be some shuffling but that our goal is to not have you know we don't we don't want to impact individuals right in terms of layoffs so that's something we'll be working with HR on and I am 100 with you on where I think you were going with that of not not wanting to impact individuals and if I could just on the lcp the reason why we didn't include that in the goals is because I can't say that I'm confident that we will bring that we will work with the Coastal Commission this coming year and get that in a position where it is ready for council to adopt and for the Coastal Commission to certify we got that to the Coastal Commission last year and we got comments from them this year just a couple of months ago and there was a long lag time in that and they wanted some they they wanted some pretty substantial restructuring of that so we're off doing that but just understanding the the workload that we're sending to the Coastal Commission and the delays that we're seeing on some of those I'm not confident that we'll have that done this year I would love to say that we do get it done but we'll have to see how that goes we're we're working to get it back to the Coastal Commission ASAP and we don't want to bring it forward to the council with a lot of Coastal Commission questions because that just creates more work on the back end our preference is to work with the Coastal Commission in advance and hopefully bring something forward that the Coastal Commission will be able to support so that we don't have to come back to the council afterwards particularly if there are significant changes it's really helpful as well thank you so much you're welcome thank you councilmember brown uh it looks like that concludes our questions and comments for this department thank you so much director lee butler thank you all okay uh it looks like now i'll call on laura schmitt assistant city manager to give a presentation on the city council and city manager's office budgets and then we'll hear from tony kandadi city attorney to give a presentation on the city attorney's office city attorney office's budget thank you mayor um actually the entire presentation is consolidated for everybody that i'll be doing great what i'll cover today with everybody are the services in the city manager's office including all of our subsidiary divisions as well as the city attorney's office the fiscal year 2022 objective achievements and that will include the city council as well and then what we are projecting for our fiscal year 23 budget and the attendant goals that we want to achieve with that budget so to give you a little bit of background about the services in this space and who delivers them when you look at the city manager's office and step back we have the city clerk functions and the we have administrative and council support we have program and project management and strategy and communications building that down a little bit within the city's clerk's division we are one of the main thoroughfares for the community to access information about the entire city and all of our functions so we have a reception area and a lobby where we triage requests from the community as well as through email and other means how to help people basically navigate to the other departments within the city within the clerk's division they also manage all of our historical records and meet the archiving requirements and any statutory requirements from the state of california or the federal level and then the they also coordinate all of our elections and the other thing that you guys are very aware of and near and dear to your heart is our city clerk's office manages the agenda and the meeting administration for the council and then they also serve as a subject matter expertise for any staff person who is also acting as a clerk for a commission or a committee so they help coordinate all of that and the use of the chambers and the technology on the city administration side of it within the city council and administrative services we do administrative support we do with the human resources functions for the city managers and clerk's office and all of our divisions contract support and then all of the support for the council and the mayor we also develop and help coordinate the city strategy so as council policy gets determined we translate that into a strategy we help facilitate the strategic plan that the council puts together usually every other year that's the cadence that happens there it may differ depending upon things like covid and fires and and other things that might intervene in the cadence we also have a very robust communications function that we've been building out over the last couple of years and that falls underneath this vertical as well on the program and project management this is where there's a variety of work the general programs and projects and i'll give examples of that subsequently those can change at any given point so some of our programs are constant and that would be climate action and sustainability and diversity equity and inclusion those are constant programs for us and the homelessness response space as well but there are also programs and projects that will come and go things like the charter amendment and district elections due to the California California Voting Rights Act challenge that we received so those things will ebb and flow and increase and decrease on any given cycle one of the questions we get sometimes on that program and project side is when does the city manager's office get involved oftentimes we'll get involved if it's a citywide request so if it impacts all the departments we would be the logical coordination point for that the other time that it may happen is if there are three or four departments involved and there's not an intuitive department to lead it nobody has the charter to necessarily lead that we may end up involved in that sort of program as well where there's a lot of interdepartmental work to be had and we'll be asked to take part in that and help coordinate we are also usually involved in interagency so if we're working hand in hand with the county or a joint powers authority or another local agency like the city of capitol or our Watsonville or scott's valley we'll get involved in that and then sometimes it is council direction and other assignments that come and go and we'll be asked to step in and help out as well that program and projects that are functions that happens in our office i already talked about a little bit about contract administration but to kind of make that come to life that includes things like our core programming in any social services grants that there may be out our independent police auditor program is an ongoing one and the legislative program as well are things that we coordinate on an ongoing basis and all of those have attendant contracts that we help coordinate on the committee side there are ongoing standing committees like the climate action task force the commission for the prevention of violence against women and the community programs committee that we coordinate we also help staff the public safety committee and now that we are going to establish children's fund oversight panel the city manager's office will be working with parks and rec but we will be coordinating that oversight panel and getting that formed and kicked off on the ad hoc committee side these come up and council directs on occasion ad hoc work to happen because there's a hot topic going on and we want to have a subset of council go off and work on a particular issue and then report back into council for recommendations and right now we have a budget and ad hoc revenue committee and we have a charter amendment subcommittee going and then we also have help in all policies the other programs that we are involved in on an ongoing basis are joint powers authorities so our city manager matt sits on the Santa Cruz public libraries board and the Santa Cruz regional 9-1-1 board and i represent along with a Santa Cruz police department represent representative i sit on the Santa Cruz county animal services board other examples of projects that come up re-invasion Santa Cruz our interim recovery plan was a project California voters rights act i already mentioned the grants management integration and improvement work that we've been doing citywide is another example and then ballot measures along with finance and other departments within the city on the climate action and sustainability front our climate action manager is currently coordinating our new climate action plan for 2030 she's coordinating our health and all policies and updates annual work plans and annual reports of achievements related to those work plans and then our west cliff drive adaptation and management plan you've heard a lot recently about our homelessness response program area we just delivered in march uh our first time three-year consolidated homelessness response action plan we also um from the city manager's office coordinate regional partnerships and relationships and conversations with our other partners in our region related to homelessness response and then we do citywide regional encampment coordination and then as needed examples of our ordinance development like csso our camping services and standards ordinance and our oversized vehicle ordinance and then any implementation associated with those ordinances or council direction looking back on fiscal year 22 anticipated an actual achievements for us within our clerk's department they've been working hand-in-hand with our information technology department to deliver the hybrid meeting format and we were lucky enough to launch that recently and then to back off of that given the covid numbers and going on the uptick a little bit for the fiscal year 22 they will have coordinated approximately 27 regular and special council meetings and then they also coordinate compliance with statements of economic interests that we have to do related to our work as council members or as staff and our purchasing and other economic interest declarations and um they have a 98 percent deadline compliance on that and then they also manage or will manage about 225 public records requests for the city and that involves a lot of work on the council side of it uh groovy Tuesdays so if y'all have felt like you're making a little bit progress on the duration of our meetings you have the blue bar represents the average hours of a regular meeting and then the lavender bar represents the average hours of toll meetings so that's a little bit less because that includes special meetings and study sessions but which tend to be shorter so you have shaved off about 1.5 hours on average for a council regular meeting so congratulations on that the last three fiscal years um this is the the yo-yo effect of council meeting time so i track from august to april because we don't meet in July and then our presentations are usually in may for council budget hearings and this gives you the up and down of the of the hours of per meeting through those months so as you can see the trendline here's a little bit lower you have like a uptick here and that's probably a study session there but you're kind of hovering around this underneath the 10 to 12 hour mark right now on this city council and administrative services functions other achievements for fiscal year 22 the team has managed thousands of email over the course of this fiscal year we've hosted five citywide employee communications meetings to date and we plan to do another one by the end of fiscal year 22 at a minimum so that'll get us to six uh you've heard every quarter are the many achievements of all the city departments related to re-envision Santa Cruz and then our quarterly updates that we've delivered around the performance measures as well we also delivered a citywide two-year work plan and it's a bridge document between re-envision Santa Cruz and the anticipated updated council strategic plan which will happen at the beginning of calendar year 2023 on the program and project management side we've coordinated the california voters rights act follow-up for seven districts plus the charter amendment measure for potentially six districts and a directly elected mayor we've also done polling and facilitation work for the sales tax ballot measure that is on in this June election we've delivered an updated 2022 legislative program and then helped coordinate along with many city departments the sidewalk bending ordinance and the permitting program and then we also have developed a citywide grant target list of opportunities for additional revenue sources for the city which is very critical right now additionally we delivered the three-year homelessness response action plan and we've coordinated conversations and worked directly with the county of Santa Cruz related to the 14 million homelessness funding that we received from the state of california we've stood up additional sheltering and hygiene resources the list includes the ones that you see in august the plan is that you will have before you the draft of the 2030 action plan so that's a little bit outside fiscal year 2022 but wanted to put that on your radar and then for health and all policies we've delivered a two-year plus work plan and also a draft of the community well-being indicators as it relates to that program looking forward into the fiscal year 23 these are the boxes we hope to tick we want to deliver an updated three-year strategic plan to you all in the beginning of calendar year 23 we want to have found additional revenue capacity and sources and that is a combination of the work with the council budget and revenue ad hoc committee as well as grant beating the bushes and any other sources that we can find legislative advocacy will be another key point there we will deliver various achievements within the homelessness response action plan as well as the climate action 2030 plan and the health and all policies and youth and diversity and equity and inclusion spaces will launch a city branding plan and take the first steps there probably that work will continue into fiscal year 2024 and then we will develop specific training for staff leads for advisory bodies so these are basically when a staff in another department acts as a clerk as it relates to like the planning commission or the transportation and public works commission we will also put together an emergency response protocols for the clerk's functions those are the targets so that's what we want to achieve those smattering and examples of all from different functions within the city manager's office so let's talk about our asks as it relates to our ability to get to those achievements this is a functional view that i showed earlier of the city manager's office and the lavender boxes represents asks for us as it relates to personnel so within the clerk's division that community information function we are asking for a deletion of a vacant position and an ad of a vacant of a new position for that vacancy and that request will help us be able to triage better the visits to the lobby but it will also bring an additional level of resource for our ability to answer requests and route requests within the community request for service portal you all talked about chris yesterday with information technology department so we get a lot of requests that are general and that means that it doesn't fit a specific category of activity within chris so we need somebody to really own that and be that stable presence to be able to route those those are requests and follow up with them with the other departments as well as if it goes internally to the city manager's office that request goes in concert with a request over here on the administrative division side where we need additional support for council as well as just the overall administrative functions of rfps contracts invoicing and giving our executive assistant some additional bandwidth there so um and i'll show you organizationally how that would work and then on the communications front we're asking and you already have approved a half fte there as a community relations specialist to help do community outreach and implement parts of the homeless response action plan and then we're also asking for additional capacity in the climate sustainability and equity function we have over the years um our manager in this space she is a division function of one and it started out very narrowly focused for climate action and sustainability and over the past couple of years we've added health and all policies to that and then now diverse the equity inclusion so there's a lot more work on the plate of that one person division so we're asking for additional capacity what does it look like as far as actual position changes so the community relations specialist that you approved in the last meeting is a half of an at full-time equivalent so it is a half person that we would hire as a community relations specialist and then the functions that i talked about a combination of clerk capacity for community information routing and triage and being able to be that conduit to the rest of the city as well as councils and administrative support that would be we have a vacant administrative assistant to position we are asking to delete the vacant AA2 and replace it with an AA3 just that additional analysis triage and coordination with the council the mayor as well as the community requests for service portal we think it's a better fit as an AA3 than as an AA2 and then finally i talked about the increased functional scope of this space of climate action and sustainability because we've added things like grants management and diversity equity and inclusion as well as health and all policies being able to give the manager their additional capacity by adding a management analyst to report for her and between them they would cover all of those functions that i spoke about and then also coordinate we believe the grants management function with the roadmap we've established even as we hire and go out to RFP for additional capacity for grant writing on an ad hoc basis we still need additional capacity in-house to be able to do this area justice to coordinate it and be that across the city integration point for all the departments and it's just too much for one person to handle so we're asking for a management analyst to cover all of those functions so those are the personnel changes giving you an understanding of the city council budget you guys have about 493,000 in your budget so 500,000 in your budget about 25 percent of that is in your services and supplies things like being able to host the employee party holiday party do participate and contribute to the strategic plan efforts when you guys want to do that and then personnel you're about 75 percent the city manager's office budget is about 3.75 million and that covers the city manager's staff itself cp the commission for the prevention of violence against women has a specific budget our independent police auditor budget is here city clerks climate action and memberships and dues on the community programs front these are the ways that we invest in different programming we have made a subshift in the homelessness response space and in order to implement the three-year homelessness response action plan we've got about 80 percent of our community programs budget goes to sheltering and storage contractors and other service providers outside agency partners like housing matters and the county and then our actual personnel is here as well and then you guys know about our core investment and we have added to core for this fiscal year for the set aside as you directed a few months ago so that is included in this part of the pie and then other community programs and services where we have contracts with the county to assist us that are sometimes related to homelessness response but not entirely homelessness response like our downtown outreach worker for instance is funded in this other community programs and services space and then our animal shelter jpa participation is in the community programs space as well our city attorney's office budget is a little bit almost 1.6 million our base services where they provide support at the city council other case analysis and work it is the major part of the pie at almost 70 percent we do have split out code enforcement and litigation related to code enforcement into another section of the pie and then there's a retirement contribution as our city attorney's office we fund part of that contribution for him and then we have other litigation other fees that are not related that they we may need to hire specialists that are not within the city attorney's office and that's about 2 percent of the budget a summary of the changes on the council side we are adding a community co-sponsorship fund at council requests we actually stuck that in the community programs budget though not in the council budget but every year we get ad hoc requests related to waivers of fees and sponsorships or post sponsorships of events and it's been very hit and miss and ad hoc the city manager's office will be working directly with parks and rec to implement an actual update to council policy as it relates to co-sponsorship so we'll bring that back to you in a formal request to adjust council policy and you'll be able to weigh in on the proposed process and the structure of doing that at a high level we are looking at recommending that our community programs committee so you have three council members on cpc that they be the review branch for the co-sponsorship requests and that we do that on a periodic basis and those recommendations would come to the larger council to be able to have you weigh in and approve or adjust them on the city attorney's office we made a little bit over 2 percent of a reduction in the code enforcement and outside council buckets and we did not touch the base services because those tend to be actually expended in a fiscal year on the clerk side we made some changes and reductions in training travel and administration across various accounts there and on the climate side we added ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars sorry in to participate in a regional grant service and we also did a very minor reduction in travel and temp there for the city manager's office we reduced the animal shelter participation amount based upon the run rates that have been happening with covid the animal shelter has actually been very accommodating during covid and understood the budget constraints that the participating agencies are under so they their run rate actually got reduced so we have made an adjustment to be able to match that we're still participating at our normal level here but we're just making the budget structurally lined up with where we are right now with the jpa estimates and then for our independent police auditor we're making a reduction there we have we went out to rfp and have had a new independent police auditor and based upon the billings that we saw for the previous fiscal year we made an adjustment and think that's going to be enough to get us through there and then we've also reduced some on the training travel and administration front we created interim finance director bobby mcgee mentioned yesterday that we worked with finance and they've done a lot of they've been a lot of the help to help us create a homelessness response activity code within our financial system so we actually in your budget book you'll notice 6105 it's a new thing that if you've been here previously that wasn't there so we've moved everything over to consolidate homelessness response revenue and expenditures into 6105 and then on the community program side anything that was purely homelessness response we've moved over into that homelessness response division and then we've also put in here a set aside 25 000 for post sponsorships historically within the council budget you would set aside 1500 for santa truce neighbors and open streets for 7 000 so that will if you decide as part of the cpc recommendations to continue this funding it would net out of the 25 000 that you have set aside for this programming on the climate action front i already mentioned that we added in the climate action budget a 20 000 participation for a grant a regional grant writer and that the community foundation is organizing and coordinating on behalf of all the agencies these are the details as far as how it ended up being aligned by our different functions we had a target of 163 000 and we met at about 188 we did notice after publication that there's an error in the numbers and the police auditor and the cpva w was swapped as far as police auditor was supposed to be reduced by 15 000 but it got taken out of cpva w so that will be an adjustment that will make annual the budget book will have to get adjusted when it comes back in june so independent police auditor will be 15 000 less cpva w will be 15 000 more so i just wanted to make note of that but this is the breakdown of how the different activities within our department participated in it in our ability to meet the reduction goals what that translates into potential service impacts will have obviously with all the changes for the homelessness response space will have improved capacity to implement our homelessness response action plan we will be able to fund and fully participate in core as you directed earlier so the set aside is there and then we will have reduced capacity for the city attorney's office based upon the almost 2 percent that we cut in the the two areas there and that could be further impacted by contract updates the city attorney's office has not adjusted their rates since fiscal year 2015 so they are well overdue for some sort of cost to living adjustment so those rates would obviously probably be higher and with a higher rate than the set dollar amounts that we have would not go as far as we figure that information out we will come back to you if we need to do a budget adjustment we could either do that off cycle or we could just do it during the mid-year and that usually happens around february ongoing professional development i had mentioned in various buckets we cut the travel and training budgets across almost all of our divisions that just means professional development might take a little bit longer we might just have to take turns more as staff of who gets to go to something on any given fiscal year and then we've increased the funding for cosponsorship so that's something that we definitely heard a desire from the council and the community so that will be an improvement in a service level and then if the management analyst is approved will have a better ability to meet all the needs and health and all policies to diversity equity and inclusion and the grad space that is the summary for city managers office city clerks city attorneys and council and community programs thank you and what questions do you have thank you so much laura schmidt that was i love that you call me laura schmidt and not just laura thank you that was um thank you for the visuals very thorough um overview um there was a lot in there and um in conjunction with our budget binder i have a little more clarity um i do want to um i have a couple questions but i do want to call out a big thank you for adding the community cosponsorships into the budget and i think that'll be really important i know this past year and a half we've had a lot of community requests and kind of the system to address those has not really been there so i think this will help um add to our community requests for sponsorships and be able to support some of our very important um community requests going forward um let's see my question on the police auditor reduction is that i'm trying to understand the reduction is because there's a new police auditor we had um we had originally estimated 65 thousand dollars per year for the independent police auditor and um it was based upon um historical run rates and we also adjusted it based upon the research that we did when we went out to rfp and looking at other agencies because we hadn't really updated our budgets in a while so um but we've we've gotten about a year and a half underneath the belt with our um the selected auditor from the rfp process the request for proposal process and we the current run rate is around 40 thousand dollars so we reduced the budget to 50 thousand dollars to give us some wiggle room depending upon the work that gets done in any given fiscal year so that's why we made the adjustment okay no reduction in services no reduction in services thank you um okay i'm going to pull it out to council members for questions and um council member Cummings and then council member Calentari Johnson thank you ma'am thank you Laura for that great presentation i had a question about the um the council i had a question maybe a comment regarding the versus with council support i'm just curious so since i've been on council there are a number of times when we approve new positions and the idea was that council would get you know support whether that's with checking emails and getting back to people and like each time we approve those positions we don't see that happen so i'm just kind of curious like what would the person's role be and how can we kind of make sure that there's some level of accountability with that because i mean yeah we're all working full-time obviously and um it would be great to have that support but you know the fact that a couple times we've approved positions and then we don't really you know i don't feel like i get that support in terms of assistance with whether it's well largely around communications so i'm just wondering how we can kind of build that in to make sure that it's effective for council members and i think what has happened over the last couple of years with the pandemic and the retirement incentive we've held vacant and that administrative assistant to for almost two years so that has obviously had a big impact and then we've also had our principal management analysts try to be the kind of sole navigation point for the mayor and the mayor usually has a lot more duties public appearances and coordination of schedule work related to that that office so all of that has been channeled through the principal management analyst so with the approach that we're taking for the administrative assistant three request is to be able to have that person contribute on the clerk side have our city clerk coordinate them but also take some of the administrative routing and support that normally historically has only been the principal management analyst because that person gets pulled into project work the pma and all the commission and committee support as well so that that's the general idea is to have that person act as pull and give some capacity to the city manager's office as well as fulfill some of the city clerk's work and then have our city clerk be the coordination point and the person that oversees that and helps maintain that balance because the city clerk is very good at that sort of supervisory coordination and logistics piece of it and then I see our city manager Matt Huffaker is on as well I think Laura Schmidt answered the question well I would just add that we've been fortunate to have some supplemental help from Casey Hamard as well as Sarah Daley own on special projects that have come through at council's request and you know on a daily basis we're triaging requests for council originated staff items assistance with responding to constituent questions and emails so the structure that we're standing up is all really intended at building a more robust support structure council member Cummings I'm happy to talk through as well of you know what that looks like and how we could best support the council going forward given some of your feedback on past commitments as we as we build to the the cno team but I appreciate the question yes I guess so for clarification it's not necessarily individual support of individual council members it's more along the lines of some of the support that's needed for whether it's like subcommittees obviously the clerk and I guess one question along those lines though is there any potential support with public records requests because there are times when we don't get many and then there are times when we are like inundated with those and those can take a long time especially depending on the time frame from when they want information and I think that that can be something that would really benefit and help council members so I'm just wondering how that might be factored in we could definitely take a look at that we understand and I think staff feels it too depending upon the uptick at any given point a department or a staff person could be triaging just as many if not more on public records requests it is definitely a pain point I think the challenge that we face whether it's public records request or support of individual council members even with the request that we are bringing to you for staffing now it's that supply and demand curve the demand for FTE hours far out outseads what we are asking for so even with the asks that we bring to the table we are trying to thread that needle of fiscal sustainability um and being able to hit that demand signal that's out there so it's a constant struggle for us and and we do appreciate the council's patients related to that and um we'll do what we can but it is we know you feel the pain we're we're we're empathetic with it um but we also have we have a lot of pain ourselves as well okay thank you thank you councilmember Cummings councilmember Kellan Terry Johnson thank you mayor and thank you Laura Schmidt um I'm going to be forever Laura Schmidt now not just Laura that's right I didn't have questions I wanted to thank you for all the work the city manager's office does so much you wear so many hats and it's it's hard to turn it off and turn it on and go into different gears so I just want to acknowledge and thank you for that and and I did want to point out thank you mayor for bringing up the sponsorship I just I want to point out that this really is in the effort to support the health and all policies work and support our DEI work it's often communities who don't have access to resources you know we work with the API community and Black Health Matters Initiative so it's often those community groups that don't have the resources so it's advancing that that commitment that we made as a city so I just wanted to highlight and acknowledge that and and thank you and the whole team for all your work thank you very much thank you councilmember Brown thank you mayor thank you Laura for the blur Schmidt I have to say it too now for the overview and that was a lot and you know the the various functions that fall within the city manager's office it really is complex it really is ever-changing and so I just appreciate you know all you do and how you make that legible to us in this process and I want so I'm glad to hear that the I see Tony's turn his camera on that the city attorney's budget is going to reflect some changes to their fee schedule because when I heard that that their they don't increase their fee their rates for the city despite you know over that amount of time since 2015 seeing considerable inflation I'm glad to see that they'll hopefully get a little relief there with that and hopefully we'll have corresponding reduction in legal needs legal representation needs but I'm I'm not going to hold my breath the question that I have is just is really about this the the branding item and I have a couple of other really kind of minor questions but I'm just wondering if you could talk more about that because I mean I get conceptually what that means but I we haven't really talked about it at the council level and I you know branding has a certain uh you know there's there's you know I have a sense of what that means but like just for you all what does that mean and what does that work look like to develop the city's brand um the the reason why it says planning and first steps on there is there definitely needs to be a coordinated conversation and our communications manager will do that strategically with the council and the community as well as the departments to put together that scope and and the plan before we begin to take the next steps in that space so I believe fundamentally if you if you look whether it's at our website or at the diversity of of city graphic presences that you may notice over the course of a council meeting or correspondence from us um we don't have a unified message and presence there and part of that branding is being able to put the identity there of our mission our vision and our our graphical coordinated presence and and to know this is the city of Santa Cruz and recognize that and then I'll also ask Matt to our city manager Huffaker to respond as well yeah thanks Laura just to add to that it's really I think the spirit behind it council member Brown is to have consistent compelling effective branding and communication across all of our functions we're a little bit scattered right now each department has their own way of approaching the way in which they present themselves to the community into the world I think the same is true for for city-wide image and branding that's some good conversations with Elizabeth on this front as well of how we can ensure that we continue to capture the wonderfully weird way we are as Santa Cruz in the work that we do and it also bleeds into the work that Bonnie and her team are doing around economic development business attraction so that's the idea behind it and of course we would love to hear the council's thoughts as we move into that process I also think there will be an opportunity to align some of that with the upcoming strategic planning we'll be doing in the new year all right that's that's all I've got for now thank you oh I and I also wanted to thank you for really taking seriously the needs for it with our climate and sustainability manager and that workload it's something that I've I think every year I say Tiffany needs somebody if she needs help and so I'm really glad to see that that's getting built in to the budget this year thanks thank you thank you council member brown council member Cummings you have your hand up did you have something else tag yeah I did have one more thing and it was related to what council member Brown just said in the position with Tiffany wise west and you know I think that maybe what should be considered is that we in the future potentially create a position that is focused specifically on kind of diversity equity inclusion health and all policies that can work as a single person with the different departments and the various initiatives because that is a field that has you know there's a lot of research and work that's kind of that field and there are professionals who specialize in that work and I think that given that Tiffany's background is in environmental studies and with all the environmental impacts we're going to be seeing that are facing our community like that's something that we need somebody specifically focused on understanding how we're going to address our environmental issues around sea level rise increase the coastal erosion fires water like that's something that somebody should be specifically focused on because it's only getting worse and if we're really committed to DEI then we should hire somebody with that background to focus on how we can make sure that we're meeting all the needs around diversity equity inclusion as it relates to health and all policies across all the different departments so I'm just going to put that out there as a suggestion because um you know health and all policies and DEI knows not what Tiffany's background is in but I know that if we were able to really have her focusing on environmental issues and having somebody who's training DEI work to focus on diversity issues that we'll be able to meet the needs um and reduce workload thank you council member um Cummings really appreciate your feedback um the more strategic fundamental view of that function is something that Matt and I have talked about um turning to next one of the things we wanted to do this fiscal year was as council member brown alluded to um getting help in this area on the on the flip side of that I think Tiffany has done an amazing job of stepping up to the plate and and figuring out health and all policies with the council members who sponsored those efforts and really pulling she is an amazing um practitioner of pulling in experts in areas if she doesn't have the expertise herself and working effectively with consultants and other subject matter expert professionals and then being able to tee up productively project work and content um while tapping into those experts so I wanted to acknowledge that she she has done a tremendous job of being able to put together the the fundamental structure of our program in in these spaces yeah no absolutely no doubt um about that I just think about you know as we're you know having just gone through one of the biggest fires in our county's history just knowing that we need to be somebody we should have somebody dedicated to working on those kinds of issues around climate change climate impacts that's focused on that and yeah Tiffany is great and she's an amazing person but I think that we can do both um so just something to consider and I totally understand we got to take baby steps and we don't have all the money in the world but just wanted to put that out there so that we could start thinking about that so thank you thank you thank you council member Cummings both and um it looks like that concludes our council questions for this presentation um at this point I will call a 10-minute bio break and we will return at 11.05 and thank you with the next department thank you so much Laura Schmidt and we will resume is the city clerk ready I am thank you thank you um we will resume our presentations our budget presentations from each department I will now call on Bernie Escalante chief of police to give a presentation on the police department's budget good morning mayor and council can you hear me yes good morning thank you not often I say good morning as you see an evening session so thank you for your time um and can everybody see the power point yes presentation okay um I will get started uh I also have Patricia Dodge our principal management analysts operating the slides and with us today to answer any other detailed questions you might have as well as uh deputy chief Garcia and deputy chief John Bush um also to assist if if need be uh next slide Patricia are you ready I could also stop her share and spread it if you want me to okay why don't we go ahead and do that I'm assuming she's having some difficulties is it not showing up on on your screen uh no it is I'm just are you ready to move to the next slide yeah it's advancing on my screen but apparently no that on zoom okay why don't you uh Bonnie if you don't mind thank you Bonnie okay I think we're good now everybody still see it okay all right so the agenda for uh for today we're going to go into speak to our police core services we'll show our organizational chart uh we'll talk about some 2022 achievements and then present our budget proposal for 2000 fiscal year 2023 next slide so core services um right now obviously the biggest chunk of our services is general patrol police services it also includes uh three canines uh and two traffic officers um and some other auxiliary duties and assignments but the bulk of what we do and are doing now is is general police patrol um in the future I would like to add some more proactive sort of uh assignments but right now with some staffing challenges we're really kind of down to the general police patrol services we do have one school resource officer um and obviously we have uh homeless services related to the cso's that we've been newly added to to our budget um our record section again does a tremendous job processing all the paperwork behind the scenes uh investigations um we have a wonderful volunteer program that's probably 30 to 40 people now that just does great things in the community uh professional standards works closely with our independent auditor administration community relations um property and evidence is really part of investigations it's we're all the processing of our evidence and working closely with the district attorney's office for uh case preparation um as well as hopefully you've noticed uh we've we've added some uh community service officers into the downtown and we hope to continue to build on that next slide so our organizational chart here um you know it's it's really kind of down to the the bare bones here uh we're really trying to build and um and so out of the you you see over here on the left hand side with operations we have three patrol lieutenants ideally we would have four um we have six patrol sergeants that's the bare minimum we um can have we have three shifts on each side of the week so um uh we don't have much room for air there and then below them there's there's a total of six patrol teams um currently staffed uh we're working 12 hour schedules due to our staffing challenges um and and no real room for replacements there over on the right side um we got uh acting deputy chief john bush that's kind of trying to balance two positions between the deputy chief of administration and uh also overseeing investigations uh we have two sergeants and i think it's about uh four detectives in investigations and ideally we have eight positions in that section that we would like to fill or four additional we should have eight um but we have four professional standards community relations and the admin assistance also doing a lot of great work behind the scenes for us here next slide so some of our achievements for 2022 um you know we we brought in a leadership team building consultant around november of 2022 that's been working with our leadership team ever since and has really made a tremendous difference for us as an organization and for some individuals in their professional development um obviously we've made a lot of uh efforts and we've made some positive strides in the area of recruitment and in staffing um we're just waiting for some of those folks that make their way through you know the uh police academies and or the field training programs to actually um be useful for us out in the field we also really focused on um you know trying to diversify our our staff uh and our team here around really uh representing our community so that was also a focused effort for us community engagement uh you know we we thoroughly believe in in working with our community and building relationships with them um we were super excited to bring back the citizens police academy this year um and we also are kicking off in collaboration with the district attorney's office and the fire department um a week-long teen academy i believe it's scheduled for around mid june um something that both of those is something we had probably about four years ago and and we we no longer participated in those but it was important for me to bring those back um also we just continue to build on a great volunteer program that does does great work in the community um so those are those are some engagement activities that we're excited about uh as you know we've been working hard through some legal updates uh ab 481 it was the latest and biggest one uh we also continue to work through the racial identity and profiling act um which requires our officers to document uh basically on almost every stop um a ton of information about the individuals stopped um which also adds to their time um to to input that that data that's required so that was that was a big project this last year to get that up and running uh we were also able to reinstate some of our traffic officers um not only for the needs and and the wants of the community but also for internally our staff really enjoys the opportunities to do something a little different so that was really um great for for us to be able to implement and roll out for our staff and the community as well um and we also were able to apply uh to to get this new solar traffic speed sign which um is extremely useful and and helpful in dealing with some of the concerns in our community around speed in in our neighborhoods next slide so uh usually one of the top three questions I usually get is around staffing what does staffing look like for us now and um obviously we we are challenged uh in staffing right now I think the the profession in across the country is challenged um and we continue to try to make proactive efforts in in increasing our staffing and recruiting and on top of all of that we sometimes forget about retention and and retention slips through the cracks um which is really important um in in a lot of the challenges that our officers face today um so as I mentioned earlier we are on mandatory overtime 12 hour shifts um and we really have gotten to the point where I have not been able to implement any sort of real proactive or specialized patrols that that I think ultimately would benefit the community to address some of the the ongoing issues um our current staffing um as you see there we we have we only have six vacancies on paper um proud to say we have 12 in the police academy seven in the field training program uh we have five that are on light duty which means uh the doctors have put them to come back to work on a limited duty status um which is still helpful for us uh and five that are on more of a long-term medical leave that we don't anticipate returning anytime soon so having said all that that really boils down to about 59 people uh out of the 94 budgeted sworn staff that are on duty for us um and you could see the pie chart there and and you could see that about 37 percent of our workforce sworn workforce um are not useful to us right now next slide so for fiscal year 2023 budget um you know it's a fairly status quo as far as materials and services um really the only increases any personnel costs based on you know negotiations and contracts um and there are no new positions that we are requesting um as requested we're submitting a status quo budget next slide just a brief history glimpse here uh back to 2019 and and what it looked like uh you you have personnel services the cost of that and then supplies and services and other charges in the red uh you could see there has not been a whole lot of change over the last four years five years um the 2021 dip that you see there was a result of of concessions that we made as a result of covid uh early retirements and such that that all of the city departments went through so uh that's usually uh that that's signifies the dip there in 2021 but you could see that really the only increase from 2022 to 2023 is personnel and costs and as well as the services and supplies that includes services such as the SART exams the MDIC interview center for for child victims those sort of services are incorporated in that that we've seen a slight increase next slide uh so again a quick historical glimpse back in 2020 again status quo budget other than we did incorporate the team of rangers into that year uh did not not add any new positions other than the rangers uh 2021 we made a 1.7 million dollar cut which resulted in you know the ranger program the crime analyst position 10 positions uh the community programs I think that I talked about related to uh the citizens academies teen academies and such um and then multiple positions that were either frozen uh or early retirements and then last year most of those frozen positions were made available which I believe is part of what we're dealing with now and trying to catch up uh a status quo budget this last fiscal year and we do have one lieutenant's position that remains frozen until early 2023 which was part of the contract negotiations and cuts from 2021 next slide so moving forward of 2023 budget our proposed budget here's here's the kind of high-level breakdown of personnel costs you know 80 percent of our of our budget is is personnel costs the other 20 percent is supplies and services but I would um we will show you here shortly that it's not entirely discretionary to hold 20 percent a lot of that has to do with again certain contract agreements like with netcom with the SART exams mdic center insurance liability is all incorporated in that 20 percent as well so it's a very small room for discretionary funds in our budget next slide but here is that kind of a little bit more into the weeds breakdown of of that 20 percent that you just saw and you could see how a large large chunk of that 20 percent is is not necessarily discretionary funds such as you know work on our vehicles I mean in some of this that's not shown here you're talking about like building maintenance really getting in the weeds of you know building maintenance electricity water all of those things that we would obviously say would are necessary to run our run our facility next slide so uh asked to come up with some proposed cuts to meet a 2.5 percent reduction goal which is a total of 665 thousand for us um you know here's just some options we don't have a lot of options so unfortunately it does in order for us to get to that amount of money it does require us to dip into to personnel because that's one of our biggest cause we currently have a vacant admin assistant to position that we could freeze we currently have a vacant police officer position in a sergeant position that we could freeze as well as a property in a evidence specialist position all four of those positions are currently vacant um and then we could uh or we will cut we had two grant funded cso positions that were working for a couple years on the tobacco grant um educating going around the schools um covert really put a a stop to all that work um and so those positions have been vacant so we can cut those positions at this point the other supplies and services i mentioned earlier the team building consultant that we were working with this year we plan on trying to wrap that up uh close to the end of the end of the fiscal year um although she's been very beneficial to the organization um we do have two independent attorneys that we've outsourced to help us work through some backlogged internal affairs investigations um and they've been a tremendous help to get us back to where we'd like to be so that's another option for us to cut some some money and then last but not least is the training reduction um i honestly you know really worry about any sort of training reduction but you know if necessary that that was an option as well next slide but here's some of the impacts to those those cuts um the admin assistant and property evidence specialist you you know you're going to see uh obviously the evidence specialists and their their ability to keep up with the amount of evidence and processing that's needed for the prosecution in in uh cases that are going on over at the district attorney's office um the admin assistant to you know it just really bogs us down with um some of our revenue resources as far as permitting uh alarm billing, DUI billing, all of those things kind of get put on hold without the extra extra help the elimination of specialty units is something that would come when you start cutting personnel um and and those are just some examples of as far as downtown uh the gang task force traffic enforcement if it's a narcotics team if you know whatever specialty assignment that we feel is is the greatest need for the community those things have to be put on hold until i can ensure that our our response to emergency services on a day-to-day basis are are are being met so um those are some of the risks or or impacts when you cut now like police officers and sergeants um the reduction to uh our development organizational development around the team building consultant uh the i a consultants we have two of them uh and our training those all come with a risk and an impact to to our staff um and as you know there's a lot of demands on on training uh for our staff to respond to a variety of situations and scenarios that are very challenging and when you cut training that that's that's a risky proposition in my opinion next slide so for fiscal year 23 uh you know priority goal is is is staffing um hiring a high quality character workforce um that fits our community uh and they're hard to find um and it's a tough profession to recruit right now so uh hiring development or retention is our primary goal um we do that through um you know a variety of recruitment strategies we continue to try to think outside the box look what other people are doing in the profession to try to expand our options there um we we obviously try to develop our staff through special training and special assignments throughout their career and then also i'm really big into the health and wellness of our staff and taking care of them and their health to to be able to be well enough to respond to the challenging situations they're asked to deal with um next slide i think i'm at my timeline and uh that's all i have for you today and available for any questions thank you chief escalante um okay i was just comparing some of that information with our police budget binder um i have a question before i go out to other council members on the training aspect that you had mentioned potential uh reductions and i know over the past um a couple years council member Cummings and i worked with um chief mills and really looking at uh training and um the anti-bias training use the force training um all of those aspects of training and we learned all about um i think it's post and required post training um for new incoming um officers as well as a required um every so many years i think it was every three years there were um trainings required for officers and knowing that we just received um five new officers and um my um question is um around the training and and my first thought is around public safety and our officers need to be trained on all levels as new incoming as well as um seasoned officers and and regular updated current required trainings and um so what does that reduction potential reduction in training until when you mentioned that yeah that's a that's a great question i mean it's it's really complex there's a lot of layers to it but uh i think the best way i could describe it is our department's historically has had a training season that runs from uh roughly uh october to um the end of may um september ish october to the end of may um i think that we have prided ourselves in the amount and in the um quality of training that we provide our staff that is above and beyond the post mandated hours um i don't have the number off the top of my head but i think that uh posts has every year's you know a mandated of let's say 48 hours uh per officer and our department usually does you know over 100 something hours um in quality training across the board so um you know what the cuts really do to us is uh you know that starts getting us down to that minimum requirement required by post uh that we feel is is the minimum um and it certifies us with posts but it certainly limits our our development and training and educating i for one would um hope that we we don't go that route our officers really are supported with the training and the tools they need to really carry out public safety and um their their jobs um so i'm happy to bring this out to other council member questions at this point council member calentari johnson and then council member brown thank you mayor and thank you chief escalante for the presentation and the work um i just i had a couple questions i was curious when when you spoke about you know innovative ways of doing recruitment and outreach are we connected to um the high school cte programs and and community colleges and if we go out there as well i'm sure we are with what i would ask you know we're we're not as connected to the high schools uh but i do work with uh former um well ginger charles from cabrillo and we've collaborated as it actually an attire county and she's very interested in how she can help all of our organizations prepare students in for the profession and to be successful in the hiring process so that is definitely one thing um and you know quite honestly uh in the past we've had a recruiting team um that comes together with creative ideas and works closely with the schools and we've gone to job fairs and such some of it just comes down to bandwidth and being able to dedicate the time but but i i do like our um our relationship with ginger charles and and atta cabrillo great okay high schools may be another place to connect with so we can maybe talk offline um the other question i had is i'm going back to my community prevention partners days and i know that we were engaged with that initiative and we did um responsible beverage services trainings as part of our community engagement efforts and worked with local merchants to decrease um alcohol sales to minors do we still have those types of programs or have that has that sort of subsided given our staffing capacity challenges we currently have an officer that is technically assigned as the alcohol enforcement unit uh unit of one uh and we have one lieutenant that tries to to manage uh alcohol permits uh entertainment permits all of those sort of events um and and and define them with conditions that hopefully are helpful for our staff when the events are happening um and that particular officer at times collaborates with it you know alcohol beverage and control um and uh but yes we are very uh limited in in the proactive uh educating and or enforcement i mean historically we used to work with establishments educate them on what to look for on ids and such um quite honestly it has not happened in a while okay good to know we'll have to bring in some additional resources for that um yeah i i appreciate the question because some people don't i think realize the the challenges the alcohol establishments have in our community especially downtown on a friday and saturday night and and then you mix in you know a significant college population right um it's a lot of work and it would be nice to be out in front of some of the issues and quite honestly we're usually chasing sure yeah we used to do party patrols too to implement the social host ordinance so not that there's a whole lot of parties happening with covet but um all right well thank you so much for the presentation and the work absolutely thank you council member brown thank you mayor thank you bernie for the overview uh it was really informative um i have a couple of questions related to the i think that well most everything relates to the capacity questions uh and issues that you and challenges really that you've laid out um with respect to the traffic enforcement team i'm glad to see that being reinstated i um i know that it's an issue and across the town but also in particular parts of town um and so i wanted to ask about how um you know how you prioritize where traffic enforcement is happening and how it's happening um i ask um because while i recognize that this is an issue over across the city we get uh communications from particular neighborhoods and and i'm thinking about specifically the kind of grant street and the line market area we and those are pretty consistent and you know high a significant number relative to other parts of town i know there have been issues in seabright appreciate the work that's happening there um but i i just wanted to ask um how that you know how that gets prioritized or what areas get prioritized how you um deploy the traffic enforcement folks or that that element of the work yeah you know uh so lieutenant mori uh lieutenant west mori kind of oversees the two traffic officers and and he kind of you know goes through whether whether it be you know phone messages that get passed his way whether it's email complaints or or you know requests maybe from from city staff um uh and i also believe that we get uh phone calls you know not so much on our tip line but through our website you know you get a variety of phone numbers people will call any one of those numbers and leave messages and so uh those all go to one lieutenant and then the lieutenant is the one that really starts delving those out as assignments to the to the traffic officers and obviously you know there's other thoughts um around that as far as will we look at data source recent traffic collisions and or you know some of the more significant incidents that we have seen uh those rise to the higher to the top thanks um i i yeah i hope that uh and this is this is also kind of a cross department so talking with public works as well but um you know people are just asking for traffic calming measures in that in that particular area and so i'm i'm wanting to try to be responsive and figure out what resources we can bring to bear there uh another question i have is about the cso um the the the not the staffing for of cso's and um you know as as you showed in one of your slides the ranger program was eliminated in in 2021 um which i did not support but um here we are i um um and and the thought at the time was that some of that work would be accomplished through the cso program and uh increased number of officers that potentially rangers would move into some of those positions um and so i'm just wondering how what's how that's work how that's happening and how what's working and you know what challenges or opportunities you've seen with that transition yeah so i can think of uh two rangers uh that are still with us as police officers um so that you know has worked out well i know uh i think at least one of them applied to be a community service officer but did not pass the fto program for that um but yeah i think you know we currently have two uh cso's one unfortunately is out injured but we have two cso's that are assigned kind of to open space sort of uh work um most of it comes down to you know encampment sort of issues but um they're you know out there uh in those open spaces uh it certainly is not enough with the amount of open space that we have in our in our community so um you know we recently uh got to additional community service officers uh to assist with the homeless action plan and so that brings us i believe up to a total of 15 and currently uh we are at 12 so we're getting there we have two that are i'm sorry we have i believe five cso's is that correct John five cso's in the fto program um so uh hopefully as we work through getting them trained and getting them out there that we could certainly use them downtown uh down in the beach area for you know the significant um crowds down there during the summer but as well as you know uh getting people assigned to the open spaces is certainly our goal that's great thank you i'm really glad to hear that i'm i worry as i'm sure everybody does about fire season it seems to be year round now but certainly uh at certain times of the year are more challenging and and i do worry that that's um something that is going to end up costing quite a bit more in terms not just monetary but um you know just you know the for our community so i'm glad to hear that that's um you're getting those positions filled and and hopefully um have people out there um thanks i think that was all of my questions yeah thank you council member brown okay um council member Cummings yeah most of my questions were have been answered so i'm just going to make a comment which is that um i think when we when it comes time to make decisions on this we really need to not cut the um training of officers from the budget um training is like one of the number one things that people ask for when it comes to public safety that we have well trained officers in our community and so i think that um if there are areas where we're gonna try to you know save money and not make those cuts i think that's one of them and also want to acknowledge the cuts that we made for the 2021 budget um while departments i remember back that year i think PD was one of the departments that took the most cuts and so i think we need to really make sure that you know when speaking about equity and needs for services that we um think about where some of the other cuts can be made so that everybody's doing their fair share to uh make sure that we can balance our budget thank you thank you thank you council member Cummings and and my my understanding is that there weren't any cuts but reductions um proposed and that you know even that to me is a concern so i'm happy to um talk more learn more as we get to our June budget uh vice mayor Watkins welcome thank you and i i apologize if i missed um your response to my question but i wonder did you have a chance to touch on some of the mental health liaisons and work that's happening within your organization within scpd and the needs and if that's sort of a factor in not necessarily the budget but part potentially in terms of being able to help meet the needs um for some of our folks who are struggling in that way and if you did touch on it totally fine i will go back and watch and i apologize for you no i i did not and as you mentioned it's not necessarily directly related to our budget but we you know we do have the two county mental health liaisons that are funded by the county that work you know seven days a week in our organization yeah certainly if there was an ability for us to fund um at least one if not two more to work in the evening hours that would be uh unbelievable um i also know that there's a lot of work being done at the county level including with netcom as far as um a better avenue of addressing some of the mental health calls that we receive that might be able to be intersected at a more of a mental health level professional level than a law enforcement level so there's a lot going on a lot of great things going on that i think we're going to see hopefully a shift but uh there definitely is a need to to have mental health liaisons with us you know a little more into the evening um so yeah if if we had the ability to maybe work with the county and co-fund some of that that would be really nice yeah and i know that there's some you know work happening within the city especially around some grant resources and grant writing resources but i do believe that within the state there's going to be a significant amount of money coming into communities for mental health needs and behavioral health needs and so um you know just keeping an eye on what could be potentially available to us um creative or through the county or um through a cdo i i definitely think that could definitely support a lot of individuals and probably the officers in that really meaningful way so anyways thank you appreciate that thank you guys for watching ma'am yes i did want to note that um in the homelessness response action plan the council did approve um usage of part of the california 14 million toward mental health liaisons so we will be starting conversations and larry and moale will be working with the county on the expansion of the mental health liaison work that we do with the county and that'll get funded for fiscal year 23 through the cal state of california funding so those conversations have begun to look at what that expansion looks like we haven't we haven't had a chance to start them at this point but we do have funding in 23 to do that and we will reach out to them it's on the list yeah okay thank you you're welcome thank you so much um are there any other council member questions for chief galante or deputy chief bush um okay i did want to quickly uh plug a community safety meeting that is happening on tuesday may 31st 5 30 p.m to 6 30 p.m um here it is at the civic auditorium um and uh community members can come and participate in a meeting around community safety and future priorities of our santa cruz police department so please register scpdfuture.eventbright.com and um thank you for sharing that and um thank you for that presentation and for all of your hard work and to your entire department thank you thank you okay i will move on now to our next presentation our budget presentation i will call on uh rob odie fire chief to give a presentation on the fire department's budget so we will continue with our essential public safety departments here well thank you thank you mayor thank you council as um you would expect chief s galante is a tough act to follow uh we'll give it my best um you guys can all see my screen yes awesome thank you i want to make sure i don't have any technical difficulties um so again thank you for the opportunity to discuss our department and our budget for fiscal year 23 um our agenda very similar to many of the other agendas that you've seen but of course in department overview discussion as to what our core services are what we've done over the last uh fiscal year um those achievements want to highlight um some important ones of course discuss our proposed budget reductions for fiscal year 23 and uh within that context discuss some of our goals that we have moving forward as well so um again um like many this is sort of our organizational