The hour of 2.15 having arrived, the council is in session for its afternoon session on May 9th, 2023. The clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Newsom. Present. Brown, here. Watkins, here. Present. Calentari-Johnson. Present. Vice Mayor Golder. Here, sorry. And Mayor Cooley. Here, a quorum having been established, we will move on. Our item number four is a mayoral proclamation declaring May is Older Americans Month. We have some fine folks here who I will present this proclamation to, but who are also going to be making some remarks. Recording in progress. Happy Older Americans Month. Hi, my name is Kelly Mercer-Lee-Boff and I am the Senior Programs Coordinator for the City of Santa Cruz. And I have the privilege and honor each day to design programming for our senior population at the London Nelson Community Center and to partner with agencies throughout the county to support our seniors. In honor of May being Older Americans Month, I'm excited to share what the City of Santa Cruz has on the horizon for our older adults. But first, I want to share why it's so important that we take action now. By 2030, 10.8 million Californians will be an older adult, making up one in four of the state's population. By 2034, the United States will, for the first time ever, be comprised of more older adults than of children. So we have a rapidly growing senior population that we need to start preparing for. The sooner we start community planning with an age-friendly lens, the sooner people of all ages will benefit from the adoption of policies and programs that make neighborhoods walkable, feature transportation options, enable access to key services, provide opportunities to participate in community activities and support housing that's affordable and adaptable. Our current plan is to enroll the City of Santa Cruz into the AARP age-friendly network. This designation is actually the US affiliate of the World Health Organization's global network for age-friendly cities and communities. It's a public commitment to a five-year program cycle that can be entered at any time. And once in the network, there's a plethora of resources available to help jurisdictions support each other in making communities more livable for people of all ages. Now, once in the network, there are eight categories we'll be assessing in our community with the idea that the availability and quality of these programs and community features impact the well-being of older adults. The eight demands of livability framework is used by all of the towns, cities, counties, and states enrolled in the age-friendly network to organize and prioritize their work to make our community become more livable. Now, while some communities tackle all eight domains at once, others may choose to focus on fewer or combined domains. Now, this framework is also in alignment with the city's health and all policies, particularly the pillars of equity and public health. So how do we do this and what are the next steps? We've identified points of contact in each of the city departments to form a city-wide committee on aging and in collaboration with the County of Santa Cruz and other local jurisdictions. We will be conducting our community needs assessment in early 2024. From there, we will develop a community action plan based on the assessment results and the needs identified within the eight domains of livability that influence the health and quality of life for older adults. And we look forward to keeping you updated as we pursue our age-friendly designation for the city of Santa Cruz and we invite you to join us in these efforts. And if you'd like to learn more about this process and all the amazing ways we are currently keeping our seniors active, engaged, and connected over at the London Nelson Community Center through education, recreation, and technology, please don't hesitate to contact me or my team at the London Nelson Community Center. Thank you. Well, thank you so very, very much. We very much appreciate it. We're so impressed with the work that you do at London Nelson Center. I went down just before we went back into session and told you that I thought it was a prank of sorts today because today is my 73rd birthday and I thought this is a prank. A happy coincidence. But in all seriousness, thank you so very much. You're doing great work and we very much appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We are on item five. Members, any comments on this item you'd like to make? If I could. Yes, please, Ms. Brown. I just want to say thank you so much for the presentation and for being at the forefront here of moving in this direction. I represent the City of Santa Cruz on the Area Agency on Aging Advisory Board and this is something that has been in discussion. I've actually reached out to, and I, Council Member Watkins, and I had talked about bringing something forward and I'm really glad that it's happening and that through the staff, you are coordinating with the other jurisdictions. I think this is just a really wonderful way to get a sense of where we're at, that inventory part that's part of the process as well as using it to help a lens to a lot through the PIAP lens, really to decide how we move forward with projects and programs. So thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member Watkins. I'll just briefly echo Council Member Brown's comments as well as the mayors and really thank you for the work that you're doing and just how pleased I am to see this come forward. We have talked about wanting to see this move forward and I know there's been energy happening in the county and other jurisdictions to now have it come before us is really encouraging. And I think we do want to be prepared to understand how we can best support our aging population and we do need to start right now. So however we can be kept abreast of what's going on and any kind of points that come back to us for any decision-making please do and hopefully we can make this a real age-friendly community for our seniors. So thank you. Thank you for the comments. Good. Thank you again very, very much. We are on item number five and this item is a crisis consulting for the department. I'm sorry for the development of a city-based integrated health response team. Whereas Ms. Murphy here, I believe Mr. Klamers also here, but Ms. Murphy, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council members. I'm here to introduce the presentation on the integrated health response team. Short, the I Heart team. Thank you, Mr. Olt for that. Just like to start off with, according to the Department of Justice, one in four people shot and killed by law enforcement between 2015 and 2020 had a mental health condition. The current mental health crisis response system relies on law enforcement and puts people suffering from mental illness through an expensive and traumatizing revolving door as they shuttle between jails, emergency rooms, and the street. A comprehensive crisis response system can prevent these tragedies, save money, and increase access to appropriate care. Last year, Council Member Golder connected Chief Escalante with the City of Petaluma's Chief and City Manager to learn more about their mobile crisis response and intervention program. Their program began in 2021 and has proven to quite successful. They connected us with their consultant, Mr. Ben Adam Klamer, who prepared an analysis for them in recommendation for a model mobile crisis response in not only Petaluma, but in several Bay Area cities. The city engaged Mr. Klamer late last year to perform a data assessment and analysis of the types of calls of service that we receive here in the city. He then reviewed existing programs since our mental health liaison program, met with numerous local service providers, including the county, and did ride-alongs with FIRE and PD, and he prepared analysis and a report on an integrated health response team for the city. And Mr. Klamer is here today to present his findings. While we're not here today to take any action, but to hear the program, there is no, there is not funding that is identified today for this program. However, there will be opportunities to discuss potential funding in the future, including at the FY24 budget process or even the mid-year in FY24, later in FY24. So with that, I'd like to introduce Mr. Ben Adam Klamer for the presentation. Mr. Klamer, good afternoon. Welcome. Thank you. Hello, hello, I'm Ben Adam Klamer, and if we could just maybe hit the next slide. Just a little introduction, although I think that Lisa did excellent job. That was fantastic. I worked for a team up in Eugene, Oregon called Cahoots for about five years as a crisis worker and as an EMT. And then I have been for the last few years helping cities all around the state of California start mobile crisis teams very similar to Cahoots, including at the UC Santa Cruz as well. Those teams have been started or I've also helped improve them in Sonoma County, Marin County here at the UC Santa Cruz, San Joaquin, Los Angeles and Orange Counties. And I have been working with Lisa and with Chief Escalante and Chief Odie and Larry, the homelessness liaison here in the city developing this report. And what I've got here is a sort of much, much more consumable summary of that very long arduous report that I wrote. So we can go to the next one. So I think just as we wanna sort of talk about what I think are general, although I think Lisa laid it out really well, the kind of problem, oh, that doesn't bend, the problem that we're facing generally as a society is that we have developed a very good response system to get to crime, violence, fires, medical emergencies. And that system is made up of law enforcement, fire department, EMS, emergency medical services, but there's so many calls that come into that system, into the 911 or the emergency response system that don't really meet the criteria for law enforcement or fire or EMS, but those calls have been given to those agencies. And some of those are mental health, some of those are people experiencing homelessness, some of those are people just having quality of life issues and some of those are just family members who are having conflict and end up in that state where they feel like they need emergency assistance, but the system that we have right now isn't necessarily designed to respond to them in the best way. So the goal really for what we're talking about here is adding into that system a response that is designed to tackle those situations. Also, we're doing Older American, that was really awesome, the Older American Month, but also May is a National Mental Health Awareness Month. I think it's really fitting that we're having this conversation now in this month. It's important to remember that mental health crises can be frightening and very isolating experiences, and especially with older adults, as their friends pass away and as their things change in their lives, there's a huge older adult mental health crisis going on. And a lot of what we do in the Kahootz model or the Integrated Health Response Team model is responding to older adults and saying, hey, imagine it's pretty tough where you're at right now and we're here to support you. In fact, this story that I'm about to tell is with an older adult, and I just wanna take a moment and recognize this month, both as Older Adult Month and as Mental Health Awareness Month. So this is a story about a man named Ernest. Obviously, there are details of this story that have been changed for the sake of confidentiality. So, but this is a story that I've encountered many, many times in my career. Ernest was an older adult living on a fixed income in a hotel, and hotels can be pretty pricey, as I can tell you right now because I'm staying in one while I'm here. And this left him very little money for paying for a roof over his head, after paying for a roof over his head, left him very little money for food and all that kind of stuff. He was taking numerous different prescription medications for both physical and mental health conditions, including Xanax and anti-anxiety drug, and he started to feel suicidal, and it was pretty early in the morning. So he took three Xanax over the course of two hours, which is too much, that's more than he was prescribed, and he proceeded to call 911 because he was feeling suicidal. Now, at the same time, he called 911 and as a good decision, he decided to call a friend for support, and he told that friend that he had overdosed on Xanax, and the friend got very scared and called 911 and reported an overdose. And this, of course, was alarming, and so the dispatchers who got his phone call for the suicidal feelings sent out our integrated health response team, and the dispatchers also got a call from his friend for an overdose, and sent that over to Fire EMS, and they sent out an engine to manage the overdose. So we can go to the next one. So in a normal city with earnest, what would happen? Usually, because of the suicidality, law enforcement is going to be deployed to do a 5150 assessment, and because of the overdose, Fire and EMS is going to be sent out as well. That means we've got at least two, maybe three officers, and then we've got up to, especially in the city of Santa Cruz, and most cities in California, we're gonna have five employees, usually three firefighters on an engine and two paramedics in an ambulance, or some configuration of that. If you're a city like Santa Cruz or like other cities in California, you might have a crisis team on duty, and they're usually riding around with police officers, so then, or they're working for the county team, so we might have another one to two staff there as well. So we're looking somewhere between nine to 10 employees who are responding to this one man. Because of his overdose of the Xanax, which is to say an overdose that's not lethal and is rarely very dangerous, he's going to be transported to the hospital by an ambulance, and he's gonna be taken to the ER before he can be transferred to the crisis stabilization unit. And in all the midst of this, Ernest was dealing with a lot of stress around money. That ambulances bill probably run him $800 to $1,000. The ER bill is gonna run him $1,400 to $2,000, which he's never gonna pay, and that's gonna be footed by somebody. All told, we could be looking between somewhere, between seven and 10 responders arriving on scene. This can be very overwhelming for a person who's suicidal, and ultimately in the end, despite all of that response, all of those resources poured into it, he ends up at the ER, which is not the best spot for him. Next slide. So what happened in reality? What actually happened with Ernest? Well, we showed up as the integrated health first responders, and we are first on scene, and we performed a suicide assessment. We also performed a rapid medical assessment to determine if the Xanax overdose was affecting his mentality, his mentation, and if he was losing consciousness or whatnot from it, he wasn't. And because of that, we were able to say to the fire department, hey, we don't need paramedics, we don't need five firefighters and paramedics, we don't need law enforcement because he's not threatening us, he's not being dangerous, and we can handle the suicide assessment, no problem. We were able to contact the CSU and say, hey, this is the situation going on, can we bring him in? And they were like, yeah, bring him in, it's no problem. And so we were able to transport him directly to the CSU, skipping the emergency room, saving a bed there, saving an ambulance and saving every one time and money and energy, which is to say with just two staff, we were able to manage the entire situation, save time, save money, and get him not only to the right place, but to the place that he wanted to go to. So a recent study in Georgia has shown that people with histories of mental health issues and their families prefer a non-police crisis response. And I think this is important, this is an important study because as more and more teams pop up all around the state, it's important to note that we try to create these teams independent of law enforcement, independent of fire EMS so that people feel like they have an independent team to respond to them, which is what they long for. And we go to next. So when it comes to mobile crisis response, we have a couple of different models and obviously I have worked in the integrated health response model myself, but I do wanna just note that there are several different models out there and then I wanna talk about, both are sort of the positive components of them and the maybe deficits of them. The most common model generally throughout the country is the corresponds model, which pairs a licensed clinician, usually an LCSW or an LMFT, which is a licensed clinical social worker or licensed marriage and family therapist. If I ever say an acronym that anyone's confused by, you feel free to stop me, there are so many. So usually that they are paired up with a law enforcement officer and their access through 9-1-1, which makes getting them very, very easy. Having the team's final through 9-1-1 system or the PSAP, the public safety access point is a very functional system and that has worked very well to get crisis workers to scenes. They also respond to a very wide variety of calls. They can respond to anything that a law enforcement officer can respond to, so which is pretty much everything, which is another positive of that model and often they do transport, although when they do transport, it's in the back of a police car, which as you may know is can be, will include handcuffs. It's not the most comfortable transports and can be fairly frustrating for somebody who is having a really bad day and now they're in the back of a cop car. So not the most ideal transport situation, but they do transport. However, they don't have medical capabilities. So I think in particular, when we're thinking about this model, especially with somebody like Ernest and older adult, this is not great for them because being put in the back of a cop car can be damaging to their health and things like that. So there's some positives to that model and then there's some deficits there. The other big model for mental health response, which I like to call it in the report, you'll see it called the county-based two-clinician team because I couldn't make it look good and fit there. I called it the clinical team. This is where you have at least one licensed clinician. So historically, it's always been two licensed clinicians, but more and more they're going with a licensed clinician in peer support model. These teams are usually run by counties. So you have them really all across the state, like almost every LA area team, every Bay area county has a team like this. They're usually accessed or almost exclusively, I should say exclusively accessed through 10-digit numbers that are run by the county. They respond very strictly to mental health calls in Santa Cruz County. They respond to mental health calls only at locations, at facilities, so they don't respond to people's houses or to people on the street. And sometimes these teams can transport, but that's usually limited. So the Santa Cruz County team does do some transports, but not very often. And then most of the time you look at them throughout the county or throughout the state, this model will use either private or city ambulances to do the transports. Again, they have no medical capabilities either. These teams do not. So then that leaves us with what I call the integrated health model, which is, I call integrated health because it pairs up some kind of crisis worker or mental health professional with a medical professional, most typically an EMT. There's paramedics, sometimes there's nurses, depends on which city you're in. When you look at something like San Francisco, they have paramedics. When you look at something like Petaluma, we just have EMTs. Again, these teams kind of combine some of the best parts, I think, of corresponds and the clinical team model, which is that they are accessed most typically through the PSAP or 911 system, which is to say they're very easy to get the teams. We launched in Santa Fe, and I'll point out some, we'll do a comparison of Santa Fe with Santa Cruz here shortly, but we launched in Santa Fe at the end of March and within a couple of days, we were responding to about nine to 10 calls a day on a 12 hour shift. So we were rocking and rolling right from the get go, but that's because the system, the calls that are already coming into the police that fit within the wheelhouse of that team, they were already coming in. So all we had to do was just send the team out. Very simple. That because of that, because of the crisis worker EMT pairing, they're able to respond to a ton of different kinds of things. So for example, very frequently, you see somebody sleeping on the street and you see them there and then you walk by them two hours later and they're still there. That frequently gets coded as a medical call because well, what if they're overdosed or what if they're really sick or something like that? But most of the time, they're just sleeping. So frequently fire engines and paramedics and all the whole crew get sent out to those calls for service. With the integrated health team, because you have that EMT, you can make that team respond to that call easily because most of the time it's an auto medical emergency but with the EMT, if it is, you've got a really easy way to start an intervention, start medical care and get EMS in route quickly. The other great component of integrated health is that they can transport. As I said, a lot of clinical teams throughout the state utilize EMTs to do the transports. With the integrated health team, we take the mental health worker and we take that EMT, we put them in the same van and then we have them do the transports. This saves a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy and like in the case of Ernest at the beginning, it's much more comfortable. No gurneys, no handcuffs, just sit in a nice seat. You want us to play some good music. We're gonna take you and yeah, we love playing music for them in the back. Whenever I transport, especially like suicidal teenagers, we always want to get them their favorite songs in the back, which are usually my favorite songs. So that's always great and then obviously, as I mentioned, the integrated health model has medical capabilities. Generally, not advanced medical capabilities, we're not doing, we're not responding to heart attacks. But we do run up on somebody who's overdosed, we can get that going or somebody who's just got wounds on their feet, wounds on their legs or whatnot, we can handle that as well. Oh, there. So what is it? Just as a sort of definition, what is integrated health first response? It's modeled off of Kahootz and Eugene, Oregon. It includes a crisis worker and a medical staff. And I also wanna say that the primary focus of these types of teams is de-escalation, support, resource referral, and then helping that person in crisis access their own internal and external resources to manage the crisis. Our number one goal, always, always, always on these teams is to help people stay where they're at, stabilize, and when they are at that spot where they really, really feel like they cannot stay where they're at, it's gonna be too overwhelming, then we have a really easy and efficient way to get them to the place where they need to go. And one of the cool components of that as well is we transport to any staffed service. So you wanna get into a rehab, cool, we'll take you there. You wanna get, you wanna go to the crisis center and stabilize there, cool, we'll take you there. We're not just gonna write you a note and say, this is the address, like this is the phone number. We're going to go, we're going to make introductions, we're gonna help that person get through that process, which can be always sometimes very overwhelming. Yeah, we can go next. So what kinds of calls specifically do these types of teams respond to? So obviously our highest priority is always mental health and suicidal folks.  Those are great, kind of bread and butter calls for this type of team. Substance use, honestly, runs the gamut. If somebody's contemplating going to treatment or if somebody's just drunk and needs somebody to come check on them and make sure they're gonna be cool for the night or make sure they get to a place that's a little safer, sounds great to us. People who are unhoused, a lot of times what you find with, especially with law enforcement, is that it's very exhausting going to calls frequently to deal with people who are sleeping on the street and it's not great for the person who's sleeping on the street and the officer doesn't like doing it and we don't have a great alternative for that. So these types of teams respond to those types of calls. Sometimes that's to say, hey, you know, the business called and they would like you moved along. Can we help you get someplace better? Sometimes it's just going out and making sure that someone's still alive and saying, hey, you know, here's a cliff bar and a water bottle and I hope you can have a better day. So the other big, really big ticket item for these types of teams is what we call welfare checks. These are a lot of these that we do are done on older adults, so bringing that back in as well. People with dementia, people who maybe their grandkids live out of state and they talk to them once a week and their grandkids haven't heard from them in two weeks and their grandkids call say, hey, can you go check on my grandparents? That's a total thing that we do. Honestly, those are some of the most fun calls. I really enjoy those, you know, going out and seeing how folks are doing. Sometimes that means we're looking to make sure that they're able to take care of themselves, trying to make sure if we need to file an APS report or something like that. Sometimes it's just going out and saying, hey, you know, how are you doing? And they're like, not well.  And then also, you know, not the sort of domestic violence calls, but sometimes people hear their neighbors yelling at each other and they call for assistance and really just the family's having conflict and they just need a referee of some kind. And we like to go out and do those mediations. I also really enjoy those calls so that they can last a long time. My very, when I was training the team in San Rafael, the very first call, this was a month ago, the very first call that we took was a two hour long family conflict call and it was rather exhausting, but, you know, those are the types of things that we go out to you and that can be any family. It doesn't matter if you're the wealthiest family in the city or the poorest family in the city, you can go out and handle that. So I do want to bring up the similar, yeah. Excuse me. Yeah. So we have scheduled this till. Am I going too long? Let me finish my, and you can make yours. We have scheduled this for another eight minutes. Okay. That is also going to involve. Questions. This is enormously helpful. I appreciate it. Yeah. I just want to alert you to time issues. Let's skip this slide. Santa Fele and Santa Cruz are very similar cities. Next. And it's working really well for them there. We go next slide. This is what we, what might look like a sort of proposed system of response that I, that we call like a two tier where we have first responders and second responders. Just to give a sense for this really quickly for some context, because I think we understand everything on the left side. This would mean that when there is a, we would, that the integrated health team would respond to that huge bulk of calls that come in that aren't sort of law enforcement and, and EMS related. And then when they escalate to the point of needing something like a 5150, then we would sort of include the county clinical team in that. And we'd, and the goal would be to create a really nice sort of tiered response that way. We go next. And then this is benefits to first responders. I think I've already hit everything here. And then we go next slide as well. This also benefits the community. Honestly, I've hit everything here as well. One of the, I will say one thing here, which is that I like to think of these teams as, if we think of the person in crisis as the hub of a wheel and we think of the social service agencies that support that person as the rim of the wheel, we really want our integrated health response team to be the spokes of that wheel, where they connect that person to those services. And then when those services are having, you know, need to give extra support to that person in crisis, they call on the integrated health team to provide the extra support, which will reduce their overtime costs. It will reduce their burnout of their employees and it will reduce their sort of reliance on, on extra help in their, within their own organization. There's some data, I think that we could respond to a lot of calls in Santa Cruz. I'll just summarize it that way and go next. And thank you so much. And I'm very looking forward to answering any questions. Well, thank you very much. That was an excellent presentation, very thorough, very complete, very helpful to us. I know that a number of colleagues of here on the city council have been interested in this for some time. I know the city administration and police department have also been very supportive of this and this is a real step in the right and proper direction. So thank you very, very much. Let me ask the council members to have any comments on this. You would like to make Ms. Brown. Thank you, mayor. Thank you, Mr. Kleimer. And so I just, I want to say, I'm so thrilled to hear your presentation, to see you here today. I have heard you speak about this model and your experiences and how this model could be utilized in other communities for several years now. I'm just thrilled that you're here talking to us about it. I did try to move forward this process a couple of years ago and didn't have support at the time on the council to do that. So I'm just thrilled. I want to thank the vice mayor for catalyzing this and I'm really looking forward to seeing how things progress. I have a question which is really a big question about what next after getting this information and I think the cost effectiveness and for all of the reasons that you've articulately laid out it's a wonderful opportunity for us. So I would just love to get a sense of when we might hear about this again, how we're moving. Thank you. Ms. Murphy. Thank you. What's next would be to consider in your budget deliberations, either FY24 deliberations or kick it to mid-year, it is not funded at this time. So that's where it stands. And the next steps, if it were to be funded then would to be continue on with the second phase of the contract of actually going and putting together RFP. It would not be a program that's run by the city. It would be funded by the city and hopefully there would be at one point in time the ability to go after some grant funding in the future but it would be by a non-profit, most likely who would administer the program. Wonderful, thank you. And so the budget time is where this will, as you said before, thank you. And to highlight also the second part of the contract is what she means is that not only do I, when I work with cities like this not only do I provide the analysis and things like that but I also provide training to teams when they start launching so that there's somebody experienced in the whole system helping out with that. Council Member Brunner. Thank you for your presentation. And I guess I have a couple of questions regarding the Petaluma model, is that where you worked? No, I worked in Eugene on cahoots. I helped the Petaluma start their team and train their team. And so one of the things that I know we come across we have existing response models as you laid out here. One of the concerns as places for people to go which is also simultaneously being worked on. And so what, I didn't get a sense in this model how that addresses that and I don't know if you have an answer to that. Well, I think you explained it just in the way you guys the question, right? Which is that there is an important component of this which is having good locations to take people when they're in crises. And the struggle with that is that we need both the team to take them there and the place to go. So I'm the person who can talk about the team to take them there. And I think that continuing to expand those things like good crisis centers, sobering centers, when cahoots was started in 1989, they opened a sobering center at the same time, specifically so that the team would have a place to take someone when they're intoxicated. That, so having components set up is really good. And also as somebody who can say that I used to work overnight shifts when very few services were open. And so my role was to help that person stay calm and deescalate and say, okay, like we can't go anywhere right now so what are we gonna do? How are we gonna manage this? I still think there's extreme value in having a team like this helping that person sort of center and deescalate even though there might not be a place to go. And then my question might be for staff and at what point can we, are there other options that have been explored by staff based on the direction of this type of exploration? Well, I think if you've seen the report that Mr. Kleimer has explored what the other options are and lays out several different models. Currently we're in a co-response type model where our mental health liaisons go with PD. Actually they're in two separate vehicles but that's the model we have. This is the overall ones that he looked at of all of the models he looked and now analyzed. The one that we're proposing if we move forward is the most appropriate best response we believe for this city. And then one more question. So I guess on knowing that we have existing models and county is working on, for example I was in a stakeholder meeting and they're working on expansion of their responses and I just, I'm trying to understand the overlap and there are other organizations and how this all fits in. This is Ben's opinion and experience that he's presented and for city staff I'd like to see the county side, the other orgs and the whole picture and I guess in knowing, like do we need to consider a model like this that is a template basically that Ben has provided based on the Kahootz model and some of these other cities, it's a template but it's up to us to find funding, to staff it or the non-profit to staff it and I'm just wondering when we'll have the opportunity to figure out what it is we need in this realm, that's not an overlap. Well, yeah, let me say, I will say we've started teams, I've helped start teams like this in Orange County and Sonoma County and Marin County. What we find over and over again when we've done that is that the county mental health crisis response teams have at first been like, oh, well, all the work that you guys do is gonna, we're not gonna have work anymore and what they found is that hasn't been the case because these types of teams respond to calls that those teams would have never gone to in the first place because teams like that are county mobile crisis teams are almost never responding to the person who's sleeping on the steps of City Hall, they're not responding to the person with dementia, they're not responding to the person who's intoxicated, they're not responding to a whole variety of different types of things that these types of teams respond to and so what has then happened is that the types of calls of those county crisis teams respond to, they continue to respond to those both on their own independently but also in coordination with the mobile crisis team in the city-based mobile crisis team so when I say city-based, I'm talking Hunan Beach, Garden Grove, Petaluma, San Rafael, Runderparkitadi, et cetera and then when they collaborate together to respond to those types, it creates a nice continuum of care where you have somebody who's in a crisis, they get a crisis worker, that crisis worker calls the county crisis worker to come out and do the 5150 assessment or something like that and then the transport can happen either by the city-based team or by that county-based team so that throughout the whole experience of that person's suicidal or mental health crisis, they're never touching law enforcement, they're never touching fire, they're only ever dealing with mental health workers. So I do see them respond weekly, daily, often, different teams that we have so I'm asking staff, at what point can we have follow-up on determined, will this come again on an agenda to determine if we're moving forward with a model like this, if we are voting to fund it or look into funding, what is that next step? This is, I guess I have a lot of unanswered questions because a lot of what is described in this model almost makes it sound like if we added an EMT to existing teams and already that are being expanded, it could be a very similar model to this and I'd be curious what county says about this model and how that affects all of this. So yeah, absolutely, it makes sense. It is a different model and it's a model that's been proven in numerous cities to be successful with the EMT co-pair. Now, is that something that county wants to participate in that type of program? Not wholly sure, they are under a mandate to put together a mobile crisis type response program. I know they have, I sat in on the same college you did. It's very much a different program in terms of the level of what they will be looking at and responding to versus the needs of the city and it's a much broader, widely expanded program. Right now we just have two mobile crisis, well, two mental health liaisons for this city and it's not a 24-7 program. That's what we're looking to implement is a 24-7 type program. The recommendations that you see before you is the full breadth depth of what we're looking to implement. I'm happy to bring it back if we want to re-agendize and bring it back for further discussion. I think it's wholly appropriate to continue down that pathway. Again, we have worked to met with Encompass and 911, and Encompass Outreach Workers. All of them, it's a model that's far more responsive and have the ability to respond.  Excuse me, we're running really late. Sorry, yeah. No, we're running really late. For the questions on this. This is an informational item.  Do you have any questions? That's the answer to my question. Council Member Callantari-Johnson. Thank you. I have a number of questions as well, but I'll keep it brief. And some of my questions and concerns were around not duplicating efforts and why not augment and expand what we have at the county, but I'll leave that be for now and go to some of my other questions. Are the crisis workers licensed? No, they're not in this model. How are they trained? We do probably about 20 to 30 hours of classroom training and then we do significant infield training and then they also have to come to us with at least two years of experience in the mental health field. Okay, so that's something, if we were to continue to come back to this, that's something I'd like to dive into a little more. I know that in the report it said 10% or less would be acute cases, but even if that is the accurate number, that 10% of acute cases would need a licensed clinical trained person to respond. So again, I know we're running out of time, but that's a concern I have with this model that I'd like to dive into. And then the other point that was brought up is, and I totally understand this, I have a master's in social work by the way, so this is a world that I'm somewhat familiar with, but that one of the purposes of the model is to remove law enforcement. So I understand the thinking behind that and how do we account for worker safety? We've had a lot of challenges very recently in fact with some of our public works and Parks and Rec workers when they've gone out to respond to encampments. So that's a concern and we've heard from our mental health liaisons recently from our criminal justice council report that they would like law enforcement there when they respond to calls because there are safety issues. So I'll keep it at that. I have a lot more questions. I guess one more thing I will bring up is the opportunity if we were to move forward with this because we are relieving the impact on emergency rooms and diverting folks from emergency rooms, an opportunity to partner and ask the medical world and hospitals with emergency rooms that's dignity here to provide resources. So I'll keep it there but I have a lot more to say. Very good, thank you very much. Vice mayor has recognized. We'll keep doing it in order here. I'm also gonna keep it pretty brief but I just wanna thank and acknowledge Mr. Huffaker and Chief Escalante and in addition, Jeffrey and Stacey Arl that kind of put me in touch with those folks up in Petaluma and gave me the ball to keep rolling. And I agree, I think this is a great first step. I think we have to partner with Netcom. We have to partner with the county. Get also Lupin, Kaiser and PAMF in this as they are opening hospitals in our region. And one thing that didn't get brought up but when we do bring this item back and something to think about when I spoke with partners up in Petaluma, they mentioned that not having a locked facility was a barrier. So not just facilities but locked facility for some people in some situations. And so I think again, the county is gonna have to be an important part of this conversation moving forward. And I just wanna thank you for coming and thank you for the presentation and thank you everybody, that's all. Thank you, Ms. Watkins. I too will keep my comments brief but I will just echo what my colleagues have said in terms of appreciation of the report and the work and definitely a good first step and important for us as a council and community to consider our options to not only efficiently but be socially responsible as we address some of the mental health issues that impact our community and the individuals like the old family that were deeply impacted by this. I agree with what was brought up in regards to kind of context with the county that was part of a reason why in terms of what kind of was a barrier to have this move forward at the city level years ago and that the county was already working and we were trying to work with them and so that will need to be I think fleshed out and would be a consideration for this council if we were to move forward and then the only other additional kind of insight or suggestion or consideration is as we see the state moving towards more reimbursable services that if this could be a model that could be sustained through Medi-Cal reimbursement and having these individuals who are conducting this work be certified by the state and able to reimburse for that. I think that would be helpful for sustainability. So if that does come forward, I'd like to also have a sustainability component built in. Thank you. Council Member Brown. Just a quick follow-up question. I'm sorry. Okay, just given the concerns that I'm hearing, I wanted to, just because I am very familiar with this model and I've heard a lot about it and the County Mental Health Advisory Board recently had a session about this where Petaluma folks were there, you were there. And I remember hearing, but I have no recollection of what the number was. The savings that they have estimated to the city budget as a result of this. So if you happen to know Ball Park. I don't have anything off the top of my head. I can say that in Eugene, they estimate approximately $8 million a year. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Dueson, just to recognize. Thank you. My comments will be very brief. I just want to kind of re-echo the comments from my colleagues and express my appreciation for the report and for the presentation and for all the work that went into making this, making the report and the presentation. And I think it's a great first step and thank you. Thank you, council members. Thank you both very, very much. It was an excellent presentation. Thank you so much. You are also free to email me or but not. I'm also, yeah. Thank you for being so available. Very much appreciate that. Anyone wish to provide comment on this item? Good afternoon. Hi, my name is Jeff Horne. My very good friend, Sean Oralt, is one of the people who suffered a mental health crisis and was shot by a police and died. Two houses down from my parents' house. I just want to say like, myself, tons of people who knew Sean really want dedicated services to respond to that sort of issue. I think it's super important. I don't think anything outside of that will ever be appropriate. It was kind of hard to listen to the great presentation, thinking about all the things that could have been different. Yeah, you know, it's still something I think about basically every day. Not just what happened, but what could have been done differently. There were all responsible, 100%, the entire community is responsible for what happened. And just as a community, I think that we should keep in mind that these people, this happens to, are valued members of that community. Nobody wanted any of that to go the way it went. And everyone can imagine how it could have been just better. You could still be here with us. Anyway, I really appreciate the time. I really appreciate the reporting that you all had to have them come. And I just would really, really appreciate if everyone thought a little bit about, you know, if someone they cared about deeply, how the mental health crisis, how would they want the response to look like? What would they want to show up at their house for their loved ones? To me, it's extremely clear. So I just really encourage everyone to think about that. Thanks so much. Thank you, sir. Good afternoon. Hi, I read over the report when it was posted on Friday, and I would just like to say it seems very compassionate and thoughtful in that sense, but I think it's incumbent on everyone to keep in mind constitutional issues and where we are at this particular junction in history. On the one hand, I can see a good idea to not involve law enforcement in every case. We seem to be at a conjuncture in history where not involving law enforcement might mean you end up with less rights. I noticed in the report that it's mentioned that the county manager has the right to authorize any employee or anyone they want to come in put it basically to have the LPS certification so that they then would be able to determine that the person they're helping could be involuntarily taken in and put somewhere. And I think that's a very serious issue that needs to be kept in mind that it might be friendlier, but it might in the long run mean a loss of civil and political rights. It's undetermined where the locations are gonna be, where people might be taken to. And also I'm concerned with the wide scope of the applications for this. So someone I knew died a couple days ago and the police were there. And I'm kind of unnerved by the thought that when someone dies, it's not gonna be the police who interface with the community. I'm concerned that there's going to be a nonprofit organization that is going to be the interface for our outreach to our fellow citizens. And I think that these are some critical questions that should be taken into account. Thank you. Good evening. Good afternoon, rather. Good afternoon. Good afternoon and happy birthday, sir. Thank you very much. Seriously. I guess I read this information was at 32 pages on Sunday night. I took some notes today of note. I'll say stories about older adults, welfare checks and 24-7 type of programming. So in these pages, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's another number people can call and set a 911-988, which seems like it's a service number and I think that's important. But here's a pretty big elephant in the room that's on page six, so I'm just gonna read it because boy, does it set up a lot of conversations that seemed like if more people had read this, they would have made different comments. On page six of this, the primary responsibility of teams in this model is to perform risk assessments. In the state of California, welfare and institutions code 5150, WIC 5150, allows all law enforcement officers, all law enforcement officers, or anyone designated by a county medical behavioral health authority director to place someone in an involuntary psychiatric hold so long as they are perceived to be an eminent danger or harm to themselves or others. When mental health workers are granted this power, it is known as having an LPS designation where a county's mental health behavior, health authority director has liberty to determine who has this designation. It is, it typically, and this is rather important, is reserved for mental health workers with advanced degrees such as masters or doctoral degrees in social work, psychology, or counseling. Oftentimes, licensure is required. So beyond an undergraduate degree, it's two to three years in a specialty graduate degree, and my understanding is two years of being in direct observation. Or you could be a law enforcement agent, or someone could just designate you with that power. Wow. I wonder why that wasn't spoken by any of the council members or the staff that spoke. What's the time do I got? Okay. I'm done already. I appreciate the liberty, sir. And I suppose I'll leave it at that, but I had other, thank you. Thank you. Was I given three minutes? Or two? Oh, two. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Um, being out on the streets, watching some of the people out there that have mental health issues. I experienced one time where there was one person who was suicidal, a young black man. He was walking across the street from the shelter and there was a call that he was suicidal. I guess he left some place and someone called. So I arrived soon after and there were 14 cops there. I have pictures of, I have pictures and videos of it, 14. I just, I can't imagine what that young black man was going through, surrounded by 14 cops.  So I highly suggest I'm very much for a hoods type program and I'd love to see it here in Santa Cruz. I think, you know, I know Port, or Eugene, wherever. He said was eight million savings. I'm sure you would like to have that. I'm sure it's gonna be lower here because Portland's a bigger city, but whatever it is, we could use that savings for housing or for shelters or for whatever we need to do. So I just, I hope you look at the savings that we can make also. And I know the Sobering Center had, you know, it's no longer in existence. It would be great to see that no matter what. The Sobering Center up and running again. I know it helped out a lot of people there. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Hi, I'm Joy Schendl-Dekker. Hi, everybody. I just wanna speak in addition to what Abby just said, which I have experienced meeting people, working with people who live outside, being friends with them. But also I'm a parent of teenagers. And in the last few years, there have been several friends of my children housed middle-class people who, you know, we wouldn't lump together with people who live outside or people with disabilities or people with mental health or substance use disorders in the way that we other people. And several of them have had mental health crises, children, and the police have been called. And those experiences for those children and their families have been more traumatic or as traumatic as the mental health crisis itself. And so what I argue for and many other people is abolition and a non-police alternative emergency response. And, you know, the way that this, the alternatives are being presented as far as I can tell so far is that there's still not a fully non-police alternative emergency response.  And I'd also like to say that three years, almost three years after the murder of George Floyd, this is a long time coming just getting to this point. So it's great that the conversation has begun. It's really too slow for my BIPOC friends, especially the ones who consider themselves far to the left and abolitionists. And I would like their voices to be heard and considered as part of these conversations as well, not just the more moderate middle of the road. You know, they've told me that they really feel sidelined. So thank you. Good afternoon. I'm just very briefly, I want to thank the mayor for opening up presentations to public comment, which have hitherto been inexcusably shut down. And we had to listen to a lot of people, often with useful information, without any access. So thank you for that. And I just want to kind of expand. I, of course, endorse Cahoots as a first step, perhaps. But the problem also remains that the rights and the actual power of treatment for people who are being removed from the streets, which of course is what really this is all about. I don't think it's really about the mental health of folks. I think it's about the fact that there's a lot of people from the community who regard the presence of homeless people as itself a kind of social illness. And they like to put it in categories like drug abuse and breakdowns and bad behavior. They've got all these categories. But the real essence of it is they don't want them in their neighborhoods. I'll be coming back to this because the mayor has given me more time to speak. Thank you. But again, thank you for allowing the public to speak here the more the better. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anyone else wish to comment, seeing and hearing none? I do have someone online. Someone online. We'll hear the person online. Thank you. Good afternoon. Hi, this is Anne Simonton. It's a very emotional issue for me, having a son who has witnessed two suicides and makes him 100% more likely to kill himself. He and I both found both bodies.  We need to understand that Mr. Clemmer's is an incredible asset and would be an enormous help to our community. And to think that we would need to wait to see what the county does, why not allow Santa Cruz to be an example? To be shining as an example of what can be done, the money that can be saved and the lives that can be helped.  That was astounding to me that, you know, the military use of the police department is extraordinary. And that we need to have this be immediately part of budget deliberations and to understand that Santa Cruz could be an example that would lead the way to show how this works. Obviously allowing Mr. Clemmer to teach and work with us to ease a lot of the fears would be an enormous asset. I was under the, I could never call the police if my son was feeling suicidal because he would anger them and he would be dead. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Anyone else online? This is an informational item. We thank everyone who has participated. Mr. Norsch, let me just be clear about something. Typically we don't take a lot of public participation. This issue is one which falls in my judgment outside the normal kinds of presentations. We receive informational presentations. A lot of people showed up today contacted council members and myself saying, we're very interested in this. We understand it's an informational presentation. So at the discretion of the presiding officer, I am encouraging today for there to be participation in this presentation. I don't want people to think that every time there's a presentation, you know, Boy Scout, Girl Scout Day or whatever, we're gonna have two hours of public comment about it. We're not going to, but this one seemed to fall a bit outside the normal course of events. Please, please. I would just like to do one final comment in that the three of us and Ms. Murphy met with the president of Cabrillo and Chris Monroe and student representatives yesterday for our first children and youth summit in the city. And what bubbled to the top for all of us was mental health across the board. And so I think that we're at a pivotal point in time where not only could it be a cost savings to the city to address this in some way, but I mean, I think there was a point in time when there wasn't paramedics on the fire engines, right? It was all through AMR. And so I think that however this gets addressed, it's not about the homeless, Mr. Norris. It's about the whole community and everybody with mental health crises often suffer in silence.  And that's why I feel passionately about this. Thank you. Anyone else last comment? Very briefly, again, thank you so much for this. I will say that that a way to look at this when looking at other models and the one that the gentleman brought to us today had been successful, I think it's terrifically important we are evolving as a society, as a culture, how to deal with pleas for help.  I do wanna say this though. I don't think people should labor under the impression that if we institute this, which I think would be quite a good idea, we'd have to work it all out, but quite a good idea. I don't think we should labor under the impression that means that there are savings. Because if what you mean by savings is now you're not sending a police officer to this mental health, you cannot call that a savings. I think what it does is there's an awful lot of calls which appropriately belong over on this sort of mental health social service side. I think what that does for our police department is freeze up our police department. Every time you don't have to go to one of those you can go to something that is more serious for which you might not have time right now. So I don't think we ought to labor under the impression I think it's a way to actually make the city safer by freeing up the police officers to do more law enforcement work and have folks who are over on this other side appropriately respond to that. All in all, thank you all very, very much. We are on item number six. I want to point out that we will be returning to this item about 4.30 because we're gonna have children who are coming here who are gonna be acknowledged for their Hans Christian Anderson contest awards. We will move then to presiding officer announcements. I'm going to give my time over to council member Colin Tari Johnson. Thank you, mayor. I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge community action month may is a lot of things. It's also community action month. And this is something that's celebrated across the country, community action networks that implement anti-poverty strategies to help underserved individuals with stability and self-sufficiency. Our local community action network is community action board, which I have the privilege of serving on as a council member. I want to just highlight one data from a recent, they do a bi-annual community action plan and they worked with UCSC to do a survey and the preliminary data with this survey, which they were able to reach individuals who aren't typically reached through census data, like undocumented individuals, farm workers, individuals who speak and indigenous languages. So this data show that 56% of survey participants earned less than $20,000 a year with the majority of them being farm workers. Yeah, less than $20,000 a year that's here in our community. Community action board is one organization that addresses these issues. There's a lot of organizations in our community that do. So if you all can take a moment to learn more about the work the community action board does and to contribute in whatever way makes sense for you, I invite you to do that. I just want to take a moment to thank them for their work. Thank you, council member. We're on statements and disqualifications. Any statements need to be made? Seeing, hearing none. We are on additions and deletions. Madam Clerk, any additions or deletions to our agenda packet? Thank you so much. City attorney closed session reports are, good afternoon, Mayor Keely, members of the city council. This afternoon, the council met at noon in the courtyard conference room to discuss three items. The first was a conference with legal council concerning existing litigation. There were three matters of existing litigation that were discussed by the city council this afternoon. The first was the case entitled city of Santa Cruz versus service employees, international union, local five to one pending before the public employment relations board of the state of California. On that item, the council by motion of vice mayor Golder, seconded by council member, Conntary Johnson, the council uniformly voted to direct our outside special council to dismiss that case pending before the PERB board. Item two was the case city of Santa Cruz versus the regents of the University of California at all pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. And item three was the regents of the University of California at all versus the city of Santa Cruz pending in the sixth appellate district court of appeal. There was no reportable action on those items. The second item was a conference with legal council concerning anticipated litigation, a matter of significant exposure to litigation council received a report on one item of potential litigation under that category. And then finally, the council consulted with legal council on potential initiation of litigation on one potential item. And there was no reportable action on those. Thank you, sir. We are on the consent agenda for those of you unfamiliar items eight through 18 inclusive will be voted on on one motion. There is an opportunity now for council members to either comment upon or pull an item off of the consent agenda and placed on the regular agenda or for a member of the public to do so. Let me ask, we'll move around here. Start with the vice mayor, Madam vice mayor. I just have a comment on 17. Please make that. So I just wanna thank Claire Gloglie and Matt Starkey for bringing this item forward and making some improvements along Bay Street for bicycle and pedestrian safety. They've done tremendous outreach. Ms. Calantari-Johnson and I met with them on site and they've done outreach to our parents at Bayview and to other neighborhood groups. And I'm really excited to see this project. And I wanna really thank them for their great work on this. Wonderful. Anyone else on consent agenda, comment or items? Ms. Brown. Yeah, I totally agree. A protected bike lane on Bay is a really big deal and I think we should celebrate that and more than the consent agenda allows. So thank you. I wanted to pull item 11 and I also have had a request to pull item 10. So I have a few questions on that item. I'll just pull it. Let's do this. We will pull both items 10 and 11. We will take them up immediately after taking up the modified consent agenda in the West on the consent agenda. Anyone with us today wishes to either comment upon an item on the consent agenda or have it pulled for further discussion? Good afternoon. Yeah, I'm gonna comment on number eight on the consent agenda. I'm glad that number 10 and number 11 are being moved. I have some questions on number 12 and some questions on number nine as far as the minutes for that agenda item. Number nine. Go ahead, make your comment, certainly. Oh, I will. I'm trying. Okay, okay. And resolution number eight, resolution extending the emergency declaration in connection with the December 2022 and January 23, winter storms. There's nothing natural about what happened and what's happening all around the world. There should be lots of states of emergency, but not necessarily this one. Our weather's being affected by both natural and unnatural sources. Trying to stay on subject, but wishing I had more time on the one on number five, which is of critical importance and how it relates to number eight is emergency declarations. I just don't know how I can politely put it together so I can't. I sure wish I could have and understood a point of order because I would have loved to have used it earlier. I'm sorry, what was that? Can I help you with that? I'm sorry, what are you saying? Excellent, thank you so much. About number five, we were just talking about the first step of 50 story building with what was presented in the actual information. And you said that this shouldn't be something that comes up for public comment, or I feel it is of critical importance that it be discussed by the public. No, I'm done because I'm done with the consent agenda. I am totally done, but I appreciate your time. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Anyone else on the consent agenda? Mr. Norris, good afternoon again. This is, I'll be talking about a couple of items, but when you're finished voting and so forth. But this is generally about the consent agenda, a concern that we're gonna be hearing a police auditor's report later. We've heard about mental health problems at length, which I think is a very important topic. What we don't get, and this is again something that I brought to this council before, is the ability to see what kind of claims are being made against the city regarding the police department, regarding problems that have arisen here. This is because though these are public records that are available, the city clerk and administrator has chosen to keep these secret. Let me just ask a question. Commenting on a specific item? I will be soon. Okay, thank you so much. I ask you to make some changes on this. Thank you so much. Anyone else? Anyone else online? Okay, we will take up, yes, Ms. Watkins. No, I'm just, I'm willing to move consent with the exception of items 10 and 11. There's a motion, is there a second? Motion is second by the vice mayor. Exclusive of items 10 and 11. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carries the soul watered unanimously. We will take up Ms. Brown. We are on item 10, you ask that that be pulled. Yes. You have the floor. Thank you, mayor. I had a couple of questions that I wanted to ask. This item is the quarterly update regarding city council directed homelessness response programs and services of which there are a growing number. I'm really pleased to see the information in this report and I think it's really a reflection of a lot of the commitments that have been made over the past several years. So I want to thank you for that. My, and then others, there may be folks in the audience who want to speak to this. They asked me to pull it. But my questions were, I wasn't able to find, maybe I missed it, information to help us understand what's happening where these, where like 1220 and the safe parking program in particular are full. The report speaks to people being at capacity and so I'm just wondering if you could talk about what happens where people are turned away, wait lists, I mean, how do people begin to think about accessing these sites over the longer term? Good afternoon, Mr. Imwali. Hi, good afternoon, mayor and council. Thank you for the question, council member Brown, Larry Imwali, homelessness response manager. The short answer is for ongoing capacity that we have with those programs, our city outreach team, our outreach staff are really the principal source of connecting folks in the course of their work with available space at the shelters. The programs, both the 1220 and at the city overlook have been close to full capacity for quite some time now, but there is some regular turnover, both for positive housing exits. Some people decide that that's not the program for them. So while they are essentially full, there is typically some available capacity at each of those places. And so our city outreach team works through the course across the city, engaging folks who are unsheltered and really trying to connect them to the space that we have or other programs that other providers have in the community. Thank you, a quick follow-up. I read in a separate document for another agency agenda that there's a wait list for the parking program. And so I guess I'm just, if you could, I'm wondering how, I get it that the work is happening and our outreach workers are doing amazing work. They run into them out in the world and yeah, they're doing a great job. But just so people just sit on the list and then they're contacted when a space comes up or how does that? Yeah, thank you for that. The Safe Parking Program, that's our tier three program that is operated by the Free Guide and Association of Faith Communities. That program for recreational vehicles has a capacity of 15 and there actually is a large wait list of approximately 50. And so the Free Guide actually does regular contact with folks who are on that wait list to make sure that there's still a need or if there is a need to keep that list current. They're in more frequent contact with the folks at the top of the list as they anticipate openings so that they can begin to do that work. So yeah, so there is regular contact, rather ongoing engagement with those folks as well. Great, thank you. And similar for 1220, is there a wait list there or is that through your internal transitioning people into that site? Right, that is for the outreach team, exactly. Sort of as the course of their work when they engage folks. There is an interview process for 1220 as a self-managed camp that requires kind of a community set of rules and living in that environment. So they do sort of their own kind of interview and assessment, if you will, when they engage folks to see who might be a good candidate for that program. And when there is capacity, they can be considered for that program or also the overlook. Thank you. Can I make a quick comment? Because I just wanna say, in addition to my comments earlier about really being pleased to see how this programming is being built out, I think that the key takeaways here are we don't have enough capacity. We don't have the resources to provide the capacity for the level of need we have. And so I'm also very glad to see the conversations happening with collaborating agencies. So thank you. Further on this item? Anyone else wish to comment on this item? Matters, back before the council on item 10, the recommendation here is to receive a quarterly report. Motion? I do have someone online. Excuse me. We do have public comment. We have someone online. Well, there is someone online. Okay, thank you. Let's hear from that person. Good afternoon. Yes, hello. This is Garrett. Hey, as to the homelessness update, once again, that has always been the case. There's no mention of a numeric goal, time and delivery for a price of reducing homelessness that we may use to judge the program's success for cost. Instead, we just get a listing or proposals or a list of ever expanding services and workers as if ever expanding services or assets is in itself accomplishing that undefined goal and at what cost. Where is there an ongoing detailed and comparative financial analysis here of the total homelessness response cost, including staff and cost per homeless person and the cost to actually elevate someone back into self-sufficiency. And where are those totals for this quarter? How many less net homeless people are there this year at what cost compared to last year? You got me, I don't think any, but you know. And how do you define success? Do you consider getting people onto welfare and into housing via welfare as eliminating homelessness? Do you think the city of Santa Cruz should be the Statue of Liberty for the county's homeless to become the welfare Grand Central Station Population Center? Do you think growing a bigger welfare state in Santa Cruz is the road to prosperity? Do you think blowing the whole $14 million and more in one year to establish a response infrastructure without a completely approved plan to maintain it is wise? Do you think, dang, if we could just house 1,200 people at any expense, like who cares how much, or even no worries where the money will come from and put them all together somewhere, then no one else will come to take their place on the problem itself? Or are there limits and what do you think they are? Thank you for your comment. Anyone else? Matters back before the council. There's a recommendation on this one. Motion second, second by Ms. Brown. Motion is second. Mr. Norse, good afternoon again, sir. Yeah. I have to take issue with the idea that the outreach workers have been wonderfully successful and that they're doing a great job because I hear exactly the opposite from people, both who they were contacting in the bench lands, when the bench lands was being depopulated, destroyed in fact, without adequate shelter alternatives. And then of course now again, in the Pogonip area and in the Sycamore Grove area. I attempted to, yesterday I was up there watching the police dispersing the area between Highway 9 and the river and people were desperately taking their stuff out. I requested of Jeremy Leonard what the capacity was. He refused to say it, kept referring me to higher authorities. This is what he does regularly. I don't think it's appropriate to do that and I thought I would mention it publicly because I think it's important if a member of the public can't get what is relatively simple and open information, I'm wondering how homeless people are doing with this too and I've heard unfortunate reports. So regarding this particular quarterly report, it doesn't mention as, I kind of take a different slant on it than Garrett Phillips who just spoke with you, but it doesn't mention any of the costs involved and how effectively the money is being spent. And that kind of accountability has never been clearly provided that I've seen, at least it's not included in this document. I mean you hear about essentially a lot of money is being spent for a fundamentally small number of people, smaller number of people compared to the overall needs of the people who are outside. So the matter of there being optimistic assessments were working very hard. This is the kind of stuff we heard for years under the earlier councils, but of course, what's happening is a few even more than before are getting served. But for example, the broader community that was served in 2015 meals at Coral Street no longer has served meals. And that was the case throughout, of course, COVID and the people that were served meals were served meals by Food Not Bombs, often under hostile action by the police when they tried to serve, for example, under the ease of parking structures. 10 more seconds, 10 more seconds, just to give you a sense of time. You told me I was gonna have five minutes on this item. My error, you have three minutes and 10 seconds to go. Okay, thank you, I appreciate that. I'm gonna cut it short anyway. I know you're trying to fit into a schedule here, which I want to encourage you to spend more time on public comment, so that's the point. So do we know the actual number of people in town who are in vehicles? It's not in this report. We know that there's a waiting list of 50, as you've just heard from Larry and Wally, but you've got a capacity which is already filled and you're gonna have your city is spending money to appeal an OVO ordinance to essentially drive OVOs completely out of town for those people who have so-called oversized vehicles. So all these things are happening at the same time as everyone is, I'm hearing praise heaped upon the HRAP program or the homeless response folks. You have to consider what is actually happening to the average homeless person, whether they're getting the most basic services or have access to them, and if they're not, why not, and how much is it costing to give the appearance of a lot of progress when in fact, it's not real progress for the majority. Some obvious examples are of for the last six months there's been no porta-potties, no services up at the Poganip area. They were pulled out. So you've had a hundred or more people up there crapping in the woods because the city decided it was somehow more cost effective to do that, or as I said before in an earlier comment, is this an attempt to use the hide out or get out strategy, which I think is a go to for the city with respect to homeless folks. I think essentially the behavior, well, the reality shows what the answer is to that question. That's it. Good afternoon. Brief. My name is James Whitman. I think I made some comparisons to the homeless. I don't know if the archives in this place are available for more than like starting three and a half years ago. But what I suggested to various people that were in service with the homeless is why don't they work on the strength of the homeless? People are getting, people are doing things, holding full time jobs. The kids are going to school and they don't have correct housing. What makes a house?  But I was speaking more than three and a half years ago that we're all homeless. That has to do with the technology that's around that doesn't give us security, it doesn't give us privacy, it doesn't give us safety. So when there is actually some real emergency, we're all going to be homeless and what are we going to do? Because I think that these subjects are kind of very narrow and they could be broad. That's enough. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone online, Ms. Bush? One more. Good afternoon, person online. You are on. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. All right. This is Reggie Meisler, a member of Santa Cruz Cares. I just wanted to comment briefly on the HRAP. I don't want to disparage all of what HRAP is doing. Obviously there's a lot of money going towards a lot of very good programs. I just think that there's some problems with the balance of how we do certain things. For instance, in response to the winter storms, as we know recently with the Civic Auditorium, there was a demand to open it during the most extreme winter storms. Those demands were not answered. Instead of staffing it with one person, we staffed eight police officers to defend the Civic Auditorium from being broken into, which I find somewhat disturbing, especially considering that the Santa Cruz Police Instagram is often toting their ability to operate in a social role that they cannot be tasked with just watching over the Civic Center as temporary safe sleeping. I think that there's some interesting uses of funding here. There's what happened with the Civic Auditorium. There's the vehicle abatement contractor, which was not a lot of money granted from HRAP, but is a position that we used some of our trap funding on which works in contrary to people's, it works with the vehicle abatement hotline to start ticketing and towing and green tagging people based on this unaccountable complaint-based system and is far more helpful or harmful than it is helpful. The other thing that ties in with that is that we just recently in April got a study that demonstrates that involuntary displacement is bad for public health. So when we talk about health in all policies and we're talking about involuntary displacement, like what is being done or requested to be done in Pogonip, we have to understand that that is explicitly evidence-based, 23 different cities were looked at, I believe over a 10-year period, it increases people's overdose deaths. This is exactly what the Santa Cruz County public health officer was anecdotally describing is happening based on the data he was looking at. So when we sweet people, we are hurting them, we're killing them, we're making public health worse. And so I want the city to take this kind of data into account because if you're not, you're just working for anti-house lists, bigots and fascists, you're not actually doing good public health and good public policy. Thank you.  Seeing and hearing none, matters back before the council. Ms. Brown. I'll move. Ms. Contar-Johnson moves the recommendation. I'll second that and if I could make one comment. Second by Ms. Brown, Ms. Brown on the motion.  Okay, so I just, I want to make a comment in response to some of the things that I'm hearing from members of the public, much of which I agree with about the bigger social problems we have in our community as a result of extreme inequality in unjust institutions that are just, we have a lot of work to do to try to move forward in productive ways. And so I agree with all of that. And when I am laudatory of what I am seeing here, it's because this challenge, we have talked about this as an intractable problem. We have talked about this as something that we can't address, that we just don't have the ability to address. And when I see genuine efforts being made and positive outcomes for, yes, certainly not enough people, but for some people, I believe that's worth being laudatory of. And I think that with respect to the people who do that work in the field, they need to be supported. And so I just wanted to say that before we take the vote. I do understand and all of those problems still are on the table. And we have to figure out a way to work together to address them. But we also need to be positive when we take some steps. Thank you, Ms. Brown, Ms. Calantari-Johnson. Ms. Brown took the words out of my mouth, but I'll just say it my way really quickly. The problem is huge. We're not the only players. And this is exceptional work and a big thank you to everyone who has gotten us so far in less than a year. Any comments? Seeing and hearing none, the clerk will call the roll. Council Member Newsom. Aye. Brown. Aye. Watkins. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Calantari-Johnson. Aye. Face Mayor Golder. Aye. And Mayor Keeley. Aye. Motion carries and is ordered. We are on item number 11. Ms. Brown, you asked this item to be continued. The floor is yours. Thank you, Mayor. So I wanted to pull this item because it, I believe it's really an important item that is a bit misrepresented in the title on the consent agenda. The contract is to remove debris, but nothing is really said here about the people. And we know at least from the previous item that there are 80 to 100 people that you projected are in that space. So I wanted to, I think that if that's the intention which I believe it is, that needs to be made clear. And so I wanted to ask if you could talk about a little bit more about this process. And I have one real specific question that's related to this. My understanding was that, and it looks like it's scheduled for May. And so I wanted to ask you about Sycamore Grove because I was told that that was noticed last Friday and that people were being at least communicated with the police were there yesterday. And so I thought this was part of the Pogo Nip, the overall. And it seems like it just has happened sooner. So I'd like to hear about that as well. Thanks. I'll address the Sycamore Grove. Sycamore Grove, that location is considered separate from the Pogo Nip closure process. And yes, it has been noticed. Yes, there's been offers for individuals to go to the Salvation Army, I believe we've transported for just recently who accepted offers of shelter. So that is in the process. In terms of the Pogo Nip, we will be doing a very similar process as we were doing with the Benchlands where we're doing outreach and we're working with the county to do outreach as well. They're out there every day. We are now making plans which includes the refuse contract to move forward. Primarily there's for several reasons for the closure. One is it's extreme fire danger. Fire department already has plans to do vegetation management, which they have done before. As we know, the storms create a lot of underbrush, a lot of growth, that's extreme fire danger. So that's a concern. And as always, the public health, public safety. The folks living there, it's a public health safety concern as well. So what the plan is to take our time from about in the next two weeks through June to do a phase closure and through that process of offering shelter, continuing to connect people to services, providing for storage, very similar in the same process that was quite successful in the Benchlands when we closed that. So that will be the process for closing and outreach is extremely important. Again, and connecting with the county to help us through this process with their case workers. In terms of this particular contract and what is difficult in this location compared to the Benchlands is the Benchlands is a very flat area, much more easier to work in. This is a steep terrain. It's quite difficult. It will take longer to close even though it's not as many tents. We have 65 to 75 tents that of our latest count. We're going out to do another count next week. So yes, that's the process. Again, very similar to what we did in the Benchlands in offering shelter. Further on this item. Any other council members wish to comment on this item? Anyone with us today wish to comment on this item? Anyone online? Ms. Bush, do we have anyone online? No, I'm sorry. I just do. We do. Let's go with one online, then we'll go one here, then one online, then another one here. Thank you for your forbearance. Good afternoon. Hey, this is Garrett. Hey, I will be brief here. As to clearing the homeless program in Kentonet, I'm not up exactly where that is today, but I want to tell you and relate a story in that I recall my cat escaped from Kitty Hill Resort, which is right around there about 15 years ago. And I went looking for him for almost a month all over the place. In the process, I had an eye-opening at great many encounters with homeless campsites on the San Lorenzo River across hour nine, while looking for him mattresses, sleeping bags, trash. We're at that tomato farm homeless camp on Golf Course Drive and all along the railroad tracks. That was a really long time ago. And it sure seems like nothing has changed, meaning that for the better anyway, except the good news is I did finally find my homeless cat under that underpass on Golf Course Drive, which was a minor miracle after about a month. And I have no idea if that's a motor farm homeless camp, which is the first right as you go underpass on Golf Course Drive is still there. But you know, at the time, that seemed like a private property, you know, homeless camp-bound solution at no cost to the city. And that was working pretty well. I did talk to a lot of those people there looking for my cat. And some of those people had jobs and they seem to be doing okay. And they were just living in their tents. And I assumed that that was at no cost to the city. And I don't know what happened to that, it's still there, but I just told you that story. That's all, thanks. Thank you. Good afternoon. This morning I went to Sycamore Grove and Pogganup and walked around. Although the cops that were there would not allow me to go to the area that they already closed. But yeah, they swept yesterday. And then another area they put up notices to sweep on the 15th of Sycamore Grove. I'm curious. It's an interesting thing that happens every single time is that the camp gets very dirty and messy. And then you wanna close it.  So it wouldn't be so messy. So you don't have to spend $250,000 to clean it. I think you've put yourself in that position basically blame it, blame it on people.  You have a garbage can outside your house. So all you need to do is put a dumpster, which they did years ago, but sometimes they do at the beginning and then they take it away and then all of a sudden they sweep it. It's too dirty. So that's my comment on closing. And also the main thing is where are people gonna go? You mentioned that 1220 is almost completely full. City overlooks completely almost full and as well as the armory. So, you know, Jeremy has a little closed thing where he particularly, no, he picks certain people. And a lot of the people don't last because they have mental issues or they have problems with being around other people. So they don't last in the shelter system and then they're out back in there.  It's inhumane what you're doing to these people where they have to pack everything up and lose half their stuff. And just a reminder that just because someone's items happen to be at a location and they're not there does not mean that they gave up their items. The city is supposed to store those items. So today one person's items where he moved from one part of Sycamore Grove to the other to the upper part of Sycamore Grove and he put his items there. And I'm really worried that normally you guys clean it. So you're not supposed to clean it. You're supposed to hold it and put it in the police department or somewhere where people can grab it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we had three people now. Three folks online. Next person online, good afternoon. Good afternoon. We'll go to somebody who's with us here. He's on now. Okay, now you're on. We can hear you, please proceed. Yes, good afternoon. This is Michael, the resident of Paradise Park. And I drive through Pogunov area, the Grove area twice a day as does my wife. I'm glad we have this month, the senior month because we have a lot of senior people in Paradise Park and with the encampments near our entrance, there's a lot of fear driving through there now. We've had one guy at costed. My wife has had an attempted carjacking. All coming back to home with people who are living in that camp as far as I know. The other aspect I'm worried about, and I believe it's mentioned in your agenda items, is fire. There's a Redwood Forest there. It's not like they're in the city, next to the river, or in a parking area or any place else. They are in the forest, whether it be on the Poponik side or the Grove side. I have personally seen people entering those encampments carrying propane tanks and gas cans. And if a fire gets going in there, it's gonna cost you quite a bit of money and it's gonna be a whole lot more homeless to deal with. I'm so sorry people are homeless, whether it's a mental issue, living arrangements, friends or family, a lack thereof. I do take a sense that people calling folks bad people because we don't want them in the forest, but they don't belong in that part of the forest. Simple. It's a danger to themselves. It's a danger to society. And just recently with these heavy rains, this thick and more grove area got flooded out and 20 people had instantly had to move out and all their belongings went down the river into the ocean. And it's a terrible situation. They deserve help. They need help. But honestly, they don't belong in the forest. And one of my biggest concerns is where are they gonna go? Just like a lot of other people. Are they gonna go deeper into the forest, become more of a problem? Or is the exit going to be managed so these people are taken care of in the manner that they deserve? So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you listening to me and I'll lower my hand now. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, sir. Yes, hello, my name's James, and I'll be brief. I went up there today. You know, from the mid 90s to late 90s, I probably rode my bicycle from Felton to Santa Cruz to Hardy and then sober up more than a hundred times. Now fortunately, where I parked today and looked around, I didn't see any hyperdermic needles on the ground. That was good. So this is number 21. It has to do with the homeless money, the $250,000 for whatever it's gonna be spent for. At some point, I'll make a connection from number five to number 21 and how it relates to number 11. You know, I think it's kind of pitiful that people litter as much as a corporation does. As I've, for years in this town, it's incredible how dirty it is that people that just don't care. Very much like a corporation because the other side of that is terrorism. That's the people who are being terrorized. I'll continue at number 21, thanks. Thank you, sir. Another person online, correct? Good afternoon. Reggie Meister again. I just want to echo a little bit about what Abby was saying, which is that there are obviously not 70 plus open shelter spaces for everyone up at the Pogonip. And so if everyone asked for shelter, you wouldn't be able to give it to them. And so I guess I'm just curious, like how do you see this kind of thing playing out with Martin v. Boise? Because you're moving ahead as though enough people will reject shelter space. What do we have like three open shelter spaces? All we need is like four people to say they'll accept shelter and now you can't sweep the can. Like, are you taking that into consideration? Cause this is a constitutional requirement of Martin v. Boise is that if you do not have shelter space, you can't sweep. So I'm just very curious about how you plan or how city staff rather plans to handle that particular situation because it seems as though similar to with the closing of the Benchlands, there's simply no consideration as to whether this is even like lawful to do. There's just an assumption that you can kind of get away with it if you do it in a particularly tricky way. I think the other thing that I would bring up here just for everyone's sort of edification or sort of, I don't know, let's say it's experiencing is that here we have, what do we hear from Santa Cruz together and Santa Cruz neighbors folks? Not in the city. Like we don't want them in the city outside city limits. Well, here they are, they're in the forest and people don't want them in the forest either, right? This is what happens when your entire like economy is mostly controlled by like the demands of people who are invested in real estate or the gentrification of real estate or the privatization of real estate is that nobody wants anything anywhere. It doesn't matter if it's in the most remote part of the woods and they never see it and that never affects them in any way, they don't want it there.  So I just wanna sort of call out this sort of interesting dynamic that even in the sort of remote woods, people don't want unhoused people. So this is not, it sort of reveals so quickly how unsustainable this Nimbius logic is that, oh, they can't be there, but I don't know where they can be, but they can't be there. Like obviously we know what people want and what works, which is tiny houses, individualized shelter space, even if it's not that great. And I think you can economically pretty efficiently provide that for people. So maybe start looking into that a little bit more. All right, thanks. Thank you. Good afternoon. Hi, Joy Schendl-Dekker. Three of us were campaigning last fall when the Benchlands were cleared. Mayor Keely, Council Member Collentary Johnson and me. And none of us thought that the Benchlands was a good situation. We all wanna protect the people in the camps and the environment. But Mayor Keely and Council Member Collentary Johnson spoke very publicly about how it was so unsustainable for people to be in the Benchlands that it had to be cleared as quickly as possible. Now I agree, like that's no place for people to be in the winter when it floods. And the Pogonip is nowhere for people to be in the fire season. But if the Benchlands was a horrible place for people to be where vulnerable people were exploited sexually and economically, the Pogonip is not better. And now the Pogonip is being cleared and Sycamore Grove. And as many other people have said, there is no mention of where people can go aside from the few people who will accept shelter space for the few shelter spaces that are open. And that does mean that there are going to be 50, 100 more people who will continue to move around the city between spaces wherever they can. As long as people don't have space to go where they're allowed, this has been happening for at least 40 years, probably since colonization. As soon as you exclude people from the system, they go where they can survive, right? So that's one point. And another point is I think that we've spent about a million dollars in the past year just on cleanups. And for Sycamore Grove and the Pogonip, there's been little to no sanitation or waste management services for them. So $250,000 is gonna be spent again. And when they go in with their heavy equipment, they grind up debris that's left in the ground and it gets compacted, broken and compacted into the top layers of the dirt. I've seen this multiple times at multiple camps. There are better ways to do cleanups with people who live outside. There are better ways to avoid people moving from place to place unsanctioned. And that million dollars, I bet could have spent, that's a lot of portable toilets and hand washing stations and rent and other living spaces. So that's all I got to say for right now. Thank you. Bush, anyone else online? One more online? One more. One more. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me. It's Keith McHenry and I saw listen to staff say that the Benchlands eviction was very successful. And of course, the core part of that illegal and inhumane and cruel aspect of that bit, of that sweep was that those people then went to Highway 9, Sigma Grove and the Pogonips. That's where they went. So it was not so successful. So now you're gonna have those people and it may be many more people than what the city is admitting to, will be back down on the levees and in the doorways of downtown until they get swept back into Pogonip. And that's not a solution. And it's every few weeks we hear that another few million dollars is gonna be given to the city or the county to deal with homelessness. But all it is is this inhumane, tragic disruption of people's lives over and over again with no actual solutions and no intention of solutions. And the reason there is no intention of solutions as the people on this council, the people in the Board of Supervisors, the people in the higher levels of management and staff in the city and county do not perceive homeless people as people. And that is at the core of the problem. The York council has repeatedly referred basically to these individuals, these families, these people that are struggling is essentially trash. And that's why, all through the Bench lands eviction, we even for the two years of the Bench lands that we tried to negotiate with the city to actually provide real solutions, there was no will because there is a perception that these are varmints, are rats, transients, vagrants, drug addicts, mentally ill people. So they're not worth any resources on their behalf. We have, I think that Joyce underestimated the amount of millions of dollars that have been wasted year after year after year, which could have provided housing and access to addiction treatments and to healthcare and things which were never offered, never provided, and it gets down to that core thing, which these are useless eaters that at some point you're going to place in internment camps and that just saddens me that you cannot at all consider these humans as the people they really are and that to you, they're just trash and they can get put away in some internment camp somewhere else. So it's really, it's frightening that we're at that point in our history of our country and of our city and the county. Good afternoon, sir. For the record, Mr. Norse requested in a timely manner additional time. That time has been granted to him on this item. Good afternoon, sir. And a thanks to Mayor Keely for that. You know, yes, it's unfortunate that people are so afraid of homeless people as they drive through the Pogonip from the areas where you can drive at, most of them you can't from Felton, but remember there are lots of seniors who are also living in the Pogonip outside. At least I met some of them yesterday when I was there. And remember that you found out before when you attempted to move people without paying attention to the fact, it's not just you have to have a bed for everybody you move. When you look at it moving a group of people, whether you have asked them whether they will take it or not, you need to have provision for that group. This is what the injunction was granted on the basis of up in San Francisco in December. So it's not applicable here yet, but it could be so argued and probably should be so argued because this business of switching them around, musical beds that Jeremy Leonard and others are playing, perhaps under orders from higher management, this is not necessarily to blame Jeremy for that particular thing, is it's a scandal, it's disgraceful, it's beneath the dignity of the community. It's not beneath the dignity of the council, the council does it all the time and the staff makes money doing it. So that's not really the issue. But the issue is for the rest of us, it sucks, it's bad and it also tempts an injunction. So for instance, Ross Camp, when you tried to do this with Ross Camp, didn't fly an injunction, held up for a week at least. Then when you tried it against the duck pond area, held up for a year and a half, and the city decided that the actual proposal by the union of the homeless to use the benchmarks was a good one. And remember where the benchmarks came from. It came from police chief and city manager, not the city manager currently here, but the city manager. They were directed there, that's why they went there. And so to sweep them away again, I would hope that some legal eagles will in fact hold the city accountable for this and get some kind of damages because you're obviously creating damage when you do this. When you, because I've seen people trying to try scuttling to get their property out. Police officers stopping the press, which I'm a member, I do a radio show, a net radio show, and I tried to get in there yesterday. I was stopped by the armed force. Police officers said, you will arrest you if you walk any further. I said, I'm pressed, that doesn't matter. You can't go there. You can't help these people or document what's going on. They didn't say that, but that was the impact of what they did. And that's what's gonna be happening throughout the Sycamore Grove and throughout the Pogonip for the next month. And that's what this council is responsible for. Even the council members, Martin Watkins, Renee Golder, and the other ones who are not even keeping their eyes on speakers who are talking. I don't care about me, but I've been watching, you've got other things to do than talk about this homeless nonsense, I know. Focus in. I am focusing, because the council has the power. What I'd like to do is just, let's not get into ad hominem. Just address the issue. Well, I'm not trying to be ad hominem. I'm referring to the professional duties of council members here. I'm encouraging the entire council to pay attention to these speakers, or at least to pretend to pay attention. I'm gonna ask you again. Council members can pay attention in a wide variety of ways. I'm gonna ask you again. Address the issue, please. Thank you. I have been interrupted and I will continue. It is my perception when a council member isn't looking, they're not paying attention. But if they're not, if you aren't paying attention, I thank you. I will thank the council for doing that, if that's the case. But it's hard to know because the council's comments don't usually necessarily indicate that. So the basic issues have been raised. The notion of fire danger, I haven't learned about the nature of fire danger at the moment, but up in Felton, it's low. That's the situation according to the sign outside the fire department. So you certainly don't need to be going after people this last weekend like you did. But as has been pointed out, this is a pretext. And the real issue here is, for instance, as I've been told by some staff members, what happens at the shelters is they evict people who are in the shelters in order to provide room so the police can say, we have a place for you to go, get out of here, get off this area. If that is the case, it is, I would hope it's illegal. And if it isn't illegal, it's scandalous and it's abusive. And someone at this council should request it be looked into. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Anyone else online? No. Anyone else? Matters back before the council. Council, the vice mayor is recognized. I'd like to move item 11. Motion to approve the recommendation as presented in the packet. Is there a second? A second. Second by Ms. Watkins under discussion. Debater discussion. Ms. Brown, then Ms. Brunner. Well, I actually have a few comments that I've been thinking about, but I also wanna be mindful of the time we have people who are coming into the room to have a scheduled presentation. So I'll just say here, I have a long history, as you all know, of opposing encampment clearances for all of the reasons that people have, many of the reasons people have talked about in others, until we have places for people to go, we will continue to chase people around. It immiserates their lives. It costs the city money. It's a dynamic that's been going on for as long as I can remember, and I've not supported it. But I wanna say that in this case, fire danger is very real. It will become even more real in the coming months, and I think it's important that we address this problem, which some of us projected we would be facing after closure of other encampments, and including myself who didn't support that. But in this case, I think it's really important to move forward, so thank you. Thank you for there on this side of Ms. Brunner. Thank you. Thank you for all the comments today and online, and this item is a Pogonip Refuse Disposal and Abatement Contract. I walked the area and the amount of refuse that was in that area was pretty outstanding, and I think it's really important that I wanna respond quickly to a couple of the questions that were brought up, and this isn't about a closure, it's about the cleanup contract, and staff did mention earlier about the phased approach that would be happening in this area. So the question about if there's only four shelter spaces and however many people above that, what happens? Well, my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I am asking staff, my understanding, based on the earlier comment was that it pauses and then it continues, and I think the reason why that's starting now, this phased process, because it does take time before the fire, the extreme fire danger and a forced closure by fire department. So given that we need that time to do that phased approach, and so it's so sad that we are here talking about this and it's so sad to walk those areas and see people living that way, and there are comments about people not wanting homeless people in their area, and I know I talk to a lot of people where that's not the case, it's more about, or even the caller who called in, seniors living in Paradise Park and they're afraid, it's the behaviors that people have a hard time with, not the people, at least people that I've talked to and have concerns, everybody wants people to get help and whatever their needs are to have housing, we have housing coming, so I wanna keep that in mind that as we keep moving forward, there are repetitive cycles that we've seen, but at the same time, there are steps forward in terms of the long term that are happening that I think will have a positive impact and we're not talking at all either about the fact that people wanting shelter or even help in the form of mental health or any other component, it's voluntary. So as we reach out and I know that as a council member I've directed to staff that our outreach is really happening, we had the conversation with the presentation earlier making sure there's less law enforcement response and those things are happening, but there is a people component, there's an environmental component and thank you city staff for getting this area safe and clean and clear and for doing it in a phased approach. Thank you, further on this item? Very hopefully briefly, a couple of thoughts, one is I was not on the council until December and so this is my first experience with this particular activity as a resident of the city, I must say that at that point I was distressed by the situation that took place at Ross Camp and equally distressed at the Bench lands, neither of those nor is the Poganep a right and proper place for folks experiencing homelessness to try to live a healthy life. It's my understanding that when the Bench lands was cleared that something on the order of 70% of the folks who were there, something, excuse me, something on the order of 30% of the folks who were there were willing to accept one or more offers of assistance, everything from some kind of sheltering option to various kinds of social services spanning a fairly large spectrum and it's my understanding that that was a similar number with regard to the Ross Camp at the time and as the gentle lady said a few minutes ago or just a moment ago, these are voluntary actions. It does seem to me that as we move forward with the challenge of how to assist those folks that are experiencing homelessness, that we know the state is coming in and whether people will have a wide variety of views whether this is good, bad, or indifferent but the cares courts are arriving and that will be an entire public policy debate and discussion about the relative wisdom of that and how that is assembled. That is a county activity as health and human services rightfully belong for the county government. They are subdivisions of the state. They exist to provide health and human services. You can wander around this place all day and you won't find a city department of health or a city department of mental health because that's not what cities do. I think the helpful thing we can do on this is to identify those opportunities for providing safe, clean, healthy housing, shelter, navigation center, permanent supportive housing into which county government and nonprofits are going to pour their wonderful health and human services. As it relates to the current challenge, it seems to me that it is not even close question about whether it is healthy or safe for people to be in the Pogonip for very much longer given the wet winter and the vegetation and the fire danger. You can drive up to Felton CDF, fair enough. You can drive up to Felton CDF today and it will say fire danger low. That does not mean that you should keep people there necessarily and only wait until it's extreme fire danger and then start thinking about what to do on that. I do think that both the city has a greater obligation than what we have undertaken so far in that space. But I think the great area of advancement on solving the issue really does and I'm not trying to point to another government to excuse this government, but the state government and the county government are designed to do this. They are designed and intended to solve the area, the kinds of problems that many folks spoke of today that is not a city government role and responsibility. We do have roles and responsibility and we are going to get to an item later tonight, latest afternoon, which we'll go to the question of whether or not the public may wanna have an affordable workforce housing bond and what proper place in there we could locate a fund or funding source for those who are experiencing homelessness and what is the right and proper element to be included in that measure. We will talk about that later this afternoon. Clerk will call the roll. Council member Newsom. Aye. Brown. Aye. Watkins. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Vice Mayor Golder. Aye. And Mayor Keely. Aye. Motion passes this award. I think we have a bunch of wonderful young people with us. I think I can see some right back there. There's one right there. Authors. Young authors. Young authors. Come forward. We wanna see you. We wanna see you. Do you have a script in your pile? I do. I got it. So come on forward, young'uns. We wanna see you. We're so proud of you. Come on up. Come on. We're a long ways away from being able to bite you or anything, so don't worry about that. Well, my goodness, how wonderful to see you all. And so, hello. These are the creative and talented writers who are the winners of Santa Cruz Sister City Committee's Hands Christian Andersen Writing Contest. We're so proud to have all of you and so honored to have all of you in council chambers with us. Also, kind of glad that you were able to see your city government in action. We were taking up an issue which is controversial in our community. And as you can see, there's a spirit of give and take and that's what we do here on a regular basis and try to solve some public policy problems. But right now, this is your moment and we're so happy to see you here. Our winners are, and I will try to... And please excuse me if I get into your first name or your last name wrong. I'm gonna do my best on this. So Molly, hi, Griffin, so Molly, hi, Groon, with Scarlett Bird, Jasmine Harris, Shanken, with Tight-knit Wood, Mira Stern, with the document alone or the writing alone, Elina Kaplan, with Herbrook, and then in the ages 17 and up, I'm sorry, fourth grade, I'm gonna have to back this up. Let me do this again.  Okay, okay. Then we have fourth place in the Division for Adults ages 17 and up. The winners are fourth place, Eves, Yuggle Nister for Goldhearted, also fourth, Shannon Bassano for firing up the old Studebaker, California Foothills, 1949, Terry Fret with Gifts and Challenges, third place, Mary Floodin, with the Magical Wishing Pond, second place, Michael Warren Mott, with Light Over the Mountain, second place, Joan Priblich, with Heat, and Janine, first place, Janine, Celfo, and I apologize, I suspect that is not the right pronunciation, with time when a super small something stopped the world. So these are exciting titles and we are so happy to have you here. We would appreciate seeing all of you. Stand up if you are one of these award winners. We'd love to see you. Thank you all. Come on forward. How nice to see you. Dear council members, thank you for having us over. We're really delighted to every year have the opportunity to have the writing contest and we have prizes for the winners, so please stay around and we'll give the awards to our wonderful writer. I have to say this year was a really good year and you'll find the fable on our website, Sister City, which is on the Santa Cruz City website and you'll find all the fables on the website as well as a ranking of the fables. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you, Mayor Keely and council members. I'm the chair of the sister cities committee. I just wanted to briefly add that, give you a little context that there is an annual Hans Christian Anderson writing contest that takes place in Sestri, Levante, our sister city in Italy and what we do is we run a local competition here in Santa Cruz and then the winners are forwarded to that competition which will take place in June this summer. And so we're really excited to have all these amazing entries and we think we're gonna have great representation this year. So if we could give them a round of applause, please thank you. You two lovely youngsters right here in the front row. Would you like to come to the microphone and just tell us a little bit about your writing? If you want to, you can. Okay. Would you like to? I can't. Okay. Okay. Well, we're so proud of you and so excited that as young authors you would take on this challenge and do that good work and we're so happy to recognize you for the good work that you have done. Any other comments? Anybody would like to make comment on this? I just want to mention that last year during the international competition somebody from Santa Cruz actually won first prize. Oh, yeah. And the over 18 age groups. So we represent. And so hopefully one year we'll be able to go in person to Sestri Levante during their week, it's in June where they have that all weekly event around the fable, around Christian Anderson and it's really something we should try to and start to think about. Well, that's just great. I think what we're gonna do here is this is the conclusion of this activity here. And I think what we're going to do is we'll take a five minute break because I know there's council members that want to come down and say hi to all of you. So let us take a five minute recess right now. After a brief recess, the council is back in session. We would ask folks to come to order. Thank you very much, appreciate it. We are on agenda item number 19. This is the Coral Street visioning report. Good afternoon. I see two of our outstanding planning department staffers. Good afternoon, Ms. Noyes. Mr. Van Wa, how are you? Good, we're happy to have you here. You're on. Great, thank you. So my name's Sarah Noisy. I am a senior planner in the Planning and Community Development Department here at the City of Santa Cruz and I've been the project manager leading this project for the last few months to develop a vision for services, housing, all kinds of land uses and public realm improvements for the Coral Street area. I have also online with me, Justin Duel of Dallin Architecture. He was our consultant on this project. There he is, hi, Justin. And he's gonna be joining me in this presentation. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. So just a little bit of background about what brings us here today. So this campus at Coral Street, the Rebly family shelter and the housing matters operations have been in this location on Coral Street near the intersections of Highway 1 and 9 for many decades. Last year, the Homeless Response Action Plan was approved by your city council and one of the actions that came out of that plan was under the goal around permanent affordable and supportive housing was an action to partner, work with partner agencies to deliver a plan for the Coral Street campus and navigation center and acquire needed properties. So a little bit out of order, the city acquired 125 Coral Street and then we got to work on this visioning report to sort of guide the next several decades of time in this neighborhood and look at it with all of the various service providers and the community as well. So we're here today to talk with the city council. There is no formal action that's required on the report itself and there are some other pieces that we as staff are asking for direction about. So having the city council review provides another opportunity for your council to contribute to the vision, make any amendments or additions that you think might be necessary or wise, provides another opportunity for the public to comment and to provide their comments directly to you as the city council and then also, as I mentioned, we're asking for some direction on our immediate next steps. We did do a fair amount of outreach on this. We had two in-person community meetings. The second one of those in February was also available online in a Zoom format. The first meeting in December wasn't really a format that was well-suited to Zoom but we provided that information. The questions, the content from that meeting was available on our project website after the meeting and we got a lot of really thoughtful, rich, complete comments and thoughts from our community members. We also had two focus groups specifically with the service providers that are already working in this neighborhood to make sure that as we move forward we're keeping all of their needs and their just knowledge of the needs of these community members in mind as we're moving forward. We made a point in both of these meetings of ensuring that community members who have lived experience with homelessness had the opportunity and support to be able to attend and participate. That was a really important piece of this for us. So just at a high level sort of hitting the key points that came out of this. At the first charrette we had, the first meeting we had in December in person, some of the big themes that came out were around services, how our services provide, how does transportation fit with those? Transportation then also includes some mentions of modes of transportation. Walkability came up a number of times. This can be kind of a challenging area to get to on foot. People also talked about opportunities for career and health, housing, hygiene, food. All of these were kind of themes and topics that were mentioned frequently in that in person event. From the same content was then placed online as I mentioned and we got a lot of really thorough comments that way as well, hundreds of comments online. And again, we're seeing some similar themes. So parking is also related to transportation. We are still seeing services, housing, community, walkability, and then you'll also see the big one there is SCRS, which is the Santa Cruz rehearsal studio. They are a business that is in the study area and is very interested in staying in business in that location. So they were mentioned frequently in the context of folks wanting to be sure that they could stay in that location and continue to do their business. So just to introduce you now to the study area, this is the area that we're looking at. This is showing you, this map is showing the ownership of the property here. So we were looking at the area from River Street to the rail line that rail line kind of provides both a visual and physical barrier there. So it made sense for us to look at both sides of River Street from the rail line to, or I'm sorry, both sides of Coral Street from the railroad to River Street. And then also grab this one parcel here that housing matters is currently leasing. So the purple parcels are the city-owned parcels. This is 125 Coral Street that the city recently acquired. The blue parcels are owned by Housing Matters, who's the operator out there. And then these parcels that are shown in green are currently under lease by Housing Matters. And then these parcels over on the west side are not owned by the city or under controlled by any service provider. Those are privately held parcels. So I just want to be really clear about, site control and who owns the property and all of the things then that that may mean for the vision and phasing over time. So at this point, I am gonna ask Justin to step in and talk through how we started to look at this project and sort of what we thought about for the campus. Thank you, Sarah. And thank you to the members of the council and the mayor for hearing us today. I just wanted to put up a quick slide to kind of highlight some of the key uses and areas of the existing Housing Matters campus. Sarah spoke to the Rebly family shelter, the day services building across the driveway from that provides a number of key services. And it's the home of future hygiene bay. Sure if it's open yet or not, but we'll be there. We've also shown the Harvey West Studios project considering it a part of the campus that is already well underway. And then across the street, across Coral Street, there's 801 River Street, which has been the recent renovation that Housing Matters has gone through with seven studio and one bedroom units. And then the three pieces at 112 to 116 Coral Street that are currently leased. So it kind of just sets the stage a little bit for kind of filling in these missing pieces and creating the synergies here between existing and future use. So what we'd like to focus on mostly here are the key opportunity sites that have been identified. Site one, 125 Coral Street, I'm gonna actually talk about last to spend a little bit more time on it. The other two that we took a look at are the site of the former River Street Shelter, which is currently shuttered and as mentioned the three sites across Coral Street. So first at the River Street Shelter site, we explored two options. The first one is sort of option one here would be a kind of low-cost, easier implementation that would not preclude option two from being a future use for the site. It essentially expands that the sleeping cabin, small community that has been an outgrowth of COVID that we've witnessed being actually a really great success for some privatized space. It introduces a little bit of additional parking near the entry at the sort of mouth of the drive, as an entry point, but does it in a way that really kind of tries to preserve a pedestrian character? Parking was a key item that we heard. And it also organizes those sleeping cabins around sort of a core community open space that has a relationship in a way and sort of expands and builds on the current courtyard outside of the Reveley family shelter. Some outdoor community gathering spaces was another kind of key element that we heard come up a number of times in our outreach. Option, can go over option two, just very quickly, sorry. The option two looks at a future use for that corner parcel which would frame in the campus a little bit between Reveley and Harvey West Studios, creating kind of a sense of enclosure for this as a campus. Basically it's a podium type building with ground level mechanical and some, what we're calling programmable space to be very, very general in terms of what its future use could be. And then residential units on upper floors above. For the sites across Coral Street, we looked at two options. The first one was essentially just an enhancement of the existing spaces that are currently used for essentially storage and staging just to get a sort of a yield about how many square feet. We received a fair amount of feedback from different service providers with some specific square footage needs. It identifies that there are about 7,000 square feet that we could make use of potentially in more better utilization for that space. Option two, one of the key components that we discussed and we'll see at 125 Coral is the idea of a navigation center. We looked at a way that ideally without impacting the actual parking and circulation of the front parking area there, if we were to peel off one parcel at the end and enlarge that from a programmable space that we would be able to essentially come up with what would be about a 16,000 square foot navigation center as an alternative use for this parcel. We go real quickly through just the idea of four options that we looked at for 125 Coral Street, kind of a range of programming scales. First option, we know parking was a big deal so we looked at basically what would happen if we created a ground level parking podium with some use fronting Coral Street but essentially the balance in the back portion of the site being at grade parking with residential units above. Option two, eliminated the parking garage itself. We know that parking is a very expensive costly item to add to a building so there could be cost considerations that would, as we saw in the Harvey West studios, there is no at grade parking, they parked it on the surface. It expands the ability to provide some programmable service space by doing so and also adds a few additional residential units at the ground level. All four of these have upper floor residential units. Option three looked at the idea of the entire presence along Coral Street becoming a service provider use and that the access to the residential portion of the building would actually come from the internal portion of the campus through the existing checkpoint so you