Vice President Henry, here, Director Foles, here, Director Smalley, here, and Director Too, here. Thank you. Are there any additions on deletions to the closed session agenda? Staff has none. Okay, any. We next go to oral communications regarding items in closed session. Do we have any members of the public? Let's see, who would like to speak on this? I see two attendees. Would any of you like to speak on this? I see a hand raised up with somebody called visitor. Go ahead and let that person speak. Hear me now. We briefly heard you, and then not again. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay. So I'm Nick Nicari, the property owner of Scenic Way. And I have done my best to make everything. Can you hear me still? Yes. I've done everything I can to make this deal work. It's kind of out of my hands, because there's a third party that the district kind of felt was necessary for them to be secure in the purpose, purchase of my property. I really don't know what to do at this point. I mean, I've tried everything I can try. We haven't agreed price, and that shouldn't go higher or lower. That's the agreed price. There's an agreed timeframe, which has actually been a year since we signed our agreement sale. It's amazing to me how slow you guys have gone. Although I want you to know, I would love to bring water up into our neighborhood. So I feel like I did everything fair and square and I just would like the district to be clear. Gina tells me now that she can't talk to me. Rick has never answered my phone calls in six months and nobody else is allowed to. So what do I do at this point? Please, you guys are putting me in a talk. I think this isn't on the closed session agenda. Gail. It is on the closed session agenda. Oh, I'm sorry. I apologize. That's basically it. You know, I'm trying. You guys are making it hard for me and I'm trying still to make things go through for the benefit of the district and the rate payers up here. And of course myself, I didn't even want to sell this property but was pushed into it by the district. And so I don't know what else to do.  I don't want to renegotiate. I don't want to do business with the district anymore after this. They've been really hard on me. And so I am still offering my property at the price we agreed to. And I just want you guys to let me know without dragging it on anymore. The deal is, becomes invalid on the second of March because it says you'll pay me within 30 days of the one year long CEQA process. So I was told that would be less than six months in the beginning, but that's all I have to say about it. And I've really been trying and I don't know what else to do. So please treat me decently the way you would want to be treated. And let's not get into a big hassle about this. Let's make it work. Okay, thank you. Are there any other comments about items on the closed session agenda? All right, with that, we will adjourn and to the closed session. Thank you. Okay, Mark's here. So we'll go ahead and convene the open session of this meeting of the Board of Directors of San Lorenzo Valley Water District on February 18th, 2021. And we have no actions were taken in the closed session. Nothing to report. Holly, can you take the roll call for the open session? Yes, President Mayhood. Here. Vice President Henry. Vice President Henry. Here. I have a frog. Director Foles. Here. Director Smalley. Here. Director Too. Here. Thank you. Are there any additions and deletions to the open session? Yes, Chairman Hood. I'd like to remove item 11A, the Lumpiko District Oversight Committee agenda item. After the agenda was posted, we received additional applications. We would like to return our next board meeting on March 4th and we have enough applicants now to appoint a quorum to that committee. And we tried to get notices out that we were gonna remove this item tonight. And I apologize if anybody's attending that we did not inform for this item. Okay. Now we are to the part of the meeting where we have oral communications from the public. And this is reserved for oral communications by the public on any subject that lies within the jurisdiction of the district that is not on tonight's agenda. And if you wish to speak, you should raise your hand. So I don't see anybody with their hands raised. So I guess we'll go on to unfinished business. And the first item is the fire management plan. Yes, thank you, Chair Mayhood. We have a presentation tonight and I will turn this over to the environmental planner. She'll present this item to the board. Thank you, Rick. So early in 2020, the district began pursuing a fire vegetation management plan to address hardening, egress, ingress, field reduction opportunities, expand mapping for access and identify funding sources. The board and staff voted to hire panorama environmental ink to develop the plan. Shortly after beginning their work, the Valley experienced the effects of the CZU Lightning Complex fire, burning approximately 86,000 acres in Santa Cruz County. The district lost significant infrastructure in its northern areas and approximately 1600 acres of the district's watershed land burned. Tonight, panorama will present the outline of the fire management plan. We asked the board of directors and the public to provide feedback on the plan thus far. In the presentation, we will learn about the plan's contents, benefits and how it assisted the district during the CZU fires. We asked the public to hold questions until the end of the presentation but would like to give the board the opportunity to ask questions during if acceptable with the board president. Gilmuth, if you wanted to express your preference for questions during the presentation or after, that's up to you. Yeah, I would prefer that they be after. It's just easier to manage. Okay, no problem. So I'm pleased to introduce Panorama Environmental Inks principal, Tanya Trace and project manager, environmental planner, Caitlyn Gilleron, as well as Jason Mahogdes, Spatial Informatics Groups, director of operations and natural hazards. Welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you. Do you want me to share the presentation from my screen? I believe CTV should be able to share the presentation. They should have that. Okay, thank you. Again, my name is Jason Mahogdes. I grew up in the East Bay. I live in Northern California and I'm a registered professional forester and fire ecologist. I actually went to Cabrillo College and spent some time with Semper Barren's Fund, pulling weeds in Santa Cruz Mountains. In the early 90s with Ken Moore. So it was fun to come back home again and see some of these areas both before and after the fire. In terms of the overview, we'll talk about some of the high level content of the plan. And then Caitlyn will be able to talk about some of the NEPA and CEQA and funding opportunities she's explored as well as part of the program. Next slide. So again, Jason Mahogdes, we're gonna give just a background overview for the plan and then again, overview some of the details, treatments and what we've done to date so far as part of the program. Next slide. So these are maybe some familiar shots for the folks who work at San Lorenzo, some of the water infrastructure before the fire and some of the forest before the fire. Next slide. Now, I think a lot of you there, probably everyone was affected by this fire last year. And as Carly had said, we started this project a few months before the fire and we're actually out in the field with Phil Dye, one of our field folks, about a month before the fire. And what you're looking at here is basically, it's a map of fire hazard in the area. This is zoomed in. We've clipped out the CZU complex, which is the area to the left, because that's all burned and there's actually pretty low hazard right now. But to the right, that green to red, what you're seeing are areas where you have a probability of having a flame length over eight feet, which is considerably high. And green areas have a lower probability and red are much higher. After this fire, I think in the big picture, the risk that you're looking at, not just to San Lorenzo, but the greater community in that side, is a fire starting on the eastern side of the mountain range, when you're getting a wind that's blowing up to the ocean. So this is that fall weather. And if some of you remember the Oakland Hills fire, that's kind of your worst case scenario right now, is a fire coming from lower down and moving up the hill from east to west. As you can see, we've mapped some of the infrastructure, the San Lorenzo has both in and outside of the fire. And there's just a lot of infrastructure scattered around in very large area, has a lot of vegetation, a lot of access issues and then some potential fire hazard. There's also all the things going on, including it's basic species, why does sudden oak death mortality, sudden oak death mortality, and these things are all contributing to future fire risk even beyond the CCU complex. Next slide. Now, just to step back, we started this project. We were looking at treating areas that hadn't been burned and obviously the fire happened and there was a large amount of damage both to the communities, some to the ecosystem and particularly to the infrastructure that San Lorenzo manages. One of the things we're able to do during the fire was actually pull satellite imagery of the fire's location and you typically get one to two point in time locations a day that are basically infrared imagery of where the fire is. And this is just a composite of all those little data points. Our staff could work with San Lorenzo a bit to actually see where the fire was relative to some of their infrastructure and then staff could start to manage and take actions to better protect their infrastructure. A lot still burned, but from my understanding, I think this helped keep various contaminants from getting pulled down into the larger system by knowing where that fire was. It's strange because you think you would know actually where a giant wildfire is but when it's buried in smoke and you're not next to it, it's really hard to tell where actually the flaming front is. So we've actually developed some newer systems for this that'll be online this year. Hopefully we won't need them, but we'll bring the whole center and the staff up to speak to how to use those as well. Next slide.  Fire severity maps are basically looking at pre-post satellite imagery with the fire in between, looking at essentially foliage loss in the forest. So areas of red and dark red or areas where you see maybe trees with 100% scorch or even the foliage sort of blown off and down to green areas where you had, essentially like an underburn, maybe some trees killed, but not large extensive patches of mortality. There was still a lot of damage that was done after the fire, but if you look, a lot of San Lorenzo's lands are on that eastern edge of the fire, which I would sort of call the cooler edge. That middle red zone, we're looking at probably a 10th of the fire's perimeter in this image. There was extensive high severity fire sort of around Swanton Ranch and east of Swanton Ranch. So to some degree, the fire that burned through your property actually did what you would have hoped it would do for a prescribed burn other than damaging a lot of the infrastructure. You did have some high severity patches north of that Clear Creek area and out in the field that looked like a lot of that was sort of tan oak and shrubby, not so much like redwood forest hitting burn to that degree. Next slide. So again, I think the goal of fuels management and not just at San Lorenzo, but statewide is to just reduce the amount of accumulated fuel on the landscape in key areas before that burns. And I think everyone there has seen the negative and positive effects of this fire. A lot of mitigation work is sort of understanding that your landscape will burn, getting out in front of that and treating where you can effectively so that when it does burn, you have a chance to either contain it with suppression resources or you don't have the severity impacts that you had that we saw on some of the larger areas of the fire west. Next slide. So in terms of overview, this is interesting this picture to the right is actually down the road from my house. This is a field break in the Sierras. We have drier, lower density forests, but this type of cleanup and prescribed fire is a very common work that's being done across California across ownership and across the ecosystem. Next slide. So again, the purpose that we're looking at is to reduce the intensity and potential impacts of wildfires, reducing impacts to infrastructure and increasing fire resilience. So when you do get that next fire, it does not burn the severity that we had in this last one. This picture here was actually the areas like the western edge of the Bennett Springs property top of the hill there. This is a lot of what we saw out there, just a lot of 10-oak mortality understory, some smaller trees killed, but by and large, the overstory, redwood and dub for intact, give or take some few trees here or there. So again, I would call this actually a really beneficial fire effect that we're seeing in this picture. And just that fire line splits the fire to the right, it burned to the left is on burn. Next slide. So overview for the planned contents. We'll work with describing the different treatment methods you can use. And a lot of those are pretty common, cutting, shipping, piling, basically cleaning up debris before it burns. We focus some on just the post-fire recovery, which is I think a lot of what you're dealing with now, just cleaning up after this fire. And then we'll look at, we've looked at mapping places to implement defensible space, both in terms of on adjacent communities and properties, and then around San Lorenzo Valley Water District infrastructure. And then we'll go into some longer term management options. And I said, Caitlyn also will be able to discuss just the permitting and process, permitting and planning process, and then potential funding sources that she's researched and been discussing with the district. Next slide. I think one back. There we go. So one of the things that, not just San Lorenzo, but I think everyone in the area is dealing with are dead trees. The redwoods are very resilient to fire. And a lot of the trees that are even heavily scorched or partially scorched are gonna survive. One of the key issues with redwoods is where you've had those, redwoods that are growing off old stumps can be weakened. And it's really just their foundation can be weakened when that stump burns up. And then there's a whole range of fire damage trees, dug for that can fall. The thing with hazard tree is it's really, you wanna focus that effort where those trees can fall on something you don't want them to fall on to. So obviously roads, homes, schools, trails, parking area, people. That's where we focus our initial look at the hazard trees in the area. And I believe San Lorenzo has already communicated with the county on the larger cleanup for them to help with some of those assessments and then work as well. Next slide. So defensible space. A lot of the infrastructure owned by San Lorenzo, it has a range of materials, construction dates and defensibility. I think in general we're looking at clearing and not removing all vegetation, but removing vulnerable vegetation and ground fuels back to at least 100 feet from a lot of this infrastructure. We're looking at doing some roadside treatments, particularly along evacuation route corridors that have land owned or managed by San Lorenzo along those corridors. And then upgrading. And this tank on the bottom is a great example. It functions for water storage, but it's got a wooden base and a plastic tank. We've been talking about upgrading these types of tanks to either a cement base with a steel tank or something a little more fire resilient as there's funding and availability to get this work done. Some of the other stuff we've talked about is providing takeoffs of some of these tanks. So a fire engine or a water tender can connect to them and use them for fire suppression. That does require going to really specific sites where you can actually drive a water tender to or a fire engine to. It doesn't necessarily work on every tank or buy you something in every tank. Next slide. And finally, some of the longer term management. You know, ultimately San Lorenzo is in the mission of delivering clean water safely to a lot of people. And so that's the core of what we've looked at. How do you mitigate and clean up while continuing that mission to deliver clean water to people? Some of the things we've talked about a little bit are working with the voluntary carbon market in California. This market is developing really sort of as we speak the ability to aggregate multiple land ownerships into one carbon project. That's something we're working on as a company with the state a little bit, but that's one potential option. There's a lot of pieces of that moving cars that need to be figured out, but that's an option. We did look a bit into commercial timber harvesting. And I do think there's, you know, existing deed restrictions on some of the properties that really constrain that. And then if you look at some of the property up to the western side of Boulder Creek, there's just really simple access issues and steepness. You know, it's not a, where I live in the Sierras, it's pretty straightforward to do that kind of work. Going down that road here poses a lot of challenges that have to be thought through and discussed before you take too much action. Next slide. I'm gonna pass it over to Caitlin to go over the environmental compliance and then some of the grants he's looked at. Hey, Jason. So the plan discusses kind of like that the various projects that Jason was just discussing will need some level permitting and environmental review depending on the scope and scale of the projects. The plan outlines the two main approaches and really gets in depth into them. First one is project level approach where you do one or a few kind of a small suite of projects, generally similar and do the small level sequel and permitting as needed. You can also do a programmatic approach. So just to dig into those a little bit more, for example, for the project level, it's probably what the district is gonna do in the near term for some of those projects that you wanna get done quickly. Those recommended defensible space field reduction that Jason was talking about, the district, for example, may just file a categorical exemption for those. Same with the hazard tree removal, the district has already just filed an exemption permit to Cal Fire. Other options for this project level approach, you could also get coverage under some existing environmental documents. Cal Fire has quite a few. Generally, the district would just need to complete these environmental checklists that kind of already exists. You may need to do some surveys like biological or cultural. For example, some of the field load reduction projects in the plan could be covered under the Cal Fire, California Forest Improvement Grant program that I'll touch on on the next slide. You could also get some of your prescribed burning projects covered under the Cal Fire Vegetation Management Program. Depending on the scale of the projects and also kind of the district's timeline, like if you have a lot of projects that you feel comfortable that you wanna do in the next five or 10, 15 years, conducting a programmatic sequel document and permitting would really be more cost-effective in the long term, which brings me to the next slide. So with the discussions I've had with Carly, it sounds like funding can be a little bit of an issue for implementing a lot of these projects that the district is hoping to do. So we've been helping the district kind of the first step. You have two things, the grants and funding opportunities, but a lot of those actually you'll need to team with partners because usually our regional effort is more likely to win. So we've been helping the district do some outreach, like we reconnected the district with the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network that has some subcommittees for field vegetation management where you might be able to meet some teaming partners. And then Jason submitted a suite of some of those field reduction projects that are in the plan to the California Regional Prioritization Group. And what they do is they kind of match up funding to projects. So those are pretty cool opportunities. And then the plan has a full section dedicated to the funding research that I've done. And there's a lot of opportunities. The grants and funding can cover forest and fuel projects, water infrastructure, because in light of the fires, there was quite a bit of damage, as well as possibly there may be a way to get some of those tank fittings covered if you team with like a local fire agency. So that brings me to what we've been able to help thus far on we helped the district apply for the Cal Fire California Forest Improvement Grant Program to prepare a forest management plan. And hopefully Carly and the district will hear back in the next couple of weeks on if that funding was approved. And then from there, quite a lot of the aspects that we've already developed in the plan can be put into that forest management plan. And then that can get approved by Cal Fire. And then kind of whenever the district is ready, you can apply for more funding under that California Forest Improvement Grant program to actually implement the on the ground projects. It's pretty cool. So yeah, the grants and funding, there's a lot of opportunities and it's all laid out there. And yeah, it's pretty cool. So thanks so much. That was really interesting. I wanna make sure Holly that this presentation is available to the public because we didn't have it on the agenda. And can we also have a copy sent to the board because I'm sure a lot of people would like to look at those hazard maps and things that we had. So let's go ahead and start with questions from the board and Director Henry, did you have anything you'd like to ask? I'm wondering about individuals, how, what they can do to help clear their properties, to keep some of these wildfires from spreading. And if there's ways that people can go together with that or if they can go with the water district and connect up that way or with fire districts, I'm just, I mean, I have just spent a whole lot of money cleaning up my property and it still isn't cleaned up even from the lightning fire. I have some huge branches down but I have lots of redwood trees. But I'm thinking that there's a lot of people that probably don't know how to make their property safe or don't have the funds to have someone come out and work on their property and what can be done for them. Yeah, for sure. There's different programs but I think the main places to look locally are your local fire safe council, the local resource conservation district. And then with San Lorenzo specifically, we can map and look at where there's adjacent private parcels to their lands. Where we are, there's actually, I'm not sure if Santa Cruz County has the same program but there's a senior thinning program where people just apply and they'll come and clean up your property for you if you're over 65. This is run through the local fire safe council. What you're seeing, I think in the next year is the state pushing a lot more money to these local organizations to try and get this work done. So like a large entity like the Forest Service or the Park Service might have money to do this work. But like you said, it's incredibly expensive to move dead Mcbranches around and get rid of them everywhere you go. In terms of applying for grants where you have say groups of homeowners, three to five homeowners working together sometimes in a neighborhood is more effective than everyone trying to each go after their own funding or pay for that. And I think finally in terms of cleanup, I know Carly started to work on this but the county does have a process to at least identify and start to clean up hazard trees. And those are gonna be coming down for two to 10 years. Once a fire comes through, it has a long time effect on the landscape. So at the top of my head, that's some quick ones. I don't know between Carly and Caitlin if you've talked with other folks that might have something that would fit. And Jason has the right information. So Santa Cruz Fire Safe Council is a wonderful resource for local people in the Valley as well as the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County. Both have received funding from the state and through Cal Fire to begin helping individual homeowners. And they have multiple programs from chipping to neighborhood efforts just like Jason said. And we can send out that those links are on our website but I can also post them in the chat here if people are interested in those. Sounds like a good idea. All right, Director Smalley. Yes, when can this plan be completed? This is the first question that I've got and I think that's to Jason. Yeah, so we've actually done a lot of the background work for it and the field work. The fire sort of threw us off because we switched from planning to dealing with the fire. I would like to go through and designate a few potential units and have the staff and maybe if a committee wants to review those, the areas we really are looking at are areas that are adjacent to neighborhoods. So where your lands are pretty square, right? They're not these funky shapes but most of the treatments we'd be recommending are within one to 300 feet, particularly of boundaries where SLD lands come up to private parcels that are developed. And a lot of that cleanup work that you're looking at is really in the fire, just cleaning up the dead material and probably chipping it. The other place we've been looking at is around some of the infrastructure that's on private land or managed by easement. Those are actually, I think, some of the more difficult things you have to deal with. You have water tanks that aren't on your own lands. My question was though, when will you complete your report or this plan? Not necessarily the follow-up work. I think we would look and we'd probably work with San Lorenzo staff but I think to have a solid draft by the end of April. This presentation lets us bring up some of the issues that may come up. So my preference is always rather than write a giant draft and have you guys review it, have the issues brought forward and then we can try and address them in the next draft. Okay, and the other question that I have is for Carly. They're describing possible grants, partner funding, reaching out to other partners. Do you have the time within your wheelhouse to be able to take all of this on or are you going to need help? Yeah, that's a great question. So right now I am on the board of the FireSafe Council. That has been something that the district has participated in for the last five, 10 years. So I am part of that agency and that really gives us some insight into when they are pursuing these grants and where we could fit in. We also are a member of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network but unfortunately I'm not as active in that group but we do still get all their emails and information when they do share those grants as far as grant writing. That is a pretty large time commitment. The nice part about being part of these regional efforts is that really all you need to do is come forward with that shovel ready project which hopefully will kind of be able to take out of the plan that Panorama is working on currently and say, here's the project, we're ready to go. This is what we'd like to do and they'll prioritize that within their grant and then we just become part of theirs. The other thing to consider right now is we do have an RFP out for a grant writer and we have received some questions of people interested in applying for that RFP and submitting a proposal. So I'm hoping we'll have a consultant grant writer to work with us in the next year and start really pursuing these big funding grants that we haven't had the bandwidth to do. Okay, thank you. Director too. Actually, Mark asked my questions about grants so I appreciate that and because we're always looking for money, right? That's the biggest thing right now and I think you did a good presentation so thank you for that. I actually don't have any other questions I was just gonna be about grants, so thank you. Dr. Fultz. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. I was good to hear that your activities were able to help us sort of mitigate some of the disaster that could have impacted us had we not had your assistance. I'm glad that we were able to move forward in that and I wanted to recognize Lou and Rick, Lou Ferris and Rick Moran that are in the audience that were instrumental in getting that going earlier as well last year when they were on the board. I have a number of comments and questions. The voluntary carbon market, now this is something the district had talked about a few years back. I don't think there were really a lot of programs formed quite then. Could you expand a little bit more on what that would involve and effectively would that be another organization taking on responsibility for managing the land? Is that sort of the way it works? So in California, there's the compliance market. So that's people are selling carbon into this market, energy companies using that to offset emissions and those types of contracts you're doing for 100 years. The voluntary carbon market really, I think is forming in response to some of the complexity of the compliance market that I'm talking about. And we actually have a whole staff who works on that and I'd be happy to get like a full deep dive on this within if there's time. But essentially voluntary carbon market right now is letting people, letting multiple landowners aggregate their carbon into one project. The problem that you ran into with the current market system is that if you have to own probably three, five, even 8,000 acres of land to have a viable carbon project, these are big landscapes. And there's lots of landowners who have 50 acres, 200, 500, 800 acres. There wasn't a mechanism for those people to pool their resources. The voluntary carbon market now is gonna allow people to do that through a process of aggregation. So say Santa Cruz County, any number of small landowners can go in under this aggregation system and then sell their carbon into that system and be paid individually for that carbon before it was really hard to separate whose carbon was whose. So one person might put in a well-stocked 1,000 acres and another person at really unstocked 2,000 acres. And there's a lot of conflict over how much money each of those is worth. So this system is coming into place and a lot of it is actually being funded by corporate offsets. So you're seeing companies in Microsoft. Just to help me here. So basically we'd be selling the carbon but there would be no one that those people that would be buying that would not be taking over responsibility for managing the forest in any way, shape, or form. Now, yeah, so you specify how you're gonna manage it and how much carbon you're gonna have on the landscape and then you're responsible for keeping that there. Got it, okay. Sorry. No problem. So you talked a little bit earlier about the commercial timber harvest and I agree with you that that's not likely but would you say that our forest is healthy in terms of the density of trees, the way that they are growing and that sort of thing?  You have this redwood forest that I imagined was completely almost all cut down and probably hundreds, hundreds, hundred years ago and it was recovered and redwood just grows. I think in the long run what you do run into, I mean, eventually there's more trees than there is water and light. And I think that's where you start to get some, you know, competition that's gonna reduce, you know, result in mortality in the future. At the same time, I do feel like where you had these low severity burn parts of the forest other than the damage of the infrastructure in the community, that fire actually did a lot of good on the ground. Well, but the trees themselves though are, it's a healthy forest. That is where I grew up, you know, if you have trees jammed together too closely, it's not particularly healthy. Right. So what you've seen, our forest is healthy. Yeah, I feel like with the redwood forest, I mean, from what I've seen, it's in good shape. The issues I think you really have down there are the dug fur that was killed by the fire, particularly in larger patches, and then the tan oak with the sudden oak death. And that's an ongoing problem in the region that just every landowner is dealing with dead oaks. I have a number of myself that went down. On the blanket sequa option, what is the length of time that such a permit would be valid? Is it 15 years, 20 years, forever? Are you saying for, if the district chose to do like a programmatic sequa document? Yes, how long would that be good for? As long as everything was adequately analyzed, like as long as your project description clearly covered what you're doing, it's good forever. Yeah, they don't really expire. Cal Fire, we noticed, has been working off with some EIRs that they did in 81, and they're still doing project analysis under them. So as long as the conditions apply, they can last for a long time, yeah. And then, where do we sign up? On one of your slides, you mentioned a forest improvement. And fortunately, the slide went before I could get the rest of it. What specifically is involved? What kind of activities are involved in forest improvement? Yeah, so it is very, and Jason might be able to help out here, but that's that Cal Fire forest improvement program grant. And that is one of the documents where they actually have an existing environmental document that you just submit your projects and do a checklist. But for the grant, the types of programs, so unfortunately we did find out defensible space is not covered, but other fuel thinning, vegetation thinning projects can be covered. Jason? Sure, yeah. And that program, every county has a representative or every Cal Fire unit. That was originally really geared towards helping these landowners and say that the 50 to 500 acre size, like non-industrial lands, improved their lands. So that was things like reforestation where there'd been deforestation, road and coal road improvements for erosion. Those types of like, it wasn't so much paying for like timber harvest planning, but really for like improving like these smaller scale forests where the people didn't have funding through like they're not like a big creek where they have an industrial timber base to pay for that. And so yeah, Caitlin said a huge amount of work on that. And I think we've come a long way on that application. Yeah, I think getting some specifics around that in the plan would be helpful. I mean, my priorities are pretty straightforward, starting with protecting the critical infrastructure and moving out from there. The second part is the interfaces to our neighbors and perhaps our neighbors and ourselves could join together to do more work at lower overall costs. Making the project bigger sometimes drives the cost down on a per acre basis. I have a few scorched trees myself from I'm sure a fire a long, long time ago. Fortunately, not recently. So I know that the redwoods can recover from that kind of activity pretty well. And I'm just hopeful that we at the Sacramento level have learned something from this fire, which is when a lightning strike happens, you don't wait for the fire to get bigger. You jump on it right away. And hopefully we'll remember that if this happens again. Thank you. I just wanna sort of add on to what Director Fultz said in terms of my own priorities. Again, I would like to see a prioritized list of all of our infrastructure everywhere and taking into account what the cost would be, sort of bang for the buck, what we could go do to harden them. Because Jason, what I heard you say was looking at things that were 100 to 300 feet from private property in places where we have easements into private property, which that's obviously addressing our sort of legal problems or liability. But I just am really to, I think that to me that's secondary to hardening the things that we have now. And if you can help us by suggesting those things that wouldn't be really expensive and we could like get to work on them. I mean, I wanna get to work on them before the fire season starts in June, some of the smaller ones. Because I look at that map, you show this over on the east side of the San Lorenzo River with those big areas of red. And I think, oh my God, the Lumpico tanks and I wanna make sure that all the stuff we have is hardened. So I just wanna second that that's my highest priority too. Yeah, and really just in general terms, like doing that 100 feet of defensible space where you have the land to do it, where you haven't had the fire yet. I mean, that's like where I would start. We have been talking really to San Lorenzo staff or the experts in the infrastructure, but looking at where to replace tanks that are there today versus waiting till they're older, moving some of these structures from like wood-based structures to cement. We're talking about that already and where to do it. It is hugely complex and expensive. You know, a water system is not a cheap thing to upgrade, so. We know. Yeah. Okay, let's go out and see if any of our attendees and I see that Larry Ford has his hand up. So you wanna go ahead and speak Larry? Thank you. This is Larry Ford. I'm a natural resource management scientist. I work as a consultant around the state and I'm really impressed with the work that Panorama has done. And I want to specifically congratulate Carly Rick and other staff for pulling this together. I remember when it was just an idea and suddenly you were able to get a plan, a contract for a plan that worked really well. And I'm just thrilled that Panorama was able to redirect some of its energies to help during the fire. I'm really looking forward to seeing the plan when it comes out. And I would really like to be on one of your review committees. I think what you've described, Jason, so far, it's very comprehensive, very impressive. I think there are a couple of gaps. Like I didn't hear you talk about water flow in different regions of the valley and I didn't hear you talking too much about staff readiness. Rick had his team mobilized really well to be able to go out and make sure that all the generators were still working when PG&E shut off the power. Anyway, that kind of thing. I wanted to reinforce your notion that you mentioned that we need to distinguish between what is really urgent and needed by the water district from what's needed in the whole San Lorenzo Valley because the district doesn't have that much land, but it's related. And so that part is really important. And then lastly, I wanna make sure that you recognize that there's a great big fear in this community for what's gonna happen when the next fire season starts, particularly on the east side of the river. All those communities are much denser than on the west side. And they've also been recognized. You probably saw that article in New York Times about how one of our neighborhoods is regarded as one of the top 10 risk areas in the whole country for not being able to evacuate. And so evacuation is not the responsibility of the water district, but it is the responsibility of the county. And so I think somewhere in here we need to reach out to the county to say, we've gotta deal with this because there's this huge risk of a big fire. We could easily get a windstorm. We could easily get a fire that sweeps down the valley and completes the job that wasn't finished last August. And so anyway, I also, I think we need to, well, I've just run out of time, but we need landscape scale fuel reduction. And that's a county responsibility also. Thank you, Larry. Are there any other comments from the audience? Lou Farris. Yes, I have a question for Jason. Jason, the district has a number of dirt roads through our property. And I was wondering what your thoughts are with taking those dirt roads and converting them into effective fire breaks. Yeah, we've talked about that. And one of the ones I've spent time on is the one that runs through the Bennett Springs property. Basically runs east, west, straight up the hill almost. I think with those roads, the first step is to get them to where the Cal Fire and local type three engines can drive on them effectively. And that's really getting out there, getting the dead trees off there, getting the big ruts out that an engine can't cross. So that's step one. And we have talked about that with the staff. There are some issues with making roads more derivable and more easily accessible is that people on motorcycles and mountain bikes also want to then use them too. So you have to sort of balance that road improvement with those existing roads with managing, not actually a trespass, but use that you don't want on those roads. And then the second thing we've looked at is along that same road network, starting to brush back and clear back those roads. So one, you can get an engine onto them. And then two, they could potentially use that as a fire line or a potential fire line. Some of the other work we've been doing with mid-pen is trying to pre-identify places where you would actually do fire suppression or where you don't want it. And those are things like dozer operations or where you have field treatments, making sure your staff and local fire districts know where that stuff is before fire season. So they can, they're going to be the first ones there. You know, Boulder Creek Fire Department, Cal Fire, they're going to be the first ones on scene. So having those folks know your lands as best as you can. And having, like you said, the staff ready, which I believe they are, to respond to a fire. All that pre-planning is as important as the fuels reduction. And we can touch on some of that in the plan. But, and I think that touches a little bit also on what Larry had said as well on pre-planning. On evacuations, the evacuation problem is a statewide problem. And right now the company that's probably addressing it most closely is Stonehaven. You probably got notices through their site. We partner with them a bit. Having that discussion to improve evacuation maps that exist in Santa Cruz County through Stonehaven at a local level is an important next step to engage your county with, to make sure they're accurately representing where to go and who's got to go down those roads. And just on Larry's comment on water flow, you're right. You know, we don't do, we're not hydrologists. And I think San Lorenzo has other professional hydrology companies that work with them. So we don't really address things like water flow and tree density and that kind of work. We can do some calculations, but it's not something that's written or expertise. Where would you put the priority of firebreak as it relates to the fire prevention planning in general? I think like the consensus is right, work out from your existing infrastructure first. Do those spot level treatments where you can. And the next level is work with that larger collaborative like the RCDs that Carly and Kate had mentioned to build a larger network of field treatments. So that when you're implementing something or you're planning something, it ties in with your neighboring lands or a community that was also doing the same thing. And that's that communication piece showing up to all those meetings, which takes a lot of time, helps build that consensus of where to go. What you don't wanna do is build some tiny field break that's ineffective in the middle of nowhere, you know? So generally, like we said, we're focusing on like infrastructure. I really, in the absence of all information, focus on schools, hospitals, evacuation routes and critical infrastructure. Start there. The larger ecosystem stuff, the high lands and mid-level lands above Boulder Creek on the west side there, you're gonna get there later. Those areas are really inaccessible and difficult to get into. But I think we're on the same page of starting around your infrastructure communities. I look at evacuation routes and then reaching out from there. And as best as you can, connecting those with your neighboring landowner efforts. Thank you. Sure. Do we have any other questions from the public? Okay. I don't see any hands raised. So I'll come back to the board. This is largely informational. There's no motion involved in this, but this is your chance to cite your own priorities. I think the way Bob and I did, if you have any or any other questions. Director Henry. Well, golly, Larry Ford. You just brought up the very scary Lompico situation, didn't you? The one way in, like the one way in and the one way out canyon. And I've been here for almost 50 years and I'm beginning to think my luck might run out one of these days. But that's all I wanted to say, scary. Yes, Lompico Road is the ranks number two as the most dangerous road. So because of the one way and one way up. Director Smalley. Yes. I agree with the priority of focusing on existing infrastructure and focusing on the ones that we can do quickly for what limited funds we have. Focus on tanks, focus on pipelines. So that's it. No further questions. Okay. Director Too. Nothing at this time. Thank you. Okay. Well, did you cover it all?  And so we have to be very focused on where we spend the money that we have on this area. So, you know, for Panorama, please keep that in mind as you're putting together your priority list and really focus in that final report. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much for that interesting report and for all of your answering the questions. That was really great. Next, we have... Point of order, Gail? Yeah. Given that this next item may be a lengthy discussion, would it make sense to swap this with the next item after it? If the board, a unanimous, I believe it's either four-fifths or unanimous, we could swap that. I think we're gonna try to get through everything. So I'd just rather just keep it the way it is. You know, unless you think there's, well, I don't care. I think there's the potential for a fairly lengthy discussion over the board. Yeah, I agree. Well, all right, I guess I'll just ask, Gina, can I just ask the rest of the board if they agree? Yes, that would be fine. And a vote isn't needed. It's really up to you, Chair Mayhund. Okay. If nobody objects, then we will change the order and go next to 10C. Does anybody object? All right, then let's go ahead and discuss the Nakari property. I think Rick had his hand up, if it's relevant. I just had just a real quick comment and I have to do direct reports, thanking Larry Ford, Lou Ferriss and Rick Moran. They really brought this fire management to the board very early on and started the foundation where we continued and they need to be commended. Larry Ford spent a lot of his own time at coffee shops with directors and myself and working on getting it started. And it's much appreciated. And that what Jason made that quick comment about you couldn't even see in the Santa Rosa Valley and James, the director of operations myself and others were up in the valley. You could not even tell where the fire was and those satellite imagery maps were made all the difference in the world of contamination into our water treatment plan. So I just can't emphasize enough even so we weren't that far into the planning and operations. What we did have was priceless to have at the time. You couldn't see your hand in front of you a lot of times in downtown Boulder Creek and you knew town was burning but you had no idea to what magnitude until you saw those imagery maps and you saw that fire working down to our supply lines. And the director of operations moved staff.  But those satellite imageries were unbelievable. Just thank you. Thank you, Rick. So we'll move now to the Nakari property discussion and then we'll come back afterwards to the Board of Policy Management. So, Jane, would you like me to start with an overview of the project? Sure, that'd be great before I get into the legal issues. And I guess I did just want to point out that this is an informational item and the staff isn't requesting any Board action pertaining to it. Thank you. What we're talking about tonight is the replacement of the district's swim tanks which are two redwood water storage tanks located near Scenic Way in Ben-Loman. The site of the swim tanks is a district-owned parcel. It is a very steep lot with an average slope gradient of about 50%. It's about 6,000 square feet and it houses two small water storage tanks, approximately 20,000 gallon each. The swim tanks are part of the original distribution system acquired by the district from Citizens Utility back in 1965. The tanks are undersized for the service area and require ongoing maintenance to control leaks. If anybody's ever been up in that area, one of the tanks is up about four to six feet on stilts which is very uncommon, not unless you have a train you're taking water on with but you don't see redwood tanks elevated on a platform. We solicited bids back in the summer of 2017 to move ahead with replacement of the tank. We received one bid for 1,492,000 which was three times higher than the engineer's estimate of 443,000. The district rejected those bids, that bid. In 2019, Mr. Nicaria approached the district about selling a nearby vacant lot to the district. A lot is similar in size to the swim tank site but less steep with better access. It is not adjacent to the Nicaria residents. The district obtained an appraisal of the lot which was found that the lot was to be unbuildable and had a fair market value of approximately $9,500. Mr. Nicaria asserted a much higher value for the property. In May, 2020, the parties entered into a purchase price agreement of $88,000. Replacement of the leaking swim tanks with a bolted steel tank was it's a high priority of the district. Environmental review has been completed for this project and funding is immediately available through financing obtained by the district in August, 2019. The only holdup now is the acquisition of the property. And with that, I'll turn it over to district council who has been designated property negotiator by the district and has been working with Mr. Nicaria on the purchase of this property. Okay, thank you, Rick. So you brought us up to the point where the district entered into the purchase and sale agreement in the spring of last year. And of course, after that time, the environmental review was initiated and completed which resolved that particular closing condition under the purchase and sale agreement. The other issues that have to be resolved in order to close have to do with title. We did our title, when we did our title diligence under the purchase and sale agreement, what we ran into is an issue related to the fact that it appears that the party from whom Mr. Nicaria got the deed to the property that that transaction wasn't insured. And so our title company has raised the issue that they cannot provide title insurance to the district for that transfer. And what that means is that if the district were to buy the property and get title insurance, as we would do, we wouldn't have any insurance covering issues related to that transfer of the deed to Mr. Nicaria. And I've actually consulted with two title companies. I initially consulted with one who, then there were a lot of personnel turnovers with COVID. So I consulted with another one with a local office in Santa Cruz. They both identified the same issue. And when we raised it with Mr. Nicaria and we entered into discussions with the transferor who gave the deed to Mr. Nicaria, we found that the issue appears to be pretty serious in the sense that as far as I can tell, there was no written agreement for that transfer to Mr. Nicaria. There was no title insurance. And there are some issues that could affect the validity in terms of whether that title transfer was actually valid. So what we've been trying to do is communicate with both the prior owner and with Mr. Nicaria to encourage the prior owner to sign paperwork that the title company requires in order to confirm the validity of the transfer so that we can get title insurance on the acquisition. Unfortunately, we've had a lot of back and forth, but unfortunately it's been unsuccessful. There's no indication at this time that we're gonna be able to get the transferor to sign the necessary documents. And so we're running out of options under the current purchase and sale agreement which is going to expire at the end of the month which is the outside closing date unless we can find a path forward to closing. But like I said, what's been communicated to us is that Mr. Nicaria is insisting on the $88,000 purchase price. And we, of course, we don't have any authority to offer anything to the transferor and we haven't offered anything. And she hasn't been willing to sign any documents to confirm the validity of her title. So we're at a position now where we're kind of stuck. It looks like we're not gonna be able to close under the purchase and sale agreement unless something significantly changes in the next week or so. So what I'm anticipating at this time is that at the end of the month, we'll have to give notice that the purchase and sale agreement has terminated. And at that point, what I'd like to do unless the board objects is to make one final written offer both to Mr. Nicaria and to the transferor that kind of divides the $88,000 purchase price between them on some basis to be determined. I'm not sure what the amounts would be and see if we can close a deal that way. If we can't do that, the only other alternative that would ensure that the district gets good title would be to pursue an eminent domain action. So I think there's a little more we can do to see if a deal can be reached. And I guess I'm hopeful that that can be accomplished though. Like I said, there's no indication right now that that will be successful. Okay. Thank you, Gina. Director Tu, did you have the comment? I did not. Thank you. How about Director Falls? I do. And then I'm going to address this to Nick who I believe is still in the audience. And Nick, this is a small community and it's common in small communities for friends and colleagues to do business and especially in these kinds of contexts. So my focus now is really on what's doing in the best interests of our community. I've bought and sold property many times but it's always been my job as a seller to get cleared title. And I think that's the case here especially at the premium price that is involved. To be clear, I opposed buying this parcel for 88K as I thought that was way too much but I was in favor of giving you as the landowner or the presumed landowner at the time the money that would have otherwise gone to attorneys fighting over this. I always want to give money to our community not to attorneys, especially attorneys that are typically out of the area. Not to say that attorneys can't have their place but it's always better to see if we can do things as neighbors. I believe a big portion of the rationale for the board agreeing to this premium price was due to the savings we achieved through a quick purchase. It's been over a year now and if costs have continued to escalate over the last year as I expect they have it's not necessarily clear that we are continuing along the lines of having lots of savings. So that 88K doesn't look very good to me now either. I remember back when this happened I said take the money and run and that meant to make the deal happen. So I'm hopeful you can still do that. I'm hopeful that you can find a way to do that. After that, things take a different path and it's not a path really that anybody wants to go down including I'm sure yourself and the other person involved. So let's make it happen and let's move on to doing the good work for your community that we need to do. Thank you. Director Henry. Well, I also want to say to Nick, you need to step up here. You need to make this happen. We cannot do it for you. We have tried to work with you and we feel that it's very important for the people who live in your area to have more water flow for fire. And there has to be a way to resolve this. And I hope that you will spend time thinking about this and what you can do to make this happen. Thank you, Nick. Director Smalley. No comments. Thank you. Okay, we'll go to the public now and I see somebody that is identified as a visitor. Can we let them speak please? Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, great. So I'm Nick Nicari, the owner of the property and I appreciate both Bob and Lois talking to me about the community because that has been my goal since the beginning. They might not know that I was even there maybe 15 years ago asking the district to please pay attention to our neighborhood. That's why I did this. Now the lady is upset who sold it to me because she feels it will not lead to the protection of the trees. That's what she says. I really believe it's more about her filling left out of a deal that she made years ago. So I have offered her a couple of thousand dollars in my attempt to make things better for the district. And I have found it really frustrating to deal with Rick who never returns any questions I have for him. And I also appreciate Gina responding to me but I don't have a representative on this. I'm representing myself. I'm a small guy. I'm trying to help the district and Bob should know that I care about it and so it should blow us even though they don't agree with me all the time. So please consider this. I cannot make another person sign anything. And that's what I've been saying since I first heard about this. I wasn't notified in the beginning that I would need to make another person and sign something about this. It does seem to me that eminent domain does not apply when a person offers you to sell you their property at an agreed upon price that you agreed to. I'm not trying to cheat you guys. If I wanted to sell it for half of what I offered it to the district as my final price, which you accepted, whatever your reason was now you wanna say, you accepted it. And the fact of the matter is if I wanted to sell it in half of that, I would have sold it to you for half of that. So she doesn't own this property but she can put up some roadblocks. I'm trying to work with the district as much as seemingly possible to solve that. Would the district like to pay her $44,000? That if you don't wanna do that then don't ask me to do that. It's really simple. I'm willing to split it with the district. I'm willing to try as hard as I can. And she has been working with me. Rick hasn't, but the fact is I'm trying to make this happen for you guys, for me, for my neighborhood especially, and for everybody. So she could make a couple of thousand dollars out of this. She knows it. I'm hoping that works. I don't know what else to do. So please help me to make this work for everybody. That's all I'm asking. I never really wanted to sell this property in the beginning. I was tricked into it by Rick Rogers who told me I could back out. Yeah, go ahead and laugh for it.  And then you- Mr. President, I hope you can't let you making ad hominem comments. And I think- Okay, well he did. He did. That's not a comment, that's a reality. But the fact is, is that I can't prove that because it was only verbal. So I'm really trying to be helpful to the district. And I'm asking you guys to be helpful in return and we can make this a positive thing instead of a negative thing. Thank you very much. We can go back. Are there any other members of the public that would like to ask a question or express an opinion about this? What's with that? I don't see any other hands up. We can go back to the board. If anybody wants to make a comment as Gina said in the beginning, there's no requirement that we make an emotion or anything on this. Director Fultz. Yes, Gina, just to make sure that I'm on the right page with you regarding the clear title. If for whatever reason we're not able to get a title insurance company to ensure this purchase, that leaves us open as deep pockets for potentially a lawsuit down the road if there are any disputes about the title on the land. Do I have that correct? Yes, you're right. If the district buys the land and there's a dispute about the title for which we're not insured, we're a defendant in that lawsuit and it could affect the infrastructure that would get built on the property. Thank you. One of the things I definitely want to do is try to avoid lawsuits if at all possible, especially ones that you can see coming like this one if we were to move forward without clear title. Thank you. Director Henry. Well, Nick Nakari, I've known Rick Rogers for 10 years worked with him.  That is not the Rick Rogers most people know. And I have absolutely no idea I'm tired of some of your nonsense, frankly. Director Smalley. No comments. Director too. Yeah, I just wanted to concur with Lois on the part where, and I think Bob had also said something to this effect about the value of the property was less than $10,000. The district is willing to pay more than eight times that for a quick sale, which obviously didn't happen. We don't have any position here. There's no way we can go forward with the sale as it is. That's my understanding in that someone corrects me on that. And so I just am not really thrilled about the district paying eight times more for a property that we didn't get with the quick sale we were hoping for. And I know this is disappointing to Mr. Nakari, but I feel like according to what Gina had just said, we've done our best to try to go forward with it. And every time we talk about it, it's costing the district more money. And every time we have a meeting about it, it's costing the district more money. So I'd like to avoid that in the future. And I really hope that this can be worked out in the next week or so. Okay. Thank you. Unless Rick or Gina want to make a final comment on this, we'll go on to the next agenda item. I have no further comment. I'll refer to council. I have no further comment. Okay. Thank you very much. So we'll now go back to the discussion and possible action on the board policy manual update. And who's going to present that? The district council will present that to the board. My apologies. Okay. Thank you, chair Mayhood, Mr. Rogers. And if you'll forgive me just a moment, I'm scrolling back up to that item. As you know, this is coming back to the board now for the third time. We came up with a process at the first meeting to obtain board feedback and input on the board policy manual. We had a second meeting to address the initial input we got from the board. And now this is at that second meeting in January, we asked the board each to comment on the suggestions that the various directors and staff had made with recommended changes to the board policy manual. We asked the directors to provide that to staff for purposes of putting it into the agenda packet so that all the directors in the public could see each other's feedback. And we could come up with kind of a streamline process to move this forward for a decision in terms of what changes the board as a whole wants to see made to the board policy manual. And so you've got all the backup in front of you, but it essentially boils down to that it appears their support for the changes to the policy manual that are outlined in the exhibits numbered one, three through seven, eight through 21, 24 to 28, 30 to 32, 34 to 49 and 51 to 56. And so we're simply asking for informal direction from the board provided by the board president to move forward with making these red line changes to the board policy manual to be brought back for review and approval at a subsequent meeting. And I understand, Chair Mayhoot, that there may be a slight tweak to the items that we're gonna include in the revision. Yes, and it looked to me that perhaps one or two directors accidentally gave the wrong answer for items 22 and 23 and voted no when they intended to vote yes. And that's just based on looking at their written responses. And I did talk to Tina and she said she accidentally made, it was kind of worded in this very complicated way that I had to read it three times before I knew whether it was yes or no. So that would change it if that were the case. And that's, so Tina says she just gave me the thumbs up, which means that she had intended to vote yes on both 22 and 23. And Mark, did you wanna check those items and see what you meant to? Well, if it helps, I can quickly clarify what those are. Yeah, 22, well, let me start, 24, item number 24 was an item to change the public comment period for open session items from five minutes to three minutes. 22 was essentially the same proposal limiting public comment time from changing it from five minutes down to three minutes for closed session comments on closed session items. And 23 was for comments on general oral communication on items not on the agenda. So what would, if the consensus is that or at least the plurality is that the intent was for public comments to be three instead of five minutes for all types of comments, whether it's open or closed session or general comment, then we would include items 22 and 23 in the changes as well as 24. That was my intent. As you can tell from my other answer that that was what I had chosen. And I think that's maybe what Gail had caught. Director Smalley, do you have anything to say about it or? If the suggestion changes are to limit the time to three minutes for all of those items, I concur with that. If I didn't indicate so, the way it was worded was confusing to me. You'd actually in the comments said, no, three minutes is enough. That's what maybe- I understand. Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. And I also wanted to say we're not trying to limit the public care. It's just that our meetings are getting so long. We're trying to sort of find ways to cut back on how long this goes. Are we now discussing the substance of these things? Because if we are, I do have a few comments to make. We haven't gotten quite there yet, Bob. Let's limit it then to no comments until we get to that point, okay? So we have three things that we've been asked to do. One is to see whether basically to either advise the board to accept those that Gina listed with the addition of 22 or 23 and go on and I had taking the, I would say the sense of what we were trying to communicate and putting those in the thing. The other is if any director would like to see additional changes, that's requested that the board discuss and provide direction to staff so that those requested changes can be presented in the following forthcoming red line. And then finally, there were a few, there was a red line version that Gina had made just some few very minor wording changes or correcting typos, that for which and things like that. And so that one, unless someone on the board objects to those red line changes, I would like to direct the staff to include those minor changes in the next red line. And then we can return to the first two issues that we're basically recommending to the board. I do have a clarifying question, I think. Gail. Yes, go ahead. Who is actually responsible for modifying this agreement? Is that being done by our council, Gina? You mean the policy manual? Excuse me, the policy manual, yes, sorry. I think that's going to be in my court, yes. Yeah, this isn't directing staff so much as it is directing council. Yes, I mean, Gina, I guess what I meant to say by that is that Gina would do the writing, but there might be cases where she would consult with other staff to make sure that it's consistent with practice or that it's consistent with what they meant. I think, in that case though, you'd be actually consulting with the board since this is a board policy manual. It is the board policy manual, but we had decided that the most efficient way to do this was to have Gina first do the polling that we did and then that she along with a little bit of input from the staff as necessary would do the writing, which would produce a red line that we would then go ahead and discuss further. So we'll discuss it tonight and then when we get a red line, we'll go back and discuss it again. I will have comments on that more later, thanks. Okay. So let's go ahead and discuss the first item that we had and let's start with Director Henry. What item are we on? So we're not going to discuss every single item. I don't think that's necessary. Right. I thought this was by vote and what got three votes or I guess there's two things there that should have gotten three or maybe even four votes. But so I'm not sure exactly what you're asking me. I'm asking your opinion of whether we should adopt or recommend to the staff that they rewrite it with those ones that Gina listed, which were essentially ones that got three to two. 20, 22 and 23. With the changes that were mistakes on 22 and 23. I'm for that. Okay, great. So that's, sorry, I wasn't clear enough and what we're trying to discuss tonight. blonde roots. Okay. Director Smalley. I believe that we should have Gina proceed with making the changes as she's outlined in the memo with the addition of items 22 and 23, which we've further clarified this evening. Director too. I concur and I'd hope we'd move this along as soon as possible so that we can be done with it. Director Faults. Yeah, I have a few comments I wanna make about this. And I think part of this is a little bit of history here, perhaps for folks that weren't around in the time period, sort of in the 2015 to 2018 period. The reason for a lot of the changes that were made to the board policy manual in the wake of the 2018 election. Is that the community I think had reached a consensus that the manner in which the board was interacting with the public was simply unacceptable. Community members were routinely being ignored, cut off, not answered when they asked questions that were perfectly reasonable questions. Being short with people, effectively looking at their watch when it came to some three minute deadline. And overall, I think the impression of that was reinforced by the grand jury report that was produced in that same time period, which basically took the board and by extension the district to task for the manner in which it was interacting with the community with a special focus on the Long Pico situation. In the wake of the 2018 election in which a group of us basically promised to redo the relationship with the community at a board level, a lot of innovations were introduced into the board policy manual. The five minute situation was not intended to be a max or even a min, it was basically intended to communicate to our public, our bosses, that when they came before the board with something they wanted to say, that they were gonna be given ample time to be able to do that and not get cut off as they were routinely cut off during a lot of those board meetings that I attended and witnessed. To the extent sometimes where that was so arbitrary that the board felt it necessary to call the police for God's sake. This was just a disaster. In addition to that, we also made it clear to the community that whatever the requirements were in the Brown Act were considered to be a floor. That is sort of the minimum that the state has said a board like ours must perform. And our objective was to actually go beyond that and to not treat those as a ceiling. We're in the process here of basically rolling back a number of those innovations and eliminating that message and that promise that we made to our community. Now, I understand that three of you didn't make those promises and don't have a lot of that history. But I can tell you that this is something that really made our community unhappy. And with respect to the length of the board meetings, folks, this is what we signed up for. This is a local community agency. The owners of this agency, the people, the community have a right and an expectation that these meetings will take however long they take in order to get the work of the public done. And even if that means that sometimes the meetings go a little bit longer, 10 o'clock, what have you, that is what we all signed up for. And some arbitrary notion that meetings can be no longer than X, Y or Z sort of runs a foul of that notion of what it takes to hear everybody, particularly on contentious issues. This isn't a concern for the issues that everybody can agree on. This is a concern for the issues where there is in fact a wide variety of opinions. As we saw, for example, at a previous board meeting discussing a potential consolidation between the Scotts Valley Water District and the San Lorenzo Valley Water District, there will be other such topics that are considered contentious as we move forward. And the notion that we are in the process of rolling back to basically Brown Act minimum levels and again, considering those kinds of things as ceiling is a warrant to me. I will oppose them. I may be the only one that opposes them, but I consider the promises that I made to the community in 2018 around this sort of thing to be very sacred because this is where the rubber meets the road on local governance. And, you know, having that time clock there when someone has something to say, it just sends the wrong message in my opinion to the community that we're just looking to see how fast it is we can cut you off. You know, most people, like 99.99% of the people that we hear from don't take that long, but what it does do is it basically gives them the freedom to think about what they're trying to communicate to us rather than worrying about the clock. I really urge folks to reconsider on this and a number of other things and not move forward with some of these recommended changes. In addition, there are some changes that have been recommended that in my opinion, go to potentially attempting to restrict the degrees of freedom that a board member may take in his or her execution of their duties and responsibilities. This is fundamentally wrong. Our responsibilities to the community transcend that. And from my perspective, anything that tries to limit those degrees of freedom on activities that are perfectly legal is in fact the wrong thing for the board to be attempting to do. And I would certainly hope that that is something that the board does not try to do in its attempt to try to micromanage certain aspects of board behavior. I think everybody can agree that we want a board atmosphere that is welcoming to our community, that is friendly, that addresses topics that hears all sides of a particular question and does so in a courteous and respectful fashion within the bounds that we're all human and sometimes we're gonna make mistakes and forgiveness and grace should be always a part of that as well, not only within us, but with our community. And beyond that, I think we talked about at one point in time the golden rule, right? Effectively that's what we're talking about. It's as simple as that. And anything beyond that is really not appropriate for the board to be taking on and trying to impose certain things on other board members that are simply trying to stop legal activities. So I also hope that the board reconsider on those as well. Finally, again, this is a board policy manual. This is not a staff manual. And our responsibility as a board in terms of organizing how we're going to operate is between us and in this case, our district council who's helping us draft it, make sure that we stay legal and cover those bases. And from that point of view, we are working with the general council on this particular thing. I know that was long. Thank you all for listening patiently. And I certainly look forward to seeing what those edits are and having that break. Thank you, Director Bultz. I guess I understand why you made some of those changes because there were certainly tumultuous meetings. But I think since 2018, the first two years when you were at your term and I watched many of those meetings, I think the meetings have been pretty amiable and there's been controversial things, but we've managed them certainly. Since I've come on the board, I don't think we've had situations where people were overly shut down. We listened to everybody in the audience at the last meeting that had something to say and there were a lot of them and we still finished the meeting just a few minutes after nine o'clock. So I think that it's perfectly possible to listen to everybody and to also be efficient. I think there are also, for example, if somebody were standing up and talking and not repeating themselves, I would let them go on past three minutes. And I think most chairs would. So that's, I think, just kind of normal practice of most. For example, if you go to Santa Cruz County and wanna speak to them, you get three minutes and virtually all other agencies have three minutes. I also think that the idea that meetings can just go on and on is really not fair to our staff, many of whom that start six in the morning. It's hard on all of us. I think I start to get a little loopy after about 9.30. I'm not thinking as well. And so I think it's tough on the people in the board. But the main reason I object to it is I think that if you have really long meetings, it cuts down on the participation of younger people who have families, who have jobs, they have other things that they have to do in the evenings. And I'm retired more or less and I can spend the time. But I think that what we wanna do to increase the participation is to make the expectation that the meetings won't be too long and that people can expect that we'll get through it and it will be done efficiently. I think I agree that we should go ahead with these changes. But I do think, Director Fultz, that it'll be easier when we actually get the wording to discuss some of them. Sometimes the yes versus no binary was a little bit awkward on mine. I had some, well, I sort of agree with this, but under only certain circumstances. So I'm hoping that when we get the red line back, we can go to some of these ones that you're concerned about and we can discuss them in greater detail. So with that, we can go out to the public, if any members of the public would like to speak. Let's hear from Joni. Thank you, Chair Mayhood. I really appreciate that Bob cares about community input and wants to make people feel welcome to speak and participate. But I absolutely would be in favor of the three-minute limit because any other agency I've gone to speak at, whether it's school board, library board, Santa Cruz City Council, you know, county supervisors, they all have that three-minute rule. And I think people who come to speak can prepare themselves to be efficient and meet that time limit. And sometimes I start to run over and I get cut off and I never feel offended by it. I just kind of wrap it up and end. So, and I 100% agree with what Chair Mayhood just said about the shorter meetings being better for the public. I think that a quick and efficient meeting is gonna encourage more people to dial in and participate and pay attention. And also, if you limit people to their three minutes, more people can fit in. So you're actually hearing more voices. So that's all I had to say on that. Thank you. Thank you, Joni. Rick Moran, did you wanna speak? Rick Moran, we can't hear you. Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Okay, thank you. Sorry for that. I'd like to speak about the ethics and conduct portion of the Board Policy Manual. In 2018, the grand jury recommended that the Board take part in training to deal with contentious issues. This last July, the Board had a seven-hour training by Amy Hoseworth of MRG Consultants. The Board paid almost $10,000. We also had a one-on-one meeting with her, all the Board members individually. I took part in that training. Here are a few takeaways from that training. Our Board Policy Manual has many references to rules of decorum, orderly discussion, and to discourage personal attacks. These are all well-meaning objectives, but unless they are actively practiced and encouraged by the Board, unless they are actively practiced and encouraged, problems involving these contentious issues will persist. To be proactive, the Board should make good governance an agenda item, at least annually, to review what the Board is doing well and what it needs to do better. This will help prove that good governance has a high priority for Board business. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Jim Mosher. Can you hear me? Yes, we can, Jim. I just want to agree with what Joni Martin said. I find the long meetings to be really wearing in order to be participating as a public member. And this meeting is an example. We're already at 8.11, and I had a couple items I was hoping to listen in on later. It gets really hard on the public. To have these meetings go late. And sometimes it feels like the reason why they're going so late is because, not because the public speaking too much, but because some of the Board members seem to be repeating themselves. And so I commend the effort to get the meeting shorter. And I think the FEMA limit is a good way to start to give people the expectation that they need to get their point across in three minutes. Most of us can do that. And I appreciate that the chair can give exceptions when it's warranted. But I think the expectation should be for the public that the Board meeting, that your effort is to make it efficient and that this is in the public interest. And so, anyway, I would commend the efforts of the Board to do that. Thank you. Elaine Fresco. Hi, yes. I just want to say there have been meetings that I have gone to where I wanted to participate, but the item that was discussed was at the end of the meeting and I just ended up leaving. So I get up early in the morning and I really would appreciate. I want to give everyone a chance to speak, but not encourage them to go on and on. Thanks. We have any other comments from members of the public? Okay. If not, we can, Gina, do you need any additional guidance? Or actually- Well, what I gather from the discussion is that I'm to make the changes that are set for, in the memo, plus 22 and 23 and bring the red line back for further Board discussion and hopefully approval. So I will take that as my direction unless there's some modifications that you would like to make, Chair Mayho. There's none that I would like to make, but it looks like Director Fultz would like to, has a stand up. Yes, just to respond to a few of the points that were made after my discussion. I'm involved quite a bit with private sector boards and we do run them very efficiently. However, our public sector system of government is not set up to be quote unquote efficient, particularly at a governance level. And to try to run it as such on all items, particularly the ones that are more contentious is in my mind, complete the service to our community and is a philosophical thing that I'm sure we will be discussing in the future many, many times with respect to exceptions. So exceptions have been done in the past. What happens though is in the past, the exceptions were basically, shall we say, favoritism. And I'm not saying Gail that you're going to do that, but unfortunately when you have exceptions, that's what happens or at least people perceive that that's what happens. So if you're going to make it three minutes, it's a hard three minutes. There can be no exceptions to that unless you're going to get everybody an exception. And the point of having either no limit or a longer limit was so that you didn't have to do that. And just because every agency has three minutes, you know, most of my career has spent doing things and working in industries where we didn't do what everybody else did because that's called innovation. And I believe that even a board like this can actually do innovation. We did it pretty well for a couple of years. I'm sorry to see that we won't be doing that any longer. Director Henry? Well, I have a little disagreement here with Director Fultz. There were times in 2019 and even though we had a five minute limit, I would say, please finish your thought. And I would say that to anybody who had like one more sentence to go, there was no favoritism at all. But I fully believe that three minutes is enough and that the board president can say, if somebody's like in mid sentence, please finish your thought. It won't take 20 seconds probably. And if people see that as favoritism to me, that's kind of their issue. Because I used to go out into the, when we had in-person meetings, I would go out amongst the public and shake their hands. And there was one guy, I never wanted to shake hands with me because he didn't like me until he finally gave in. So I mean, I believe since 2019, since Steve Swan, Bob Fultz and I were elected, the tenor of the district board meetings has changed and has been more inclusive and friendly and not beating up on the public. I would just like to, are you finished, Director Henry or am I interrupting? Yeah, I'm done. Sorry, I got to take my arm down. It's all right. I just want to follow up a little bit on what Lois said and responding to Bob. And I, many of your arguments are hypotheticals and they're about things that might happen. And I guess I would, we can always make those sort of theoretical arguments. And if you think there are cases where I've shown favoritism or I've cut off public or other things inappropriately, then let's talk about that. But let's not talk about hypotheticals or make sort of implications about what people might do in the future. And I guess I agree with Lois that I think since you and Steve Swan and Lois were elected, the tenor has changed and we should adjust what we do to that. So that's all I have to say about that. Any from Director Tu or Smalley? Is there a comment? Hi. Director Smalley go first. He's next in alphabetical order. Okay. Okay. I appreciate the fact that the public is willing to stay on this meeting now for almost two hours and listen to this discussion on board policy and to give us their input into it. I concur with their comments. That's it. Thank you. Director Tu. I was also gonna concur with the public's comments and just mention as someone who has children who you can hear in the background that if the meetings go too late, I don't get to put her to bed. Like this is not, I mean, and I recognize that I'm a board member, but I've left board meetings. I used to be a public member that would come to board meetings, but I would leave to go take care of my children. And I feel like having the meetings go too late is not an obligation. I feel like it's respectful of the public's time. And yes, we should get the things done that need to be done, but I also feel like we should do them more efficiently. Thank you. So we've covered two of the three items. So there's one more where if any director would like to see additional changes, these could be noted now and we could discuss them. And so is there any other additions that people would like to make? I'll start with you, Director Smalley. One minor clarification. There's two different points in the board policy where it indicates who is taking minutes for the committee meetings. I know this is minor. It's something that I should have caught before and didn't after discussing with staff earlier today, keeping it so that board chairs are responsible is what I realized the document should be saying, not the reverse. The committee chair is responsible. You said board chair. The committee chair. I'm sorry, the committee chair. Yes. Right, rather than the district secretary. Yeah. Director too. Did you have anything you wanted to add? Yeah, so on that same topic, I had designated that no one particular person should be designated, but just that it's done because there may be instances where I don't know if we wanna adhere to one particular person, but where somebody could be more capable of doing that. So if the committee chair is for some reason unable to do that, then I'm just trying to keep an open mind with it and... I think perhaps the way we can handle that is by saying that the committee chair is responsible. It's responsible. In other words, they're the ones that handle them into Holly and if it would be more efficient when you're running a meeting to have somebody else take the notes, I could imagine that might be better, but you're responsible for making sure they're accurate and handing them on to Holly. Would that be acceptable? That makes sense, yeah. Or that they're just make sure that it's done, that the committee chair should make sure it's done, but not necessarily be the one to actually do it. Okay. Right, right. Something to that effect. Director Faulce, did you have anything you wanted to add? Well, I've already told the things that I don't wanna change. So I guess we're not gonna add anything. Director Henry? I believe that the chair of committees could say, yes, the minutes are correct, but to be chair of a committee, keep track of who's talking, who's there for the public and try to do minutes. I don't know. Maybe I just, I've never been a secretary. So that would be like impossible for me. Well, that's why we said you'd be responsible, but you could... I'd be responsible, but not to actually do the writing. Okay. All right. So I think we went around with everybody if they had any additions. I don't have any at this point. Okay. We have another shot at this when the red line comes around and... Yes. Okay. Okay. So I think we can go on to the next agenda item, which is the budget process for fiscal years 2021 and 2023. Yes. And the finance manager will present this item to the board. Hello, everyone. The CTV people can pull up the budget presentation, please. Perfect. We are going to be going over kind of the overall budget process that the district does. It's going to be kind of high level. Some of it will be best practices. Some will be where we are currently. So it's kind of just meant to bring everyone kind of into what the budget process is. Next slide. As you notice, we're talking about fiscal year 2021 to 2023. So we are looking to attempt a biennial budget this year. It's something the district has been talking about for a couple years now. We do have board support, or at least I've heard that some of the board has been asking for this as well. Some of the advantages of a biennial budget is you can reduce the total amount of time you spend every year. A lot more goes into year one, but it does tend to free up year two. It also encourages the district to think strategically over multiple years instead of just budgeting for a single year at a time. And now is the time. A lot of agencies do choose to do odd years to keep the biennial budget process outside of when a lot of places have elections, which are typically even years. Some of the disadvantages, like I said, is it does take a little bit more effort, especially in year one, like what we're attempting the first time. It's gonna be a heavy lift of updating the template, getting staff and the board and the public all kind of on the same page. And then you do have the risk of some districts do spend too much time on budget amendments, the mid period reviews, which kind of kind of eliminates some of the savings that you have otherwise. But if done properly, I think it really can help streamline the process. Next slide. So this is kind of high level fiduciary responsibilities and kind of how it goes from the broader picture down to the more narrow. So you kind of start with your strategic plan, which is gonna help guide into your five year plan for capital and financial. And then that can help lead into your budget, your biennial budget process. And then essentially you're continuing to monitor and review and kind of trace back. You're able to see what were the original goals and objectives, were you able to accomplish them? And it kind of just keeps everything kind of flowing. Next slide. High level of the budget process, we start with the budget formulation. That's gonna be a lot more of the internal aspect of it. You go into the budget review, that's kind of where we start to share a little bit more with the board and the community, how things are rolling up. What are some of the things that we've been tasked with incorporating in this year's budget? Then you have the execution, you implement it, you monitor and review the results, and then you continue to have budget oversight. So that's where we have our monthly financial report, quarterly that season to year end. And ultimately it does also lead into the audit process. Next slide. So here kind of goes over the budget process phase because we kind of talked about some of these a little bit already. This just kind of helps identify the areas that are a little bit more of the internal versus the more collaborative everyone's getting pulled into the process. So right now we're obviously in the beginning phases, January, February is the timeframe that internally staff is starting to plan, coordinate, goals are getting set. And then from there we are collecting the information, we're rolling it up into the budget package. And then that's when we're able to start presenting it to the board and the public. Next slide. So there's four main budget methods, incremental. So that's where you'll take something like healthcare projections. You know what you're currently running at. You don't quite know what the health benefits are gonna be for the upcoming year. So a lot of times you take some sort of percentage-based assumption to apply that to the budget. Some of them will have a zero-based budget where you're going building from the bottoms up. Departments like environmental will a lot of times have specific projects or different years like the urban water management plan to where you're able to kind of set your contract professional services at zero and just build it up because you know what the different things are gonna be for each of those upcoming years. Activity-based could be a top-down approach where management can use past experiences and current goals. And then less or common one is gonna be the value proposition. You know, why is it being included in the budget? Does it create value? Does the value outweigh the cost? So you'll see a value proposition more in public entities than you will necessarily in private entities that have more of a for-profit basis. There's times that there may be something we wanna do that benefits our overall community but it is going to incur a cost to the district. Next slide. We do use all of them. Most common is gonna be the incremental and zero-based and then it kind of goes down to the lesser use is gonna be your activity-based and value proposition. We kind of went over some of these but you know, activity-based one examples are gonna be things like the power shut-off events. You know, we knew that this started happening. That's something that we wanna specifically budget for. We're gonna have ongoing expenses incurred from the CZU fires. You know, that's another good example to where we know our utility costs are gonna be increasing because we're pumping from our wells more. Next slide. So this is kind of looking at what are, you know, what are we missing and where do we wanna be? So we do still have the strategic plan in Limbo. It's obviously important to say, you know, it's kind of a guiding document of the district. It sets, you know, some of the goals and objectives. The board has established goals and objectives for the district manager for this upcoming year that should be published soon. So that's kind of gonna be a good spot for us to take some of those goals and objectives and get direction for how we can incorporate that into our budget. Similarly, a capital asset management plan. Capital assets and infrastructure is one of the largest expenditures of the district. And so having kind of that long-term forward thinking plan is gonna integrate and allow you to do a lot more of your long-term financial planning. And that ultimately makes the budget process a lot easier when you have kind of a clear path of where you're going. Where do we wanna be? Like we said, all of these different things are kind of going to eventually build up to the smooth-running product that we're looking for. The strategic plan, it'll tie into the five-year capital and financial plan, leads into the more specific goals and objectives of the upcoming year, which helps guide the budget process. We're taking that next step is, we're leading into this biannual budget process. And then eventually, I would suggest that we do go for the GFOA Award for Distinguished Budgeting. We are currently being awarded that for our CAFR, for our annual financial reports. And so I think it kind of helps show the progress and the recognition from an outside agency for something like that. Next slide. Some of the fundamentals that we've been discussing internally for the fiscal year 21 to 23 budget, as far as operating revenue goes, we're proposing roughly 2% consumption reductions from average each year. We are a district that constantly has customers trying to conserve water as much as possible. And so we kind of forecast that that could be something that is able to continue based off of what we've kind of been running at is more around the 660, 670, 675. So we're proposing budgeting at 665,000 units of water for the first upcoming fiscal year, and then about 650,000 for the next expenses. Headcount, we're gonna be getting, staff is gonna be getting direction from the district manager shortly on that. There may be some changes coming down the line now that the goals and objectives, this is all kind of put together before any of that has kind of been made public. So I think some of these will get a little bit more formulated with the district manager's current goals and objectives, but we're not projecting currently any major changes to expenditures, some of the activity-based things that we know that we're gonna be budgeting for, like I said, it's gonna be the PG&E power shutoffs and the increased easy you, and then continue to present some unfunded employee benefit liability reduction planning. As far as capital goes, a lot of that is kind of laid out for us right now. We did have the 14 and a half million COP that had some major pipeline projects that are upcoming. Additionally, the season use fire has generated a lot more projects in the upcoming years as well. And then there's gonna be the ongoing CIP needs that are regular occurring things and any deferred maintenance projects that we can escalate. One of the ones that we're working on, there's tank maintenance for tanks, paintings and coatings and this year's budget and that is projected to be continuing on in future year budgets as well. Next slide, unfunded liability. So this is kind of lays out some of the district's pension liabilities and OPEB, which stands for other post-employment benefit liabilities. And so these are the big numbers that all agencies kind of had to roll onto their books that's putting kind of that future cost on your, showing it on your liabilities currently. So the district's last audit had the pension liability sitting at 4.2 and the OPEB at about $2 million. For the OPEB a while ago, the district did set up a trust fund, which is where you're able to set money aside and earn a little bit more interest revenue on that, but it does have to go towards paying off the OPEB liability. There are similar trust funds that the district could establish for the pension liability. We have utilized the fresh start to amortize our long-term liabilities over a shorter period of time to save the district significant interest. And then the district can also always do paydowns on some of these types of things for the pension liability. And so I really wanna make sure that we're still having these discussions in the upcoming budget, especially if we are going down the fire, surcharge recovery to replenish some of the reserve funds. It may mean that we have some funds that we are able to use as strategically as possible to take advantage of mitigating the pension liability with CalPERS where we have 7% interest that we pay on it or investing it in some of these other areas that we can hopefully earn some more interest. And then we have the deferred maintenance. The full scope of that still to be determined. I do believe that the master plan is gonna be coming in April, but in general we chip away at this kind of as we go. Next slide. So here's just kind of a high level proposed budget timeline. I did red line out the 318 Board of Directors, the timing of the budget and finance committee meeting the day before the board meetings. We want to allow time to have the budget and finance committee get the input to be able to then present in the board meeting and having it be the day after wouldn't really work. But in general, February, March, a lot of this is the internal planning phase. As we roll up the different pieces, we do like to allow people to take bites of it in smaller bites of it versus getting one big massive budget document. So as we complete key sections like the operating revenue and operating expenses, we will continue to roll those out to the board and the public. And then similarly, the capital as the capital projects is another big piece of it all. But in general, we strive to kind of have at least more of a final draft version in May. The board could potentially adopt as early as May. So it then at least opens up June for us to be able to wrap up kind of the budget process. But that's just kind of a high level view. We're not necessarily looking for specific action, but if there's any areas or concerns that board members have, we'd love to hear it. Okay, let's start with Mark Smalley. Yes, Stephanie, you mentioned the strategic plan and the five-year capital master plan. And I don't know that this question is to you or to Rick, what's the status on the strategic plan or the current one? You, let me unmute here. We hope to have the draft strategic plan out second meeting in March and into April. And once the water master plan is completed, then we'll work from that to develop the capital improvement master plan. And the water master plan I do believe, and James can correct me, is should be to the board April of this year. And Stephanie, the way I'm understanding the process is you're using this strategic plan as the basis to begin this planning effort. But we don't have one yet. Is that, so I'm struggling with- So that's where it's kind of going, Yeah, it's going the perfect world. You kind of have all of these things aligned. That doesn't happen all the time. And so that's where we do have the goals and objectives that the board's given the district manager. So that's gonna be a good starting point for getting us into this. It sounds like we should have a strategic plan here shortly in enough time to be able to possibly tie some of the budget back into that. But yeah, I mean, in a perfect world, you have a couple of these key different things already in place that you're very easily able to tie back to. And that's kind of, when we get into the GFOA and what they look for, that's kind of some of the staples that they have is what is your strategic plan? How is your budget tying into it? How are you proactively planning the roadmap for your success? So I mean, that's kind of the path that we're getting to here soon, hopefully. And we'll use the goals and objectives to back into the strategic plan. It should mirror definitely for the first year and then go into the second year and hopefully strategic plan and budget will be completed roughly around the same time. So we should be getting back on track very shortly. Okay, okay, no further questions. Okay, Director Faltz. Yeah, thanks for the presentation. Stephanie, it's familiar. I think I've seen it before, but it's always good to remind ourselves of what those steps are. I think with respect to moving to a multi-year budget, this is a good first step. We're dealing with capital assets that have lives of decades. And we really need to be thinking beyond even a year or two with respect to money and how that money is both raised and spent. So I think this is a great way to get us onto that path of thinking more strategically about what's happening with our system. And out of that, I'm hopeful that this year we will also be able to make some progress towards quantification of our capital obligations. And these are a variety of categories that I at some point would definitely like to have a conversation about. And that's all the places where our margin dollars, that is the money after we pay our operating expenses, where that money goes. And there's a variety of areas where that can go. And understanding what the obligations are in each one of those areas is very, very important. For example, last year, even though I kind of had a notion that our tank maintenance was in what I would call an extreme critical state, it wasn't until James put together that report that showed we were about $10 million in the whole that really drove home just how much of a red zone we are in with respect to tank maintenance. And that's something, of course, that builds up over time. Same thing with certain unfunded liabilities where officially we're at 4.2% on pension, but that's assuming a return on investment that I think is completely unrealistic given the history of the fund. And if you take that number down to something more realistic, the pension obligation goes up substantially, somewhere in the order of 30 to 50% over what it is on the official number. And so I think as part of this process, we need to also be bracketing these capital obligations in a way that makes it clear to our community what that true financial position is of the district with respect to the money that needs to be spent. We've made some attempts to do that over the last couple of years, and I think you've made some progress in those areas particularly with maintenance, but, sorry. But there's many, many other categories that we really need to quantify what our obligations are rather than approaching a piecemeal on a year to year, even a buy, even a two year basis, doesn't really work. So I'm hopeful we'll be able to do that. And I'm certainly ready and willing to have that conversation at some point here very soon to be able to at least agree on what some of those categories may be and to start putting in place estimates for what those numbers are, which I believe we have the information, we can do that pretty quickly. Thanks. Do you wanna respond, Stephanie, or? I think some of that's gonna expand past just this actual fiscal budget process. I mean, some of those are bigger projects kind of outside of the scope, but definitely certain aspects of that are going to be incorporated into the budget. Director Henry. Thank you, Stephanie. I've seen your presentation before and I'm glad to see more of a two year, multi-year budget. I go along with that and thank you for all you do. I really don't have any complaints or I could pat you on the shoulder and say, hey, good job, okay? Director too, I think I skipped over you inadvertently. Yeah, you did. I thought maybe you were being creative with the order. I don't know. All in with it. So I was gonna ask a similar question to what Mark did about the capital master plan and the strategic plan and if they're gonna be done in time, which you would answer that. And if we could go ahead with the budget, I'm assuming we would just go ahead with the budget anyway, even if we didn't finish. And then I also liked the biennial budget format. So that was good. I noticed the 2% reduction. Where did you get that number? Did I miss that somewhere in the original? It's just, yeah, it's just kind of similar to what was done in kind of the rate studies in the past for conservation purposes. It's typically been a 2% is what you hope for. I mean, it's kind of that double-edged sort. It's less revenue, but I mean, we do have a very conservative public. Okay, so that's good to know. I just, I wasn't sure if it was something you knew that was gonna happen or that you were hoping for or that you expect. And then have we accounted for the reduction? And then I know this is a sad subject, but the reduction in the number of homes in our district due to the fires? We will factor some of that stuff in. It is a nominal amount for our agencies. There is roughly 120 homes of which some of them have already gone ahead and reestablished connection. And so we'll kind of have a staggered, but it should be less than $100,000 change in the budget. Okay, thank you for clarifying that. And, you know, cause some, we don't know when some of those will be back online, right? That's all I had for my questions. Thank you. Now let's go out to the public and see if there's any comments or questions. If you do, go ahead and hit the raise your hand button. I don't see any questions from the public. So we'll come back. And if there's any more comments from the board, Director Fultz? No comments. Director Henry? No comment. Okay, Director Smalley? No comments. All right, Antina. No, thank you. All right, good. Let's move on to the next item, which is the district manager contract review. Yes, and district council will present this item to the board. Thank you, Chair Mayhood, district manager Rogers. What you have in front of you for item 11C is a proposed contract addendum that the district manager has indicated he would be willing to enter into to extend his existing contract by three years. And extend a little bit the meet and confer period at the end of the contract, which is the time where the district manager is supposed to let the board know or meet with the board to discuss a possible transition at the end of the three year term. So I went ahead and prepared the proposed agreement, which the board could approve by the motion set forth in the board packet or alternatively, the board could approve the agreement in specific changes or appoint a negotiator to negotiate with the district manager prior to finalizing an agreement. Okay, let's start with director too. I have no comment. Okay, director Fultz. Yes, so I really appreciate the extension of the time at the end of the contract. While I certainly hope that Rick may consider doing yet another one, I know that there is a time where perhaps he might want to spend more time doing other things. And having a longer period of time to look for the next person, it would be really, really appreciated. I would also have one other request. And again, hopefully this does not come to pass, but Rick, if you decide to leave before the end of the term, if you could make sure you have an interim replacement at least on a part-time basis, that would be good too. But please don't do that because we really do want you to work through the fire recovery and getting this next set of capital projects into the ground. Thanks much. Dr. Henry? Yes, in 2000, sorry, I still have the frog. 2019, I had like three different long-standing members of Santa Cruz County, not just SLV area, say to me, virtually the same thing. Rick Rogers is the right man in the right place at the right time. Now, if I believed in prophecies, those people had it right on the ball because he has been the right man in the right place at the right time. And I hope that the right time will hardly go along with this. And I would like to make a motion to approve the proposed addendum to the employee agreement with the district manager. Doesn't mean people still can't talk, but I'd like to make that motion. Director Henry, we still haven't heard from Director Smalley. I know that, I know that. Well, I'd like to hear from him first before we make a motion. Just we sort of agree that we'll have a full round from everybody. In order though, I mean, she can make the motion anytime she wants, can she not? All right, sure. I guess technically she can. So is there a second? Second. Holly? We still need to hear from Director Smalley, yes. You don't have to vote. But we don't have to vote. And also the public, correct? On the public, yes. That's correct. Are there any members of the public that would like to comment on this? Point of order. I think Mark, Mark still hasn't talked. It's getting late, y'all. Yes, yes, yes it is. I will try to shorten it. I concur with extending this contract to Rick. No further comments. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any members of the public that would like to comment on this? Seeing none. We have a motion on the table and a second. So would you like to call a vote, Holly? Why don't I just do a voice vote on this? Is that okay? Just all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. There we go. Motion passes. Okay. Now we go on to the next item, the grand jury response. Yes, and once again, district council will present this item on the grand jury response. Okay, thank you. And I'll try to keep this brief. I know it's getting late. I don't know that many of the folks on this call need the history, but just in a nutshell, the district did go through a grand jury process in 2017-2018. It resulted in a report that was published by the grand jury in the summer of 2018. The district submitted the required response to the report that summer. About a year later in 2019, the district got a follow-up correspondence from the grand jury asking about the status of implementation. At that time, we did something similar to what we're doing here, which is we prepared a draft response, brought it to a public meeting for comment and then submitted it to the grand jury. So what you have here in front of you is a draft response with some fairly short written responses and then the intention would be to attach to it as enclosure A, the meeting minutes and agendas that reflect trainings and when they occurred and the contents of the trainings and the LADOC annual report and so forth, the actual materials that show what was done to implement the grand jury's recommendations. Is that all? That's all, thank you. Okay, so let's hear from Director Fultz first. Okay, Gina, I don't know. Had you seen a letter that Deb Lohan had put together? Was sent to us by email here today or yesterday, I believe. Yes, I've seen it. Yeah, I think there are some things in there that may refine our response. I mean, in particular, I know, and part of this of course is due to the virus and the fire and all that, but we've really only produced one annual report and I think we need to put in here a statement about, excuse me, the fact that it is our intention to continue with the ongoing annual report even though we are somewhat behind here now. We don't have one, for example, for 2020. So I don't know if that's clear enough and I don't know if we're addressing some of the concerns that Deb who was very, very involved in the entire process has about this entire process and the recommendations. So I wanted to hear from you if you think that that's a fair comment or do you think Deb is not accurate in what she's saying? I didn't really review that letter for accuracy. I was hoping that we get some direction from the board as to whether more detail is needed in the response. If that's the case, if the desire is to make this more detailed with some of the input that was provided, in that case, I'd probably need to reach out to the grand jury for an extension so that we could make revisions and bring it back to another board meeting assuming they grant the extension. I personally, I would like to see us do that or at least have a conversation about it. Like I said, Deb was very, very involved in it and I think there might be comments from other LADOC members that might either factor in this. I don't know if we'd reached out to any of those either but this seems to perhaps not be quite, not quite the complete picture of what we're trying to do. And we do wanna communicate to them in my opinion that we take this grand jury process very, very seriously with respect to these recommendations. Director Henry? Hey, all right. I don't think anybody's more, has been more involved in this than I have. Also, I have been, I'm the liaison right now and I have been talking to the chair, the person who's currently the chair of the LADOC committee but for one thing, to my reckoning, we are not late for 2020. The 2019 annual report, which was actually for 2016, 17 and 18 and 19, it started June 1st, 2016, ending June 30th, 2019 and on in January of 2020, they had a meeting and they approved the first annual report that were for those years. Okay, so if, and we're on it like a fiscal year here. So, and the timing of the merger and everything kind of just fell in with that. So, if I can make my brain work here, to me, we, that they actually have until June 30th of 2021 to do the annual report that ended in January, in June 2020 and all those reports, all the information that we have here and all the information that we have here all the information they need isn't available right away the minute that the fiscal year is over. And because our fiscal year is July 1 through June 30th and it's just kind of the way that committee fell in. I mean, we merged with SLV June 1st, 2016 and due to some issues with the previous district manager and the previous board, there was no there, the information given to the LATA committee was incomprehensible and just not something that they could understand, but they did do three years and maybe Tony's gonna speak if she's still here tonight how she feels about that maybe it needs to that first annual report that we need to be saying that it was for all those years. But I do not believe we're late so far and I'm trying to work with that committee, get it going and sooner than later so we get before June 30th, we get another annual report out and that's what I'm trying to work with them. They want to do it. Unfortunately, there were some problems with everybody applying again to be on the LATA committee and so I'm hoping maybe by the first meeting in March that I might have some more information to give you. Director Smalley. Yes, Gina, you're asking a question if this report in the format that it's in is complete. No, I do not feel so. I think that you do need to go back to the county and ask for the extension to expand on this. Two points that, and after I reviewed Ms. Lowen's letter in particular, two points that I had called out, one is on recommendation one and from my read of it, we were supposed to have the annual report for the time period July 19 through June 30th, 2020 complete sometime in the past six months, but no later than by December. That's the way I'm reading the document and I don't see that yet. Likewise on response number two, I feel that the response we've made in there is inadequate and doesn't explain why the decision was made to discontinue that it's simply a one sentence response. Now, maybe the documents that you're recommending be included with this fully expands on that. But without having any of that backup, I don't agree that our response here is complete. So thank you. Did you want to respond to that, Gina? Not at this time. I think I'm just taking input. Okay. Director to. Gina, what is the deadline for this? Did I miss that somewhere in the paperwork? I think the grand jury's letter asks for it by February 25th. So you're correct. Yeah. Next week, right? Yes. Yes. We'll either have to submit this or get an extension before that date. Okay. Is there a way to revise the R one, which seems to be the contentious issue. To mention the extenuating circumstances around not getting this particular item out, including.  We had a lot of turnover. We had a pandemic. I mean, there's so many more to list, but you get the idea, right? So I don't know if there's a way to just. Get either get an extension or revise the R one. For that, just for that one item. I could. My preference would be to. Bring it back to the board for approval, unless the board prefers that I just. Write something consistent with the discussion. No. No. Okay. So that would. That was my hope that we would get this in on time, but it sounds like that's. Not something that. The other board members want. Okay. So my thought here is that basically. The board is directing staff. To request. An extension from the grand jury for the purpose of bringing a revised draft. To the board. For further consideration at a subsequent board meeting. And that would be the recommendation. Unless there is. We have a member of the public wishing to speak. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Tony Norton. Can we have Tony Norton unmuted? Thank you. Okay. Thank you. You know, a little, we have to wait for a box to come up that says I'm mute. And it takes a while. So that's why people don't answer right away. Yes, I'm the chair. My name is Tony Norton and I'm the chair of the. Ladoc. And I've also, by the way, been a member since the inception of Ladoc. And. And I'd like to say that. As Lois said, we. With. Rick's predecessor. Rick's predecessor. We received no support whatsoever. We, and I hope I'm going to get a little bit more than three minutes. I'm sorry. I just want to explain that we had no finance information. We had no, we just, we just weren't, weren't even allowed to speak to the finance director. And so thank goodness. A new board came in. And then they made Rick Rogers the director and his staff assisted us. And so that is why the first report that was turned in. In January of 2020. Covered as Lois said from 2016 through 2019.  And then came COVID and the CZU fires. And most of us have been, you know, trying to keep our heads together during that time, but we are working with Lois and we are, we are coming together. We have someone new that I'm hoping you guys will be approved as a board member. We still won't have a full set of five, which we need. We'll have four, but that's plenty. And Ms. Lowen used to be on our, our committee, but she's, um, has left it. So, um, and she was a tremendous help that we will be working. And it's going to be much easier now. So I apologize. It's not the board's fault. It is, it is because of COVID and the fire that we were not able to meet this obligation, but we should be able to do it relatively quickly. And the second thing was there was mention of the training assessment district training that we, they had, um, asked SLV to deliver to us. It was really difficult to find anyone to do that training. And it was really difficult to find anyone to do that training. It wasn't available from the state, wasn't available from the county. And there had been an expert. He retired and he wouldn't come back out of retirement to deliver his training. And so, um, Rick did find a company that was willing to put together a training program. We were discussing that right when COVID hit. So, um, that was also put on hold. So I, I'm sure I'm thinking about that. The grand jury would definitely want to hear this kind, this information about why we haven't met these obligations. And then be happy to let us move forward. So thank you. That's what I wanted to say. Thank you. And even under three minutes. No, it was very helpful to have your, uh, clarifications of this and, and additions. So thank you for that, Tony. Um, okay. Uh, anybody else have further comment? I would just like to say, uh, to Tony and the board that we will be bringing the Ladoch, uh, committee members item back to the board again, the first meeting of, of March, uh, to get those folks hopefully seated and then, you know, get back up to speed with scheduling, uh, meetings and moving. Moving ahead. Oh, also, uh, didn't, uh, Mr. Rogers, didn't you say that there was an extra person that also applied and so there's potential to be five on the. On the letter. I'll refer to Holly. I do believe we have what three now or four. We have four individuals. Three of them were currently on the board. I mean, on the committee. And then we had an additional person that had tried to be on the board and realize that she was probably better suited for Ladoch. That is the fourth person. Okay. I thought maybe there was an additional person that had applied beyond the four. So. Thank you. I was being hopeful. I'm like excited to be our, our, our public want to participate. I think that's great. Any other comments. Other than the direction to, uh, take this back, uh, ask for an extension and then bring it back to the board. All right. Um, with that. Yeah. Actually, I did have my hand up. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Um, Excuse me. So in light of the fact that. The grand jury may receive, uh, input from, uh, a number of sources. I would encourage us to, um, cast the broad net and who we go back to for input onto this. Um, just to make sure we've covered all our bases and that we've thoroughly addressed the current situation. Thank you. Any other comments. Okay. The next item on the agenda is the, um, consent agenda. And are there, um, any requests from the board to pull anything from the consent agenda? Um, Excuse me. I have, I have some questions about items that are on the consent agenda. Does that require that we pull them? Yep. Yes. Um, Okay. Sorry. So, uh, I didn't 12. Okay. Um, yes. On the audit services. So 12 a, you would like. Uh, A question. Um, Well, just two questions. One is was, uh, the recommended company, Fedek and Brown, the low, um, bid. And. If not, uh, Who was and what was the reason for not selecting them? That's the finance manager chief comment on that. So the district received a total of five bids back. Um, The Dak and Brown was the second cheapest. They were for the full five years. Uh, 143,275 for what we would consider to be the, the district's regular audit, a single audit. Um, and Santa Margarita. Audit. Uh, harsh wall was the lowest. There's was a hundred and 33,596. So roughly. About $10,000 over the full. Um, Five year potential contract was the difference. Um, It wasn't purely based off of. Uh, the lowest cost. It was a ranking. It is for professional services. And we all went through and had a ranking sheet that. The members of the budget and finance committee used to help rank these. Um, I had Fedek and Brown as my number one. Uh, the Dolly as my number two and harsh wall is my number three. And my recollection is. I believe all the. The committee members had Fedek and Brown listed as their number one. As well. Um, Harsh wall, while they were the, the lowest bid. Um, They did not have any water district experience listed. Um, In their, in their proposal.  Push them. Down a little bit in, in people's overall ra