So I will, Bonnie, are we all good on your end? Yes, we're good to go. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome to our 1215 session of the April 27th, 2021 meeting of the Santa Cruz City Council. I have a few announcements and then we will move on to our meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsantacruz.com. All council members are participating, participating in this meeting remotely. I want to thank the public for staying home to view today's city council meeting. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, call in at the beginning of the item, you are wanting to comment on using the instructions on your screen. Please mute your television or streaming device once you call in and listen through the phone. Please note there is a delay in streaming. So if you continue to listen on your television or streaming device, you may miss your opportunity to speak. And I would like to please ask the clerk to call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council members, Watkins. Here. Callentary Johnson. Here. Proclamation declaring the week of May 2nd through May 8th, 2021 as Professional Immunicable Clerk Day week, excuse me, week, and I'd like to just read a few items off the proclamation just briefly. This is a Mayor's Proclamation. Whereas the Office of the Municipal Clerk, a time-honored and vital part of local government exists throughout the world. And whereas the Office of the Municipal Clerk is the oldest among public servants. And whereas the Office of the Municipal Clerk provides the professional link between the citizens, the local government bodies, and agencies of government at other levels. And whereas municipal clerks have pledged to be ever mindful of their neutrality and impartiality, rendering equal service to all. And whereas municipal clerks continually strive to improve the administration of the affairs of the offices of the Office of the Municipal Clerk through participation in education programs, seminars, workshops, and the annual meetings of their state, province, county, and international professional organizations. And whereas it is most appropriate that we recognize the accomplishments of the Office of the Municipal Clerk. And whereas as one of the only departments open during most of the pandemic, clerk administrative staff, members of the public, both in person and over the phone. And whereas during 2020, when a worldwide pandemic hit, our city clerk and deputy city clerk worked tirelessly to make the transition to virtual meetings of the city council and commissions as smooth as possible while maintaining an open public lobby to provide uninterrupted service to the public while following COVID-19 protocols. Now therefore, I, Donna Myers, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz do hereby proclaim the week of May 2nd through the 8th, 2021 as Professional Municipal Clerks Week in the City of Santa Cruz. In recognition of the exemplary dedication to public service and expand appreciation to our city clerk, Bonnie Bush, deputy city clerk, Julia Wood, and the amazing staff of the City of Santa Cruz City Clerk's Office. So congratulations, Bonnie, Julia, and all the clerk staff. You guys do make this place work and you make us work. We couldn't do any of this without you. So many, many kudos to you all and very, very proud to proclaim this week. Municipal Clerk, thank you all very much. 2021 as Psychedelic Assisted Therapy Awareness Month. We have today Allie Faduccia, co-founder and executive director of Project New Day. And Allie, I will read the proclamation and if you have a few words, we'd be happy to hear from you. Just get this. This is the Mayor's Procurement Domes, Chronic Depression, Severe Anxiety, End of Life Anxiety, Grief, Cluster Headaches, and other debilitating conditions are present in our communities. And whereas the use of psychedelics has been shown by scientific and clinical studies and traditional practices to be beneficial to the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities in addressing these conditions as well as personal spiritual growth. And whereas clinical studies and research in the United States, Canada, and Europe have shown the safety and efficiency of psychedelics for treating a variety of mental health illnesses going back to the 1960s. And whereas the food, excuse me, and whereas the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was founded on April 8th, 1986, to further the research on psychedelics as medicine and psychedelic practitioners celebrate the healing power of psychedelics on world bicycle day on April 19th. And whereas psychable is committed to being a trusted and comprehensive community dedicated to connecting those interested in legally exploring psychedelic-assisted therapy with practitioners and bringing together generations of indigenous healing with Western medicine. Now, therefore, I, Donna Meyers, Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, do hereby proclaim the month of April, 2021, as Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Awareness Month in the City of Santa Cruz.  So, Allie, I'm happy that you're here today to join us. And I'm not sure, Allie, if you'd like to say a few words, but we would love to have you speak if you'd like to. Welcome. Hi. Great. We're going barking in the background during the meeting. The City Council of Santa Cruz for putting forth this proclamation, we're honored to accept it on behalf of Project New Day in our site, Psychedelic.Support. We feel like this is a very important move to help people learn more about the research studies that are currently ongoing for using psychedelics as treatment for mental health conditions. And we're doing a lot of work in the community now to raise public awareness around best and safe practices so people can make responsible and safe decisions if choosing to engage with psychedelic therapies. So this really says a lot of the City Council to continue to advocate since the decriminalization of these substances last January 2020. And we are excited about the possibility of these treatments becoming more widely available in the coming years to address some of the more serious and treatment resistant conditions that we know trouble a lot of people in our community. So thanks so much for bringing this forward and we're going to continue to do our part to help people access treatments as well as good care through our leading provider directory at Psychedelic Support and our nonprofit Project New Day. So thanks so much. Thank you very much, Allie. Thanks for being here today. I'll move on to our next item, which is the item number eight, which is the Mixed Library Mixed Use Project Update. Our presenters today will be Amanda Rotellen with our Principal Management Analyst with the Economic Development Department and Bonnie Lipscomb, Director of Economic Development for the City. Bonnie and Amanda, welcome. Well, thank you so much for... I'm just gonna put my presentation. Everyone see that all right? Here with you today. I have a lot of updates to give you about the Library Mixed Use Project, but we underway last year. And as you know, the project includes a modern library, housing on the upper floors, you know, Council directed that there be a minimum of 50 affordable units, but we are really hoping to maximize housing on this site. And then of course, we've got parking consolidated into a structure with no more than 400 spaces. Have related to the Library Mixed Use Project is this update about funding that we received $500 million for affordable housing from the California Housing and Community Development Local Housing Trust Fund grant program. And this funding will be used across three city-led affordable housing projects, as you can see there, Pacific Station North Pacific. So that was really exciting news that we've gotten in the last couple months. A meeting with Congressman Panetta, Council member Cummings set up that meeting and Vice Mayor Brunner was also able to be there. And we had an opportunity to share with the congressman a little bit more about the project and talked him through it. And I'm sure Cummings and Vice Mayor Brunner can speak to this too, but he was very excited, very engaged. He asked really good questions and really seemed excited by the opportunity in particularly affordable housing and the resource that a modern library can really be for a community. So that was a very exciting development to have participated in the Downtown Association, Downtown Recovery Big Plans for the Future webinar, which had a number of different projects that brought a number of different projects happening in the downtown that kind of give updates. And this was a really exciting opportunity to really frame the Library Mixed Use Project in the larger picture of everything happening in downtown. There were updates on both Pacific Station North and South, the Pacific Front Laurel Development and other housing developments happening along the river in addition to the Warriors Arena. So that was a really good opportunity for us to share more about this project and really within the larger context of all the really exciting things that are happening in downtown right now. And then really getting to the meat of what we've been working on behind the scenes, we've released two RFPs just this month. So the first one we released was an RFP for a master consultant, which is our Affordable Housing Developer Partner. So that went out earlier in this month and is due, as you can see there, May 12th. And this will be the partner that helps us to really pull together the Affordable Housing piece, helps to figure out what the project's gonna look like, how many units we're gonna have, what funding do we need, they'll help us to pursue additional funding and really make that housing component really starting to come to life. And then the second RFP we released was for the master architect. And this will be the design team that'll help us to design what the exterior of the building really looks like and then they'll have a real hand-bond role to play in designing the interior of the library. And next steps and kind of where we're at. So last fall, as you know, we hired on the owner's representative, Griffin structures, April, as you can see, I'm very proud to have that checkbox there. We released two RFPs. We'll be looking to bring on both of those teams, both the Affordable Housing Developer Partner and Master Architect sometime around June. And then our goal is to launch a community engagement process around design this summer. And so there's gonna be a lot more coming before you and just a couple other time frames there that can kind of help to wrap your head around where we are in the process. And then as always, there's more information. I'm working very hard to keep our project page updated cityofsandercruise.com slash mixed-use library. There's a button on there that says project updates. I've highlighted it for you there in green. And that's just a great place for the community to go to get up-to-date notifications on what's happening. And I'm posting there quite frequently every time something happens, it goes up on that page. And then the second set of updates I have for you are on the site reuse and envisioning process that we launched this month. We're working with the project for public spaces and groups for architects. And this is sort of our engagement process so far. We had a couple of stakeholder group engagement meetings. So we met with 14 representatives from nine different groups. Yesterday and Sunday, we hosted two community workshops. We had over 135 people sign up and 80 people attended those meetings to provide input on uses and activities that they would like to see on the site. And we also set up a project webpage that has updates, next steps, three tasks of all the things that have taken place so far. And where we are in that process, this is a little difficult to see, but this column says March, April, May. So the yellow circle that we have here is what we just finished, so those workshops. And we have a number of other community engagement opportunities that we'll be bringing forward. There's gonna be a survey and then we're creating a pop-up sort of in-person engagement opportunity. And that will allow us to be a little more nimble and flexible about where we're able to bring that engagement and who we're able to engage. My goal is to really partner with other organizations and we can put a kiosk in the library or out in the community. So it'll allow us to get a little bit more engagement from different demographics and people who may not have been aware of some of our other opportunities. And then the goal is to return to council on June 8th with a report out of the whole process and then some recommendations for you to consider. And again, the project webpage there and there's lots of them. And that is my super quick update. Happy to take questions or, you know, I'm also always available if you want to email me things. So I'll defer to you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Amanda. Happy to have, we're right on time, so I'm happy to have any questions from council members. We do not take public comment on presentations, but if there's any council members with questions. Yeah, I just have one question for now. And I guess I'm trying to route my mind around the work around this engagement process and kind of the other pieces that are moving forward. And so I'm just wondering, is this part of the, this is not part of the master, it is. No, I'm sorry. Okay, so yeah. And so those funds are coming from, are we using funds for, people are asking where the money's coming from to do this engagement process and some of the other aspects. So I'm just wanting to be able to answer questions about that. Are interconnected and one is dependent on the other. They are very separate processes. So we hired a group for architects and project for public spaces for an outreach and engagement contract around visioning for the library site. And that funding came out of economic development budget. The funding for the library mixed use project is a separate project that divides costs between measure S and the parking fund and the affordable housing trust fund and other ED sources. So those are very much separate. Their budget is separate and the funding sources they come out of our staff. That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure I was. Yeah, no, thank you. That's super important to clarify. So I appreciate the opportunity to do that. Questions from council members? Being none. Okay, onto our regular meeting. Today's meeting is being broadcast live on community television channel 25 and streaming on the city's website, cityofsanacruz.com. If you wish to comment on an agenda item today, instructions are provided on your screen. We will provide these instructions throughout the meeting whenever we move into an agenda item that will be opened up for public comment. Please note, public comment is heard only on items the council is taking action on and not regular updates and reports. The items that will be opened for public comment during today's meeting are numbers 12 through 40 on the agenda. I'd like to ask council members if they have any statements of disqualification today. Being none, I will ask our city clerk to announce any additions or deletions to the agenda today. And there are none. Great. This is an announcement about oral communications. Oral communications is an opportunity for members of the community to speak to us on items that are not on the agenda. Oral communications will occur immediately after agenda item 40 today. If you wish to make a comment during oral communications, please call in towards the end of item 40. Okay, I'd like to call on our city attorney to provide a report on closed session. Mayor Myers, members of city council, this morning the council met in closed session at 10 a.m. to discuss the following items. Let me, one second. The first item was public employment. The council discussed the city manager recruitment in closed session. Second item was a conference with labor negotiators pursuant to government code section 54957.6 involving the following groups, FIRE, IAF, FF, local 1716, fire management, OE3, mid manager and supervisor employees, SEIU, local 521, and unrepresented employees. Council met with its chief negotiator, Lisa Murphy, in their direction. There's also an item on your after name agenda that relates to this discussion. Third item was a conference with legal council involving anticipated litigation. Council met to discuss one item of potential initiation of litigation. And then the fourth item was real property negotiations. Council met with its negotiator, Parks and Rec Director Elliot to discuss the property and potential lease for the homeless garden project. Lastly, the council met with its legal council on an item of existing litigation. That is the regents of the University of California at all versus the city of Santa Cruz. Matter is currently pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court. There was no reportable action at the meeting. Thank you, Mr. Kandadi. We'll now move on to item number nine, which is our city manager's report. And I'll have city manager, Martin Bernal, make his report. Thank you, Mayor, City Council. I've got two updates this afternoon that I'm gonna ask be provided to you. One is on the COVID-19, the latest on COVID-19 from our party. And then secondly, Slee Butler will provide an update on the San Lorenzo Park encampment and the new global intervention and status of that. So I'll start with Chief Hydro giving an update on the latest on our COVID situation in our county. Thank you. Welcome, Chief Hydro. Hi, Mayor, City Council. So I have an update on COVID and I'm gonna start with showing the slide that's worldwide cases. And I think it's 16 months ago. I think if you were like me, you were watching this going, we were 10,000 or 100,000. We hit a million. That was a huge milestone. And worldwide, we're approaching 150 million cases. And that's really significant. And obviously, within the news, you can read about other parts of the world, specifically India that are growing. So we're not done with this, but I do have some, we have kind of a good news, bad news. As far as where we're at, we can go to the next slide. Going in the right direction. And specifically the number of COVID deaths has not increased all that much since my last update two weeks ago. The bad news is that I was optimistic that we were going to be moved into the yellow tier today. And we just missed the metrics for that. And so our next opportunity for that will come in two weeks. And I'm optimistic that we will hit that benchmark at that point. But our cases are holding fairly steady in the county as a whole. And we are moving in the right direction. It's just, we're not done with it yet. Next slide, please. The change that we've been having here in the county or it's a rolling 14 day average. The last update two weeks ago, that 14 day change was minus 20%. We're now at minus 32%. So if you're looking at graphs as far as growth and decrease, this is the right direction. So as a whole, compared to other parts of the nation and the state and the world, we are heading in the right direction. But I would caution everyone that we're not done with this yet, even though the news is optimistically good for us here locally. And the next slide, taken from the California COVID website. And it shows the number of people statewide that have been vaccinated. And here locally, over 75, we've got about a 90% vaccination rate. And they are moving pretty aggressively with giving vaccinations to anyone who's eligible. And there's been 237,000 doses of vaccine given out within Tana Cruz County. Now, obviously that's not the entire population because of the single dose and the subsequent follow up for the two shot for Moderna and Pfizer. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine had a few really negative impacts in a really small group of people. And today they rereleased it after looking at the numbers and what was going on with that. So that vaccination is going to be a pathway out of this. In India, one of the issues that they're finding right now is that they have about 20% of their population was vaccinated and they also had a huge fortune to their population that early in this pandemic got COVID. And so they were kind of thinking that potentially they had that herd immunity. What they're finding now is within that people that did not get vaccinated, they are getting COVID now from a new variant that's much more virulent and transmissible. And so that's why they are where they are at right now. Their population has about 20% that's been vaccinated and they're having a huge surge for almost a million cases in three days. And so that vaccination component, if you've had COVID in the past, you may not be protected against getting COVID again, which is really the kind of message wanna give out to everyone. Next slide. So with that being said about vaccines, all California's 16 and over are eligible for vaccination. And the two portals that you can go to are myturn.ca.gov or to sanacruzhealth.org. One thing with the my turn is if you log on to that and you enter into it, it may say that there's no vaccination appointment available. Keep scrolling down. There's a number of other entities that have vaccinations available. And we're now to the point here locally within the Bay Area and within Santa Cruz that we have the supply to meet the demand. And now the challenge is finding people who are going to get vaccinated. So we need to push that message. So my turn, when you go there, they say there's no appointments available. Keep scrolling down. They've opened it up to a number of different agencies, whether it's a hospital, whether it's safe way. There's a number of different mechanisms for you to get vaccinated and it is available. They're also optimistic that the under 16 crowd, the vaccination should be available by the end of May, beginning of June. And so that will get that other population-based fits here within our County. So we're doing really good, but really need to keep urging people to make an appointment even if you've had COVID, get vaccinated. And that's what will get us out of this, you know, where we're at right now. And then next slide.  The CDC is releasing new guidelines about what vaccinated folks can do for masking and whatnot, but really these very simple things, even with or without a vaccine, are going to help us. And again, you can go to sanacruzhealth.org for local information or my turn for state information about where you can get vaccinated. That's what I have for you today and I'm willing if you have any questions and more to happen to answer this. I see Council Member Cummings has his hand up and then Council Member Watkins and Council Member Calantari-Johnson. Thank you, Chief, for that presentation. I was just curious with regards to moving into the yellow tier, I was just wondering what, did we not meet that prevented us from moving into that tier? It's an adjusted quartile as far as at risk population number of vaccines in comparison to the overall positivity rate. And we missed it by just a few tenths of a percent. So we have to stay within that tier for those metrics for two weeks. And so that's why we're not moving forward tomorrow. I was like I said, I was optimistic that it was going to happen, a little disappointed that it didn't. But given where we could be in relation to other parts of the world and the nation, we're doing well, we're just not doing as well as we'd like. Thanks. Council Member Watkins, thank you for the presentation and for your work on this. Just to make sure I heard you correctly. So you're anticipating by May June, under 16 will be eligible or they're anticipating under 16 will be eligible for vaccines? Yeah, that's the latest information from the County Health Officer that they're hoping to have the guidelines and the vaccination rollout for that age 12 to 16. Once you get younger than that, there's some developmental issues as far as your immune system and probably better off asking a pediatrician or a doctor about that, but they are looking for under 16 for the end of May, beginning of June, which will target that population that's been missing out so far. Great, thank you. Ontario Johnson. Thank you so much. She's had a good presentation. I know that we continue to have a robust public health sort of effort around how to stay safe. Do you know of these efforts around getting vaccinated? Now that we have the supply that we need locally and at the state, what's being done to push the message for vaccination? Well, I think this is part of it, but also this is coming from the County Health Officer, the State Health Officer, and also what they call their MCEs, which is the multi-county entities. So, Dignity Health, PAMP, Kaiser, they've rolled us out into CVF, Safeway Pharmacies, and they keep pushing that message to get vaccinated. I know that the county is also really targeting what they call homebound, and so those are people who may not be able to travel to a clinic. They're going to travel to them, and so they're trying to identify that group. And what they've done is taken a very targeted approach to those who are most at risk, either because of age or medical conditions, try to meet their needs, and now they're trying to get the general population, and so that message is that getting vaccinated is what will get us through this with as little impact as possible. I know that when we were first moving out with public health campaigns around how to stay safe, the county funded some organizations in South County through the Community Health Trust to get culturally responsive messaging out, so I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for that, but that's probably a question for the county. Might be a question for the county. I believe that they were funding Salud Parlihente and some of those entities that are actually healthcare providers, not necessarily a city entity, but they were trying to target specifically some of the farm workers because they viewed that as a high risk, and so they were trying to be language appropriate, culturally appropriate, and trying to overcome some of those barriers, so they could vaccinate that population quickly. Thank you so much. Sorry, Council Member Golder. I was wondering if there's been outreach or if there's been vaccinations available for the homeless population through the HPHP or what percentage of that population specific numbers as far as who has been vaccinated within that population. I do know that the county has targeted that population specifically and has done outreach, and my understanding is a significant portion of those who are willing to be vaccinated had been vaccinated. At this point, they have this supply, 16 and older, and so that is a group that they were specifically targeting earlier on, and so it's available, whether or not that they have been able to vaccinate that entire group. I don't know the numbers, but I do know that they've made significant outreach efforts to that population specifically. I can add that what I've heard is that it's been offered, particularly to those in the encampments, but there is kind of a high rate of not accepting it, which is a bit of a concern, is my understanding. I don't have the precise number, but there is a bit of concern about that. Any other questions for Chief Hydrick? Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, we missed the tier also, but thank you for all the updates. We appreciate it, Jason. We'll have Lee now. Thanks, Martine, and good afternoon, mayor and council members. I'm Lee Butler. I'm the director of planning and community development and homeless response to the city, and everyone's aware of the federal injunction in San Lorenzo Park, and our need to allow campers to remain at that location. In an effort to conduct maintenance and increase usability of the upper park area, we suggested at the last federal court hearing that if the judge was not willing to release the injunction, that we could move individuals who were camping in the park to the lower benchlands area, and the plaintiffs in the case and the judge agreed to that. So a couple of weeks ago, we noticed that area, the benchlands area, to vacate that area so we could begin preparing it. That occurred, and as of yesterday, we began moving individuals from the upper San Lorenzo Park down into the benchlands area. They moved about 40 people yesterday, and we've issued 100 vouchers. So today, we're looking to do another 40 or 60 people and have them relocate down to the benchlands from San Lorenzo Park. There's been a lot of outreach to those individuals, and so that move was really successful and smooth yesterday. We are planning on closing the upper portion of the park on Friday, so that's cleanup. This is not intended to be provided direction regarding having camps available, or excuse me, having, for the capitalizing on the resource that we have there at towards a focus on safe sleeping in sanctioned areas. The next federal court hearing for this is on May 13th, and I'm available for any questions you may have. Is there any questions on these items? This was mostly focused on San Lorenzo Park. Can you give us a very quick update on Highway 1 and 9? Sure, absolutely. So we are continuing to coordinate with the county, the state, both in Caltrans and HP, the California Highway Patrol, and we're meeting with them regularly. They have requested some additional information about outreach statistics from both us and from the County of Santa Cruz outreach workers, and so we're providing that. So they are moving forward with the steps so that they can close that area. Timeline, or is it still sort of to be known as it kind of rolls out? It's still to be determined, but they are working towards gathering that information so that they can have a definitive timeline. But we're providing that information as they request and expect that Caltrans is going to be, and they do expect that they will get the green light from the Caltrans folks as well as the governor's office. And I think, in fact, I think they've already gotten a green light from the governor's office. So they're collecting information to make sure that they've got all the background information for when they go out and request that people move. Great, thank you, Meef. Council member Cummings. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a question. I know that we've provided direction for staff to kind of work on developing the safe sleeping sites and the storage program and that there's an ordinance that's going to be coming back on May 11th. And I'm just wondering if you can provide an update on whether there's updates on what kind of outreach has occurred with the community on the development of the ordinance and kind of where those safe sleeping and storage programs are at in terms of outreach that's been done with service providers, RFPs, anything like that that's occurred since last meeting. Sure, so we are including an update on that as part of the May 11th agenda report on the ordinance. So you'll have some additional details related to that then. But just very briefly, we have been working on the RFQ and went through some final questions that we had. We've also been coordinating with the county. At this point, we are not going to release the RFP, excuse me, RFQ as a joint release with the county. That was something that we were discussing with them. But we really want to move forward quickly. This is a, the RFQ is a critical path item towards getting those safe sleeping sites up and operating. And so we have pulled some of the information that was county specific out of the RFQ. And we were just this morning working through some of the final revisions that we have for shipping that off to the city attorney and our risk managers. And so we're expecting that that will be out and pending that attorney review, roughly in approximately two weeks we'll be releasing that RFQ. And then we have also been talking about what is that outreach component going to look like. There is going to be an overlap in timing in terms of us going out to the community while the RFP is out there. And I think that that is, excuse me, RFQ is out on the street and I think that will be helpful because that can inform the information that we receive back. And it also, we may be able to issue if we're hearing information that is helpful that some of these service providers may know, we could issue an addendum to the RFQ, for example, and say, hey, we heard this great idea in the community. If anyone has thoughts about this, then that could be included in the response to their request for qualifications as well. So we are designing that outreach effort right now and we'll have a few more specifics before the May 11th. I don't think that any of the outreach itself, maybe some of the targeted outreach, but not some of the larger outreach. We probably won't have that ready before the May 11th, but we may have opportunities to speak to some of the specific service providers in advance of that May 11th hearing. And then just briefly as it relates to the ordinance, I know that there's a lot of interest in community members wanting to weigh in on that before it came back. Is there, and I've gotten some emails and been contacted by members of the community who are wondering how they might be able to weigh in or what the process is and where things are at. And so if we're getting those communications, what's the best way for us to either, who should we direct those concerns to or are there opportunities for people to weigh in and how can we get this information to people? We will be, we are happy to post the ordinance on the website when it's available. The ordinance, the council has directed changes to two primary sections, 6.36.040 and 6.36.050. That is in the allowable areas and the prohibited areas that are identified in the ordinance. And essentially the council has said that camping will be prohibited in all areas when location for sleeping can be provided. So when we can direct someone to a sleeping location, to a shelter bed, to a managed encampment, then they would not be able to camp anywhere else in the city. So the ordinance is actually fairly simple, simpler than before, except there are some nuances that we're still working through in terms of the language itself. So if we have that information available in advance, we're happy to post it. We are still working through that right now in terms of some of those specifics, but it is feasible that we will have that posted and we can post it on www.citiesandcruise.com slash homelessness. And there'll be a link to the information on that page. And just to add also that it's also coming back obviously as a, well not obviously, it's coming back as it's first meeting at the main meeting. So there'll be the issuance of the agenda reports and the agenda packet like there normally is. And then there'll be a second meeting that we'll be able to do in two weeks after that. So there's a number of opportunities for the public to weigh in as well as during public sharing to some extent. Thank you. Any other questions for Lee on these items? Seeing any hands. Okay, great. Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Marcee. Okay, so we will move on to number 10, which will be, I will now call in the clerk, city clerk, to provide any updates to the calendar. Time for item number 11. This is council memberships in city groups and outside agencies. This is the time for council members to report out on actions at external boards, committees and joint powers authorities meetings. For future meetings, please come prepared to provide an update on any meetings or actions that occurred since the last council meeting so that the council and public can be informed. So I will look for council members. Why don't I start with council member Brown and I'll just have you guys go from there around the circle here. Okay, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm going to start with the regional transportation commission for last meeting, we had a bit of a stalemate. So we're in limbo here regarding accepting a business plan that was developed to consider the cost of building and operating light rail system, passenger rail system on our right of way. And because that has already been adopted as the alternative, the alternative, preferred alternative, excuse me. And so we are now going back to discuss it again in our next meeting. This is a pretty important issue. We have an item on our agenda for later today. So hopefully you've seen that. So we have a split RTC, a split among the commissioners and it'll be revisited. So if for people who are interested, watch for that at our next meeting. The area agency on aging, I, a couple of months ago, announced a meeting for the master plan on aging process launch, our local launch. And I'll just say again, the state has now, the state is in the process of developing a new master plan on aging. And this is really like very, very new thing. It's pretty exciting that there's a recognition in this way that all of these programs and systems can be better coordinated to serve our seniors at the local level. And so that launch actually got postponed and it will be happening on Wednesday, May, I think it's the 18th, 19th, excuse me. Wednesday, May 19th, check out the AAA website if you wanna participate and you can also contact me for more info. The, oh, I participated in a forum to discuss the UCSC LRDP Environmental Impact Report and I was there on behalf of the City County Task Force on UCSC growth along with the advocate who is funded through the city and county to coordinate our work. And we had a lot of, it was a great conversation in many ways. It was a lot of speakers who talking about different aspects and so it was pretty wide ranging. There is a video of that which you can access and I'm happy to send the link for anybody who's interested. The last item I wanted to mention, although I kinda wanna give Vice Mayor Bruner the opportunity to report on this if you want to because you put together such an amazing overview, written notes on the visit that we had to the building trades, construction council, several apprenticeship training sites. And so we were able to see what's happening at the electrical workers and the sheet metal workers and it was really, I'm just gonna say it was really fun and we learned a lot and I'm gonna let Vice Mayor Bruner talk about the rest of it. And I think that's all I got, thanks. Okay, thank you Council Member Brown. I've got Council Member Goldner next. No, it's in front of me. And I'll try to send it on the County Stripe IC funds. And he shared that provider to childcare providers serving 172 children, the amount range from 1,300 to 5,000, that was a really wonderful. We have distributed $20,000 as dollars. A little bit of surplus as we haven't had our camps to the, that we've had in the past. So there's some discussion around the surplus funds. We did discuss a potential partnership with the SEADS program, which is a program that invests, that opens up a bank account for every child born in Santa Cruz with a $50 account that goes towards a college fund. So we talked about what that partnership looks like. Council Member Watkins and I serve on that SEADS committee. And let's see, we heard from Superintendent Chris Monroe from Santa Cruz City Schools about their summer camp program. They received some funding from the federal government to do some care in the summer, not many hours. So we're looking at what partnerships could look like there. And our City Summer Program's Activity Guide has, it's gone live, so thank you to the Parks and Rec Department. So the English and Spanish registration is this weekend. And there's opportunity for blood. Nelson will be available for people who need internet access. And there'll be Spanish speaking support available. And that's from eight to 12 this Saturday, May 1st. Highlights, and I'll let Council Member Golder and Watkins add anything to that if I missed. The other meeting that I participated in with Mayor Meyers is at the Metro since middle of March. So that's really good news. We have 62% of the Metro workers vaccinated and the team is actively working on increasing that percentage. We are continuing to increase our bus capacity and we'll reevaluate when the governor announces the green tier of what that'll look like when we're in the green tier. The intent is to go to full capacity by the time that college and university students are back in the fall. We have our fourth electric bus, which has arrived in our county. And so there's a lot of training for bus drivers and we're hoping to put that bus in circulation in the fall in the right direction. We went from about 17,000 a week in March to over 23,000 a week, the week of April 17th. So it's not the rate that it was clearly, but it's heading in the right direction. So those are my updates for the Metro Board and Mayor Meyers, if you have anything to add. I think you covered all the main points. Yeah, thank you. Okay, I've got one more update. It's been a wonderful month of being engaged with the community. I met with the staff of the Youth Action Network and they have been doing some wonderful stuff. They're in a four phase planning process of really the Youth Action Network used to be the Youth Violence Prevention Network. They're really restructuring it. And without going into all the details, the main focus is really looking for opportunities to enhance youth leadership and youth voice in particular around community and city and county decision-making processes. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for partnership there. They will be hosting a kickoff event in the fall and they hope to come to each of the jurisdictions, including our city, to make a full presentation of that. Right, great. Thank you for those updates, Council Member. I will go ahead and call on Council Member Cummings now. Please. Thank you, Mayor. Items that occurred one was the commission adopted a draft resolution approving the extraterritorial service agreement involving the city of Scotts Valley and properties on Pippinway and Bellflower Way. So this extended the sewer services from Scotts Valley on to those adjacent properties that were outside of their steering influence. The next was that we adopted a draft resolution approving the draft budget for fiscal year 2021-2022 positioned on 1581. And that bill, it made a minor non-subsistence of changes to the Cortese-Knox-Hurtsburg Local Government Reorganization Act of 2000. And then the last item that we had at our meeting was appreciation for Commission Clerk Debra Means. Commission Clerk Debra Means had served as the Clerk of Lafko for 19 years and has now moved on to retirement.  In addition to Lafko, the Council Ad Hoc Revenue Committee has been meeting almost weekly at this point in time. And over the course of the last month, we had a number of discussions, but to kind of bring it folks up to speed with where we're at, we have identified a polar who will be pulling the community on more or less if we move forward with a courtesan sales tax increase, like what that revenue would go towards. And so we've been discussing a number of different items related to infrastructure homelessness. And so that as we continue to refine that poll, which we've been working with the polar to identify the appropriate questions and to ensure that the poll is gonna be able to help people identify what they'd like to see the funding go towards as far as prioritization. That poll will be going out, I think in the next couple of weeks so we can get feedback from the community on if we were to move forward with a sales tax increase, what would the community like to see that funding go towards? And hopefully in the next coming weeks and months we'll be able to bring something to council as far as kind of what our next steps will be with regards to a revenue measure. And Mayor Meyers and Vice Mayor Brunner have both been in those meetings and so if there's anything I missed, please feel free to chime in as well. And then looking at the safety meeting, so I think that the Zoom, so if there's members of the public who would like to participate or would like to view the public safety meeting, it will be occurring tomorrow at 5.30 and you can find the details on the city's website and cityofstanacruze.com. And that concludes, actually there's one more item I wanted to mention. As a community member I've been working with the Criminal Justice Council's ad hoc safety committee and I just wanna let members of the public know that we developed a survey that went out to all, every law enforcement agency in the county, so Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz, Capitola, the Sheriff's Department and Watsonville really asking about different types of policies that relate to use of force and bias. And also we sent that survey to probation. We received responses from all those agencies so every agency participate in the survey and we'll be having another ad hoc meeting on the 30th in preparation for the next Criminal Justice Council meeting which will be on May 13th. And so we'll be pulling those results together and determining steps forward but ultimately our goal will be to have some kind of report that will be released to the Criminal Justice Council, to the broader community around aligning public safety policies across the... Thank you, Council Member Cummings. Next up would be Vice Mayor Bruner. We'll be reporting on the two by two committee we met and we had a lot of discussion on coordination on services. This is for those experiencing homelessness and are unhoused folks in the city but coordinating on services and connecting to county services including release of info form to county services, public property management and how that relates to services and coordinate with services and clarifying those roles and responsibilities more. Looking at short term and long term they were able to update us on and Mayor Meyers sits on this as well so feel free to add on but massive structural funding across California and looking at county, for example, their budget, a quarter of the behavioral health budget is on in-person hospitalization. Talked about things like drug and Medi-Cal is great but the counties don't have to come up with a 50% match. So they're looking at net fiscal year, a lot of reductions and pots of discretionary funding to help cover. So they're working on going through their certain pots is my understanding and because we brought up some of the mental health and substance use disorder treatments and services needed in addition to housing and the different types of housing needed and outreach efforts, including getting people to enroll in Medi-Cal. So expansion of eligibility staff and the idea of a shared vendor pool for the city and county and how it relates to, for example, storage options which could align with the full of vendors, managed encampments and working with the US Integrated Agency on homelessness to help bridge any collaborations. Let's see what locations to use for what purpose and what funding. Also looking at exit resources. They mentioned about 300 people a year have been helped from homelessness to housing. So how can we keep on that path if not increase it? And looking at resources of rental assistance, soft skills to get into housing, not having shelters be like a place for people to get stuck. The resources needed to move to more permanent housing. So shelters, transitional housing, transitional age youth housing, permanent supportive housing, low income housing and resources for public property like a management team, an outreach team and what else? We also talked about a joint plan on or just the emphasis on working jointly and articulating what the funding needs are in order to give direction and make decisions and with resources for county and city knowing that it's all limited and setting those priorities. Mayor Meyers, you can add anything else to that if I missed anything. Vice Mayor is that the council will have a special meeting on May 18th. Excuse me. I think it's May 18th. Yeah, May 18th will be a presentation. From five to six p.m. And the county will be presenting the countywide plan to the council as well as a proposal for some change in governance as well. So just wanna let the public know that that's from five to six on May 18th and that'll be a special city council study, excuse me, a special city council meeting with county staff coming to do that presentation for us. That's the only thing. I think you've got everything else. Yeah, thank you. We did the building trades. We did an apprenticeship program tour. All council members were invited. They will be having future dates. This past Saturday, council member Brown and I were able to go. It was a great tour and very informative and met some really interesting people and our understanding of the apprenticeship programs three in Coralitos. It was my first time leading Santa Cruz and it was the Coral EW Electrical. Their apprentices received education through Hartnell College Enrollment and attend two nights a week while working out in the field with a journeyman and gaining that out in the field experience and earning a living wage. They also received health insurance, retirement benefits while in the program. It's a five year apprenticeship program and they're really encouraging women to join as well. They've had women throughout the years but really trying to expand that. The top was the sheet metal workers, local 104 and learning skills like architectural design, CAD detailing, being industrial, kitchen, HVAC systems, et cetera. Five year apprenticeship program, also working in the field with a journeyman while attending classes two times a week. We were there, one of the third year apprenticeships was there and someone that hadn't gone to preschool and was in scouts with my son. So it was nice to see that progression. There were other apprentices there that spoke of their stories and the program. The next stop was the Plumber. They learned medical cast installation, welding, rare certification and all of the school locations we visited were very hands on. Took a lot of pictures, it's very interesting. They also have a lot of math and they have some interesting stats by zip code in terms of metrics and data of who's in their programs and there's also a pre-apprenticeship program. That's a good way for people to see if it's a good fit. One of the interesting stats they said is it used to historically be primarily people out of high school around age 18 that would enter into these programs and now they're seeing a chef into more older apprentices, 26 to 35 they're just really trying to build the workforce in this way, so it was very interesting. Also, we had a city manager sub revenue, the ad hoc revenue committee meeting which council member coming spoke to. And so Donna, I will let you speak to the rest. Okay, thank you, council member. I mean, vice mayor Brunner. I'm here on council member Watkins and then I'll go left. To council member Brown, I saw your hand at the door. Yeah, sorry, council member Brown. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to add two things. So it was actually Castorville. I know there, I get them in unincorporated North Monterey County and they have a huge industrial area there that's where they have space. But the other thing I wanted to say was that for those of you who didn't go to the boxes, you don't know if you can see it here.  We have two boxes that were made by apprentices in the sheet metal program. So that was pretty awesome. And I actually just remembered a third thing. The, one of the reasons that the folks that we talked with said they believe that the later entry into the apprenticeship programs was in part related to the elimination of industrial trades programs in the high schools. And so they've been working with the workforce investment board and I believe the county office of education in Santa Cruz as well as Monterey and then Hartnell and Cabrillo to try to fill in some of the lost pipeline that no longer exist. And so that was really good to hear as well. For adding that, council member Watkins. Great. Yeah, no, thank you to my colleagues for all of their work in the community outside of our meetings. Thank you also to the update around visiting the different trades and all of the work that's happening there and just really an exclamation mark on wanting to continue to stay connected on trying to get career pathways and opportunities for our workers here. I think a lot of what I was going to talk about has already been covered by my colleagues who share these various committees with me. The only thing I would add to the city school committee is the potential partnership between the city schools and the city parks and parks department for after school programming and really trying to look at how do we extend the day for our families and students in a way that allows them to have a really fun experience after school as well. And so hoping that that partnership will come to fruition and not only provide a good experience for the kids but also support the working families that could use a little extra care. And I know council member Golder is part of that. So thank you council member Golder for what you do in education. The other thing is in regards to our public safety meeting tomorrow, I just really wanted to highlight one thing that's on the agenda, which is redefining public safety. And it's really exciting. It's something I learned about in Sacramento and our communities are really having an open conversation about really what to their community members think about when they think of public safety. And so we're all on the same page with shared definition of language. And I'm really excited to have that conversation tomorrow. So I just sort of wanted to highlight that as one of the agenda items that we have. And then lastly, I just wanted to highlight also what's on our agenda and it's the proclamation that declares the month of April as Child Abuse Prevention Month. It's in the agenda packet. Just wanted to kind of speak to that and really thank our family and children services partners my partners at the Children's Network really looking to raise awareness about child abuse prevention but ultimately look at how we're creating conditions for families and students to succeed in the first place. So really exciting work happening around those social determinants of health and thank you mayor for the proclamation declaring April as Child Abuse Prevention Month. And I think that's where all these might updates. Okay. Thank you, council member Watkins. And my, most of my updates have been discussed. We had a downtown management corporation board meeting a while back now. Actually, one of those outcomes will be is actually on our agenda today, the downtown POC program. And so the downtown management corporation continues to bring work with the Economic Development Department and property owners and tenants downtown to through downtown association and other partners to really focus on some of the needs downtown in terms of getting downtown reopened, getting some really neat and creative ideas going with some of the empty storefronts that are currently empty but hopefully a little bit longer. And so yeah, the downtown management corporation has just been doing really great work the whole month as has the downtown association on really just visioning downtown and what we can be, we'll be doing over the next couple of years to really get downtown up and running again. So some really great work coming out of that group. And our next meeting is on May 20th, the downtown management corporation at 830. The only other thing I guess I will just let's make sure the public knows as part of the subcommittee on the city manager recruitment is on the city's website. Under the news tab, there is a whole section on the city manager search and there's a community survey. So please get on there and provide us your feedback on our next city manager. I believe we'll be taking input on that survey through May 1st. So we've already had hundreds of people respond but please go ahead and do that yourself and let other folks know, post it on Facebook, et cetera, help us get this out so we can get as many people from our community as possible and answering that survey. It's really important for us to help us with our hire of our next city manager. And with that, I think we will call this item complete. So thanks council members and vice mayor, everybody for your updates. Really good, great stuff. Okay, we are running a tiny bit early so if folks are up for it, maybe we'll just take a 10 minute, we'll come back at 1.45 and just take 10 minutes to get some water and take a quick break. So we'll be back at 1.45, everybody, thank you. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. I did text council member Watkins. So these items are 12 through 30 on our agenda for members of the public who are streaming this meeting. Now is the time to call in if you want to comment on items 12 through 30. Instructions are on your screen. Please remember to mute your streaming device, press star nine to raise your hand and listen for the cues saying you have been unmuted. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to comment or pull any items? Comment on or pull any items. I will look for folks. I see council member Golder and then council member Brown, council member Kandari Johnson and then council member Cummings and then vice mayor Ritter. Okay, council member Golder. I'm just wondering do we need to pull item 24 to make a change based on what we talked about? Yes, we do. Recessions? Yes, so 24 will be pulled. Thank you. Council member Brown. Yes, I have one question, 12 and 13, 27. No need to pull. 19 and on 23. Question, comment on 23. Okay, we're coming. Appreciation for item number 18 which is the resolution denounced in Kate Crimes and bigotry targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And so just again, want to continue to extra bring in this forward and for all the work that we're doing to try to end hate crimes and discrimination in our community. Thank you, council member. And I also have a comment on item number 21 of our consent agenda. So we will take separate action on that. We do have several items that have been pulled for either questions or comments. And I'll go ahead and start with the items at least as far as I was able to take them in order for comments. And then we'll go to the items that there are questions I would imagine for staff. So for comments, I had item 17, public, the nomination of reappointment of Carol Bird to the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. So I had a note that was to be pulled for comments. And I believe that was Vice Mayor Bruner. I have sat with her on this board and she is a very valuable asset to everyone to know that the Housing Authority Board of Santa Cruz County, San Juan Batista and the City of Hollister, Santa Cruz is one of those seats. There's also a seat for Watsonville. There's a seat for the Community Action Board, age 62 and over. And I'm very happy for the City of Santa Cruz seat for another term. Thank you. Thank you, Vice Mayor Bruner. Next will be item 18 for comments. And this is a resolution denouncing hate crimes and bigotry targeting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And I believe just comments on this item. We're coming. I believe you pulled this item. I made my comments earlier. Okay. Council Member Brown. Thanks. I just wanted to thank my colleagues for being willing and open to talking with members of the API community to address some of the questions and concerns they had or not concerns but additions that they wanted to include. And thank you so much for doing that. I know they really appreciate it. That and I just have a statement here that Kiko Minami wanted me to read because none of the coordinators of their group effort were able to get off work to be here to give this thank you. This one and just so everybody knows this the group that brought this did end up doing a survey and they had 33 responses. So and incorporated all of the, you know, the comments and so it did take a little time. And I really appreciate again, Council Members for being willing to and the Mayor for being willing to, you know, take that time. So I have just a very quick statement. So Dear Mayor Meyers and Council Member Calentary Johnson and Council Member Watkins, thank you for working with members of our local API community to develop a resolution against anti-Asian hate. We appreciate your patience as we work with city staff member Ralph DeMarket to include our voices and historical background into the resolution. The inclusion of our local history of anti-Chinese movement is particularly significant. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the city to support our API community into the future. Thank you, Kiko Minami. So thanks for me and thanks from them as well. Thank you. And I'll also just make a comment. I just want to also thank all the community members who met with us and Council Member Calentary Johnson and Council Member Watkins, Ralph and Laura Schmidt, our Assistant City Manager also were very, very involved in this as well as some of our community members and elders in the AAB who I know also met with council members. So it's such an important resolution and I'm just very pleased with the time that we took to listen to the community and I hope that really the intent is that this is just the start of a more broader relationship with the community and we really want to work hard on these issues, obviously in Santa Cruz. So just wanted to say that. Other council members comments on item 18 at all. Good to go. Okay, great. We also have comments on item 19 and I believe Council Member Brown, I believe you pulled that. No? That was me, Calentary Johnson. Okay, Council Member Calentary Johnson. Great, thank you. First I wanted to thank my colleagues, Council Member Brown, in coming for putting this resolution forward. I wanted to further draw out one portion of the resolution that speaks to the wealth gap across our county and just highlight some additional data around population and per capita income. So the city of Watsonville, I'm gonna look at my notes to make sure I get this right. The city of Watsonville is made up of 81.2% Latinx and 15.2% white and their annual per capita income is 20,869. City of Santa Cruz is 21% Latinx, 61.6% white with an annual per capita income of $39,653. City of Capitola, 24.9% Latinx, 64.8% white with an annual per capita income of $41,438. And the city of Scott Valley is 10.6% Latinx, 78% white with an annual per capita income of $56,176. I know that's a lot of numbers that I just put out there but I think it's really important to really specifically highlight these numbers. It shows the significant inequities across our county and the rail transit option gives us an opportunity to reduce some of these inequities. We won't solve them, but it's an opportunity to reduce them by increasing access to jobs and education and reducing household transportation costs. This really is a social, environmental and transportation justice issue. So I just, I want to thank my colleagues and bring the data out further and support us continuing to explore all options. So thank you, council member. Next I have item 21 was pulled for comments. This is a resolution recognizing tobacco waste as a public health and environmental threat. I believe that was, go ahead, council member coming. First, I just wanted to expect my appreciation of this resolution coming forward. And I just wanted to put it out there for the council and maybe if there's other council members who are interested in working on pursuing, because part of this is pursuing policies to mitigate tobacco waste.  And so if there's interest with other council members, I think it might be worth us working with other nonprofits like Save Our Shores and other groups, but maybe considering moving forward with trying to create some kind of policies around plastic lighters, given that people who want to smoke can still use matches which are biodegradable. There's also refillable lighters that could be sold in lieu of having these disposable lighters. And that may be another area that we can create policy to address some of this ongoing plastic waste that really ends up in our oceans and our environment. Thank you, council member. Council member Watkins, did you have a comment on this one? Yeah, I did, thank you. Yeah, I just want to extend my gratitude to my colleagues who also brought this item forward and my appreciation to our partners in the county and Tobacco Health and Public Health and their work on this as well. And there's a Tobacco Education Coalition which could be a really great space to have further conversation about additional policy recommendations as suggested by council member Cummings. And also in light of the fact that emerging tobacco products which is the baking products and then they're disposable. So it's I think an ongoing battle really. And just really wanting to really highlight how at the local level it's so important for us to be incubators, to really advance policies that are aligned with our values and hopefully get some state traction because we're not the only community impacted by tobacco waste. And nationally it's the issue. Internationally it's the most and I will hopefully not, but my understanding is that it's the most littered item on the planet is cigarette. What they do to our environment is don't take snow, has any requirement to do anything about this product that has and have no disposable outcomes for it in a really healthy way. So I think there's so much opportunity for us to advance policy that's going to support the environment and can ideally move away from having these toxic cigarette filters in our oceans and in our seas and impacting our animals and our communities. And then just also want to highlight that we had a event recently where there's some folks who actually met in Santa Cruz and they created something called the cigarette surfboard and they took all of these from the beaches and created reuse for them around these really beautiful and somewhat discussed designs within the surfboards and just trying to raise awareness about the impact it has on our ocean. So although this is a small action to try to raise awareness to have us as a local jurisdiction say that we want to see policy change, we're going to take it to the state and ask that the mayor send a letter to our representatives to share our concerns and hopefully we'll lead to eventual policy change that will impact not only the city of Santa Cruz but other communities like ours. So don't wanna miss this opportunity to speak to that and just thank all the folks that do the good work in our community to clean up the tobacco, the cigarette filters, but also just around awareness and prevention. So those are my comments on that item. Thank you mayor. Thank you council member. I will also just shine in. I just wanna thank the Tobacco Education Coalition. They helped guide the language on this and we've been working with them for a couple of months on this. So really helpful and also recognize our city attorney's office. They also helped put this resolution together and so they did a lot of research for us and so just wanted to thank both of those and their input on this. I have item number 22 and then item 23 as the next two for comments. 22 for the public is the theater business license taxes and I believe that was, whatever council member pulled that, please go ahead and raise your hand. Council member Cummings, okay. Yeah, it's kind of a joint statement on the two items. So both of these items reduce the theaters and for businesses that sell alcohol, primarily the ones that are on site consumption because they've been impacted by COVID and I know I mentioned it a couple of times but just thought it would be worth bringing up. And I'm not sure the best way to move forward with this but last year we were receiving a lot of correspondence or we received correspondence, I should say, from people living in the beach flats around parking and the impacts that they were facing because of parking. And I know it was brought up at the previous meeting, determining whether or not we could allocate some of the revenue from the parking fund to help with different services and different issues that may be occurring in the beach flats. But I'm wondering if we might be able to agenda a separate item that would allow for a waiving the parking fees for residents in the beach flats community for the 2021 summer. Those passes are generally only about $30 per resident but given that many of the low-income residents who live in these areas have experienced significant impacts from COVID-19. It would, I think it would be helpful for many of these residents if we, if the staff were recovering from the impacts of COVID-19. And so I don't know if that needs to be a motion. I mean, maybe the city attorney could weigh in on how we might be able to get an item like that agendized. And ideally, if we could have it at the second meeting in May, that would allow us to pass something before parking enforcement begins after Memorial Day weekend. That's to be agendized for action at a subsequent meeting. And I'm sure what is all entailed in that but I see the city managers coming on. Yeah. Yeah, so what I would refer back to is the council adopted policy of when looking at adding items to the agenda to have three council members sponsor an item and to be forward onto the agenda and of course, working with the mayor to agendize those items. So it would be just a standard approach that we have for any item that needs to be that council members want to sponsor onto the agenda. That would be working with public works and parking, I assume, or team to understand. Yeah, certainly. There's a background information that is needed. Council members can definitely work with staff. I think they're working with the staff here in my office, whether it's Ralph or myself. And then we can work with the appropriate departments as those information. And we understand that the council members is interested in just bringing forward a proposal that would look at the setting aside revenues from the parking fund for the purposes of subsidizing or paying for permits for residents of the beach area, which is a, as the city attorney mentioned, it's a completely separate item. That's what's before you, what does a rate increase in parking rates? Actually, what's before us, that's business license taxes for theaters and then the reduction in the alcohol sale permit fees. And so the reason why this came up is because we're reducing fees for these businesses. And then, but for our lowest income residents, if there's something that we can do to support them as well, you know, if we can have a discussion around that. That's right. There's another item on your agenda today on the parking rates in the beach. That's why I was referring to that. So, yes, yes. And so we just have to be agendized. Council members can work with staff and then like any other agenda item, you'd have to have the pre-counseling response for it and then work with them here to agendize them. Was there any other questions on 23? I believe someone had a question on 23. I had it. Yeah, thank you. I had a sort of comment question. I'm glad to see that we're supporting our local businesses in this way. And this is sort of a comment question for Chief Mills. I noticed the DUI increases as that was alarming. So I'm wondering if Chief Mills can speak to how we are on sale vendors so that they can follow best practices and policies and not over-serve, not serve our minors and help address the DUI numbers. Yeah, thank you. That's Council Member Conletary Johnson and good afternoon, Council and Mayor. We regularly work with the Alcohol Beverage Control Commission on edgards that are complying with the best practices and the law. We also run stings occasionally on those locations to make sure that they're not serving minors or over-serving other people. They've also allocated one person in our department as the Alcohol Enforcement Officer so that anytime we get a problem at one of the local liquor establishments, it gets funneled to that person for us to work with code compliance and others to make sure that we're paying attention that's needed to some of these establishments through education, but as well as enforcement, whatever it takes to make sure that they're compliant. And then also we work with the California Highway Patrol. They do a post-DUI arrest survey to make sure that if we're seeing that there's a particular bar, for instance, that has had some problems that we contact those bar owners and we do so on a regular basis where we talk about them over-serving people and the people getting behind the wheel and driving. So in looking calls for service, we do a variety of things to make sure because alcohol's such a risky behavior when people are intoxicated. Thank you, Chief Mills. And I believe in the past, your department has worked with community prevention partners, the county-wide drug and alcohol prevention effort and has done some positive upstream approaches, including recognizing merchants for responsible behaviors. So thank you for that work. Thank you, Chief Mills. Thank you, Council Member. I have questions on three items. Number 12, number 13, those were all questions requested. I think it was Council Member Brown. Thank you, which is the same question for items 12 and 13. Now this is the extension of the emergency declaration. I am just wondering because we aren't getting in the reports any information about what criteria, if any, I'm sure there are criteria. What criteria are being used for making a determination about this extension? What the plan is for moving out of the emergency mode, it seems like we are, we have a lot of emergencies, but I'm not sure that they're necessarily directly related to COVID or the fire at this point. So I just like to hear your thinking on that. Number 13, Bernal. I see Tony. I can start off again. The, and Tony came in and also Chief Haiduk can also weigh in. The part of the rationale for it is, well, first of all, we do have an existing county and state health emergency in place. So it's consistent with what the county and the state has in place. So this is not any different. And so that's to be consistent with that as a practical matter. And then in addition to that, in order to be eligible for female reimbursements of all the expenses that we're incurring currently with this fact and will be incurring during this public health emergency, we need to be able to have it in place. And so that's the other rationale again in order to take advantage of female reimbursements. And that really are the principal reasons to respond to the active emergency that's currently in place at the county and federal level. I suspect that once the, those declarations are removed and we would follow suit. But that's my understanding of it. And I don't know if Tony wants to add more or Chief. I would just add that particularly with respect to the item number 13, the fire emergency the primary rationale for that is to to continue to remain eligible for potential female reimbursement. So that's the primary issue driving that resolution. And I don't really have anything to add to what Martin said with regard to the COVID emergency but I'm happy to answer any further questions. And you had also asked a question. I wanted to ask a question. Council Member Brown on item 27, which for the public is Highway one and nine intersection improvements, a budget adjustment? Thanks. So I have a question related to the project itself and it seems like now is probably a good time to ask it. So, and I've been, well, I'll just ask the question. So I assume that there's been some traffic management planning around the construction phase of this project. And I'm just wondering if there's information that's already been developed around it like a traffic management plan. And if so, could we, would it be possible for council members to get a copy of it and just know what's happening? I mean, this is, this is right now we're not really thinking about it this way but it is going to be a major disruption and we're going to start getting tons of questions from members of the community and complaints, I imagine. So, having a way to respond to those with some level of understanding about what's happening would be really great. So we'll hear all the quirks of Mayor Myers, Mayor City Council. Mark, I'll just jump in here for a second here. Caltrans is mandated, we have a mandated traffic control plan throughout the entirety of the project is divided in about six phases. The majority of the work that will be disruptive to the actual traveling public is going to be night work. Positive thing, at least we can do that there because it's not located right in the middle of the residential area. So, and as you mentioned, this will be highly disruptive when the work will be going on but I anticipate that the majority of the really disruptive stuff will take place at night and all those traffic restrictions, traffic handling restrictions are in some of the contract documents that have been approved by Caltrans. So I'd be happy to get you what we have. I mean, a lot of the details will be fleshed out during construction. Obviously there's a lot of things that, a lot of unanticipated things that can happen. I'd be happy to give you at least give you a framework for traffic closures and whatnot but the majority of that is at night time. Thank you. I appreciate that. I didn't ask to suggest that I want you to put a whole lot more work into this. But so- Oh no, I put plenty and I'm happy to do more. So yeah, just like some basics and you know, I think just when it starts, when it's happening it's going to be important to be able to- Sure, yeah, Caltrans typically what they do is they'll give us an honorable look of time when we can set up traffic closures and when we can have them down by. They only work that to my knowledge will be taking place during the day we'll just have shoulder closures and certainly not on the main on the main line there. But yeah, I'll get you whatever information I have. Yeah, I said a follow up comment I was just going to suggest to you if there's any information that when the time comes it might be worth having some information on the city's website. So if that's on the public works department's website but so that way if members of the public are contacting us with concerns around congestion or if they have concerns around how construction is going to impact traffic we can direct them to that site and there's some talking points available or just some information that can help the community understand when those impacts are going to occur and when construction is going to be taking place and how the city's going to mitigate a lot of those impacts. So as we have a viable schedule from the contractor and things are really beginning to move we will keep our website updated and I know the PIO for Caltrans District 5 will also have the information on their website because it is two state routes. So but we will absolutely make an effort to keep everybody informed. Thank you. Okay. That does it for all the questions and comments on that. I had one question on item number 14. Okay. Item number 14 is the minutes and I just had a question and maybe this could go to the city manager or city attorney. I think there was some confusion around the motion that was made at the last meeting. This is the temporary outdoor living ordinance item. Within that motion items number three and four, number three was restrictions on daytime encampments with implementation of a daytime property storage program and number four was enforcement of nighttime prohibition to be conditioned on availability of alternative shelter options and to be deferred until item one is accomplished and safe sleeping programs are operational after which the city would prohibit camping in all other city areas other than city permanent indoor shelter, safe sleeping locations and managing cabinets to be run by non-profit faith-based community and county partners. The thing with item number, with both of these items there's been some confusion because some people have reached out and asked if the city doesn't have an ordinance in place, what are they enforcing as it relates to restrictions on daytime encampments with the implementation of a daytime storage program and in the nighttime prohibition and so I just wanted to see if we can get some clarification is this largely gonna take place when an ordinance is passed or what would be enforced and when would that occur because I think some people envision that we've been moving forward with creating for example the storage programs and if those programs are created and then they'd have to impose restrictions on daytime encampments but we don't have an ordinance, is that legal? And so I just wanted to see if we can get some clarification around when enforcement of daytime and nighttime encampments would be occurring and what that would be in conjunction with. So I'll be happy to take a crack at that one. My understanding and this goes back to the meeting in March where I think the first meeting in March when the council introduced the amendments to chapter 636 that were later adopted with direction to bring amend modifications back and my interpretation of the council's direction at that time was and continues to be that we will have an amended ordinance in place and in effect before we'll begin enforcement. So assuming that we're able to get programs operational before that's great but we need to have the ordinance in effect in order to effectively enforce it. So to add just a little bit to that. So essentially the directed come forward is not in effect because the legislation to make that happen hasn't been approved by the city council. So that will happen at your next meeting when there'll be a first hearing with respect to the here referring to the daytime storage program as well as the nighting portion. So that is not in effect currently because again no legislation's been adopted by the city council. Okay, well I just like to express last meeting and I think that helps clarify our members of the public. Did you have a note first of the public that would like to speak to any item on our consent agenda with the exception of item number 24 which has been pulled. Now is the time to do so. Please press star nine on your phone to raise your hand. When it is your time to speak you will hear an announcement that you have been unmuted the timer will then be set to two minutes. You see two people in the audience with their hands up. And so this will be just for items on the consent agenda except for item number 24. And I see three. Okay, I'll go with Santa Segal first. I just wanted to thank the council so much. I have so much appreciation for you including the resolution on light rail in this week's agenda. You know, a lot of people in this county ran on an activity platform but the Santa Cruz city council is actually following through. And so I just wanted to really thank you for doing that. Thank you. Thank you for calling in. And next is Peter Bache. Bache? Hi, Peter. Oh, Eric. There you go. Can you hear me now? We can. Hi, Peter. Good, hello. How you doing? Hi, everybody. Thanks. Let's see. I wanted just to say thank you for talking for the community from Beach Flat. I want to have such an echo. Is that better? Anyway, try to give input with the phone issue and just trying to dial and raise their hands with star nine, star six. There's been several times confusion and also they're in the middle of work like right now. So I just want to talk for them because throughout these months and throughout this pandemic the garden has been goldmine. It's been a great pressure valve. Like, you know, a lot of people when they couldn't go out to work, they just, their garden was really just like the place to be outside of their only room. A lot of times I have one, two families in one little room. So the garden and of course the street, but the garden was kind of like just a place, you know, ventilating their frustration and also obviously we're having a meeting on May 6th if I believe with Robert Acosta from Parks and Recreation and we'll have a meeting and there'll be a great news and they've been asking already for almost a year like what's going on, what's going to happen and this is a wonderful news and I appreciate what you all did for it. Thank you, Peter. Next up I have phone number ending in 1810. You know, I, on item 18, I am concerned to divide the nation over race and widen the existing racial divide stewing anti-racist racism to justify a Malcolm X blank check, Marxist, anarchist, violent revolutionary war on America. Homosity of violent attacks on Asians from what normally were very low levels. Identity finger pointing, including by the leftist propaganda monopoly machine known as the MSN, who never tires of stewing partisan lies, it desperately wants us to believe late in racism by whites or premises is responsible, which needs instead either dispassionate analysis based on real card facts or better still, just stop that. You don't need to be Lenin's version of useful idiots and then one paragraph, because it simply states you're on condemnation of any violence directed toward Asians, but you just can't resist pushing the leftist dogma. Now, many people, MSN press desperately wants to sell the Atlanta shootings as a hate crime poster, but so far the FBI says it wasn't. I know it, and violence is not about racism or hate anymore, they're rapes about having sex or sexism. Race is a bad, not excuse for the violent ones.  If you must, search Blacks assaulting Asians on YouTube or consider a well-known white deal of activists was arrested recently for an Asian dog, 28 crime charge plus a malicious harassment in Seattle in March, not white supremacy and not really the same as any of these historical comparisons. I don't care what the racist attacker is because the only important thing is they are dangerously violent, but if it comes out to deal with the current realities, I examined the study done by the New York Asian Bar Association and I conclude it was very similar to this resolution as an ill-relevant leftist-regarded history lesson. The actual number of acts of violence is still minuscule compared to the anti-racist violence emitted outside the BLM. Thank you. Okay, next we have caller ending in 7496. Just press star nine and you'll be unmuted. Council members, this is Matt Ferrell. I just want to thank the council for its support of moving forward with the rail business plan and funding for environmental work to evaluate next steps. I think it's a critical opportunity for economic development of the region and for green-trees. Development of the region and for green transportation and social equity. Thanks again for your support. Thank you. I'll bring it back to the council now and I'll look for, we will go ahead and I think Lisa Murphy, our director of HR. Lisa, do you have an update on item 24? I believe there's some language. And then Mayor Meyers, we just need to do a vote on the remainder of the consent agenda. Yep, sorry about that. Head in, look for emotion on the remaining items of the consent agenda before moving on to item number 24, which has been pulled. So I'm now looking for emotion on the remaining items on consent with the exception of item 24. And I see council member Cummings and then council member Colder. I'm happy to move the consent with the exception of item number 24. And then also just wanted to express my appreciation to the Seaside Company for working with the city to extend the lease of the past years, those extensions work for three years and this one's for five. And given that this is a really huge benefit for the community, I just want to express my appreciation between the ongoing relationship between the Seaside Company and the city for the use of this land. I'll call the... Great, council member Watkins. Aye. Number 24, that was pulled by council member Golder and I believe our HR director, Lisa Murphy, here to present that item. Thank you, mayor. Good afternoon, mayor. Council member Lisa Murphy, your human resources director. Item 24 is the approval of the early termination of the cost reduction agreements with the various bargaining units, the city manager and the executives. We reached an agreement with all of the units to remove the furlough. However, we did not reach an agreement with the supervisors, but I am confident that we will and we'll be able to bring back an agreement at the May meeting. In addition, there should be before you a revised agreement with the SEIU unit. And I would like to be able just to highlight what those differences are. If I could take a moment and share my screen. I'm in yellow. In addition to the language, we are adding to this agreement the ability for SEIU members to continue the furlough if they decide to do so. That's a number one and number two, how they can do that. They can either go voluntarily unpaid or they can use their paid time off to make themselves whole. In addition, the directors and department heads and supervisors are asked that they respect the needs of these employees who may have childcare, elder care, or other time conflicts due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which point these off the furloughs off. However great it is, please, we wanna honor that and grant the request for that opportunity to utilize the furlough time or pay time off. And then finally, they're just going to have to notify me so that we can make any operational changes that may be coming no later than May 3rd. And these terms and conditions have been accepted by the SEIU members. Union, excuse me. With that, that concludes my additions to this particular item. And just remind you that when you do make your motion to please remove the supervisors from that motion. And that concludes my call. I will go ahead and see if there's any questions on this item. Otherwise I would look for a motion. Excuse me, I'll take it out to the public comment next and then we'll look for a motion. Any other questions? Vice Mayor Bruner, did you have a question? No, okay. Okay, I'll call you when we, okay. I'll go ahead and take this out to public comment and not seeing anyone in the audience with their hands up. So I'll bring it back to council for a motion on this item. And I see Vice Mayor Bruner and then Council Member Golder. I'm happy to move a motion on item number 24, approval of early termination of the cost reduction agreement with various bargaining units minus the supervisors unit fiscal year 2021. And the second by Council Member Golder. There's, second. Sorry, Mayor, there's also a resolution that needs to be included. Part of the motion. Okay. Should I state that as well? Yes, please. Yes, yes. And to adopt a resolution approving the early termination of the 10% furlough for the executive and represented employees and the city manager effective May 14th, 2021. You're great. I'll make one additional comment. It should be recognized and thanked for the employees that had chore the city to help us through this recession. And I can't express my gratitude to the employees and my fellow colleagues and us for agreeing to these concessions. Thanks as well to all of our employees who took these furlough work under really stressful conditions under COVID-19. So just really want to recognize your work over the past year and really pleased that we can get this done early. And so thank you to Director Murphy also for your work on bringing this to us. And with that, I have a motion by Vice Mayor Brunner and a second by Council Member Golder. And I will go ahead and ask for a roll call vote. Do you want me to repeat the motion Bonnie or do you just write out a gender report? Do I need to repeat it? No, just declare unanimously. We'll now move on to our consent public. These are items 31 through 35 on our agenda today. For members of the public who are streaming, this meeting is, who are streaming this meeting, if you want to comment on items 31 through 35, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by a Council Member for further discussion. Are there any Council Members who wish to comment or pull any items on our consent public hearing? These are items 31 through 35. I will go ahead and bring these out to, and I see we have one attendee who would like to comment on these items. Number ending in 1810 please. Three, oh wait a sec, I'm gonna trough my sound. Seething, but I'm not paying for otherwise because sites under construction don't yet pay property taxes.  Do you tell me exactly what city-provided child care services are these developers receiving that they're not paying for? I can tell you, absolutely none. Your resolution justifications are socialist, welfare-resist, re-eution nonsense.  It is the Bill Clinton defense. When asked why he had sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, he replied, because I could. That is your justification, because I could, using the monopoly power of project approval like the mob might. This and many other developer fees are questionable as to their justification or monetary amounts. This one has zero justification. Yes, it's really, really sad. Who is a fault there? Not the developer. Maybe you need to find another pocket to pick that is not so obviously unjustified and tyrannical. I don't think the city should be charging any developer for this, but your faulty idea, they are responsible, it's double faulty by excluding 100% affordable developers because, and I admit this is a prejudice, cats that people who occupy such structures are more likely to require socialized childcare services, not less than other market rate developer occupants would. As to police and fire, I don't know if I can talk about that here, but I suppose it's possible construction site might need police for trespasses of medical emergency and arson. But I would guess the occupied buildings, especially during a reconstruction, don't generate a lot of police fire response. And the amount charged seems like the full amount charged per capita for every citizen of Santa Cruz. I can't go on about all these other fees discussed last meeting because they're off topic here and somewhere to last week, who can address six different fees in two minutes, but they all have issues. Again, this seems like a shameless and no justification, so it's a muddy grab. Thanks. Thank you. I'm now gonna look for a motion on the consent public hearing. This will be for item 31, which is the second reading and final adoption of the Beach Area Parking Meter Rate Ordnance Updates. Item number 32, which is the second reading final adoption of ordinance number 2021-09 amendments to the municipal code chapter 16.01 to align city code language with the recently council adopted 2021 interim water shortage contingency plan. Item 33, which is the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 2021-10 child care impact fee and resolution setting the child care impact fee. Item number 34, which is the second reading and final adoption of ordinance number 2021-11 public safety impact fee and implementing resolution setting the new public safety impact fee. And finally, item number 35, which is the 2021-22 housing and urban development action plan. I look for a motion on these items. Council Member Watkins and then Council Member Golder. I'm sorry for the sound in here. I will go ahead and move our consent public hearing items, items number 31 to drive by the mayor. Okay, great. I have a motion by Council Member Watkins, seconded by Council Member Golder. And I'd like to ask the clerk to please take a roll call vote. Council Member Watkins, Callentary Johnson. The street tree master plan. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. Okay, I will go ahead and ask for a presentation by our staff. This will be Travis Beck, Superintendent of Parks and Leslie Keady, our urban forester. Welcome Travis and Leslie. Here they're on. Good afternoon, Mayor. This is Tony Elliott with Parks and Recreation. I'm just gonna try to reach out to Travis and Leslie here. So just one moment. Okay, honey, I misread. We are late, aren't we? Good afternoon, Council. Hi, Travis. Welcome. Thank you. I'm afraid this item has popped up sooner than our team is ready to present on. Okay. I see that Chris Berry and Rosemary are on. Is it okay to go out of order? Take 30, yeah, then you can reorder it, yes. Okay, Travis, we'll go ahead and do item 37 and then we'll come back. I'll get everyone lined up, thank you. Great. Okay, I will go ahead and ask for item number 37 to be brought forward. This is the Federal Endangered Species Act Incidental Take Permit for Operations and Maintenance Habitat Conservation Plan. For members of the public who are streaming this meeting, if this is an item you want to comment on, now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comments and then return to council for deliberation and action. I see we have Rosemary Menard as the presenter and I also saw that Chris Berry was on the line. Hi, good afternoon, Mayor and Council. It's really my pleasure to be here today and introduce an item that has been a long time coming and I just wanted to make a couple of introductory remarks and then I turn it over to Chris Berry who's got a brief presentation for you on this item. Mayor Myers, what we call some 20 plus years ago when the city started working on this activity and I don't think we have too many items that have been on the burner cooking, if you will, for 23 years as this one has done and has obviously required staff to nurse it along through the thick and the thin and imagine how many different federal administrations there were during that period of time and the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs of whether people are for these kinds of things or against these kinds of things over those many years but I do want to really acknowledge and congratulate the Water Department staff who started on this long before I came here for achieving an outcome that I think is a long-term certainty relative to our operations and maintenance and the kinds of things that we do every day that requires that we interact with the environment and some of the protected species that we want to be careful of. So with that I'm going to turn this over to Chris Berry to tell you a little bit about it and then the action here is for you to authorize the city manager to accept an incidental take permit for the Fish and Wildlife Services Operations and Maintenance Habitat Conservation Plan for the city activities. Okay, with that to you Chris, aim on the screen. I do too. Also I'm doing the typical zoom shenanigans here and pardon my fumbling through this but thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk today about the operations and maintenance habitat conservation plan. Are you seeing my presentation? No, we're just seeing you right now Chris. Okay, well I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully I share the right screen. Okay, I'm getting better at this. It only took a year. Okay, thanks again. I'm going to be real brief here. There's a, it's a long and windy road and I could ramble on for quite a while about this but I'm going to try to keep this brief and give you a chance to ask questions. So in short, this is a 30 year permit Federal Endangered Species Act compliance for the City of Santa Cruz Water and Public Works Department. So I think it's notable that we started out with all the city departments that had any interaction with endangered species and we ultimately ended with just key activities engaged in by the Water and Public Works Departments. And I think that's noteworthy because for a long time we've had and sometimes our activities are not well aligned. And I think this has been a good vehicle to try to bring them into better alignment than they were in the past. So I think that's positive. I'll also say this is the other HCP. We have the Imagine as some wanted HCP still out there. There's quite a lot of overlap but these are species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has jurisdiction over and I will get into that a little bit more further in the presentation. Again, it's a long term permit, 30 years. So I think we have our work cut out for us in terms of this commitment but also as Rosemar alluded to the changing staff not only will I not be here in 30 years but we'll have different regulators. So we're gonna, I think one of the biggest challenges just to sort of reveal some stuff I'm gonna talk about later is that we need to be thoughtful about how we implement this in terms of our project management and record keeping and organization and just make sure that we're really on top of that because it's pretty unusual to have a 30 year obligation like this. Again, multiple species. We started out a long time ago with sort of a dream list of all the species that we thought ought to be included that the city ever interacted with and thankfully we had a little bit of a reality check and carried that down over the years. I think another message along with the departments being aligned is that there's opportunities to leverage other natural resource protection goals with this effort. Either our drinking water source protection goals or otherwise. And again, I'll get into that a little bit more as we go along. Along with doing this presentation today we have done presentations at international and state conferences, the County Fish and Wildlife Advisory Commission. There's been quite a lot of outreach. I will say that because it's been such a long process and maybe that folks have sort of forgotten about it or they're wondering why they haven't heard more about it but there has been quite a lot of outreach and then there's of course been the official Federal Register notice that invited public comment and review back in September which you see a screenshot of right there. Some of the activities that we're covering are the big ones that Water and Public Works are engaged in that have the potential to affect listed species and some non-listed species, species that might be listed in the future. And of course those are the ones that probably come to your minds being flood control, water diversion and maintenance. And lots of other sort of nuts and bolts activities that the city engages in on a daily basis where we like a pipeline repair here where we actually had red-legged frogs in the bottom of that pit and we had to work with our maintenance crews to figure out a way to appease both our federal regulators and make sure we kept the water flowing to the North Coast farmers. So it's not all as glamorous as the title Habitat Conservation Plan. It's really down on the digits, trying to make compromises and meet sometimes competing goals with some of this stuff. So here's our list of the finalists and our covered species list. Again, I think we had a list that was over 30 species when we started. We paired it down to the ones that we really do have an effect on and that have resulted in big project delays with some of our work over the years. And I won't give you the details on where they're all found, but if anyone wants to talk offline about this stuff, I'd be happy to do that. Incidentally, when we first started, we were considering species as widely as sea otters, pelicans, an extinct beetle that used to be found in Santa Cruz 100 years ago. So we really did make a big effort to pair this down and make this a more manageable list of species that we're getting coverage for. So lo and behold, on January 25th, we got a permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I won't say how many years the draft document has been sitting in their email box, but it actually caught us a little bit off guard that we got the permit on January 25th. We were, of course, grateful, but if you notice there's a couple typos in the document, that's because basically we finished this up with a draft document. And lo and behold, as I said, surprisingly I got a permit in my email one Monday morning or I think January 25th was on Monday. Anyway, it was a big surprise to get this permit after 20 plus years. And Mayor Myers remembers well, I'm sure thinking that the process was taking too long back in the early aughts. She was the project manager back then and is well familiar with some of the travails that we're working through a permit like this, whether it's the, what activities are recovering or what department doesn't have long-term funding assurances or what federal regulator is getting in the weeds about things or what have you. So it's really a great pleasure for me to be able to present this to the council with Mayor Myers being seated where she is because she has that unique connectivity to this process that's really valuable and I appreciate it greatly. So what are we doing for the conservation strategy? We're first and foremost, we're trying to avoid and minimize our effects on these species. And the big thing that of course you all have heard about is in-stream flow improvements. And that's one of the things that overlaps most with these species and the anatomist cell monitors that we're also getting take authorization for in the other HCT. But then there's your sort of run-of-the-mill construction maintenance best practices. Those are things that are typically already involved or already included in other permits that we have. So they're not really new to us. We're just formalizing those for the next 30 years and getting take authorization, which will presumably excite some of our permitting in the future and also give us a little bit more certainty about what the standards in those permits might be over the long term, which is really pretty important when you're planning a big capital project. You can't have a shifting regulatory landscape that you're dealing with. And then we have this compensation for remaining biological effects. And that's basically the stuff that we can't offset our biological effects for the buoyancy minimization. You have to figure out a way to do off-site mitigation or somehow otherwise compensate for those effects. So this is another win-win collaborative benefit of this project where we're doing the Albany-Tigerbele mitigation. Thankfully, Parks and Rec has been very cooperative and we're working with them to do some work on the Moor Creek Preserve, which for a long time has been planned, but there hasn't really been resources to do. And that supports the work that they're doing elsewhere on the Moor Creek Preserve. That's to basically mitigate for impacts we have related to our North Coast pipeline. And I'll speak a little bit more to that long-term obligation later when we talk about the cost of this permit. The other thing that we need to get, we need to compensate for remaining effects is for red-legged frog. And that's again, because of our pipelines, they run through lots of red-legged frog habitat up the coast and while red-legged frogs are prevalent up the coast, they're reduced probably more than 90% of their range is no longer occupied. So it's kind of a big deal, both for the red-legged frog and the tiger beetle. We have the potential to affect 10% of the world's remaining population of tiger beetle, I'm told. So this is really kind of a big deal. Some of our obligations, this is a third-year permit, which is probably scary to a lot of us. I'm feeling pretty good about things, but I asked our attorneys to lay out a flow chart of how we go through evaluations of projects and what our permit obligations are, just to make it clear that in some cases we do have some expedited permit and in other cases we still have permits that we need to get, but we obviously need to implement the conservation strategy and I should apologize because we've already started to implement it without getting your authorization. We had a 90-day deliverable when we got the permit and frankly to be able to do that we had to start literally the day after we got the permit. So we've already started to implement this on the more creep-preserved reporting. There's a ton of data management. A lot of internal outreach, we talked about external outreach earlier, but there's gonna be a lot of internal outreach similar to what we've done in the past for general environmental regulatory compliance purposes, but there will be, it's not a night to do anymore, it's a need to do. So we will have to put a little more rigor into our staff training. Funding assurances, I referred to that in terms of what departments were part of this earlier on, but funding assurances actually is part of the permit. So you have to show your ability to fund all your obligations for the life of the permit in order to be granted the permit.  And then of course staffing, we need staff to do all this and we, of course, we have a lot of obligations as you all do, so we're thinking about staffing as a big deal and especially with the anatomy of some on an HCT coming up, we'll be considering very seriously how we're gonna staff this. You probably saw in the staff report, it's about a $2.7 million commitment over the term of the permit. Most of that is due to staffing, but also the tiger beetle mitigation. However, the tiger beetle mitigation can potentially be avoided once we determine whether we actually need to disturb tiger beetle habitat with North Coast rehab efforts and there's a good potential we can avoid that. That may not mean that we stop that effort and may just open up some other opportunities in terms of a safe harbor agreement and alternative funding opportunities to continue the work that we're doing with parks out at Moore Creek. And again, a lot of the stuff and stuff we're doing anyway, we just don't have the 30 years of assurances. So a lot of the costs that went into the funding assurances analysis were things that we were already planning to do. So it isn't like this is a new $2.7 million obligation. It's just a rejection over at 30 years, what it will cost for us to do stuff that we were mostly doing anyway. And then hopefully there's gonna be some savings if we have expedited permit conditions and more certainty with what those conditions are over time. Presumably that will help us save on project design. It will help us build things sooner, which of course is generally good because prices seem to just continue to escalate. So I will say that because this was a municipal applicant driven process, our funding assurances analysis was somewhat less rigorous than had it been otherwise. Also because our remaining effects are not huge. Fish and Wildlife Service was not super concerned about our ability to pay overtime, which was helpful certainly. So that said, I will just thank you for listening to me and thanks to all the folks that helped with this. There was a massive team of consultants and other staff and Mayor Myers and our former water director, Bill Coker and my former boss, Terry Tompkins, who started this in 1998. There are lots of hands went into this. So anyway, it was a good team effort and I look forward to the next 30 years of implementation. So with that, I'd be happy to take in questions. Thanks, Chris. I will look for council questions and I just wanna thank you and congratulate you. I know this has been a really long haul. Chris and I spent a lot of time crawling around in the mud trying to find these animals a long time ago. And so Chris is really, I mean, for my fellow council members, certainly a world that I work in and there are very few cities that commit to this kind of conservation oriented work in their regular operations and date. And so this really set us again in a very solid place around the values that we have about our environment and about the unique species that make up Santa Cruz. So just really wanna recognize Chris and the whole team. We have some of the best biologists working on this and really this is really a standout situation with us as a city to commit to doing this. And I know Chris will be bringing the Anagymus cell-monad work forward as well. So it's pretty exciting for us biology geeks to see something like this come to fruition. Even though it took 23 years to get a 30 year old. It's a good lesson in patience. I will open it up to, let's see, council member Brown and vice mayor Bruder. Thank you for the very thorough but condensed report on this habitat conservation plan. I did read through the plan and it's just fascinating all of the work that's gone into this and I can only imagine how it felt just when you saw that email in your inbox just kind of happened. So I'm just, I'm really glad to see this coming to fruition as well. My question is about the assessment of what this might do to change our access to North coast water. So will, I guess, and it varies, it depends on the year. So I know there's no definitive answer but will this change the amount of water that can divert from North coast streams? And like, do you have any sense of what that might be? I'm not to say that I don't support this. I'm absolutely supported. I'm just wondering what it means. Yeah, that's a great due diligence question, commissioner Brown, and certainly for folks that understand the way the Endangered Species Act works, you would know that fish and wildlife service needed to be aligned with the National Marine Fishery Service when they issued this permit. So that was literally one of the last things we had to iron out. And I, it's sort of an interesting experience to have had because it was this big contentious issue which was resolved as literally a sentence that basically said the minimum flows from the Anatomous Salmon at HCP will be the minimum flows for this HCP, which was enough for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to feel like they were getting protection for Tidewater Gobi and Steelhead, or excuse me, Tidewater Gobi and Redlegged Frog primarily. So yes, it will affect our ability to take North Coast water in the future. Those commitments are the same commitments that we're making in our water rights project right now, as well as our Anatomous Salmon at HCP. So, but yes, this is the first time we've made a long-term commitment to any sort of flow agreement like that. And interesting, learning about the San Francisco popcorn flower and Western-covered species list was very fascinating. My question is if you could maybe speak to the request for the doubt you mentioned that was highly unusual and why 30 years? Yeah, thanks for your question, Commissioner Bruner. But 30 years is actually not unusual for Habitat Conservation Plan. In fact, sometimes they're 50 years. It's just unusual for the city to make a commitment of that duration. In my experience, which is almost 30 years now here, we've never in my knowledge had a permit that was a 30-year permit. So I guess for me, that's meaningful in a way because A, it allows you to do more good things for the environment and provide more certainty around your operations. But it also begs the response to actually have some continuity and institutional knowledge and build a program that other staff can plug into. And I think that's, I wouldn't be a good manager if I wasn't thinking of that down the road because obviously I'm not gonna be here forever. So against my natural inclinations, I'm trying to be a much more organized and thoughtful long-term planner at this point, knowing that we have a fresh slate, so to speak. And now that we have this fresh 30-year commitment, I just wanna be sure that everyone understands that and that we're setting this up and ready to go and have people be able to move forward with it after those of us who worked on it in the past years move on. So could I just add one thing to that, which is that I think that the benefit in terms of endangered species compliance is a long-term certainty you get with one of these long-term permits. And so by negotiating the agreement kind of upfront, you do set a set of terms of conditions that allow you to build that into your planning. And when you're a water utility, that kind of certainty about what your flow agreements need to be or what actions you can take, what actions you can't take relative to your operation or your construction projects, these are things that are really valuable to know upfront rather than to go down the road through a section seven consultation with every single project and have it be this way, this administration in some different way and a different administration. So that's a real driver behind the length of these permits and why they're valuable, particularly in a water utility kind of funding. We're lucky to have a water director who's actually developed an HCP and implemented an HCP as well. That's pretty rare that we have that much depth in-house among city staff to have the mayor and the water director and myself working on habitat conservation plans. So we're set up pretty well for success there, I feel. You're on mute. Mayor Meyers, I'll take this out to the public now. I see one person with their hand up and they end in the phone number 3346 is your last four digits. And if you could press star six, you'll be unmuted. I had raised my hand for the street tree master plan before you switch the order. So I'll wait for that one to make comments. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I will bring this back to the council for deliberation and action and look for a motion from, let's see, I've got council member Cummings. Are you, do you have additional discussion or are you ready for a motion? No, I just wanna express my appreciation for all the work that's been done on this over the years by all the different people working in the water department have come and go and Mayor Meyers, we worked on this long time ago and I'm happy to move to authorize the city managers to accept the US Fish and Wildlife Services incidental take permit number TE89655D-0 providing incidental take coverage under the Federal Endangered Species Act for various aspects of the city's ongoing water and public works operations as described in the operations and maintenance habitat conservation plan. Council member Brown. I'll second that. That's a huge thanks to all those involved. Great. We have a motion then by council member Cummings seconded by council member authorized city manager to accept the US Fish and Wildlife Service incidental take permit for the operations and maintenance habitat conservation plan and could we get a roll call vote please? Council member Watkins. Aye. Street Tree Master Plan. This is item number 36 on our agenda for general business for members of the public who are streaming this meeting if this is an item you want to comment on now is the time to call in using the instructions on your screen. The order will be a presentation of the item of by staff followed by questions from the council. We will then take public comment and then return to the council for deliberation and action. I'll turn this over to our presenters, our staff and presenters today. That's Travis Beck with our superintendent of our parks department and Leslie Keady our urban forester. Welcome Travis and Leslie. Travis here on mute. Afternoon again, Mayor Myers and members of the council. Thank you very much for your flexibility. This afternoon as we assembled our team and to discuss the Street Tree Master Plan to get it started I wanted to take just a minute to introduce our team and our presenters today. Of course we have Leslie Keady our urban forester who pushed this plan through on top of all of the regular urban forestry work in spite of all the challenges of 2020 and 2021. We're also joined by James Scheid who's a forester with Cal Fire and they are the grand tours who provided the funding for this project. Very grateful for their support and Jimmy will say a few words in a moment. And then the presentation, the bulk of the presentation will be conducted by our consulting team from Davey Resource Group. We have Tina McKeon who's a board certified master arborist with Davey and also Rachel Fitz who holds a doctorate in plant pathology. And so we're really lucky to work with them on this project and they brought a lot of experience in doing similar projects and other municipalities. Tiffany Wise-West is also available if we have questions as she was a key collaborator on getting this grant and administering the project for us. So with that I'll turn it over to Leslie to give us some background on the project and how we got here. Good afternoon council and public Leslie Keady urban forester. So I worked with Tiffany in the Climate Action Office and we obtained this Cal Fire grant. Originally the grant was to do the planting of 500 canopy trees in the community on public property and then to do a complete inventory with the Davey Resource Group to inventory all trees in parks and along streets and publicly owned excluding the green belts. Tiffany and I overestimated how many trees we had on public property in the parks and in the right of way. And so we were left with a little bit of funding. So then we requested of Jimmy's group here at Cal Fire to be able to appropriate the remainder of the funds over so we could create a policy document for street trees. This is the first policy document that we have in the forestry program that captures the resource value, see an objective and quantifies the benefit of our urban canopy on public right of ways. And it's just a really good opportunity to have some policy that unites all of the different departments that we work with together to actually have a document on hand that supports the inventory that we did and also sets as a baseline so we can have funding for other forestry documents and programs and other grant opportunities as they arise. So I'm here to answer any questions but our Davey Resource Team is primarily going to do the presentation. And then I'll let Jimmy here talk briefly on the Cal Fire process and the value of this plan that we have. Okay, I think that's me, right? Thank you. Yeah, oh thanks. I appreciate being here virtually. Just as a bit of background, our Urban Community Forestry program has had grants in existence for about 20 years now and in the last few years we've had a more robust program that has largely focused on what we consider to be disadvantaged communities and low income communities. That said, the city of Santa Cruz while maybe lacking some of those was able to competitively submit a proposal that we found to be of great value. And while having that application approved and a grant created as one thing to actually implement those goals is quite another. And as Ludley alluded to, there were certain expectations at the onset of the project which Sten Morved as a savings was seen. And with the last year of time that they had on this project having an extension granted to the city they were to make good on what remained of those funds to make sure they worked on spent. So they planted those 500 trees and had conducted that inventory that were very useful for moving the program further in the city but to then take that a step further and to reallocate those remaining funds to create the Street Tree Master Plan that'll be discussed here in a moment was very advantageous to them and something that in the timeframe given I'm really proud to see come to light my hope is that after the council and those that are gathered are witness to the presentation ahead they'll realize the value of that tool not only in terms of assessing what the inventory laid out in terms of the different attributes of the urban forest but what those quantifiable values are what those trees mean in terms of dollars and cents to the people that live and work in Santa Cruz. And so I just hope that the council will pay it mind and ask any questions of me if needed or those that have worked on the plan but in terms of it being a tool that I hope that the city continues the reference for its own vision but also to implement the goals that are contained there and to realize that without proper investment in this kind of program in the tree services and the urban forestry program and those that work and are related to it in the city it's hard to see the return on value of just simply planting a tree or saying that your community is green minded. There are real dollars that grow on trees and these come from making that local investment. So I think you've forgiven me the opportunity I'm happy to answer questions at third time and if not again I just hope that much value comes from this presentation, thank you. So with that we'll turn it over to the folks at Davey and I will bring up the slide show. Can you all see the presentation? Don't present your view. Don't present your view, yes. I've seen other people have this difficulty. And we're only seeing a part of it now. I think if you press from current slide it usually... How about now? I still have your notes, yeah, the presenter view. All right, give me one moment I'll sort out the technical difficulties here. Travis, I also have it if you want me to... Give me one more second, thank you, Bonnie. Okay, Bonnie, why don't you go ahead and bring that up and our team can cue you. Thank you for the introduction. I'm Rachel Fitz and my colleague Tina McKeon is also here and we're representing Davey Resource Group as Travis said. This presentation is to introduce the Street Tree Master Plan and we'll discuss the Street Tree Master Plan development process, give an overview of tree benefits, summarize the Street Tree Work Plan and Planting Plan and highlight several of the goals for the Street Tree resource as well as the entire urban forest. Next slide, please. We have completed a resource analysis summarizing the structure, composition and benefits of community trees, a tree canopy analysis and a background in operations review that systematically reviewed existing policy and regulations, regulatory documents as they relate to trees including municipal code, the general plan, eight specific area plans and other documents such as the climate action and adaptation plans with the current funding, staffing and maintenance levels as