Good evening everybody. We're about ready to begin our meeting for this evening, so if I could get your attention. I wanted to begin first by announcing and really with great sadness the passing of Peter McGettigan, who passed away on June 14th. And I don't know if Mary or Martha McGettigan are here, but their, his sisters that were traveling down here to help care for him and anyone who's been sitting in our chairs knew Peter quite well and anyone who attended a community event probably know them equally well. So I wanted just to start the meeting and read something that was prepared by both Mary and Martha. And then I'll invite up James Fisher, board member of this community television also to make a brief statement about Peter's work with community television. Peter was born in St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco and raised in Menlo Park. He was a percussionist and musician in the Palo Alto military band Peninsula Symphony and California Youth Symphony. He traveled with CYS for a month long concert tour of Japan in 1963. Peter moved to Santa Cruz in 1975 and became well known and recognized for his extensive documentaries producing, directing, editing and chronicling our community's history. In 2010 Peter received the Gale Rich Award. It was said that his mantra was tape everything and that Peter is always shooting. Peter over the years has produced thousands of hours of programs and recorded over 700 city council meetings. He worked with community television of Santa Cruz County and earned six awards from the West Coast Alliance of Community Television Stations for video excellence for his documentaries. Peter served on two of our city advisory boards. He was for eight years on the City Arts Commission and for another 12 years on the Historic Preservation Commission. He also served on the boards of the Del Mar, Friends of the Del Mar Theater and Museum of Art and History's blue plaque committee. He was our current chairperson of the Historic Preservation Committee. In December 2015 then Mayor Don Lane proclaimed Peter McGettigan Day for his work in our community. He will be greatly missed. I'd now like to invite up James Fisher. I want to thank the council for allowing us this opportunity. This is a prepared document from our board. For generations of members Peter McGettigan was the face of Santa Cruz Community TV. Everywhere one looked there he was operating camera both volunteer and staff shoots in the studio and in the field. Hunkered away for hours in the old tape based linear edit base where he was the master and then reluctantly in front of a Mac editing in Final Cut Pro. Or behind the scenes at the Santa Cruz City Council meetings bringing the proceedings to the public and their homes. Many CTV alumni, some of whom have gone on to professional careers in media, credit Peter as a mentor. Beyond how to frame a shot he taught them the intangibles, things that aren't typically taught in classes, how to put talent at ease, how to take control of an event space not designed for video or sound and rearrange the entire room to guarantee a good recording. Oh and not to mention how to find the best free food. An avid local historian and always keenly aware that today's activities are future history, Peter would often convince event organizers that their events simply had to be documented. Even if the thought hadn't occurred to them. Through the Davenport Oral History Project Peter captured for posterity the memories of Santa Cruz County's North Coast residents. Known by his friends for his daring he had always classy fashion sense. Peter was a passionate thrift store bargain hunter and would often gift his fines to deserving recipients. He was quite fond of cooking for his friends and breaking bread over a fine glass of wine. Peter's dry, witty, the revelant sense of humor brought a smile or a laugh to many a face. Peter will be fondly remembered with a sense of gratitude by the many CTV members and staff whose lives he touched in both and ways both profound and modest. And I just want to add we are all of us molded and remolded by those who have loved us. No love, no friendship can ever cross the paths of our destiny without leaving some mark upon it forever. Mr. Peace Brother. Thank you Mr. Fisher. I wanted to also say Mr. Stevens. It's always difficult to lose a friend. Peter, my wife and I are here because we treated, we considered Peter a member of our family. We had him over for dinner not too long ago and he took over the kitchen and he prepared a nice meal for us and that was one of his loves. What hasn't been said about Peter when we were here protesting the Vietnam War, Peter was in Vietnam in a Medevac unit where he got Agent Orange and I'm sure that contributed to his death that he will be greatly missed. Peter was in Vietnam in a Medevac unit where he got Agent Orange and I'm sure he will be greatly missed. He was also a co-founder of the E. Clampus Vitus local chapter. I'm sure that all of his brothers, both in the military and the E. Clampus as well as everyone in Santa Cruz will miss him. I just want to thank this council for not only previous councils but for the current council for honoring him. Thank you Mr. Stevens. Certainly if you didn't know Peter, you saw his work and he made a lasting impact on our city and I'd like to invite you now all to take a moment of silence in honor of Peter for his work to the city and to recognize him for the many contributions he's made to our city. Thank you. I'd like to say that the Magetian family and I believe members of the CTV board and others will plan a memorial for Peter. We'll also in an appropriate time lower our flags to half staff and recognition of Peter for our city. Now I'd like to open up the meeting and ask our new, this is our first day in her new role as city clerk administrator. Bonnie Bush who is promoted and I'd like to open up the meeting with a call to the roll call. Thank you Mayor. Council Member Cron. Present. Matthews. Here. Chase. Here. Brown is absent. Naroyan. Here. Vice Mayor Watkins. Here. Mayor Teresas. Here. So thank you. Welcome to our 7 p.m. June 19, 2018 study session meeting of the city council. This is a single item that will be on our agenda dealing with a study session on the downtown library advisory committee with recommendations for the downtown branch and downtown parking rate strategy. As a reminder the order will be a staff presentation followed by questions of staff from the council and then we'll take public comment. At this point I'd also like to ask if the council, if there's any conflicts for this meeting. Yes, I would very much like to be present for the presentation and discussion but unfortunately I do have a conflict of interest, material conflict of interest because I own property within 500 feet of the site in question. So on the advice of the city attorney I will have to recuse myself from this issue and not be present or participate. So at this point I'll leave. Okay. Yeah. Enjoy your evening. I will be watching at home. Before you leave I'd like to just say I'd like to recognize some members that contributed to some of the information that we're going to receive tonight and I'd like to say on behalf of the entire city council I'd like to thank the members of the downtown library association or the D-LAC members for the many many hours of service they provided to our community. In addition to all the public meetings that were held members also contributed research and participated in visit to other libraries to ensure that Santa Cruz gets the best of and it's the best of all possible libraries and I know I was on one of the trips that traveled over to the Los Gatos branch and met some of you there when we toured that library. So to all the D-LAC members thank you for your service to our community and thank you for your work to fulfill the community's wish to look at and establish the new downtown library and engaging the public in that work. If you would and you're willing if you'd stand up so you could be recognized for your work as a member of the D-LAC. Thank you. Okay. Now I'd like to turn it over to staff to begin the presentations. Good afternoon or good evening mayor and members of the city council my name is Bonnie Lipscomb I'm director of economic development and with me this evening is Claire Flesler who's our transportation planner Jim Burr our our public works. Our transportation manager. And also Susan Nimitz who is our library director. So we'll each be taking this in parts and I'm just going to kick it off and start with talking a little bit big picture of why we're here tonight. This is actually part of a two evening presentation last week we had started in with sort of big picture downtown some of the things we've been working on over the last couple years focused in on some of the work we've been doing with the farmers market over the last year as well as some of the work related to the housing blueprint subcommittee related to housing and some big picture sort of looking towards the future. Tonight we're going to go in a little more detail where I have first have a presentation from the downtown library advisory committee with some of their recommendations that they made last December moving forward and a more detailed look on the parking rate strategy. So those of you who saw the presentation last week this is a familiar slide just in the context of the big picture vision one of the things that we have really been focused on in the last two years is really looking overall at the downtown what is our vision going forward for the future where are we now where do we need to focus some of our efforts. I would add to sort of these four areas of community spaces parking housing and transportation sort of with that community spaces is also sort of our commercial aspect of retail and as part of the downtown community office some of those other elements as well but the ones that you see on the screen right now are those that were directly as part of the overall vision actively working at the city level but there are some policy both directions and decisions at the council level related to retail as particularly as it relates to the downtown plan amendments that you recently approved. So this is part of the strategy last week we really focused in on on three of these community spaces parking supply and demand and housing and some of the overall vision for the five to six hundred units and then tonight we're going to go into more detail on the library and the work of the downtown library advisory committee and then on the parking rate strategy. Just to recap you actually did provide us direction back in December 2016 so just briefly wanted to recap what that direction was and that was to actually form the downtown library advisory committee the DLAC committee to determine the best path forward for the library. You also directed staff to develop recommendations regarding the development of the new permanent site for the downtown farmers market and following last week's presentation you did direct us to move forward with pursuing an agreement with the Santa Cruz community farmers market for a permanent location and with an actual site identified we'll be looking to see if we can actually come up with a long-term agreement for that site. So we're pretty excited by the progress in the work working today with the farmers market board. You also directed staff to develop a parking rate strategy for funding of the parking portion of a potential project in the downtown. A lot of work has been done on this some of this as I mentioned the supply and demand was really focused on last week. The strategy and the parking rates will be part of the presentation for you tonight. Last week specifically we overviewed this sort of overall community spaces I already mentioned the farmers market those three areas. We also focused a little bit on housing and some of the overview of the projects that are planning downtown and why we're looking to the future as far as the vision and wanting to make sure that we're getting that balance right particularly as it relates to proposed development future development housing creation specifically the market rate housing that's under that's currently being planned privately as well as the affordable housing development largely on the public side and making sure that we're balancing that right and we're creating those opportunities to create more affordable housing and housing downtown downtown being the of all the places in our community where we can actually develop additional housing. So that's a component of what we presented last last week of showing where those sites are identified in the work that we've done to date. Today's presentation will really focus on by the downtown library advisory committee on the process of vision and their recommendations that they have made coming out of their committee to you and that will be presented tonight as well as a detailed specific strategy on parking rates including the proposed sunset of the parking deficiency fees currently paid by businesses in the downtown as well as transportation demand management funding and that program both the progress that we've made over the last you know decades of work on transportation demand as well as the future plan for expanding that program and then a more detailed sort of in-depth analysis of parking replacement what's going away and what is that balance for parking for future for future development and then finally and we'll recap this at the at the end of the presentation what we really like to do next is is outreach so we wanted to come back to you based on the direction that we had on December 2016 you also asked us to develop an outreach plan and so we wanted to come to you and present the sort of the information we have thus far and then we additionally would like to do community outreach both on the proposed library downtown mixed use project outreach on the parking rates strategies both for downtown businesses downtown workers property owners and then return to you in august with further recommended actions so that's sort of an overview of tonight tonight really is a study session we intentionally didn't want to have actions for you to just to make tonight because we felt like we had so many moving parts and components to these two-part presentation that we felt it was really important to present the information to you to take some feedback from you on a lot of these various elements conduct community outreach and then come back to you with that information so that's our proposal and sort of our outline for how for how tonight's presentation will be and what our sort of proposed next steps are and with that I'd like to turn it over to Susan Nimitz our library director thank you so much for having me I'm Susan Nimitz the director of the Santa Cruz public libraries I'm so excited to be here tonight and introduce you to the work of this amazing citizens committee and we had 10 members of the public who had great love for public libraries and devoted an enormous amount of their time and energy to this project just for me to go back a little bit this was the result of a 2013 master planning exercise that the library board did to really look at the facilities across Santa Cruz county and and to begin to address what was a great deal of deferred maintenance and out of date service models at that time there was a suggestion that we move forward with measure s and measure s was on the ballot June 7th 2016 and it received approval with over 70 percent of our voters agreeing to it the money from measure s improves all 10 libraries one of the things we knew about measure s at the time was that the amount of money being approved was less than what was probably needed and I will say as we work on all 10 projects one of the things that we're finding is that our community expectations far exceed the funds that are available so each and every community is really looking at how they manage that shortfall I think one of the things the city recognized in the fall of 2016 was that the 23 million allocated to the downtown library was not likely to cover the full cost of a remodel or rebuild and so we did this quick study with group 4 that Bonnie referenced and just to see if a multi-use facility could work in downtown Santa Cruz and if it could be financially feasible the consultant group 4 did find it to be so and the city council instructed us to put together a citizens group to basically explore national trends assess current and future library service needs in our community look at the existing condition of the library and make a recommendation about what kind of library we should be building in downtown Santa Cruz I the mayor's already introduced the committee but again I just want to say thank you to these amazing community members we had some really incredible people from our community serve on this community we had librarians and educators and small business people and tech people we had heavy library users a community maven and a home school mom we had a woman who's working with immigrant communities we just really had an amazing cross-section of the Santa Cruz community and I can say in my entire 30 years of public service I've never worked with a community group that was more devoted to finding solutions for the library in this community so thank you mayor for mentioning that it was very a very lovely process let me just say also I know Martha Dexter was on the former library board because I served with her so I'm sure she has a pretty lengthy tenure being on a library board and she also spent 30 years at the Library of Congress so there's two of our members that really are going to present their findings and we've got Rina Dubin and Martine Gomez Rina is the homeschool mom who's a community activist and has more energy than I think the whole community committee put together and you'll see that in her presentation Martine Gomez is really extraordinary gentleman with a long history of working in libraries he's the former director of the LA public library the Brooklyn public library the Oakland public library and most recently was the director at USC's academic library the two of them would like to tell you what they learned and what they found so in the last eight years beloved bookstores have closed all around Santa Cruz county and amazon.com streaming services and the internet have permanently transformed our relationship to books how we get our information and our entertainment with bookstores closing not only here but all across the united states and with google searches so ubiquitous it would seem that libraries are doomed however in many communities around the world libraries are not only surviving but thriving these libraries are not only managing to stay relevant in today's world but they are the hub the key part of vibrant neighborhoods and cities in fact so many libraries are evolving that there are now 1.5 billion in-person visits to the library annually that's more than four million visits to libraries a day nationally nationally yes across the yes not here and library programs are attended by 96.5 million people across the country per year that's more than attended all major baseball leagues and nva games combined many libraries in the u.s. and worldwide are prospering but part of the charge for our committee was to explore why why are these libraries flourishing what are they doing right what are the trends nationally for libraries the committee wanted to know how these libraries have been designed to address the modern needs of their particular community and most importantly what does Santa Cruz need from its library and how can we best use millions of dollars to create a library that can still be an integral part of the Santa Cruz community 20 years from now the members of the committee visited other libraries and researched national trends that are creating such successes and here's what we found and I will tell you it was really fun and exciting to research and go through these so hopefully you'll get a little taste of it so thriving libraries here we go have welcoming children's rooms like this slide from wisconsin and this slide from south korea successful libraries today have children's areas like these in rhoda island that are inviting and inspiring they have flexible space for early literacy programs and activities that can draw families together libraries that are flourishing also have a fun and safe space to support learning for pre-teens and teens like this teen room in a library in stock home libraries with great teen rooms are wildly popular here's a room in new york teens want a safe place to gather after school and hang out and meet with tutors and do homework like this teen room in jacksonville florida these teen spaces are designed to appeal middle and high schoolers flock to these libraries if you've been to a library that has a welcoming atmosphere for teens like the scott's valley library between 330 and 5 on a weekday or enlist gata's library after school then you know what i mean because children and teen spaces are used and provide a wonderful asset for the community 21st century libraries also have computer labs and quiet study spots and flexible spaces for tutoring and small groups to meet as well as larger rooms for lectures classes and other programs a thriving library is a welcoming place not just for people to borrow books but for the community to meet to gather to take classes to listen to a lecture to work or study our committee was really encouraged these libraries are so successful that neighborhoods are using them as an anchor for their communities some of these are standalone structures and some are in mixed use structures so here is the shirlington library in arlington county virginia and it's a good example of this a mixed use structure in this four story building a branch of the county library occupies the first floor and a theater for plays not for movies is on the second third and fourth floors they are all attached to a 750 space parking garage the vibrant and artfield courtyard unites the entrances this is in chicago and they are using the neighborhood branch libraries to anchor affordable housing for example the west ridge branch project in the left photo will soon feature a glassy 16 000 square foot ground floor library space topped by 44 senior housing units the right photo is of their independence branch currently under construction from inside the library the design ensures that one would never feel like four stories of housing are above that space the four apple level upper levels will contain 44 apartments comprising of 30 public housing units and 14 affordable rate units these pictures are from the east branch library in milwaukee a 16 000 square foot library and a five story building with 99 apartments parking and retail space the milwaukee public library billiard square branch pictured in the bottom corner is in a mixed use development that includes the library on the first floor with 47 apartment homes on three stories above and that's specifically for families where the grandparents are the primary caregivers for the grandchildren so what does santa cruz need from its downtown branch to have a flourishing library now and also 20 years from now one way the committee attempted to understand the community's needs was by surveying a public the public about optimal features for the downtown branch library over 2000 people 2273 people responded surpassing our goals the results of which i shared with those of you who are in the los gatos tour with us the details are also printed in the appendix of the delac report and recommendation if anyone wants more information but from this survey working with the consultant and other interviews presentations and research the committee realized that santa cruz needs 44 000 to 47 000 square feet to meet the needs of our community this will give us enough space for a treasure children's area a vibrant teen space a genealogy and local history section there's the location of the first library right there expanded technology like more printers and computers quiet seating and study areas tutoring rooms and community learning spaces as well as keeping the current collection of books and other materials if we have anything less than this amount of square footage we will have to eliminate key priorities we need to have at least 44 000 square feet to have all the programs and features that santa cruz wants and deserves good evening the downtown library advisory committee worked with the architectural firm of nolan tam to develop various design options that fulfill our vision for the new downtown branch as rina stated our vision was to create a library that met our desired program of at least 44 000 square feet had dedicated space for children and teens seating and meeting spaces for group study and community programs and of course state of the art technology for public use and to support public access to the increasing numbers of digital information sources available for library users in the end we were presented with four options to consider first option a was a partial renovation of the existing library but you can see there did not meet the requirements for the program that we had developed b a new mixed use facility it did meet the program requirements c full renovation of the existing library also met the uh the program requirements and d new construction on the existing lot as you'll notice on the cost estimates that were provided by the architectural firm of nolan tam the costs for all the libraries uh varied widely after much discussion and deliberation the downtown library advisory committee voted unanimously to recommend that a new downtown library be built as part of a city's proposed mixed use facility on cedar lincoln and cathart streets or option b the committee did not arrive at this recommendation lightly we debated and many of us felt that option c was also very desirable but the cost as you can see was prohibitive we only had 23 million dollars from measure s to work with option a was also not a logical alternative it offers less usable space than other options and we couldn't recommend that an option that doesn't meet what the community asked for we felt that option a is an irresponsible use of measure s funds because primarily it will not meet our program and people may ask what did we get for our money so why option b the cost the option option b was selected because it is the most cost efficient although the cost is slightly above the 23 million dollars available for measure s this option fulfills all of the program requirements identified by the downtown library advisory committee in addition to the programmatic benefits the cost for creating a new 21st modern library are less expensive in this option because it is being designed and built from the ground up in other words built with all the modern features and flexibility of function that can be taken into consideration for the next deck several decades this option is also less expensive expensive than trying to retrofit an existing facility that is nearly 70 years old it is important to point out that the anticipated costs for this option are less because the infrastructure costs can be absorbed and shared by all the project participants in this mixed use project as the anchor tenant this option will add character and greater public benefit to a mixed use development project drawing more foot traffic to retail businesses from families and individuals students etc in the area however our recommendation comes with some caveats first we want to make sure that there is public participation in the design of the new library we don't want the library to become an afterthought as the mixed use design moves forward the library will be and should be the core anchor tenant for the project and the residents of santa cruz should have a library that they can be proud of for generations to come second we know that we will need additional financial support for the construction of this plan b the friends of the santa cruz public library will do their part but we will also need additional support from the city of santa cruz third when we were given a behind the scenes tour of the current downtown branch we were all appalled by the condition of the library it's clear that basic and required maintenance had been deferred over the years overlooked for decades hva systems and other infrastructure needs had been sadly neglected we don't want that to happen to a new downtown branch library we would like some assurance from the city of santa cruz that they are committed to keeping the library in excellent operating condition that it's well maintained and that it receives the attention that it needs over its usable lifetime on behalf of my colleagues on the downtown library advisory committee i want to thank you for the opportunity to serve the city we know that you've received copies of the report and at the appropriate time we'd be happy to answer any questions you may have thank you i have a couple questions and martin do you want to do those you want um what's the preference to do we'd prefer to go all the way through before questions any more presentations are there this is a it's parking can you hold and then we'll do the questions after is it something you really want to put if you if you'd like to pose it i mean i don't know if you have a series of questions or a single one series but go ahead okay let's let's go through this and then i'll come back to you okay parking rate strategy portion of the meeting tonight just to recap we developed a new parking rate strategy at the direction of council at their december 6 2016 meeting where we looked at the concept plan the feasibility study for a mixed use project there we did convene the ad hoc an ad hoc subcommittee to look at the rates we did reach out to some business owners and run looking for critique on our initial plan we did present to the downtown association association just a week ago for more critique and then finally we presented our rate strategy to the downtown commission meeting this morning and for those of you just one one i apologize to interrupt would it be possible to have the outside speakers turned on so we could make sure that others that might be outside on the far can hear that and have it turned up louder all right so just we'll pause for one moment and also we have staff looking to develop some overflow seating so that's in the works too someone just said move it to the civic do you want to i heard that all you did okay do you want to explain why that ready i i was hoping if the speakers are on but um yeah uh you can let's tell them i want to just confirm that the speakers are on thank you for your patience because we we're missing our our new city clerk right now and now we don't have a quorum should we keep talking so we'll make it we'll wait for a pause for a moment stand just a reminder hey everybody got up we didn't have a quorum okay just a request for the speaker did you hear that okay the outside speakers are now on and thank you for your patience you can continue just to recap uh we are developing a rate strategy by the way i'm jim burr i'm the transportation manager here and this is the player fleece their transportation planner we uh been working on this rate strategy at the direction of city council at from their june 19th or from their december 2016 meeting um again we presented it to the downtown association about a week ago we have reached out to a few businesses just to get critique on the plan and um we did convene the ad hoc finance subcommittee of the downtown commission meetings as was directed by council um just to remind folks here that the downtown commission is advisory to council on all things parking and i'll go into more of that in just a moment so we took the rate strategy to the downtown commission meeting this morning we had a four one vote to one increase the permit garage lot meter user fees we had um approval to recommend that council sunset the deficiency fee at 20 percent a year we had a recommendation for council to approve funding transportation demand management at three hundred thousand dollars a year and we had a recommendation to that city council approve construction of a new parking supply project in general that's not cool okay just keep working through and if i ask you this is the type of meeting where everybody please be respectful of one another when we have the discussion there's all different viewpoints and perspective but the bottom line is we all want to hear from each other and um so please when each person speaks i ask that you be respectful of of their comments and uh they'll be of yours so thank you please go ahead sir one more that's a warning i see in the back please if you can keep it down thank you sir please go ahead mr burr so the downtown framework uh we'll touch on briefly we'll touch on a budget overview just to orient folks um current status of transportation demand management in in town and uh supply and demand review just because it's so important for this for the parking rates discussion we're going to reiterate some of the points we made last week um and then finally the new information the parking rate strategy and as jim said the first four of these items here are mostly a recap of items that you've heard before but we wanted to make sure to present them again in the anticipation that we would have a larger audience tonight so to really set up and help everyone understand how we how we reached item five the proposed parking rate strategy so apologies in advance because some of the information is what you've heard before but hopefully you find it a good refresher uh again the big picture slide and we are talking about fees tonight um to support all of the other uh items why a new rate strategy again council direction um in a nutshell we have planned housing and growth downtown we are losing surface parking lots uh even if we do nothing and we have growth that uh we'll be coming in at a um at a rate probably that we haven't seen in a few years we um had several supply demand models over the years and we our latest model predicted a balance point around 2008 and that's just about the time the great recession uh really sat in and so we didn't see much growth much new growth downtown but we are seeing new projects we have pipeline projects that we're fairly certain are coming in and we are planning for those uh so we have both uh lots coming offline and we have demand coming online in in a nutshell that's what we're looking at um why a new rate strategy we want a regular predictable funding from the from the district side for transportation demand management um another good reason to adjust the rates is because the old model is exactly that an old model where businesses subsidize the cost of parking uh best practices uh and best practices the user of the parking facility pays for parking and uh that way that user can make the best choice around whether or not to drive and park um and finally those businesses that are paying the subsidy um will no longer have to do it with sunset the deficiency fee one more piece on that the um we've heard over the years that the deficiency fee is actually a double hit to businesses in that I'll explain more of this but they paid a deficiency fee it doesn't get them any parking they also pay for parking thanks uh we are in a downtown parking district and and this is important because this is a different it's a unique place in town everywhere else in the city and usually everywhere else in the state and the nation when you open a business you provide the parking that's not the case in the district uh the city provides the parking in the district and um it's been that way since 1956 um it uh a downtown enter uh parking district enterprise fund was established in 1956 it is a separate fund it doesn't use general fund money as nor does it um send money back to the general fund it's a standalone self-supporting fund uh the downtown commission advises on all things parking um in the parking district we have reduced parking requirements again because we concentrate the supply because it's a shared supply we can reduce the number of spaces basically that are needed downtown uh it's about 30 to 70 percent uh reduced parking requirements that's the code that businesses are are required to um provide the flip side of this uh it's very important for the city to supply that parking it's our job to be out front and supply the shared add to the shared supply the district is funded from very few sources um parking parking in really uh then the deficiency fees which we're going to talk about sunsetting tonight so really it's users of parking that's that's how we get funded the citations the whole enforcement operation the meter enforcement personnel that's all general fund um both funded by and and the citation of revenue goes to the general fund just a real quick this was presented in great detail at the downtown commission we do this each march we go through the entire district revenue and talk about the capital improvement program and um I bring this slide to your attention to just point out that the parking deficiency fees are now um at 16.7 percent of the the whole pie if you will um there was once a time it was greater than half when I started it was about a third and it shrinks every year because one it's eroded by inflation it hasn't been raised in a long time but more importantly it's overshadowed by finally more and more paid parking facilities that have come online uh and this is an important I think to to point out because when it was half the budget I don't think we could have ever considered um sunsetting the deficiency fee but but I believe now that it's in a reasonable uh it's a reasonable piece of the pie that we can actually it can be replaced and I'll show you how in a little lot in a little while here again shared parking is the model we use for the downtown district it's like the gold standard of parking uh there are so many different businesses downtown a mix of uses different business hours people can park once and hit three or four different businesses alternatively um those businesses are open at different times of the day so their customers can come down at different times and um I'll share the same parking we can turn over a parking space three or four times a day and some of our busier garages and serve the same number of businesses with much less parking and that's the key here the difference here outside the district is that each of these businesses would provide their own parking for example if you had a breakfast restaurant next door to an office building next door to a bar each of those establishments would provide their own parking requirements could not share them and would result in a net higher number of parking spaces whereas in downtown that same breakfast establishment office and bar could share that same parking supply leading to an overall net lower number of parking spaces because of the differing business hours that they represent so in the downtown the key component is we have a shared system that results in a lower number of parking spaces provided and a higher efficiency of use moving on to our current status again I'll try to go through these quickly because there are elements that you've heard before but the one that I want to make sure that we always pat ourselves on the back for is that in terms of our transportation demand management efforts to date in the city of Santa Cruz we see a drive alone mode split of 20 percent below the national average we have been investing as a city in alternatives to give people choices that don't involve driving alone in their own vehicle and we've been investing in these for decades what this has resulted in is a significant mode split in public transit 6.8 percent a huge number of people walking over 10 percent which is seven and a half percent above the state and then finally the second highest bike mode split in the state of California at 9.5 percent and what this has resulted in is us being named a gold level bicycle friendly community we've continued to invest we're pretty proud of it we've been investing in these heavily over time one of the things that we have underway right now is between 2011 and the present we've been successful in winning over 21 million dollars in outside grant funding sources to continue to construct bike and pedestrian projects to continue to move the needle on giving people alternatives to the single occupant vehicle we're really proud of the progress we've made and we've worked really really hard to get here and this is something that I know I spent too long on the slide but I want you all to feel very very proud of how much progress we've made in particular some of the current TDM strategies that we've been working on our bike and pedestrian mode split combined is just under 20 percent we've been investing heavily in our bike lane network and our off-street facilities in particular we're going to be going to construction on segment seven of the rail trail in the coming months we're really excited about that in downtown we provide over 100 bike lockers for secure bike parking for people to feel better commuting downtown and using their their own bicycle our downtown commission and our city also sponsors encouragement activities getting people excited about biking and walking including bike to work day in open streets we're really proud that we've rolled out our bike share system at 250 bike shared electric bicycle fleet we've had over 5200 rides since we rolled out just over a month ago and we're averaging six trips per bike per day where the national average is one to two so we are just blowing it out of the water on bike share we're amazed and we're looking forward to continued progress there and then finally we've invested heavily in our sidewalk network to to provide for safe pedestrian access with parking as Jim mentioned we have our shared parking model resulting in a net lower parking requirement lower spaces provided in higher use we also use pricing strategies to encourage people to consider alternative modes and to encourage turnover especially on our main street on pacific other options we have is that we provide partnerships of zip car for car share for those who choose to use alternative modes to get downtown but who might need to make a trip during the day or don't have a vehicle and have one on demand additionally our transit center is in downtown offering a transit alternative to downtown employees and residents we partner with the RTC on the cruise 511 program which offers traveler information and finally we have the downtown trolley which operates summer weekends and holidays update on segment seven the phase one will be out to bed early next week we're very excited now i'm going to walk you through our supply of parking that we have oriented to that and the supply impacts that we see upcoming and then we're going to follow that up with demand supply and demand in terms of parking and land use are intrinsically linked so we have just under 3 000 spaces downtown which are shared public supply 815 on street and then 200 excuse me 2135 off street primarily those are those are mostly in the garages those are about 1500 spaces i believe garaged we lease 140 spaces which is a key piece of what we're here telling you about in that we see lots coming offline one of the reasons the district works is because we have supplied parking over the decades and we heard even at the last presentation a number of businesses who don't support any new parking and that's that's fine that's great but one of the reasons we don't have a parking problem downtown is that we've planned for and built parking structures over the decades that's also one of the reasons we can keep prices low because most of these structures are paid for with the exception of the soquel front our early modeling showed that when soquel front was completed we did have a surplus in the district and we've enjoyed a surplus again right till we got to the balance point of 2008 and we've kind of teetered on that balance point since but we see that changing in the near future so as Jim mentioned here we have 140 spaces leased in the downtown a particular area that we're concerned about is the calvary church lot in between the 515 and the red church there this lot has 108 spaces and we sell 120 permits to downtown employees and residents here uh we were operating under a two-year lease with a two-year option we are currently in the two-year option with a lease end date of october 2019 we are anticipating this lot coming offline because we have been approached with a couple different potential uh projects here which should mostly add housing to downtown this would be a loss of 108 spaces in a really imminent time frame we are planning to send out um letters to all the permit holders in this lot next month to notify them and give them a year's head start to get on a permit wait list our permit wait lists currently are between 10 months in a year this brings us into our predicted loss of supply of parking over time so to orient you here the blue polygons are existing public garages and the yellow rectangles polygons are um our existing surface slots um further to remember that we have a total public supply of 2,950 spaces in downtown the first lot that we're predicting losing parking in is lot two which is in the northern northern portion of pacific and this is going towards filling the final gap left over from the 1989 earthquake so it's a long time in coming but it will result in the net loss of 30 spaces in our supply next uh as we identified the cavalry church lot 108 spaces predicting that coming offline in late 2019 and then a lot 23 which is at the corner of laurel and front there that's going to be incorporated into a mixed use housing development project those are both coming offline and we're currently at a net loss of 162 spaces next uh we have lot 22 which uh it will be incorporated into another mixed use housing project and then lot 12 which is a city owned lot adjacent to the transit center and this has been identified by your council as being incorporated into a future affordable housing project there those coming offline results in a net loss of 202 spaces we have lot seven lot 27 excuse me which is another lot that we lease we anticipate this coming offline in 2025 and then that brings us to the action from last week which is to look for a permanent home from the farmers market at lot seven which is there at front and cathcart and the potential library mixed use project at lot four which would result in an additional loss of 135 spaces so uh with that happening if that is incorporated into a future project we will have a net loss of 369 parking spaces during the project that is being considered um we modeled it on a potential 600 total space garage but with a 369 net loss of spaces this results in a total net new of 231 spaces what that represents is about a 10 increase in supply um whereas without the project we would be losing about 10 of our overall parking supply another thing to notice here is that with their resulting loss of these lots coming offline the southern half of our downtown parking district is really lacking for that shared parking supply the remaining public facilities are almost entirely north of cathcart street that's particularly important as we get into the demand of what we're seeing in the future when we look at demand and when we talk about what is full for our garages and our off straight facilities the accepted literature has an effective capacity of between 80 and 90 percent for our models we use 90 percent to model the most progressive way that we could that we felt was still viable what this allows for in modeling at 90 percent is gives a cushion so that you know when you enter a parking facility there will be a few spaces available this reduces the amount of circling that people spend looking for parking and reduces the impact of the estimated 30 percent of downtown congestion which is directly attributable to people circling and looking for parking we really want to make it so that if you are driving downtown you can drive directly to a facility and find a space rather than spend your time circling we'd rather you park get out of your car and continue on your way additionally what this allows for is fluctuations for special events and local to Santa Cruz what this looks like is every Wednesday when we have the farmer's market that's a special event the 26 home games a year that we have the warriors that's a special event first Friday is a special event street closures are special events and those are not events that we would consider providing additional parking supply for but planning for a 90 percent effective parking parking capacity allows us that fluctuation to happen on street we look at 85 percent effective parking capacity and what this does is leave one to two spaces open per block face so that you can make those quick trips and especially to those businesses immediately on Pacific Avenue so quick run in for a cup of coffee run into a store etc and there is a space available on each block face so we used the supply impacts that we just showed you and we used a 90 percent off street effective to make effective capacity and an 85 percent on street to model out what we saw coming forward the future development impacts and what those are to orient you to this slide shown in yellow is where our existing surface parking facilities are after that the supply impacts come offline and the purple shows where we are projecting future development occurring primarily this is due to our adoption of the update to the downtown plan which encourages mixed use housing projects and intensified development in the southern portion of downtown and oriented towards the river this also is in line with the council's two-year work plan goal to entitle five to six hundred housing units downtown and so you really are seeing that that is something that we're projecting out occurring based on both applications we have in pre-apps and then conversations we've had with various owners again what you'll notice here is that the existing parking supply is heavily in the northern end of pacific avenue and the new demand is largely generated from the southern end of pacific exactly where the existing public supply will be going away so as I mentioned we modeled this on the loss of supply and the increase in demand this first scenario you see here which you've seen models out a 10-year and a 20-year planning horizon this is a 90 90 percent effective capacity scenario that does not add new parking supply but does model in that loss of parking supply and the increase in demand as you can see in 2026 the 10-year horizon we're projecting a net deficit of over 650 spaces and then the 20-year horizon in 2036 net deficit of over 1200 spaces we also modeled this on the addition of a 600 space structure which were to result in a net new parking supply of 231 spaces you can see here in 2026 we're projecting a parking deficit of just shy of 200 spaces and by 2036 of 745 spaces as you'll note in both these scenarios we do have a deficit in both the 10-year and 20-year planning horizon which tells us that a we're not considering overbuilding parking by any means b that we need to continue to invest in alternatives in either scenario and see that we we can and must do better in our transportation demand management and that's one of the elements that we included in our proposed parking strategy again to reorient you we're already doing very well in our transportation demand management and we want to continue to do better one of the things that you received very many letters about so we wanted to provide you information on is how do we stack up against some of our peers uh the ones we heard most about were uh Palo Alto and Boulder as peers and also San Luis Biscoe gets brought up a lot you can see us highlighted here in orange and the data that we use is the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey they do a um five-year rolling estimate that they release each year and this is the data that we use to track ourselves over time and also to track ourselves against our peers over time this is an apples to apples comparison that uses the same methodology in every uh every place in the united states um as you can see our drive alone rate here at 56 and a half percent is incredibly low boulders is lower than us by about 5.2 percent largely that comes from their larger percent of work at home 5.3 percent higher than ours um when we discussed transportation demand management strategies with the downtown commission and brought up work from home as one of the effective strategies they came back loud and clear and told us that downtown employees are downtown customers and we want to do everything we can to attract more people to come downtown and to stay downtown not to discourage them from coming so the transportation demand management strategies that we are looking at heavily rely on transit walking and biking rather than encouraging a work from home so that explains that the largest difference in these stats here um we also modeled our parking demand over time with different mode split goals so one of the questions we asked was since we're seeing the parking deficit in both the additional supply and no new supply scenarios how low would we need to get our drive alone rate in order to be at a balance and not have a parking deficit to orient you here blue is our existing 56 and a half percent drive alone rate red is with the addition of a 600 space garage for a net new of 231 spaces and green is a status quo scenario with just losing supply and increasing demand uh we modeled this on 10 year on a 10 year and a 20 year horizon and as you can see here 10 years out if we were to add a new project we would need to reduce our drive alone rate to 50 percent if we did not have a new project we would need to reduce that to 35 percent a 21 and a half percent reduction over our current similarly in our 20 year planning horizon we would need to reduce our drive alone rate to 37 percent um and with a new project and without a new project we would need to reduce it to 25 percent which means 75 percent of people are getting downtown not in a single occupant vehicle to contextualize this for you we've recently been celebrating increases of one percent in our bike mode split and one percent in our pedestrian mode split and we've been working incredibly hard and investing incredibly heavy heavily to get there so um mode split reductions of this magnitude are incredibly aspirational and incredibly difficult to work towards and are likely unattainable our professional opinion is that we cannot use transportation demand management alone as a way out of our parking deficit problem if we are to uh to realize the housing and growth downtown which brings us to our parking rate strategy so we've presented the problem and now we're presenting the solution okay again the components that make up the um pieces of the rate strategy are deficiency fees those are paid by businesses again that's about just under a million dollars per year of district revenue permit fees hourly which is your visitors downtown anybody who doesn't have a permit comes down in parks um regular funding for transportation demand management uh the bonding assumptions which i'll go through to fund a new construction project uh the parking portion of it and then the operations and maintenance costs both current and new uh yeah we don't need to hit this again again it's a smaller piece of the pie we can now get rid of it so this morning at the downtown commission we uh they did move i had two different scenarios and if anyone picked up a rates matrix uh at the back of the room i'll be going over this in a minute um they recommended the 20 option and not the 15 percent they would like to see the deficiency fees sunsetted over five years so uh i'll spend less time on that the monthly permits are currently primarily 39 dollars a month there are there are few exceptions to that with some um uh off core lots if you will that are a little bit cheaper we're proposing the first year increase be 45 dollars a month that's a six dollar a month increase or 72 dollars a year um with 10 dollar per month increases after that so then the 55 then the 65 then the 75 this brings the cost of a monthly permit in line with a transit pass and allows the user to make better choices or more fair choices about how they're going to spend their transportation dollars this is one way to incentivize or disincentivize um employee parking in the garage is downtown um david had a point just a quick question so near five it says 10 10 dollar increase is that should that be 85 or is that that's my error no we top out at 75 okay yeah strike that so four years of increases we we did hear a little bit this morning about accelerating this um but that motion was uh um not uh successful and the downtown commission approved this methodology here for parking meters uh we have a variety of different meters downtown uh they are the most expensive on pacific avenue and then they get cheaper as they go out uh towards the edge of the district that map I showed you up at the front of the presentation um in year one we are proposing to raise meter rates by 25 cents an hour so if it's 75 it'll go to one if it's a dollar it'll go to a dollar 25 and so far down the list a year two increase would be between 25 and 50 cents an hour uh it would bring all of the core with with the exception of the very very fringe outer fringe of downtown to bring the core to a dollar 50 an hour for the introductory uh the the first two hours of parking um there are 815 meters not included in this pricing or anywhere in this financial model is a recent uh approval by city council to uh install credit card meters on pacific avenue and move to a performance pricing um program in that uh we heard from businesses that they wanted more turnover in their core shopping district and we're going to use the meter pricing to try to effect that instead of beating people over the head with uh parking tickets the uh proposed parking rates for lots and garages they are currently 50 cents an hour I believe for the first three hours we're talking about raising them to one dollar an hour in the first year and a dollar 25 in the second year they will remain they'll top out of dollar 25 for this uh for the remainder of the five-year forecast uh we're looking at a daily max of eight dollars and um the downtown commission may take up restructuring that daily max at a later meeting I know there is some interest and some discussion around commuter buses or what have you but that's more of a policy standpoint it doesn't affect over 90 percent of the revenue is uh quick turnover less than three hours or so so that's that's what I used in here we want regular funding for TDM um again the bulk of our community funding for alternative transportation comes from many of these grants Claire talked about the 21 million the rail trail could be a true game changer in that it's an off-street um method for people to get uh around town um but for the district we want a regular funding amount that we can um gonna meet people where they are uh we want to expand our existing program where we support bike share and we support the trolley we want to expand that uh to support transit we want bike and bike share subsidies um we want carpool and ride share subsidies and we'd like to look at an emergency ride home for people who take alternate modes but are not sure they can always or if they need to leave unexpectedly so they can be assured of a way back I'm in there no anything overall the the goal to meet people where they are and provide transportation alternatives for all modes really speaks to the downtown employee commute survey that we did we asked people how they get to work now if they're a full-time or part-time employee what time they start what time they end to get some basic information about them and then we also asked them what would you be interested in trying if you were going to switch from driving alone to taking another mode and we heard things across the spectrum for some people um transit was the best alternative for other people biking was what they preferred for others carpooling um for some people they said no no way no how am I ever gonna switch to anything else and so in looking to provide the easiest alternative to make it as easy as possible for people to switch we want to say if you want to try transit we're going to make it as easy as possible for you to try transit we can provide a for your subsidized bus pass likewise if biking or bike share is what you want to try let's meet you where you are there and make that a feasible alternative for you and really incentivize that if carpooling's your thing let's help you get set up with a carpool buddy and provide some incentives via scoop or Waze carpool or other programs that are out there so recognizing that for transportation there is no one-size-fits-all it depends on how far you're coming how many days a week you're coming downtown what time you get off work if you have kids to pick up if you have a second job to get to all of those elements so really really fashioning our TDM program around meeting people where they are and encouraging them to shift to whatever mode works best for them um the bonding assumptions for the new supply uh we in December of 16 you heard a concept plan developed um and the feasibility study that our price tag for the parking portion of that was 33 to 37 million we just used the highest um uh end of the range the 37 million it was also for a for a construction date that was um midpoint two years out so i added two more years to that because we're two years down the road um and then i ran just a standard amortization and then of course had it double checked by the city's bomb consultant the number i use in here is um conservative it in that it shouldn't be any higher it should only be lower when when when the dust settles um again i use the high end of the costs i use a high end of the annual payment you want me okay um we also looked at some of our comp cities to see how we would stack up in this proposed rate strategy as you can see here we present Monterey Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Santa Rosa, and Ventura for their on-street off-street and parking permits um to orient you again our proposed parking changes will go to a maximum of um on-street to a dollar fifty in the core and a dollar off-core what's shown in blue right now is our existing um off-street to a max of 125 and our permit prices increasing incrementally over the next four years to 75 dollars an hour as you can see presented here this is right in line and right in range with many of our comparable cities here uh so in summary we we looked at the sunset the deficiency fee we look to increase the permit price to in line with monthly transit pass and we looked at increasing hourly rates um for our visitors to the least extent possible i mean i really we really approached this model to we don't want to disincentivize people coming downtown and yet we we we did need to do some adjustment it's in pricing um so with that i'm going to dive into the model itself and i've already spoon fed all of the pieces i realize the model is fairly robust i think i can go through it pretty quickly and i believe i have handouts yes about how many more slides on on this this is the last one and then the recommendation okay there's handouts also available so basically this reinforces the slides that that came before it we're increasing permit pricing by six dollars a year the first year uh ten dollars for the next three years to top out at 75 dollars the next section lots and garages we're looking to raise the rate to one dollar per hour the first year into a dollar 25 the second year in here there is some items in red in this section we assume a occupancy loss with raised rates and we used industry standards and local expertise to develop these we're not sure we'll see any loss but but just to be on the safe side with the model we modeled in some lost costs um down on line 26 is when the Calvary lot goes offline and when we if we build a structure on lot four those lots will come offline and we'll lose we won't see that revenue so those show up in red um we also won't pay the lease on that lot so that shows up in black the next section in meters we talked about 25 cents for the first price increase and 25 to 50 percent for the second increase uh i told you about the bonding assumptions for the new parking garage and there's the annual bond payment uh 2.9 million um out for 30 years we do have our last garage coming offline the bond will be paid off in 2027 that's just off our our modeling horizon here but uh that is in the in the works existing supplies and services existing services downtown we want to make sure to maintain the same level of service we provide downtown we do do sidewalk scrubbing we maintain public restrooms we want to continue to do that and so we've just put inflationary values so that we can continue this service over time so for personnel for supplies and services we just added in the the future cost to maintain our current level of service we did add a number based on how we maintain our existing structures for the new structure as well so there's some new costs for OM in there and as discussed a whole bunch of times we have the 300 000 for the first year in annual TDM spending and then I add in we add inflation to that number for all of the out years um finally the um totals and I'm just going to go through the 20% scenario the line 58 and 59 58 is the annual effect of all of these changes to the district on a year by year basis the line 59 the cumulative change is the running total if you will you can see we get a bit of a head start in year one which is good because as we bond for the new structure in year two and three before it's online before it's constructed we'll need a buffer and we just carry through there and then once we come out the other side and the new project is online we again are more comfortably back in the black and that concludes the rates summary so that brings us back to the next steps what we're looking for is direction for staff to go out and conduct additional outreach on the proposed downtown library mixed-use project additionally to do more outreach around the proposed parking rates with downtown businesses and workers return to council for further recommendations in august and looking for additional actions from you this evening thank you thank you for the thorough presentation um and I also want to thank councilmember crown your patient in terms of those so you had a question for the delac I think thank you david I appreciate that and I do want to go to the public but I had just a couple questions uh if uh rena wants to come back up thank you um you you you and I have spoken you know we've had meetings and uh I went to probably three or four of the delac meetings and I know councilmember brown who is um ill tonight and can't be with us also went to a few of those meetings I don't know if other council members uh joined the delac in those meetings as well um I'm just wondering uh you know I'm not a big fan of the the parking garage and just wondering um how much the delac was involved with the garage library did they ask your advice were you able to bring in uh get other transportation planners outside of our staff to come in and brief the group on what this meant did were they was this in this mix the whole time the library pairing it with the garage well we did have presentations from the staff and we also um we're really focused on the library uh to present to you what we felt was the best option and what santa cruz needed as far as the library is concerned and then the more information that we did receive about uh how it fit into the bigger picture I think uh helped us understand that it could be a really positive thing not just for the library but in a whole more holistic way and we did have presentations from the farmers market because that part was very important to us too I don't know if there's any if anyone wants to would you have preferred not to have dealt with the the garage part of it at all and just focused on the library or did you in fact only focus on the library um I think I think um we our primary we were very clear that our primary purpose was to advise the city council as far as what the library uh what is beneficial to the library but also taking into account the uh the other aspects of the project I'm not I'm guess I'm not really sure would you ever feel like you didn't have had a choice that you didn't have to deal with the library with the garage part of this project that you're only going to focus on the library that that was a choice that that the the group uh could could make oh I see where you're going um I think that we had a lot of autonomy as the and for the direction of where of where we wanted our meetings to go and what we what we felt like how we were very aware of the garage and um how that would impact our decision is one of the options and I felt like we got all of our questions answered and that if we didn't that I do feel that we could have gone outside and um made sure that we could ask all the opinions thank you thank you I had a question for Susan as well um I was looking at the surveys and maybe I missed something but was the garage we you did like uh I don't know a couple thousand responses it was amazing um was the garage part of those surveys at all was that question ever asked that do you want to see a library in a garage um the purpose of the committee developed the survey I did not um and the the purpose of the survey was to find out what features of a library the community wanted Yolanda we were uh because we put together you know we strategized on what would be the best thing to survey and we felt that we really wanted to come to you and tell you what the community wanted to see as far as the features of the library and come up with a really good solid square foot um estimate of what what we really needed and that was the main purpose of the survey so we knew from public comment that there's a lot of contention about the garage and you know quite frankly I think most of us didn't really um we had no agenda I want to make sure that that's very clear we had no agenda one way or the other we really just wanted the best thing for the library did you ever see sketches of what a library was going I mean I saw that last one in one of the one of your slides yes were there other sketches that they brought to the group and said this is what the library could look like or might look like or we were uh we had done the research to see what other facilities were like and so that was that was enough and I felt like we could ask the architects for whatever it was that we needed okay thank thank you very thank you Mr. Mayor and I did want to thank the the downtown library advisory committee for their their work it was uh really tremendous and I know you've been through a lot and you finished your work in December and here we are in June I'm I really I apologize that it hasn't gotten to us earlier but thank thank you again for your for your work thank you mayor thank you council member chase do you have any questions but if I could just have a minute to yeah sure formulate them yeah council member Narayan I just have a couple I was really curious looking at the teen sections in the library it looked like it might be noisy and so it which is you know a step away from what I was taught growing up as a kid that when you're in the library you know you've got this so is this kind of a new model um and is it I mean it looks like it's being replicated in places all over the country I think part of the idea behind this is that uh kids want a space to come and call their own to be able to do homework whether it's group study or individual study a place to go to after school where they feel safe and somewhat protected without adults prying on them a lot of the construction of these new libraries there's acoustic you know um um details that helped to absorb a lot of the sound um and sure it's we're beyond kind of the in the library in many respects because it's not just the teens but you know if there's a program going on or there are adults that are there I mean everybody you know respects that the fact that everybody else is reading and certainly you know um I think most of the teens who like a space that's very inspiring they'll respect it they have helped to respect uh control the sound themselves and the other question I had is did you look at the possibility of um having housing be an element to this building we discussed it and there were as you saw there were some projects from San Francisco as well as um Chicago there's a mixed use facilities have been very successful and um so yeah we did look at that as an option so it wasn't just looking at you know the garage and the library it was all their potential tenants including some potential commercial enterprises as well so we kind of approached us with the idea of what is the best that we can get for the dollar uh given that we'd like to have a new modern functioning library thank you um just to say that um San Francisco and Chicago I know for sure they're both um for every new branch they're redoing all their branch libraries and they're incorporating affordable housing as part of that and so there's a lot of different possibilities that we were really excited about with a mixed use structure great and then just a question about the parking I notice you know we're going to be losing parking because surface lots will hopefully transform into something that will use the land better than what it is now um but I notice we're adding it's 240 additional spots and once again that goes back to your forecasting right of what you think the parking needs will be um if housing that's currently proposed or looks like it's coming down the pike actually happens so is that the reason for proposing more spaces above just replacing the current surface lots so part so all of the new projects which will be coming online are mixed use projects that incorporate um housing and commercial typically in the downtown the commercial does not provide its own parking rather it is supplied by the parking district and traditionally businesses have paid deficiency fees in lieu of riding that parking um similarly the housing units typically um housing does park most of their own project on site but sometimes that's not feasible for a variety of reasons in particularly we know with affordable projects such as what we're considering at the uh site adjacent to the metro it would be incredibly costly to provide parking for that project on its own site and you would be able to get more units and a higher level of affordability if you were able to have that parking be off site as part of a shared facility other projects that come in if they are a few spaces short a dozen spaces short 20 spaces short um one of the roles of the downtown commission is to find that there is sufficient parking capacity in the downtown parking district in our shared system in order to allow those projects to move forward and without that parking capacity it really puts them in a position where they can't give a thumbs up to projects that are good projects that do provide for our housing needs but that can't quite park themselves the additional 240 is to take all of that into consideration it uh takes a the commercial component and a portion of the residential component largely driven by the affordability okay i just wanted to know what was driving to go above just replacing so thank you councilmember chase so um one of the things that you had mentioned was in the downtown commission recommendations was the additional funding for tdm were there specific recommendations i know you had a few bullets in there um but were there things that they were saying were really important to them or is that forthcoming because i think it would be really great to hear um examples from them of what they think would be most beneficial generally acknowledge that a variety of modes was appropriate but our next action would be upon um having a funding source identified so that 300 000 or whatever that number turns out to be to develop a program around that get it vetted at the downtown commission and then bring it to you for approval so that would be the process there um it would largely be driven by our downtown employee commute survey asking people to meet them where they are um and then looking for some further work on that and then for the delac whoever wants to answer it um so things like the veterans information center came online uh relatively recently and so i don't know how that factors into the proposal but i'm wondering if things like that uh were factored into the new project because i know that that's we do some really innovative things i know we're not alone there's a lot of other libraries that do that too but i think this was an important new addition to the library so is that something we can continue to support it is factored into the space needs count count some more chrome going back to miss dubin's um point about affordable housing was that ever uh considered by the the the delac in this process affordable housing within a library complex kind of idea that you're speaking of san francisco has it yes in chicago too i we felt like we were here for the we're representing the library and um so it was we were excited about the possibilities and if you read the report it talks about how that's something that is um exciting to us we hope that that's something that you could incorporate in a mixed use structure but as far as um as specifically delving down into all the details of that we didn't really feel that was part of our purview of the expectation of what we were supposed to do thanks okay vice mayor walkins hold questions okay um really thank you for all the presentations i i have a couple questions that i wanted to ask you know one following up on council member naroyans um for the younger kids not the teens you know i my family uses the the library and i know that you know i was there with the grand opening of the scott's valley library and i served on our library board um the prior library board for um over four years and i was chair two years so i've seen a lot of these presentations and one of the things i feel that we haven't done in our city has kind of provided um uh upgraded spaces for young children i was recently um talking with a young child named elliot who one wanted to create a fun and safe space to be with his mom and you know one how do you create a welcoming and he was talking about making a welcoming place to pick up a book do homework and learn about the history of santa cruz is that i mean what are some of the ways that we can create activate public spaces help kids like elliot as he suggested make a fun and safe space to be with his mom you know with through this type of action so i'll ask maybe the library director mayor the most simple answer is to build a library i think um you know i really think that we haven't touched the downtown library since the late 1960s and so people in this community i don't think have necessarily had access to 21st century library spaces um they're incredibly inspiring um they're full of light and they're full of learning and they're full of community interaction of every age and every socioeconomic class and every um every type of individual in our community and um i am constantly asked are libraries going away and beg people to go to a library that's built in the the last 10 years and and tell me what their experience is and inevitably they come back to me and say i was amazed and so i really encourage this community go look at los gatos go look at scott's family to speak in the mic three o'clock after school and sit there for one hour and it's not just the kids it's the teenagers it's the adults it's people who don't have access to computers at home and are filling out job applications online um it's people with some really significant needs in our community using the library to make their lives better and i think anyone who stepped into a library like that knows how spectacular it can be and i think if we're really trying to create a community for the next generation we need to create a facility for the next generation it's been 60 years since we've invested in that facility and it deserves it and our kids deserve it i like to i think uh vice vice mayor walkins has a follow-up i think thank you i i just i know that a lot of folks want to speak tonight so i was going to not ask too many questions but i um we'll just echo the comments made by the council in terms of recognition of the work and volunteer time spent um by the delac on this um their time being here tonight to share their perspective and be open to questions as well as the staff's presentation i just had a quick question in terms of um tdm and the um if the model has or takes into account sort of technology and advancements in tdm um like for example the the jump bikes like i don't know in terms of your trying to forecast for the future in technology does that fit into your framework and strategy so that is a great question um as you probably recall in the two bar graphs that we showed both of those alternatives show that we will have a parking deficit um then we did consider what it would take to reduce our single occupant vehicle trip in trips in order to get to a place where we're at a balance we did not assume where those shifts would come from but we um we're projecting that we are going to see increases in particularly biking and walking which has been where we've seen historically our greatest increases so bike share hopefully will play a big component there additionally um well we don't have a crystal ball we anticipate there being big shifts in the way that people own vehicles and the way that people choose to get around through both car sharing and through autonomous and connected vehicles um that's one of the reasons that we do feel confident in still showing a parking deficit in these out years but knowing that there will be huge technological shifts between between now and then and that will hopefully help us to address some of this problem thank you and one brief follow-up question to that and then if and when or that you know technology comes about and we don't need cars there was discussion around the potential transformation of a parking garage to be affordable housing and i'm wondering if you could share a little bit about that uh sure and in the design stage that might be a better question to ask however i could tell you lot four is a is a great lot to build on downtown because of the length of the streets between Lincoln and Cathcart um there only one side of the garage is ramped the other side is level all the way and that's on the west side of the building and that's actually adjacent to the garage is actually pushed to the back as it should be of the of the project and the whole front piece is whatever it is it's library and something above um but that level floor then meets the level floors of the adjacent i call it the remainder parcel and uh so that's a quick natural conversion um you could do something more costly where you try to convert the the other ramps on the backside of the building to be convertible but i could tell you we built um from my earlier slides we've constructed um parking garages in the 70s and 80s and i would think before we would spend the money to convert a brand new structure that we would actually retire um some of those older ones if if in a decade we find that uh parking actually goes down thank you hey thanks do you have a follow-up i i had some questions on parking but should we go to the public and i ask them after we come back on that or sure if you want to hold those i have a couple questions i'm going to ask before we go to the public but you're welcome if you want to ask them beforehand as well um yeah go ahead okay so my question i appreciated you getting that pure level comparisons of different cities and the parking districts because i know there's different models that are out there and ours i think is unique is that correct in some ways yes in some ways no so for our particular parking district you know we have traffic impact fees are those lower for businesses that might be in the downtown than in other parts of the city so that we're we're helping to build infrastructure to reduce the cost maybe for businesses to operate or locate downtown they are i believe the reduction is 40 percent on the uh traffic that's not connected to parking that's a traffic issue and in your look you i saw on that slide for the comparisons for the other cities you were you were talking about from the cost of parking downtown did you also look at how much those cities invest in their maintenance and upkeep of their downtown's no there are some national averages and i um i don't have them right at my fingertips but we used in our forecasting we used our actual numbers okay we know it because we know them because one of the things i'm interested in if you do have in the forecast that you you're just keeping your budget at the current level of investment for maintenance and upkeep and i was wondering if there was any discussion either at the downtown commission or from some of the downtown businesses about how we might look at increasing the amount of maintenance and upkeep of our downtown there was some discussion of that uh this morning um but without any specificity um so the increase could be it could be so many things and um at that point we would need to rethink um how we fund that depending on the you know the size or change that people are looking for i understand that um economic development staff is looking at ways to kind of make some improvements and investments in the downtown i was wondering if you know part of those actions we look at coming back with some sort of kind of overview of how much we're investing in downtown and how we might provide better kind of like transparency about what we are doing to keep you know it sell a safe and welcoming place by you know just keeping it clean we are working um and working actually with public works in parks and rec on doing a full assessment of current conditions downtown and coming up with a plan over the next two years for beautification downtown as well as maintenance the one thing i want to clarify though is that the parking fund is an enterprise fund and so again it's a fund that can only be used for parking related purposes and it's paid by parking fees so there's no general fund that goes into the parking district so the money that's collected from the users goes to maintain the parking garages and support supply as well as any associated needs and so it does contribute to some of the maintenance downtown but not all of it so for example the garbage collection the landscaping the repainting of the of the lights the repainting of and maintenance of the aesthetic features and the benches and all that that's not out of the parking fund that is why public works and parks recreation are critical components and they have in their budgets funds to maintain the downtown there's also other funds that contribute the refuse fund with the hope services for example as well as the downtown streets team so there's a variety of funds that support the maintenance of downtown i appreciate that it'd be nice to have some maybe a report that kind of shows that those different funding sources how they're being used so we can see whether or not we're funding enough and maintaining the downtown and then what was the date that we'll have something back in regards to the infrastructure or improvements that that are being planned in the downtown we're working on it this summer so i imagine we can come back to you in the early fall okay um august or august probably okay all right thanks and then the other um was a wondering for the facility um is there any sort of public art component um because when you think about i know this is something that came up when i was on the public works commission is you know the two percent for the arts that used to be there and for transportation projects you know there would be funding i know sometimes it's there's complications in how they're used but i think you know for me equally important to like the uh the functionality of garage is the aesthetics in terms of how it you know operates and interacts with some of the places downtown i was wondering what kind of thought has gone into the um a public art component of you know the the garage as well as any sort of landscaping or sometimes you'll see structures that have you know living living walls that make it more of a green space and i'm just curious if there's been any discussion about that there has been some discussion about it and just in discussion with um our parks and rec and talking through the parking we have envisioned our it's you know one percent for public art would become a component of any new project both on the library side as well as the parking so we've been we do have a placeholder in our budget as we're looking forward for that project to make sure that's a component of it okay so there'll be a public art i said two percent but it's ours is one i thought it was used to be two percent used to be two percent and and due to as you reference sometimes there were difficulties particularly with state and federal grants that uh precluded us being able to provide that we always were having a shortfall what we found is if we could do one percent we had greater participation across the board because one of the shortfalls we could actually make up the difference so since we've converted to one percent we actually have a pretty robust fund so for any major project whether it's you know major projects in water department or public works we've been able to include the public part art element and it's pretty substantial so there though there is absolutely a public art component to this project yeah it's part of the project budget okay okay comes from the TDM question the transportation demand management you said we can't do TDM alone how long have we been how have we been using or or doing TDM decades since before i was born so could you say could you say some of the things that means yeah some of the elements as i mentioned specifically in public works we've invested heavily in the project side the infrastructure side of transportation demand management we have expanded our bike lane network significantly we've built off-street paths you see is on the riverwalk the rail trail which is going to construction west cliff drive multi-use path we've also expanded our green lane network we've invested in sidewalk facilities safe routes to school projects we have incentive programs to some degree through partnerships ecology action do you want to add more things and you've been here longer than i have it's okay downtown bike locker program bike share yeah you got my point that's good it's great um the single occupancy vehicle question you said we would have to get to 35% to avoid uh have building a parking garage um to be at a balance and so it depends on which alternative you look at there and let me bring you to our complicated slide there um yeah in green here in the 10-year planning horizon you would have to be at a 35% drive-alone rate in order to not have a parking deficit and not have a new supply project and you do know we conserved enough water to avoid a desalination plan that's that that's how i'm looking at this if we can we can get the single occupancy vehicle stuffed down we can we can you know pave the way to pave the way to avoiding so if i can contextualize that for you in the year 2000 our bike mode split was 4.6 percent we set a goal for ourselves to double that via our climate action plan and between then and now we've been able to increase from 4.6 percent to we are at 9.5 this has been 18 years of investing millions of dollars in bike infrastructure and we've been able to garner uh you know just shy of a 5% increase there shifting modes by two active modes or other non-auto modes by even 1% at a time is incredibly difficult so getting to a 35% drive-alone rate is something that um professionally i think is aspirational and unachievable in this 10-year time horizon thank you could you put up the slide that compares all the cities different parking things uh fees for garages and and parking meters and stuff um almost two hours just wondering i see um san luis abispo which is you know similar city to us is at 125 dollars a month for for downtown residences 255 for a court i mean um so it's a 10 hour meters 60 dollars a month okay got it because it went so quickly i'm just wondering why we can't get even beyond 75 dollars i still think that is not enough incentive or or de-incentive for people to come downtown and park park their cars and especially when you have this five years to do it you know within you know they're gonna be 10 dollars a year it doesn't i mean i'd be i don't know what the rest of the council thinks but a shorter horizon and actually getting the fees up well over 100 dollars you know i mean uh if you look at ucsc what what do they charge uh a month to park do you know a lot it's uh i i believe it's 800 dollars a year so it's 800 a year i think that's probably for nine months the year so that's yeah um so i'm just wondering if you know i don't think our monthly stuff is going i mean monthly rate is going to really be a disincentive so much even if it goes to 75 dollars we in this forecasting we we looked to not shake things up too much um we tried to raise permit rates uh probably five years ago we went to the downtown commission their businesses spoke out against the higher rate and uh we landed at i think they approved two dollars increase per year so we're currently in that five year where we we raise them two dollars a year it's absolutely a policy decision you can by all means uh propose raising rates higher this is a very slow careful conservative approach and i heard about some metro pass deal can you talk about that a little bit for downtown workers um let me before we get there could i just add one one thing to that one about the 75 dollars a month for the permits i mean i think it's possible to to raise it higher and that's definitely as jim said a policy decision i i would just bring up um one of the feedback and part of the outreach we're going to be doing for the month of july is really doing a lot of business outreach and part of our concern and what's come forward to the council in the past when parking rates have come up for consideration has been that concern of what that impact is both to businesses and employees who park downtown and may have financial hardships that are requiring them to park downtown for whatever reason can't take public transportation but also that concern of how difficult it is right now for some retail on some level and there is a lot of business concern that their margins are really tight and if we raise the cost of parking too high that's going to impact whether or not people are willing to come downtown and shop so it is a balance that ultimately it is a parking decision but we're trying to balance these as we recommend um initial rates for you to consider let me let me also just interject uh chris that there's a speaker that's going to be up next that's going to talk about some of those transportation programs so i i think maybe that's way and if there's further questions we can go there all right so if there's no other questions up here well i'm going to go to public comment we have before we go to the those that are seated four people contacted me in advance and requested additional time each of these four individuals are representing groups and they'll have four minutes and i'll just tell you the order up front then i'll call you but it's going to be dana begshaw on behalf of bus by choice then it'll be rick longinati on behalf of the campaign for sensible transportation then erin brandt on behalf of the friends of the santa cruz public library and then gene brought brocklebank on behalf of don't bury the library so we're going to start up as i mentioned with dana begshaw on behalf of bus by choice so um we'll give you a little moment to set up okay right hello you have four minutes thank you ready to go i am all right we are so i want to offer to you a little to explore the model from boulder colorado can you use the mic ma'am the mic please can you speak into the mic we heard she heard okay boulder colorado we want to explore that as a model that maybe we can learn something from it they are similar to us and that they're located uh near a metropolitan area like we are they have a university on the edge of their town they have a current population of a hundred thousand which is a little more than we but you know still considered a um a small city and look at this in 1991 the boulder leaders decided to make transit a priority in their town at that time their population was 83 500 they went to the public and didn't ask them you know try to meet them where they are but they asked them what can we do to encourage you to use the transit system and they gave them uh what they wanted and they wanted something that was fun that was exciting to ride so they came up with an entirely new bus system and with um routes that were had names and not numbers and they were just people friendly and it reminds me of our wonderful jump bikes they're you know they're fun they're bright red tomato red they say jump if they invite people to ride and that's that's the kind of thing that we and how many of you have seen the metros buses with the little banana slugs peeking up the windows things like that you know they just make it fun and inviting but that's not enough it's also much more economical so um boulder has come up with um eco passes similar to our metro cruise passes see i've got one right here all you have to do is tap and go and it cuts down on um the boarding time they're a great device and what they have done is they have offered these as we are talking about doing free metro passes to the employees of the businesses in town so and they're financed by TDM and here's a comparison of the these this model split that we've been talking about now i know my numbers are a little bit different from the ones that we've seen um they're based on a survey of Santa Cruz in 2017 and a survey of boulder in 2014 now what's interesting to me is that you see that the pie um claire was talking about walking biking working at home in both boulder and Santa Cruz they take about up about one fourth of the pie and likewise in these years carpool was seven percent but look at the difference in the bus three percent here 20 percent there and they were able to bring down the drive alone proportion to 43 percent okay so as a result boulder transit use was up by 250 percent in a 20 year time span compared to what's happening here in the same amount a similar amount of time that it's been down 25 percent said it that is it but i mean if you can wrap i just wanted to say it's a self-sustaining system in that very last slide um okay just to wrap it up yeah just to wrap it up if i could have the last slide which is that the parking fees the parking revenues go into the transit the TDM system which encourages more access which goes back into the parking fees so it is a self-sustaining program thank you to how to lean thank you okay thank you our next speaker is standing before you it's rick longinati on behalf of the campaign for sustainable transportation and you have four minutes thank you council members um so back in back in the day when we were considering desalination um the city thought it had a shortage shortfall between you know the water supply and the water demand right in 2010 a projected water demand would be over four billion gallons like 4.2 billion gallons what turned out in 2010 it was 3.2 billion gallons that was the actual demand we had a discrepancy that amounted to more than two desal plants that was a projection a demand projection that was wildly inaccurate that demand projection was done by a professional agency that did that's what they did they did demand projections why were they off they were off because they didn't anticipate behavior change and they didn't anticipate technological differences so we need to keep that in mind what if we had a parking strategic plan for our city wouldn't that be great well the good news is that we have contracted for one two years ago the city signed a contract with nelson nygard and they're supposed to come up with a parking strategic plan for the downtown what would they say in such a plan first thing they would say was the implement demand management before you build new capacity how do we know what they would say that they said it at this joint meeting in the planning and downtown commission all three of these different consultants said the same thing what else would they say they would say use your use many demand management tools that are not currently being employed in santa cruz i'm going to go through this really quickly consider eliminating monthly parking permits or how about daily rather than monthly permits because when you buy a monthly permit that is an incentive to use it every day rather than a daily permit the ecopast danage has talked about the ecopast new development required to provide transit passes make car sharing easy discounts for uber and lift and this is important reform of parking requirements needs to be a priority you saw a chart from staff that projects a parking deficit in future years and that's because of three things one is they're not considering that we're going to change our policy we're going to have the same policies why would we have the same policies when our parking code needs reform and actually you heard last week that that's what the recommendations of the housing blueprint committee are to change parking requirements so why would we have projections that depend on our old requirements we would require unbundled parking this is a massive incentive to not own a car i i want to ask you something i want to ask you to explain to me how new housing downtown would result in any impact on daytime parking use in our parking structures if we have unbundled parking and we give out for whatever amount of money residential parking permits why would we allow those residential parking permits to be good for the hours of the day when the garages are most impacted we wouldn't that wouldn't be smart policy so if we're going to have projections let's do the smart policy first and then do the projections after that so again these are the these are professionals these are consulting firms that have told the city look you do this first that is the best practice confirmed by urban planners all over the country to do something different makes us an outlier now you all got a letter from adam miller ball who's an expert on parking he's recognized across the world having done a study of san san francisco parking i don't want Santa Cruz to end up in an article on parking about how the wrong way to go about supplying parking demand thank you thank you mr longinati i'm just going to ask also for those of you that have signs and if you could keep them lower so that people that might be in front of you if you're there if you're in the back of the wall fine but if if you keep them lower so that you're not blocking people in the back please thank you and then um next up um we have um erin brant on behalf of the friends of the santa cruz public library hello my name is erin brant i'm the current president of the board for the friends of the santa cruz public libraries i'm here to talk specifically about libraries today we were a major part of helping to get measure s uh passed and we knew at that time that it would not supply the necessary funds that all 10 branches of the library's need thankfully it was passed and we do have these these monies available to help improve our libraries the delac commission for all the wonderful work they did they came and spoke to us and they showed us what options they were entertaining our board talked amongst ourselves about what we thought was appropriate what we felt would be best for the libraries and for the community and then we reached out to all of our volunteers and to all of the individuals that we call friends that donate their money and their time to help support our community and the libraries we feel that libraries are a lifelong learning institution that help to serve the community and to improve it we feel they need to be flexible in their use of space we feel that every single branch is going to face constraints no matter what their options are on the table due to inflation and just generally how money and economics work when we had a chance to talk about all four options that were presented to us we quickly ruled out options c and d because there's not enough money available for those options and do we think that we can go out into the community and fundraise for effectively close to double the cost in many situations we took a look at remodeling the library we've been working having our meetings out out in that library for a long time we run a used bookstore out of the big the front center of it we're very familiar with the ins and outs and the maintenance needs that it has and we're not experts in this we did rely upon the delac and all of the people that they contacted we determined that their knowledge in this institute or in this situation on what was required to remodel the library was sufficient for our purposes and we felt that option a could effectively be crossed off of the off of the table what we're left with is option b building a brand new library during all of this we did not entertain any other option beyond a library we know that it's a mixed use facility and we're leaving it up to everyone else to decide what the other mixed uses are for our purpose and goal is to advocate and fundraise for the library system and we feel that this is a fantastic opportunity that our community has and the last thing that we'd like to see happen is have this slip away and not provide the opportunities that pretty much everyone us everyone here in this room has had growing up having wonderful libraries to go to it is a fact that our libraries are incredibly old and they will not serve the needs of this community going forward something absolutely has to be done I'm a homeowner I've remodeled some places in my house I know that if I want to continue to remodel it it's just going to get more prohibitively expensive and it's just not going to work out for me in the long run our official position as the friends of the Santa Cruz public libraries is we wholeheartedly support option b and we would love for you to adopt that option and move forward thank you thank you our our last group speaker is gene brockelbeck on behalf of don't bury the library do you have four minutes no I need to hear my name is Michael Lewis gene brockelbeck we're friends of the Santa Cruz public libraries we have written many checks over many years and we don't agree with the board on their decision we also walked here tonight two miles from home first to come to dinner a couple blocks away and to be at this meeting and we're going to walk home after the meeting and I'm 73 more than 73 and Michael's almost 69 so you can walk in this town and be okay you don't need parking we're on here on behalf of hundreds of Santa Cruz city and county residents to ask the downtown library be retained in its current location renovated renewed and revitalized right where our downtown library has stood for 115 years voters who passed measure s never had a clue not one clue when they were voting that they were voting for a new downtown library in a new parking structure that was not found anywhere in the 13 page ballot language of measure s imagine residents surprised then to learn that our existing library was to be abandoned rather than upgraded and modernized fixing years years of deferred maintenance it's not just that the building is old it wasn't taken care of nor was the public informed that the 67 million they would tax themselves for plus interest was not going to be enough we've heard that from two people tonight the voters didn't think that they were voting for something that wasn't could be enough to do what they wanted for their libraries most people in the room do not know that this proposed project came from the city public works director and the county's library director and was resented to council a year and a half ago without any prior input from the public as to whether that was okay with residents in addition to the unfortunate beginning of this process consider some of the following several requirements of the city's official rfq were not met by either the architect or the downtown library advisory committee public engagement during the committee's work sessions was minimal and largely ignored at the only community meeting held by the committee six months after it began and just 10 days before it made its final recommendation the public at that meeting overwhelmingly opposed moving the downtown library into parking garage now it's notable that the report that you have before you does not include the transcribed comments from that meeting they were deliberately left out otherwise you would know that the only community meeting in that whole process the people who showed up were overwhelmingly opposed to moving the library into a parking structure i've got not very much time left here oh pardon me um and i'm not going to get to everything i wanted to say but let me just fast forward we've called for an independent study of what can be accomplished with renovation on the current site versus a newly built library we've even suggested a creative nationwide contest geared toward design proposal build proposals yesterday you all received our five solid recommendations for a smart renovation now let's consider these words from our mayor spoken just six months ago and he was speaking if i may both conservatively and progressively when he said we should show our respect for the past by doing a better job of taking care of what we have we don't just start over from scratch throwing throwing away everything from our past instead we renew we revitalize we transform i'm quoting the mayor okay let's uncouple the library from the parking garage and demonstrate that a 30 23 million dollar renovation of the existing downtown library can result it can in a 21st century library of 44 000 square feet with public art with resources for everyone in our community thank you very much thank you thank you miss brockelbank thank you for your comments thank you okay now we're going to get back to thank you so next we're going to get again hey can you put your signs down that was uh thank you for following those thank you sir i see in the back i see the sign yeah so if you would please uh line up for those who would like to speak at this public art public art at this at this public comment portion of the meeting um you'll you'll each have two minutes for those that are willing let me first get a show of hands of who plans to speak on this item and if i could ask a council member to give a give account just we get some numbers six yeah please keep your hands up those that are those that are interested in speaking on this item please raise your hand as public comment we see you got you no 16 17 i kind of get like 20 ish okay all right so there's about 20 people so i'd like you to those that um are standing up on this side are prepared to speak you'll have two minutes and uh you can begin ma'am you want to go first okay the number the number is going on take it away yeah jackie griffith i'm going to speak to something as your original energy advisory um member that's has not been brought up tonight uh there's a in the just in the last week the rate of ice melting in the Antarctic has tripled in the last i think it's eight years it might be 15 years and the amount of permafrost that is thawing letting out huge amounts of methane which is 16 times worse than co2 at raising things means that we are going to have uh ocean rise now the earlier maps from like i think 2010 2012 showed that by 2030 we would begin to possibly in our winter storms have um so much more water coming in and a higher level underneath our areas that were already a problem before and that it was going to come in and it would not go out as fast that the rate to come back out would be might take weeks or months to come back out and that it would begin to impact even our um sewage treatment plant and that we have so what i'm saying i don't know okay is that we have major things that we are going to have to do to take care of the very basic necessities and we do not really stand to put 2.9 million into something promised for over 30 years plus i thought that in these wonderful proposed um that they they only allowed five percent interest and that's when i when i was a young person the interest rates were 16 and 18 percent a year and we also just did this thing with china you know with trump thinks that's 400 billion dollars a year we're going to have higher costs across the board thank you for thank you next speaker please hi there dipper taylor uh two quick points and then the library regardless of what you guys think i do not find this town pedestrian friendly i walk a lot there's a lot that you could do to make it a better for those of us who walk mr crone when you go about charging a great deal for parking which is what you want to do to keep us from driving our cars you're going to have two results people with money won't blink and the rest of us are going to have to sit around and decide whether we're going to go downtown or not so the library i'm not happy with this plan i went to uh some of those meetings it felt to me i had been hearing rumblings about putting the library in the metro building putting the library and the parking structure long before the committee started to meet i never felt that this was anything but predetermined and guided i felt that the numbers i saw being presented didn't entirely make sense so i'm going to leave you with just one question which is why is it that it would if you were to tear down the current building and completely rebuild it it's going to cost you almost twice as much as to put it in the parking structure because that was the numbers that you showed right up there that does not make sense to me and i think it needs to be justified i didn't have faith in the numbers when i saw them and that just kind of cemented it for me thank you thank you next speaker my name is sofia brumba i am going into senior year at santa cruz high school as i enter this wonderful community as a young adult i would like to know that i have a 21st century library that is able to support me now and in the future this is why i'm in complete support of the relocation of the library so this is a yes on option b and ask you to please listen to the library committee thank you thank you next speaker please hello my name is aliyah glatt and i'm 14 going into my sophomore year i was born in santa cruz and i've lived here all my life i was really excited when i heard that the library downtown might be redone with enough space to have a teen room my friends and i meet downtown for first fridays and we usually meet at marines it would be much nicer if we can meet it as safe and welcoming teen space at the downtown library right now there's no space for us to be inside the library and most importantly it just doesn't feel like a safe place i get scared walking into the library even just to return a book also i wouldn't choose the library if i had homework or a group project which is kind of ridiculous i hope that the city can provide a great place for the teens of santa cruz to meet up study hang out read books and most importantly to feel safe thank you thank you next speaker hi debbie bolter i love the library i use it often i'm in favor of a new library but i am opposed to the garage and i feel like it was a bait and switch when i voted and regarding the computed the changes in revenue we saw the slide that showed the computed changes in revenue but not the reduction in demand that those changes in revenue would cause and i'm referring as you probably know to adam millard ball's research and i attended the lecture that he gave at the police community room when he said that a in seattle and portland parking demand dropped 2.7 percent for every 10 percent increase in price until today i didn't know what the projected increases in price were but my quick calculations which are just quick showed that um that the decrease in demand would free up more spaces than you would gain than the 234 spaces gate so it doesn't make financial sense um additionally the um the drive alone rate the 35 drive alone rate uh that said we had to be down to 35 percent assumed that cars would need to park uh where the they delivered the person uh what i'm hearing is when we have autonomous cars we can send the cars wherever we want and we don't have to necessarily park them downtown we can park them anywhere we want um so uh i would like to see those calculations figured into the demand projections and the revenue changes and the reduction in command in demand so um let's get a new library but let's not do it with the garage and let's uncouple those projects thank you thank you next speaker please you could step up go right ahead hi i'm probably going to need about three minutes you only get two minutes sorry ma'am i represent a group um i'll just tell you you could pause please um groups will request additional time in advance of the meeting but i you have two minutes okay i didn't know that my name is lani belcher and i'm writing to you regarding the proposed development of parking lot four oh at the corners of lincoln calf carton cedars i'm the show promoter for the downtown santa cruz antique fair which for the past 15 years has been held on the second sunday of each month on the 100 block of lincoln street in the portion of parking lot four that abuts lincoln my concern is that the antique fair would be displaced and have to move which would be very devastating to the show this would be the fourth move we had to endure in 25 years since the show show's inception in 1993 on pacific avenue the original antique fair was started in that year as a means of bringing more people downtown since then the show has grown to become a downtown santa cruz tradition with a large amount of local supporters as well as many outer towners who come to visit the show and also patronize other merchants as with any business location is the utmost importance and after being involved with the fair since the beginning i know the location we have now is by far the absolute best visibility and accessibility from pacific is crucial for our continued success therefore my request would be should the proposal go forward which i'm definitely opposed to on so many levels quote unquote that we'd be able to retain our lincoln street location with space for 25 vendors we'd be allowed to use parking lot eight instead of four with the same number of vendors and at a price that has commensurate with our present cost since the show was brought back to lincoln and excuse me 2003 our parking meter fees have gone up 100% originally being free on sunday then going all the way up to a dollar for all the meters in addition in addition our cost to close the street has doubled as well therefore keeping the present cost for use of lincoln and the parking lot is critical to the uh to preserve the show there is concern that parking lot deficiency fees meter fees road closed fees and other parking related fees such as permits would most assuredly go up for our show other businesses events or anyone else using downtown parking to help fund the parking garage you can you can wrap up if you want to finish but i mean not for an extra minute though most of my vendors are 55 years and older and virtually all of them depend on the money they make at the show for either part of or supplement to their income space rents have to be affordable with not a lot of room to increase or the cost is prohibitive in closing i hope you will consider my request and continue to support the downtown antique fair there are a few monthly thank you ma'am thank you thank you as a third generation sanitary is i'm very proud to be affiliated with the show thank you very much next speaker next speaker my name is carol fuller and i am a long time volunteer for the library currently i'm volunteering out at the capitola mall at the shop out there for the capitola library but i also was a member of the measure s campaign to raise the funds for a new library and just to clarify for people who don't know the measure actually promised um felton and capitola new libraries and the rest of us it was a somewhat amorphous because without money you don't start a long planning process so i recently i've been watching the hubbub over the parking structure surrounding the proposal for a while and i suddenly woke up one day and realized that my favorite cafe downtown is inside a park parking structure i never realized that the cafe limelight was inside a parking structure so i mean anyway i have friends that you know i normally agree with on a lot of things who are not happy about the park parking structure aspect of this and when i pursued it with them and almost always come down to what i regard as totally wishful thinking that if you don't build parking for people they will get out of their cars and they will get here some other way i live in the band king neighborhood i used to often walk down in fact i walked to work i worked on pacific avenue quite often not every day but i did and um i no longer can do that i'm now 75 and good luck with anybody who still has good feet at 75 but i cannot do that kind of thing i do sometimes take the bus downtown trying to be a good citizen and do an errand or two or go to a movie in the daytime i would not do that at night for one thing my safety on my feet you know my balance is a little impaired and also sometimes you are going to i can't be on my feet quite that long on concrete but i have to say that all the hubbub about the parking i mean a lot of what we're talking about are downtown city staff as you know not recognizing the reality of people's lives that they have errands on the way home picking up children from childcare etc thank you next speaker please very friendly greetings i'm jack nelson and my friend here is going to queue up a couple slides which is i appreciate so basically these slides i heard mention of special events and so we had ucse graduation uh just on saturday and so there's a special event doing a reality check downtown downtown's crawling with people uh here's is this overflowing parking here's some top decks of parking garages this is the reality check on current parking demand doesn't boy look at that pack full of cars there uh i well i don't i don't see it so so this is just a reality check um so i think the city's data purporting uh over capacity is off the mark and i think we can do better than just building more parking garage capacity beyond that i'd i'd like to um say that i'm a a long time library patron downtown i'm doing a lot of reading researching and writing about our human future currently so i have over 20 items checked out from the library and i'm reading a book about our human future which has a chapter in it titled don't even think about it the invisible force field of climate silence and in there it talks about well why are we not talking more about saving ourselves from ourselves and so there's actually a growing field of social scientist study uh which is the sociology of ignorance which explores the field of non knowledge which is information that is deliberately not acquired because it is considered too sensitive dangerous or taboo to produce so what i noticed in listening to the presentations tonight was that how we're going to fix climate wasn't in there but instead we're going to build more of the infrastructure that is causing climate change this plan for a new parking garage i see as a plan to bring seawater through those double doors there thank you sir next speaker please check out the april issue of scientific american arctic meltdown thank you very much good evening thank you for listening to all of us um i have a couple ideas and they're not new but um it's my turn and i'm gonna let you have it i think we need more bus passes for city employees uh and downtown employees that would make a better right ridership and more money and our metro will improve with more ridership um i think we need to take steps to initiate a campaign to get single occupancy vehicle rates down and this doing more and really having a campaign could alleviate the need for this structure making developers responsible to provide their own parking for residences and hotels will also ease the push for this garage transportation demand management must be considered first i believe we need to wait for the nelson niger two-year strategic plant and implement the recommendations first before building a garage also protections of the trees at lincoln and cedar are in that parking lot is an important consideration as a retired teacher i want to talk a minute about the library i believe putting a library in a garage is as my neighbor said quote disrespectful to book lovers a library is a sacred place of learning and contemplation santa cruz yes deserves something better it deserves a magnificent library facility we need to defer this gratification until we have the ample funds to build the library this community deserves thank you very much thank you next speaker please my name is john hall and i love libraries but i think that the proposal to have a parking garage with the library underneath it is extremely ill conceived for the dynamism of this city this has the potential to be a great city but uh we need some city planning that is much much smarter than we're seeing with this proposal it is abysmal not only are you taking away uh the library facility you're destroying the location of the um farmer's market let me just make two comparisons one to davis california another two san luis obispo davis has a vibrant downtown farmer's market that is draws i literally 500 pe