however it looks.  And like I said, I really don't know the answer and I appreciate everything I've heard today and what I've learned. And I'm glad that the discussion came up again about the Hill, but please remember, it's not just a community versus a profit center, it's pedestrian safety and someone who really wants to be able to safely enjoy this wonderful town we live in. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Anyone with us in council chambers wish to provide further testimony, sustained and hearing none. Do we have anyone else left online? How many? One. We'll take that person. Good afternoon and welcome to the council meeting. Hi, my name is Connell Wilson. I lived in Santa Cruz all my life. I lived downtown just by the clock tower for several years. And I remember when the Willow Tree on Squid Row was cut down, I know that that was certainly a sad event for a lot of the community. And from what I understand, this tree being cut down will again be another tragedy kind of for the community and a major loss in terms of our kind of culture and community up being definitely a forced area and a very nature loving community. I just wanted to take the opportunity to say that I remember growing up with that tree. I loved having it there as I had my youth in downtown Santa Cruz. And I hope that it's still there when I get a chance to move back. I'm actually calling in from Denver, Colorado right now. But this is such a part of the community. I've heard about it even being out of state now. And I hope that I'll have the opportunity to still see that tree when I come back to Santa Cruz to visit. Thank you for your time. Thank you. All testimony having ceased. The matter is back before the council. Are you trying to get my attention? You good? Okay, all right. All public testimony having ceased. The matter is back before the council. Recognize the council member for an action. Anybody offering a motion here? Mr. Newsom is recognized. Thank you, Mayor Keely. I'll make a motion to approve the staff recommendation to deny the appeal and uphold the Parks and Recreation Commission's approval of tree removal permit. PR 23-0089. But I do wanna also with the added direction that's presented here on the screen. One. I'm sorry, I'm through y'all. I've reformatted it to be consistent with our motion language. Okay. The first part is the staff recommendation and then two and three are your ads. Okay. So with the added direction or I'd like to place the added direction in addition to planning of three required mitigation trees, direct staff to plan an additional six trees in the city by the end of 2024 and if necessary, make the budget adjustments to do so. And the appellant may work with the Parks and Recreation Director and Urban Forester to help choose the six additional mitigation trees and to direct staff to bring forward a budget item providing an additional full-time assistant Urban Forester in the Parks and Recreation Department during fiscal year 2025 budget hearings for a council consideration. There is a motion. Is there a second? Second by the Vice Mayor. Under discussion, Mr. Newsom, please open on your motion. Thank you, Mayor Keely. I first wanna appreciate the appellants and their concerns for this beautiful majestic redwood tree and I wanna thank them for all of the work that they've done on this appeal and for bringing an attention to this tree. This is not a decision I'd like to make or particularly enjoy. However, we now have several reports that show that the tree is having an adverse effect on the building, three arborist reports, two reports by structural engineer, report by a plumber and one of the structural engineering reports that was provided by the appellant shows that it is having some effect on the building. So I do support the staff recommendation. I do though think that the mitigation requirements for removal of this beautiful tree should be increased substantially or at least by threefold. And I want to invite the appellants to have a say in the trees that will replace these trees in our community and for our Parks and Recreation Department to work with them on this matter. And I also want to point out that the city has started working on a goal of planting 3,000 new trees by 2030 through our Street Tree Master Plan and through our Climate Action 2030 plan. Yet there's only one urban forester in the Parks and Recreation Department to try to oversee this monumental task. So I think we should explore adding an additional full-time urban forester to our Urban Forest Department during the fiscal year 2025 budget talks. And I will be advocating to accept this budget item at this talk as well. For the debate or discussion, Madam Vice Mayor. Thank you. I appreciate these, this additional language that you brought forward before us today. And I will be supporting this motion. This isn't a decision that any of us I think take lightly. And I think last time we were really persuaded by the testimony of the public, but when taking the time to understand the direction before us to consider within our ordinance the expert testimony, it's clear to me that the tree needs to be removed at this point in time. And it's unfortunate. It is a beautiful tree, but given the evidence presented before us, this is what I feel like we need to do. For the debate or discussion, Ms. Brown. Are you? Ms. Brown. Okay, thank you. I have a couple of comments I wanna make here. I'm not gonna support the motion. I appreciate the spirit in which it was brought forward. And I do think that are very excellent knowledgeable urban forester could use some help. So I'm not opposed to that and we'll look forward to considering that in the budget time. And I'm not making this decision lightly and it's not out of any questioning of your expertise. I understand the confines in which the decision is being made. I don't think we need to contain ourselves as a counsel to those confines. I don't believe there is substantial evidence to make the findings today. We have conflicting expert reports made more challenging by the lack of access to the site. I'm disappointed the property owner would not allow access, particularly now that I understand that one of the partners has a very high profile and very public commitment to urban trees. That's disappointing. The best practice of that phase three inspection would, I believe, given us some additional information that could be useful to us in making this decision and in acknowledging that the mitigations offered are indeed reasonable. I don't believe that mitigation measures were considered at all really by the city. I'm disappointed the city seemed to have spent more time working to affirm the justification for cutting this tree than looking at the space and the circumstances more holistically that location and what the dynamics there that go beyond the tree and property rights. And I don't believe that those alternative approaches were seriously considered. To deny this appeal is doing the expedient thing and we don't have to do that. The heritage tree ordinance does not require us to do that. That is a choice that we can make and I'm not willing to vote to do the expedient thing because it's gonna be cheaper and in the distribution of risk it's gonna help the city. I believe there are other reasons to be concerned about this and I don't believe we have the information that we could have had we been more committed to doing so and what I had hoped that my original motion would that I made back in October would elicit. It didn't but here we are. I just want to say really quickly I would challenge any of you to find building that was built around this time or earlier that doesn't have some cracks in the foundation and certainly the facade of the foundation. This is not a situation where there is great risk aside from consideration of legal risk. That's what's happening here. So the mayor mentioned on an earlier agenda item and I just have been thinking about this. What is it like to when we're making these decisions play checkers or chess? This is a checkers move. It's an expedient move. I can't support it. I wish we had a little bit more will to consider how to move forward in a way that I think we could find with these property owners. Oh, I'll be voting no. Council Member Brenner. Thank you, Mayor. I had a quick question regarding the motion and that was on the additional direction for full-time arborists and I'm wondering if anybody at Parks and Rec can just briefly speak to that. Is that something that has been discussed or is in process already? I really don't know. And I was just curious that that was put in. Thank you for that question, Council Member Brenner. Travis Beck, Superintendent of Parks. The Urban Forestry Department in the past had more robust staffing. We had an urban forester, a field crew leader and supporting parks maintenance workers and administrative staff. All of the staff were lost during several rounds of budget cuts. We brought before the Council in 2021 the Street Tree Master Plan. One of the recommendations of that plan was to restore necessary staffing to the Urban Forestry Office and the assistant urban forester position was one of the positions called out in that report which was adopted by Council. Additionally, it's something that we have included as a possible item in our budget and budget narrative for the Urban Forestry Grant we've received from the Forest Service. So there may be opportunities to get that at least partially funded through that grant. Thank you. I do remember the Street Master Plan and now that you mention it, there was talk of that. So thank you for that. A couple of things I remember at our last hearing on this item, we have the determination to make on this tree and I didn't feel there was enough data to really support making a judgment and making a decision on this tree. So I appreciate the additional information and the additional data that has been presented. I kind of found it interesting to learn and read on the engineers peer and grade beam foundation, the Catervillier floor system, the retaining wall system. It's pretty fascinating although I think despite how everyone feels about the tree and despite some of the opinions or the statements said, we have to go with the expert data and really it has been clear that the root ball is responsible for the foundation to the structure, to this building, to these 18 homes where our residents live and there is a huge safety component or public safety issue here that's very concerning and another thing I learned too is that there are many heritage tree removal requests that come forward that are resolved at a staff level and we don't even see those because they are denied at a staff level because I was curious how often does this come up and so thank you for speaking to some of the process and how when these requests do come up there are mitigation measures explored and not just an immediate acceptance of a heritage tree removal and in this case as the city attorney has laid out, I will be supporting the motion because it does clearly define that there is structural integrity due to the tree so thank you. Ms. Watkins is recognized. Thank you. I too want to thank our community members and my colleagues for the thoughtful discussion. I mentioned this at the last time, I don't like these items, nobody wants to cut down the trees in our community, they're extraordinary, they're beautiful, we all love them and we are stuck in situations like today where they don't interface with our environment and our neighborhoods and I was reminded by the woman who came forward who had tripped because she was visually impaired and we're weighing all of those considerations. I want to thank my colleague for the additional recommendation. I want to thank our urban forester, Ms. Keely, I think I've sat here in a number of these and I know confidently that as a professional on this field you do your fine work to assess it, to make sure that we aren't unnecessarily brought these decisions before us because nobody wants to do that. So I wanted to make those comments. I did have either a suggested addition or just consideration is what I've heard also is when these trees are removed that there leaves a void and I was wondering if we ever track that after removal to understand the impact and that could be a consideration that we have in place or how that's factored into the science for a lay person's kind of language associated with that. So maybe that's just a potential suggestion. I don't know if it needs to be a formal addition but I wanted to bring that up and I'm seeing. I think that's a great suggestion but I think it can be just a... Okay, a consideration. Formally, given to staff, I don't think it needs to be part of the motion. Perfect, okay, great. I just wanted to bring that up. Anyways, so in understanding the challenging components of these types of decisions, I too plan to support the motion before us. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Ms. Colton, sorry, Johnson is recognized. Thank you, I'll keep it brief. I will also be supporting this motion. It's really difficult to vote in this way. I think we've heard that across the dais. If I'm glad that we took the pause, I'm glad that we went in the direction that we did because several months ago when we looked at this, I didn't feel that I had enough information and I really appreciate the work that went into providing us with that information and I don't see a feasible path forward. I don't think we are responding blindly. We've done our due diligence and unfortunately I don't see a way for us to be able to maintain this building and move forward. So I'll be supporting sadly, but I think it's the right decision. I'll be supporting this motion and I do wanna thank Council Member Newsom for the additions. For the debate or discussion. Council Member Newsom, Ms. Bush, if we could put the motion back up. Thank you. Under your third item there, would you accept the following addition? It's one word between, it would be direct staff to bring forward a proposed budget item in that we don't make, we don't predetermine budget items. Second item is where it says fiscal year 2025. The actual budget is the fiscal year 2425 fiscal year. If you would take those two as minor technical amendments that'd be appreciated. Would that work for you? Yes, accepted. I'll go for the second one. Okay, thank you. There's an issue in your head and an issue in your heart. I think for most people here right now and I think the issue in our heart is we love this redwood tree too. The issue in our head is that we have this quasi-judicial function that we have to perform here. I had the great privilege of serving for 12 years on the Board of Directors of the Semper-Pyrans Fund, which is the state's oldest forest conservation, non-profit organization founded in 1906. And the sole purpose of that foundation then and today is to preserve redwood habitat, redwood trees and redwood habitat because it is in such a narrow band where it can grow, which has now with climate change, things are even more challenging. The redwood really depends upon a regular twice a day fog coming in and out so that the evapotranspiration, which is to say watering the tree through its limbs and its leaves, that that's a very big part of how it survives and as climate change moves along, that band of where redwoods can grow is getting narrower and narrower. So I think that the notion of saving redwoods and their habitat, what we can do on the climate change side, what we can do elsewhere is very, very important. Also, when I was in the legislature, I was at the two largest park and environmental protection bonds in the nation's history. And we set aside, that was a $5.3 billion. And in that, we set aside a half a billion dollars for redwood forest conservation, preservation, and enhancement. The reason I say all that is to say, I don't think there's a lack on this city council by any member about understanding the environment in which we live and what we appreciate, what we try to do about that. I do think that in this quasi-judicial capacity now about this one redwood tree, I think that based on the evidence by experts, which is we were told by our city attorney, it's interesting to hear someone say, well, there's a river going under something. That person didn't purport to be an expert. Doesn't seem to me we can weigh that. Someone's not an expert, doesn't assert to be an expert. A lot of assertions were made. I think that what we're constrained to is the actual evidence in the record supported by documentation and people who have the requisite knowledge, licenses, et cetera, to weigh in on this. And for my part of this, I have the same reluctance, I think other council members have. In my heart, I wanna see it there. In my head, I don't see how, given the current ordinance, how we can do anything except deny the appeal and approve the applicant's application to be able to take down that tree, sadly. The city clerk will call the roll. Thank you, Mayor, Council Member Newsom. Aye. Brown? No. Watkins? Aye. Brunner? Aye. Calentary Johnson? Aye. Vice Mayor Golder? Aye. And Mayor Keely? Aye. Motion passes and is ordered. We are going to take a 10 minute recess. We will be back here at 15 minutes to four. And we'll stand in recess until such time. City Council is back in session following our afternoon recess. We will now take up item number 27. This is a community-wide climate action plan 2030, one year progress report. Dr. Weiswes, thank you and your team for very, very good work and please proceed. Thank you very much, Mayor. Good afternoon, Council Members and Mayor. Tiffany Weiswes, the Sustainability and Resiliency Officer for the City of Santa Cruz. I'm gonna be talking today with a little bit of background, remind us of our targets, talk about our progress update and hit some highlights on what our work plan is for this calendar year. I wanna begin by acknowledging our internal sustainability team, our external community-wide climate action task force and a multitude of partners, both on the local and regional level that make this work possible. Climate is highly collaborative and we will not achieve the transformative work that we need to without these partnerships. So I really wanted to start with that and also thank you for your continued support. Santa Cruz remains a leader in climate, both amongst our peers locally and across the nation, if not worldwide. And that doesn't happen without your support and leadership. So I'm gonna share with you today the highlights of our progress report. We did have a very dense agenda report and I wanna thank those groups again for helping to refine them in addition to the department heads. So just by way of background, for those of you that may be new to the climate space here at the city, we did first adopt our climate action plan in 2012. We followed that up in 2022 with our 2030 plan that we are now implementing. Importantly, we adopted at the same time a three-year implementation work plan which guides us as staff, our work both internally and with our partners. Another notable thing that happened this past year is that we were one of the partners that stood up, I serve as vice chair on the Monterey B Regional Climate Project Working Group, which last year wrote $30 million in grants alone for transformative climate work in our region and we continue to work this year on, particularly in the environmental justice space and electrification of buildings and vehicles. I also think it's notable to mention that between 2021 and 2023, we achieved for the first time an A or an A minus rating with the Carbon Disclosure Project which is our effort at being transparent in how we are approaching climate and what we're doing, everything from emissions mitigation to climate adaptation is what we report on and we stand among the top 10% of all reporting cities in the world that report. You can see, and it's not a big surprise on the right-hand side, our latest greenhouse gas emissions inventory is from 2019 where transportation by large measure is the greatest source of our emissions for those sectors that are regulated. So there are other sectors, particularly around carbon sequestration and trees that are not regulated by the state, but we do include in our climate action plan. I also wanna note that every department does have a one-year work plan that we set at the beginning of the year that again tears off that three-year implementation work plan. In terms of our emissions reduction targets, we do of course have a legal target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2030. That's this first column you see here in orange. And also recognizing the aspirational nature of both our leadership and our community, we do have an aspirational target of carbon neutrality, meaning no net emissions, zero emissions by 2035. Right now, we're unable to say whether we are on track with meeting our 2030 target, being only one year in. We will be completing our 2022 greenhouse gas emissions inventory over this calendar year. Unfortunately, the data lags quite a bit. We just got our energy data from PG&E and so forth. And so we're not able to really say are we on track for our 2030 target quite yet, but next year at this time, I will be able to update you on that. We do have 152 actions in our climate action plan, which supports 18 quantifiable measures. And notably, and I know health and all policies next, I'm with you for a while today, 91% of our 152 actions supports health and all policies, the three pillars of public health, sustainability and equity. And so that's really a testament, I think to the process that we went underwent in developing this plan with our equity lens, our equity advisors and our equity focus. So I'm gonna spend a little time on this slide because this is really kind of where the rubber hits the road in terms of where are we making progress and where are we maybe lagging a little bit behind. So this is called a wedge diagram. And what you're seeing here are 2019 emissions over on the left-hand side. And then where we wanna get to make our climate action plan target, which is 181,000 metric tons, which requires us to reduce 76,000 metric tons of carbon. All these letters here that you see correspond to the different quantifiable measures that we've adopted. BE is around building electrification, building energy, T's transportation, W's waste. Again, these are the sectors that are regulated by the state. So starting with building electrification, we are behind on achievement of our emissions reductions from building electrification. As you know, we did have to suspend our natural gas ban, which put us, had a gap where we had new mixed fuel buildings come in. However, you all did adopt a replacement reach code, which is good news for us. But in the meantime, we had to peel off existing building electrification, which I know is gonna be very challenging for us. We're picking that back up this year and we will be adopting or bringing forward some programming or ordinances by the end of the year on existing buildings. But we are a year behind on that. So with building electrification, we're slightly behind on the achievement of BE1, BE2, and BE3. In terms of transportation, it also is hard to ascertain progress here because of the data lags. And we do know that the data that we have is mostly from the COVID era, where telecommuting went up and all of our different mode shares went down, biking, public transit, and so forth. However, we also know that our public works team is making so much progress on grants, infrastructure and programming, our community partners are helping with that programming. And so I do expect to see shifts the next time the census data comes around. So we will report on that when we have that next. Also, so those are measures T1 to T2, T4 to T6 pertain to electric vehicles. And unfortunately, we are not where we should be in the first of eight years of implementation yet. We had a large grant with the Monterey Bay Regional Climate Project Working Group for $15 million to try to scale up our public EV infrastructure, which is the enabling condition that we as a municipality have control over. And we found out just this month, we didn't get it. However, we will leverage that grant proposal and we're gonna go snag some of the IRA funds that are left over. So while we are a little bit behind here, we do have things in place to get that money and get that infrastructure in place to enable electric vehicle procurement by our residents and our business owners. Lastly, in terms of our waste measure, which is the sole W on the screen here, we are on track and that's thanks largely to our food scrap collection program that Public Works has put in place in compliance with state law. So I'm very happy to report on that. One other high point, and this is bittersweet coming kind of after the item that you just heard is that although carbon sequestration in trees are not part of the state regulated sector, we do have a target for those. And we are on track with that, with the 3000 trees that council member Newsom mentioned in the prior item. And I wanna highlight the $1 million grant that Parks and Rec did receive that's really gonna allow us to ramp up the installation of the planting of those trees and the care of those trees. Notably, we also are building tree planting into a lot of our other grant proposals like for example, our pump station number one rehab project. So to the extent and the HUD pro housing grant that you all heard late last year. So to the extent we can, we're trying to kind of leverage other grant and project opportunities to put more trees in. So just some highlights there, although we have kind of a mixed report card when it comes to the quantitative measures from a qualitative standpoint, we have a really good story to tell here. And I'm not gonna review all of these kind of key high impact activities, these are the activities that achieve the greatest emissions reductions, but suffice it to say that there's a lot going on here at the city. We have three new solar PV stations, lots of energy efficiency work, lots of active transportation improvements. We notably in something this was council was very interested in the past is the fleet electrification plan or roadmap. We do have a big grant pending with our regional climate project working group that would allow us to procure 31 electric vehicles and all the charging, taking us through compliance with state regulations to 2030. So across our fingers, we're gonna be getting that grant. We of course have the new reach code in place. And then we're doing some of this program like this partnership with the library on electric induction cooktops, a loaner program that people can check out so they can try them out if they're in the market to buy. And then of course I've already highlighted the food scrap collection. I've mentioned already the collaboration with the climate project working group, but I also wanna note the nascent Monterey Bay climate justice collaborative that's launching. And I wanna thank Mayor Keely and council member Watkins who are gonna be participating in an upcoming grant funded project to deepen relationships with environmental justice groups and evaluate how we can bring them into decision making in a more holistic kind of way around climate investments and what kinds of grants we go for and what we fund. So that's very exciting happening and thank you once again for that. And then lastly, just a little preview on what's ahead in this year, what's on our work plans. And this is not everything, but we have the active transportation plan update coming up. We have again, tons of electrification going on for our fleet and charging. We are right now trying to get funded our municipal facility decarbonization roadmap. And there's several kind of offshoots of that happening. I've already mentioned existing buildings. We are also looking at a gas leaf blower ban which you will be hearing more about over the next six months. And I've already mentioned planning lot of trees. The other part here that I really wanna emphasize here is that we've picked off a lot of the low-hanging fruit here at the city. We've done it all. And what's ahead is really gonna be difficult and the change management piece is super important when we have kind of taken advantage of all the easy kinds of things. We really need to institutionalize processes, policies, and accountability. And that's why we have, through our carbon fund, we're going to be funding a change management project to really look at how can we institutionalize processes, policies, and accountability that really is gonna support us and create those enabling conditions and achieving our climate goals. So lastly, I will say not, I think the other really, the wonderful thing about this space with climate is that not only are we seeking to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions, but we know that there are so many co-benefits that go along with this. New jobs, improved indoor and outdoor air quality, which means better health outcomes, and community resilience. So again, I wanna thank you for your continued support and I'm happy to take any questions you might have about this report and I do have our staff recommendation here for your convenience. Well, Dr. Weiswes, thank you very much and thanks to the folks who serve on the task force that works with you in this regard. Let me open this up to council member questions, comments on this item, Ms. Brunner. Thank you for that update. I was really happy to see where we're behind and where we're on track meeting our goals. So that was really helpful. I guess my question is what kind of communications out to the public and the community are we doing around this progress report? And can we make sure that we're sharing wide and far these updates? We can do so certainly. We didn't have anything planned, but I can work with our team to create kind of an infographic or a snapshot, so to speak. That would be great. Thank you. That we can put out through our social media. One thing we do have planned that unfortunately we were not able to do, even though we had committed to do so last year due to capacity constraints, is have our community round table on climate. And so now that we have some support from the communications team, we have our management analyst on board. We're already in the works of planning that for late summer. And that's gonna be really a time for us to showcase all of the myriad of climate work that's going on, but also have some productive conversations, sharing progress, but also kind of hearing from our partners and the community on various topics. Okay, great. And is the city webpage still up with all that? Yeah, information, great. Yes, in the webpage is current. All of this will go on to our webpage as well. And I also encourage folks to participate in our community wide climate action task force. Folks are able to come on every other month onto that meeting where we're really getting into the meat on the nitty gritty of our work plan items. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Council Member Collentary Johnson is recognized. Thank you. Thank you so much for the report and all the work. I think one of the reasons why we are on the leading front of this is because of your contributions and your leadership. One question I have is, and maybe you covered this and I missed it. What are the different indicators for the transportation measure? Sure. So there are several transportation members. T1 and T2, T1 is active transportation. So bikes and walking. T2 is public transportation. And T4 is related to things like landscaping equipment and other off-road equipment that uses gas. T5 and T6 are related to electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging. So those are transportation related measures. Well, hopefully we'll see that T2 shift tremendously with all the work the Metro is doing. Yes. I hope so. And green hydrogen, must be green hydrogen. We got it talked, yeah. Yeah. Council Member Watkins is recognized. Thank you. Thank you so much for the report and the work. And also just for your transparency and wanting to keep it a transparent document, but also our ability to accomplish a lot of the low-hanging kind of items that we could accomplish easily, but knowing that some of the big, more challenging issues are before us, so I really appreciate that. I have two questions, and one's kind of a big question, so if you can just say it's complicated, that's fine. And that's in regards to, I think, what is kind of percolating around the concerns around the sourcing for electrification and for the batteries for electric vehicles. So that's sort of the first question, and I know there's discussion and debate about that, obviously a complicated answer, so only if you so choose to go there. But I think it's something that people are hearing about, and so how are we thinking about that? And then in the other is with the environmental justice, as we're thinking about the infrastructure, and I know you said this is forthcoming, but are we thinking about building the charging stations and areas that are less resourced and how are we prioritizing those? And I think that's what I know, or you're alluding to when you say that, but I think it's great to think of the tangible examples of that, so if you have any more, that'd be great. Absolutely, well thank you for asking about the batteries. We definitely have an item in our climate action plan that pertains to end-of-life of both EV batteries, even solar PV panels, which are considered hazardous waste at the end of the life. So first of all, our landfill and our resource recovery folks, they do deal with the solar PVs and make sure that those are dissembled and sent in the right way. In terms of EV batteries, it's not a well-known fact that here in California that recycling of EV batteries is, there's actually a market for that. I don't have much more than that, but I can certainly bring that back. It's not something we've been focused on. However, in some of these grants that we've been applying to, we've been putting that in as a placeholder of something that needs to be addressed. So for example, the FHWA grant that we didn't get, that was written in, and then our California Air Resources Board grant, that has that written in as well. So we are hoping to be able to address that with the existing markets and try to support legislation around bolstering those markets. In terms of environmental justice, you have it spot on when we worked with our partners in the Climate Project Working Group across the Monterey Bay, understanding where they were disadvantaged or low-income communities. Technically, we don't have what's the CalEnvirus Green disadvantaged communities here in Santa Cruz, but we do have low-income census block tracks. We prioritize those first. Now, there is a complication to that when you think about the beach flats. Parking is a premium there, and so how much are you going to sacrifice parking for electric vehicles? There's a very fine balance there with that, and that's something we've been in communications with both Ecology Action and Community Bridges who are working on the outreach to the Latinx community and specifically the beach flats, and we've kind of come to the conclusion of as they're walking folks through the procurement process to buy EVs, as they come on board, we know how many chargers are going to be needed, right? And so let's try to keep that matched and synced up. So it's certainly something that's a priority for us. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Tremendous work, as always, and I'm really struck this time as I'm looking at the quantitative progress summary, the measurements, the complexity of just trying to track this stuff and the work that you all have done to try to make that legible, right? So when we talk about transparency, it's like how do we even present, how do we even analyze what's happening and what are, so great, just an incredible work, just leave it there. And I'm going to ask a question that something that my students have been asking me recently in some of my classes, and I hate the question, but I'm going to do it anyway. We've got, there are a lot of areas in which we have work to do. And you've suggested that the low-hanging fruit, and we've done an incredible job in large part due to your leadership. I'm so glad you're getting more of a team these days. What's the, if there was like the one most difficult thing that you think would be the most impactful that we really have to work on, I recognize they're all important and you're not going to dismiss any of them, but what's the one thing that we need to focus on to make the most impact? It's transportation, without a doubt. Yeah, so in the realm of transportation, we have a lot of carrots to try to get people out of their cars. We're not, we can't tell people don't drive your car. I can't even tell myself sometimes when I know I'm not supposed to, or I shouldn't be. So electrification? Yes, if you look at this wedge diagram that's on the screen here, you see the biggest reductions are under T4. That's electric vehicles. The other two, T1 and T2 are related to active transportation. I did see Claire come on, I maybe was gonna add some color there and I totally would welcome that if she does want to, but that is where we're gonna see our biggest emissions reductions. But again, right, we can't mandate folks by electric vehicles. We have to create the enabling conditions and that's the chargers, that's advocating for the incentives at Central Coast Community Energy and at the state level. It's applying for those big federal grants and landing them so that our partners like Ecology Action can do the advocacy and the engagement. That's everything that we're doing and it's just a matter of scaling it up. And I don't know if Claire has anything she wants to add, but the active transportation piece in public transportation is very important as well. Absolutely. Thanks, Tiffany. Claire Gallegli, Transportation Planner in Public Works and to tear off a little bit of the thing about electrification, we work a lot on active transportation infrastructure and programs to make walking and biking easier and more accessible to people of all ages and abilities and so we've been investing heavily in the types of infrastructure that we know help people make behavior changes. You see the rail trail, you see investments along the river walk, you see us investing in our sidewalk and bike lane network and so removing barriers and then having those carrots for incentives for downtown. We have our GoSanicus program. We give out free bus passes. We give out free bicycle memberships. We give credit to use our bike lockers. We give people downtown dollars for using alternative transportation and so making it as easy and accessible to choose to travel outside of single occupancy vehicle is one of our big goals and I think our team kind of across the board has tried to make that as wraparound easy as possible. Thank you. Thanks, Claire. One other exciting thing I think I'll mention just because you asked the question about electric vehicles. The city is receiving a formula grant from the Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant Program. It's a federal grant program. It's only about $130,000 but over the past year, we've developed the concept of providing a rebate to our lower income employees here at the city to enable them to buy electric vehicles and it's something that was an idea that sprung out of our energy project coordinator, Andy Shatney had that idea and we moved it up through our leadership and found support all the way through. So it's something I'm really excited about and we're giving a generous enough rebate to bring that cost down so that the monthly payment will be affordable at our folks that are at lower income salaries here at the city. Thank you very much. Mr. Newsom. No, thank you, Mayor Keely. I just want to make a brief comment to just thank Dr. Wise-Wefts for all of her work on this plan and for pushing us to achieve the goals in this plan and also all of her work on the Climate Action Task Force. I've been very happy to be on the task force and we've done a lot of great work and it's really great to see the progress that we've made on a lot of our goals and especially, you know, say in planting trees and planting and on track to plant 3,000 new trees and by my kind of calculations on this, it looks like we've planted around say 300 trees over the last three years, which is really great and hopefully we can continue that but just really great work and just really want to thank you for that. Thank you. Mr. Butler. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mayor Keely and council members. I wanted to, I'm Lee Butler, director of planning and community development for the city and just wanted to add one additional perspective on the transportation area that Dr. Tiffany Wise-Wefts was mentioning as well as our transportation planner, Claire Gloigli. From a land use perspective, we have both state laws and local laws that are reducing the number of parking spaces that are required as part of new projects and while we recognize that this is a difficult transition where we're moving from a more auto dominated and auto-centric society to one where we're promoting more biking and more walking and more public transit use. From a land use perspective, the reduction in the number of parking spaces is helping to encourage that choice of additional costs to own a vehicle, additional challenges to find a parking space, a premium that may be paid for renting a parking space rather than automatically getting one with a apartment. All of those are also contributing to the increased use of bicycle transit and pedestrian transportation. So just wanted to add that land use perspective in as well because they all fit together in our climate efforts. Absolutely, thank you for that, Adam. Thank you for the questions or comments at this point. We're going to go out to the public and receive comments on this. Anyone with us today in chambers wish to comment on the report today? You would have three minutes to do so. Anyone with us? Ms. Bush, please come forward. Hello, good afternoon and welcome. Good afternoon, City Council. Good to see so many friendly faces. Just wanted to remind everyone who introduced myself. My name is I.O. Banjo. I do sit on the City Climate Action Task Force, pointed by Mayor Keely. I get to serve with Dr. Wise West all the time. I just want to say that I completely 100% support this package that she has proposed, not only that, but part of our job as a task force is to kind of figure out what the community, like how to implement these plans the best way that really reach the community and that affects them in the most powerful way. And I think that part of what we're seeing and part of my assessment in our conversations with Tiffany is to see, you know, what are we missing in her team, in her office that can help her to execute these goals more effectively to reach these goals, to be able to scale these goals. And so one of the things that we've found that's needed is an increased staff capacity. There's two particular positions that I'm really interested in seeing City Council take investment in. One of them is an energy manager and the second one is a resilience planner. The energy manager would be kind of responsible for developing sustainable energy solutions that would help to reduce our carbon footprint. And this is something that's gonna be really impactful for the team in terms of understanding, you know, how do we actually implement some of these energy goals that we have for 2030 and beyond? The resilience manager is really, you know, gonna be in charge of kind of responding to some of these CCU fires, responding to the flooding that's going on West Cliff, making sure that the city is always at the front edge of being the most prepared in charting multiple different alternatives and solutions to their approaches. And so these two particular positions I think will help to not only ensure that we have the staff capacity to meet and reach our goals, but also to make sure that we are presenting ourselves as an environmental leader for not just the city, but the state and the nation, and that we fulfill our responsibility to the community by doing that. So as a Climate Action Task Force member, I think this is a really important investment that the City Council should be taking into consideration. And as you're drafting your budget proposals and you're thinking about what are those investments that you're trying to think about for the next couple of months, I think this should be a critical priority to help us reach our goals. And I just want to say thank you again to the City Council and to Dr. Wise-West for all your work. Mr. Banjo, thank you to you for your service on the Task Force and your other good work in the community. Thank you very much, sir. Anyone online?  We'll take the person online. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Council meeting. Yes, hello. Yeah, this is Garrett. Well, just nothing personal, but just listen. The high up charter poison is more leftist ideology on steroids, now trying to take credit for any improvement in well-being conditions without proof of correlation, actual positive net accomplishment, and missing reliable comparative data. This report notes high up policies should embrace a forced racist DEI diversity discrimination without apology or remorse and promote spending public monies to support DEI indoctrination efforts in an attempt to, well, in a front to free peoples. Assigning public budget monies to spend to these ends will destroy American values and beliefs, which is the aim of the cultural Marxists. You ignore your job is providing common city services, not publicly sponsoring anti-American values via mind control and creating a defective economic system of undeserved rewards that will cause harm and be an injustice. Your missing baseline data makes this so-called progress report an illusion of fakery, while tracking well-being is fine. Assigning high up credit for any improvement while disregarding correlation to decreased well-being would be a cultural Marxist con. For instance, inflationary income increases happen anyway, and the passing of ever higher undeserved living wage increases don't acknowledge the lost jobs and entry-level opportunity that you destroy.  Racism comes in all colors and authorities. Another high up of misuse to your is promoting the current globalist threats of humanity of climate change, existential crisis exaggeration, which will threaten the global food supply chain, energy availability, and draining the public of necessary monies for their well-being and typical totalitarian power fear mongering. You spend public monies indoctrinating public employees at public expense with your high up propaganda when the city is in financial crisis of your doing and would benefit from a priority shift. You misuse the defective high up to justify socialist inroads into destroying free markets and housing and the doublespeak of affordable housing. You explore opportunities to apply high up to compensation and hiring policies, which defy a merit-based people opportunity approach which has served the country amazingly well until it's planned destruction by DEI and high up illogic. Now, similar policies threaten our national defense and public safety promoting unqualified and over-compensated people to positions they are not qualified for except by diversity, race, or gender. Harvard Diversity Hiring brought about an unqualified, plagiarist president committed to DEI Asian discrimination. You throw the slur against all white people or white supremacy around, but you don't define it or give wide evidence of it.  It's all big time. It's all big time, so thousands of people promote central control authority. Thank you. Anyone else with us? Good afternoon, welcome to the council meeting, sir. Hi, my name is Cosmo. And I was thinking that maybe I expanding the capacity of maybe climate employees and things that I heard were just talked about would be a very good way to bring outreach to maybe younger people, college students, and everything that could maybe be talking about excluding diversity. I know that that could also be a way to kind of negate what some people think about climate and I don't know how it goes with, but wage disparities in terms of, I don't know, some people's reservations, bringing it to the youth is there could be temp positions, all sorts of things like that that could, I don't know, kind of help maybe negate some of the reservations that we just heard or something like that. So I think the expansion is kind of on the right track. I don't know how to speak in terms of like how to address maybe some of the comments we just heard, but I think that could be a good, like, restatement to talking about maybe what some people we just heard said. Thank you very much for sharing that with us or we appreciate it. Anyone else online? We do. Let's go to the next person online. Good afternoon. Welcome to the council meeting. Just put the hand down, all right. Anyone else with us who should make comment on this matters before the body? And there is a recommendation, Ms. Weiswest, Dr. Weiswest, if you kind enough to put the back up, I believe it is to accept the report. I'll make that motion. There's a motion by Council Member Watkins and a second by Council Member Newsom to accept the progress report under debate and discussion, if I might for a moment. Dr. Weiswest, thank you. This is very good stuff. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, we know that. You're measuring it, we're managing it, we're making progress, that's great. It'll never be as much as we want, but we're always pushing hard to get to that net zero place. As you know, you, City Manager and I have been in a bit of a conversation given the importance of this issue to perhaps consider taking the task force, given how broad it is in terms of touching virtually every department of city government in terms of taking care of business ourselves and being good in that regard as an institution and also reaching out into the community and encouraging broad-based participation in that public sector, private sector individuals and so on, we've been in a bit of a conversation that maybe it is time to consider elevating the task force to a commission so that what we're doing is it has the standing inside this institution that other important subject matters have, our Planning Commission, our Parks Commission, our Public Works Commission, our Parks and we're going to go through appointments to those in a little bit today. But the idea of elevating this to a commission which I think underscores the city's commitment and I know that we've not worked out every detail on that but I wanted to daylight that to council members and to the public and thank Dr. Wise West for her participation in this conversation about how we take this and as a gentleman who's talking about and people online have said how it is we make a deeper reach into the community. They know what we're doing, we're soliciting their participation and so on. So I don't believe that what we need to do is add any language to the motion but instead to thank and encourage both Dr. Wise West and the city manager to work with me to determine whether or not that kind of elevation makes sense on this subject matter and if it does, we will be back to the council in a month or two to review this question with the entire body but again, Dr. Wise West, thank you very, very much for all of your very fine work, I appreciate it. You're welcome, Mayor, thank you. Thank you. Any further questions or comments and the vice mayor is recognized? Thank you for the presentation and while I was listening to you, I kind of overheard a side comment about green hydrogen technology and I've been, I don't know anything about this but I've recently learned that my sister's professor up at UCSC, Bakhton Singaram and some of his colleagues have been working on this development up at UCSC and I'm not sure if you're aware but we have an initial meeting set up with them and I'd love to invite you and I just think it's really exciting that some of this new technology is being developed right here in our own chemistry labs. Sure, I'd be happy to participate in that. Thank you. Yeah, I think it'd be really cool. Thank you. Thank you very much. Further questions or comments? Council Member Brown. Thank you, Mayor. I would just add, I've already said thank you, you're amazing, keep up the good work. We want a team for you. I think that Mr. Banjo's recommendations make sense. I'm not sure how you've been working on that or talking about that in your task force but I want to see, to the extent that you have thoughts on how we can actually support you with additional staffing, rather than for example myself just saying it every time you come here. I want to support that specific proposal so please bring it and I also very much support the idea of moving towards a commission for level for this purpose of determining how we move through our climate action, how we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, all the things. So thank you for raising that. I've supported it in 2017 when it didn't get passed at this council but I will support it when it comes before us next time. Thank you. Yes, if I may, we are updating our research on that. We have twice brought this in front of the, this is body, not this body specifically but over the last eight years. So we're updating our research and we're targeting March to bring that or to have that continue that conversation. Very good. For the debate or discussion seen, hearing none. Clerk will call the roll. Council Member Newsom. Aye. Brown. Aye. Republican. Aye. Calentary Johnson. Aye. Vice Mayor Golder. Aye. Mayor Keely. Aye. Motion passes and subordered. I am going to abuse the privilege of the presiding officer. Earlier today we had conversation about aging in the community and how that all works out and as somebody who's ahead of most of you in that regard, it's all good. There's hardly any problems when you get older. But I will say this, I'm on a note of personal privilege here. I had the good fortune, my father who passed away quite some time ago at the end of his life for two or three years, he had a very happy life and that was because he married my stepmom and I have a couple of step siblings and they're wonderful people and I have a brother who is a wonderful person and my brother who in addition to being very successful back in the day in the Silicon Valley is once and always a Marine and my family has come to really depend on my brother in so many ways over the years and my stepmother passed away last week at 92 and my brother came out from New York and he's been managing a lot of things in her life as she's gotten older and my step-sibs came to town. For the end of her life last week, it was pretty foreseeable where she was and how things were proceeding. So when we were discussing that earlier today, I joked around about it a little bit, that was to keep me from probably crying during that conversation but the reason I bring all this up is because my brother's here. My brother came into the chambers and he's here from New York and the Marines have landed and they took good care of everything that needed to be taken care of and I just want you all to welcome my brother, Terry, to the council chambers. Brother, I love you over there. And because he's my older brother, I will prohibit him from speaking to you. There we go, we are on item number 28. This is health and all policies and we're gonna get an annual report here and we have three council members who will take us through that. Your name is listed first, Ms. Contari-Johnson. We'll start with you. Okay, I wasn't completely prepared to kick us off but I will. Oh, did you? We have a brief presentation and that I was going to show on your path, literally five minutes and then I think you all were gonna jump in with Comma. Does that work for you? I'm happy to take it whatever order. That's perfect, please. All right, very good. Let me do so then, let me share this for you. So just real briefly, similar to the climate action work, we wanted to share a little bit of background for those of you that may be new to the health and all policies world. Talk about the progress update, the work plan and the recommendations. So this work dates back to 2019 when council member Watkins was mayor. In that time, we were able to adopt an ordinance, a city council policy that prioritized equity, public health and sustainability in our government policymaking and decision making. In 2021, we adopted a three-year work plan which is what we tear off of for our annual work plans and in 2021, there was a complimentary anti-racial discrimination resolution adopted that not only recognize the existence of racism and white supremacy in our community but revive the health and all policies city council committee that's been meeting for the past two years. In addition to that, we've adopted health and all policies community wellbeing outcome indicator metrics which we update every two years. We're getting ready to complete that update in February of this year so we'll bring that at our next annual update and we do have annual work plans for the committee. In terms of progress, these are just the major highlights, the specific things that we had on our work plans but there are other things like the age well designation that wasn't even on our work plan, right? That we are doing that supports health and all policies. So we joined the government alliance for racial equity and that has served as a wonderful resource for us for technical assistance to be able to engage with our other colleagues across the country. Our management analyst regularly participates in those fora and has helped us to tailor staff training. We of course put together the HUD Pro Housing, Affordable Housing and Climate Resilience Grant which I'm very particularly proud of. We have a lot going on with workforce development and we implemented the city like me recommendations for increasing diversity and representation in city committees and commissions. A lot of this work is ongoing and in particular this last one here. We're really just sharing a snapshot here. One thing that we have made just a bit of progress on is making sure that we integrate health and all policies meaningfully addressing the pillars in the agenda reports. Only 11% of the council agenda reports coming forward addressed health and all policies so that speaks to some internal training that we need to do to ensure that you have all the information you need to be making decisions and policy. On the right hand side you can see some of the results of our Santa Cruz city like me recommendations. One of which is the committee is recommending to the council adopting targets for increasing Latinx and renters participation in committees and commissions. So that is one of the recommendations that you'll see at the end here. And we continue to explore the integration of youth into committees and commissions along with some other committees that the city is that's really taking the lead on the youth piece. So coming ahead we have core. You've heard about core coming up. I'm really excited about phase two of health and all policies in the budget that you're gonna see this fiscal year for decision making really exciting and I got to think finance on that HR will be working. HR has been able to ramp up their capacity to address this has been on our work plan for some time the diversity equity inclusion and adding accessibility initiative and statement. Again, continue the Santa Cruz like me recommendations and then also exploring the creation of an equitable citywide gas power leaf blower ordinance which the health and all policies committee really wants to see through over this year. So that is the presentation and there are some recommendations here. I want to turn it over to the committee members and thank them for their support. And I know that they might have some words to say and they wanted to add a motion which is in red on the screen here. Thank you, Dr. Weiss West. Back to you, Ms. County Johnson. Now I'll jump in, yeah, thank you. Thank you for all the work that you've put into this. I think what I want to add is that I had the privilege of working with council member Watkins when this came forward before I was a council member and this is something this is a framework that she and I have been engaged in for decades in this community. So to see it here in our community and not just a commitment to it but to really actualize and operationalize it is really something. So we are once again a leader in this. We've been asked to present with other communities to show not only how did we get here to adopt the ordinance but what are we actually doing to again, operationalize it? So Dr. Weiss West showed some of the actions that we've accomplished over the last year and many more. The couple pieces that I really want to point out is that the commission work that's being done right now that will be done in the coming years is going to be transformational for our community. The implications of this is that we are really fostering diverse leadership through our commissions. So the implications and the impacts I think will be really tremendous. The other piece about the agenda report, one can look at that and say well okay that's a check mark but it's beyond a check mark. When I have worked on some agenda reports and I need to integrate equity, health and sustainability it really makes me think about that. It makes me think about what is the nexus? What is the alignment? How are we doing or not doing this? So I think that's a really key and important piece to see that percentage of agenda reports go from 11% to, I can't remember now. No, from 8% to 11%. 8% to 11%. So we got some work to do but we're heading in the right direction and then the other piece I wanted to pull out was the work with youth integration of youth voice in our practices and policies. That's really overlaps and is aligned with the Children and Youth Bill of Rights that our council has committed to. So those are the pieces I wanted to pull out and again just thank my council colleagues and thank Dr. Giffney Wise-West and Bernie and other members of the team for the work. Ms. Brunner. Thank you. You're welcome, nice to be here. Thank you and I'm really happy that we're able to bring these recommendations forward to the full council. I stepped into this role in 2021 when I worked on the racial equity resolution that we adopted and directed some specific initiatives around equity and our systems and we're still ongoing work with that and it's in the agenda report and we will continue to keep that as a high priority going forward and we had to look at taking bite-sized pieces that we could really operationalize and get at but at the same time, I really appreciate Tiffany Wise-West your, the way it was listed out and the status of each part of this work is ongoing versus completed. Some are ongoing, some are a one-time action and it's all laid out and we really, it's going slower than I hope but there's so much work and again, I support the staff capacity and any work we can do but we have to go at the pace that's realistic and so things aren't overnight but like my colleague, council member Collin Tari Johnson said it will be transformational and I hope everyone in our community has a chance to read through some of the action items that we've been working on. It crosses so much in our community that affects our people and our residents from workforce development initiatives to all of the kind of well-being metrics and data that we've been able to collect and working with the county of Santa Cruz too who's also on some parallel tracks with us in some of the work to really identify and get the data to really help make steps forward. So thank you. Council member Watkins is recognized. Well, gosh, to add to my colleagues who've said so much, I'm just so pleased by these progress reports as much as I know there's an interest to see us transforming systems more rapidly. We're transforming systems in an amazing way that I think really reflects our values as a council, as a committee, as a staff and as a community that I know we all heard and that we were just talking about in regards to sustainability, environmental justice specifically, thinking about equity in our decision making, how to really transfer what I know is a value of equity into specific tangible outcomes that will move the needle on equity is what this is. And that's what is so powerful about this framework. I wanna thank the council's current, previous contractor at the time. And most certainly I wanna thank Dr. Tiffany Weiswest. I really want to appreciate your professionalism and your commitment to data as well as accountability and transparency with the outcomes we set for ourselves and when we're not meeting them. And that's for me, one of the best things about having something like this in place is that when I'm gone next year, this lives on and hopefully feels like everybody's fingers have touched it in a way that feels reflective of our community. We don't do public health, but we certainly have a role in creating the health and wellness of our community, whether it be through land use, through our commitment to racial justice, thinking about transportation, equity, infrastructure, resilience, you name it, we have a role in that. That is also how we think about how we're transforming our systems with thinking about who's involved in our commissions, how they can be involved and things like that. And our responsibility is to do something about that to make that happen. And this is what health and all policies is doing. So I feel really pleased. I'm really excited to see us move forward in thinking about budgeting. Budgeting is, as I know our mayor knows well, is a reflection of our values, health and all policies through the lens and planning our budgeting in that way is truly another amazing way to have a transformative system here. So I'm really pleased and thank you to the finance department who wherever you may be at this moment, I appreciate that they're interested in wanting to see that move forward along with the other divisions and departments also. Yeah, and I just wanna thank the ongoing support of our council and my committee members for their work. So thank you so much. And I'm happy to move the recommendation when the time comes. Thank you for the questions, comments at this time. Let me invite members of the public, except for my brother, to make comments that they wish to. Anyone who is with us in chambers, let me see if there's anyone online, Ms. Bush. We'll take that person. Person online, good afternoon. Welcome to the council meeting. Good afternoon. Person online. Good afternoon, mayor and city council members. My name is Maria Cadenas. I am the executive director of Ventures and nonprofit that works for the shared and equitable economic future with zip code, race, gender, or immigration status, the net-dicted income or wealth. Over the past few years, we have partnered with the city and County of Santa Cruz to help paint the picture of their respective boards and commissions. The effort started as a recognition that different lived experiences and help inform and shape policy and governance to ensure our city and county are resilient, prosperous and equitable. We're grateful for the city, the health and policies committee and city staff for their leadership and commitment in moving this work forward. At this time, we would like to express our support for the adoption of the health and health policies recommendations to support targets to increase diversity in city committees and commissions, as well as commission or committee member compensation policies and processes. As part of this, we recommend the universal up-out compensation stipend model aligning with the counties approach where compensation is offered and members can choose to decline it. Compensation will lessen financial barriers that might prevent working class individuals from participating, ensuring access to a broader range of community members. This addresses economic disparities and will help the city build board committees that more accurately respect the diversity of the community and allows for a broader representation of community voices. Ventures fully supports this initiative. We recognize this as a transformative step to fostering a more inclusive city. Thank you for considering this proposal and we look forward to witnessing the positive impact it would undoubtedly have on our shared community. Thank you so much for calling in. We appreciate it. Ms. Bush, anyone else online? We'll take the next person online. Good afternoon. Welcome to the city council meeting. Hello, Reggie Meisler here. I just wanted to take this moment to just remind city council and the public that while health and all policies, I mean, it's a valiant sort of thought process, but it's kind of based on a faulty assumption that the city cannot do public health. The city can do public health. Berkeley does public health, has a public health department. Oakland, I mean, sorry, San Francisco has a public health department at the city level. This is not impossible. Like this is just a choice that was made by a bureaucracy that can be made differently. And like, well, it's nice that you guys are trying to do something with health and all policies. We could be doing a lot more. We could actually, we know that we have, we're already doing a lot of public health stuff. We help do shelter programs for the unhoused. We like have our community set aside grants. Like we do like multiple things. And so this is really just a technicality that folks are like operating off of right now. So just a reminder, this, we don't need to be like super careful about this stuff. This is totally just a choice that people are making. Thank you. Well, thank you. Do we have anyone else online? Thank you, Ms. Bush. Matters back before the council. Motion would be in order. I'm happy to move the recommendation with the added language as presented our staff here. Council member Watkins moves the recommendation with additional language that we put up on the screen in just a moment. And I'll second. Council member Callentary-Johnson seconds. Ms. Brunner thirds. We will, is there a debate or discussion? We're going to put this up on the screen to make sure that everybody can see it before we vote on it. I just want to kind of preface. I'll share my screen, but there was some changes or differences between the staff presentation or the staff agenda report and the presentation. I just wanted to find out what that. Okay. So I made them in red, the difference. So let's take a look and make sure that the maker of the motion agrees that that's the motion she would like to see in front of the body. Good with that? Second. All good. Is there a debate or discussion? Seeing the near none, the clerk will call the roll. Thank you mayor. Council member Newsom. Aye. Brown. Aye. Hopkins. Aye. Brunner. Aye. Callentary-Johnson. Aye. Vice mayor Goldert. Aye. And Mayor Keely. Aye. Motion carries and is ordered. We are on item 29 economic development strategy update downtown and east side district activation and direction. We'll be pleased to hear about downtown and east side district activation. Ms. Lipscomb, good afternoon. Ms. Unick, good afternoon. Thank you for all your fine work. The floor is yours. Thank you, mayor, members of the council. I want to actually acknowledge this is a joint city council and economic development item. And it was actually the three council members, council member Callentary-Johnson, council member Watkins and council member Newsom who first came to us in the city manager with wanting to bring forward several initiatives and direction around activation activities and just some needed areas for attention. And after some conversation, we decided to do a joint item and bring with it some updates to our ED strategy because many of these items were directions that council in some form had provided a few years ago, but several years forward additional attentions needed. The pandemic has happened. A lot has changed in the downtown. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to provide an update in these areas today and to take further direction from council. And with that, I'd actually like to turn it over to the three of you for any opening comments. Ms. Watkins, just recognized. Thank you, mayor. I'll keep my comments brief because I know we have a presentation. I just know and want to recognize my colleagues. I know the full council as well is very committed to the work that's happening in all of the different areas that there are recommendations. I know our economic development team is small but mighty, working so hard and doing amazing things, many of which are behind the scenes or we're getting little updates here and there. And one of the efforts around what this agenda report and presentation is trying to do is really to daylight the work that's happening to get affirmation in regards to the direction we hope to pursue and continue to go on and have checkpoints for us as a body and as a community in regards to accountability to see those move forwards and or a shift in direction if needed. So I know it's full but I appreciate the collaboration between my colleagues as well as our department to bring forward these topics to this evening. And I appreciate the opportunity and of course, my colleagues can say what they have to say. Sure, and I'll- Council Member Collin, Tari Johnson is recognized. Yes, I also appreciate this partnership and collaboration and bringing this agenda item forward. And I'll just add that I think this is a really important time in our community with coming out, well, we're still dealing with COVID but coming out of the pandemic and ensuring that our downtown and our community is vibrant and thriving and all the changes that we're seeing with development and housing development downtown. So it's an important time for us to pause and reflect on what we've done, what's worked, where there may be gaps and where we see our future. So it is just bringing it all together and getting on the same page. And as Council Member Watkins said, setting some touch points to make sure that we continue to support our local businesses and that we create a really welcoming, safe environment for community members and visitors. So. Council Member Newsom is recognized. Thank you, Mayor Keely. My comments will be brief as well. I just want to associate my comments with my colleagues, Council Member Watkins and Council Member McAllentary Johnson. Just thank you so much for your work on this and to Director Lipscomb and Economic Development Manager unit for their work on this. And as my colleague, Council Member McAllentary Johnson said, it's more of a pause, look at where we are and look at where we can move forward. And as the report says, our downtown right now is experiencing a true revitalization, but there are ways that we can improve and as well with the East Side Business District as well are looking into that aspect as well. So very excited about this agenda item being, very excited about this agenda item being before us and I look forward to the presentation. Thank you. Ms. Watkins is recognized. I just want to call attention to the East Side and Midtown reference so that everybody has, hopefully I know. That's for you, Mayor. Thank you. I'll make sure you saw that. I didn't doubt where that was directed. All right, please proceed. Thank you. Okay, so where we're going to start out today is just some context and putting this in the framework of our economic development strategy. So the economic development strategy was a community-driven sort of participation process that Council weighed in on. They were involved with us for, I don't know, I want to say six months in sort of vetting and looking at some of the strategies or all of the strategies and actions that came into this, what is basically a work plan for the next five years. We started this in 2021, so we were in the midst of the pandemic. At that time, we thought it was almost over. So it's really interesting to have the opportunity today to do exactly what the comments that the Council members just made of taking a pause and saying, okay, where are we? Because the anticipation when we finalized this work with a consultant in the community was that, okay, we are almost done with the pandemic and we're going to have recovery and then we're just going to keep on going. And I think here we are at the beginning of 2024. And as you'll hear through some of the presentation, I mean, there are many businesses, and you've heard this earlier in closed session, that have recovered fully. There are others that are still struggling. The environment has changed for businesses and our downtown environment and our Eastside Midtown environment are undergoing changes and changes to really help those businesses survive in a post-pandemic world is some of the things that we're looking at today and revisiting some of the strategies and actions that are in the economic development strategy update. So when you look at that, and it is a very detailed report, it is attached in the staff report. And I will also say that as we go to the presentation, Rebecca's going to sort of give us a quick overview of where we are in the context of the directions that are coming today and the recommendations. We'll go through those rather quickly. They are very wordy because it's actually taking text from the strategy actions and updates. So, but all of that context is in the report, which is pretty thorough. So if you have any questions, we can pause and go back to them but we'll probably breeze through those pretty quickly so we can spend more time on the recommendations themselves. And with that, I will turn it over to Rebecca. Ms. Unick, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you very much. Thank you for your good work. So as Bonnie mentioned, we'll give sort of a highlight of a lot of the progress that we've made so far. So kicking it off with our strategy to develop a pop-up program in our downtown. So this was something that we had anticipated, we had tried to do prior to adoption of the work plan and the pandemic really provided the perfect environment, unfortunately, but fortunately to test this out and really get something going. So we have successfully ran a pop-up program, it's still ongoing. And we've also made a lot of advances in working with our city departments to streamline some permitting requirements, modify some zoning to really make it easier for these to occur. So in April of 2021, I brought to the council along with Bonnie a proposal for our pop-up program. This is sort of the landscape of what our downtown vacancies looked like at the time. As you can see, all of these orange circles represent vacancies, they're almost on every single block in our downtown. It was really challenging time in sort of the heart of the pandemic period. And so we brought forward the proposal to create a mechanism to lease out some of these vacant spaces, provide subsidized rent to local businesses and be able to give them an opportunity to activate the spaces and see if it would work. So through this program, we were able to place four businesses, Tara and Self, MK Contemporary Art, previously known as Curated by the Sea, Childish and then Rev. We're really excited to see that MK Contemporary Art continues to be in that space. They're operating long term there. The businesses Tara and Self and Rev did a test case in those spaces and there's now a long term tenant there. And Tara and Self has actually got a full lease space on Soquel Avenue and this was an opportunity for her to do some business before her long term space was available. She was building out that space. So it got some name recognition, was able to make some sales and then transition into that longer term space. So that was really exciting. And then Childish, we're really excited to see that business expand from the Midtown area. I've heard that's a generational divide so I'm gonna go with Midtown. And they were able to expand and reach into the downtown and have shown success. So they've been in there since November 2022. We're actually looking at extending a longer term lease that's under review right now. They've been really successful and really been a great addition to our downtown as the only real dedicated children's toy store in our downtown community. So transitioning to sort of a more current picture, this was an analysis we conducted in November of last year. And as you can see, those colored dots have really started to change. We've had a lot of businesses open, more than have closed from the pandemic have opened. And we're releasing a lot of progress there in terms of activating those vacancies, but we do still have some areas that need some ongoing investment and lease out. So shifting to our next strategy, outdoor dining, when we were working on the ED strategy, we were operating our temporary outdoor dining program and seeing the success of sort of creating that more streamlined approach, giving businesses the opportunity to just expand outdoors. And so there was really a dedication to make those permanent changes, streamline our permit processes and bring that forward. So really excited to say that we were able to complete the Parklet program ordinance and that's now in effect. We launched those applications in May of 2023. We've received 19 applications and we have 12 of those are for the pre-approved designs that the city invested in building those out so they'd be a more streamlined approval, or sorry, invested in doing the design work for those so that the businesses could build them out more easily. And then we have three applications for custom designs and four for retrofits. So we've got five of our pre-approved designs under construction now, hoping to see those come to completion end of February. And then the custom designs, one is completed, one's under progress, hoping to be done in the next week or so. And then the retrofits are in between of being completed but majority aren't done. So we're excited to see that come online. You're gonna see some really beautiful Parklets permanently gracing our landscape. A couple of pictures here on the left is a bad animal on Cedar Street. They're getting close to being completed there and then Hulas is fully complete and theirs is an expansion of what they had pre-pandemic. They're sort of the test case. So excited to see those going forward. And then on the private property side, we have been working with a city council subcommittee to make modifications to those private property permitting processes. So that work is well underway. We're hoping to bring those modifications to the council and planning commission in the next couple months here. And that's really looking at reducing the number of permits that are required, the cost of those permits, the intensity of sort of modifications that businesses would need to make to those private property spaces so that a lot of them are operating now perfectly well. So looking at how we can reduce those permitting requirements to allow them to just keep what they're doing and come into that permanent approval. So moving to our next strategy, this is focused on a lot of the downtown business improvement districts. So prior to the pandemic in 2019, we were looking at potentially creating a consolidated improvement district in the downtown. So combining our property based improvement district that we have now and our business improvement district into one organization to try to maximize our resources. We kicked off that campaign in 2020. So we weren't able to move that forward. But both of those organizations decided that it would be beneficial to just look at modifying their existing district boundaries and rate structures to be able to provide those resources that we need. So that has been underway and was completed last year. And then we've also done a lot of work towards improving and streamlining some of the coordination for downtown maintenance and services.  So as I mentioned, last year we were successfully able to approve the expansion of the downtown management corporation as well as some modifications to their rate structure. The property owners valued that investment and that was successful. Similarly for the downtown association, the business improvement district, they were able to modify their rates and provide some additional investment that's been really beneficial. And we're already seeing the results of that investment in some of the stats below. So I'm really excited to see DTA was able to provide ribbon cuttings every single month. They sold a record setting $100,000 in downtown dollars last year, which is an excellent investment. Those can be used at a number of stores downtown. So really excited to see those numbers. And then the ambassador program, which is funded through the downtown management corporation and operated by the downtown association, they had doubled staffing from our expansion of the district and those changes to the rate structures. And so they were able to actually triple their hospitality interactions. So over 40,000 hospitality interactions, over 3000 business contacts, over 43,000 pieces of litter removed. So that's really the heart of our clean, safe and welcoming services in the downtown. And just within a six month span of sort of having those increases, we already are seeing that payoff. Thank you. I just wanted to add that between the two district increases, between the downtown management corporation and the downtown association through those, we've added about a third of a million to the overall budget for downtown services. And that will only increase in the next few years as more of the properties develop downtown. We do have residential and the commercial retail frontage that is included in those assessments. So we're pretty excited for that increase in investment that we'll have in the downtown over the next few years as development goes forward. And then on the city services side and sort of where the city is aiding in that downtown maintenance and services. We've had a lot of increases in dedicated Santa Cruz police department staffing and CSOs for downtown. Public works is able to consistently keep our sidewalks clean, make that a welcoming environment to visitors. And then parks and recreation, if you haven't taken a stroll downtown, the Pacific Avenue tree wells and planter beds have been really beautifully maintained and improved. And so they've been really committed to keeping those vibrant, just really helps with the overall streetscape, look and feel. And then we're also excited to see the downtown design standards begin implementation. So this is aligning new street furnishings and then paint schemes that match our wayfinding system so that we have that more cohesive look and feel downtown. So the parking meter poles have been painted already last year and this year we're looking forward to seeing the light poles, all the street poles downtown, planter bed fence being painted, we'll have new benches and new trash can receptacles downtown. So those will be some really tangible improvements that we'll see in the next year as well. And then looking at more of the business mix downtown, we have a strategy that's focused on improving that entertainment, dining, nightlife experience of downtown, being able to fill these vacant spaces or the new spaces that are coming online with the development with something that's exciting to attract folks to the downtown. And then also looking at how we can make those permitting processes for those uses that maybe don't fit within our traditional zoning code easier. And alongside that as well, creating partnerships with the commercial broker community, making sure that we have the communication around what spaces are available and connecting those with prospective businesses. So we've made a lot of progress there. One of this photo that you're seeing is a broker tour that we took with Anton Development Corporation for the Front Laurel Pacific Project to be able to look at the new retail spaces and the progress of the construction. It was very fun and just really exciting to see this new development come online. We had, I wanna say about 25 people join us for that tour, just a lot of excitement in these new spaces. And we were able to build out a quarterly broker breakfast meeting this past year to be able to do a lot of information sharing and just open that communication around what's happening in the commercial real estate space downtown, how we can help. And then a lot of the policy updates and changes that we've made that they should be aware of when they're working with prospective tenants so that we can make that process go more smoothly. Okay, and then as economic development, we tend to do a lot of marketing for the city and sort of promoting us as a place to shop and dine and spend locally. So that's always an effort that we take on. You may have seen around town our shop local banners and bridge signage. And so that was an effort that we took on and worked with the Downtown Association as well for an excellent holiday campaign a few years ago and visit Santa Cruz. So we're looking at bringing forward some new banner designs this year. They need a refresh. So just keeping that messaging going and looking at other opportunities to sponsor and support those shop local campaigns. Okay, so we have, and these are outlined in the report, the seven council and staff recommendations. And I just wanted to take a brief pause again before we go into each of the recommendations and turn it back over to the council members to see if you wanted to highlight and talk briefly about any of the specific recommendations and direction. May I ask if the council members who wish to do that? Sure. Do you want to say something? I'm not sure what to make of that. Council Member Clark Johnson is recognized. Thank you. I'll just pull out a couple of these. All right, I got to straighten my eyes here. Yeah, okay, I'll pull out just a couple of these. The empty storefront, I mean, as Rebecca unit showed, we've made quite a bit of improvement in that area. I think that's a huge accomplishment and success. And one of the reasons why we want to continue to assess this and look at this is because there are still some major sites that are empty and it causes challenges in our downtown area. There's illegal activities and the beautification that we're doing that was pointed to that sometimes goes out the door when there's an empty storefront. So we want to just look and see what are some other strategies that we can put in place to address what's remaining.  How about Council Member Watkins? You talk about the placemaking and activation in your baby for a while. Council Member Watkins is recognized. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Calantari-Johnson and for the presentation. Yes, certainly placemaking and activation has been something that we've been talking about for many, many years as long as I've been on the council actually. And it's that feeling when you are downtown and you're in a certain area and you are experiencing something and then say, you know, you end up in Pearl Alley and it's a different type of place or if you're in other communities, sometimes there's areas that are really centered around youth or kids. And those are the types of placemaking that in activation strategies that we want to explore as we're in this transition time thinking about these investments that makes that special culture and uniqueness of different areas within the downtown. So I'm happy to see this on our recommended list. And if I may, while I have the floor for a moment, also just the east side and Midtown, I know we're gonna be talking about that. It's been really exciting to see the Midtown parties happening, what that brings to my hour neck of the woods in terms of folks from all over the city and county to come and experience the Midtown, certainly also supporting the businesses. And one of the strategies here speaks to that a bit with the assessment and thinking about that with the businesses. And then just lastly, if I may, you know, I know that there's a lot of discussion, there has been a lot of discussion around where we are with the development of the new library and then certainly conversation around the current library facility. And one of the conversations that's been happening is what would that look like? And I know there's steps that we'll take obviously prior to any major changes or direction there, but making sure that we're really transparent with our community, that this is not something we're not thinking about. And certainly it's something that the farmers market is thinking about locally in terms of a permanent farmers market potential. It's an option. And also just a permanent space for a public market. And so, you know, as we're thinking about these things which have come before us in the past, how are we maintaining ongoing transparency and engagement with our community in regards to some of our next steps? I'll leave it there. Thank you. Council Member Newsom, you look like you're reaching for your microphone, sir. Thank you, Mayor Gulley. I just wanted to really reiterate what my colleague said. Very excited to see these recommendations, especially in the storefronts. As the agenda report points out, the vacancy rate in downtown right now is at a historically low rate. But as Council Member Colletary Johnson pointed out, I think we'd still need to look at further avenues to lower that rate further than what it is. And also recommendations to help the east side slash midtown businesses and the business association over there and place making and activation and continuing to further push for downtown to be a vibrant spot for a vibrant place for our community. The Vice Mayor is recognized. Thank you. I really want to thank my colleagues and staff for working on this super complete comprehensive package to support our local businesses. And I really admire all the entrepreneurs out there that help support our local economy. I had been meeting with west side, lower west side and west side industrial neighbor business owners and building owners over the course of the past couple of years. And there has been some expressed interest in basically the exact language in five. And so I'm wondering if it's possible to just, and I don't want to put too much on staff but to add east side, midtown and west side. That's the direction I just wanted to. Council Member Bruner is recognized. Thank you for laying out these specific directions to staff and to staff for all the continuous work in all of these areas. It makes a huge difference. And I really applaud the economic development and housing team. And I just wanted to say the midtown east side businesses, I've worked with many of them on different topics over the past several years that I've been on city council. And I just wanted to share that in terms of resources for that general area, I know that some of them are very interested in forming or exploring what it would take to form a business association officially. When we call it a business district, but there's no formal mechanism or structure in place for them to pay into and decide and have resource and funding to support what some of their goals are. So I understand also there was a survey that staff sent. So would that also be included in the next update coming or is that, do you have that information now? We're going to, yeah, we're going to go through each of the recommendations of some detail and provide that survey data. Okay, and I think that's it for now that I just wanted to comment on. Thank you. Council Member Brown to record. Thank you, I'll make my comments afterwards, but I did want to ask, I appreciate the update on outdoor dining and all of the work that you have been doing. I just can't thank you enough. There are particular needs for different configurations and different store or restaurant owners. It's incredible the amount of work that you've put in to make that work. And I just wanted to ask, given the number of applications, do you feel like you've been able to work through the folks who want to move forward with a permanent setup? Or are there still kind of problematic ones or a group of them? Where is that at? I'd love to hear a little bit about that. Yeah, great question. So we do still have some that we're working through. So the five that I mentioned of the pre-approved, those are the ones that we've got set and they're ready to go. The remaining seven of those, there's some challenges in terms of ADA access and we determined that all of our roads have different cambers to them and that makes it really challenging to pour a four inch concrete slab and have it not be high above the sidewalk. So we've been working through that and just navigating that with the businesses and so being flexible in terms of how we're getting them through that finish line, the retrofits just working through and making sure that they have the resources, information that they need to make those changes. So yeah, there are still some where we're seeing, figuring out what that path is for them but we are making some good headway. And yeah, 19, it's pretty incredible and it's really exciting to see that those businesses wanted to take it on. That's almost all of the ones that we had in the temporary. So I think that's just been really nice to see and fun to work through even if it's a little stressful sometimes with those road hikes. If I could, we've kitted around for 13 months now because it's my hobby horse about Midtown. You win, you win. The reason I say that is a couple of things. I think what you have done with regard to the marketing strategy about Midtown is actually quite helpful. And so on a going forward basis, you'll never hear me again make fun of Midtown for a reason. Not because I decided to give up on it but because you've convinced me that there is a designation in our community that makes sense with a community, excuse me, with a business community that they themselves self identify that way. And so I think that is quite good but I want you to know that 13 month running joke is now ended on my part. You win, I lose but for a good reason. So thank you very much for your very fine work on this. Back to you. Okay, now we're going to go just into a little detail on each of the recommendations. Yeah, so I'm starting off in terms of the placemaking recommendations. I was mentioned earlier with some of the council members comments around the alleyways. I think that where we're looking at with this is what are our public spaces in the downtown that are maybe underutilized and can have some additional activation. So there's an image here of Pearl Alley when Stripe and some of the adjacent businesses were doing events during the pandemic and just seeing this alleyway completely transformed and having people being able to enjoy it and spend time with it, looking at where we can duplicate those types of activities in some of our other alleys. They also have the festoon lighting which is something that the city and the businesses work together to fund and install. And so we do have some funding available that we could look at adding some of that lighting into the additional alleyways. And that's something we want to work on getting moved forward in this year. Similarly, Fraser Lewis Lane, had a lot of great success activating that with outdoor dining during the pandemic. And so looking at, you know, there's a new restaurant that's open there, seeing if they want to be able to expand into that alleyway or looking at other potential uses there. And then I provided an example of sort of some more passive activations. We have excellent murals already in our downtown. Other cities, you know, employ sort of these photomural opportunities. This is from my hometown. It's like a tour when I was visiting for the holidays. And so they have this Monarch. You can see I'm closest on the right where people can go up and take photos in front of it and look like they're a Monarch butterfly. Just fun things like that or opportunities. And just wanted to add here that, you know, Rebecca mentioned, we already have some funding in our budget. We have a downtown alley CIP line item that we've been holding for several years. We just haven't had the capacity to move that forward to the timing with some of the improvements and the coordination with the other departments is right for this year. And with your council direction, we do have that funding at a minimum. We want to put the festoon lighting, as Rebecca mentioned, in the alleys. We do, and this is also with some feedback from council member Bruner, want to do and make sure we are, and that's where I think this mural from Riverside comes in as well, sort of right sizing and doing the right activation for each alley. So some of the feedback we had is, you know, there's like a quiet zone in Pearl Alley. And Plaza Lane, thank you, Plaza Lane. And so just being sensitive to the businesses and the residents, the different users of those areas and making sure we're doing that community outreach and have, you know, a public engagement plan prior to us moving forward with whatever activation and place making we're doing in each of those areas. And then we also have a specific area that we've been working with the downtown association that they really brought forward as one of their priority areas, you know, next to new leaf in that center area, that public space. So that would be another area that, in addition to the alleyways that we would be looking to engage in some activation and place making over the next year. And then moving over to the Midtown area and looking at the city owned parking lot. It's called lot 32, but I know that we've spoken with council members in the past around the Midtown Plaza or something, you know, that can really be a more permanent public space in that area. So we've had a lot of success with the Midtown Fridays events. We're looking at bringing that back this summer, sort of a shorter time period, but still the awesome activities that event Santa Cruz puts forward. And then, you know, we're looking for some, you know, direction of, do we want to look at some more infrastructure that would create more of a permanent public space? You know, this picture is an example of the similar parking lot that's been turned into this more town square in Hayes Valley in San Francisco. And so this is ritual coffee that operates out of a shipping container converted into, you know, a kiosk. And so looking at are there ways that we could do some of this infrastructure in the Midtown parking lot and lot 32, but that would take some investment in terms of getting water and electricity and sewer and restrooms to be able to have these, you know, 24 seven activities. So seeing sort of what those costs would be and how we can move that forward. There's been a lot of interest and support in that and having a daily activation rather than just the weekends from the businesses. So looking to explore that further. And then on the vacant storefront, you know, we have had a really good grass sponsor what the current landscape is just because of tracking them through the pandemic. And so taking a deeper dive into where we currently stand, what's the current status of some of our longer standing vacancies, what are maybe the barriers to getting them least. Some of them are still in shell capacity. They don't have bathrooms or maybe be a very big investment for a smaller business to take on. And so they're just waiting for that larger potential tenant and where are ways where we could step in and maybe help reduce those barriers or help incentivize them to make those improvements so that they can be more easily leased. I think those are some of the things that we'll be exploring. Also sort of the beautification side are there window graphics that we could put up temporarily that maybe make it a more attractive and do some of that marketing messaging of shop local, shop Santa Cruz or downtown Santa Cruz branding or things like that. There's a photo here from Los Gatos they have these really cute little cat graphics that they put up on some of their vacant store fronts and just sort of create some more seamless experience or maybe not as eye catching as an empty window it maybe has whatever conditions inside. So exploring those things and then also being able to support and show that there is business activity coming in. Sometimes downtown Pacific Avenue right now you could walk down there and think that there's a lot of vacancies but there's actually a lot of those spaces that are currently leased and they're doing their TI's or their tend improvements or they're waiting for their permits or in their various stages. And so while they're an empty store front now there is something coming and so being able to promote and celebrate these things that are coming maybe with some graphics that advertise for them. Just some examples that we've seen and we wanna look at some more best practices there. And then a large piece of it too as Council Member Kalantar Johnson mentioned looking at how can we address some of the maintenance issues that we have. Sometimes properties are not well maintained there's broken windows or graffiti or repeated issues. And so how can we strengthen sort of our code enforcement arm of things or be able to have some tools in place that can really help take care of those issues in a more streamlined and immediate fashion. So just looking at those different resources. Okay recommendation three is around planning for future use of the existing library space including a permanent home for the downtown farmers market. And some of you may recall the report we had Project for Public Spaces with Group 4 conduct in June of 2021. And that ended in a report to Council it was a pretty intensive community engagement process. And it ended in a report which Council accepted which basically narrowed it down to three preferred options. And they all included public space, affordable housing. And Civic Plaza Park which should also be a home for the farmers market. But it's a concept at this point. And so we kind of you accepted the report and we moved forward on the project. Now here we are three years later we're still working on the project but I think it is time we're getting a lot of questions. I know Council definitely fields a lot of questions about what is the status of this process? I will say for the last three years we last three years, yeah actually last three years we have been going through a process particularly in the last two years with the farmers market board and the farmers market leadership. And so we did approve an MOU with the farmers market board that it has us focusing first on the temporary location. So we've been working pretty actively over the last year. And I'll just show you those of temporary layouts for the farmers market for an on street activation and some combination that we're vetting of on street and off street for temporary home. And when we say temporary that's at least probably two years could be a little longer. Once we need to start for the staging for the downtown library affordable housing project we will need to make sure we have a home that works for the farmers market. So we've been vetting these with their vendors with their food trucks in various areas we have a third one that we're also looking at that's a, you know has some additional challenges but it'd be super cool. We're not quite ready to show that one at this point but these are two that we're actively vetting right now. We also have one of the sites for temporary and potentially also for permanent that's been fully vetted with conceptual renderings. This is just one of the many renderings that we have and this is on lot seven. Definitely the farmers market board while this will work for them is at least while there's construction going on downtown is not their ideal preferred site because of construction staging activity. They really are excited about being closer to the city hall campus and the library campus and the idea of being included in the reuse of the existing library site is something that really appeals to them. And so one of the directions that we have is that action two is working with the farmers market leadership stakeholders and community input is really stepping up. Once we finalize those temporary layouts and figure out where they're going for the temporary is to really switch gears and go to both action one and two where we then pick up those concept plans where we left off re-engage the community on what does the future of this of where the library is now look like and engage the farmers market in vetting including that permanent home there as well as other potential options. So those are our next steps around those. We don't have that level of specificity in our ED strategy. So that's also why it's one of the recommendations here is to include that in that work plan. And then recommendation four really comes in the acknowledgement of how much downtown is changing how much has changed just even in the last couple of years. And one of the things we've noticed as these construction projects have gone forward is how important it is for us to be communicating with the businesses, with the developers with DTA and DMC our partners or organizational partners in the downtown of what's happening in these changes whether it's just from transportation, construction impacts to how are we going to actually integrate the new downtown residents into the downtown environment. So we have some very specific actions that we want to work on including making sure residents know about all of our amazing businesses and giving businesses an opportunity to have promotions for residents as well. And then continuing to communicate. It's just, we realize that we can't under communicate about the impacts of road impacts construction. Specifically when we look at the interim operations plan for Metro for our Pacific Station North project how important it is to make sure the businesses understand when we're changing for two years the direction of the traffic and that buses are gonna be on street how important it is for them to know that. So that will be ongoing but we don't have currently have specific direction or recommendations in our ED strategy and it's just, it's very important. Okay and then recommendation five is Midtown Business District. So thank you. So this is something that we've sort of been building to I really have to give credit to the Midtown Business Association this group very informal group of business owners on Soquel Avenue and Water Street that have really banded together and done cooperative marketing and done a lot of events together and really are trying to make a name for it and I think making a lot of progress which has been really exciting to define this commercial area and really carve it out as a destination in our community and so they don't get the same benefits that downtown businesses get. They don't have trash cans on the sidewalk or benches or pedestrian level lighting and so there's a lot of sort of streetscape improvements that could be made or different investments that could be made that are facilitated downtown through these improvement districts. So we wanna look at exploring that. We did some initial outreach with the businesses just last week to sort of present the idea and start getting at percolating in everyone's minds and sort of the process that we need to go through for this is really entails sort of hiring a consultant. The city can do that. The districts can do that. It does take a lift. There's different strategies for sort of how we fund that initial step and then it's a lot of stakeholder engagement talking with the businesses, understanding what services they want and are the priorities for them in that area, defining the geographic boundaries. I think that's something that's always been a conversation of where do these boundaries really make sense? There's an interesting business mix of a lot of auto related uses and then the traditional retail restaurants. Where does it make sense within that area to have a consistent boundary and make sure that you've got the businesses that wanna pay into this assessment. It's really a self driven thing. It's not something that the city is bringing to them as a city tax. It's really they're voting to tax themselves and create this assessment on themselves. So that's a lot of the piece. And then pulling that all together and deciding is this a go or no go? Is this something that we really wanna pursue and is there support from the city and stepping this up and from their fellow businesses and then going forward into the petition process and doing the actual vote. So there's a lot of legwork that's involved but we did sort of present some information. We did a rough survey. It's not been out there even a week. It'll be a week tomorrow, but we had some good representation with some of the most I'd say present businesses in the business association. So we've got 15 responses, majority business owners, three that are both business and property owners. We asked them to rank sort of what services they're most desiring in that area. They really ranked neighborhood beautification as a high. As I mentioned, they don't have a lot of the basic infrastructure that a commercial district usually has. So being able to have those supports, public safety, and then marketing sort of being those top three tools. And then I gave them the best of my ability in giving them an overview of these really complex districts and just sort of ask them, what is your initial feeling of what type of district do you think would be best? Overwhelmingly, Business Improvement District. This is heavily business respondents to the survey. And so, but I think it's a great testament that they feel that this is something that they would want to pursue. As you can see, question five, we did have a lot of very supportive responses, people that do want us to explore this path. And I think that the group that was in attendance in our outreach are sort of the champions that would be the ones to carry this on and promote it to the other businesses and help with that outreach and engagement. So it's a good sample size, I think just of where they're at right now and something that clearly they're in favor of us looking forward to. Okay, and so just wrapping up our last two recommendations are just to amend the economic development strategy to include these additional actions as recommended above into our eds. And then to return to council with an update on progress during the current fiscal year, including any related additional actions or recommendations needed for implementation and funding. So as Rebecca mentioned, for the business improvement district, the bid, we need to get more survey responses, more businesses so we can work with the Midtown Business Group on getting a more robust response and see where we land if it's still leaning towards a bid versus a property based. And then probably one of those next steps would be returning to you in the future with an action item to go out for a consultant and the project engineer to help us start drafting that what that bid looks like. The most of the other actions, at least for the current fiscal year can be achieved within our existing budgeted funds, including our CIP funds. So this would be one area that we would need to come back to you within the current fiscal year. Well, thank you very, very much as quite thorough and quite helpful. Questions from council members, we've done one round of this, we're going to take public comment then the matter will be back before us for an action. Any additional opening comments? Seeing, yes, please, Madam Vice Mayor. I do have one comment when you're talking about the place making, other things that I've seen in other communities and I know you and I have talked about it, some patriotic stuff around Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Fourth of July, or even holiday lights, a tree lighting, a menorah lighting, something like that, I think brings people out to and makes it a fun environment for just seasonal things. Thank you for that comment. Other comments before we hear from the public? Seeing none, we will now go out to the public, anyone who is with us in chambers wishes to comment on item 29, this would be your opportunity to do so. Ms. Bush, do we have anyone online who would like to comment? Nobody with their hand right. Very good. Last call, please, please come forward. Welcome. Good evening, sir. But as far as Santa Cruz is developing the economy of Santa Cruz, the first thing I would think is to lower the rent. I was talking to people today, yesterday, they said if the rent prices keep going up, they're gonna move to Watsonville, it's called Valley. If you lower the rent, like the square of foot per, you know, if you lower that, I think the gas price would come down. So what's, and number two, you have to deal with the unlicensed vendors out here. You have to have a better policy how to deal with those people. They're hurting the economy of Santa Cruz. Number three, you need a more police presence on the mall. Four, let's see, hand handlers. You gotta handle with them, deal with them. You get too aggressive. I mean, I'm a homeless person and there's no need for them to act the way they act. Okay, I mean, I'm just like one of them. And there's no need for them to act the way they act. And I think what's happening, Santa Cruz, I think everybody knows it. Santa Cruz is turning into a tourist trap or it is a tourist trap. You have to lower the rent because the people are moving out of Santa Cruz going to Watsonville and Scots Valley and Bonnie Dunne even, Belton. If you wanna attract business people to Santa Cruz, you have to lower the rent. If you lower the rent, it's gonna lower the gas prices. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Anyone else under oral communication? Excuse me, wish to testify on this item? We have someone online. Okay, we'll take the person online. Good evening and welcome to the city council meeting. Welcome, person online. Hi. Good evening, this is Judy Grunstra. And I've got a couple of thoughts about this as someone who participated in that revisioning for the library site process about three years ago. Now we're gonna do it all over again. So I hope you will read that report, including all the way to the end where people express their wishes for that site. Now, place making is something I've been reading a lot about over the past years. And there's also an additional concept of place keeping. That means to retain what we have here historically. And unfortunately, a lot of that is getting mowed down and cut down and paved over. I'll always think that the best place for a town commons would have been lot four. So now we're considering that on the library site. Now, there are problems there with the police department. They need access through that street. So how much of a public space that can be? We don't know. And a lot of, I totally support the farmers market, new ventures and new directions and expanded services. That'll be really great for this town. If they wanna reuse the library building, a lot of cities do reuse their existing buildings. I mean, I could see a food hall and all kinds of great food related things there along with the farmers market, but I'm not the one making the decisions. And let's not forget the antique fair. When you're talking about the farmers market, which was on lot four, I hope you'll remember that the antique fair also needs to be considered. Let's see, sorry for the scattered approach here, but I have a lot of assorted things to say. So just right about in San Francisco, they have a vacant to vibrant approach to revitalizing their vacant storefronts. I know, you know, I passed the written house building and see this brown paper in the windows. That's really terrible. Something should have been, you know, done to encourage them to put some sort of artwork in those big windows. I think I'm coming to the end of my thoughts here, but I look forward to a new farmers market location, some kind of common public space. And thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Gunstra. We appreciate your participation. Anyone else online, Ms. Bush? We'll take the next person online. Good evening. Welcome to the city council meeting. Thanks for letting me speak. This is Sonia McMorrin. I own homework in Midtown, and I just wanted to pop on to voice my support of trying to create a business district in Midtown. I think it's long overdue and the Midtown Business Association has been kind of trying to fill in voids where we can, but we really need a kind of more organized way of growing the neighborhood. I think Midtown has such an amazing possibility for growth. There's so many opportunities there. And I think over the last few years, especially with Midtown Fridays, we've seen what an amazing community space Midtown can be and how it can bring together the locals that live not only in the neighborhood, but around the county. And I think that if we had a more organized group to create, you know, real change and really improve the area for the community, it would be beneficial both for locals and for visitors. So I just wanted to type in with my support. And I also wanted to just say that Rebecca Unit is a gem and I love her so much and she is such a hard worker and I just really, really enjoy working with her. Just so kind of you. Thank you. We feel similarly. Thank you. Anyone else online, Ms. Bush? Yes. We'll take the next person online. Good evening. Welcome to the council meeting. Good evening. Hi, good evening. Well, first of all, thank you for doing this plan and especially I'm very excited to hear about the Midtown Business District. As the previous caller mentioned, there's a real camaraderie amongst businesses on SoCal and water and they've had to do that because they haven't really had a formal structure but it's been going on for years. And the other interesting thing is that there's a certain vibe about Midtown from downtown. And I, since I've lived on the east side for a long time I'm probably a little bit biased here but I used to go downtown all the time. But a lot of times now I work very late and when I'm looking to see, you know, just to wander around or go downtown, and a lot of the businesses aren't open but there are a lot of businesses that are open on the east side up to 11 o'clock. So there's a lot of eating activity already happening. And also there's a lot of new restaurants and, you know, breweries and such. And it's inviting a lot of people to walk from the neighborhood and the biking parties I've seen where people are, you know, groups of 30 people are heading over for a pizza for a big birthday party. So there's a lot of really interesting activity that's happening in Midtown, it doesn't happen in downtown. One thing that the businesses are very vulnerable on though is that because there's a lack of structure, you know, like they mentioned benches and trash cans and any kind of patrols, a lot of the activity in downtown was pushed into east side when they started pushing people out and the businesses weren't prepared for that. So they had to sometimes lock their doors and then invite people in to the businesses rather than having the doors open and things like that. I just wanted you to be aware of that. Anyway, I just also wanted to mention one more thing. When you do your plan, remember that it was originally called Brand Supporting Business District and it was called the East Side Business District. So there's been a lot of legacy there and I hope you can bring some of that rich historical context into the Midtown area and not just business only. I think it's a really wonderful area and a lot of wonderful business owners, many of them women own, so thank you very much. Well, thank you very much. Ms. Bush, anyone else online? Nobody else. Last call, anyone wish to provide input on this? Matter is back before the council. Council Member Watkins is recognized. Yes, thank you. I'll move the recommendation as presented in the staff report. I'll second. I'll second it a bunch, so I won't. Okay, there we go. This is second by Council Member Newsom. You may open on your motion. Great, thank you. I just want to thank everybody for taking the time to have this presentation to go through where we've been and also outline some of the direction that's being proposed this evening. I know there's immediate needs that we always have to take care of at the city level and there's often things that come up that require a diversion of our attention to be fixed. But what this looks like for me is outlining what we want to see in our community, what activation looks like and what makes Santa Cruz such an amazing place to live, no matter where you are. For us in Midtown East Side, but to every district we represent that this is outlining how to move forward. And we also know that a thriving downtown is a really great reflection of a community's vitality. And so we want to see all of our downtown thriving. And it's so great to see how it is already and where we can go moving forward. So I know that this is a big lift. I also know that we have limited resources. And so I know in seven we have coming up if there's adjustments or needs, that those are shared with the council. And if this is truly a priority, then we need to have those difficult decisions at the budget level and how we want to invest in seeing some of these things through. So kudos to you and the work that you do. I know it's expansive. And if you need more support, I guess that's what I'm saying, then let us know. Anyways, I'll leave my comments there and just appreciate the meeting and the discussion. Thank you council member. Other comments on the motion? The vice mayor is recognized. I just would like to add a friendly amendment to recommendation five to include Westside as well. Yeah. Good. Acceptable. Acceptable. Okay, very good. Let, pull this up. Let's make sure we know exactly for Ms. Bush where we're going to insert that. I believe that it is on item... Oh, do you have it? Okay, great. It's item, exactly. I believe it is item five, correct? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I see. It would be under E, one E. So it'll be Eastside, Midtown and Westside. Okay. Without objection. That'll be added to the motion. V