So let's start. Good morning. Hi, everybody. If you're in the Scrumberjack session, this is the correct session. This is about prioritizing your Scrum product backlog and Drupal work. And my name is Amy Dugnan, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But first of all, this is a lot of information. It will be fast. There are a lot of slides. These slides will be shared, and it is recorded. Hang on for the ride. It'll be fun. So first of all, who are you? Who's a developer? Okay. Project manager. Lots of you. Product manager. Ooh, not so many. This is good. Executive. Okay, good. How about everything? Okay. Great. Yeah. A lot of jack-of-all-trades here. What size of work do you do? Do you do, like, small brochure sites? Not that many. Just one or two. How about medium sites? Okay, we've got a few more of those. How about with some integrations? It's not huge, but it's slightly complex. How about large enterprise? How about ginormous enterprise? Yeah. Okay. Good. This is what we're going to talk about helps all of you. And this session, if you're a developer, a basic goal is, like, how to get the business to agree to upgrade core.  And as a stakeholder, is how do you actually request some value-based features? And we're going to be covering a little bit about Agile and Scrum 101. We're talking about understanding and defining business value and how to define and prioritize work and a little bit of application in real life. So that's a lot of juicy topics, so we're going to go fast. Woo! So first of all, why Scrumberjack? Well, you can see that the evolution of web development is moving a little bit toward a lumberjack look. And what does a lumberjack do? Well, they work with forest trees and logs. They cut wood. They make lumber. But they work hard and it's an ongoing effort. And why Scrumberjack? That's you, Ryan. Why Scrumberjack? Scrumberjack is punny. And this is my backlog and I'm full of bad puns and it will be punny hopefully through the day. I have not had that much coffee. That's good for you. Scrum has backlogs. Lumberjacks work with logs. And Monty Python, I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay. And then Drupal is created by Scrumberjacks, which you'll see throughout the presentation. So first of all, let's talk a little bit about Agile and Scrum. First of all, Agile is a philosophy of iterative development. It is not how you do it. Scrum is a framework to manage and execute that iterative development with high value solutions to complex problems. Let's demystify this. How many people have heard people go, yeah, I work Agile and Scrum and they don't know the meaning of the two and they'll inter-swap it. Yeah, this is real or you'll go to an interview or you'll hear maybe a potential client or a business owner. They'll like, yeah, we want to do Scrum or we don't want to do Scrum but we want to do Agile. And you're like, whoa, okay. So it's funny but it's real so let's just walk through but this is a little bit of the difference. And the first reason that Scrum actually exists is it's created to overcome the challenges of a waterfall project and software development projects. And really because people were saying, will this project ever ship? Is this project ever going to end? Are we building the right thing? The developers ask and then the business owner is like, what is the dev team doing? And the dev is like, how the heck do I estimate something that I don't even know what you want me to build? So you have all these questions that come up in a classic waterfall-based project because you have just one section of design and implementation and one round of verification classically. You can work more into it but that's kind of the base of what waterfall looks like. So Scrum works. Why? Because it didn't do my thing. Scrum works because it limits work delivery to a short finite period of time. People can pay attention to a two to four week sprint. It uses a well-defined work management structure. It uses a well-defined meeting structure and value is often tied to delivery. It's a valuable product. And developers get it. It's short. I can make things. I can see me make things. And it's great. And Scrum is lightweight. And it's simple to understand. You don't have to recreate the process all the time. It's there for you. But it's incredibly difficult to master, right? Because it gives you a framework but it doesn't tell you how to do it every day as you apply it to your job. And that's what we're talking about today. So if you visualize it, Scrum 101, the old school way is you have product backlog, sprint backlog. Perhaps a sprint is every two weeks. You have daily stand-ups. And then out of that two-week iteration, you have some potentially shippable product increment. People like to say minimum viable product, valuable product, visionary product. A lot of people are playing with the terminology but you get something tangible out of your work that was well-focused. What's really important is we're going to talk about backlogs. So what is a product backlog versus a sprint backlog? Really, as things evolved with Scrum, people have figured out, oh, wow, the development team needs to work with the product team a little bit to kind of understand what they're asking for and how prioritize. And that's now called story time. So let's talk about what you want. Let's see what those impacts are and allow more discussion with the product's teams. So first of all, who is... Is everybody familiar with the term backlog? Yeah, sprint backlog? Okay, good. Let's clarify this a little bit more. So the sprint backlog is all the work defined for the current sprint cycle, whether that be one week, two to four weeks, anything. It's small and it's easy for the team to see and understand and work with. And I put an asterisk on this one because people don't normally say this, but we prioritize our sprint backlog each week by priority of what's the super most important thing that the business needs in that delivery but also by skill because we have some complex projects that some tasks can't be done by one person and the team. So we make sure that the work is evenly balanced. And the product backlog, that's like all the work for the whole product. That's like how many weeks in the future? Like years? It can be quite large and menacing and it's supposed to be prioritized by this person called the product owner. And I only saw like two hands raised when we talked about what a product owner is and who resonates as a product owner. So we'll evolve that a little bit. And so that's why we're talking about the product backlog. Because the sprint one's pretty tangible. So what's in a backlog? We have well-defined work requests in something called stories. And work is often categorized by size. There's different sizes of tree trunks in a big thing of wood. First of all, they have a topic, a type of story called an epic. And what we've defined it further functionally is something that, an effort that will span many sprints. It's not something that you can do in one sprint. A story is a functionality that can be built in the sprint. So in whatever sprint duration you have, your functionality can be built in the sprint. And tasks are just the steps to actually execute on that story or function. The sprint backlog is limited to the work the team can finish. It may be a combination of different work sizes. You might have a very large feature and a couple tiny ones or a ton of tiny ones. And it contains well-defined work requests. If you do not have a well-defined work request, maybe the defined work request is to please further define this work request. And actually that's a very valid thing to do. It's the plan, it's the please R&D, what the new big effort is going to be. That itself is a story. And then the product backlog is everything else and that conceptually is huge because those things can have elements of just initial ideas or aha moments or very limited requests from the business all the way up to very well-defined efforts and maybe pre-scoped project work. So it's hard actually to see what's going on if you have that range of information in your backlog. So some of the product backlog challenges, it's like what have you experienced? Who has very large product backlogs? Yeah, quite a few.  Yeah, a lot of them. How many are prioritized correctly? We got a few of them. Yeah, so you can see the story we're building here. There's not that many are prioritized correctly and it's ongoing challenge because a lot of the things they may become out of date are not relevant because it might have been important a month ago or two months ago or six months ago but what does that actually mean now? And you may have duplicate requests. This happens all the time. Somebody says something in a different way and you're like why do I have these five requests that look the same thing? So it's a lot about intake of new work as well and knowing what is in the backlog. But if it's a huge mess, it's going to be hard to find those things out. And a lot of this ginormousness and lack of organization or structure is not clear to developers and everybody would be like don't even make me look at that because when part of Sprint is like oh yeah, you're done with your Sprint, there's nothing out of the backlog to work on. And it's like oh really? Do I have to go into that closet? All this stuff is shoved into? I'm going to open it up and everything's going to fall out. And so it's a bit scary. And then also they're like half the time, it's like I can't tell from this backlog what I'm even building, right? It's a big disconnection from what really are you doing and it's more wood cliches. You can't see the forest through the trees. You're like swamped with so much detail that you don't know that you're in the forest. You just see lots and lots of trees. And what is that forest? Where is my forest? How important is the forest? So if you're in the position that you have to help clarify and clean your product backlog, well let's just start from scratch. Just get rid of everything. Yeah, I'm nervous laughter. It's a good one.  So what we're going to do is talk about seeing the forest purpose and describe each tree's contribution to the overall forest. And so we bring chaos to order from a disorganized backlog to an organized backlog. And the product owner's role in all of this is to see value in the work and align it and organize it. This surfaces through a categorized backlog that can scale across functionality and scales to a long-term product roadmap. It may take some effort but if you have the right tools and knowledge, you could be master of the backlog. So this is awesome. This is my backlog. So like the thing that's taught in all sorts of different places is that we, like how do you actually define value? And it's interesting, I think some of my slides are missing out of here, but that's okay. First of all, oh yeah. Okay, so by default, they resorted my slides for this right before they switched it to the layout. So let me see what's going on. So first of all, let's talk about product and business value alignment. So let's all talk about assumptions because I'm a project manager and I'm going to set up some assumptions for this discussion. But first of all, let's understand we have to make money to spend money or provide value to get foundational money to spend money. So first of all for this presentation, a product is equal to a Drupal website that is tied to a revenue stream. Stakeholders are multiple business groups that have interest in this website. The business makes money from this product. The business pays for website development that you are responsible for. The business needs visibility to website investment. The business defines the value of the work and the business value drives prioritization of work. That sounds totally simple, right? But like how is value defined and what items are more valuable than others because as we go through prioritization challenges, who has a squeaky wheel that's just really loud and like I need that feature and it might be the stupidest feature ever or a very wonderful feature but not very important to the business. Also how about those that I've got Power, Prestige, and the Pocketbook? These are people that's like, I don't care, make this, I am paying for it. And how about the conflicting priorities? Everything is a P1. Okay, yeah, that one's more... I see the team over here is hilarious. And a lot of times people exclude maintenance like Drupal product patches and everything. And who has like the constantly changing roadmap, right? And what I do is I feel that sometimes if you're on a larger site or you're on a yacht, or you're not on a yacht, you're like on a princess cruise ship. I think there's somebody from princess in the room. But you're on a cruise ship and when you change priorities, it is very hard to turn that cruise ship which could be a large development team. It takes time. It decreases throughput from your team. So if you have constantly changing priorities that are radical, it's a huge impact to what you're doing. So we had, you know, that when... This is tiny, okay. Sorry, we made it 16 by 9. So the first thing for defining value is... I'm gonna just tell you what it is. You make money and provide value. You start there. Two, you invest and on improvements to making money and buying that value. Three, you paid the rent and keep the lights on. You have to maintain that and maintain the basic support structure. Four, you have to have data and metrics that say, yeah, these things are either working or failing. And those things you have to look at in a feedback loop. You have to look at it and make informed decisions to actually create and expand your product backlog. So let's talk about the primary value creation. First of all, you have to make money and provide value. And if we can imagine this as kind of a conceptual section, you first, you have to market your product. You have to have a customer shop for your product. You have to then sell the product. Then you support that over time. All the while you have a large group of content supporting this. What this looks like in the real world is you have a blog that surfaces information through social media and SEO. You have product pages that inform the person about buying your product. You have a shopping cart that they can actually buy things and then you have a contact form for help and support. So that is making you money. So at the bare minimum, you should be able to run your business, right? Yeah, that's it. That's all you need, right? But no, that's not all you need. Because you need to have an ongoing improvement to primary value to improve your business. And so then you have this idea of supporting systems to your revenue stream. And they provide direct impact to value. And that's important to understand, because the first one is the most important, let's make money. The second one is let's make more, more money. We're talking about let's make more, more money better. So if we can visualize a supporting system in this model, you have SEO will help market your product. You have targeting while the user is shopping for related products and products like these. You have a very secure shopping system so the person will buy the product from you because they feel safe that you can provide a good secure system. And maybe you have something like onsite search that has a lot of knowledge based articles or anything that supports your product over long term in a very business savvy type of way. And underneath that, I would say performance is a supporting system because you need to have an engaging fast system for your end users. And if you look at it in the real world, you have keyword, so perhaps like features within each one of these would be a keyword enhanced URL pattern for SEO. Maybe you are doing some A-B testing for targeting and then you've added single sign-on for security and shopping carts. And then perhaps maybe you've added self-service support or documentation for your product.  So let's expand this idea, right? We are making our money, we're making it better. And then, but they're sitting on a Drupal site, right? It's sitting on infrastructure and stuff happens. And so we have to maintain our basic needs and keep our lights on and pay the rent. So if you can visualize this, a couple of types of supporting systems are software updates and infrastructure updates. And has anybody heard of Drupal Geddon? Yeah, that little thing, yeah. How about the heartbeat patch? The heart bleed patch, I can't talk this morning. How about the log jam open SSL security thing? Okay, yeah, that was a fun one to find. Yeah, so this stuff happens and it happens in business and you can plan for these things and you can plan for contingencies, but they do happen. So let's go on. What next? Oops, I did the wrong button. Okay, here you go. We're at the reporting and feedback loop. So at this point, you have to retrieve and review data about these major processes and features that you've put out because you don't know if they're doing well or not. So out of each one of these systems or processes, you capture metrics. So like for primary value creation, often it's like how many number of visits to the site? How many leads are you generating? What's the number of sales and conversions you have? Supporting metrics for the supporting systems could be like what's your page rank for SEO? What's your site speed? And also metrics for the supporting systems, it's like what's your version? What's your uptime? How's your performance? And all of those go into a reporting and feedback loop which is looked at by executive leadership and knowledge owners and product owners because they can say, oh, look at the thing that we did last week has really improved our page speed. And they can validate the decisions that they've made in development and then that makes everybody feel good. And if you look at that in real life, you have things like sales reports, Google Analytics, Versions, is your Drupal status page red, that type of thing. Even the tiniest tangible bits of metrics are really valuable to start tracking. So the next piece is the product roadmap and backlog. So you've got all of this feedback and you're like I need to now make informed decisions and invest in change moving forward because I need to make more money or make more and more money. And I also need to keep the lights on at the same time. So this all pops back in out of the reporting feedback loop into the product backlog and through these creation streams. And it looks like that. And really you have to go, well these all seem really important, right? Who thinks every one of those things on that screen is important? Actually that's not that many hands which is funny. But I see strongly waving ones. When you work in big complex enterprise crazy sites they get more and more important and you have business units that have their own budgets and things and they get strongly important on every level. And then they're conflicting because they have the same amounts of budgets and maybe the same amount of cloud. Like whose VP is going to go ask the other VP to like step down. That's interesting. It's an interesting time. But it all work types are necessary and some efforts do take priority over others. And the priority may change over time based on the business and the scrumberjacks help navigate those changes and make informed recommendations. So all of you here as developers or maybe project managers that aren't the quote-unquote official product owner or the business owner of the site this is where you can help influence change by how you structure the way you capture and organize your work requests because it's like a Grassworks Foundation. It's like you have to start the structure and hope that they kind of jump along for the ride and it takes some time. So the first thing is let's talk about the number of hours in a day or in a work week or sprint. We're going to talk about balancing work and this is another scrumberjack from Drupal. This is John Peck, Flux Sauce. And he's balancing his daughter Genevieve. But really when we're balancing work you have to account for just overhead of stuff. So the scrum, meetings overhead, administrative overhead, people have time off, that type of thing. But this is a very fair kind of way to balance work. 15% for reporting and feedback, 30% for primary value creation 25% for the direct supporting systems 10% for updating patches. At least it's something. Now, these are flexible as the business needs to change. And they're also flexible as Drupal Gettin happens or Heartbeat happens. It has to be flexible across all of the different work streams but not to cause undue technical debt or really cause problems for the business. So, yeah, this is what it looks like as it's full here. So we have 30% for primary value creation 25% for supporting systems and 10% for software updates and 15% here. Now, that's product backlog management can be kind of clumped into that 20%. In real life, sometimes you have work stories that are saying, please define requirements or please design something. So that's where it's like, well, that could be arguably backlog management and clarification but whatever, maybe you just need time allocated from people that are in the 30% value creation system to actually do the work. And play with that balance there. So if you look at balancing the work and it's sample work applied to one sprint. So your 20% overhead is having stand-ups, sprint retrospectives, your reporting and feedback loop. Perhaps you have a create a page speed reports per page type. And that's owned by Roger Reporter. And the primary value creation stream, they've said, I want three important things. I want a blog content type form. I want the blog content type display or theming. And now on my cart, I want to update the checkout messaging to say, yes, you bought it. It's awesome. Thank you. And that is three people. It's Barry Builder. It's Cameron Commerce and Debbie Developer. So you have Skype Builders, Commerce Specialists and Frontend Developers. And then maybe you have to actually add some rich snippets to product pages and implement custom analytics. So you have Samantha SEO, and Roger Reporter is going to come back in because he really knows his analytics well. And then you have your supporting indirect work. You know that there's a supporting core security release because thank you Drupal Association and thank you Drupal project team for having a pretty set cadence of when you do feature releases and security releases. So it's very nice. And that's what Debbie Developer works on. So you can see that the team is distributed based on their skill and the work priority. And if you get into balancing work on the big picture, this is things called the business roadmap or the project roadmap. So who's classically trained here as a project manager for like waterfall stuff? Yeah, there's five in a room of many. So quickly a project is an execution of effort with a finite end over a period of time. A program is in multiple projects aligned to like one or many business goals, but they're managed as a group and a portfolio is something that exists over time. And the portfolio is very similar to looking like a percentage based balance system of work. So if we move back here, a lot of people will have roadmaps that will show programs, projects, or basically structures of a portfolio. So if you look at this, this looks kind of like a portfolio at its simplicity. And so you can see the reporting and feedback, they have different stakeholders and they have prioritized that the page performance reports come first and then we have a next thing coming up in their priorities backlog for cart updates and feedbacks. So, and you can see the primary value creation has work going through time. They have more percent, so they have a lot more efforts going through. And this is very real. This looks exactly like business roadmaps. This is real. This is super helpful because people, when you talk to them, resonate with timelines and clarity. If you show them a list of just all of the tickets in your backlog, like in JIRA or an Excel spreadsheet, they're going to be like, what? So this is helpful to communicate down to your developers or with your developers, not down, and then with the executive team and product owners. So we're going to apply this to a blog. So we're going to take one feature and we're going to evolve it. So the blog at the very beginning, there's an executive, it's like, why are the number of sites low from our reporting and feedback loop? And then they get a competitor analysis outcome and they said, well, all of our competitors have a blog and we don't. And they're popping it out on social media and that's taking our visits away. So he goes and talks to the stakeholders. Then they go, oh, we need a blog to be competitive and increase our traffic. And the product owner of the website says, oh, the business needs a blog. How big is the effort? And the development team's like, I don't know. What do you want? And so they do it. They go, okay, this is probably going to take more than a couple of sprints because we have to start from the very beginning. They make an epic. And then there's a little definition of tasks. One story for each which is defining requirements, designing the blog, building the blog, write content for the blog. A lot of people forget to do that.  And if you see this in the sprint structure, here's sprint one and I know it's small but I'm going to talk you through it. Sprint one could be defining the requirements and you can assume like two weeks is a very aggressive time in large enterprise that people A, give you requirements, B, give you feedback and that type of thing. So that sprint one is just getting the business input. Then sprint two is design the blog with the graphic design. And assume maybe they want it fast. You have to do it on, like do all iterations in within two weeks. And then you can start building the blog for the content time because you know the fields that you're capturing. So you can start development very early. And then sprint three, you've got a lot of stuff going on. You're building the blog and you're going to build the blog listing pages and you have views. And you notice that the views module has a security patch. And you're like, hey Scrum Master, I have a security patch. Can I update the views module at this time? And you say, yeah, we don't have a lot of views on the site. It should be low impact. Let's do that. And then at that same time, the designer is theming that blog. And you can do a parallel effort for people to start writing the blog content because it takes a while to write and get that approved and edited. And then hey, maybe we're going to start adding that blog content type to the search engine. So do you see how we prioritize the basic form and data structure first? So you can start doing lots of rapid parallel development. That's really cool. There's a lot of stuff going on. Then you're in Sprint 4. You're tuning the theme. You're getting the blog content approved by the legal team. You're populating the content into the site. And you're training the business on how to actually do ongoing blog updates. So that does take some time to prepare. And it all comes out of your Sprint team's effort.  And that's where you start looking at metrics. Now what happens is you have this wonderful iterative check-in point at each end of the Sprint so you can make micro-corrections based on business education, business changes. Maybe they want to track some other metrics that need to go along with it, that type of thing. But you have constant check-in. Now this looks like a waterfall-y thing, doesn't it? It looks like it's iterative. It looks like it has dependencies on previous work and work planning. Yes, it does look like it. But what waterfall has less of is iterative check-ins to make sure that you're on the right path and also less feature-based iterative development. Because you could have gone live with the blog before you added it to the search index if you wanted to. I just gave you a structure. So that's what it looks like. And that's how you can help. And within all that work, that it goes into that 30% of the primary value stream.  And that's why it takes maybe five sprints to do it. All right, but at the end, the stakeholders are engaged and informed. The business owners have their blog and they're happy. The business owners for the SEO like the supporting system, they're happy. The content is great. The blog is to SEO spec and they have analytics with it. The business owners of search, they're happy that the feature has a search component. The product owner is happy because everyone is happy and the feature is built. And you know what? Maybe as they were working on views, they had to patch it. And that developer got to patch views and also contribute back to Drupal.org. Everybody feels good in the end. So you have a very happy developer and happy customer. And so this prioritization can scale and everyone can use it. So this does apply to all sizes of business. So you can do this for yourself and you have a lot of ideas in so much time, right? So you can give your own level of priority. Small businesses with limited resources can apply this model. And also large businesses with so many stakeholders and stakeholders of equal prioritization. If you align what your overall value system is, that can help set priority on the lower micro, like the other departments. And this also applies to multiple teams. You can use this concept not only to technology or Drupal, but your business teams, your content team, your marketing team. And it applies to multiple verticals. So who works in education here? Okay, cool. How about government? And business? Yeah, lots of business here. Okay, and your family? Who has family? Everybody. Who has yourself? That's me. Or then family. So the big thing is this was incredibly focused from business process improvement and business process management and also classic project and program management. These are all very, very standard concepts. A lot of people, sometimes in education will say that will never work with an education. Because we just are different. The business is different, the people are different. And it's not different. There are some differences, but really, like, the enterprise has a lot of the similarities as a system. Same with government. There are some additional challenges in both. One person had asked, hey, like, I'm an edgy when they just don't value the work that we do. But it's not the value of the work that you're doing. It's the value of the outcome to the overall business or the organization or the school or the department. It's not about us as developers. It's about what we contribute, the royal we, the big we, to business. And who saw the Dries note? Okay, that's good. So who saw that he took a survey? Yeah, did people take the survey? Who saw that we had 75%, I think, allocation for like front-end and content improvements, content editor improvements, yeah? Who saw that there was like, hey, we need to keep the lights on and improve them? Yeah? Guess what? He totally did what I'm showing you today, right? And you're like, wow, okay, he is influencing change over a large group of people by showing value with data to and with market data competitor analysis with data from the rest of the team and also customer data. So we aligned all those things to then enable different people to do work and understand and he prioritized them. He created balance based on value. He's organizing initiative teams. So it's fantastic, like we worked, I had the opportunity to work with the Drupal 8 multilingual initiative. They're incredibly organized and it executed a lot of change along priorities for multiple people and it works and it works in the Drupal community. Also the Drupal 8 release process, the new one has frequent releases which helps both the customer and the developers so everybody is happy. It's all about that stakeholder is happy. They're actually using iterative development using experimental modules. Who's played with Drupal 8 here? Yeah, who's seen those experimental modules? Yeah, you're like, what's that? I want to touch it. What's going to happen? And what's going to happen? It means there's iterative development. You get it in people's hands. They're testing it. There's faster satisfaction for everybody and it drives we all like to build things and we like to use things and it's really increasing satisfaction across the board. So first of all I would say if you didn't see it, watch the Drees note. But Gabor and Webchik watch the potential in Drupal 8x and how to realize it because they are applying these principles exactly to the Drupal 8 release process and it's a beautiful execution. And it's hard because the Drupal community is very passionate but your communities and the business are also passionate. Government education, business your family, everybody your team. So take a look at it and it's very clear and concise and it's tactical. So the big takeaways is be master of the log right? You have to be master of the log. Be a leader and supporter of the extended team. You know everybody in this room is probably passionate about the position that they can impact change, a positive change to not just the team around them but their clients. And please place tie value of the work performed to business. Tie the prioritization to the work performed. Communicate it with your team. And what we do is classify the work by type that's in your main value stream like you know those leaders generation. Is it support? Is it cart? Is it selling? It will be different for your business or your education support or your government support. And you want to qualify the value commitment by the percent allocation of work. And as I talk to different people in the past, the biggest questions come down to, well how do you do it in Jira? What tools do you use? And that's a big question. And that's like eight talks. But what the big takeaway for that is let's talk about it. I'd like to do more topics about that because understanding how to communicate value and is hard. I try to get the most industry standard simplifications here for you guys to use as a tool to apply to your system. You will use different metadata and taxonomy to categorize your work and to organize it in different clumps. So people can have visibility and make informed decisions about prioritization and that your developers will feel squashed by the log. Do you guys have any questions? Can you please walk up to the microphone? Or I can shout it out if you shout it out. Hi. Any thoughts on estimation? Do you have any time next? Are you sure we're on that? Yeah, it's an art. It's different for every team and developer. And like what does your 30% mean? And so I'm going to ask you for some clarification on that. Which level of estimation? Is it the story itself? Or is it taking a big thing and breaking it down? Right. So it's answering the business stakeholders is how long will it take? Now that's a good question and it depends on the complexity of the ask. What we often do is say you've asked us for a very complex thing it's going to take time to estimate. So we estimate the time of discovery and that initial discovery. Maybe that initial discovery is discovery of discovery. Because they're like, yeah, I would like to implement an e-commerce system. And that ask is huge. Right? And that requires a program manager and multiple projects in parallel and impact a system. But if they're going to ask for like a bug to capture metadata that is something that you're like, oh, I can estimate that very well with my development team. If it's something that needs requirements flushed out with the business then it's like it's going to take time and then you do that. But what we do is also we have these things called spikes where it says spike define overall like who knows the term WBS? A few. Breakdown structure. It's the dependency tree of big chunks of tasks or deliverables to get from start to finish with an overall effort. So you can say make the spike to do that. And what that does is it gives them some time that says in a finite period of time I can get you more answers about how long this is going to take.  They're actually pretty happy about that because it allows iterative feedback conversations within the sprint structure on planning and estimation. Yeah. So the question was when you're constrained by fixed time events, how do you do it? Do you and one of the options they had was do some scope and feature control. And if we go back to that optimization structure you have to do the must haves. That's your primary value chain. That's your primary value creation. So you have to identify what in that deliverable, that's a timely deliverable needs to get done first. And you also have to identify within that effort you have to keep the lights on or we have to upgrade the module to give you that feature that you're asking to communicate with the team. We're going to do this big project initiative but it's actually improving so many channels. So what you end up doing is instead of having this big project that's just under primary value creation it becomes a program that takes a little bit of effort from each one of your reporting and metrics and the infrastructure team and then also your supporting systems like your SEO team. So, yeah. So I'm going to reiterate what was said so it's the everybody's number one issue so every to ask is a priority one and it's funny because we were working on a project and it was hilarious we had so many priority ones then we were like is that a 1.5? And it was the subtlest thing to say yeah it's still one and I understand that it's still a one but is it a 1.5? I think we still use 1.5s. P1 plus sometimes. Yeah and the end result is if you can't deliver to everybody everybody is unhappy and this is why you give ownership of a certain percentage of their bucket of prioritization. So the reporting and feedback business owner they have this much allocated to them they can choose whatever priority order they want and if they have business obligations that must align to something else that's also deploying that's their initiative and that's their responsibility. The primary value creation system that drives a lot of things the other kind of supporting system sometimes follow those big initiatives but it's the collaboration of all of those different business owners or process owners that need to happen and the work is allocated over those different percentages of work so that makes sense. Basically everybody has different a cup that they can drink from some cups are bigger than others and so you can drink your drink at your own pace and that is your cup. Now that's why we said the business percentage can change because maybe the business thinks a reporting project is much more important than something else so you can swing it for a couple of sprints but as long as you have that open conversation of like oh that's taking away from this other work because we have a finite number of time people and resources then it should be better because it's all about having that open upfront communication and expectation setting with the business owners. But then sometimes people are squeaky wheels and they'll not be happy with anything but you can do your best with data and prioritization. Oh that's actually kind of sailing the ship if you will and dealing with rapid changes of priority as you ramp up and ramp down the team some people can context switch pretty quickly if you can't. There were a lot of developers in the room so a lot of people know that once you're deep down into something you have to take a step back and go oh I was totally in that module and I was and to be halfway through it or right at the edge and have the business like change priority it's hard to do and it has a huge impact on productivity should I say is that what we're oh yeah absolutely so a lot of times what we do with the team is we have a pretty sex scrum team but as the work increases if the budget increases you can increase your team but there is overhead in adding people to the team because sometimes if you're in those crazy complex environments wow you have to get started like getting the development environment but for some of these crazy environments just takes time and education and not only that it takes time from the other people on the team because you have to come in and help so it's a huge impact to ramp up and ramp the teams down to the business and that kind of you can estimate that a little bit in your overhead but we also are clear with the clients that if we're going to add more people to the team we have to scope that in with the project so we have we have a story called get new developer setup or get new business person trained because a they understand that that time takes time and often they would say oh this stuff doesn't need to be in a sprint but then it ties back to the estimation questions somebody had but how do you how do you know that your sprint team can actually execute everything that's committed and do the weird side asks that they're asking you that's not tracked and so we were pretty adamant about no no no everything is to ask everything goes in the sprint so then we can track time to it and provide value and it's been fairly successful so otherwise it gets stuck in email and it's like ah thanks Ryan players that are competing for resources within the team we've found some success in requiring a single point of contact who is our decision maker so anybody in their team has to filter to that person and that person can be like oh I don't care about that and that allows you to say okay this one is really a P1 and this one is really not because to each person on that team their initiative is the most important and so if you have like five people from a team working directly with you you're going to find that five people will have a P1 so if you can negotiate with them that like this person is the person who says on your team what is what right so that's clarification so clarifying ownership is a huge deal and you know also clarifying ownership in your development team and skills assessment and skills realization often people have very complex projects and going well there's only two people that can do that but you've asked them for three other P1s over here it's not like our team can't do it it's just going to take forever to ramp up the other pieces so you have to communicate you have asked the super specialists to do these other things which one's more super special right also in the business having that one business owner one business contact is key so perhaps delegating out your developer contact to work directly with that business contact will help decrease kind of that weird overhead but it is challenging when multiple people are saying no no no the blog is this and the blog is that and they're all saying it separately and they all feel very important and maybe they are all differently important seriously like one's the SEO person and one is the reporting person and one is the infrastructure person they are all equally important right because that value chain that whole big stack of complex boxes they're all important in their own way and within their own perception so it's just how do you balance that as the hard part so it's 1141 however I don't know when the session ends but I think it huh? 145 oh okay so anyway you look have more questions yeah go ahead yeah let me talk to that you said thank you for the presentation and it's how often do you hear a product owner doing this and I didn't say much about me or where I came from so I'm a really I'm a really angry sysad man at heart um and that's where I started and then people in the business were making funny decisions and asking us to implement stupid crazy things and I was like how do I influence change and then I started on the project management and into product management and so it's been a long time for the triple kind of community to really start embracing this but I'm really happy that this is the first year that triple con has had a whole project management track and it's really refreshing and I have all the silly certifications and letters and training I say silly I'm in trouble because I have to list this as my professional development unit because I'm presenting this for my PMI PMP so sorry PMI but seriously like the Drupal community sometimes a lot of communities balk at the getting knowledge and education and they balk at certifications but those that are coming from a classic enterprise background they require those things so I'm going to wrap up a little bit with that and respecting that a little bit more it comes with the experience and everything and the whole the whole thing with me is I always like to build cool things and make sure everybody's happy and so that's evolved into kind of helping the product owner as much as possible I think and it uses technical skill and all the knowledge that I've gotten so it's a lot of common sense so I don't know but thank you and I'm so glad and yes there have been buffs but I think a product owner buff would be interesting any other questions, thoughts oh yeah so the team over there will go damn it you hijacked my dam scrum meeting I am the worst rule breaker because I like to break the rules and break them when they make sense so you should follow best practices and having a daily stand up sometimes we don't have sprint retrospectives if the team is like barreling through but we have a really open communication about what's not working immediately right now sprint planning is always necessary to align with the business and product owner it's necessary for the team to hear that it's not well planned and the homework is not done for the sprint planning development team over here how often if the business is not ready do you just like start coding and doing something else while I figure it out with the business so we've got nods and stuff and scrum master how much does that make you crazy because it's not following the scrum process he's making so and so sometimes I have to help do course correction for the client because the client oscillates a lot in a stand up but we make sure that the stand up is done so we have stand ups that are a little bit longer but we have a pretty big team we extend out to the business owners to come in and they actually come in and we do that for course correction so the frequent meetings are extremely important because that's why scrum works instead of waterfall because you have to show up and be awake ish sometimes people aren't but it really helps decrease the roadblocks and manage things early so the response was the team is distributed and we have to have that human check together or else it gets like echoey so the question was what internal collaboration tools we have a lot of people that are in various flavors of Linux and Macs and Windows and everything and they travel and their internet connection is interesting we actually as a team ended up on using Skype a lot now there's all sorts of cool things like Slack and that integrate that are cool they are cool but because Slack was slacky before when we started it's just our culture that we have Skype groups that are just open and what happens is if something happens and we need to share it with the team we just chat it in there because we have a people that are traveling, they get it on their phone it's the most I guess broad reaching easy communication app on all devices so but that is aligned with using like Jira and Confluence from Atlassian Suite we also use Zoho products for our internal site so it depends which client if we host the information for the client or if the client is paying for like the big enterprise Jira then we'll use their systems so yeah and I think that's time thank you guys so much it's been awesome to see you so I'll post the slides up in a little bit I just have to put them on a PDF they'll be on the session page thank you


s program would be Something is something that the sheriff and Our health services agency have both talked about during budget hearings And they are here in the audience to talk further about that during public comments In addition, uh, we want to fund the operational costs of a year round 24 hour homeless navigation center one in Santa Cruz And one in the city of watsonville right now. We offer emergency shelter during the winter But we don't offer very much in terms of Day services and we only and we close down the winter shelter During the summer this navigation center would offer year round 365 days 24-hour services in both watsonville and santa cruz who would house Provide services to about 40 adults in watsonville and about 150 in the city of santa cruz And then we have needs to maintain our parks And provide more recreational activities both for youth and seniors And so this proposal would also provide new staffing to our parks department Both to maintain our parks and to offer new recreation services The other main category of needs that we are presenting to you today involve Parks and critical capital improvement projects This is a list of the parks in which There we have plans, but we do not have funding Let me just highlight a few channecler park Which would include leos haven Which would be the county's first all-inclusive playground for children of all abilities And this will include numerous accessible structures and features There's been over two million dollars raised privately for this project And now the county needs to do its part and meet Match those funds to help make this park a reality Simkins swim centers another Need this is a deferred maintenance issue where the aging pool infrastructure including pumps heaters and the deck need to be replaced Um, there's also the opportunity to provide lighting at the pool which would allow nighttime use of the pool That would be a very Important project for us and then you can see that the felton nature park Is um also something that's planned in conjunction with the felton library It would provide an outdoor learning space for environmental literacy programming Interactive nature discovery zones and an interpretive nature loop trail There has been grant funding secured for this project, but we need to find the county match And then there's also funding for an aptus village improvements at the aptus village park and for a possible new park in south county as well So the challenge before the board is how do we find the funds that are needed to fund these critical unmet needs? That also align with the goal set by the board in our strategic plan So we looked at two main options one is a sales tax or transactions and use tax And the other is the hotel tax or also called the transient occupancy tax The sales tax currently in capitol and scott's valley is at nine percent In watsonville and santa cruz. It's nine point two five percent And the unincorporated area of the county is eight point five percent So we now have the lowest sales tax in the county A quarter cent sales tax would bring in two point eight million dollars a half cent would bring in Five point seven million dollars and this would be in the unincorporated area The hotel tax or the transient occupancy tax is currently at 11 percent in capitol a santa cruz watsonville and the county scott's valley is at 10 percent It was last raised in 2012 I know that there are proposals to increase this the hotel tax in scott's valley and Capitol and I believe there will be one in watsonville as well This would bring in a one percent increase in the the hotel tax would bring in about seven hundred and sixty two thousand dollars So staff is recommending after reviewing these options and the critical and meant needs that we have before you To place a half cent transactions and use tax or sales tax on the november 6 ballot This would be a tax in the unincorporated area only Even though the entire voters in the entire county would vote on it Because they are would also benefit from the tax It would be for a 12 year period and it would be subject to annual audits and independent citizens oversight The process would be that if the board chooses today to place it on the ballot It would go in the ballot in november If it's approved it would be in effect probably in the last quarter of this fiscal year So march through june So we would get about a quarter of the proceeds if we put in a half cent So that would be about 1.4 million dollars in this fiscal year 2018-19 So we would have next year in 1920 you would have the full 5.7 million this year You'd have only 1.4 million dollars Here's how we would propose that the budget the board budgeted if it is approved by the voters We we would recommend that about a little more than 400 000 dollars be used for the ongoing operating costs Of the focused deterrence initiative This is where the sheriff deputies and the behavior health would offer services For those individuals who are resistant to enter into treatment and And then we'd also fund the homeless navigation centers Both in watsonville and in santa cruz And then we'd also fund the parks maintenance workers and recreation staff So that would be for that partial year funding for these programs And then we would recommend trying to find the funds to to fund all of these projects which total 4.3 million dollars We think there's a way to do it. We've come up with it Here's the the recommendation we will be making to the board if the sales tax is approved We would recommend using a million dollars of the sales tax in this year Prop 68 funds which are state funds of half a million dollars We believe there's going to be about a million dollars in budget savings from this Last fiscal year and we also were notified that we are going to be reimbursed for sp90 mandate money And we propose using about 1.9 million dollars of that So the combination of those four sources of funding would allow us to fund All of these projects every one of them, which would be a great benefit to the community So in conclusion, that's our recommendation and that concludes my staff report. Thank you very much Thank you Supervisor Caput Just to for the sake of transparency The the tax we're talking about is a 12 year tax. That is correct Okay, it's not a 30 year tax a 12 year tax 50 cents 50 plus one vote to pass it that is correct. Okay to assure that it's going to what we're voting for Putting it on the ballot. I mean that that's separate but People voting for it How can they be assured that it's going to go to what we intended to go to? Well, we put on a resolution Which the board on today's agenda to a company placing the measure on the ballot Which would set out these budget priorities for the board and so you would be on record Approving these budget priorities. Okay, and then I'm going to just read south county parks to provide matching funds To unlock other resources and I'll skip over a little bit to increase park safety Deferred maintenance and establish new Or expanded park facilities. That means we could actually purchase land and add acreage to south county parks that is correct. I like the wording on that and Just uh, I'll make a quick commentary, but I'm ready to vote on this Um, you know, it's a sad commentary On society today when you drive around and you look at what we used to use schools for Parks and rec our kids just going down there to the school to shoot baskets or To play catch or to kick the soccer ball around Uh, if you look around there are fences that have gone up I've noticed the schools a lot of schools are starting to look like prisons and It's a sad commentary something bad happens somewhere else and I really hate to see that and I've been arguing that At least on weekends gates should be unlocked people should be able to use those schools For recreation and The schools are not doing that a lot of They're locked up 24-7 or whatever on weekends and So what i'm getting at is I don't want us to If we're going to expand facilities and we're going to actually do maintenance I don't want to see walls go up all around the facility and locking them out I want to see access people You know able to go down there So I I mean walls do not solve problems They just defer problems and they they put them off somewhere else So anyway, I just want to make sure that Our parks are accessible And I would like to see schools making their land accessible for people to use also their playgrounds For the kids that we see here that they're able to go down there and use them Taxpayers are paying for all this And to have them locked out During Reasonable hours Is not fair to the taxpayer they're paying for it. They should have access to it their kids and family should have access to it also And let's see just refer That's basically it. So thank you Thank you a brief question from supervisor leopold. I know we want to get to the community as well Thank you chair I just wanted to ask Although this will be a tax that's only charged in the unincorporated area The services that are going to be provided here are really countywide the focus deterrent Initiative is really to to work with all of our incorporated cities as well The simpkins swim center is obviously a regional park facility The leo's haven is is going to be the only all accessible park for Handicap children throughout all santa cruz county. So this So everybody's going to get a chance to To vote on this but everybody will also get a chance to benefit from this. Is that right? That is correct Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate everybody's patience Now is an opportunity for members of the community to address us on this item Please feel free to step forward. Can I get a sense of how many people are interested in addressing us on this item? Just to know how long testimony will be. Okay. We'll offer three minutes for each person Thank you. Ms. Roberts. Yes Three minutes. I know you don't have to take it all This is true. Watch out You want to come? Okay I actually wrote something down today because it's a very wonderful celebratory day for our team My name is mariah roberts director of shanta clear park neighbors evesinos See And i'm here to say thank you To you for showing your commitment to the private public partnership that is leo's haven at shanta clear park Thank you for prioritizing parks in your funding decisions And working with us to care for these spaces that we all hold dear through these years of work You have shown us that a partnership with the county of santa cruz is not only possible It can lead to something greater than its parts Prioritizing healthy public spaces opens a free and accessible path for all of us to take charge of our own health To find community to connect with nature and to strengthen our families We have a comment What's your name Anything else about the park And i want the park Back to the boring the boring comment Leo's haven at shanta clear park has supporters from every district in this county From service clubs chambers of commerce community groups businesses medical providers educators I cannot think each of think each of them enough Today, I really want to give a shout out however to the el patio de micasa bilingual family support group from live oak community resources For years since we first organized these families have met every week out at the undeveloped park site no bathroom Led by their teacher yolanda provos de fuentes who I want to grow up and become She is they have raised their children planting and harvesting in the interim community gardens They have found health community and support from each other under a that giant beautiful live oak Whenever i'm weary of this fundraising and all of the hoops we all jump through I go join the families in the park I'm filled back up with nature. I'm nourished by the food from their harvest I'm soothed by conversation yolanda's guitar and the sound of kids playing I hope you'll join me in thanking them today for exemplifying what a public space can offer So I want to say thank you to the el patio families okay And thank you for seeing that value and for following through on our shared commitment to build leo's haven at janakler park. Thank you Thank you Oh We may have had staff here that was here earlier, but they had Okay I know what she said that is uh, it's very important to have A park in the community where the community these children are going to be for many years there and Park is fun if family communities is diversity Is everything and the children is our future, you know, i'm 70 six year old Committed to Do the work for them Because they're going to be here for a long time and I hope that all of you Do the same. Thank you very much and thank you mariah and thank you and all the mothers here You can raise and we use the park every week and we have a beautiful garden if you need care go there Thank you. Thank you for your work yolanda Hola Empoderados para enfrenta los retos de la vida moderna y que más con este parque no gracias por el apoyo gracias por lo que están haciendo para nosotros Buen día I'm going to do a better job now because before I didn't interpret She said that she wants Empowering the children and she goes to the garden because it's a place to Grow the children in a safe place Okay, thank you Okay Thank you for your patience for being here so long Good morning members of the board. My name is will forest I am a resident of the city of santa cruz and employee of the county of santa cruz And the president of the santa cruz county employees chapter of seiu And nowhere near as charming or entertaining or organized as the families who just spoke But one thing I want to say is anytime you're thinking about Proposing attacks There's Naturally, there's some resistance and there's there's some concern potentially on your part that it might fail that it might look bad and so on and so I cannot Because there is no ballot proposition as yet the seiu has not taken a position on it And so I can't speak as to that but what I can tell you is that I have spoken with Some of our members and our leaders and that we're enthusiastic about the prospect of this Proposition being approved by your board so that it can go to the people of the county to make an informed decision and I think anytime that you are Proposing something where you're putting it out to the voters to say hey Do you want to spend money on this thing then the voters are getting to make the final choice? and so I we fully support that and I know that there are not very many ways in which the county has the Ready ability to raise money and the the analysis by the ceo's or my staff Shows that this is one of the few ways that you can go ahead and do that And the purposes for which it is targeted in particular The combination of health services cooperation with law enforcement to Reduce both kinds of issues. We think is an extraordinarily good choice. So I want to urge you all to vote. Yes on this. Thanks. Thank you Thank you Thank you for waiting sheriff heart. Good afternoon. I think yeah afternoon now Chair friend board of supervisors jim heart sheriff corner And I I'm here just to express my support of the board to adopt this resolution to place the half-send sales tax On the november ballot. I talked to you a little bit at our budget hearing about the focused initiative focused deterrence initiative and That Something I didn't say is that in my 30 years in law enforcement. I have never seen The level of mental health calls and substance use disorder calls that our patrol staff receives every single day We're responding over 10 times a day to people who are in serious mental health crisis And that's just in the unincorporated area of the county. I'm sure the city of santa cruz and the city of watsonville are experiencing similar numbers And that's placing a tremendous burden on our patrol staff And and all they're able to do is really place a band-aid on that call in that moment And what this program would do would it would allow us to partner Sheriff's deputies with mental health professionals to work with the district attorney the public defender the courts the probation department to focus on people who Are causing harm in our community who won't accept and don't want help And so using resources that that we have access to particularly the county jail Along with other resources I feel like we can Convince these people that getting help getting off the street and and stop causing harm in our community In our open spaces our parks our beaches and our business districts It will do nothing but help our community In the fifth district. I think the most the most picturesque park in this county is the covered bridge park in the fifth district and That park is Tremendously underutilized because of the number of people who are drinking and doing drugs and acting out And you just don't see that many families in that park the way they should be using it And unless I place a deputy there during the day hours, it just doesn't get used And so I think having a team like this that could really focus on those people For some long-term solutions will have tremendous benefit to the county. So Thank you for your time and I encourage you to to vote. Yes on this resolution. Thank you. Thank you for your leadership Sheriff hard on that issue Good afternoon. Thank you for waiting. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me. My name is Karen Gosling And as a citizen of Santa Cruz county, I'm Extremely enthused by this measure as it's very exciting to see the energy going to something that is so critically important I'm also here as part of Santa Cruz sunrise rotary club And we along with many other rotary clubs have been very big supporters of leo's haven And I'm here with the the crew that was with us behind us to really Support this measure to make sure we get this park built as a as a health care professional and a rehabilitation therapist I know the the essential part of pay play has for children's development and the consequences of not having that And this park is really going to go a long way to ensuring the continued development for all of our children And and we have to have it soon as part of Santa Cruz sunrise rotary. We've been involved in many Public fundraisers or private fundraisers to help put money towards this and we have our final one coming up at the end of september It's our john and ken's most excellent adventure and we have over 75 people Who are training and raising money for this because they really believe in in this park and We're hoping that this could be the final push To get that groundbreaking done on october 13th so As a rotary member as a health care professional and as a citizen of this community I want to thank all of you so much for your continued support Um of the parks and especially leo's haven and thank you for your Creativity and finding ways to make this happen. Thank you And thank you caron for the leadership your leadership and the leadership of sunrise rotary for the project I know that you've already raised a lot of funds and to hear another one scheduled. Hopefully will be the last one Uh, uh is is great. So thank you for your leadership. You're welcome. Thank you Good afternoon, miss corwin Good afternoon. Um, i'm terry corwin. Some of you might remember me from my previous career as a CEO and president of land trust of santa Cruz county Um, i'm enjoying retirement now over a year, but i haven't lost my passion for this community its parks and its environment Um, my kids live here. I have grandkids here And i'm currently serving as treasurer of santa Cruz Friends of santa Cruz county parks there. I'm new um Despite my best efforts and those of some others over the last 10 years and much to my chagrin santa Cruz county still does not have sufficient Dedicated funding to steward its parks and open spaces Our current county parks department ably led by director gaffney Remains at risk of drastic cuts in the next inevitable recession We all remember when the last recession hit in the parks department was radically cut and rolled under public works Because of this lack of sufficient dedicated funding santa Cruz county does not have a strong public agency Such as an open space district or a stably funded parks department that can leverage and partner with nonprofits such as the land trust And or friends of santa Cruz county parks or others Non-profits working in conservation and recreation in santa Cruz county Are at a disadvantage to their bay area brethren when it comes to competing for federal and state funds that require Local matching funds. Thank goodness for our local philanthropic community partially fills that void I was honored to serve on the county park strategic planning working group I helped to facilitate at all five of the community meetings that were convened to receive input on priorities The community has spoken through the strategic planning process And they love their parks and they want to see it stick around The ballot measure before you presents an opportunity to provide some funding It does not solve the problem of dedicated funding But it sure is a good start and I applaud you for considering it. I plan on if it passes If you pass it and working hard to make it pass with voters. So thank you very much. Thank you. Ms. Corwin Morning miss hall. Welcome back Good morning chair friend honorable board of supervisors memey hall interim director of the health services agency I'm here just to speak about the importance of Reminding the board of the gaps that we have in the behavioral health system We enjoy great partnerships with human services department with our sheriff's office and with our local police departments But as I As I told the board during my budget presentation There are so many complexities to the work that we do And we have some serious gaps that are difficult to address Under the funding systems and mechanisms that we have And I really appreciate the work of not only the ceo's office, but also sheriff heart and chief wilson in working with us Back from it seems like the week that I got here in april on on this focused deterrence initiative And just wanted to express my gratitude. Thank you. Thank you for your work Welcome back commissioner. My not Good morning Supervisor friend. My name is kate minas. I live in aptos. I'm The second district representative on the county parks commission The parks commission met last night in watsonville where suppressor cap it was we weren't able to review today's measure But we took an informal poll and we know we're going to have a formal presentation make a formal Recommendation to you As a single person I urge you to approve this motion today. Thank you. Thank you for your work on the uh parks commission Thank you Charlie I'm bruce all the way from boulder creek I'm a lot less worried about this tax measure than the last one You know, this is more in the classic sense of put a tax and provide services It's not trying to you know the other one. I don't think it's gonna work Parks and libraries, I think that's the fun part of local government. Those are the the good services we get I Was in the first class of docents at quail hollow park almost 30 years ago. I did that for a couple of summers So I I do support parks but What I want to point out is that the the elephant in the room as far as the county is concerned is the unfunded liabilities for calpers The city of santa cruz just passed a half cent sales tax And about a week after that passed marcus pennantel the finance director of the city made an eight million dollar Pre-payment towards the unfunded liability of the city of santa cruz and he described it I think he described it as this isn't really eight million dollars This is 15 million dollars because we would have been paying interest on this money for so many years in the future If we did not make this prepayment Um, so every jurisdiction that has an unfunded liability with calpers is paying seven percent You're paying about seven percent interest on that unfunded liability and the unfunded liability for this county is about 500 million dollars So that's really the elephant in the room here. That's And I want to point out that for the city of santa cruz That's their first priority as soon as they get more sales tax revenue. That's what they're going to do That's what they did with it Same thing for the city of scott's valley city manager at the city of scott's valley has looked at their finances And and by the way every local jurisdiction if you look at their calpers reports for all of their pension plans And you look at the projections for the next six or seven years. Everybody's payments going to double Everybody's payments going to double to calpers The city, you know all of our water districts. It's we're all in the same boat But it impresses me that the City of santa cruz finance director and the city of scott's valley city manager recognize this problem And they put that as their first priority and their city scott's valley is also planning to extend their Sales tax. So I just want to remind you about this elephant in the room. Um And another observation I want to make about this you know Gosh, I think it was more than 15 years ago. I was here and bob sir Of scott's valley was in the back of the room He was about 90 years old I think and he was at the time the county was paying about nine percent Towards calpers and I think it's over 20 percent today and he was like a voice In the wilderness, you know warning warning the board of supervisors then that this calpers problem is is going to eat us up and You know, so the county's paying 20 percent towards calpers every year That means that 20 percent of the money that ought to be fixing are roads. Thank you is getting spent on It's just isn't going where it needs to thank you Is there anybody else who'd like to address this on this item? Okay, see none. We'll close public testimony and bring it back to the board Supervisor leopold. Uh, thank you chair. Thanks for everyone who waited to uh speak to this item You know, uh, our county administrative officer pointed out during budget hearings that The county of santa cruz isn't like every other county. There's lots of ways in which we could define that But one of the things that the county of santa cruz is required to do is act like a municipality Because so many people live in the unincorporated area We provide so many services of a city even though we don't have the same funding structure as a city I was grateful several years ago when assemblymember mark stone worked a path legislation to allow Counties to have some of the same tools that cities have To raise funds to help pay for those municipal services We also heard during budget hearings A great presentation From sheriff heart about work that could be done to address a pressing community problem around those Suffering with the mental health disorder And substance use disorder in a new way in which we might be able to attack the the problem And really improve not only the lives of the people in the pro in in that program But the quality of life in santa cruz county Likewise, we have seen an incredible amount of community support for our parks When our when we had a small funding measure on the ballot that received over 76 of the vote Mariah roberts, who was here today has helped lead A fundraising campaign in which nearly two million dollars has been raised To support A value that we all care which is inclusivity and ensuring that we have the first all inclusive park in santa cruz county They they have done that by building a broad array of Supporters from little kids selling cookies on the street corner to service clubs to foundation This park however will be available to all children In santa cruz county and will be a well-loved Park and so it seems appropriate to ask the entire county to help Be part of that fundraising effort in order to To help make that a reality we want to do the we want to start construction By next summer. We also have other critical parks in our system Lastly, we know that as we Heard in our last measure Having resources to be able to to address The issues facing people experiencing homelessness in santa cruz county is Is critical It's important for our community and we have to do everything we can Given that there are close to 3 000 people who are without shelter this evening so i'm a enthusiastic supporter and will work hard to Pass this measure and i would approve i would make the motion For all the recommended actions to put this sales tax measure on the ballot I'll second that We have a motion from supervisor leopold a second from supervisor capis or are there additional comments Supervisor McPherson. Yeah, much of the same. I I just think this I see this measure as a sign of strong fiscal management in the county over the Last decade or so we hit a big recession We had to cut back on sheriff's deputies. We had to put the parks department within the public works department has been mentioned But now we're on we're on good standing and There's no question as was mentioned the pension issue obligation is over It's blooming over us like every other governing agency in the state of california but I think we're really doing the right thing and focusing on this public health sheriff's cooperation issue As well as parks under the circumstances as sheriff hartz said Having deputies respond to 10 calls of people that are in a In a personal crisis of one type of another Is not something that we looked we we realized 10 years ago There's new challenges and it's going to take a cooperative effort and I think we're this is the right way to address that And as well with our parks We have we have a tremendous director and jeff gaffney who's done more with with what he has then Most people could imagine and this whole parks department But now providing this this asset and I really see see parks as a tremendous county asset So people can enjoy their leisure time and leo's haven is just a Star in the sky. It's it's a tremendous Asset for the county of santa cruz. So I think we're filling A void when we had to make cutbacks During the great recession And there's a tremendous need and a different need in that sheriff Or public safety health services agency And there's always been a need for more parks in our our growing county Population so I I think we are focusing on the right things to do with the proposed sales tax and I'll support this measure Thank you. Supervisor coonerty. Yeah, I just want to echo some of the Comments, which is that I really appreciate The leadership of this board and the pre and boards previous and county staff From top to bottom that have really made sure our fiscal house is in order That we have high bond ratings who are able to refinance and save taxpayers millions of dollars So that we're doing more with fewer employees than we had almost a decade ago And by getting our house in order, I think we've been able to You know provide solid services to our residents In addition to starting to do some preventative programs trying to do some innovative programs What I see this measure doing In almost every aspect is spending more on deterrence by having a focused deterrence initiative and I appreciate the sheriff's leadership on this That's going to save not only citizens Time and discomfort and insurance charges But then the revolving doors of the jails and the revolving doors of the emergency rooms By focusing on a few people who cause a disproportionate impact to our community By having a navigation center that that gets people stabilized sooner and gets some attached to resources sooner It also reduces impacts on the community and costs and finally by having parks that are accessible Across this county to all children Is the is a really the most preventative because you're talking about a generational investment We're giving people And families and kids somewhere positive to go and to build relationships and health and quality of life And so I'm excited about this possibility and I'm excited about Bringing forward an initiative that really benefits not only the community now But could benefit the community for generations to come Thank you supervisor cappett To clarify something to make it clear to the public too The when we're talking about voting on this tax for the parks The sales tax in the four cities will not go up That is correct. Okay, then one legal question. It would be About half or more of the voters on this Uh, they won't be taxed, but it is A legal question. They can vote on a tax for somebody else to pay The entire county will vote on the tax because they will be benefiting from it, but it won't be um The tax will not be in place within the city limits of the four jurisdictions in the county Okay, is that would that be the legal opinion also? City residents will pay the tax when they're shopping in the unincorporated area the tax will not be imposed within city limits Okay, so once the bills uh sales tax will stay at 9.25 That is correct. Thank you Okay, well, we have a motion and a second all those in favor I Opposed It passes unanimously I'd like to thank all of you who came out for this item I'd like to ask the board. We have a couple more regular agenda items I believe will be pretty quick and we're comfortable with just going through them All right, so move on to item six, which is a public hearing to consider resolution appointing the county road commissioner as outline of the memo the deputy cao And the director of public works have resolution and the road commissioner appointment. We know that this is just a Standard uh process, but we have to have a public hearing on it. I don't believe there needs to be any presentation Unless whether any questions from board members on this Seeing none. I'll now open up the public hearing. Are there any questions or comments from the community on item six Seeing none. I'll close the public hearing bring back for action. I will move approval the recommended action We have a motion from leopold a second from coonerty all those in favor I Opposed passes unanimously and I move on to item seven also a public hearing to consider the proposed issuance of bonds By the california statewide community's development authority for the benefit of monovista christian school and the amount not to exceed six million dollars and take Related actions as recommended by the CAO We do have a brief presentation on this very brief very big Good morning members of the board Christina Mallory the county budget manager So briefly on june 26 your board set a tep for hearing which is a tax equity and financial responsibility act hearing For today to authorize the proposed issuance of the bonds at an amount not to exceed six million dollars by the california statewide community Community's development authority cscda for the benefit of the monovista christian school Proceeds of the bonds will be used for the construction of a new 16600 square foot multi-purpose building Pursuant to the irs code an elected body Within the territorial limits of the project must hold the hearing to allow for public comment on a proposed issuance of bonds The county has no liability for the repayment of the bonds The proper 14-day notice for the hearing has been provided as required Their representatives here from the financing team are available to answer any questions you may have Jen pin cower from cscda and michael So lorano, I hope I didn't butcher that The headmaster from monovista christian school So it's recommended your board open the public hearing hear any public comment Close the hearing and adopt the resolution Thank you. Are there any questions from board members and I appreciate that you were here today. I know that it's been quite a long wait Seeing none. We'll now open up the public hearing. Are there any Comments or questions from the community on this item item seven regarding this public hearing for the monovista christian school bonds Seeing none. We'll bring it back to the board for action Second we have a motion from supervisor McPherson in a second from supervisor coonerty all those in favor I opposed the passes unanimously again. Thank you all for waiting back there Number eight is to consider a final reappointment of various at-large representatives to the workforce development board for terms that expired June 30th to 2022 we had nominations accepted at our late june meeting and we have previous agenda materials Are there any questions or comments from board members before we open it up to the community on this? We'll open it up to the community any questions or comments on the at-large representatives the workforce development board I move approval the recommended actions A motion from leopold in a second from coonerty all those in favor I opposed It passes unanimously Now on item nine is to consider an ordinance amending santa cruz county code section 2.14050 relating to the authority to approve contract change orders and direct the clerk of the board to place the ordinance on the next Available agenda for final adoption as outlined in the memo the deputy ceo and director of public works We have the ordinance that strike out an underline and the clean copy. Mr. Machado. Welcome. Thank you for waiting Thank you chairman friend members of the board The item before you is an amendment ordinance 2.14.050 contract change orders Section this section of the county code provides authority to the director of public works to approve and execute contract change orders This update to the county code is to make it consistent with the california public contract code The public contract code sections also provide specific limits for which a public works director may approve contract change orders change orders Above the limits require Approval by the board supervisors those limits are listed in the board letter I'm here to answer any questions you may have the recommended action is to approve and concept this ordinance amendment the county code Authority to approve contract change orders and to direct the clerk of the board to place the ordinance amendment on the next available agenda for final adoption I think I have no questions any questions from board members Anybody in the community like to address us on item nine regarding this? Okay. We'll bring back to the board for action I'm glad to see this. Uh, I'm moving forward. I move approval the recommended actions I have a motion from leopold a second from supervisor coonerty It's always good to see mr Wiesner in a suit and tie to know what it took and now we know it brings item nine forward. So all those in favor Uh, I opposed it passes unanimously as a reminder Item 12 was withdrawn by the appellants That was the item on the public hearing for petition for decision. So we don't have item 12 Regarding closed session. Is there anything reportable planned? There is Is there anybody from the community that'd like to address us on the items in closed session before we convene into closed session Okay, seeing none the board will recess into closed session or adjourn into closed session And if there's something reportable as we believe there will be we'll report it at the end of closed session Thank you all for being here and thank you for community tv for Being here today and reporting on it