I will now call the March 10th, 2020 regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors to order. Will the clerk please call the roll. Supervisor Leopold. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. McPherson. Here. And Chair Caput. Here. And Supervisor Leopold. Chair, today when we do the moment of silence, I would ask people to think about the recent passing of someone who's not normally associated with Santa Cruz, but former San Jose Mayor Susan Hammer. She was a part-time resident here in Santa Cruz. She was an amazing mayor in San Jose who championed diversity in the arts, did amazing interventions around gangs. And I got a chance to work with her when she served on the UCSC Foundation Board where she worked to build a student scholarship. She was a great leader and she'll be sorely missed. Okay. So we'll do a moment of prayer or silent reflection and then followed by the Pledge of Allegiance. United States of America. And the degree of public support which stands one nation under God. Turn this over for a moment to Carlos Palacios. Yes, Chair Caput and members of the board and community. I wanted to announce first of all that in compliance with the guidance from the health services agency, we've done a couple of modifications to our board meeting. Number one, we've made available an overflow room in the new community room in the basement. So in the event, we're trying to avoid crowds of more than 50 people. So we're asking that if people want to they can go to the community room downstairs and they will actually can, we'll be live streamed the meeting and also we'll be allowed to make public comment from there as well. So if anyone felt more comfortable down there, it is available right now and we will take public comment from there that's being live streamed and it'll come over the television. We've also made available a comment via the web through the agenda management system and there's instructions on our webpage where the agenda is on how to do that. And we will actually read those comments during the meeting if somebody wanted to participate remotely in the meeting. And I'll repeat that this afternoon when we go into our public hearing as well. Okay. In terms of revisions and corrections, we have on the regular agenda, number five, there's additional materials. There's an attachment instructions for submitting agenda comments that's been added. On number seven, there's a correction. The item should read consider report on the existence of a local health emergency, adopt the resolution ratifying and extending the direct relation of local health emergency by the county health officer due to the imminent threat to public health from the novel coronavirus COVID-19, adopt resolution proclaiming the existence of a local emergency related to COVID-19 and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative office. There's also additional materials of revised attachment B packet page 22. On the consent agenda item 42, there's additional materials, revised memo packet page 970. On a item number 48, there's additional materials, revised memo packet page 1081. And then item 55, staff requests that this item be deleted and deferred until March 24th, 2020. That's item number 55. That concludes the corrections to the agenda. Thank you. Do any board members wish to pull or consent items to the regular agenda? We have none. Okay. And then we'll have public comment. Now is the opportunity for members of the public to address the board on topics that are on today's agenda, consent items, closed session agenda, and on topics that are not on the agenda but are within the jurisdiction of the board. If you cannot stay later to speak on regular agenda items, you may address the board at this time. Thank you very much. Good morning. My name's Olivia Martinez. I'm the lead internal organizer for the Santa Cruz County. And I'm here to talk about the Corona virus. And I want to thank the county and personnel for taking a proactive approach with the Corona virus. I know we're having a meeting this week to talk about the specific of departments and what they're doing. Some of the departments have been more proactive than others but I think they're following the strong recommendations from the CEO and from personnel. So that's really good. Our members have a lot of concerns and have a lot of fears around this. And the more we work in collaboration and have good communication with our members, I think that's going to be very useful for both of us. So I really want to thank Ajita Patel for working with us. And hopefully we get all the materials that we need for the clinics. I think the clinics are very nervous since they are the first, right? They're health providers that are working directly with the public. And so I'm hoping that we can get everything by this week. So thank you very much. Just wanted to give you an update. Thank you. Good morning, Gail McNulty. I'm a mother in the county and I also work for Save Our Shores. We had planned a plastics rally this morning in support of bold single-use plastics reform, which I know you'll be looking at in April. We canceled due to COVID-19. So that's not happening today, but I do have a few comments to share in regard to plastic legislation. I also would like to make sure that you're aware of the recent resolution passed by the Santa Cruz County School Board following the lead of San Diego, supporting youth climate activism in our county, including walkouts should students choose to leave them, recognizing the urgency of the climate situation. So I'm going to read a bit from a recent, well, this month's Rolling Stone Magazine. Planet plastic, how big oil and big soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. Every human on earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air. According to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastic, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Over the past 70 years, we've gotten hooked on disposable goods in packaging. As plastics became the lifeblood of the American culture of speed, convenience, and disposability that has conquered the globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen dinners. It's the material of childhood from Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks our e-commerce purchases and is woven into our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece. Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute and 500 billion plastic bags a year, including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash. But the world's plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into our oceans, the equivalent of a dump truck every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmlands, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. We've found plastic everywhere we've looked. It's in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, the middle of the Pacific, the bottom of our Monterey Bay Sanctuary. It's in the Pyrenees and the Rockies, and it's settling out of the air. It's raining down on us. More than half the plastic now on earth has been created since 2002, and plastic pollution is on pace to double by 2030. At its root, the global plastics crisis is a product of our addiction to fossil fuels, but big plastic isn't a single entity. It's a corporate supergroup. Big oil meets big soda with a puff of tobacco, responsible for trillions of environmental damage, trillions of plastics, or cigarette butts in the environment each year. We hope you will act extremely boldly, not just with what you're planning to look at next month, but with true measures that can actually protect our children's future. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Becky Steinbruner. I ran for County Supervisor in the Second District, and I'm here to congratulate you, Supervisor Friend, on your victory, but I'm also here to speak for the one in three people who did not vote for you.  I wanna make it clear. I wanna bring to you publicly the concerns and the wishes of all of those constituents that I spoke with during the campaign. They want you here to represent them, to be responsive. It is upsetting to see you multiply going to be on the Larry King Show as a political commentator, to go on Fox News when your constituents are asking for your help in their neighborhoods with crumbling rural roads, poor fire evacuation routes, insurance policies being canceled, and speeding that will not stop. Placing a dummy share of car in La Selva Beach has done nothing to help those people. They need your help, they need you to be here, paying attention to them, paying attention to us, listening to us and responding with true solutions. We want you to hold constituent hours that are at a time when working people can attend. Wednesday mornings from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. doesn't cut it. You've got to be more accessible to the people who are working hard to stay in this county and to have their businesses in this county. You've got to start putting out a newsletter, such as what Supervisor Leopold does, not just Facebook and Tweets, because many of your constituents do not go on Facebook. They do not use Twitter and all of those social media. They also are looking at Nextdoor. They also look just like emails, such as what Supervisor Leopold does. And we want regular town hall meetings, not before the Chamber of Commerce, not before the paid memberships of the C. Cliff Improvement Association and the Rio Del Mar Improvement Association with the people, the general public. We need to have our voices heard. We need to know that you're listening. And right now, one in three people does not feel that way. I want you to start recusing yourself from any decisions this board makes regarding wireless technology. Because of your conflict of interest, sitting on the board of Yardham Technology and Pred Bull, I ask that with great respect, because oftentimes I've seen you have not and you do have a conflict of interest that needs to be publicly recognized. So I want to also ask that you help the people in the estates drive to address the safety issues they have with their children. They've come here many times asking for your help. You need to help them. Thank you and congratulations. Mr. Chair, I don't easily say too much about this. This is not a campaign platform and that election's over. You can address the issues of the day pointed directly, but I think the vote has been done. It's said and done. Let's move on. Let's don't go back. Gee, I thought we had freedom of speech here. And when people can't, they can speak their three minutes. Thank you. And thank you, Becky. I don't want to use your time, but I had to do that because he does not respond to my emails. Thank you. Doesn't respond to my request either regarding wireless technology dangers. You know, without our right to health, we basically have no rights. And wireless microwave systems endanger our health ubiquitously from the cell phones at cell towers, the antennas, the 5G on earth and in space, the 4G on the utility poles all over. And it's profitable for corporations and you're making some money from yard arm. Supervisor friend, I do feel there's a conflict of interest here and in all good democratic process. I think it is required that you recruit yourself from wireless decisions. Today's the, I think it's the ninth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. These nuclear power plants emit huge amounts of radiation. And you know, we were told how nuclear energy is safe and clean and so inexpensive you could hardly pay anything. And I also think to the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island where Supervisor Leopold, you've said publicly when you had to be evacuated in 1979, I think at the age of 14, you said this was a formative political experience of life, this evacuation and that you spoke at an event on fracking and you rightly praised ourselves for being the first county in the state to ban fracking. I think we need to be in the leadership of banning wireless microwave technology as well. I have an article by Amy Worthington from 2007, The Idaho Observer and it's called The Radiation Poisoning of America. Very well substantiated. She refers to cell towers as nuclear bombs on poles and describes how the radiation, the non-ionizing radiation and the ionizing radiation have similar hellacious health impacts. And I'm going to leave the article for you, but let's talk about real health threats and remove those threats like wireless radiation. Thank you. Thanks, Marilyn. And next, is there any, do you want to call on the committee? Yes, I know I'm going to do that. Anyone from the public to address the board from the community room? And it looks like we have a long line there, huh? Yes, Chair Caput. Okay, go ahead. Good morning, Chair Caput. Good morning, members of the board. My name is Mytrea Maziarz and I live in the city of Santa Cruz and I'm also an employee in ISD. I was too shy at the employee awards to say anything, but I wanted to take this opportunity since we're also using this new facility here to give some thanks to our ISD management, Kevin Boling, our director, assistant directors, Tammy Weigel and TD McCann and my supervisor, Stacy Lake. And we got the gold for the general government category. So yeah, it was a real honor after almost working here 20 years. This is my third award. I got a couple of bronzes last time, so it's nice to be recognized and it's nice to have such supportive management. And of course, we love our coworkers in planning and we enjoy working with them. So thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. The clerk doesn't, the clerk will read it. We have someone else to come here. That's fine. Thank you. I didn't see you. Good morning. My name is Dennis Varney. I live in Aptos, California, on Via Palo Alto. And I'm here just to, as a citizen, a concern of what's gonna happen today on your vote of the Coastal Commission's ability to take over our property on the coast. So I'm opposed to the Coastal Commission and the Planning Commission going ahead with this proposition that it's gonna be in front of you today. That's my only comment. Thank you. Do I need to say the clerk will read into the record any comments from the community room? Thank you, Mr. Chair. There have been no live comments received on this item. Okay, that's fine. And that concludes public comment. The next item is our consent agenda. And I'll ask each member to comment on the consent agenda if they wish to, Supervisor Leopold. Good morning, Chair. First of all, I would like to offer my congratulations to my colleagues, Supervisor Friend and Supervisor McPherson on their successful elections. And I am grateful for the people who showed support for me in this most recent election. And more importantly, to see as many people as they did come out and participate in the election process where a stronger community when people become civically engaged. Just on today's agenda, just a couple items I'd like to comment on. On item number 35, I wanna thank the probation staff for this thoughtful use of the Prop 47 implementation funds. I think these are good uses of these resources and we'll make a difference in our community. On item number 43, the human services, this grant in the amount of $104,000 to be used for this emergency childcare bridge program services seems like an excellent use of funds. And I appreciate the effort to work with the County Office of Education to make this happen. Child care is definitely an issue that this board cares about. And that's it. Okay, thank you. Supervisor Friend. And nothing to comment on. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome. And Supervisor McPherson. Thank you. I think I can speak for our voiceless colleague over here. He's a little laryngitis, but I wanna express my support for Supervisor Coonerty's efforts to request more time for public input on the Coastery's Cotone property. It's a huge undertaking and it deserves more time. And I think it's gonna, the community will benefit if we have additional consideration on that. On item number 40, the deferral of the IV drug use report or needle exchange program. I understand under the coronavirus issue that we have a lot of health related concerns. And so this is going to be delayed, but I do understand the reasons why and I'm looking forward to discussing this item in the near future. On items 45, 48 and 52, these are all issues about public works type projects up in the Santa Rosa Valley, including water, sewage and transportation. I really wanna thank the public works department and everyone involved planning for addressing these issues that are very, very important for the Santa Rosa Valley. It's a really a quality of life type of a situation up there. And I really appreciate the efforts of our public works department in planning and environmental health to get these projects moving. Thank you. Thank you. And then I would comment, but I'll wait until later because we're gonna have on item seven comments on the coronavirus situation we have not only locally, but nationally. So anyway, I'll wait until that point. Thank you. Do we have a motion? I move the consent agenda. Yeah. We'll first and we have a second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any objection? None. Passes unanimously. We'll now turn to the regular agenda and that would be item seven. Report on the existence of a local health emergency, adopt resolutions ratifying and extending declaration of local health emergency by the county health officer due to the imminent threat to public health from the novel coronavirus. Also known as COVID-19, adopt resolution ratifying proclamation of a local emergency related to the coronavirus and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative office. Okay. Thank you. How are you? How are you? I'm here and glad to be here. Thank you. Okay. Good morning, chair Caput, honorable board of supervisors. My name is Mimi Hall. I'm the health services agency director for County of Santa Cruz and I appreciate your time and attention this morning. It's, this is a very important topic and I wanted to take just a few moments to provide the board and the public with the update of the Santa Cruz County situation in light of the broader situation this morning. So as we all know, this is a global matter and in a very short amount of time from the end of December till today in a number of weeks, we've gone from the emergence of a new disease to what we have now is over 110,000 cases confirmed in the globe around the globe. You can see that COVID-19 is quite widespread. These red circles show you where there are areas of outbreaks and this is quickly becoming what we believe will be soon identified as a pandemic. So in terms of what's happening in Santa Cruz County, we do have two confirmed cases to date. I'd like to remind everybody that this is very emergent. We learned of our first case on Friday evening and we learned of our second case. I think it was yesterday. All the days are kind of smushing together for me because I have a very, I'm not very aware of time, but I believe our second case was over this weekend and what we knew after our very first case is that even before our first case, we've been preparing for this and thinking about what actions we would take as a government and for our public, should we have a case in our community? And so in California, there are 114 cases. So we have two of those locally. And as you may know, we had two deaths in California. One was in Placer County and one was in Santa Clara County. I will say that the reason we are here declaring a local emergency, you can see the timeline right there is that we have to be in a position as a government where we're well prepared to deploy resources to ask for mutual aid and to also get some kind of reimbursement from the federal and state government in our actions to respond to this emergency. You can see that our health officer declared a local health emergency last week and this was, I believe it was a day or two, maybe a few days before we learned of our first case. And I'm grateful for those actions and I'm also grateful that the board has decided is entertaining also declaring a local general emergency. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we're doing in Santa Cruz County and what we're doing in the local public health department, which is our public health division. So we are responsible for monitoring surveillance, case contact investigation, lab testing, communication, emergency response, working with our healthcare system. What we have been doing is convening local calls for our healthcare system partners. So Tuesday mornings, 7.30 a.m. before providers have to see patients, we have a local healthcare partner call. The first 10 minutes of that call is spent giving the latest updates on lab testing, guidance on assessment, all kinds of things, because this is a quickly changing situation. And then we allow the remainder of the call, providers, administrators from the healthcare system to ask us questions on implementation. We also have Tuesday morning 8 a.m. partner calls and they're robustly attended. I heard that we reached maximum capacity this morning. So we'll think about how to provide more access for our community partners, but many partners join that from fire to education, to senior services, businesses, non-profits, you name it. And it's our way of getting real-time good information and guidance out to our community partners as soon as possible. We do have our department operations center open. We use the incident command system that's used at the local, state and federal level. And we provide our guidance and information based on consultation with California Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As soon as we had our first case, we began consultation with the CDC and CDPH. One of the things that we're doing quickly is I don't know what people think about how we are resourced, but we're a very small public health department. It's for the last seven weeks our communicable disease team has been on overdrive in planning and preparedness, and now we're in response mode. So we are in the process of gaining extra help by hiring two additional epidemiologists. We're seeking a way to have some more dedicated time for our deputy health officer because our health officer, I don't think she's had a day off in three weeks, but we know that we, this will be a longer drawn out response and we wanna make sure that we have the resources to prepare for it. This is one of our meetings last week in our department operation center. So our department operation center is it's really a table we're planning operations, resource requests, communications. There are chiefs to each one of those and we all come together. We have our morning calls with community health system partners there. I just wanted to assure that even though the public has found out about these two cases just over this weekend, for us, we've been working for several weeks in preparation. The most important thing I wanna leave with you all today in this information has also been shared with all of our city partners and our community partners is there are five key messages that are very, very important. The first key message is, I'll name them all social distancing, prevention and preparedness, vulnerable populations, school and workplace actions and just staying home when you're sick. So for social distancing, you may all know that we have released guidance yesterday regarding social distancing. It's on our website and this is county guidance from the local health department, which is the official health jurisdiction for Santa Cruz County. We're asking the entire community to comply. So the guidelines that you will find online and our general social distancing guidelines for the general public as well as organizations and then furthermore, there are workplace guidelines. We're calling these interim guidelines because they're in place for a period of two weeks until March 22nd. It's very, very important that people heed these guidelines and do the best that they can in their home, their neighborhood, their faith community and their workplace to comply. So what we have right now is we have a situation where we have two cases that are travel related. Because of the circumstances and our proximity to Santa Clara County where there's a rather large outbreak, we have been advised by California Department of Health and CDC to launch our response as if we have community spread, even though we don't have confirmation yet. And so that's what we're doing. So these guidelines are intended and I appreciate the CAO's office on the board's actions in altering our meeting here today. These guidelines are intended to ensure that across our entire community, we reduce any opportunity for transmission. And the period of two weeks is the period of time that we would typically monitor anyone who has potential exposure to COVID-19. And I know it's difficult. It may have many, many impacts on families, on the local economy. I hope that the federal and state government will have some measures to alleviate those concerns, but our first and primary concern right now is protecting our community. So preparedness and prevention. We are asking everybody to be ready. Don't wait for government or your employer or someone to come in and tell you what to do. There's a lot of information out there. I encourage the public to learn about what they can do to prepare their household for working from home, having your workplace closed down, maybe having your children out of school for an extended period of time. Probably one of the most important key messages is our vulnerable populations. So some of you may know that there's no treatment for COVID-19 and there's no vaccine. We don't anticipate one to be available for quite some time, at least a year, maybe more. So similar to when we had H1N1, which was our last pandemic, what we do and every action that we take as individuals protects the people who have less ability. So in this case, our vulnerable populations are those who are older. If you're older and or you don't have to be older, you have any kind of underlying health condition like harder lung disease, diabetes, things like that. You are at more risk for serious complications and perhaps even death. So what we're doing through social distancing is we're keeping the amount of circulating virus in our community really, really low so that those people who may not have a choice and who are more at risk are protected. Schools and workplaces. There is school and workplace guidance that's released by ourselves in California Department of Public Health. We are asking everybody to comply with that guidance. The one thing that I want to let everyone know as a precursor is if we have a positive case in one of our schools, our health officer will recommend school closure. The ultimate decision is made by the school district, but we wanna take swift and quick action so that we can reduce the spread in our community. And above all, stay home when you're sick. If it's at all possible, if it's not possible, please practice really, really good hand hygiene and cough and sneeze etiquette. And if possible, if you see that someone is ill or you know that they're ill, please try to stay away from them. The resources that we have, we really work, it's really hard for people to go to multiple places. So at our website, sanacruzehealth.org slash coronavirus, we have our own interim workplace guidance and social distancing guidance. And on those documents are hyperlinks to the state and federal resources. I do wanna say right now, we're being inundated with calls from event organizers, from schools, from people who are fundraising, from people having meetings, asking us, do you think that we should not have our event? Follow the social distancing guidelines. That we are not here, we're not the social distancing police. We're asking everybody's help to comply because we don't have the bandwidth or the energy to provide that opinion to every single organization. Our opinion is everyone should follow these. So please do your best to do that. The other thing I wanna mention is that people can text COVID-19, all one word, no spaces to 211211. And this is different than the information that we've provided before. Previously it was said that it was coronavirus. So they have shortened that and it's COVID-19 to 211211. I just tried it. It's really good. You can also put in your zip code to have local information about what's happening in your community. Our community calls for community partners are Tuesdays from eight to 825. And if anyone is welcome to participate, we're gonna work on figuring out how we expand the maximum number of callers. And then if folks wanna join that call, they should email hsadoc.coordinator at sanacruzcounty.us. And that's all I have for you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Supervisor Leopold. Yes, first I wanna thank you for the presentation. I also wanna thank you and your staff for the hard work you put in already. And I know we're at the beginning that with the greater availability of testing, I'm sure we're gonna find greater prevalence here in the community. The one thing that I'm aware of and try to share with others is we have superpowers. The superpowers are not coughing into your hand, coughing into your elbow, having those safe social distance, following those guidelines, not going out when you're sick. And all the same preparations you would take if you were trying to avoid the flu. And so that gives us agency, it gives us a ability to control how this spreads. And I think we need to keep on sharing that information. I also appreciate the efforts that have been made with our local school districts. I know that you've met with the COE and the school superintendents last week to help prepare them. And I know this is an area of concern among many families in the community. So I appreciate all the different ways in which you're allowing people to learn information, the most recent information. I encourage people to use these resources because in any kind of public health emergency, good information will really be a lead to good health. And I appreciate the effort that everybody's put in. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Chair. And also thanks to Dr. Newell for her work and Mr. Hopin and Mr. Placios. I feel like the communication to the community has been very good and very strong, which is an important thing during this time. One of the things that I have taken away from the information that you've provided or the county's provided is that we're gonna need flexibility from the community at large, from employers, from schools, because there's gonna be very real health, economic and social impacts associated with this. You could see a situation where service continuity is tough to maintain. You can see a situation where economic continuity for some local families is difficult to maintain. And so we need, the county can handle on the health side, but we need a much greater community response on the economic social side. Our ask is that every individual, every family, every business, every organization, every church think outside the box about how they can help their neighbors. So for example, if one of our schools should close or a few of our schools or a whole district should close, employers who have the flexibility could think about allowing well children to be at the workplace with their parents just for a period of time. There are many, many other examples and I encourage the community to feel empowered. You don't need to wait for government to tell you to do these things. You have all of these things within your power and we're asking the whole community to come together and assist us. What's a community that has a history of natural disasters and response to natural disasters? And we can look at this in that scope of addressing what the government can and cannot provide to you in the first three, seven or 14 days, how people need to be prepared for that, how employers need to be prepared for lack of continuity, even public safety in speaking to some of the local fire districts yesterday about how they'll be triaging calls to ensure that their employees are safe and they're to respond to the most pressing needs. So it's really a, if you have a plan for yourself and you have an understanding that the community, in my opinion, at least from an economic and social sense is going to be impacted for some time as a result of this, I think it's something that we can actually come through. And that's not just the health side. That's just the other impacts that are associated with it. But I really do appreciate because I imagine all five of us are just being inundated with questions similar not just to whether events should be shut down but what people should plan for and individually do. So the degree that you can, there's nothing wrong with over communication with the community and the degree that you can provide guidelines and information, I think, and allow empower people to make these decisions for themselves and their family. It's going to be very important moving forward. Yeah, so I would emphasize that people go to our website. If you have a cell phone, text 2-1-1, 2-1-1, and encourage every single individual to become familiar with the information that will be shared with you. Thank you, Supervisor. Thanks for working all these hours. Yeah. Thank you. And Mr. Chair, I certainly repeat what has been said about the coordinated effort for our response and preparation that gets absolutely outstanding. And thank you for what you're doing and everybody that's involved in the health services agency and beyond. And I just would like to make a different point that not only this county, but other agencies who's on a conference call with the University of California president, Janet Napolitano reaching out to all the university campuses. We're going to be hearing shortly from our Metro leader. It has been taking very strident steps to make suggestions on how we should handle this in the best way and the safest way. So everybody's in on this and everybody's very much aware of it. And if you know somebody who's not, well, let them know and give them those few pointers as you can for starts and then the website. And last but not least, this is a time of high anxiety and I understand it in our community and throughout the state and the world for that matter. But remaining calm helps too because when you become anxious, it doesn't help your, I'm not a doctor, but my uncle was, but stress doesn't help. So try to be as calm as you can and find out the information. And if you don't know where to get it, call us or go to the website. Let's try to stay as calm and collected as we can under some really trying circumstances today. And I want to thank you also. I think you've pretty much summed up with our efforts are all going towards and I appreciate the fact that we are being proactive and doing all we can. I know with school kids, they bring home a lot of things that go through families and all that. I have five kids and so we tell them to of course, wash their hands and everything like that. I know my wife went out to buy some hand sanitizer and they're sold out everywhere. So what I did at my house, I don't know if it works or not, but I think it does. We have a bottle of whiskey and I just have the kids rub some whiskey on their hands.  Does that help? I'd like to make, here's my message to everyone. It's a good closing message because we recommend that there be hand sanitizer available widely. There's a shortage. There's a shortage even for businesses, employers and healthcare facilities. So good old fashioned hand washing. Most of us have access to soap and water. And I would say that when your kids come home, when anyone comes home, I have kids as well.  Frequent hand washing is the best thing. And if you're not able to wash your hands, refrain from touching your face. And the hand sanitizer shortage brings up, there are some people that are not happy because we don't have all of the supplies that we need in our healthcare facilities. We have our essential supplies across this community. So for example, N95 masks, surgical masks. So we ask people to be kind. We ask people to think about community and not blame others for a situation that pretty much nobody has control over, but trust in the fact that your medical community, your epidemiologists, your public health department is prioritizing the big picture to make sure that we protect everybody. We do not recommend that healthy people wear masks. There's a shortage of surgical masks in the nation and in the state. Reserve those for people who are sick so that they don't spread their illness, whatever it may be, to others. But these are general messages to remember, be human to each other. The reason that we're taking these actions are because in terms of social distancing and all of these prevention measures are to protect those who are more vulnerable than the vast majority of us will have an illness like a cold or a flu and get better. But there are some of us who won't and that's why it's so important to take care of our community. You bet. Thank you very much. I'll open it up to the public and if you have any comments on this subject, please come forward. Thank you. Bye, Becky. Good morning, Becky Steinbrenner from Rural Aptos. Thank you for the report. It's good to have good, clear information because that's part of the problem. There's so many different pieces of information out there that is creating concern and panic. So thank you for that. I had the good fortune of meeting with a group of rural residents, actually in Supervisor Leopold's district over the weekend as a ham radio operator and learned about a very out of the box thing that the summit mountain community is doing. The owner of the summit store has arranged and is in the process of putting into action when need be a system where people who are quarantined or are concerned for their health and don't want to go out can order food to be delivered to their home from the store using either an email or an app or something that he has worked out himself. This is the owner of the summit store working in partnership with the pastors of the four area churches who is now, those pastors are now reaching out to the community and they've got a list of volunteers who are healthy and are willing to deliver this food to the doorsteps of these people who cannot or are afraid to go out. So it's this kind of resiliency that our community is certainly capable of doing and I encourage other communities to take this kind of creative action to help out and work together with their neighbors. We'll all be fine working together and we'll do our best. So I would like to put that out and if you are in connection with any large community groups, I'd also reach out to the community emergency response teams because they are well connected in their neighborhoods. So thank you again for that report. I heard on national public radio this morning coming here, the same discussion and concerns about the economics of this. What will it mean for families whose schools are shut down and then they will need to stay with their children and cannot go to work? What will it mean for students whose schools are shut down and the schools themselves who are shut down? So the economics of this is quite staggering and I'm happy to hear that this board is considering funding from state and federal sources to help out with that. I will look forward to hearing from the Metro report how Metro and especially para crews are working to sanitize their buses to prevent spread for the vulnerable people that do use those services. And I was happy to see at the Aptos Library yesterday, they have made wipes available to all patrons so that we can wipe down the keyboards and the seats where we are all working. Thank you very much for your good work. You're welcome. Hi Marilyn. Hi, Supervisor Caput. Well, I have some thoughts on this. I noticed right off that the Trump administration allocated, I don't know how many millions or billions of dollars to the pharmaceutical industry to come up with some kind of vaccine, big money in this, regarding sanitizers I read years ago that they tend to destroy the beneficial bacteria and they're actually toxic chemicals and sanitizers, something to look up. And I think the best advice is to wash your hands with just plain old soap and water, not the sanitizers. Years ago I read an article in the Independent of England by Jeffrey Lane and he was talking about the wireless microwave technology tends to put, this is my lay person's terms, a charge on toxins and particles that are in the environment so that they stick to the lungs more. So there's this kind of interaction and synergistic effect from what I understand. Another thing that I've heard is that where this coronavirus was first discovered in China they had activated the 5G technology. So I have a question of what's the relationship to that? Does it have more to do with the 5G than the coronavirus? I don't know. I also heard there's a biochemical lab near that province of China and that was suspected that genetically engineered virus had gotten out. Lack of testing, I've heard on the news that just to test people for it, there aren't enough testing kits. So those are questions I have and also to recommend a book called The Invisible Rainbow, A History of Electricity and Life by Arthur Fürstenberg. There's a chapter in there on the great influenza of 1918, a whole chapter and what the author attributes it to is the activation during World War I of a wireless communication system that made people ill and a lot of the first outbreaks were on naval ships. It's quite a read and he makes a strong case with lots of documentation that it wasn't how viruses normally behave. Thank you. Do we have anybody in the community room that would like to speak? Mr. Chair, there are people there. They are hiding off camera and I don't think they're wishing to speak. Yeah, that's fine. There's somebody sitting in the back row but and they can hear us, I guess. I think there's someone else here. Okay. Anyway, that concludes, I'm sorry. Hi, thank you very much. My name's Tim Delaney and I'm from the summit community and congratulations on your win. I think you probably won the election, I'm assuming, correct? I came in first. Oh, cool. Right on. So anyways, I'll just get right to it. I am concerned about this virus that came out of China. And I look at it from the standpoint of on one hand, you have a socialist society over here. And on the other hand, we have a highly gullible American public. I know all of you folks are very nice and whatnot. It's wonderful, but I look at how this election went and here in the state of California, I sort of feel like, you know, I'm living in a Jojo rabbit society where the deep South, they got the message, they voted for Biden and, you know, they figured, okay, so we got a deadbeat father, a crook and a tax cheat. And on this side, we have a communist on the other side and he said, you know, forget it, we're gonna go ahead and vote for Biden. The state of California, a lot of you folks voted for Bernie Sanders. And that concerns me when you look at Wuhan, okay, the citizens of Wuhan over there, they're not very happy with their socialist government over there and they're coming in with their teams. Hey, you know, we need to like, you know, reeducate these people and get them to try to figure out how to show appreciation for the Communist Party over here and how they're dealing with this disease. So it is what it is. You know, I think everyone needs to wake up and snap out of it. You don't wanna drink from the Sinai punch pole, punch pole of Jim Jones, you know, the religious cult leader in the 70s. And you need to think about your freedom. When you're, when you have international travel and you have a disease here where we have no immunity, there's no vaccine, it spreads fairly easy. Sure, it's three to 5%, whatever, you know, for folks like myself might be 15 to 20% death rate. You know, good Lord, thank God it's not smallpox.  You need to wake up to reality here. Don't give away your freedom.  That's what happens. And then we end up in a predicament like this.  We're powerless. That's my message to all of you. Thank you very much. Just a quick point, super appreciation for the staff and for you guys on trying to get on this quickly. I just wanted to point out that every presentation I've heard that goes to even groups within Santa Cruz, everybody says thank you afterwards.  So, just trying to be careful of trying to add in personal knowledge as a response that isn't according to the guidelines. Like I've heard people after comments being like, oh, don't worry about doorknobs or oh, you can reuse medical gloves. Let's really try to stay with the best practices of this. So we try to contain this. Thanks. Okay, that concludes the comments. Chair, first of all, I just wanted to say that I meet regularly with constituents this week because of the social distancing guidelines. We're switching to an online Facebook live event and which Director Hall is gonna join me on Wednesday at 5.30. You can tune into facebook.com slash Supervisor John Leopold. We'll be talking about issues affecting the county and I'm sure we'll be talking a lot about COVID-19. I appreciate Ms. Hall's availability for that. I would be prepared to move the recommended actions on this declaration. Okay, do we have a first and second? Okay. And all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposition? There is none. Thank you. And then we'll go now to item eight, presentation on the state of Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District as outlined in the memorandum of myself. Mr. Chair, Supervisor, thank you for the opportunity to be here today to present you our annual state of Metro. I'll cover some updates for you as I usually do, but towards the end, I'll talk a little bit more about what Metro is doing in response to COVID-19. Just some quick stats. Our budget this year is $52 million. We employ 300 people. We have 98 fixed route and commuter buses and they run on 26 routes, 41 paratransit vehicles. We serve the entire county population. We provide about 5 million trips a year and about 72,000 additional trips on our paratransit, which we brand as pair crews. Always interesting to talk about the percentage of our ridership that is from the educational institutions, primarily Cabrio College and UCSC. This year that is up, about 60% of our annual ridership is represented by those folks. We're also working on completing our AVL, our automatic vehicle location, or GPS, installation on our buses. That's going on right now today. It's been a bit challenging for us because we have so many different series of buses going back to 1998. We're trying to implement a very new technology on buses as all this, as 1998 buses, but that is moving along and we hope to launch that here in the next couple of months. And that of course will provide our customers a smartphone application for them to see where their bus is and when it arrives. And also for our staff to literally have pipelines full of data with which to try to manage the system even better than we do today. Just updating you on the topic I raised last year, which is our aging fleet. I mentioned earlier we have 1998 buses. They should have been retired long ago. They are still in our fleet and about 50% of our fleet actually needs to be replaced.  Those buses are more costly to maintain and they're less dependable hindering our ability to provide the service we hope to provide to our customers. So we're continuing to work on that, but that's a big challenge. That can be anywhere from 38 to $50 million to fix depending on whether we buy compressed natural gas buses which are the buses we've been buying since 2002 or we move into fully electric buses which range in price up over a million dollars apiece. To that end, we have four pro-terra fully electric buses that should be here by June of this year. And we're making our initial commitment and towards following the State California Air Resources Board mandate that all transit agencies in California become 100% electric by 2040. So we'll have our first four buses here. We just completed the electric infrastructure charging infrastructure in our yard. If you happen to be driving up river, take a look at our facility and you'll see some really beautiful charging stations right there up against the, near the street. So that's pretty exciting for us. We can't wait now for those buses to arrive. Additionally, this year we will, in the next couple of months, we will launch another smartphone application on our Highway 17 service, which allows our customers to pay for their fare via a phone application. That's important to us because we do have some crush load periods of time on Highway 17 in which that bus is on an ongoing and regular basis late because it takes so long to board our customers, many of which are cash paying customers. So we hope that will speed up our boardings and help us get to the other side of the mountain in a more timely fashion. So more on that, of course, next year when I come back and provide you an update. Now turning to Metro's response to the coronavirus, we certainly are taking that extremely serious and trying to do our part. We appreciate the county in providing their memo yesterday, which gave us some additional guidance. I will tell you that over a week ago, even prior to the first case in Santa Cruz County, I directed that our buses be taken up another notch in the cleaning that we perform on those buses each night by adding a disinfectant that is one that is we're told can kill the coronavirus. I was sort of drawing from my experience back in about 2005, 2006, when I was a general manager in Los Angeles and had to do something similar during the avian flu. So we're doing that kind of a practice nightly hitting all of what we call the high touch surfaces. Those are surfaces in which our customers will touch. For example, the stanchions within the bus, the hand straps, the backs of the seats, those kinds of things. So that's already been done. We're also doing that on our paratransit equipment. Certainly some of the population that we transport on paratransit are within that vulnerable population. So we wanna be very careful and do everything we can to properly sanitize those buses and vehicles. We're also closely monitoring the CDC website and other reputable sources, including the County Health Services site. We've participated in several webinars to date, primarily focused on transit and coronavirus. So we're gathering information wherever we possibly can, including from these webinars that are transit and non-transit related. We've provided for the safety of our employees and our bus drivers. We've provided all of our drivers, both paratransit and fixed route bus with hand sanitizer bottles. Those, and we've purchased gallons of the hand sanitizer so that when they run down, they can go to the window and refill those bottles so that they always have hand sanitizer on their person. We also have obtained a supply of the sanitizing wipes. As was mentioned earlier, both those products are becoming increasingly difficult to source right now. So we were fortunate enough to have some of that on hand, but we need to continue to get more and we're trying to be careful not to buy more than we need because obviously there's a need far and wide for those same products. And then thinking about our employees agency-wide, we're distributing the hand sanitizers with the pump actuator on it throughout the agency wherever employees can access those, be that restrooms, break rooms, other gathering facilities, front desks, those kinds of things. And the employees have been provided with hand sanitizing wipes to clean their own workspaces, computer keyboards, those kinds of things. So we've also directed our custodial staff to increase the frequency and how vigorous they're cleaning all kinds of surfaces at night at the various facilities as they go through there and adding, of course, the new level of disinfectant to their workload. Almost daily, we're providing all of our employees emails on the subject matter. We're not creating our own stuff. We're just replicating what we find on the county side and on the CDC site, just putting all of that prevention information out to our employees. And then our safety bulletin boards throughout the agency have all been updated and will continue to be updated regularly on all the information, both from the CDC and from the county. So we're trying to get that information out to our employees. And then this week, we will put the finishing touches on what we call car cards. These are, if you're inside a bus, you'll see advertising along the top of the bus. Those are called car cards. And so we have those being created, again, repeating the information about coronavirus prevention from the CDC website, both in English and Spanish. Those will hit our buses this week. They will also hit all of our transit centers where we have display cases so that our customers can see those in addition to other sources. They can also find information on our website. We've created a press release that talks about everything that we're doing to date to address prevention on our buses. And there's also a note on there from me updating the public about that. We're investigating other sanitizing methods.  We have four of those on order, two for paracruz and two for the fixed route. And there's a lot of work to be done. We have to figure out what the protective wear is that our employees will have to wear when they apply that product and train them on it. So it'll take us a little while to move to that next step of sanitizing. But we think that is promising also. Finally, in closing, in response to the county memo that was issued yesterday, we have a meeting with our management team this afternoon to talk about what social distancing means and what crowds of less than 50 mean to the bus community. Obviously we have articulated buses which carry 60 or more people. We'll need to have a discussion about that and what social distancing means and crowd control means. Even on a fixed route bus, particularly in the morning, when we're transporting students up to UCSC, on a regular 35 or 40 foot bus, we'll have that many people. So we'll need to talk about that. So there may be an announcement, likely will be an announcement coming from Metro in the next couple of days about how we're gonna regulate that and be in compliance with the county guidance in that particular area. So Mr. Chair and supervisors, that concludes my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the presentation, Mr. Clifford. And as a member of Metro, I wanna thank you for being active in addressing the coronavirus issue. I think you've done what you can do and you're gonna probably do more. And I think, did you mention that about the closure of part of the Pacific Station too? Just briefly on that, yes. So over the weekend, we had an employee, temp employee who called in sick. And unfortunately went the extra distance to say something to the effect I may have coronavirus. So we went into immediate action. Obviously we're concerned about our employees and our customers. So we immediately closed down the customer service center.  Within two hours, I had the management team. This is on Sunday. I had the management team at our offices working out what we were gonna do. So we've already had a sort of our own EOC and we've been prepared to invoke that whenever necessary. And we did on Sunday. And the plan that we came up with was to keep it locked down, to relocate our employees that work at that facility elsewhere for Monday and to have a company specializing in disinfecting come in and completely disinfect the facility. So we did that yesterday. The facility is open as usual today. As we learn more about that particular employee, there is no credible evidence whatsoever that that employee came anywhere near anybody who had coronavirus. But we needed to do the right thing, particularly in this day and time. Very good. And on another subject, as I mentioned to a member of the Metro Board, the awful subject of unfunded mandates that we've had to deal with here in the county. Thankfully, some years ago, a couple of years ago, we had some of that returned, but there is three pieces of legislation in the assembly as I believe it's in the assembly only that would, in essence, cripple the Metro service if they, as they propose these bills to had free rides for those under 18, free rides for those over 65. And what was the other one? All college students. All college students.  I think it would cost us between six and $9 million a year. I mean, it would really cripple our service. This just doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm saying this as a Board of Supervisors member. I mean, it's going to really cut the services to those who we really want to provide it for more than anyone. Those who are the low income that maybe don't have a vehicle that want to ride the buses.  We have written a letter. We instructed our chair, Mike Rockin, to write a letter against this. I don't know that we should get into it as a Board of Supervisors, but I think it's really a big concern. We all know our transportation problems. We need more people to ride the buses, not less. And this would severely cripple our situation. I don't know if you have an update on that legislation at all. I think it's just been introduced in the assembly. Correct. It's still in the same state as what you just really clearly went through. We are working with the California Transit Association to come up with a sample resolution that we could circulate to all the cities and certainly to the county to consider adopting. But as you point out, this could hit us and hit us hard to lose those kind of revenues would mean no less than one third of our service would have to be cut. Now that's cutting service in an environment which everybody can board for free. And in theory, many more will wanna use the service which creates its other challenges. So cutting at the service and cutting a third of our employees, we don't take that lightly. This is legislation. I understand they wanna grow ridership. This is the wrong way to do it. Instead of making a mandate what the state could do instead is do a program in which they could fund it with new resources, we would hope in order to encourage agencies to institute free fare programs, but not mandated. We're don't broad brush the thing. We're not all the same. We all have different challenges and free works potentially for some agencies, but not all. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, chair. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for your leadership at the transit district. I wonder if you could just give an update about where we are with our bus replacement and particularly our effort to go zero admission in our bus fleet. Right. So we'll abide by the state mandate. Now, because we're classified as a small transit property, we're given a little bit more time to go 100% electric. So for example, our agency, if we make purchases between now and 2026, we'll continue to make those as compressed natural gas buses. In 2026, any purchases that we make, 25% of what we purchase will have to be zero emission. And then from 2029 on, we'll have no choice, but 100% of those will be zero emission. Now, what's happening between now and 2026 is two things. We're gonna test the heck out of those four pro-terra electric buses to see what they can and can't do. They are challenged electric buses to date only go about 150 miles. This particular bus that we're buying may go as much as 200 miles on a single charge. But for our system, we need buses that can go 300 or a little more than 300 miles on a single charge. So there's some real challenges with electric, which is why we don't wanna dive in with two feet yet. We really wanna experiment and get to know these buses and how to maintain them and what they can and can't do. And for the time being, they'll go on runs that are 150 miles or less. But at some point, as you add more and more electric buses, you run out of runs that only go 150 miles. Now, in parallel with that, we proposed to the board and the board gave a nod to the idea that over the next two years, we're gonna heavily investigate hydrogen fuel cell buses. Now, hydrogen fuel cell buses are much more promising for a variety of reasons, including distance. So that holds great potential for us. The other challenge we have is if you look at our yard, there is no place to put 100 charging pistols in that yard. So we'd have to build another facility in order to be able to be 100% battery electric. Hydrogen fuel cell, however, has a similar footprint as our compressed natural gas facility does. So we'll test it and then in two years, we may come to the board and say, ask for permission to go for a grant to buy some hydrogen fuel cells to experiment with. So that's sort of the lay of the land I realize is sort of complicated, but we're trying desperately not to make a big mistake in this environment at a million plus per bus. That's a costly mistake to make. But as we change over our buses, we're moving to lower and lower emission buses. Yes, and as you may be aware, we added some, we added 10 diesel hybrid buses to our fleet for Highway 17. Our partners at Santa Clara VTA over the hill were taking their service levels down and had a number of buses they needed to surplus and they sold those to us for a whopping $1 a piece. So that was great for us.  So you're not putting out all of the pollutants that we would for any other vehicle. Not quite as good as our compressed natural gas, but better than our diesels. Yeah. Well, it's good to hear and I'm glad we're moving towards that. Thank you for your work. Thank you for that. Okay, that's fine. Thank you for the report. And I agree that the bus service and everything is of vital importance to everybody in the county. What would be the biggest threat against in the future for the use of the metro system in Santa Cruz County? I know it was mentioned by Supervisor McPherson, but do you see anything else that would be out there that you might be concerned about? Well, I think even before our latest challenge, the talk across the nation has been declining riderships, average declining ridership year over year, 4%. In this county, we're experiencing that on our non-educational institution ridership, right? So with UCSC in particular, their ridership year over year is growing, which is artificially helped our numbers remain relatively flat. But if you take them out of the equation, our general population ridership non-UCSC is experiencing the same decline as the nationwide. So that's our biggest challenge and we're participating in all of those forums through the various organizations that we belong to to try to understand better, why is that occurring and what are the things that we can do to try to address that. Now, some agencies are experimenting with microtransit concepts, which are similar to a paratransit type of concept where you have door-to-door service. We haven't jumped into that because it's a very costly proposition. So we're monitoring it, looking at what we can do. And maybe even this AVL date I talked about earlier will help us understand a little bit better where to place service to try to grow ridership. Okay, and I know there's a good bus service on the 91X and other buses going to and from Watsonville to Cabrillo. Have you ever looked at it? Maybe it was already tried, but buses that would go to from Watsonville to actually right to Aptos High School. I know they don't have school buses anymore and there are a lot of students from Watsonville that do go to Aptos High. Yeah, so interesting proposition. It's a little bit tricky for us because technically the federal regulations preclude us from providing school bus service. So we can't do that by law. Now, as you know, we do provide a lot of students service to their schools, but those are schools that are on our routes. So if we deviate and say this bus is gonna go specifically to this school, then we're at risk of violating the federal law on that. So we try to get as creative as possible. Sometimes detours occur in order to do that. I'll be happy to go back and just double check that and get back to you on it. And I guess it would be all right. I mean, I'm not saying you just go from Watsonville to Aptos High and then come back, but make it a stop on the way, let's say on the stop on the way to Cabrillo. Yeah, I'll be happy to take a look at that. Thank you very much. And I'll open it up to the public. Anybody has questions and please come forward. Thank you. Becky Steinbruner, resident of rural Aptos. Thank you for the presentation very much. I appreciate that. I also received the memo that the Metro Station on Pacific Avenue was closed. And I wondered about that. And what my question after hearing you was, was that employee actually tested for COVID-19? I think that would be good information too to know. I attended the Carrillo College Board of Trustee meeting last Monday and heard a member of the public who depends on Metro begging for the second time and she had a petition in her hand that the Cabrillo trustees look into working with Metro to improve the 91X and also the 71 service to Cabrillo to make earlier buses available for students and staff and also later. So the Cabrillo College trustees are going to meet with this person and try to agendize that and meet with Metro, but it is a problem for students and staff who need to be there early. The earlier buses are either filled and there's nowhere to get on or they're just not available. So I would like to see increased numbers of 71 which would also service Watsonville to Aptos High right there on Freedom Boulevard and include the 91X in that examination. I am happy to hear that the Metro is considering going more to electric buses and I would like to ask if it's possible to put on solar panels on top of the buses to have trickle charging that would extend their range per charge and also to include solar panels for charging at the charging stations at Metro. I'm happy to hear that Metro is considering hydrogen fuel cells. I'm aware of the passenger train that's coming here a hydrogen fuel cell passenger train. So that technology is moving into the realm of transportation as a possibility and I think it holds great promise. So I'm glad that Metro is looking into this in a long-term way for effective fund allocations. I want to ask if the bus, if Metro is at all looking into retrofitting any buses that could run on the rail corridor, those conversions cost about $10,000, I'm told you could run them on the rail and make it a lot quicker commute for many people who are stuck in that traffic on SoCal Drive. I would also like to ask that there be a study and made public of the new service that has to be provided for the Kaiser on SoCal Avenue Frontage Road. There is no bus service there now. And also ask that there be a new stops put in the Aptos Village area at Aptos Creek Road to service those new residents coming in there as well as the many special events and NICI Mark State Park users. Thank you. Mayor Linkara, retired teacher, I rode the bus here. I wonder how many of you ride the bus? Those on the Metro Ward or the CEO? And I am discouraged from riding the bus. And I'll tell you why. When people are on cell phones on the bus in a metal enclosure, the radiation is amplified. There's a card on pass out public health warning about wireless microwave technology. I picked up the bus schedule and it reads like a Verizon advertisement. Do everything on your smartphone. Do this, do that. Instead of putting money into bus routes, running more frequently or to needed locations, how much money is going into the toxic cancer causing microwave technology? You're advertising, do this on your smartphone. These are dangerous devices and anyone who looks into the independent science, we have a local doctor here, Dr. Carl Merritt. You can look up Dr. Martin Paul, P-A-L-L, Dr. Joseph Merkola on the known dangers. Very, very disturbing. I really wonder how I could find out how much money Verizon is giving to Metro or your paying Verizon regarding disinfectants. It's really important to look at the list of ingredients and what is known on the toxicity. Environmental working group is an organization that often looks into the toxic chemicals. When it says fragrances on a label, there can be like maybe 300 chemicals. And we know many people on your agenda, it says please be aware people are chemically sensitive, come to the board meeting, fragrance free. So when you're using sanitizers, and I can tell you, I feel horrible around these sanitizers. So there are problems here with Metro that I think discourages riders instead of encourages, thank you. I think you have to turn your microphone. No, your microphone, they wanna be able to hear you on the microphone. We'll go to recommended action then. I don't think there is any, I think it was just a presentation. There's nothing, no action requested. Okay, next we have an appointment. Number nine, consider final reappointment of Dan Quinto to the Emergency Medical Care Commission as an at large representative of field care providers for a term to expire April 1st, 2023. I move approval. First and the second, any comments? There are none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposition say nay. There is no nay, passes unanimously. And item 10, consider the selection of Anastasia Manova as the artist for C-Cliff Village Park phase two public arts project, approve independent contractor agreement in the amount not to exceed $4,900, adopt a resolution accepting unanticipated revenue in the amount of 5,450, and take related action as outlined in the memorandum of the director of parks, open spaces, and cultural services. Thank you. How you doing? I'm doing well, thank you. Eric Serm with County Parks. In the COVID-19 response, I realized this is a very small thing, but it is a thing we need to keep in the forefront of hope and optimism. So I'd like to introduce Cynthia Killian, the chair of the arts commission for the county who's gonna introduce the project. Thank you. What are you about? Thank you, Eric. Sorry. This is a really nice thing to be speaking about today in light of all of the other things that seem to be very negative. The art commission is pleased to recommend for your approval today, a proposal for the C-Cliff Park public art component. And this is phase number two. The art selection panel comprised of community members, professional artists, county arts commissioners, and representatives of involved department. They met on the 16th of October to review the proposal and submit, they were submitted by two artists. With the selection panel on November 7th, the artists were asked to bring detailed drawings or maquettes to further define the project proposals. And each of these artists brought maquettes which were really beautiful and we really enjoyed looking at them. And then after much deliberation, the panel chose Anastasia Baknawowa and then we continued with the process and at the December 14th meeting, the art commissions and the commission reviewed the panel's decision and voted to recommend that board approve the selection of Ms. Baknawowa to be the public artist for the C-Cliff Park phase two project. The artwork selected by the panel and recommended by the art commission is original and the artistic merit and it is adding beauty to an otherwise unattractive restroom building. So now I'd like to introduce Anastasia and we're very happy to have a brief presentation by her and then she'll answer any questions afterwards. Thank you. Thank you. Hi there. My name is Anastasia and I just wanna thank you for taking the time to hear me today. I'm really excited to have my proposal considered for the C-Cliff Village Park phase two public art project. As a working artist, the opportunity to contribute a public art piece to the community is something special. So the proposal that I have is a painted mural to wrap around the three walls of the restroom building, the permanent structure that's gonna be at the C-Cliff Village Park. The design features a vibrant sunset over the pier and cement ship transitioning to waves and an underwater scene with sea creatures. I would like to incorporate the fourth wall with the doors in a collaborative community painting event where residents can add their mark to the piece, painting and sea creatures to complete the scene. And the materials that I plan to use are mural quality acrylic paints which are light fast and durable. I would prep the surface by cleaning and priming it and then finish it with a UV protective anti-graphy decoding. So the proper execution of the painting process would ensure that this mural would stay vibrant for decades. The reasons for proposing this particular piece is showing the iconic C-Cliff area. I think when a lot of us think of C-Cliff, we think of the cement ship and the shark population maybe, maybe some other things but that's what comes to mind for me. I also think that many residents of the neighborhood appreciate the coastal setting so that's why my focus is on the ocean. The design is also a sort of snapshot in time as the ship will crumble over time and the wildlife might migrate. But it's also everlasting because we will always have the ocean and the sunset. So what makes this a unique signature piece is the proposed image was designed specifically for the site and the structure with the community in mind. In my years as a professional artist, I've developed a personal style that cannot be recreated by other artists. And my work features vibrant colors, bold line work, a hint of realism and celebration of nature that is cheerful and fun. It can be appreciated from near or far and by all ages, making it ideal for a park setting. Are there any questions? Yeah, we'll open it up. Any questions? Supervisor Front. I don't have questions, I have comments which is, I mean, I'm excited about this. This took a lot of work to get the park to exist at all. Ms. Minot and a group from Seacliffe worked for a couple of decades to even get the funding for that. And then we've been doing it in phases and then the great work of the parks department to be able to bring in a permanent restroom. And immediately upon the restroom being presented, there was a question of how do we make it look beautiful? And you've done that. So I think that this is really the next phase and the commitment to the second district and that community. And it blends in perfectly with the new skate park that was just done both in design and style. And then there'll be parents that'll be hugging you like you don't know because they all have a clean bathroom that brings a youthful and a vibrance to that area that it doesn't currently have with this mural. So thank you for your work. Thank you for our parks and our amazing art staff and commission for this work as well. Thank you. Chair, I would just say this is a beautiful piece of art. I like that you got the sharks in there as well because that's their regular visitors to the cement ship. And to take a building that is important but doesn't mean a lot to people outside its function and to make it a beautiful addition to the community, take skill and talent. And this is real clear that you have those pieces and I look forward to visiting this park and being able to enjoy this art. So thank you for your work. Thank you. And you have a real talent and I wanna thank you. I think it's very important. And did I pronounce your name correctly? Oh, I'm good enough. Yeah. Okay. My daughter's Anastasia. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for it's a tremendous plus. I mean, this, it could just be another building. This is gonna be a real attractive focal point of the park. It's really something else that I hope we can follow throughout the county and other projects. So congratulations and your ingenuity in doing this really, really nicely done. Thank you. We'll put it up to the public. Thank you. Becky Steinbrenner, resident of rural Aptos. I am very grateful also for your good work and also to the parks commission for the good public process that they had in selecting this artwork and to putting real value on art in the public parks. Thank you. And I look forward to seeing it too. And I'm happy to hear that you're gonna put a special ceiling on it for graffiti. That's very wise and thoughtful. I would like to ask that there be or ask if there will be any space within the artwork for some kind of an interpretive panel telling us a little bit about you as an artist and also the significance of the features in your artwork tying it into the community and the history of the community that you represent there with your artwork. Thank you again very much. And I look forward to seeing it. Thank you. I got to run to a meeting, a building K. Can I say something really quick about the focus strategies presentation you're about to get or is this not the time? Super short. No. Okay. They're really good and you should support them. Bye. Thanks. Thank you though for all the other work you've been doing. Okay. Anyway, I'll bring it back to the board for nobody and anyone in the community room Hi there. Yeah. There is somebody. Hi. There's nobody that wishes to comment down in the team if you were right now. Thanks. Okay. All right. Bring it back to the board for the, yes we do. I'll move the recommended actions. Second. Okay. First and second. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposition? There is none. Passes unanimously. Thank you very much. Did you get on the board? I made the appointment. Eric. Sure. Okay. All right. That takes us to number 11. Consider report on the focused intervention team fit pilot program to increase services, engagement of eligible fit participants and reduce community impacts from aggressive criminal behavior, approve recommended program enhancements and direct staff to return March of 2021 with an annual report as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer, 2019 fit annual evaluation. Welcome. Good morning. Morning board, Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner. And I have with me Eric Herrera from Health Services. And today we're just gonna spend a few minutes to talk to you and give you an update on the fit program. I just wanna remind you that the population that this team focuses on are high risk, high users of the jail and the emergency services system. They often act out with violence and they scare people and business owners and people who are visiting our cities and our unincorporated area. And the goal is to refocus these people into treatment and this benefits the public's safety and also reduces calls for service. And today there's a number of our fit team members here and they're all seated in the back. And we're gonna discuss with you today the background on the fit pilot. We're gonna update you on the fit client profile. We're gonna share some client experiences. We're gonna show you with you the results of the first annual evaluation and then recommend a few small changes to the program. And so Eric's gonna go ahead and start out here. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. I'm Eric Herrera. I'm the behavioral health director for the County of Santa Cruz. I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the background of the fit program. And this is a county program that was designed by the sheriff's office in collaboration with behavioral health and our county administrative officer. The team composition is three peace officers, three clinicians and one administrative aide. The team provides intense field supervision and in custody services at our local jail as well as fast track custody assessment, service and treatment plan development. Custody status is determined at the time of arraignment or conditional release. And there's a strong emphasis on community engagement and participation as well as an independent program evaluation. Since our last report, we had 33 additional clients added to the fit program for a total served of 78. After an initial surge of referrals to the program, ongoing referrals have stabilized at about five per month. This is consistent with the reduction in referrals to fit from our partner agencies. In terms of our client profile data, 56% of the clients have lived in the county for over 10 years prior to enrolling in fit. In quarters three and four, however, over half of our new fit enrollees with those who have been here for two years or less. The stable referral rate and increase in clients new to the county may suggest that the fit program is serving almost the entire eligible population. A counterpoint to that hypothesis, however, is that fit clients are currently predominantly white men referred from North County, not necessarily representative of the demographics of our county in terms of race and ethnicity. As fit moves forward, equity and access to the program is something that we should aspire to. Finally, it remains critical to understand that almost all fit clients suffer from substance use and are unhoused. We'd like to give the board two examples of actual fit clients that illustrate the challenging clients that we're targeting with this program. Client A here in the year prior to enrolling in fit was arrested 20 times and spent 125 days in jail. People reporting this client described him as making threats to kill juveniles at a bus stop harassing business customers and yelling at pedestrians along Pacific Avenue. After placement on fit, the client was arrested twice and spent 19 days in jail. Fit placed the client in a drug treatment program and upon completing the program, the client transitioned to a sober living environment. The client went 60 days without an arrest and received a fit completion letter on May 28th, 2019. The client has not been arrested since February 14th, 2019. I'll turn it over to Sheriff Hart to talk about our next client. So client B has been a little bit more challenging. He's lived in Santa Cruz for 30 years and has excessive 200 arrests. In the year prior to being placed on fit, he was booked into jail 11 times and spent 121 days in jail. In the 90 days prior to being placed on fit, citizens reported that the client was throwing chairs inside a business, was intoxicated while walking in traffic and causing a disturbance on the metro while he was intoxicated. Since placement on fit, the client has been arrested 13 times and spent 192 days in jail. Arrests included public intoxication, possession of controlled substance and resisting arrest. Every day for 10 months, the client refused substance use treatment offered by fit clinicians. Finally, in November of 2019, the client did complete a drug treatment program and went 60 days without an arrest. Since January, the client has been arrested twice. This person has been disruptive but less disruptive than prior to being placed on fit. This client highlights the challenge that although fit works for many people, there remains a population that is not amenable to change and the best we can do is stop them from causing harm to others. In terms of the annual evaluation, we would like to share the results which look at the time period between February 2019 through January of 2020. Fit clients are maintaining a decrease in arrests on average, cutting their arrest in half after joining the program. Jail days are now consistent with what our team anticipated. For clients with fewer days in jail, prior to joining fit, their average jail days are increasing as they sober up and our clinicians are able to work with them to accept treatment. For our heaviest jail users prior to fit, we're seeing a 30% reduction in jail days. In terms of mental health and substance use treatment, fit clients face several challenges. Overall, about 73% of the clients were assessed as needing some level of mental health treatment and about half of them received that treatment. Treatment days did increase from an average of only 0.9 days per month to over two days per month. We saw similar increases in substance use treatment with 21 clients starting a program and overall days in treatment increasing on average ninefold. One of the many challenges in trying to engage these fit clients in services is the timing and availability of residential treatment beds. Matching an open bed to a willing and locatable client has been a problem for staff within the current 60 day, no arrest exit criteria. In terms of closing fit cases, we can see here that 53 or 68% of fit had been, fit cases have been closed so far. About a quarter of those cases closed through clients completing 60 days with no arrests. We have readmitted five clients to fit, which highlights the biggest challenge the program faces, which is housing. Housing remains a major challenge, although 15% of fit clients have left the county for the 56% of clients who have lived here for over 10 years, there are a few options. The fit team has only been able to place four clients into either transitional or independent housing. To increase our ability to serve fit clients, including the demographic changes and the desire to have more clients, or to excuse me, to move more clients into housing and treatment and away from law enforcement in the jail, we're making the following recommendations to amend the program, which can be executed with the program's current resources. We would like to increase the criteria for a case to be closed from 60 to 90 days without an arrest. And we believe this will allow more time to link clients to critical resources, including housing, residential substance use treatment and primary care. We'd also like to increase the client case limit from 30 to 40. This will give our staff more flexibility to serve clients, especially those who require more time to be placed in programming or linked to housing. It will also allow staff to accommodate the few tougher cases that cycle through the program multiple times. The full evaluation of the fit program is attached in your board packet. Going forward, we recommend the following targets for the next year of the fit program. First, maintaining a 50% decrease in the arrest rate. Secondly, increasing mental health treatment participation by 20% and increasing substance use treatment participation also by 20%. Thank you for your time. And with that, we'd be happy to answer any questions. Chair, I think the... Supervisor Caput, I'll be reading some questions from Supervisor Coonerty since his voice is a little low today. First, this is Supervisor Coonerty speaking, Sheriff Hart. First, let me thank the sheriff and HSA and the CAO's office for their work on the fit program. It is just the kind of outcome driven collaborative and out of the box effort that we need for such a challenging set of problems. Please keep up the good work. He has three questions. First, it is concerning that more than half of those qualified don't end up being accepted into the program. If they are being addressed effectively through other systems, criminal justice, most or other programs, then it might be okay. So the question is, do we have any data on those individual arrest rates after not being accepted into fit? Not that I'm aware of. I'm not sure if James Russell or somebody from the fit team could answer that. Who's here today? No, they're not accepted. Yeah, you should come up to the microphone. James. Hello, William Burnett, I'm a Sergeant on the Focus Intervention Team. Can you repeat as does that question? You're looking for the answer? Do we have data on those individual arrest rates for those not being accepted into fit? At this time, we do not. And I think there's probably some factors that we need to look into as far as a lot of personal reasons why these people don't get accepted to certain programs as well. I think James can maybe elaborate a little bit more on that, but prior history with these individuals with a lot of these programs being privately run can inhibits them being qualified for the program. I guess my question is is so hard. If these are the most problematic people, are they being addressed through other programs or are we just, if they don't fall into fit, what's our strategy to deal with these people effectively? James Russell, Forensic Program Manager with Behavioral. Just to clarify your question, sir, are you asking about the individuals who don't meet the criteria to be placed on the fit team? In the report, there was recommendations to fit and then there's people who are accepted into fit for the people who are recommended but not accepted. Correct. What's the strategy? Cause they're obviously having a huge impact on the community. So I think I can address that. Wait, there's certain criteria that person has to meet in order to get accepted on the program. So we get referrals, but they don't meet, but those referrals are then vetted out and they're not meeting their requirements to get put in the program. Right. So how do we, do we know if these folks are being addressed through other programs and not being arrested or they're still just not accepted but still being arrested all the time? There's several programs and outreach groups in place. We have the hopes team. There's downtown outreach worker program. Hopes is now going county wide. There's a presence out in the Watsonville South County area as well with bilingual, bicultural clinician. In addition to that, there's some recent activity by Santa Cruz PD with the heroes team. Also with Watsonville PD with the care team. So there's a lot of outreach that is going on to try and connect people with the resources they need and engage them in ways that can facilitate them getting into treatment. And of course those individuals have been referred. We're also looking back at them later on to see if there's something that might have occurred that makes them eligible for the fit criteria. Okay. Second question. It is striking that one third of fit clients haven't been here for less than two years with 20% less than a year. And yet they have already been arrested enough to qualify as one of the most high-impact individuals in our community. We need data on why they came here. What made them stay and what it will take to get them to return to a place where they have more connections. The reality is that these individuals, even if they participate positively with our programs, have no chance of finding affordable housing or rebuilding their lives in this community. We need a robust effort to get these individuals to somewhere where they have a chance at success. Can this data and a strategy be developed going forward for these individuals? I'm sure we could gather some of that data. I think it's also striking the number of people who have been here as long as they've been though too and they're still living on the streets and going through everything they're going through. But if there's some specific data points that you're looking for, I'm sure that we can include that. Yeah. Why are they here? And then the third question. Does the fit program need a budget for rewards for positive behavior? For example, small gift cards for sandwiches or food. We have the sticks of jail time, but should we also be constantly rewarding good behavior with carrots for coming to an appointment, joining the streets team, not getting in trouble? Well, I think we're combining a lot of different teams in that this team is, it's focused on a very specific population of people who have caused a lot of problems for a long time. They're not amenable to treatment. And so that might have a benefit, but I would think that would be more in line with another program that's going on in the jail. I don't know if James Russell or Billy has any comment on that. I'll just say we have managed to have a small budget that has accommodated that for folks that are going to program. Hey, they need some clothes and other articles to help them be successful in that. It would be a nice little thing to tack into that budget to make sure it continues to be there. I don't know exactly where we carved that out of in terms of placing it there, but I know it was not originally included in the budget from the tax measure, I believe. Okay, thank you. I think if I could make one comment surrounding the budget in terms of the substance use treatment programs, specifically residential programs. For those folks who have MediCal as their insurance, we are under some pretty strict limitations from the state in terms of how many times an individual can enter a residential treatment program. It's twice within a year. And so with this population in particular, many of them are unsuccessful their first two tries. They may go into a program and exit the program after a couple of days. And then we try again and the same outcome happens and they might be ready the third time. However, MediCal will not pay for that third stay. So we're having to come up with funds to pay the full cost of that individual's residential stay, which could be 30 days. And that's a cost that the county has to bear. And we do not include that in our original budget for the FIT program. And it's certainly a future consideration for us if we wanna ensure the success of these folks going through services. Sure. I'm really encouraged by this programming to combine public safety with mental health treatment and to do it in a sensible, reasonable way is quite a challenge. And I'm really glad that we are under this program. I wanna thank you for the efforts that you have had. I too have a similar question to Supervisor Coonerty.  And Santa Cruz has a reputation by some that this is an easy place and it's not. I mean, we don't give more general assistance than other counties or whatever. But just to get an idea, were you encouraged to come here by somebody else or did you just hear Santa Cruz was an easy place to get treatment or get services, I guess. Those are two basic ones I'd like to know and some of the newcomers, so to speak. On that same page as 53, the most of these are white men in their 40s. And do we need to, is that reflective of our population, probably is our population makeup but I'm just wondering about it doesn't include women or people of color. I don't want to go out and arrest those folks for one reason or another, but is that reflective of the population makeup of our area or is it how close, I mean, I'm just wondering, are we overseeing women or people of color for any reason or who are in need of assistance or is that just the general makeup that it's just the facts as they are, I guess. It's, and just looking at the demographics, it's a little high on the African-American side. Our population is roughly 3%. Our jail population is about 6% African-American so it's about in line with our jail population. The Latino number is a little bit low but I think primarily this team, we focus on the North County area, City of Santa Cruz and then Live Oak, Soquel, Aptos is where a lot of the work's being done because that's where this population is at and I think that probably better matches up with the Caucasian numbers that you're seeing on there. Okay. I was glad to see on page 56 an increase in the amount of mental health and substance abuse treatment among fit participants. Did you attribute this to an intensive case management and I think that's what part of this program is about or more time in jail to sober up or is there a nexus of that? I think it's a combination of the above, both issues. As undesirable as it is to use jail as a resource in connecting people with treatment, it can be an important disruptor for that person's behavior and allows for a short period of time for that person to become sober for example and more amenable to treatment and the interventions that we're offering to them. It's very difficult to support a person entering treatment whether it be mental health treatment or substance use disorder treatment on the street when they're actively using. So we try to really use the jail time as a disruptor to that behavior and it often allows for enough time to pass that the person has some clarity and can engage more with our clinical staff to connect them with services. And one of the big gaps and we're gonna hear more about this in the next item on our agenda, the homeless issue, the lack of transitional housing. If it's pretty difficult to get that one way or the other is there anything that you can see that we are working on and maybe we'll know more or you'll hear more in the next item that we're going to address. But to get increased the sober living environments and permanent supportive housing, it's just hard to come by I guess in this area. Is that right? How big of a search do you have out there for supportive housing? I think it's this group of individuals are competing for the same limited resources that everybody else is in the county right now and it's a huge challenge for us and when you consider their clinical needs, it's a particular challenge for someone coming out of a residential program for example where they've achieved some degree of sobriety for 30 days and then they have to return to the streets and they're returning to the streets and having contacts with the same people that they were engaging in drug behavior before. And it's just hard for someone to maintain that sobriety when they're homeless and the resources around sober living environment, beds, transitional housing, supported housing is just so scarce in our community. I believe it's negatively impacting the impact and the negatively impacting the outcomes of the program. Well, again, I want to thank you for this. I mean, the amount of the reduction in jail time and the getting some of these folks on the right path, I don't think it could hardly be, it is measured in some respects, but how important this is and the reduction in the face-to-face confrontations people have had with some of these individuals has been reduced greatly and I think it's a worthwhile effort and I congratulate you for trying to carry it out. It's a very difficult assignment, I think. Thank you and I do want to acknowledge the dedication and the effort of this team. These folks that are here today are working with a very high risk, very difficult population of people to work with both in the jail and out on the street and they're extremely committed to this job and to doing the right thing and anecdotally, we're hearing from the city police department that they have felt a reduction in the amount of people who are acting out in the downtown and on the streets and so the police department is feeling it as well that this program is going in the right direction. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Yeah, first I want to just thank everyone who's on this team who goes out and works with what that many of us was considered some of the most difficult folks in the county and to do that day in and day out and to try really hard and know that there's a lot of failures as part of that and keep on trying takes a special kind of person and I appreciate the leadership and the commitment that everyone on the fit team has shown because trying something new, trying something that looks like it's yielding some good results, but also struggling for resources and just dealing with the difficult population is can be very taxing. So I just want to acknowledge the hard work of everyone on this team and looking at this information to me there's some really good information in here. The issues about housing are pervasive through lots of our program and being able to transition people into housing that can be stable and allow them to start a new life. And that's something this board has been committed to working on. We've approved projects and we're continuing to look at ways in which we can provide more housing. In terms of the metrics for success, I just wanted to ask some questions about the question about reduction of arrests because the reduction of arrests could mean less disruptive behavior or it could mean that people are in jail so they can't be arrested again. And so when I look at the list of jail days, it seems like those that haven't spent a lot of time in jail are seeing more jail days and those that are let's say habitual jail users are seeing less jail days. So I, and I understand from the presentation that we use jail, this flash incarceration, let's say as a way of disrupting behaviors. It's, we could have a longer conversation about if we're trying to disrupt substance use behavior as the jail, the best place to detox. But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about why use a rest percentage of arrests instead of looking at jail bed days because are we, is one feeding the other? And that doesn't give us the best picture. Their rest may not be the best measure. Well, I can start off. I think when we first created the program, what we were hearing from local law enforcement jurisdictions were the challenges of these frequent contacts with these individuals. Multiple arrests, they were being brought to the jail. They were often booked and released at the jail and then returned to the street and then re-arrested again for multiple different types of issues. So I think we began the program with that as a proxy to have our baseline measures around arrests because that was one of the areas that we thought we could be most impactful with. And it was a separate issue from our use of the jail as flash incarceration or disruption for the person's behavior that the two weren't necessarily connected. If, and prior to fit, if we were arresting and jailing every individual, I think we might be having a different discussion, but because most of these individuals were booked and released, the use of jail days and arrests seem to be two distinct measures in terms of us evaluating the outcomes of the program. That's why we made that choice at the beginning. We can certainly reconsider that now that we have some more experience, but I think that was a major factor in why we chose to measure it this way. Yeah, I'm just trying to look, you know, as I look at the statistics, there's over 40 of the people who before fit spent two days or less in jail and now they're spending more time in jail. And so that's the question, is that leading to the lower number of arrests? I get, I'm not sure there's a perfect answer. Yeah, I don't think there's a perfect answer either. And I think in looking at the other data as the programs evolved over time, we were initially serving kind of the more well-known individuals in the community who had much more time in jail and probably their level of disruption in the community was much higher. And as a program has evolved over time, we're kind of catching people on the other tail end of the spectrum, maybe with less arrests, but with a greater familiarity of this program being out there, we have a chance to intervene early and this person doesn't have the opportunity to be disruptive in the community for those long periods of time that we're seeing with our early referrals. Yeah, well, I think this is something to look at over time to see whether it's the best measure. And to my colleague's point, knowing about those folks who don't qualify and just knowing something about what, if there's a possibility to collect some information to know whether their outcomes look particularly different, that might tell us or might lead us to invest our resources in different ways. And I think that's what we're all trying to do is figure out the best tools to be able to meet the need in the community. I do know from talking with representatives of Santa Cruz neighbors, they are very supportive of this program and they feel like it's made a difference. And so as a measure of public satisfaction, I took that as a good sign. And I look forward to this work deepening over time and collecting more information. And I again, want to just want to thank everybody who works on it day by day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much and we'll keep going. Good luck. Thank you. We'll open it up to the public. You bet. We'll open it up to the public for comments. We have none. We do have one downstairs. Oh, down there. Hi. Hi. How are you? I moved. Yeah. I wanted to come check out the new facilities. There is one other person here. They're not choosing to speak. My name is Becky Steinberg. I'm a resident of rural laptop. Thank you for this presentation. And I want to remind the public that this is being funded by the measure G, half cent sales tax that was funded passed by the voters in 2018. I've attended a number of candidate forums recently and was privileged to hear the three judicial candidates speaking. All of them expressed the concern that those who need these services and are being given the referrals from the courts are not getting them. And this seems like a problem here with the FIT program. I heard over and over that there are some that do not meet the criteria to be entered into the FIT program. I want to know what those criteria are that are filtering out these people that have actually had referrals from the court to the program. What makes people not qualify? And they're being rejected even with referrals from the court to participate. I'm concerned that the women may not be receiving equal treatment and consideration. And I would like some discussion about that. I really want to thank Supervisor Coonerty, even though you're here with a bad voice and I think you should be home because you're sick. Why are we just releasing these people back on the streets with no place to go? I think what we have to do is, and Supervisor McPherson, you also brought this up, we're just putting them back out on the streets where how can you not go back to your old ways when there is no support there and you don't have a roof over your head. Why don't we put back in the mobile homes in Watsonville behind the Crestview Center where after the 1989 earthquake was, the temporary housing for people whose homes were destroyed, that area is all still bare. It is still plumbed. It still has electricity. And it is right there on Freedom Boulevard next to the services, the medical services. There's a garden there where people who have come through this program and are in transition could create some sort of a peer support community. Much like what is going on with the homes community in Berkeley, where people are entered in, the community accepts them, they interview, and they're there to support each other until they can move on and find permanent housing and services. The county has that land and it's all set up. What we have to do is bring in some mobile homes and this could be an excellent, very well located transition community for those. And in closing, I just wanna support the idea that perhaps this county could enter into an IVOMEC pilot program. It's a plant-based drug treatment, much like Narcan with cold side effects and is being used very successfully in Africa. Thank you very much. Anyone else? There is none. There is none.  There's no motion needed. This is a report. Supervisor Caput suggested you move on to zone seven at this time. I'm sorry, there is a vote on this one. Oh, there is. Accept in file and approve a program enhancement. Move approval. Second. Okay. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Any opposition? There is none. Passes unanimously. Okay, we'll go to zone seven and maybe after zone seven a short break or what are we gonna do? None. Skip it. All right, let's do zone seven. Are we gonna have a quorum? Yes. I'd like to call to order the fully controlled water conservation district zone seven board of directors for our March 10th meeting. If we could begin with a roll call, please. Director Leopold. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. Vanister. Here. Villicich. Here. Siri. Vidal-Gazales. Here. Chair Friend. I'm here. It's okay. Are there any changes today's agenda, Mr. Strudley? No changes. All right, it's an opportunity for all communications. Is there any member of the community that'd like to address us on items not on the agenda but within the purview of zone seven? Either here or in the community room. Chair, I would just like at this time just to acknowledge Mr. Strudley for his recent employee recognition award. I wanna make sure this full zone seven board note that we recognized you for your work. Thank you. Well deserved. We'll move on to item four which is the approval of the zone seven minutes. Are there any changes or comments on the minutes? Just, there's one part where there's an incomplete sentence someplace. It said regarding and it's, there's nothing there. Your Becky. Item under oral communications. Right. Chair Friend. I believe it may have been regarding groundwater recharge and a few other items. So we just need to put it in the minutes. Yes. I will make that much. Is there anybody from the community who'd like to address us on this? I'll move it for us. Is there a motion with the amendment? So moved. Second. There's a motion from Director Leopold. We'll give it to Director Bilicic. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Now we have the consent agenda which are items six through eight. Are there any comments in the consent agenda for many board member? Any member of the community who'd like to address us on consent? Okay, so now we'll bring it back for action on consent. I'll make a motion to approve consent. Second. There's a motion from Director Bilicic. Such as second from Director Leopold. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? That passes unanimously. We'll go on to the regular agenda which is item nine. Is the Board of Directors a zone seven to consider the status report on the Pahoa River Flood Risk Reduction Project is outlined in the memo of the district engineer. We have the memo, the Army Corps report and letters from our congressional delegation and our zone itself and the Army Civil Works program, Mr. Strudley. Thank you, Chair Friend. Members of the board, we are moving forward with the Army Corps under the award of $1.8 million in design funds coming from this fiscal year's work plan which is a tremendous accomplishment for the district. As I've told you before, we have some very good momentum with the state but this helps solidify some very positive momentum with the Army Corps of Engineers with their commitment to start design. I've had some discussions with our Army Corps staff in the SF district office. We are starting to work towards mutually developing ideas for what that money will be used for initially and we strongly are gonna be encouraging the district office to use that money to start design and not let it get bogged down in other administrative or environmental needs. Although those still do exist, we wanna move as quickly as we can with the Army Corps and actually start designing components of the project. I can't tell you what those decisions are yet because they have yet to be made but we will be having those conversations with them beginning later this month on March 30th where we'll have a staff call with their management team. What this means is that the Army Corps will be requesting some funds from the local non-federal sponsors. So that includes Zone 7 as well as Modern County Water Resources Agency. The memo indicates approximately $630,000 split between Zone 7 and Modern County Water Resources. Subsequent discussions with Army Corps will be revising that number because the calculations is a little more complicated than what I originally anticipated. So the numbers more to the tune of about $970,000 split between Zone 7 and Modern County Water Resources Agency. This is well within the budget that is being developed right now and that will come before your board later this year. We are continuing, as I said, to move forward with our Subventions Authorization with the state. We have submitted a non-federal cost share report to the state which has been tentatively approved by Department of Water Resources staff. You will be pleased to know that under the calculations that DWR requested, the project qualifies for 109% cost share. So we have such wonderful protection provided by this project to disadvantaged communities, state transportation facilities. It actually results in a higher than 100% cost share. The limits of that program, of course, are 70%. So we easily reach the maximum level of cost share coming from Subventions. That report is now required to be publicly noticed. It will go on our website as well as there will be a notice in the Pajaronian. It will be under a 45-day public comment period that should begin this Friday, assuming all goes to plan with publishing that in the Pajaronian. We will be putting more irons in the fire with different grant opportunities that arise. We are still waiting for DWR to release their coastal watershed flood risk reduction grant offering, but we will make every concerted effort to land some money that will be in addition to our Subventions Authorization under that grant program and any others that come along that we are eligible for which includes the Urban Flood Protection Grant Program. We are moving forward with our CEQA Environmental Review. We had a very successful scoping meeting last month which was well attended. We received a number of comments which are we are in the process of organizing and responding to, but none of them seem to be obvious showstoppers or indicating some overwhelming discontent among the public or agencies responsible for permitting. So we are moving well through that environmental review process. And we are continuing to work with our program management consultant team in moving towards standing up a joint powers authority to oversee the capital improvements as well as the ONM existing as well as proposed for a new project once it's built. As I told you at our last board meeting, I anticipate hopefully bringing this item before you prior to our June meeting. So I think it's too early to assume any requests coming for a special meeting in April, but the earliest I think you may see something as a special meeting across might be during the mid to latter portion of May. If things don't go according to plan, it will just fall likely to the normal June meeting for adoption of a JPA agreement and other accessory information. We are working towards refining and finalizing the proposed rate assessments that would be brought before the voters in support of capital improvements and ONM. I don't have those rates to share for you now. We are gonna be first sharing those rates with the governance and finance committee. That meeting will be upcoming on April 9th. A number of you are part of that committee. And so you will hear an update from our team on what those rates look like and we can discuss likely public success and acceptance of those rates being calculated right now. And that's all I have for you and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Strathley. Questions from directors? Comment. Or comment, please. Dr. Bilsich. I just want to say how proud I am of you and chair friend and of course the whole board but to get the acknowledgment of our senators, Senator Harris, Senator Feinstein to get our assembly members Stone and Rivas to even get the president on board with his flexibility and trying to have this all come together and it's politics, but it's politics that is working. And it's great to see that and I just want to commend you and chair friend. Thank you. I appreciate that. I just like to offer that this is very much a team effort and chair friend, the rest of the board and your support as well as of course all the support coming from our assembly members, state senators and Congressman Panetta, a huge help from him and as well as some engagement from our senators.  So appreciate the accolades but the accolades definitely go much farther beyond even this room. It's a team effort. Thank you. Well, Congressman Panetta has been instrumental.  But thank you. Thank you. Other comments? Anybody from the community like to address this on this item or anybody in the community room want to address this on this item? Yes. Ms. Steinbruner. Thank you, Becky Steinbruner. Thank you, Mr. Stridley for this presentation and I want to applaud you again. I know it is a team effort but I was at the December 2nd special board of supervisor meeting when I heard Congressman Panetta say it was your good work that caught the eye of the Army Corps of Engineers leaders and helped move this out of its stalled, very long stalled state. So I can't thank you enough. Thank you. I was at the scoping meeting last month and it was very well attended and very well put on and organized and I want to thank you for doing that. Again, as you move into the design phase, I do hope that there will be some consideration of controlled managed aquifer recharge if you will with flooding and to really take advantage of the benefits of possible groundwater recharge as we also work to protect those who are vulnerable along the levee that we can make use of this project working with Dr. Helen Dahlke from the University of California at Davis and the agricultural businesses in the Central Valley that are putting this into practice with good success. So please consider that and I want to thank you again for your good work. Thank you. Anybody else from the community that'd like to address us? Okay, see none will bring it back to the board. I believe that there is an acceptance file on this. Yes, that's correct. I would move the recommended actions. And I will second that. So a motion from Director Leopold and a second from Director Bill Sitch. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? It passes unanimously. Thank you as always, Mr. Shredley and that will end zone seven. We'll turn it back to the board and the supervisors for item number 12. We'll go right into item number 12 or should we have? They're ready if you'd like, if you'd like to just go right into it. Put this up to the board. Do you want it short and just go into it? Go into it? Okay. We'll take a break after that. Good morning everyone. Elisa Benson, Assistant CAO here to introduce our study session today on our ongoing work with focus strategies to assess and develop an improvement plan for our homeless response system. A quick reminder of the overall work. We started this with a contract you authorized us to enter last February and have been working very diligently in the community with our partners and city colleagues to undertake this work. The purpose of today's briefing in a study session is to update you on our work since the October study session we had and we'll be focusing on the quantitative performance results that was part of our most recent phase as well as an update as to the progress and emerging recommendations from the ad hoc work groups we put together coming out of the qualitative assessment and the interim recommendations focused provided to our community. We'll also give you a preview of this next phase of work which is our final phase for this engagement around action planning. Before I introduce Kate, our partner here I wanna thank all of our community partners and city partners in doing this work in the last 10 months. People have been incredibly engaged, have been incredibly open and what we see is really just the heart of collaboration in this work and the willingness to take hard looks at what we do today and identify our gaps and our opportunities and it's been very impressive to see people be open and willing to do things differently and really working together to do that. It's been a privilege to be part of this effort. So with that I'm gonna introduce Kate Bristol. She's Director of Consulting at Focus Strategies as you know, a firm that specializes in the issues of homelessness and is working across the country in helping communities like ours deal with this very critical crisis. She will be doing a majority of the presentation. I will add some relevant content as we work through the slides. We do, there are three major sections of the presentation and we will take questions at each section break so you don't have to sort of get through a section to raise questions or comments. At the end, I'm gonna summarize really quickly the board actions. There's a slide at the end to remind us what's actually in front of you and then we'll have more time for questions, public comment and then board final action on this item today. With that, I'm gonna introduce Kate. Thank you, Elisa. Can you guys hear me? So thank you to the board for having Focus Strategies back again. Last time I saw you all was in October when we presented our initial deliverable which was a baseline assessment report. Okay, how do I go forward? I can get this. There we go. So this is forward, okay.  As Elisa mentioned, we're gonna do about three main sections in this report out. First is just kind of a quick review of some of the information I presented last time which is the planning framework that we're helping you kind of drive towards which is a systems approach to ending homelessness. Then the majority of the presentation will be the data that we have analyzed to look at your system performance. We'll present some of the key findings from that. Then the work that the work groups have been doing around system design and implementation strategies. And then we'll talk about the final step of the engagement which is the action planning process that's gonna kick off this month. Okay. Just straight that way. Okay, so just a quick review. Last time I was here, I presented these same slides. They were in a different color because we changed our colors of our slide template. So the goal that we're trying to help you all move to is to get to a homelessness response system. And the idea here is that instead of having just individual and sort of loosely coordinated programs which address homelessness for some folks, you wanna get to a strongly coordinated system that is strategically prioritizing your resources. And you have a strategy to address homelessness for everyone. And so while we try to always be person centered and think about people really thinking about the systems strategy is to envision that you're gonna have a system that will have a response for everyone regardless of what their specific situation is. So this is kind of the why. Again, just you have some good programs. Every community has good programs. Programs alone really can't solve the problem. In an environment where you have limited resources you need to have a joint decision making shaped by shared goals and really know how you're investing your funds. I think particularly in a community like Santa Cruz County where you have actually a pretty sizable unsheltered homeless population relative to the size of your community which means you have even more resource constraints. And you wanna have accountability for all the stakeholders in the system. So when you have a system you'll know you have one. When you have shared objectives that everyone has agreed upon and all your resources are aligned to achieving some shared objectives and outcomes. And then your programs are designed to achieve those objectives and outcomes and you're analyzing data to understand whether those objectives are being met. So just for example, just to pick an example that might be one you wanna think about in your action planning. If one of your key objectives you're driving towards is to reduce the number of unsheltered folks in the community, people living outside or in encampments you might agree that the key and most important strategy is to have a larger percentage of those folks get to a shelter bed and have a higher percentage of them get from shelter to housing.  Then to accomplish that because you have multiple jurisdictions and a lot of stakeholders you need a clear structure and process for making decisions about the response that everyone understands so that every person gets a timely and calibrated response that gets them on a path towards housing and that is fundamentally what the system needs to be about. And so this is just a picture I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on all the details but I think the important piece about this is on the left-hand side you see a group of people who are experiencing homelessness and your objective is that at the end of the day everyone is in housing and you have a variety of ways you go about doing that. The other thing I just wanna say about this is I think and we talked about this quite a bit last time I was here is I think there's a tendency to get very caught up in the crisis response strategies which are outreach, shelter, all the things you do in the immediate crisis which is that dark blue circle all of which is really important but if it's not connected to some strategies to get people to housing it's not gonna help you in the end reduce the number of people who are experiencing homelessness. Okay and then this is just a quick review of the timeline of the engagement that we're doing so we started in March of last year we issued our baseline assessment report in August and I presented it here in October. We started the data work actually in July and completed the initial results in November we then went back and did some data cleanup which I'll talk about and so the results are now final in March and then in February and March also the implementation work groups convened and they've developed a variety of implementation proposals and so we'll start the action planning this month in March with the goal that your action plan is finished in June. Okay so stop for questions just anything on this first part? Okay thank you I'll go ahead and click now. She can drive herself now. Okay so now we're gonna get into the data and actually to just get started just to kind of orient people we thought we'd put up a summary of your 2019 point in time count which I focus strategies does not take credit for having done we didn't work on this but just to sort of give everyone kind of a baseline to start from this is your biannual count that's done every January in odd years so the last one was January 2019 and this is found a total of 2,167 people who are homeless in the community of whom 78% or 1700 were unsheltered and another 467 were living in a shelter or a transitional housing program and you'll see the majority of them were adults over age 24 actually a significant number of transitional age youth which is a youth 18 to 24, 27% and then children under the age of 18 or 13, 14% you also have 18% of the population that you counted wer