Good morning and welcome to the September or January 11th, 2022. It's not that far in the year or a new year yet. January 11th, 2022, first calendar year meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Please call the roll. Supervisor Koenig. Here. Friend. Here. Coonerty. Here. Caput. Here. McPherson. Here. Thank you Chair, you have a quorum. Thank you. We will have a moment of silence and then the Pledge of Allegiance. The allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for its establishment, under your honor, indivisible with liberty and justice. We have consideration of late additions to the agenda, additions and deletions to the consent and regular agendas. Chair McPherson, we have no late additions and no corrections today. Very good. Do we have any announcement by board members of items to be removed from the consent to the regular calendar? Seeing none. We'll open it up to item number five. This is a time for public comment. Any member of the public may address the board for two minutes. Public comments directed to an item listed on today's agenda, closed session items and yet to be heard on the regular agenda or a topic, not on the agenda, but under the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors. Welcome. It's nice to see you. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to go. Good to go. Good morning. Good morning, Chairperson McPherson and members of the board. My name, as most of you know, is David Brody. I'm the executive director of First Five Santa Cruz County. I'm here today to thank you for proclaiming January, 2022 as positive parenting awareness month, the 10th annual in our county. Positive Parenting Awareness Month started right here in Santa Cruz County some 10 years ago and since then has been replicated in counties across the state. And we're really excited to let you know that we believe very soon the state legislature will pass for the third year in a row a resolution, ACR 112 proclaiming positive parenting awareness month in January, 2022 statewide. The growing movement to recognize the importance of positive parenting builds on our increasing understanding of the tremendous importance that parents and caregivers, for parents and caregivers to develop warm and nurturing relationships with their children from the earliest years. It also builds on our growing awareness of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis and racial injustices that have only exacerbated the economic insecurity, mental health challenges and other trauma faced by children and families in our community. As recognized in your proclamation, positive parenting is one of the most important, protective factors that can help our children build resiliency and overcome these challenges in the long term. At first five, we are proud to manage the Triple P program in partnership with your health services agency, the human services department, the probation department and many community partners. Since 2010, we have collectively served over 40,000 diverse parents who have benefited from Triple P's high quality evidence-based workshops, classes and resources. And of course, Triple P alone isn't enough, which is why we are so proud to partner with the county, with all of you on the Thrive by Three initiative, on our growing complement of home visiting services in our county and everything this does to support children and families. So in conclusion, I did just here to say that we are very grateful to the community. We are very grateful to all of you for once again proclaiming in Santa Cruz County, January 2022 positive parenting awareness month. Thank you very much. Mr. Brody, I want to say thank you to the designee from the County Board of Supervisors to attend the first five meetings. What the first five has done is truly remarkable. And what they do to serve our parents, our kids, everybody included. It is just truly an amazing list of accomplishments that you have. I hope that people can recognize that more fully and look at your annual review, your annual report. It's truly an amazing... Recording in progress. Amazing accomplishments that you've been able to do. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Brody. Excuse me, I'm trying to record this. You want to get it ready and have somebody else speak? Good morning. My name is James J. Lin Whitman. It's January 11th, 2022. I would have stood in a moment of silence, but I am not going to stand to pledge allegiance to the corporate flag of the United States, which only has jurisdiction in 10 square miles of Washington, DC. The Board of Supervisors does not support the people. You guys support the corporations. And that's really sad. There are so many devastating things going on in this County that are affecting the health and safety and well-being of the adults and particularly the children. I'm not sure, I wish I had more positive things to say about this Board, but I don't. Thanks. Thank you, Chair, Board. Michael Beaton, Director of General Services. I would like to introduce today Chief Nate Armstrong, who began his career in Southern California as a reserve firefighter and then worked for the Forest Service and local government before being hired by CalFIRE in 2007. Nate worked in Monterey County for 10 years for CalFIRE. In that time, he was assigned as a paramedic, a truck operator and captain in the unit's emergency command center and training captain. Chief eventually promoted to battalion chief in 2015 on the Monterey Peninsula, where he oversaw the Cyprus and Cormel Heights cooperative agreement with CalFIRE. In his time, he also led the unit's Ocean and Sofplot Rescue programs. In 2017, Chief transferred to the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit of CalFIRE and worked in North Santa Cruz County, covering everything from the Saratoga Summit, the San Lorenzo Valley, and the North Coast. In 2018, Chief was promoted to the Assistant Chief of Administration, overseeing the finance and personnel functions, and then promoted to Deputy Chief in 2020, overseeing the state's operations in Santa Cruz County Fire. With the retirement of unit chief, Larkin, Chief Armstrong was appointed to the new unit chief of Santa Cruz, San Mateo unit. So it is my pleasure to formally introduce Chief Armstrong as your County Fire Chief and unit chief of CalFIRE. Welcome. Good to see you, Mr. Armstrong. You too, sir. Thank you, Director Beaton, for the introduction. Good morning, Chair McPherson and members of the board. Thank you very much, as Director Beaton said, been settling in for about 60 days now. So just really starting to get my feet under me. One is the new CalFIRE unit chief and all the ancillary roles that come with that. One of those roles being your Santa Cruz County Fire Chief. So just really quick, because I know we're just in public comment, not agendized, but just to give you a quick update. As of eight days ago, we finally, on the CalFIRE side, transitioned out of peak fire season. So went down to that base staffing and with that comes the period where Santa Cruz County picks up funding of some of the staff on our CalFIRE engines to maintain that fire protection in the unincorporated areas of the county. So our staff, CalFIRE and Santa Cruz County remain engaged outdoing defensible space inspections for residents as well as fuel reduction efforts throughout the winter. What we're really just trying to stress to everybody is the next fire season is right around the corner. So trying to get folks ready for that. Hopefully I'll be back with you folks in a couple of months and let you know an update on fire season and where we stand with that. But in the meantime, please don't ever hesitate to reach out. Do you have any questions, concerns, anything that I can help out with as the County Fire Chief? So unless there's any questions today, I'll give you guys back the rest of the morning. I just want to say welcome, Chief Armstrong and thank you for your cooperative efforts with CalFIRE, very much appreciated, very much needed, now more than ever. And thank you for your efforts and being ahead of the game, getting ahead of the game of what we need to do to protect us from some awful fires that might be in the offing. Really, we really appreciate the work that you do and the cooperative effort that you have with the county. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Look forward to the challenge and working with you, fine folks. Have a great day. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you, sir. Any other comments from the public? And one more here. Good morning, Board. My name is Steve Palmosano. I'm the Assistant Director of Public Works for the City of Watsonville. And I'm here to comment on item 13. I can't stay for that. I have to get down to Watsonville, but I want to congratulate you on starting your Climate Action Plan process and want to let you know the city is fully supportive of that. We're here to collaborate and partner with you and we're really excited about what you're doing. And you have great staff. We've already been talking with them quite a bit and kind of working on regional efforts together. So a couple of things I wanted to mention. One, thank you, Carlos Palacios and the Board members who worked on 3CE because we finished our Climate Action Planning work and adopted in October. And that was one of the biggest factors in reducing our emissions was moving to 3CE. So huge, huge effort, thank you. A couple of things that we found, I want to encourage the Board to not study too much but to move quickly to implementation because we know the answer is in short. One is 40% of our emissions come from automobiles and vehicles, so moving to electric vehicles is really urgent. The other piece we found is heating and water heating in homes is the other 40% of our emissions. And so to move and address those issues is it's a huge regional, even national issue. We found for the city of Watsonville it's gonna cost about $400 million to convert our homes from gas to electric. And so one of the things I wanted to urge the Board is to work with us to push on the state for a goal of carbon neutrality by 2030 and then also push for significant amounts of funding. We really need to work as a region, work together and I want to encourage those efforts. So finally, we didn't really get to address agriculture in our plan because it's mostly outside of our city limits. So there's great potential for reducing emissions in agriculture by changing practices. There's also a lot of environmental issues that need to be addressed. So anyway, thank you so much for your work on this and we look forward to collaborating with you. Thank you again for your efforts and for everybody else that's involved with the triple CE or Central Coast Community Energy. It's really a step forward and we really appreciate your efforts and thank you very much. Great, thank you. All right. I guess. It's also in the audience that would like to speak. Is somebody on the phone? Yes, I have multiple speakers. Danielle Loho, your microphone is available. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great. Good morning Chair and Supervisors. My name is Deena Lojas. I'm the Chief Strategy and Impact Officer for Santa Cruz Community Health. Our mission is to improve the health of our patients and the community and advocate the feminist goals of social, political and economic equality. Driven by a 48 year commitment to healthcare as a human right, Santa Cruz Community Health is a leading nonprofit provider for high quality, affordable and comprehensive health services in English and Spanish to all ages, gender identities, ethnicities, abilities and sexual orientations, regardless of their ability to pay. We are healthcare for the homeless grantee and we're recognized as a tier three, which is the highest level patient centered medical home by the National Center for Quality Assurance. We currently serve close to 12,000 Santa Cruz County residents annually, 2,000 over 2,000 of which are unhoused and over 500 unhoused children. I have some really exciting news to share today. In addition to our Santa Cruz Women's Health Center which has been operating since 1974 and the East Cliff Family Health Center operating since 2014, we're about to open the doors of our third and newest clinic which will be located in the San Lorenzo Valley. That clinic is gonna be opening on January 24th, 2022. We plan to begin with a three medical provider offering, three medical providers offering primary care services at 30 hours a week. And that said, we're prepared and anticipate to grow into a full-time practice as demand indicates. We're really excited and proud to bring quality healthcare closer to home for the residents of San Lorenzo Valley. Thank you for your time today. Thank you and I can say all of us, I'm responding to every speaker, I guess, but we're tremendously excited in the San Lorenzo Valley for the opening of the Ben Lomond Health Center. The ribbon cutting is gonna be Monday, January 24th at 9 a.m. We welcome anybody to be there. It's tremendous news for the San Lorenzo Valley. Is there anyone else on the phone? Blair Beekman, your microphone is available. Hello, my name is Blair Beekman. I'm from the Santa Clara County and Alameda County areas. I wanted to attend this meeting for item eight today and I may have to leave a little early. Hopefully I can offer a bit of public comment at this time on item eight and good luck on how you review item eight today. To first offer, I guess just I'm trying to learn through media and other reporting that February can be a time, an important time to review the current state of Omicron virus and where local communities are at with the Omicron. And what we can expect through February and for the rest of the winter of 2021-22. Good luck in having some sort of agenda item in February to talk about the subject. And so we can be clear where things are at. It's hopeful that it can start to be on the decline in February, but keep up the good public health efforts through January. So we can hopefully have good reports by February and onward. With 45 seconds to quickly offer a few words on item eight, good luck on the concepts of public review, community oversight and public oversight. I'm interested if surveillance and technology, community surveillance and technology can also be a part of the future of community oversight of police efforts. Just to simply mention the good practices here, hopefully can keep your minds aware of good practices of community oversight for the future of community technology. Thanks a lot. Well, in user one, your microphone is available. As a reminder to star six, two and mute on the phone. This is Marilyn Garrett and Broadband. 4G, 5G represents a clear and present danger. I quote from one document here out of numerous documents, evidencing biological radiation harm from wireless microwave radiation. Over a 20 year period, I have publicly provided you such resources. This is titled 5G, great risk for the EU, US and the international health. Compelling evidence for eight distinct types of great harm caused by electromagnetic field exposures and mechanisms that harm causes harm, causes them. It's written and compiled by Martin L. Paul, expelled P-A-L-L-P-H-D, professor emeritus of biochemistry and basic medical sciences. Here's the summary. We know that there is a massive literature providing a high level of scientific certainty for each of eight pathophysiological effects caused by non-thermal microwave frequency EMF exposures. This is shown in from 12 to 35 reviews on each specific effect with each review listed in chapter one, providing a substantial body of evidence on the existence of each effect. Such EMF attack our nervous systems, including our brains, leading to widespread neurological neuropsychiatric effects and possibly many other effects. This nervous system attack is of great concern. We need to stop this 5G, and instead the county is proliferating it. You do a great job representing the telecom corporation in disregard of public health. It needs to stop and I'll end with a quote of Chief Seattle. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the children of the earth. This we know, stop the microwave assault. Thank you. Last call for public comment. Peter Gelblum, your microphone is available. Thank you very much. I am speaking today on behalf of the Santa Cruz County chapter of the ACLU of Northern California. And I'm speaking on item eight only because I don't know that I can stay until that item comes up on the regular discussion. First of all, we really applaud the board for recognizing the need for independent oversight. I'm given how important the sheriff's office is in this county and that the acknowledge as shown in the criminal justice commission report, there is no presently no independent oversight of the sheriff's office. Our concern is that the agenda packet proposes only the creation of an inspector general program. As you probably know, AB 1185 also authorizes the creation of an oversight board composed of civilians. We believe it's crucial to create both a civilian oversight board and an inspector general's office that would work with the civilian board. This is important for several reasons, including that community participation is vital to give the oversight structure that is developed legitimacy in the eyes of the public so that it's not just perceived as somebody working hand in glove with the sheriff's office. Second, direct involvement of diverse community members is vital to providing the oversight board, the board of supervisors and the sheriff's office diverse viewpoints on the actions of the sheriff's office. And finally, only a civilian board can hold public hearings to provide the necessary transparency to the work of the oversight structure. Because of all that, we urge you to direct staff to develop a scope of work and issue an RFP that includes a civilian oversight board, not just an inspector general. At a minimum, staff should solicit input from a broad range of the community and stakeholders in deciding which type of 1185 oversight structure the board should adopt. And again, I thank you for your thoughtful consideration of this vital issue. Thanks very much. Eli, your microphone is available. Good morning, my name is Annie and I live in Watsonville. I would like to reiterate everything that Peter just said. It is very important for us to have a civilian oversight board. Watsonville recently had an ad hoc committee that was not diverse and was not equitable. And we can see the problems arise when you have people that work closely with the police department and it's not diverse or equitable in voices, how easily that can get nowhere. So in order for it to be constructive, I completely agree that it's very important for it to be diverse in civilian voices and not only with people that work closely with the sheriff departments themselves. I also want to ask for resources to be used in Watsonville for our unhoused community. The city in Watsonville has been pushing back that they have no resources, there is no shelters open, there is no space at the Salvation Army, there are no churches available with spaces and they say to our unhoused neighbors that if they want any help, they have to go to the county. Then when we go to the county, the county says you have to go to the city. So there's a lot of back and forth on who it is that can help. Our Pajaro River unhoused residents who have been trying to keep themselves safe during this winter by creating warming centers with no help from the city, no help from the county. Everything that has been raised, all of the money that we have for food and shelter has been provided strictly from the community members in Watsonville and in Santa Cruz County. So I'm here to ask the Board of Supervisors to stop this back and forth between the city and the county if, let us know who is that has the resources to help our unhoused community. Where did the money that we get from COVID specifically for our unhoused community go? Because you can't be telling people in Watsonville, oh, we have resources in the county but you have to go all the way to Santa Cruz. It's not viable for people that don't have transportation and work in Watsonville and have doctor's appointments in Watsonville. So I'm asking for more support for our unhoused neighbors. Thank you. Thank you. Karina Moreno, your microphone is available. Second call for Karina Moreno. Please accept the unmute. They're not responding. Okay, anybody else? There are no other speakers. No other speakers, okay. All right, we will come to the Board of Supervisors now for action on the consent agenda. First District Supervisor Monocloniak, any comments? Thank you, Chair. I just want to do on item 43, 44 and 45 in regards to applications for state no place like home funding and authorizing the health services agency to provide mental health substance use disorder and housing supportive services in collaboration with Midpen and Housing Matters at three sites at 314 Jesse Street, 119 Coral Street and 1500 Capitola Road. I just want to appreciate how important these permanent supportive housing units will be to our community. It's nearly a hundred and it's about 141 total units. It'll make a pretty sorts of services. And I want to thank the nonprofits involved, Housing Matters and Midpen Housing for bringing these projects to fruition. You know, in particular, Director Kramer, working to raise $9.3 million for the project on the Housing Matters campus and all the community members that have donated to that project. It's going to make a huge impact. So thank you. And then on items 54 and 56, two road related issues which I think are worth noting, particularly in the context of our discussion later today on item 13, around the climate adaptation plan. So first I want to acknowledge Public Works for the work they continue to do, working through the backlog of storm damage repair from the 2016-17 storms. So it's item 54 and it's great to see these repairs on Laurel Glen moving forward. But I do think that we are going to need more attention on storm water management and culvert management moving forward so that intense storms like the one in 2016-17 which we're likely to see more of don't cause quite so much damage in the future. And then on item 56, approving specifications for the 2022 Measure D resurfacing projects. Measure D has made a huge difference in our ability to repair our county roads. I want to again thank county voters for approving it. But I think we are ultimately just provides about a quarter of the funds we need even to maintain the current state of county roads. And so our board working with voters is going to have to find additional funding sources but to ensure that we maintain our county road network. That's all, thank you. Thank you. Second District Supervisor, Zach Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I'll just have a couple of brief comments just like to welcome a couple new commissioners. I'd like to welcome Rebecca Downing to Metro. She's an Aptos resident. She'll provide an outstanding voice to Metro on behalf of the county in Fay Levinson to the Disabilities Commission. On item 46, I'm just excited to see additional funding coming for improved oral health and oral health access across our community. Dientist does remarkable work in our community and appreciates seeing the work on the county's behalf to fund some of these nonprofits who are doing work on oral health. And I'll just second some comments that Supervisor Koenig made in regards to Measure D appreciation every single year of the voters supporting Measure D. And also by the way, it was the Measure D funding that made us competitive on this new congested corridors funding that's coming into the community that will make pretty significant investments for bike, pedestrian and metro access along Soquel as well as on the pedestrian over-crossings at Chanticleer and Marvista as well as the highway improvements. So having this local funding can't be overstated about its importance for also qualifying for state and federal funds. And so even though on a year to year basis we recognize that it doesn't do enough to actually maintain the roads, not having that funding would also mean that we would not qualify for a lot of the state and federal funding that's just now starting to come through which can make a pretty significant difference in our local transportation network. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Third District Supervisor Ryan Coonerty. Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are a lot of items and a lot of good work being done by the County as always. I wanna focus on item number 49 which is the Parks Department leading an effort on a North Coast grant or commission to work on addressing issues on the North Coast and hopefully put us in a good position to both do good planning but also be competitive for grants that will help provide the infrastructure necessary to keep visitors and locals safe and when they're utilizing the amazing resources on the North Coast and I wanna thank the Parks Department for their efforts. Thank you. Fourth District Supervisor Greg Caput. Thank you, Chairman McPherson. Item just two quick comments on item 30 and 31. I wanna welcome Karina Moreno as the fourth district representative on the Women's Commission and also thank and welcome as the reappointment of Nancy Bilicic, Robert Tanner and Edward Banks to the Pajaro Valley Public Cemetery District Board of Trustees. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to make a couple of comments on item number 22, the general fund projections. I wanna thank our CEO and the budget team for this report and while we know things can always improve the projected 6.8 million deficit for the coming fiscal year is that's concerned. I've appreciated our board's work and our CEO's cautious approach to the budget. I look forward to a full midterm or mid-year report in February. Yesterday, Governor Gavin Newsom presented a $286 billion budget for the state that includes a $45 billion surplus. How that might play in regard to local governments, counties and cities in particular is unknown but we have, we're dependent on it a lot in the last few years and it's going to end sometime but we hope that it can be applied to help local governments in this next year and the next fiscal year as well. I know item number 38 has also been mentioned, the Parks and Recreation Commission Annual Report. I wanna thank members of the commission and staff for its work, its excellent work and challenge. These challenging two years, the parks have been very, very important in these stay at home, closed doors and so forth. They've been more important than ever and the list of topics that they have, the Parks Commission has tackled is very impressive and we know the good work will continue and I'm pleased to note that we were able to generate additional funding for parks through our feed policy this last year. We know now that more than ever that the value of having parks system with our outdoor recreation opportunities is invaluable to the people of Santa Cruz County. Like some of the others, Supervisor Koenig and others, the items 43, 44 and 45, the no place like home projects. I wanna thank the health services for its work on to secure the no place like home funding for these important projects. I, maybe it is 141, I thought it was about 225 affordable units that we're gonna be involved but it's somewhere, it's gonna be a significant addition. We have a lot more to do in this regard as do every other community in the state of California to address the housing needs for the, to provide more affordable units. Also on item 56, I would like to mention also to thank you as always our public works department and the team that they have for measure, our measure D repair list each year. We've made tremendous progress with this funding stream approved by voters to more than two thirds of them in 2016 and Senate bill one funds in the state also helped address our deferred repairs which get into the hundreds of millions of dollars. This comes in addition to increase funding through the regional transportation commission of $2 million for our county road system as well as FEMA and the federal highway dollars to address storm change. The safety and accessibility of our roads is critical and especially in our rural areas and I'm glad we're able to make as many investments as possible. The value of having those road improvements especially in the rural areas of our county including my district of San Juan's Valley in particular, Ryan Coon, Supervisor Koenig Koenig's in the first district, Supervisor Coonerty's in the third district. The value of escape routes and updated repairs for our roads is as critical as ever. The evacuation that we had that we had to go through there was not one fender bender in that but our roads have been in disrepair just from these last couple of months of storm damage that we've had to many of our roads and we're gonna have to use it, use them or update them and improve them more than ever. Also, as was mentioned, it was in the passage of Measure D was really critical because we became what they call a self-help county. We were taxing ourselves to improve our transportation network. The state recognizes that to those counties that have passed their own self-help transportation measures and we are able to do much, much more in that regard. So with that, I'd entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda. I'll move approval of the consent agenda. Second. Second, call the roll please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Okay. And finally, we're gonna move to item number seven. The appointment of the chair and vice chair. And I wanna take this opportunity to thank the board and the community for the opportunity to serve as chairman of the County Board of Supervisors during this past year. It certainly was a challenging year, as was 2020 with the pandemic and the CZU fire and the ongoing homeless issue that we have. 2021 has been defined by our efforts to recover from both those challenges, though we are by no means done with that work. And we also made improvement progress in the creation of more affordable housing, which was just mentioned, increasing the resilience of our water supply, deepening the investment in our roads and parks, and doing the best we can to address the needs of our fire survivors. And the response and the effort that our health services and emergency care people in this county have done for this last year is just over the top. And I can't thank everybody enough for the extra efforts that they have put in to make our community and our county safe. I look forward to the year ahead and welcome vice chair Koenig into his new role as our chairman of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Koenig. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. I also wanna thank the community and this board for the opportunity to serve as your chair this coming year. Look forward to everything we will accomplish together. I will strive to be a chair that respects the voice of the minority, the will of the majority, and makes efficient use of everybody's time. We're hitting, we can go to five. Supervisor Caput. Sure. I wanna thank Chairman McPherson for the past year. You've had quite a year.  I think you've had enough too. Normally being the chairman of the board is it's an honor and privilege. And it usually goes very smoothly, but the last couple of years have been extraordinary. And so hopefully years will be somehow going back to normal. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I'll say still Mr. Chair McPherson until we actually do the vote. I wanna echo the comments of my colleague, Supervisor Caput. This was an extremely difficult year to chair the board realistically speaking across the country what we're seeing. And it was no different here in Santa Cruz County. Sometimes some members of our community lost their better angels in regards to their interactions with the board and other members of the community in general. And you always showed a great amount of respect and deference to the community in this very difficult time. And we're able to bring us through this year in a very positive way. So I just wanna give credit to your leadership and also your compassionate empathy for even those that were expressing some disagreements with the board. You always showed a remarkable amount of respect and restraint and deserve credit for that Mr. Chair. And I just wanna add that I wanna appreciate Chair McPherson's not only past year which has been extraordinary but really a lifetime of public service that's benefited this community greatly been an effective voice in your district in the county and at the state level for our community. And it's been great to have you as our chair to representing our county both here but then also statewide and did a tremendous job. And I hope, let's hope for all of our sakes things reduce the, some of the pressures reduced and some of the issues are dealt with. And I look forward to working with Surveyser Koenig in this new role. Thank you. Is there any public comment on this item? There are no speakers via Zoom. Seeing none, a motion would be in order. So moved. Coonerty. Motion by Supervisor Coonerty. Second by Supervisor McPherson. Clerk, please call the roll. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, Mr. Passes unanimously. Thank you having been newly elected chair and Supervisor Friend having been elected vice chair. We will now move on to item eight. Presentation on the criminal justice council of Santa Cruz County. 2021 report and direct county staff to develop a scope of work that meets the requirements of assembly bill 1185 and issue a request for proposal or enter into contract with an independent police auditor as outlined in the memorandum of the sheriff corner. Supervisor Friend, you are the chair of the criminal justice council and I'd invite you to present some opening remarks. Thank you, Chair Koenig. I appreciate that. I have the honor of serving as the chair of the criminal justice council of Santa Cruz County and for those that aren't familiar with the criminal justice council, it was created by then district attorney Bob Lee in particular to address and coordinate youth related gang violence across our community. It has evolved to a broader understanding of dealing with criminal justice issues in general across our community, but it involves I think a remarkable broad section of the community. It has all of the police chiefs and the sheriff. It has city managers and the CAO's office representative represented local behavioral health and mental health. Departments are there, the DA, the public defender, local nonprofit leaders, head of local educational institutions as well as the mayor or designees of every local city. So it has a significant cross section. We decided this year to focus on law enforcement policies and procedures we actually believe, at least according to the White House and the National Association of Counties that our region is the first region in the country to take this type of region wide look at policies and procedures. And our goal wasn't to make any specific recommendations but instead to just provide a transparent look at law enforcement policies and procedures throughout the county in particular around use of force, although we also looked at technology and privacy related issues. We worked with Applied Survey Research which as you know is a nationally recognized survey research firm and they helped do an independent look at the policies along with us. We had an exceptionally transparent and open process with the local law enforcement leaders who willfully and transparently participated in this process. We had an ad hoc committee that included some members of the CJC as I had mentioned as well as some outside voices that were able to come in and also provide their expertise. And the end of it we produced a pretty easy to read report that all of you have received that takes a look at local law enforcement policies and procedures and at the end of it I'd asked every agency if they would be willing to present to their local elected bodies to take a look at the findings specific to their agency and to see whether those elected leaders had any comments or suggestions for improvements or the agencies themselves had any suggestions for improvements and the community had an opportunity to participate as well. I think one key takeaway on this was how remarkably progressive and aligned all local law enforcement agencies already were when you look across the country, most agencies don't already have most of the policies that we have in place in our county and that's something that we should commend both the local communities and law enforcement agencies for. Today I understand by looking at this item that the sheriff's is considering an independent inspector general component. I'd just like to acknowledge that the sheriff was one of the only agency was the actually the only agency that had initiated 21st century policing and as far as a lot of these use of force policies that came into light in particular around the George Floyd murder, his agency was actually had already implemented these policies five or six years in advance of that. And so it should be commended to the fact of our sheriff's progressive leadership but I appreciate the fact that he took a look at where there were holes within the CJC finding and today is here to have a discussion with us about that. Thank you, Mr. Thank you, Chair Koenig for that and I'd like to hand it over to Sheriff Hart now. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Morning, Chair Koenig, Board of Supervisors Jim Hart, Sheriff Corner. And today I'm going to give you a brief summary of the report that Supervisor Friend just spoke about that was formulated from a subcommittee with CJC and all four police departments and the Sheriff's Office had executive staff at the table during about a year long process to really examine our key policies, not our entire policy book, but the key policies particularly around use of force and technology acquisition and also oversight. And so I'm going to provide you a summary of that report and as Zach, our Supervisor Friend said that the report can be found on the criminal justice council's website. So we just wanted to look at the four local police departments and the Sheriff's Office. We didn't look at CHP, state parks, UCSC or fishing game because those are state agencies and those policies come out of Sacramento. So we looked at the five local jurisdictions and the purpose was to see where there was alignment and where there were gaps and if there was anything we could do to bridge some of those gaps if they existed. And again, it's not a comprehensive look at the entire policy book but it's just more around the critical issues. And as Supervisor Friend said, all agencies participated on their own. They, nobody was forced to do this work. And so I thought it was a really good thing that all five agencies are willing to come to the table and take a look at some of these critical issues. So some key takeaways are is that there's widespread policy alignment between the five jurisdictions of Santa Cruz County. Just about every policy regarding use of force, technology, release of information, the four police departments in the Sheriff's Office have modern up-to-date policies. And then for the agencies that don't have dedicated mental health liaisons working in their patrol groups, those agencies are very interested in the creation of some kind of independent agency that could respond to mental health related calls. And then as Supervisor Friend says, we believe that Santa Cruz County is the first county to take a regional look at policy alignment rather than jurisdictional look. And really, if an incident occurs in the city of Santa Cruz it should be handled the same way as it's handled in the county or in the city of Watsonville. So it's good to have that consistency. Moving on to an area of concern and we've seen remarkable cases across our state and country around use of force. Every agency in the county requires their officers or deputies to practice de-escalation techniques. Every agency has banned choke holds or carotid restraint. Every agency's policy requires that deputies or police officers have a duty to intervene. So if they see some kind of misconduct by another officer, they're obligated to intervene. Every agency has banned no knock warrants and also banned shooting at or from a moving vehicle. And all five agencies require that less lethal force options are used prior to deadly force. And also the policy, there's a policy that requires warning before deploying lethal force. Around technology, no agency in the county is using predictive policing or facial recognition. And then for the five agencies actually have a policy about technology acquisition, procedurally at the sheriff's office, if we're gonna examine a piece of technology that we are thinking about utilizing, we hold a 30 day public comment period, we hold a community meeting, and then I come to the board and provide you with information about that technology and then we make a decision on whether we're gonna use that or not. We've done that twice now with your board. And I remember when we put licensed plate readers on SoCal during a series of shootings that occurred near Dominican hospital up to 41st Avenue. And then we also, when we implemented our drone program, we had the 30 day public comment period, public meeting and we presented that information to your board as well. In terms of the militarization of the police, that's a, it's obviously a hot topic across the country. And there is a program called the federal 1033 program where the military gifts surplus equipment to local police jurisdictions. And so I'm happy to say, we haven't participated in that program, but I'm happy to say that every agency in the county does not participate in that federal program. And then lastly, on oversight, only one agency in the county has an actual oversight program and that's Santa Cruz Police Department. They have an independent auditor there, which they've had in place for many years. And the sheriff's office, there was some comments earlier that we have no oversight. We actually have the board and state of community correction oversees our correctional facilities, the grand jury inspects our correctional facilities annually and also anything else they want to involving the sheriff's office, I report to your board on critical issues. And I'm also elected, so I report directly to the voters. So I just agreed that there's no oversight. I think there is significant oversight. However, after a lot of thought and to be fully aligned with President Obama's 21st century policing platform that we adopted back in 2016, and also to be in compliance with Assembly Bill 1185, which is the sheriff's oversight bill that was passed back in 2020, which give independent police auditor examines sheriff's office use of force cases, complaints and critical incidents to make sure that those investigations are done thoroughly and fairly. So today I'm going to request that your board authorize staff from the county administrator's office to develop a scope of work so that a contract can be completed for an independent police auditor to perform sheriff's office oversight to begin services sometime in fiscal year 22, 23. That's my report. And I'm happy to answer any questions or listening to comments. Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff Hart. Thank you, Supervisor Friend. Are there any technical questions from members of the board? Mr. Chair, if I could. The, it is encouraging to see again that our sheriff's office and the police agency throughout the county are in this cooperative effort over how to implement public safety precautions for the people of Santa Cruz County. I mean, it started as you said with the 21st century policing, what, 2016. And it's really important to see that your programs are aligned. I'm really, I want to just hope that you will carry on to the police chiefs and the police agencies throughout the county, the four cities about how valuable we at the county treasure their input and respect what they have to say. I think it's tremendous. And I think it's really something that we've seen that nobody else is doing as quickly as we are. So, but with the issues, would they be prescribed by the agency itself? I mean, the city or county, or is there a common set of issues other than inspectors routinely review? Is there something to start with in essence that police agencies have already said, we want to look at this or that you would anticipate an auditor saying, we want to, he'll say, this is what I'm going to review. Yeah, I think that that would be established in the scope of work that the CAO's office will put together. I did examine the Santa Cruz Police Department's contract with their independent auditor and it very clearly calls out citizen complaints, use of force and critical incidents is really what that office or that person looks at the police department. But it would be crafted through the CAO's office with input from your board, probably I'm sure. Good. And I just want to say my credit to the city of Santa Cruz for having an auditor previously, but it's very encouraging to see the cities and the county get together in addressing this critical issue of public safety in our community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Any further questions from members of the board? No, I'll just make a comment. So I want to thank you for what you're going through right now. I made a comment about how hard it is in the last couple of years to be chairman of the board. And I'm sure in your opinion, as the last two years been probably the toughest that you've ever seen dealing with situations as a sheriff. Yeah, I think the last two years has been very unusual, very challenging. Yeah. And then you lost an officer that was shot and killed during the two years also. And anyway, keep it up. Thank you. It's a good work. Thank you. Thank you. Any further questions? I do have just a couple of questions, Sheriff. We've already heard from members of the community who are requesting a more complete citizen oversight board as compared to the police auditor position. But ultimately we're operating within an environment of constrained resources. And your office has a number of unfunded positions, just by way of example. So have you done any analysis on the cost it would require for a citizen oversight committee versus a police auditor? I have not. No, I was thinking that the CAO's office will complete that. I'm assuming that there'll be some sort of a contract or a purchase order, but I'm not sure what the cost will be on that. I'm ballparking it somewhere between 50 and $100,000. For the police auditor position. Okay, thank you. Does the CAO have any further context you can provide there? Yeah, we'll be happy to provide that analysis. Based on my experience from other jurisdictions, the independent auditor versus a full commission will be a much less expensive way to go because with the full commission you would have to have a staff person basically running the meetings in addition to an investigators and so forth. So my gut feeling is that it'll be much less financially as a burden to do just the auditor position with a contract. Okay, thank you. I look forward to more information on that. But again, just for the public's understanding, we had members of the public, including Lisa K. McKamey, a president of the Santa Cruz criminal defense bar right to our board saying they've heard multiple first hand alarming accounts from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. And one of the reasons for that is a lack of staffing in the jail. So it seems to me that we can either prioritize solving the problem that we already know exists or continuing to study the problem in one way or another. And having had an opportunity to tour some of our jail facilities with you, Sheriff, it's clear to me that we have really first hand facilities particularly at Roundtree that prioritized the health and wellbeing of the inmates but we need sufficient staffing to make sure that people can be housed there. Seeing no further questions for members of the board, we'll take it to the public. Anyone wish to comment on this item? Hello, my name is James Ewing Whitman. I appreciate what I heard from Sheriff Coroner Jim Hart today. I believe there's 3,100 counties in the United States and there was a time in the United States when any sheriff had the legal authority to even arrest the president of the United States. I'm pretty sure that that ended on February 23rd, 1871 when the USA became a corporation. Seems like there's a great deal of information that I could find in the information packet. If I just looked at it, I took a half page of notes. I appreciate that so far the feds have not come in to infiltrate the police. I'd like to do a little bit more investigation on that. I would love to find out the capabilities of the drones that this county is using because I see a lot of drones in the sky. Sometimes as many as four at one time. But I'm sure I can find out that information by looking further and asking the right questions. So thank you very much, Mr. Hart. Thank you. Good morning, Board of Supervisors. Can you please lower your microphone? Good morning. My name is Renita Pomeroy and I'm here to speak about the condition of the jail downtown. I was going into the jail to visit an inmate but then that ended. But I go on with a group called Profits of Hope led by Beverly Brooke, who's an outreach minister for Peace United Church of Christ. And I really got an eye full.  And I understand we can't make it friendly, but we can be more respectful of the people coming in that are visiting its family. Plus they have lots of little children. Sometimes it's grandparents with infants, toddlers, babies, and it's just not serving them. You go back and you get on the phone and you speak to your inmate and it's a little space. It's filthy in there.  And no one was really watching out for the families coming to visit. And they are traumatized families.  The men's restroom has no toilet paper. So you speak to a sheriff, well, guess what?  You know, I'm just going on and on. And I was really, just, these are traumatized families and they have children with them. They deserve some kind of respect when they go in there. And when I was first going in, there was a, well, they have the sheriff there, but also- Please conclude your comments. Pardon? You're out of time. So if you could please wrap up your comments. Yeah, oh yeah. There was a receptionist, well, she went away. So there was nobody to answer to anything. Even when we called it in, it was very well accepted up very at the top of the line, but it never got implemented ever. So thank you. Thank you. Any other members of the audience that wish to speak to this item? We have anyone on the phones? Yes, there are multiple speakers via Zoom. Reverend Beverly Brooks, your microphone is available. Second call for Reverend Beverly Brooke. Your microphone is available. Please accept the unmute. Oh, thank you. There you go. Good morning. My name is Reverend Beverly Brooke. I am a community outreach minister with Peace United Church of Christ and a volunteer chaplain at the county jail in juvenile hall. Thank you for listening. In light of the $5 million settlement on behalf of Antonio Townsend and the grand jury's report on the state of our county jail, I appreciate the sheriff's office moving forward with the request for an inspector general to oversee the sheriff's office and the county jails. I would encourage the CAO's office tasked with creating an RFP or scope of work to develop an avenue to solicit input from a variety of community voices such as NAACP, Smart on Crime, Faith Organizations and the National Alliance for the Menly Ill. Additionally, I would encourage the board to appoint a citizen's commission to work in tandem with the inspector general. The field of law enforcement has changed dramatically over the past year with transparency as supervisor friend mentioned being at the forefront. A balance of voices will provide the citizens of our county including our incarcerated sisters and brothers and the sheriff's staff with the safety everyone deserves. Thank you. All in user one, your microphone is available. Marilyn Garrett, your microphone is available. We'll move on. Barry Ritchie, your microphone is available. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hi, thank you, thank you. Yeah, so I would like to personally comment on the sheriff's oversight committee. I'm very troubled by hearing that it'll be, that can sit by hearing from the board that it'll be significantly cheaper to hear from an independent auditor rather than hear from the input of the community. Because as a community organizer, I've been very troubled by the lack of response by the sheriff's department as well as as an essential worker. Last year, as an essential worker, it was the most crucial and most dangerous time as an essential worker dealing with the ongoing pandemic. Personally, working at the farmer's market, I dealt with a series of incidents by an anti-mass crusade who was invested on harming the community and disregarding the safety of community values. And with that, we relied on the sheriff's who did not respond to this incident on three separate occasions and up on the third occasion. It was that I caught video of a sheriff fist pounding one of the anti-maskers on video and it caused a response to where we had to pursue legal trouble on this incident. And as well as the issue of the prison conditions which has been responded before as an organizer, we thought a lot about the name of Tamario Smith who was a male who died inside the county jail. And with that came a lot more incidents which sparked a lot of incidents within the county jail meaning that the COVID conditions was rampant inside the county jail. And it wasn't due to the prisoners, it wasn't due to the inmates. It was due to the lack, also the negligence of the county sheriffs who was not practicing public safety rather than bringing issues of COVID inside the county jails. And so I hope you really can reconsider on here in the community and put in getting solutions from community members. Thank you. Thank you. Serge, your microphone is available. Good morning. My name is Serge Cagno. It's my honor to speak to you today and to serve as the secretary of the Mental Health Advisory Board. The Mental Health Advisory Board voted in support of a sheriff oversight board in line with AB 1185. At our upcoming meeting, we're scheduled to finalize our letter to you in spite of the agenda item number eight. I thought it's appropriate to update you on our thoughts. A sheriff oversight board would give voice and transparency for both assurance of quality services and additional perspectives for innovative improvements for equity and representation of our community. As you know, the Mental Health Advisory Board is state required to include specific percentages of representation for both people with mental health diagnoses as well as their families, as well as people knowledgeable with our mental health services. The Mental Health Advisory Board advocates for similar representation on a sheriff oversight board. We asked the board of supervisors to not simply choose a police auditor but to also implement an oversight board to include representation by those with mental health diagnoses, their families, and those knowledgeable about our services. It recently came to the attention of the Mental Health Advisory Board Sheriff Department, nor any of the local police departments, as far as we know, have a policy to ensure that people placed under arrest at a traffic stop have their prescription medications in their vehicle brought with them to the jail to ensure the medical provider can quickly confirm their prescription and obtain more for while they are incarcerated and adequate supply once they're released. Medications are needed for immediate physical health and immediate detriment can happen if they are stopped. This is also true for psychiatric medications. Behaviors could include emotional distress, anxiety and PTSD and depression as well as some with psychotic or delusional symptoms as well as self-injurious or violent behaviors. We're concerned about reports of daily medications not being given due to limited staffing and we asked for the support of the Board of Supervisors to include mental health representation on a Sheriff's Oversight Committee. Thank you for your time. Have a great day. Thank you. Bernie Gomez, your microphone is available. Yeah, good morning Board Chair. Bernie Gomez with Miipa resident born and raised in Watsonville and live in Santa Cruz. I'm going to read straight from the text from the 1185 AB 1185 text, section one, two, five, three, oh three point seven, states a colony may create a Sheriff's Oversight Board either by action of the Board of Supervisors or through a vote of County residents comprised of civilians to assist the Board of Supervisors with his duties required to pursuant to section two, five, three, oh three that relate to the Sheriff. I think it's imperative for to have a civilian board, you know, to provide this this board with, you know, checks and balances to the Sheriff's office. You know, the Sheriff Hart just stated that he is an elected official. Therefore, he is not answerable to this Board of Supervisors in if something may arise, he answers to the voters and just County like in the surrounding areas, you know, there's been a lot of, you know, talk about how to, you know, essentially make, jails obsolete, essentially making rehabilitation a priority instead of incarceration and how do we move away from de facto facilities, acting as mental health facilities, right? So there's a lot of work to be done in this new age of just, you know, redesigning what public safety looks like. But to start with, I think a civilian board is much needed just to have a transparency and also to be inclusive of the community members, especially those that have been mostly most impacted by the system and are formally incarcerated at this table to provide that voice right there, that direct impact of voice. So both that, yeah, thank you for your time. Thank you. Last call for speakers, Marilyn Garrett, your microphone is available. Hi, this is Marilyn Garrett and I agree with the previous speakers about the need for a sheriff forward side board. Chair Koenig, your opening statements upon becoming chair had to do with listening to those who are, I forget the words, like rarely heard, voices of the community. And I think it's imperative there'll be this oversight board. Also a friend of mine about two years ago and I wrote to I call him supervisor, Captain immediately for a share of deputies. And it's on the record because I submitted a statement to the board, picked up a friend of mine who's in her six she's and basically kidnapped her from her home. And four of them took her off in a sheriff deputy car to behavioral health. She was injected with, I don't know what, she was held for over two weeks, couldn't get out. No, yeah, anyway, this does not make me feel good or about what the sheriff are doing. This is a big problem. And I think also indicates the need for an oversight committee that's members of the community. I also want to know more about the drones. This is another microwave dangerous technology that I think is a detriment not held to the community. And last point is yesterday I was listening to KPFA radio. I think it was up front. And this had to do with sheriff officers in LA County being members of gangs themselves, quite a few gangs. And the woman who was reporting, there was a mother of a young man who had been killed in the sheriff custody in LA and the autopsy revealed it. So there are problems here, serious. And I urge you to have a full oversight commission of the public and not just an independent police auditor. Thank you. Thank you. Ali, your microphone is available. Hi, thank you. My name is Ali and I live in Waltonville. Community participation is vital. Regardless of comparison to the state or other departments, this sheriff department still needs a lot of work. Banning chokeholds is the bare minimum. I've seen plenty of officers let approach other community members without a mask and no other officer intervened. I've seen officers intimidate other community members. And again, no other officer intervening. Self-examination and self-accountability does not work with the police. This is why we must have a civilian oversight board aside from the independent auditors, financial burden or not. We need to have community voices be heard because or else the burden is going to fall on who it always falls on, community members. So if no community voices are heard, it is not equitable, it is not oversight. And like Watsonville, it will be performative and that itself is a financial burden and a burden more than financial for our community members. Community voices are what are the most important when it comes to oversight of the police. If it is a conflict of interest to be quote-unquote kept accountable by people that you work with in the county, we saw this poorly be done and Watsonville. So again, it is important to follow what is being said. Everybody else is saying, if you're not going to make a community oversight board, then what is this all for? Prioritize your money. When I hear that we don't have staffing or money, all I hear is more money for cops when they already have the most. It makes no sense to me. We cannot keep pouring more money into them to try to keep them accountable because we are taking this money from community resources. The SRO program takes money away from our students. Hart said that this department would do it for free. Did that happen? Lastly, the county jail is atrocious. It has blood on its hands and it must be closed down. Tamario Smith died in custody. More staff would not have made a difference when it's the staff and the organization that is the problem. Thank you. Reggie Meisler, your microphone is available. Hey, yeah. I just wanted to respond. I can't really meet that last comment, but people are dying in the county jail, as people have been saying. And the Sheriff's Department doesn't really seem to know why they're dying in many cases or care enough to even put reforms forward to respond. And so when you have this level of just apathy and lack of concern for the public, you need to have some sort of democratic accountability over your executive branch. I mean, this is tyranny.  Last speaker, Karina Moreno, your microphone is available. Hi, thank you. My name is Karina Moreno. I'm a lifelong Santa Cruz County resident and I'd like the board to see the board support the implementation of an oversight committee. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a lot of improvements that we can make and the Sheriff's office has talked about building trust. And so I hope you'll all recognize that transparency representation and community involvement go a long way in building trust in a polarized community. I believe as we reimagine public safety that making it inclusive to the people living in this community is the right way to go. And it feels very unsafe hearing how people are dying in jail and families cannot get answers and the Sheriff's aren't being held responsible for that. So I ask that you vote to implement both the community advisory board and an independent police auditor to not only cover the requirements required by AB 1185 but to work towards a healthier community. And I urge the board to realize that it is well worth the financial cost. Thank you. Thank you. There are no other speakers. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public here in the audience that want to speak to this item? Good morning, members of the board.  I would request that you consider two points. One, that the board of supervisors instruct county staff to solicit broad input from community members and stakeholder groups in deciding which type of community oversight model to adopt. And two, I support a commission working with an independent auditor that is comprised of knowledgeable stakeholders and is capable of holding public hearings to resolve complicated issues of law enforcement accountability facing our community. Those two points I think are paramount in addressing this issue. Thank you. Thank you. Pardon me, Chair T, more speakers raise their hand, John Zoom. All right. As a reminder, please raise your hand to speak and you'll be called in the order you're appeared. This is the last call for this item. Kasey Gazapura, your microphone is available. Hi, my name is Kasey Gazapura. I'm a local attorney. I've spent quite a bit of time in the county jails meeting with clients and I also now work at a community-based organization that provides services in the jail. And I've been working with a number of advocates on the issue of oversight for some time and I just wanted to make two points that don't want to be duplicative. The first is that I worry about chalking up the issues in the jail to the staffing issues. I acknowledge that that is a problem. And also I think the issues raised in the grand jury report go far beyond the issue of staffing. And I worry about it being a foregone conclusion that the method of oversight that will be adopted in our community is an auditor and nothing else. I don't presume to know what the appropriate method of oversight is. I have some ideas based on the work that I've done but I think it is critical to get input from community members, from stakeholders, from those who are working with the populations who are incarcerated before making a decision about what is possible, what is feasible and what is appropriate and we'll meet the needs of our community. That's all. Thank you so much. Susan Cohen, your microphone is available. Good morning, everyone. My name is Susan Cohen and I am a community member and I care deeply about the safety and wellbeing of all of us in our county. And I was relieved to hear that the Board of Supervisors recognizes the need for an independent oversight of the Sheriff's Office structure. Sheriff's Office, excuse me. I'm asking that there be a creation of an oversight board made of diverse community members in addition to an independent auditor. I was first aware of the negligence in the main jail after the death of Tamario Smith in the summer of 2020. Then last June when I read the 2021 grand jury report I learned about other events that took place in our county jail that included prisoner deaths, homicide and sexual assaults by correction officers of prisoners. I was horrified. Then I learned there is no process in our county to hold the Sheriff's Office accountable and I was angry. We need a civilian board to bring diverse perspectives including those formerly incarcerated and family members of those formerly incarcerated to the table. I would like to urge you please to use both of these oversight and that work together. And thank you for your time. Last speaker, AJ, your microphone is available. Name AJCCHIKJA? Yes. I don't know if you can hear me? Yes. Okay. My name is Ashika Khan-Kawil, just a butcher. However, I felt that like the many who have already spoken I would agree we should maintain having our council. It just feels like there's already a lot of distrust with our own local law enforcement. And even though I personally support our local law enforcement it's just gonna continue further driving a wedge between the people and our local law enforcers. And for all the reasons that people are brought in up may seem clearly of sound mind. And I would really, I don't wanna sound like a broken record and it seems like everyone is on the same page. But if we continue to even hint this idea of someone who may not even be local, this auditor we know really nothing about. I would even urge some form of compromise even. I'm not hearing any suggestions for a compromise. I know that might take longer. I know it might be a little bit more out of the way to even do more research on what is and what isn't when it comes to the idea of bringing in an outside auditor. But maintaining that council is going to be what allows us, the people, to at least have some form of degree of trust. The more the people are wedged out the more powerless we're gonna feel. And I imagine tensions will get high and high and unnecessarily bitter. I know only have 15 seconds left but I would like very much for the council to rethink and not be so hasty with this decision. That is all. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please raise your hand now if you intend to speak to this item. Please raise your hand at the beginning of any item that you intend to speak to so that we can expedite this process. Last speaker, Amelia, your microphone is available. Second call for Amelia. Sorry, can you hear me? So just to echo everything that everyone else that most people have said, it definitely needs to be an oversight committee composed of community members from all parts of Santa Cruz, not just the east side or the west side. And it's part of a checks and balances. The Sheriff's Department has created kind of a bitter taste in most community members' mouth. And if they want to reestablish any kind of trust, they need to be willing to be more transparent and they need to be open to the possibility of an independent oversight committee to run by the community and independent auditor. Because if there is nothing to hide, then why would this be an issue? All of the checks and balances are done internally and that causes a lot of problem, a lot of looking the other way. And there's been a lot of unjustified deaths and incidents in the county jail, which shouldn't happen. Your life shouldn't end because you got incarcerated. That's not up to the police that arrest you. That shouldn't be a fatal thing that happens to any citizen to be founded in your jail cell. So I think a checks and balances system definitely needs to be implemented if the Sheriff wants to establish any trust at all back in the community and less fear when the community members come in contact with them. Thank you, I see my time. There are no other speakers. I will conclude public comment and bring it back to the board. I'd entertain a motion. I'll move to approve. Motion by Caput to approve the recommended actions. Is there a second? Second by Supervisor Friend. Any discussion? Mr. Chair, this is my opportunity. I just wanna take a moment to recognize the effort of the CJC to look at best practices around across the entire county, working collaboratively with mental health professionals and public safeties, elected leaders. I think as Supervisor Friend mentioned, this is the first effort that we've seen of this kind. I also wanna appreciate the Sheriff who adopted 20% repolicing reforms to adopted many of the reforms before there was a national outcry and to implement those needed reforms. And I think this is just a continuing step to ensure that we are providing the best practices for our community. Further comments or discussion? I'll just add that I think that the recommended actions here, which include the creating a scope of work for a police order does not exclude further investigation into a citizen's commission. And that could certainly be another step that this board considers a further time. And so I'm supportive of the motion. Pat, please call the roll. Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. With that, we will move on to item nine. To consider authorizing the Human Services Department to submit an application for state of California project home key funding and adopting resolution, authorizing the director to enter into an agreement with the California department of housing and community development to fund a Santa Cruz County project home key supportive housing project for households experiencing homelessness, direct HSD to return on or before March 22nd, 2022 with an update and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the director of human services. Director Morris, will you be planning on this item? Yes, good morning. Happy New Year. Chair Koenig, congratulations on your appointment. I'm Randy Morris, the human services director and I'm here with Dr. Robert Ratner, the director of housing for health office who's done most of the detailed work on the matter in front of you today. I just want to make a few introductory comments. I also want to apologize for not being there in chambers. COVID protocols have us both working remote today. So first is because the word project home key and another phrase project room key have gotten a lot of media attention and this is an issue that's very important to the community. A lot of constituent concerns, understandably I want to briefly say the difference. Project room key is the name the state adopted when COVID pandemic hit that grabbed federal money and project room key with state money that allowed local communities to stand up local shelters to provide housing for those who are un-sheltered or at risk of contracting COVID and we have been managing those programs in the human services department. After project room key was established our governor established project home key the matter in front of you today which was funding to allow local communities who had taken over many local hotels and motels to house the un-sheltered to consider purchasing those establishments. And then when project home key was put in place it also broaden it from just hotels and motels to other structures where communities could take this really one time really impressive opportunity of state money to purchase and acquire properties to provide permanent and temporary housing for vulnerable unhoused people in the community a critical topic. Your board's approved our strategic plan that we'll have Dr. Ratner and I in front of you in February to provide a one-year report on that three-year plan and this fits very nicely within that strategic plan. Want to bring to your attention that though today's matter is one item one particular item in the city of Santa Cruz we do plan to be in front of you in two weeks at your next board item to also ask for approval to apply for a South County and a Mid County project home key application. We are working very expeditiously to get applications in for project home key before January 31st a state deadline when applications become more competitive but we do want to make sure you're aware that your board directive to make sure services are spread throughout the county is being honored and that will be completed when we come in front of you in two weeks. So to summarize before turning this over to Dr. Ratner the matter in front of you today is exclusively to ask for your authorization for us on behalf of the county to submit this one application in a matter with housing matters in the city of Santa Cruz to accept and file the report to authorize us to submit the application and to direct us to return the matter does not commit the county to indie funds or any particular contractual agreements with the city of Santa Cruz or housing matters all of those items can be brought back to your board for consideration if we are approved. So I'll turn it over to Dr. Ratner to share a bit more and then we're both here for any answers to any questions that might have. Thank you Randy and thank you board for review of this agenda item. I'm really excited to present it to you all and want to appreciate that you called out the no plates like home applications that the health department has put forward on the consent calendar today. All of these actions combined are part of our effort which being the health agency human services and planning department to work for our goals established in our housing for a healthy Santa Cruz framework that the board adopted previously. All of these projects are bringing a new permasport of housing units to our community and increasing our affordable housing stock. So I'm quite excited to work on these with members of the board and members of the community. I want to add a little bit more detail to what Randy described to give you in the community some background on this funding source and then get a little bit into the specific project that we're asking for your authorization for today and then provide an opportunity for any questions or public comment. The program that we're talking about applying for today is called Project Home Key as Randy alluded to. This is actually the second round of Project Home Key funding. In the first round, the County of Santa Cruz wasn't able to pull together an application for a variety of reasons. For the second round of funding at this point we're exploring up to six potential applications. Before you today is one application that we feel is ready to go. The funding that's available at the state level is unprecedented. There's $1.45 billion of which most of that funding is coming from federal coronavirus state relief funds but $250 million is coming from state general funds. The other aspects of this program that are really unique are that it's an over-the-counter, first come, first serve competitive process. So that lead applicant for any project has to be a local government entity and thanks to the support of the board and our new Housing for Health division we feel like we're in a good position with our partners here in county government and with our city partners to help bring together everyone to submit as many applications as possible to be as competitive as we can in the state process. Randy alluded to the fact that there's a couple of deadlines for applications to get submitted. The first deadline is January 31st, the end of this month. So applications that get submitted before the end of this month are considered for a regional set aside of funds. And in our community we're considered part of the central coast within the state of California. So there's five counties in that region and there's $42.6 million available for central coast counties. If we're able to bring forward all of our proposed applications just from our county we will exceed the $42.6 million available for all five of those counties. And I hope we can bring to you over the next few months a series of applications so that we can show the huge need here and go after as much state funding as possible to create more affordable and supportive housing. The timeframes are really tight. So I wanna acknowledge the unprecedented nature of this process and the work that many people have done to get this resolution before you and future ones. It requires deep collaboration between the county, the city, developers of housing, supportive services providers and members of the community to pull all of the documents and materials together. So a lot of work went into getting this item to you and the ones that will be coming before you soon. The other thing I wanted to mention is that this is one time funding and it's unique in that it can cover the vast majority of costs of affordable housing. Typically affordable housing projects can take three to five years to do fundraising to get all the resources necessary to actually acquire and build the property and then the money to operate it. So with this particular funding source we're given a rare opportunity to get most of the money and make these projects turn from dream to reality in less than a year. So the program actually requires that we have these programs up and running between eight and 12 months. If we get applications in before the end of January we also may be able to get some additional funding for these projects. There's some bonus dollars available that can help support the projects over the long term. I wanted to spend a little time on this one specific project we're bringing before you today and as I indicated this is the beginning of some other items we'll be bringing before you. Housing Matters is one of the leading nonprofit organizations in our county that has done amazing work to prevent and homelessness and before this funding opportunity even existed Housing Matters has moved forward with trying to secure land and property to create more affordable housing. They've been highly dependent on private banking grants and a supervisor chair Kloeneck indicated amazing work to raise funds for another housing project that they're working on your other campus. This particular project is 801 River Street it's on the corner of River and Coral Street is actually a really unique project in that it was a commercial property that Housing Matters acquired and got approval from the city of Santa Cruz to convert it to private rental housing. This funding will enable us to turn that rental housing into deeply affordable housing for people experiencing homelessness. Once the project construction is completed we anticipate that'll be sometime this summer there'll be two studios and five one bedroom apartments for people who have experienced long periods of homelessness and have been struggling with disabilities. The authorization is for up to a $4 million application to the state which will cover the vast majority of the development costs. We in our division also partner with Housing Matters on a HUD grant to cover some of the supportive services and operating costs for the project. So we really look forward to the board support for this resolution and future ones coming before you. And I'm excited to help move forward with the goals in our strategic framework and now I'll stop and answer any questions that the board may have or members of the public may have. Thank you. Dr. Ratner and Director Morris are there any technical questions from members of the board? Mr. Chair, I just want to say this project home key application for 801 River Street. I want to thank the Human Services Department for bringing this item and thank our partner Housing Matters as was mentioned for developing this project in my fifth district. I'm supportive of this project and I appreciate the proximity of Housing Matters to the Housing Matters shelter itself. Anytime we can provide permanent housing for folks coming out of homelessness, it's critical. And I look forward to this project being completed later this year. I think that's the timeline. It's critical that we do this. It's just a one small step. We have a big challenge ahead of us but this is a great step ahead to start with. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions from members of the board? And seeing none, I'll open it for public comment. Any members of the public that wish to speak on this item? Are there any on the phones? As a reminder, please raise your hand now if you'd like to speak to this item and you'll be called in the order your name appears. Marilyn Garrett, your microphone is available. Lowered their hand. Terry Ritchie, your microphone is available. Hello, can you folks hear me? Yes. Thank you. On my issue of housing, as far as within Santa Cruz County, I feel it's deeply important. When I first moved to Santa Cruz as a teenager at the age of 13, I was actually a resident of Housing Matters Shelter and every day, you know, walking from the shelter I would walk up the hill to Mission Hill Middle School and I would hope and pray that people had enough empathy to not judge me or not discriminate towards me because of my housing situation but to show me and treat me as a member of the community and since 2008, I have not seen that level of empathy of houseless members in our community and this is a quote I would like to make that I just heard the other day. So criminal responses are not racial but environmental, poverty, economic deprivation, social isolation and all of these breed crime wherever the group may be and it is torturous logic to use the tragic results of racial discrimination as an agreement for the contribution of it. And it was a quote by MLK Jr. doing this Nobel Peace Prize and I feel that a lot of our houseless members are associated with the criminal element. Even the issue of affordable housing is always associated with the criminal element and I feel these underlining dog whistle tones are often discriminatory and also plagues us and also deters us from making the reasonable decisions on supporting our houseless members in ways on our financial decisions to best support our houseless members because we think more about the economic needs and supporting the needs of our community members in need and I feel that the needs of those who will throw more comfortable in their million dollar homes are discriminatory and use these criminal outlines to judge our houseless members. Thank you. Ali, your microphone is available. Hi, yes, thank you. My name is Ali and I live in Watsonville. I want to completely amplify, reiterate and back up exactly what the last speaker said. They are 100% correct when it comes to discrimination and criminalization of our unhoused community members and what a burden that can be and how it's not helpful and it's actually harmful to continue to displace our unhoused neighbors and criminalize them. Being homeless is not a crime and it should not be seen as one and it should be handled differently. We need to support our neighbors. I 100% agree this needs to be done in Watsonville as well. I heard it saying that it's gonna be back in two weeks. I expect and asks for support there when we're bringing these types of projects to Santa Cruz County it is important to always prioritize Watsonville. It's not fair and it's something that I hear a lot from our city council that County doesn't account or give us the resources that we could have and I see that happening here today hearing that this is only for Santa Cruz today but Watsonville is being spoken about. It should be brought up at the same time in my opinion. Affordable housing needs to be looked at from affordability. We've had several affordable housing quote unquote affordable housing projects be put up recently and the prices are ridiculously high. It is not affordable. It is not affordable to live in Watsonville. It's not affordable to live in Santa Cruz County for people that have full-time jobs. So for our more, our homeless neighbors that need the most resources than need the most services not just resources, not a bandaid something long-term for especially for people suffering from chronic homelessness, right? This needs to be well thought out and it needs to be a long-term thing. It can't be a bandaid like you guys tend to do. It has to be more and we have to stop criminalizing homelessness. It is just unfair. Thank you. Reggie Meisler, second call for Reggie Meisler. We can hear you. Oh, great. Yeah, I think it was about two years ago that I actually emailed the County Board to look into Home Key. So I'm glad that they finally kind of put this on the agenda, even though it's kind of a very like early thought process of how to do this. But, you know, I would like to see this done, yeah, throughout the county. You know, the state has a lot of money. Newsom keeps on re-upping it. And it's a lot better than the permanent room housing zoning concept that County was working on those two years ago when I mailed about this. You know, we have to really focus on very low income units and very low income, low income, low. I mean, that's really what you have a deficit in. So, yeah, and then, you know, if you don't have if you don't have the money for something like this, you could consider taking some funds redirected from the Sheriff's Department for unhired police officers or other things like that and just buy those types of old motels that you were just gonna do permanent room housing zoning on, which are only like, what was it? $2 million for 10 units? I mean, that's incredibly cheap.  Like, you can do a piecemeal too if you want. So, I'll just leave it there. Thank you. Marilyn Garrett, your microphone is available. As a reminder to star six and meet the phone. I am just shocked at the hypocrisy of what is going on like you for helping the homeless when the opposite is taking place. I wanna read something you participated in post the lockdowns and quarantines. I wanna quote from a book here and this is totally related to homelessness. Before I read this, I heard that the homeless and countenance food in a bomb there at front and front street and Laurel is, you know, they're gonna be pushed out of there. Where are people supposed to go? The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression and severe educational deficits in children. Economic destruction and shifting wealth upward. And this is why we have so many homeless, right? This is during this COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci served as ringmaster in the engineered demolition of America's economy. His lockdown predictably shattered the nation's one spuming economic engine, putting 58 million Americans out of work. So when people are out of work, they become the homeless as well. This is the book I recommend and I was reading from the real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Thank you. There are another speakers. That will conclude public comment and bring it back to the board. A motion would be in order. Mr. Chair, I'd like to remove the recommended actions. Motion by Supervisor McPherson. A second. Seconded by Supervisor Friend. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, clerk, will you please call the roll? Supervisor Friend. Aye. Coonerty. Aye. Caput. Aye. McPherson. Aye. Koenig. Aye. Thank you, motion passes unanimously. With that, we'll move to our regularly scheduled item at 10.45 a.m. so that I'm 13 to conduct a study session to discuss the plan for developing the climate action and adaptation plan and direct the office of response, recovery and resilience to return on or before August, 2022. With the progress report as outlined in the memorandum of the County Administrative Officer. Director of the office of response, recovery and resilience, David Reed will be starting us off for the presentation. Thank you, Chair Koenig. I'd like to provide some brief introductory remarks. Senators County for more than a decade has been a leader in adapting our organization to climate change and to reducing our greenhouse gases. And this board in particular has made adapting to climate change, reducing our carbon footprint. One of its main goals has adopted in our strategic plan. Just to give you some examples, our County, Senators County was the founding government for the central coast community energy which has had the biggest impact on reducing greenhouse gases in the central coast in history. Our former chair, our board member, MacPherson was one of the leaders in establishing that organization was the founder, chair of the policy board. Right now, central coast community energy has five counties, over 23 jurisdictions, over 436,000 customers. The goal is to eventually within two years, within by 2025 get to 60% renewable energy for all electricity in the central coast. We're almost at that goal right now. By 2030, the goal of central coast community energy is to be 100% renewable energy. This will be 15 years ahead of the goal set by the state of California. To achieve that goal, central coast has invested our dollars, our local dollars, in $1.1 billion of renewable energy and storage contracts. These are more than 10 different initiatives, including solar energy, geothermal and storage energy. We also are leading the way in electrifying our homes, our businesses and agriculture and other industries. So basically by starting this organization, this county has really made a huge difference in establishing our goals of reducing greenhouse energy, greenhouse gases. We also as a county have adopted solar energy in our facilities and building efficiency upgrades. We are one of the only public jurisdictions that is committed to ongoing remote work for our employees, which is also significant in reducing our global carbon footprint. And just to give you one more example, we've established our OR3 office, which is here today, where we've centralized our climate action initiatives in the CAO's office to show that it is our highest priority as an organization and to allow OR3 to also coordinate and be a leader in the county government in adapting to climate change and in leading the county and reducing our carbon footprint. So with that, congratulations and thank you to the board for being so supportive of these initiatives over the years. And I'd like to now turn it over to David Reed who will lead the report as well as our staff Tatiana and Alisa here to support as well. Thank you, Carlos. Thank you, board, for taking the time this morning to review our climate action and adaptation plan development and have a conversation with you today. I apologize for not being here in person as well as our prior item. I'm in COVID protocols, so I can't be with you there personally, but I apologize for that. I believe our, there we go, thank you, Stephanie. So today we wanna talk about our climate action plan with you, next slide, please. Sorry, is it advancing? Thank you, thanks. So what we wanna talk about, Carlos, talked a little bit about our highlights from the climate action strategy since adopted by this board in 2013, a lot of great efforts to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We wanna talk specifically about some of the central coast climate change effects that we're seeing right now. So often our conversations have been around sea level rise or focused on greenhouse gas reductions, which are harder to visualize and harder to quantify, but we've been seeing some very clear effects of climate change. We also wanna talk about our regional and local responses and then get into some of the planned details. And by way of introduction, Tatiana Brennan is our senior analyst in the OR3 office. She'll be our project manager for this effort. And so I'm so grateful to have her energy and support in moving this initiative forward with all of you in our county departments as well. And then we'll have some time for questions. Please feel free throughout the presentation. If something comes up, I welcome questions. We don't have to wait till the end. If something is pertinent, so please feel free to ask any questions. Next slide, please. So as Carlos articulated, since the adoption of the climate action strategy in 2013, our focus has been on reducing greenhouse gas emissions for the county and the region. As Carlos said, the three CE or Central Coast Community Energy is the largest community energy provider by geographic region in the state and is doing amazing things to help us reach our net neutrality or carbon neutral energy at a very fast and aggressive rate. So we've done a lot of effort in that regard. A few things that aren't listed here in addition to the Sustainable Santa Cruz County Plan which is going to be addressing land use and that'll be coming to the board this year through the planning department. Our public works department has been working very hard to address multimodal transportation infrastructure efforts which helped to reduce vehicle miles traveled and therefore the emissions from our transportation sector. So we actually have a community meeting tomorrow evening to start the kickoff conversation around the so-called drive corridor and addressing multimodal improvements as well as signal synchronization efforts along that corridor which will have a tremendous improvement along that major transportation corridor in our community. Additionally, public works has been working tirelessly on efforts around safe routes to schools and partnership with other county departments. So the efforts have been ongoing to address and mitigate some of the impacts of climate change. Next slide, please. So some of the central coast climate change issues I wanna talk about, I won't go through all the detail in this slide but really just to wanna focus a little bit on and talk a little bit about the changing precipitation patterns that we're seeing, the increased frequency and risk of an impacts from wildfire and then also the temperature changes associated with climate change, the increased heat island and heat dome events that we're experiencing. So often in the past, we focused really on sea level rise which is a very, very important thing to consider and look at and our board and our planning department submitted the local coastal program, LCP amendments to the coastal commission to explore ways in which we'll address that issue. But today I really wanna focus on these three items and how they've been impacting us here locally recently. Next slide, please. So as I said, what does it look like? What are we experiencing right now with respect to climate change? And next slide. What we are seeing is changes in precipitation patterns and temperature are having a profound impact on our county. The top graph in this slide shows the fuel moisture from last year and basically last year, our rainy season ended approximately on March 19th and we didn't get any further rain throughout the spring that we normally would get. And what that caused in that blue line that you see in this graph is that we had historically low fuel level moistures throughout the summer. And after coming out of the impacts of the season fire in 2020, we were all very concerned around what those fuel moistures might mean. Fortunately, we didn't have any major events but when our rainy season window shortens, we get that higher, those drier fuel moisture levels and then higher fire risk. The lower graph actually shows the last, since October, the rain patterns here in Santa Cruz County from one of our rain gauges in the San Lorenzo Valley. The reason I wanted to just show this briefly was there's two big steps in that graph, that blue line, there's two big steps. Those were the October 24th rain event and the December 13th rain event. Two big events where we received almost 10 inches of rain in a single day or in a very, very short duration. And those big storm events have a tendency to cause significant damage. We did declare, your board declared, a disaster associated with the December 13th event. But what we're seeing is big pulses of rain in short periods of time having profound impacts on our community. Next slide, please. The biggest and most profound example of that and we've discussed it, your board made comments about it today during the Consent Item is the 2017 storm event. And during that storm event in the first three months of 2017, we received nearly 60 inches of rain again in those big pulse events. And so the culmination of those about winter was over 200 storm damage sites over or close to $150 million in damages. And some of the significant impacts in addition to those infrastructure issues is that we've had to spend public works and your board has had to spend SB1 funds, nearly $7 million of SB1 funds as local match to repair those storm damage sites. What that means and what that has meant is that our public works department has had to stretch their limited payment management dollars even further. And those $7 million may have originally been slated to help address our backlog of maintenance on our road network, but have had to be reallocated to match the state requirements and federal requirements to repair these storm damage sites. Our public works department has worked tirelessly and aggressively to address repairing the sites so far, 91 have been repaired and they're working aggressively each year to try and get through that backlog. Next slide, please. As we all know, 2020 was our first big wildfire. It was the biggest recorded wildfire in Santa Cruz history. Our former fire chief, Chief Larkin, in a presentation early in 2021 used to share that we never thought Santa Cruz County would burn the way it did. We thought that the coastal fog patterns, we thought that the redwood natural resistance to fire would protect us from large-scale wildfires and what we experienced in 2020 is that climate change and our changing precipitation and weather patterns are making us vulnerable to those large-scale fires that we see more often in the central parts of the state and in the eastern parts of the state. That fire caused over $20 million in damage that we are trying to get FEMA support on to our public infrastructure network and in disaster response due to hazardous tree removals. And then obviously the biggest impact to our community was the homes and lives forever changed. The 911 homes that were destroyed, the hundreds and hundreds of community members that are navigating the rebuild process in a very tough environment where they're most often underinsured and the cost of construction is very, very high. Next slide, please. So with that context of where we sit and what we're experiencing, we are positioned well and poised. The state is taking an aggressive action. The federal government is taking an aggressive action to address climate change. And we wanna be positioned through this planning process to access those funds both for our jurisdiction but in partnership with our regional entities and jurisdictions like the city of Santa Cruz, like the city of Watsonville. So this effort that we're embarking upon this year is well timed and hopefully we'll position as well. But by way of context, there's over $15 billion over the next year, three years to support a variety of climate change initiatives and both adaptive as well as mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. And as we heard from the recent state board or the state budget, the budget surplus from this year, we may see additional funds becoming available. Next slide, please. So I was so grateful for some of our colleagues in Watsonville to speak this morning. They've done some great work and on adopting their Climate Action Plan and the city of Santa Cruz is in progress in that regard as well. And they've done some amazing work to ensure that equity is a big part of their project and their program. And so what we wanna try and do is work collaboratively. We wanna build plan alignment across the county. This is not a jurisdictional effort. This is a regional state and global effort to address this crisis. And so we are gonna partner and collaborate and leverage some of the great work done by our partner agencies to move this forward on an aggressive timeline. Next slide, please. So just by way of context for kind of where we've come, as we talked about the climate action strategy produced in 2012, adopted by your board in 2013, was spearheaded by our planning department. David Carlson and planning staff did an amazing job creating that document and have been providing regular board updates annually. But what you can see in the key elements is that we really focused on mitigation efforts and that mitigation was in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And what we need to do now, and one of the reasons why we're changing the title is that we really need to address the ongoing impacts of climate change and think about adaptation strategies as well in a more robust way. So we did certainly looked at those things in 2013 and have continued to look at those things but it needs to be a bigger part of our strategy in addressing the experiences that we're feeling right now. Next slide, please. So our 2022 climate action and adaptation plan, this is just a broad statement in terms of how we wanna, our goal is to have this plan address climate change with adaptation and mitigation strategies and founded upon principles of equity and actionable within the span of local government response. What we can control and how we can support our community both from an adaptation standpoint and a mitigation standpoint. And I wanna take a quick second, next slide please to define those terms. So often we use those terms but I wanna make sure that we have a common operating picture of what they mean. And so really adaptation is around acknowledging the experiences both anticipating them but also acknowledging that we are currently experiencing the effects of climate change and how do we adjust our government processes, our infrastructure and our community to minimize or prevent those impacts. So how do we adapt, how do we adjust to what is happening right now? We still wanna address mitigation and mitigation is really focused around still reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and getting towards net neutral carbon emissions and as our colleagues in Watsonville articulated, we know that transportation and our built infrastructure are the two biggest components of that. So we'll look at those pieces at the county wide level as well as we'll look at our greenhouse gas emissions inventory for government operations. And then we wanna make sure that we're addressing equity. We know that climate change is going to disproportionately impact our most vulnerable communities. We wanna have a better sense of their vulnerabilities. We wanna document that and find ways to address the inequity of climate change impacts and build resilience and adaptation capacity to all community members. Next slide, please. So now I'm gonna pass off to Tatiana Brennan and she's gonna go into our work plan in more detail for you. I'll put your mic is off. There we go. Can you hear me now? Lean into the mic a little bit. Is that better? Yeah. Thanks, so. Can you hear me now? Is that clear? That's great. Okay, thank you. So now I'd like to share with you our work plan and our initial planning for the cap. So we've broken out the work plan into four phases and if you'd like additional detail, you can see attachment B in the packet has additional detail on the work plan activities and the outcomes. But what we see in phase one is that we're gonna be focusing on planning and that's gonna have to standard project management stuff of scoping, identifying the team and the resources. And then we wanna understand what's happening in our county in terms of climate change right now, where are the impacted areas and what are the assets that we have to address climate change? And like Dave said, we also wanna make sure that the plan that we have and the engagement plan that we have is equitable, that our approach is equitable. So we're going to address that. Phase two is where we really assess the impact of climate change in Santa Cruz County. We'll be choosing climate change modeling. We'll be designing a methodology for our greenhouse gas inventory. And then also looking at our county in terms of systems.  But also our government systems, our systems that we have for addressing change in this county, what is the present state of it to address climate change? And then also looking at the capacity of our local agencies to respond. And phase three is really where we'll do the bulk of the work. And this is where we develop our adaptation and mitigation strategies to address climate change. We'll draft a plan which we'll bring to your board and then we'll also do community engagement. And phase four is where we do implementation. And this is where the work is really going to happen with the cap. And it's really important for us to make sure that there are accountability mechanisms that are worked into this plan. So that there's an opportunity for us to be accountable for the work that we're doing. And then of course we will do plan, do, check, act. Next slide please. And then in this slide, you can see what are the outcomes that we would like to achieve. And then you can also see the timeline. So for phase one, we will produce a charter, a budget, and then our procedural equity analysis. That's this month and next month, February. Phase two, from March to June, we're gonna be mapping the impacts of climate change across our county. We're gonna be doing our greenhouse gas emission inventory. And that's where we're really gonna lean into what Watsonville and the city of Santa Cruz have already done because they've done significant work on this. So we don't need to kind of recreate the wheel there. And also Ambag will be partnering with us on this. Then we'll also be doing a vulnerability score and social vulnerability index. This is special for this county because typically what's been done is a vulnerability score. And that shows, when I was talking about systems, that shows our county's vulnerability to climate change impacts. But that really focuses on the build and natural environment. When we look at a social vulnerability index, that's when we start to look at the impact on the people in our county. And that's important because climate change is here. It's impacting our residents and it will continue to. In phase three from July through November, we'll design our outcomes and metrics and our adaptation and mitigation strategies. And then we'll also make sure that we have distributional and structural equity in our plan. We'll complete the draft of the cap. And then in December, after we receive your feedback, we'll design the final version of the cap. We will also have an online platform where the public can access the cap and possibly report on their carbon usage. Our goal is to secure some of the funding that's coming from the state, that 15 billion, and then continue to engage across sectors and across departments. Next slide, please. Significant work has already happened on phase one already in November and December. On the right-hand side, you can see the departments that have participated in some initial planning. Before we did the planning with departments, we met with CAO Carlos Palacios and with ACO Elisa Benson to do scoping on the plan. After that, we had two meetings with departments where we asked them for their feedback and what they thought the highest priorities would be for our county and what they could do within their departments. In between those meetings, we did individual check-ins with each department just to take a temperature and see where department heads were. And the feedback that we got was overwhelmingly positive. The departments are very interested in continuing to work on this and really turning the curve. Then we did a special session with the commission on the environment. Because of their engagement with this, we wanted to get their feedback and so we have received that and incorporated it. Next slide, please. What you see here are the priority areas from the departments. This is definitely a consolidated table, but what they came up with were some really high level ideas. They wanted to focus on water and energy, specifically micro grid development and water supply issues. Also land use was a big one, carbon reduction, electrification and something that came up was changing code for new homes, but also addressing the number of rental homes that we have in our county. Also looking at shifting our county fleet to electric. Also workforce was a big one, making sure that we have training programs for residents in the county to build green homes and the electrical skills needed. Also we're looking at since climate change is here, how do we adapt in terms of having cooling centers? And then also, we heard from Watsonville earlier today about agriculture and that was something that we heard from the Ag Commission is looking at lowering ag emissions. Also another big thing was looking at our county facilities, specifically the jail and looking at the waste management in terms of food and decreasing meat purchases. Next slide, please. That's the end of our presentation and we invite any questions and discussion, your feedback on the work plan. And if you could pull back that priority area side, the previous one, we wanted to see if there's anything you'd like to discuss or add to this. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Brandon. Thank you, Director Reed. Any technical questions from the board? Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to make an extended comment on this whole situation. It's really something that's critical for our county and I really want to thank everybody who's been involved to have this aggressive timeline for this calendar year of 2022 to get us to reach our goal. I want to thank especially David Carlson, David Reed, Carol Johnson, Tatiana Brennan for their work in the climate change strategy and the other county green energy projects outlay and outline in today's report. When the board approved its original and also for Carlos Palacios, our CAO, he has been chair and a member of the operations board for Community Choice Energy throughout and his leadership is very much appreciated as well as some of the other administrators throughout this five county region that we have. When the board approved its original climate action strategy in 2021, the plan recognized that the highest mitigation we could pursue was to lower our greenhouse gas emissions to establish a Community Choice Energy Agency because roughly half of those emissions that we're talking about were determined to come from our use of energy. The county was the lead agency to steer the formation of Monterey Bay Community Power in 2017 with three counties, the Tri-County Area of Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz and 17 agencies. As a staff mentioned in their presentation that involved now today to a five county, 33 agency, Community Coase Energy, five county, the South Coast Community Choice Energy. It's one of the most successful and stable Community Choice Energy agencies in the state of California and really throughout the United States. We made sure in this process that we built a strong financial foundation and we're conservative and managing the assets of the community. We are now on track to build the agency's operational reserves to 50% of the increased annual budget of $300 million which continues to be critical as we have seen a few CCE agencies go bankrupt in the past year. It's getting very much more difficult to create these CCEs today than it was back when we did ours. And even with all the growth, the agency has experienced it continues to be the model for all the other CCE agencies in terms of business operations. When the new rates for the Central Coast Community Energy and PG&E go into effect on March 1st, our regional CCE agencies rates will be more than 27% less than PG&E. That's remarkable. And we're still able to invest millions back into the community in the form of clean energy projects and complimentary programs that help residents. Central Coast Community Energy is a shining example of what is possible when counties and cities cooperate and are savvy and flexible in terms of serving their communities. I have no doubt that Santa Cruz County will continue to be the leader with the future regional cooperative mitigation and adaptation standards and the projects. There have been so many people who've been involved to make this become a reality. I'm very, very thankful. And for the county's leadership in making this become a reality. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson. Other questions from members of the board? Can I, this is Supervisor Coonerty. I wanted to appreciate this effort. And I think the challenge before us is daunting and ever changing. I appreciate that we've been a long time leader in reducing our emissions in order to reduce the overall impact to our community and now coordinating this effort. One of the things that strikes me when we talk about resiliency is the social capital and the network of people outside of government who can respond, whether it's at a community, at a CERT level or with nonprofits. I mean, what we saw with the fires and various disasters is the ability of the community to rally around each other, to have neighbors, take care of neighbors. And I'm wondering if we're going to be able to capture how we maintain the social capital and the connections because the changes are going to be coming so quickly that it's not only going to require a government and an institutional response, but just a community-based response as well. Yeah, Supervisor Coonerty, that's a great point. I think one of the innovative efforts that your board and the CAO's office took in combining our Office of Emergency Services with fire recovery and climate change resilience is that we did create the long-term recovery group to support the recovery efforts from the fire. But as part of that, we do want to re-energize and revitalize what is called our community organizations assisting in disaster, our COAD. And so our department, with the support of Lisa Errett and Karen Adler, we're going to continue to build that capacity through that COAD formation, both the internal combustion of the community organizations as well as support from our department. So it's definitely part of our work plan. We do need dovetails certainly with the climate action efforts that we're going to be embarking upon, but it also is preparing us in making sure that we're prepared for the next disaster by having that robust network in place. It's a great point. All right, thank you. Thank you. Not sure. Supervisor Caput. Thank you. Yeah, I applaud all of the trying to cut down on the emissions and everything like that. And I think what we need to do to also is plant more trees. We've got to have more trees. There's an article in the Mercury newspaper about the city of San Jose has lost a couple thousand acres of actual trees and they're counting acres by homes, backyards, people cutting down trees and also the city itself cutting down trees that will line a street. They'll be out and on the sidewalk. What do we have in our plan that would, I know I've been promoting planting small redwood trees all over, I probably have handed out over, well over 16, 17,000 redwood trees. That sounds like a lot. Actually, it's just a drop in the bucket. But that will get a lot of carbon out of the air when the trees get established. So maybe we can do something where we actually get small seedlings or trees that we actually give them to people and encourage them to plant them in their front or backyards. Anyway, have you thought about that at all? Yeah, thank you, supervisor. I think there's a number of ongoing efforts that are going to be addressing this. I'll just highlight a couple and then certainly we want to look at it as well. Ambag, our association of Monterey Bay Area Governments submitted a grant to explore both agricultural and working lands, which includes our forest and looking at the carbon sequestration capacity of those forested and agricultural lands. And we're hoping that they get that grant because I think that will illustrate and quantify your point, which is that additional tree planting or healthy forest management can help our carbon sequestration capacity. The other effort that's ongoing and is significant is in the rebuilding of our oldest state park in the county, in the state, Big Basin State Park. So they're going to embark, state parks is going to embark upon a 10 year master planning process, which is going to include a robust forest health component. So how do we rebuild, how do we support the vibrancy of our redwood forest that burned? And so there may be some tree planting elements to that as well. But certainly we're going to look at different mitigation efforts around tree planting and other efforts like that, where we have the authority to do so, or where we can support through policy around healthy forest management. Actually, Supervisor McPherson has Big Basin. And I've been a member for many years of Save the Redwoods League. And the greatest forest carbon, taking carbon out of the air is the actual coast redwood. And Big Basin is a good example of that. They are the redwood trees are fire resistant. But that takes about 75 to 80 years where they're big enough where they can actually survive a big fire. We had the fire, the lightning fires a couple of years ago and that destroyed quite a few young trees. So I guess the other would be strawberries have replaced apple trees in South County over the years. And I understand that the apple trees that were established to use less water than the farming of the berries and whatever. So I guess we need to encourage also the apple industry or other trees that actually produce fruit with our farms, yeah. Anyway, Martin Ellis has been doing a great job of actually buying up some land or leasing land and putting in more apple trees that have been removed over the years. Thank you, Supervisor Caput. Any, yes, Supervisor Friend. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, I appreciate the presentation, the thoroughness of it. Actually, the board has, as was noted, has been moving down this road for quite some time. I also appreciate the leadership of our two cities within our county on this issue. I do think that one thing that stuck out to me and I recognize that there was a line in the report that speaks to the fact that there may be, it may necessitate some funding for consultant work in the coming fiscal year is just the fact that there isn't actually any funding connected to this item. And so I would like to just sort of ask director Reed perhaps how, I mean, realistically, every employee is already working toward this goal within their current construct, but I want to make sure when we're setting aggressive goals and timelines, which we really are here, that we're also putting something realistically behind it from a financial standpoint. So if you get to speak to the staffing component or what you anticipate bringing to the board either a next fiscal year or moving forward on this. Sure, I think we definitely, we have some one-time funding from the EMPG, which is the Emergency Management Program Grants through the ARPA funding that we're looking at potentially tapping for doing some of the social vulnerability index work because I think that's an important component of it. We are certainly Tatiana, we're going to be leveraging Tatiana and candidly that the expensive work that our other cities did to establish some of the inventory. So David Carlson did a tremendous amount of work early in inventory development in 2012, but those procedures and methodologies are in place now and standardized and we want to make sure that we're in an apples to apples situation when we do our inventory. So I think we have some cost savings over what the cities have done by leveraging their work, but we'll look at the outreach strategies as well. One thing I know well from our Sustainable Santa Cruz County plan was that outreach back in 2012 and 2013 when we did that program was much different than outreach now in the COVID era. So we wanna dovetail and make sure that our outreach is robust. Sometimes we've used consultants to help with that in the past and we may look at that as we get closer and deeper into the development of the budget to ensure that we're reaching all citizens effectively and equitably. Well, all fair points, Director Reed. And I'll say too that, you know, the creation of OR3, there was, I mean, it's really a lot to put on not that many people within your team there. And that's in a year that we don't have catastrophic issues happening within our community, which now unfortunately seem to be either every year, every other year. So I just wanna be mindful of the fact that adding on another, this, by the way, is part and parcel of what you should be doing. But then the question just from a more broad standpoint is that whether it's reasonable within the current structure that you have. And so just feel free to be fluid, obviously, with our CAO and us about what is needed in order to ensure that you're meeting all those competing interests. You're doing a great job of doing it. Your team's doing a great job of doing it. But we wanna be supportive of you in that. Thank you. Thank you. And I will, sorry, I forgot to highlight as well. Your board supported our application for a grant that we were awarded that's gonna hire a county-wide coordinator on fire and fuel management efforts. So we're hoping to leverage that person and their resources as well in this effort. So we're through grant funding able to expand some of our capacity, but I really appreciate your statement. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. I just have a few questions as well. The first is on the greenhouse gas emission inventory. I think one thing that was sort of missing from our report today was a sense of how we're doing exactly as a community. I understand that will be part of phase two when we do that inventory. But in rereading the 2013 plan, it was imagined that we would actually take that inventory every year. And of course, the more frequently we can measure, the more we can get a sense of how we're doing and then hopefully accelerate our response. So, it's been now seven years. My understanding is the last comprehensive inventory I have is from 2015. Is that correct? I believe that's accurate. Payah Levine may be on and the planning department had been heading up some of those inventories. But yes, it's been a number of years since we've done a comprehensive one. In the past, it was very time consuming to develop that methodology. And we're hoping through the work of our cities and through the efforts here that we'll have a more standardized and easier methodology where we can grab the important data points on a more regular basis and calibrate our progress year over year or bi-annually through a more standardized inventory methodology. Great, that's what I was hoping to hear is that hopefully we'd simplify the process to get that inventory so we can produce more regular reports. The second question is about the vulnerability score. I think that's really great that we're gonna be doing a vulnerability assessment throughout the community. And of course, the big change with this phase of the plan is the adaptation piece. And so people who are, we want people to be aware that they are in an area that is highlighted for either greater or less adaptation. And I just wanna reference the urban services line and the rural services line. Those concepts, those definitions are extremely useful in our code when we create more sustainable land use policy. And I think that having a vulnerability score that could be referenced in the same way would be incredibly helpful, both in terms of what we restrict and what we promote. Essentially to be able to define what parts of the county we wanna see greater infrastructure in or more densification of housing which parts we wanna be aware are more vulnerable. So currently with the vulnerability score, are you anticipating creating some kind of a map with the different vulnerability scores or is that just for populations? Could you elaborate a little bit? Yeah, great po