Good morning. Welcome to our 8 30 am public portion of the closed litigation session of the December 11, 2018 meeting of the city council and this part of the meeting the city council will receive public testimony. Thereafter the council members will move to the courtyard conference room for the closed session. I'd now like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member is Cron is absent. Matthews is currently absent. Chase? Here. Brown? Here. Narayan? Here. Vice Mayor Watkins is currently absent and Mayor Tresa? Here. Before we open public comment, I have a brief announcement. The city attorney will provide a report on items listed on the closed session agenda at the beginning of the 9 am session. Are there any members of the public that would like to speak to any items listed on the closed session agenda? Now I'd like to turn it over to the city attorney for any additional comments. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Tresa's members of the city council. I would request that by motion the council add three subsequent need items to the closed session agenda. The first two are threatened litigation items. You've received correspondence relating to both items 26 and 27 on your afternoon morning afternoon agenda threatening litigation relating to those two items. The third is a pending litigation matter entitled state of California ex rel Martinez versus Monterey Peninsula engineering. The basis for adding those is that the need for action arose subsequent to the posting of the agenda and there is also a necessity for the council to take action or give direction prior to the next regularly scheduled meeting. Thank you. Is there a motion to add those three subsequent need items to the closed session agenda? So moved by Councilman Matthews and I'll second that. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. That passes unanimously. See no public comment will now recess to the public to our closed session. Passes with. Councilmember crone and vice mayor Watkins absent. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to our now 904 session of the December 11th, 2018 meeting of the city council. I'd now like to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. Council member is crone. He's here. Here. Matthews. Here. Chase. Here. Brown. Here. Narayan. Here. Vice Mayor Watkins is currently absent. And Mayor Trazos. Here. And if the clerk would now please lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God. Indivisible with liberty and justice for all. There are no new employees to introduce. So at this time it is my pleasure to introduce the Jim House Community Service Award. The officer Jim House Community Service Award. It's an annual award that is given to community members and city employees for outstanding service to the city of Santa Cruz. The award was created in honor of Officer Jim House who retired in 2007 after serving as a Santa Cruz police officer for nearly 26 years. He was known throughout the city for his positive approach and partnership building between the city and Santa Cruz community. The Officer Jim House Community Service Award honors his legacy of positive collaborative problem solving. Recipients of this award are found to one exhibit extraordinary dedication and efforts towards improving the quality of life in Santa Cruz. Through constructive, solution oriented work. They also work in collaboration with the city or city departments and other community stakeholders. And embody a spirit of cooperation between the city and community and set a positive tone that inspires and motivates others. After this year's nomination process in which many impressive and worthy community members and city employees were nominated. A selection committee which consisted of Deputy Chief Rick Martinez and Santa Cruz Warriors President Chris Murphy and myself chose two honorees in each categories for 2018. In the city employee category, we recognize Sergeant Scott Garner and Susie O'Hara. And in the community member category, we recognize Paul Martin and Robert Oritzi. At this point in the agenda, I'm going to turn it over to, in just a moment, to Vice Mayor Watkins. And we'll step down and hear a little bit about each of those recipients. I can tell you that one, I was grateful I received the Jim House Award I think in 2008. And it's really something where I feel very proud and honored and I'm really happy to be here to recognize each of the recipients today. So I will step down and. Good morning. So it's my honor to first recognize Scott Garner, City Employee Recipient. Sergeant Garner has been with the police department for more than 20 years. Colleagues, neighbors and community members share their experiences of Sergeant Garner's willingness to step up and lead complex projects and volunteer his time in the community. Whether partnering with neighbors to address issues, training new PD volunteers, serving as a criminal justice instructor in the county schools, volunteering with youth for Special Olympics, or dedicating countless hours of off-duty time to organize and run the annual Police Officers Association Golf Tournament to benefit our local youth. Sergeant Garner works tirelessly to collaborate with community stakeholders. Thank you so much for your service, Sergeant Garner. Thank you. I just want to say thank you. This is an honor. We all work very hard and it takes a village. It really does. Thank you. The City Employee Recipient is Susie O'Hara. Susie has been with the city for eight years. When the city was facing the challenging task of sitting, establishing and managing the River Street Camp to offer stability and services to the homeless members of our community, Susie stepped up and she got it done. She spent countless hours planning and managing the River Street Camp, making sure the residents had meals, access to services, and bathroom and shower facilities. As a result of Susie's outstanding work, many members of the River Street Camp community went on to successful outcomes. With 56% of the 130 people who lived in the River Street Camp at one time or another, moving on to better living situations. Thank you for your service, Susie. I do have a few prepared remarks. Garner, you can put the timer on for three minutes. Yeah. Written but no less heartfelt. I want to thank Mayor Trossis and Vice Mayor Watkins and the entire council for this honor. Thank you to Amanda for the nomination and the selection team for their recommendation. I'm so happy to share this recognition with two friends and colleagues, Scott and Robert, and Mr. Martin, who I don't know, but I know is well deserving and has certainly, they all have served the community with honor and dignity. I won't take much time because I know that our today's agenda is very full, but I do have a few words to share, and I'm going to get emotional like Chip last year. It's his fault. After a long year of dedicating myself and my work to some frankly monstrous tasks, I've learned a few things that I think are important to reflect on. First, never be afraid of tackling even really difficult and even unimaginable tasks, even if you basically have no idea what you're doing. When you have the potential of doing something good and something lasting. Spending this year building the River Street camp, being immersed in his community of staff and campers, and learning about how best to tackle this vexing challenge of around homelessness has been the singularly most gratifying and painful experience of my career and taught me to be brave, learn from others, and lean on my colleagues to help. I think Mike Hopper, who I don't think is here, but hopefully he will hear this, especially if you're being an exceptional partner in this process. From conception to breakdown to all the other countless city staff who have lent their expertise along the way. And to the River Street camp managers, Chris Monteith and Adam Carruthers, along with many other staff. Some of whom are here today, who I relied so heavily on to share their skills and experiences as the camp was built and flourished. Second, it's easy for you to have, for people to have faith in you when you have faith in yourself. To this end, I thank Martine and Tina for saying, yeah, let's go ahead and do that. When I said, I think we can run this camp, what a leap of faith. In fact, Tina and Martine have been gently nudging my path in this direction since my fellowship year in 2013 and have always been supported of me as I've navigated my career from water engineer to analyst to assistant to the city manager. It's their leadership that has given me this faith in myself. Third, modeling honest, strong and compassionate leadership goes a long way in building trusting relationships with those that you work with in the community. No better example is my relationship with the downtown streets team. Amazing staff and team members I've had the honor of working with for the last 18 months. The team not only has made a huge difference in our town, and they came over with their pickers to be here today, but also helped make the River Street camp a success through serving as camp hosts and maintaining the surrounding neighborhood. Thank you especially to Greg Penzinger, who just last week announced that he's moving on to Modesto to start a new team there. And to Brooke Newman for taking the reins and being my Cat Faw Chair for the last couple years. Their partnership means the world to me. Lastly, public service is an honorable profession and we should be grateful to serve in the ways that we do and share those experiences with those we love. I've been able to share my work with my daughters this last year in ways that I never would have imagined. Casey, don't cry. They spent time with me at the camp, had long conversations with campers and learned about their lives. And saw many lives transformed before their eyes. Those are important experiences that may give them inspiration to serve others and the communities they build their lives in. I think Maeve, who's not here, she's taking the geometry test. Bridget and Farron, who are here for being curious and open to learning and listening. And most importantly, I want to thank my husband, Matt, for his steadfast support of my career and aspirations along a pretty windy path. I'm so lucky to have your partnership for the last 30 plus years. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Susie. That was beautiful. So now I have the honor to recognize Paul Martin, the community recipient. Paul has been voluntarily removing and cleaning graffiti in the city of Santa Cruz for the past 20 years. Each day, Paul sets out on his bike, tirelessly looking for and repairing graffiti. He spends four to eight hours a day on repairs, paying for the materials out of his own pocket. Paul is an inspiration to public service. Thank you so much for your service to our city, Paul. Yes, it is an ongoing activity. That is for sure. Anyone can participate. I want to thank Damon Bruder, who nominated me. And of course, Economic Development, they do supply me. I don't buy all my own goods. They supply me.  I would like to see the city actually put a little more emphasis on correction and possibly apprehension. But I want to thank the city for this award. And it does occupy about 20 hours a week for me. So it is meaningful. And I would, again, emphasize that we could use more volunteers. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Martin, for that and for making our community experience cleaner and for your time. This time, it's my honor to now recognize Robert Oritzi, community recipient. Robert takes on projects big and small to make Santa Cruz a better place to live. Whether serving as a volunteer at the police department or helping a group of neighbors collaborate with the public works department to create more crosswalks and bike paths on Broadway Street. Or partnering with neighborhood businesses like Safeway to keep their neighborhoods safe. Robert is an example of community mindedness who continues to work to make Santa Cruz a better place every single day. Thank you so much for your service, Robert. I'm being forced to say a few words. Okay, so my story is I came here in the 70s as a hippie. And now it's my time to give back to the city. So when I entered semi-retirement in 2009, I started finding projects that I was interested in. I got really involved with neighbors. Santa Cruz neighbors has been a great vehicle for me to reach out throughout the city and hear and listen and to work with neighbors and to connect with city staff. And council and it's really a pleasure to work with staff and with council. My method of work is to work in collaboration. And I'm very grateful for your open doors for everybody answering my emails, answering my phone calls, giving your time to meet with me. It really means a lot and I think we get a lot done together. I'd also at this time like to thank my partner, Steve, who makes it possible for me to have all this extra time to get out and do these meetings. I was in these chambers last night on a commission meeting until after 10, parked in the same place this morning. And also I would like to recognize the council members. I mean, you guys have been here already at 8.30 to start your work meeting. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing what you feel is best for the city. I know we differ on many different opinions, but it means a lot to me to know that people in our city are willing to step up and to donate so much of their selves for the betterment of the city. And let's keep on working together. And one other thing I'm very involved also as Susie is with the downtown streets team. I'm very tickled that they're here today and it's really wonderful to see them and have them. And I'm going to take this opportunity for a plug. We are launching this week our 2018 giving tree for the downtown streets team's members. So I'm in the process of getting collections and gifts for the team members. And if anybody wants to help me out on that, just get in touch with me. Thank you. Really nice way to start the day. I mean, we have a long day and I think this really sets a nice tone for us for the rest of the afternoon. First of all, I'd like to thank Jim House, who's not with us today, but for providing the inspiration for the award. I mean, it really means a lot to see these community members and their engagement in Santa Cruz. I think the descriptions that were read just touched on a brief amount of their work. I can attest that Susie O'Hara was a leader in the Public Safety Committee meetings that took place several years ago and has been active in a lot of city manager's work, not just related to what's happening now. So this is a long standing thread that continues of service to this day. I know that I can tell you that Sergeant Garner is constantly at work in the community. I've attended meetings with him at all parts of the city, different neighborhoods, talking about solutions for traffic issues and neighborhood outreach. So I really think it's important to kind of know that these awards really kind of signify their work out in the field. And then for Paul, you might see him around town riding a bicycle with his grandkids, showing them how to be good service minded people so that they kind of have those same values in their lives moving forward in the city. And then of course with Robert, he's not only active on our commission as he mentioned. He's been an active board member with Santa Cruz Neighbors, the UCSC Long Range Development Plan, Community Advisory Group. He's also been a supporter of the Downtown Streets team and also been really actively involved in Santa Cruz Pride with the police department to program for teens at risk of joining gangs. And so we touched on a few of the examples they did but I really want to again congratulate each of the recipients today and I think we should all give them a round of applause. That brings us to the domain meeting and if anyone, you're welcome to stay the rest of the day. We'll be here probably, you could come in and out as you'd like, but I know that now might be a good time if you want to exit just to kind of transition. Nobody here, bye. Congratulations. Okay, I have a few announcements and then we'll move on to our regular meeting for the day. I'll just pause as we... Today's meeting is being broadcast live on Community Television, Channel 25 and streaming on the city's website at CityofSantaCruise.com. Mike Oliphant, who hasn't been here in a while but he's here today. He'll be here for the day recording our meeting. He's our technician for both this morning, afternoon and evening. And I'd like to thank him in advance for his work and hopefully his commitment at this time that he'll be here throughout the day. I'd also like to recognize our Jim House Community Award recipient, Scott Garner, who's in the back getting congratulations. He's not only the award recipient today, but he's also serving as our Sergeant of Arms for all day long. So thank you. That's his reward. That's his reward. So we can see him and congratulate him between breaks. All City Council members can be emailed at CityCouncil at CityofSantaCruise.com if you would like to communicate with us about an agenda item. We'd like to receive your email by Monday at 5 p.m. before our council meeting. This provides us with an opportunity to review your email and include it with the rest of our agenda packet. Please bear in mind that all items of correspondence with the City and City Council constitute public records and are generally subject to disclosure upon request by any member of the public. Accordingly, if you have sensitive or private information that you do not wish to be made public, you should not include that information in your correspondence. Our rules of decorum are on the window ledge to my left. It's my job to keep the meeting running without disruption, and we ask that you respect your fellow citizens, whether you are inside or outside of the chambers. At this point in the meeting, I'd like to ask if there's any statements of disqualifications by any council members today. Seeing none, I'll ask the City Clerk to announce any additions or deletions. There are none. Okay.  In regards to 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 generally occur at the conclusion of our afternoon business at or about 5.30 p.m. but may occur sometime before then. Before we begin, I'd like to make a few announcements regarding today's agenda. Agenda item number 26, the Laurel Front Pacific Avenue permit item will be heard at a time certain of 11 a.m. And also, due to today's very full agenda, we'll look at taking lunch sometime around 1 p.m. or so before we move on to the next portion of the agenda. And in addition, we'll be recessing at or before 6 p.m. and then we'll return for our 7 p.m. session later this evening. Any questions? Okay. At this point, I'd like to turn it over to the city attorney for their report on closed session. This report on closed session, I should say. Thank you, Mayor Tarazas, members of the city council. This morning, there were three subsequent need items added to the closed session agenda before the council went into closed session at 8.30. The first two involved a significant exposure to litigation. The council received letters threatening to challenge decisions that the council may make with respect to items 26 and 27 on this morning's agenda. Those are the 100 Laurel Street project and the large rent increase ordinance second reading. The third item was a matter of pending litigation entitled the State of California X-Rail Martinez versus Monterey Peninsula Engineering. That is a case that's brought by a private plaintiff on behalf of several public entities against Monterey Peninsula Engineering related to a false claims act or alleged false claims act violations. This morning, the council authorized the plaintiff to dismiss that action on behalf of the city of Santa Cruz. And that matter is pending in the Santa Cruz County Superior Court case number 16, CV 00267. That results as a result of a settlement between Martinez and the defendant Monterey Peninsula Engineering. In that case, the council voted unanimously to accept the dismissal of that litigation. And there was no reportable action taken on the two threatened litigation items. Lastly, there's the claim of Gabriel Suza Barbosa. That is also agenda item 10 on the open session agenda. There was no action taken on that claim. Thank you. Can I just get clarification on the vote? Because I know there were some absences in closed session. So did anybody show up late? Council Member Watkins joined that meeting. Council Member Cron was absent. But Council Member Watkins was not present for the vote to accept the settlement. It was unanimous of the council members present with the exception of Council Members Watkins and Cron. Any other questions? Okay, any other questions at this time? Then I'll move on to the main agenda. First up is the consent agenda. These are items number 2 through 23 on our agenda. All items will be acted upon in one motion unless an item is pulled by council member for further discussion. Are there any council members who wish to pull any of the consent items on today's agenda? Anyone? Council Member Cron? I'd like to discuss the budgetary policy and number 13 raising the minimum wage. Okay, so that... Workers, no, so 513 and the jump by contract amendment. What number is that? 18. Okay, so 513 and 18. So I'll pull those from the consent. Any other? Council Member Brown? I just have a quick question on item 9. I have a comment too on number 6. Okay, do you want to ask that comment? Do you make that comment now or do you want to wait? Sure. Okay, go ahead. I think this is a great thing that has been brought forward here. This is a resolution opposing any future policy change under the federal Title IX law that would reduce or erase legal recognition of the protection for transgender people. I think that this is... It takes very little time. I think that it says who we are as a community. I really am proud that we were getting behind this. Thank you, Cynthia Chase, for bringing it forward. This is... I just wanted to read two, whereas this... Because I think they're really important. Whereas the proposed changes in Title IX definitions threaten policies that protect people of all genders, identities and education, including labor and housing, including assisted care facilities, shelters, foster care housing, and whereas the City of Santa Cruz is committed to providing safe and affirming services to all members of our community, regardless of gender identity. And I think that's the way we stand up. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Brown? So a quick question on the year-end budget adjustments for this fiscal year. And thank you to Director Pimentel for clarifying some of those questions in advance. My only additional question is if you could tell us a little bit more about the professional services adjustment. This is in the amount of $137,259 just to get a sense of what those services were. And thank you. My other question was related to legal, and you answered that previously. Actually, those are one and the same. We had, yes, there were higher than anticipated legal requests during fiscal 2018. There were a lot of different council actions that required additional research beyond what was programmed in. So it was those additional requests. So this is not related to other outside consultants or anything? This is all related to the legal. Thank you. So at this point, I'd like to turn it up. Actually, one thing, I'm going to poll number two, the minutes from the November 27th meeting. So any members of the public that would like to speak to any items other than two, five, 13 or 18, now is your time to speak. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council for deliberation and action. I'll move the consent agenda with the exceptions of two, five, 13 and 18. That is items two through 13 with those exceptions. Seconded by Vice Mayor Watkins. Any further discussion? In favor of the consent item, moving the consent item with the exceptions of items two, five, 13 and 18, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes unanimously. Just to clarify, items two and three were both minutes where council member Chase was absent for one and council member Naroyan was absent for the other. Which one was council member Chase? Chase was absent for the November 27th. Okay. Did you watch the video? I think you did. And then Naroyan, you were absent for the December 4th special meeting. I did not rehabilitate myself. That just sounds so. She's abstaining on number three, right? That was number three. Okay. So item number two, I just wanted to make sure the record was clear. When we had the discussion about the tobacco, the flavored tobacco ban, there was two ordinances that were brought forward. One had the language regarding youth possession struck. And the direction, why we did that was to have the police department contacted in regards to any impact in regards to striking that language. I just wanted the record to reflect that the city manager's office contacted the police department and they reported back that there was no problem striking that language. Because the record does reflect that it's going to come back and have it reviewed again, but that was how it was presented. And I just want to make sure the records reflect that. Okay. So given that comment, I'd like to move an option of those minutes. That's item number two with inclusion of language expressing that the police department was consulted and felt there was no negative impact. Deletion of that language. Second. Seconded by Vice Mayor Watkins. Is there any member of the public that would like to speak to item number two? Seeing none, I'll bring it back. There's a motion by Council Member Matthew seconded by Vice Mayor Watkins. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes unanimously. Now we'll turn over to item number five, which is the city council ad hoc budget committee. That was pulled by Council Member Cron and I'll ask what was your question? Council Member Cron? No, it's really it's philosophical.  And I mean, the council's never talked about this. I know, I guess your subcommittee did, but I'd love to hear some feedback on there seems to be absent here. We've been putting a lot of emphasis on climate change and there's no, I don't see any reference to that here. I would say also this full cost recovery needs to be fleshed out. What does that mean exactly? And in what instances will we do full cost recovery because not all departments or what services that are provided are equal. So I'm not sure what that exactly means. Yeah, well maybe before we get into the substantive responses. Does any of the committee members would like to speak about some of the work and how this has come forward in the past? We've had a couple public discussions about it when we were going through the budget process. We talked about each of these actions coming forward in regards to policy changes as well as expanded outreach. And as a way to kind of address how we handle budgets moving forward. So we're not necessarily having the intensive internal meetings where we have staff present. This is more externally focused on bringing more community members in to look at how our budget process works. And part of the recommendations were that we have adopted policies that reflect that as our intent moving forward. So Council Member Brown. I mean I would just say having been involved as a member of that subcommittee and working through this. I mean I think the intention here in addition to the goal of really making the streamlining in some respects the budget hearing process but also making it more accessible to the public. That having this kind of policy was really an attempt to reflect some principles that may or may not. I mean I don't think this is in any way binding if you know there, I and I have actually an issue on one small matter related to one time spending, one time resources need to be matched with one time spending because we know that like when it comes to core funding in some other places we sometimes use ongoing funds for one time allocations. So I don't think the intention was to make this a binding document and we cannot go outside of it. But to say these are the principles that we believe the city should follow and that we should follow as council members to be fiscally responsible and ensure that our budget is balanced. So I mean I think that was really the impetus behind this. I'll just echo those comments that it's just sort of a general kind of guideline and structure to follow knowing that sure things change and circumstances differ in terms of various things but in essence this is sort of the process we hope to have in place moving forward based on what we learned this prior year. For example community programs is missing from here. A dedication I don't know of our city and I don't know this document seems like it's stating some philosophy here or like you said guidelines and the climate and community programs are two things I'd like to see included in statements that our city makes because I think that is what our community would like to see also. Council Member Brown. I mean I couldn't agree more however I don't know that this is necessarily a place where we would do that because there are all kinds of areas in which I'd like to see the city make additional commitments related to our budgeting process but I'm not sure that this base document is the place for that. I mean so if you want to work on and I think we will probably do that in the future around some of those issues I'm very much interested. I just want a clarification on what exactly this is and I appreciate the comments. Are there any members of the public that would like to speak to this item? This is number five. It's the City Council ad hoc budget committee. Anyone? I'll bring it back to the council for discussion. Council Member Matthews. I just want to thank the committee for working on this and it is a general document. There are plenty of areas that could be called out specifically but I think this is not the place to do it. I just want to thank the committee and I notice that these principles were drawn from the charter council policies, best practices, et cetera, et cetera and to my mind they're just consistent with what we've done in different settings related to budget decisions and practices. So I think it gives the public confidence that there's a concise statement of how we're approaching our budget issues apart from the specifics. This is the general overall approach. With those comments I'll go ahead and move acceptance of this item. I'll second and also say that this was probably one of the best committees I worked on. I think it was just something where we worked really well together and I agree with Council Member Matthews. This is not intended to create a lock us in on certain positions. It's really about being more externally focused to bring in different groups to see how we're doing. I know that when we had our discussion with that first focus group, many of them were interested in what are certain outcomes that we see from the city as part of our budget process. So they brought to light a lot of issues and I look forward to seeing this work continue during the coming budget year and actually freeing up staff maybe from some of the presentation and work that may not have been as impactful in terms of getting out, getting the word out to the public as far as how they could be more involved in kind of how we're looking at our budget. Any other further discussion? I do want to mention something quickly because the question was raised about the full-cost recovery and this is not, as you say, a lock step mandate but it does reflect many, many discussions we've had about revisiting our fee structure and so forth so that we are recovering our fees but we on a number of occasions have the option and do take action to reduce or eliminate those fees for a specific reason. So it's a general guidance but it's not hard and fast. Right. Okay, Council Member Cron. I'm probably just going to register a no vote because I don't understand this. It seems too rigid to me and I just thought it needed more massaging and a fuller discussion by the city council rather than just having it at the subcommittee and then come to the council on the consent agenda but that's just me and I'm not understanding enough about it. Okay, no problem. Okay, so all those in favor of the motion on the floor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, that motion passes with Council Member Cron voting no. Council Member Matthews, Chase, Brown, Naroyan, Vice Mayor Watkins and myself supporting the motion. Okay, next we'll move on to item number 13 which is the resolution amending the city of Santa Cruz personnel complement and classification and compensation plans. Council Member Cron. I just wanted to hear a little bit from our HR director, Lisa Murphy and talk about, you know, really we're talking about the lowest paid workers here and despite that they might be 17, 18 year olds, also there's a category right above them that, you know, I'm concerned about as well that, you know, do live off these paychecks and not just, you know, and maybe their families depend on them as well. And I know that the last two, well, campaigns were about the fight for $15 an hour and my thoughts are, you know, wouldn't it be nice if the city could lead on that and, you know, and it did at one point, you know, have a living wage built into our salary structure as well. But I just want to maybe listen, hear from Lisa about what. Well, is there a specific question that you want to ask about? Yeah, what we're, what will be the minimum salary? We're going to just be where the state is. Minimum wage is what the city's paying $12 an hour. Is that correct? Yeah, that is correct. And so there's legislation that will have that rise $1 for the next three years so we get to $15 an hour. So it will go up on January 1st and it'll go up to $12. And I provided some statistics and it might be useful for the public to hear about who those folks are that are at the lowest wage. So primarily there are parks and recreation staff, they're kids. It's their first time, first job. Some of them don't even have their high school diploma just yet. So at the, about $11.50 is what we pay our recreation one staff. And again, primarily, or they all are like 17 and 18 year olds looking for their first job. And then we have a couple other that also fall within that category that you are going to raise today. And again, these are all temporary positions. It's nobody, no employees that are impacted by this in our regular employees. So we also have some office assistants and they'll come in the summertime. I've used them, finance has used them against 17 or 18 year olds. And the last one that's at our minimum wage that will be raised with your action today is a maintenance worker aid. One, and we consider that a training program, you don't even need to have your high school diploma. It's an opportunity to get your foot in the door, get your experience. You don't even have to have any maintenance experience. But again, it builds up time. And once you get some of that experience, you automatically move up into what we call our maintenance aid two. And again, that's a lot of our ground for how we actually move folks into the maintenance worker series. So that's primarily what are the impact of your action today will increase those wages to the $12. And I do want you to keep in mind also those individuals after a certain amount of time with the city will move up to the next step. And the steps can go all the way up to, there's I believe about 10 steps, up to about $25 an hour if they're here that long in that position. But typically those temporary employees don't. But often we are able to move them into permanent positions or these kids will move on. But they'll have a resume builder that they've gained from the city. So that's primarily the group that you are impacting today. A couple more questions. Is this primarily before us because of the state increase in the minimum wage or would have come to us anyway? No, this is because of the state's legislation. It comes in to effect on the 1st of January. And with this action also, we have adjusted several other classifications because of what we call compaction. So in that Recreation 1 series, because we're going to raise that minimum wage that salary level, we're going to raise the entire salary schedule. So it has a little more impact than just the ones that are at the $11 an hour today. But you will see us back again this time next year to get to the 13, because of the state action, the 14 and the 15. Chris, do you mind now, I'd like to just, last year when this came up, is there any reason why we're not just building that in? It's a state law, we know that it's going to change every year. And why do you need to bring it forward each year to provide that information? Because our salary schedule will change through the year. So for example, the temps will receive a salary increase through the MOU negotiations. We don't, we need to build that in. Also, we won't know what other classifications and other bargaining units such as SEIU might also have compensation increases coming. And so when we look at the bigger picture, we raise the $13 an hour, we need to incorporate any MOU changes. And as you know, we're going into bargaining. So I don't know, I can't anticipate what those are. And then we also have the compaction issue that we'll have to take a look at as it increases. How many temporary workers does a city employ? Any time over the course of the year can be up to 300, primarily again, all in parks and rec. And that's, so it's a big summer push and also our lifeguards, they're temporary employees as well. And then now we're pretty light on temps, I don't have the exact number. The recreation one, two, three, and four categories in five, are they also all temporary workers as well? Or are those some permanent people? Those are all temporary employees. Just for the summer programs, that's all they staff. Yeah, I just want to put that before the council and think about raising our wages in the future for the folks that are at the bottom. And they're not just, I mean, I know there's workers coming from high school, but sometimes I've no people whose families do depend on these summer wages. But there's the 17 or 18 year old brings in. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Are there any members of the public that wish to speak to the side? And this is number 13, resolution amending the city of Santa Cruz personnel compliment and classification plans for the state minimum wage law for 2019. Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council. I just want to make a quick comment and say, these are really important jobs for youth. I know when I was on the library board, we saw many of those jobs go away during certain budget crisis. And I think sometimes these are initial entry points where kids do have the opportunity, many first jobs for people to start their work and I think they're really valuable. So while this I look at is mainly complying with state law, it's really important that we also protect those types of jobs because they are good entry level jobs for kids that want to have engagement with the city. Council Member Matthews. I appreciate the additional information that was provided. Not simply the fact that these are mostly entry level young people, but also the complexity of one adjustment triggers many, many others. And also want to say that I appreciate, in many cases, these are optional jobs. And it's part of a commitment the city has made in our investing in young people to create these entry level summer job programs for young people to give them that first paid employment. And many of their activities at this level include not just doing some task for the city, but also learning a lot in terms of what it means to be a good employee. So I'm really pleased that we do have these entry level positions. And of course, we'll make this motion to raise the salary as indicated. I'll second that. Motion by Council Member Matthews, second by Council Member Brown. I do want to make a comment since we've opened it up for discussion here. Yeah, I think that the Parks and Rec programs and the kind of training that they provide and leadership skills for young people is absolutely important, and so I appreciate all of this discussion. I also believe that even young people should be compensated fairly for the work they do because it benefits the city, it benefits the city's residence. And so I would like to see us in the future consider wages that go beyond the minimum wage. There are many young people in this community who enter into these jobs, certainly because they're committed and they want to participate. But also because they contribute to their family's household income. And when they can go work at Petsmart or somewhere else for $15 an hour, they may make that choice. And I would hope that we would want to be competitive and bring young people who really are committed to doing this, who don't have the privilege of making that choice. So I just want to say that for now and with that, I'm happy to support the increase and hope to see further increases in the future. That's where we're croak. That's exactly where I was trying to go to, why not make it cachet to work for the city? Like have a young person say, I'm working for the city, and feeling like they're being rewarded. And that being a really good thing, enjoying people who want to actually work for the city. But also feel okay about the compensation. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, Council Member Narion. And while, if I had a magic wand, I would love to pay people a more competitive price.  So we have a motion by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Brown. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously. Next up is item number 18. And I'd like to first ask Council Member Cronus if he has any questions. Yeah, a lot of a few people contacted me about jump bikes, which I think is revolutionizing some of our transportation options in Santa Cruz. And I'm pretty much feeling really good about it. But I think attending to folks who have issues with it, and some of them are just picking at it and wanting to have issues with it. But I think we should go to every possible length. And people have said that the obstructing of the sidewalks has become a real issue in several neighborhoods with the jump bikes. And maybe people don't know how to contact jump bikes or what to do when a bike's been left out in front of their house for several days. So I just wanted some clarification on that. I'm glad this, that we're going, I think I'm glad we're going forward. And the other question I have is, and maybe you sent it to me and I missed it. But any pictures you might have of what this electricity looks like, what the station will look like, and how the electricity is going to get there. Yes, I'll answer the second question first. Claire Fleisler, Transportation Planner, Bike Share Program Manager. To your second question, photos, I sent you three photos yesterday of what they look like. Generally, the charging stations that are proposed look substantially similar to what we have now. They're about the same size and scale, the same color palette, minimally different. So you have three photos there, you can also see them on Jump's website. There's photos available on there at jump.com, I think it is, or jumpbikes.com. To your first question about how you can report potential issues that you see, this is an area that we're continuing to work on education. As you may know, the City of Santa Cruz in our Municode since the 1980s, we allow bikes to be parked almost anywhere except locked to a tree, if there's no official bike rack within 50 feet. That's part of the reason that you see many bikes locked to street signs and parking meters, etc. Which we've always seen, but it's a lot more obvious now that there's a fleet of 250 brightly colored bikes around. To the point of being able to contact jump to let them know about the issue, one of the points that we encourage is for you to email support at jumpbikes.com and note the bike number, which is on the back fender in red and the time. And just state that the bike is parked inappropriately or whatever other issue or concern that you're having. That allows jump to send out someone from our local operations team to go retrieve that bike and move it to more appropriate location. And it also allows jump to contact the previous user and educate them about proper parking so that in the future they can do it better. Oftentimes what we find is that people are not parking these bikes inappropriately on purpose or to cause harm or to be an inconvenience, but they've never pushed a baby stroller or been in a wheelchair or had that issue and it's just something that doesn't occur to them. And with one polite nudge from jump about how to do it better in the future, it tends to resolve the issue. But until people are aware of that, they don't know.  You sent me some interesting statistics on numbers of rides in October and November, and there was differences. And I'm assuming the differences might have been because of the rainy season kicked in. But do you have them with you, the numbers of rides? Yeah, I have our systems dates to date. So as you know, we rolled out bike share in May to coincide with bike to work week, bike month and since that time. So we started with 25 bikes that first week. Soft launch, soft rollout escalated to 50 bikes by the end of that month and up to 250 by the beginning of July. So since that time through the end of November, our bike share system has taken over 155,000 trips, almost 156,000 total trips. The total mileage is almost 390,000 miles on bike share. The average trip is 2.36 miles, which we're really encouraged about because that's a distance that you think of as replacing within town car trips, which is one of the goals of our climate action plan. Additionally, each of our bikes is used almost six times per day. This is an awesome stat because other, as I've mentioned before to you, other systems nationwide, the average is between one and two trips per bike per day. What this tells me is that there was a huge amount of latent demand for bike share in the city of Santa Cruz. And that we need to look towards expanding the number of bikes that we have, as well as continue to speak with our neighbor and our jurisdictions about expanding the geographic area to better serve our community. In terms of the variation in system use, what we saw was that the system ridership grew from May to June to July to August. We took an anticipated dip in September because after the summer season, we have less tourists here and UCSC doesn't come back to the third week. So we just have way less population in town during those idyllic first three weeks of September. And then we're starting to increase in ridership again. And it is weather dependent as well. On days that it's raining, we naturally have a lower ridership. But overall, our ridership is continuing to increase. And that almost six trips per bike per day is a fairly stable figure that we've seen throughout the life of the system. I'm absolutely blown away by some of these numbers. I like numbers like this. And the 2.6 miles really is impressive because it is a car not going somewhere. It's a bike and somebody's getting some little bit of exercise, which is really cool. The last question I had was, do you know any city that has vouchers or that jump bike program has vouchers for economically poor people or city workers? Or any kind of, because people have been talking a lot about, maybe why don't we integrate downtown workers into the jump bike program and offer them vouchers? Is there anything like that that's a model now that we don't have to invent? Yes, so there are two programs that we're working on. One, I have a call on Thursday about Jump has a program called Boost. And that is a low income program. We're working right now on building partnerships between existing community organizations. I will probably contact some of you about organizations that you work with and how we reach people who could really use a subsidized bike share membership. And that subsidized on the jump side. The other side jumps coming to us with a framework that could be a proposal for a bike share employee benefit to benefit the downtown employees as part of our Go Santa Cruz program. And as you remember when we, when you authorized us to raise parking prices and revamp our parking pricing strategy to fund the TDM program for downtown employees, that would be one of the things that we could purchase with that. Last, last question. Okay, she said that last one. I know to go from like 250 to 500, what needs to happen with that? We're working on that right now. We'll be going to the Transportation and Public Works Commission probably in first quarter of 2019 with a plan there. And the other thing that we want to make sure is that that goes hand in hand. The counties and discussions right now with Jump as is the city of Capitola and is UCSC. So coordination between jurisdictions as well as just making sure that we're ready to move forward on that. That sounds great. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Cool, Council Member Matthews. As usual, you are way ahead of us already. And this is great coming to us. I've contacted you a few times about complaints from the public. Usually about the parking things. And you've mentioned there is a number people can call. I haven't checked, but is that number on the bike basket or somewhere? It is on every jump asset. So it's on the signs and it's on the bikes and that is a contractual obligation that we have. So if someone sees a bike and appropriately parked, the number's right there for them to call. Okay, great. Thanks. Well, with that, I'm prepared to- We need to go to public comment. Council Member Chase. I just wanted to say briefly because we've had this item before in the past. I have seen a noticeable change since we rolled them out and since we've talked about it at council in regard to inappropriately parked bikes. And also I've seen that a couple people who drive the vans around and restock. And so seeing that they're actually keeping the stations full. So it does seem like over time we are getting better and better at this, which is great.  So well done. Thank you. I had a couple comments and questions. The first question is, one, I think that now that we're seeing a lot of development projects, I know I had a couple people approach me that we're doing some work downtown about how we can integrate maybe some of the bike share programs into those projects. Are there any ideas? Yes, please contact me. If you are interested in doing a project, I can connect you with Jump's business development team. And they would love for new projects to host bike share stations, especially bike share charging stations. It really creates an opportunity for residents and employees and is a pretty simple thing to do. So Jump is completely open to that and has requested that I do pass along those contacts. Great, and then second, when you look outside of the downtown, let's say on the east side near where the fire station three is located, there's a parking lot. The closest bike share seems to be over near where the buttery is. Is there a thought about making bike share so it's integrated where a parking is so that if people want to commute downtown, they have the ability to do that? Yeah, great question. So that is one of the locations that we have an approved encroachment permit for. It's one of the locations near the fire station on the east side in that parking lot that we will be installing a charging station. And that's part of the contract amendment today is to allow for electrical cost reimbursement and the building permit for that location was just finalized yesterday. So that should be moving forward in the next couple of weeks. Okay, and then I know we talked at a couple meetings ago about the policies that go along when they're, what we consider when we install these stations or when we look at when we need to add new ones based on usage. Is that something that will eventually come before the council as far as looking at those guidelines? Yes, so we did a brief update to the Transportation and Public Works Commission last night, very late last night. And so we're continuing to crunch that data with jump. We're working with the jump data science and analytics team on building out a dashboard that hopefully we'll be able to turn over after it's in the beta phase to a publicly facing dashboard. So not only can I present that information to you, but you can go self-serve to see where the most common origins, destinations, routing info, how many trips happened yesterday, tomorrow, not tomorrow. We can't predict the future. Yesterday, last week, last month, et cetera. All right, and last, how long do you think it'll take before platinum community? I'm very hopeful that the next time that we apply for a Bicycle-Friendly Community Award, we will be granted Bicycle-Friendly Community Platinum-Level Award, not only based on this program, but based on the significant infrastructure investments that our whole community has made over the past few years. One of the exciting ones, as you know, is the rail trail coming right up. So we're really excited for that. Great. Thank you for all of your work. Vice Mayor Watkins. I just have one quick question, Claire. I appreciate your presentation and the jump bikes have been fantastic. And I often ride them over to my meetings with my team from one office to the next. There's those sort of those times that I apologize and ask this in advance, where you see the youth or like certain people doubled up on bikes. Are there ways to also sort of report that or prevent that? Because that sort of just gives your heart a sort of a stops for a moment when you see the youth kind of not appropriately riding the bikes. Yeah. So we would love if you could report that. Also recognize that it's hard to report, but that's one of the key areas of education that we are focusing on. So those are, please wear a helmet. Although it's not required. We love your brain. We highly recommend you do. You can get a cheap subsidized helmet from Jump on their website. Please look into that.  Please do not ride more than one rider per bike. Not only is it in violation of your user agreement, but it is dangerous. Please obey the rules of the road and please ride with consideration for others. Are the big pushes that we go with our education and encouragement. Okay. Great. Thanks. So see no further questions or discussion. Are there any members of the public that wish to speak to this item? This is item number 18. You see none. I'll bring it back to the council for either further deliberation and action. Council Member Matthews. Great. We'll remove approval. Second. Okay. Second by Council Member Chase. So motion by Council Member Matthews. Seconded by Council Member Chase. Council Member Cron. One more quick question for Claire. What's the enforcement like when you say that's the kind of what we stick with? Do we have something a little bit more than just please you all, you guys are not really following the rules or do you have something that you actually write a ticket for somebody? How are we dealing with young people when they're, you know? Yes. So the first notice is a warning. The second notice is a $25 fine. And then future breaking of the rules is a suspension from the system. Okay. So there's a warning first. That's right. There's a warning first. Yeah. Thanks. So we're related to this. I know we got a motion and second on floor, but it's so nice also to know how you handled all of the discussion about the scooters and the birds and all that stuff. I think we've kind of like really focused on this and it's been a very, very successful program. So thank you for all your work you've done. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. We have a motion on the floor by Council Member Matthew, seconded by Council Member Chase. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes unanimously. Next up is item number 24. This is the city interim representative to Metro District Board of Directors. I asked that this be on our general business. I think it's pretty straightforward and I support the item. The reason why I asked it to be on the general business is because our practice as a council has been where we have a motion that comes forward from the council for the prospective board members for the year. This one takes place after the new council is seated and we'll carry over until the new selections are made. And so I wanted to ask the city attorney just on that background on why we're handling this because we have not done this ever before. Yes. Thank you, Mayor Trousas, members of the city council. This is an unusual situation. Typically city council members are appointed to boards and commissions by actions of the city council and they serve in that capacity until a successor is appointed when in a circumstance like this a council member serving on a commission or a committee when the term is expiring. State law prescribes the manner in which appointees to the Santa Cruz County Metropolitan Transit District are appointed and the length of their terms. And it has an unusual provision that says when the city council appoints a council member to serve on the metro board, their term expires automatically upon the expiration of their city council term. What that does is it leaves the city in the situation where in this instance, there is a committee meeting that council member Chase has served on scheduled for, I believe later this week or early next week but her term will have expired at that point. And the council members who do serve on the metro board have expressed their interest in having the council be fully represented at those committee meetings. So somewhat other unusual provision of the Transit District Act provides that once an appointment is made, it will be for the duration of the term. So this interim appointment in some respects is relying on the good faith of the appointee to step down when the new council takes action to appoint a successor. So that's the sort of unusual situation. I'm happy to answer any questions or respond to any comments. I just had one additional question. When is the first meeting scheduled for the new council in terms of in January? First council meeting is the eighth. Okay. Okay. But the council appointments are scheduled for the 22nd. Later in the month. I'm on Lafkin, we have a January 9th meeting. And so I guess I wanted to know like for any, one thing I asked is that maybe in addition to, you know, the motion that's on the floor based on the city attorney's report, that there be some additional language requests the incoming mayor to make any other advisory board member service appointments during the winter recess as needed. So if there's other things for other board members, you know, that needs to be filled in, that she has the whoever he or she, who the vice mayor and mayor have the ability to make the appointments directly. Tony, you can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I think part of this glitch is due to the bylaws of Metro, because many agencies do allow for a member to continue until their replacement is named. And Lafko could very well be in that situation. I don't know. But we can decide that separately. It's not even the Metro bylaws. It's written in the state law that the term expires. So I have been told by general council for the Metro that there is going to be an effort in the coming legislative session to amend the law to in a common sense way that basically says that appointees serve until their successor is appointed. Well, I guess I'm just asking that in addition, we just say that the incoming mayor, she has the opportunity to make the appointments for anything during the winter recess as needed. Let me just, if I could just finish. Nonetheless, my recollection is the mayor designates, but those designations are confirmed by the council. And so that would- I'm asking that we give authority through this action to the incoming mayor to make any other bridge appointments that are needed so that those current council members are, if they're on something, can do it. I wouldn't be comfortable supporting that. That's a technicality because they still wouldn't be confirmed by the whole council. We're confirming it now. That's what I'm saying. On this one. No, I'm asking, but what I'm saying is I'd like to expand- Okay, I would like to make the motion. I understand what your issue is. I'd like to keep this clean. I am the other person that serves on Metro. And one reason it's particularly important is that Cynthia has been serving not only in the board, but on the facilities committee. There's some very critical discussions coming up about the partnership between the city and Metro regarding the Metro, the Pacific Station, which just has huge potential for housing, for our downtown, for a really key location. And to have the continuity of her knowledge and participation in that is absolutely critical during the next month. And so I think that's why we particularly need to take action on that. So for that reason- Before we do all, is there any member of the public that would like to speak to this item? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the council. Council Member Crohn. Two questions. I think it's an academic one, but what council member Matthews is bringing up and maybe the city clerk can help us out on this. I don't remember approving, but it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I don't remember it coming to the council for approval of all the boards and committees that we sit on. Does that just come regularly with us at the beginning of the year? That's right. Yeah, it does. Yeah, typically it's a second meeting in January. And I would love to know, it seems like there's a hot issue going on here that I have no idea what it is. And I don't know if council member Chase is at liberty to talk about what the committee meetings about and how strategically you're the person, because I'm not saying you're not, and I'm not saying I'm not gonna vote for this, but I appreciate what council member, excuse me, manager Rousa said too about interim appointments and trying to fill things. Sure. So I can say specifically that the item that council member Matthews just referenced was the Pacific station project. So I'm the chair of the capital committee for Metro and the primary reason that I'm the chair is because we've been in very long negotiations between the city and Metro on the Pacific station and the housing, namely affordable housing project that we've been working for more than a decade on to get in that space. And the only agenda item for our capital committee in January is the Pacific station. And so the continuity of that project is important to the city and absent me being there, we will have no representation and it's a three committee, three person committee, which means nobody from the city, just Capitola and the board of supervisors will be represented making the recommendation to the Metro board on how to proceed on Pacific station. So it's pretty critical in terms of our involvement and at least having seated the table for that discussion. And it seems like since you've been working on this, I mean, somebody filling in might have to take a while to get up to speed. Yes. Oh, yeah. That's no border? I would also add that this is something I happen to be in this position right now, but this has been an ongoing issue and outgoing council member Lane thought that he had fixed this when he was on council because this happens every cycle where we have this gap and then the city is unrepresented at least by one person on the board for that period of time. And it does seem like, I mean, certainly it's good that Metro is taking a look at that now because it could be problematic for us in terms of making big decisions that could impact the city with us having a fairly big gap for those meetings and any other committee meeting. So hopefully this will get fixed moving forward. I just happened to be in the position right now where I'm serving on that committee and I think it's important the city have representation. Council Member Matthews. Just the bigger context on this also is that Metro in partnership with the city, you may remember has conducted a couple of studies of the space layout for possible alignments for both the Metro operations and other associated buildings. And these are all coming to a decision point. So it's not a matter of just kicking this down the road. I think Metro and our economic development department which wants to move forward with the affordable housing and related projects wants to get moving. And so we've funded, we've completed the studies. Those are coming to Metro. And so it really is reaching a decision point. So that's kind of the context for wanting to have that continuity and knowledge represented. Is there a motion? I will move approval of the item to appoint Cynthia Chase as the city's interim representative to Metro. Second. Okay, motion by Council Member Matthews, seconded by Council Member Brown. And again, I think you're gonna say no, but I'm requesting that you also have some sort of, that the incoming mayor make any other advisory body service appointments during the winter recess as needed. I'm not gonna add that. Okay. I'll make a motion to allow that to happen that the incoming mayor make a advisory, be able to make advisory appointments before we officially seat our member. As needed. As needed. For meetings that might take place. Okay, I'll second that. I would interpret that as a motion to amend the main motion. Yes. Okay, well, now we'll vote on that particular item first. The motion is to add language that requests the incoming mayor to make any interim advisory appointments before the full appointments are made at the second meeting in January. If needed. If as needed. Okay. Motion by Council Member Crohn, second by myself. All those in favor of that motion, or there's any further questions?  I'm just trying to decide if I wanna support it or not. No, go ahead. Okay. All right. What's the downside? Cause I would like to get informed. Go ahead. I think that the downside is, again, procedural in that all our other appointments to boards and committees for council members are confirmed by the whole council. And this one would not be, I fully trust whoever is gonna be mayor to make good decisions. We don't know of any others coming up. I would be quite comfortable asking the staff to see what other commission, board and commission assignments might run into this same snag and try and make procedural changes. So those aren't a problem. And I would say this is only for if there is a meeting. It's a pretty minor issue, but I understand your point. But I also would have full confidence in the mayor to do that. I mean, that's the person leading our group and we should put trust in that. Council Member Chase. I was just gonna say it would be helpful to know which bodies we're even talking about. Because there is a lot of variation in there and some of them it seems like are already covered. Some of them aren't even meeting and some of them there's nothing we can do about it without talking to those bodies. So it's an unknown for me. So I don't believe there are any, we can explore it further, but I don't recall there being any. Nothing I'm on is meeting. Lafko, there's one I'm thinking of. Okay, so there's a motion on the floor. And I second it for amendment to the main motion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Okay, so that motion fails with Council Member Matthews, Council Member Chase, Council Member Brown and Council Member Naroyan voting opposed that motion with Council Member Cron, Vice Mayor Watkins and myself voting in favor. So we'll go to the main motion. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes unanimously. So now we'll move on to item number 25. This is the Regional Transportation Commission's Unified Quarter Investment Study and Chris Snyder, you'll be presenting. Thank you, Mayor and Council Members, Chris Snyder, Assistant Director of Public Works. The item before you is an action on the Regional Transportation Commission's Unified Quarter Investment Study. And the motion is to support the draft preferred scenario in the Transportation's UCIS Study and inclusion of multi-modal intersection improvements on the Soquel and Mission Quarters and reconstruction of the Highway 1 bridge over the San Lorenzo River. The UCIS was unveiled in September and since then, and prior to that actually, there have been a lot of public meetings and discussion of the study. Staff has released a draft preferred scenario which I've just handed out as well as up on the screen. The primary recommendation here from staff is that because we've looked at the preferred scenario, we think it's a good one, but that there are some things missing that are currently in the City's General Plan as well as actions that the Commission or the Council has taken in relationship to transportation improvements. The concern from staff is that if this document, if and it's likely that this document will inform future investment opportunities and grants that we have to make sure that we're not precluded from applying for those state and federal grants that go through the Commission. And so therefore, we are recommending adding to the preferred draft preferred scenario the additional lanes on the San Lorenzo River. That is the Highway 1 bridge over the San Lorenzo River which improves traffic circulation safety, protects the transportation infrastructure by providing a better bridge, improves flood flows currently having issues with that's the abutments in the piers in the river, back up water potentially flooding the tannery and other properties and then also improve fish flows of fish passage. The Mission Street improvements as well and the SoCal Avenue improvements, multimodal accommodating, transit, bikes, pedestrians, automobiles, deliveries and those are part of the City's General Plan mitigation. And one of the attachments at the end of the staff report are the traffic impact fee program and the intersections that are included in that program. And that program is mitigation to the City's General Plan that was adopted a few years ago. So those are the additions to the preferred scenario. If you'd like commission staffs available to answer questions specific to the UCIS and I can respond to questions related to the additional projects. Being there for questions. Are there any questions from the council at this time? I usually do have one. Serving on Metro, I'm looking at a couple of the items that have to do with transit and particularly in A, B and C all of those recommend the BRT light and but that was not transferred over to the 200335 preferred. And I know that some of the other transit recommendations talk about increased transit frequency and that is a big expensive operational thing but it seems to me that some aspects of BRT light could be a one-time capital improvement that could, for example, the signal priority and so forth that could help the buses maintain their scheduling. Do you have any comment on that? I don't have enough specific information related to that one. Any? Okay, it's just something that occurred to me on that one item. You know, I see someone, I'm not, you're from. We have Ginger Diakar with the Regional Transportation Commission, she could respond. Thank you. I'm happy to provide clarification on my question. Ginger Diakar. Yeah, thank you. Transportation planner at the RTC and the project manager for the unified car to study. The reason the staff recommendation to not keep the BRT light on SoCal Freedom was due to the passenger rail service on the rail right of way that that would provide a high quality transit service as well as on the highway. Initially, the bus on shoulders project would provide a faster travel time, higher quality service for more of an express service through our community. Obviously, SoCal Freedom is a very important transit part of the network for our community but we didn't see a vast improvement in transit travel times for given the expense of the extensive amount of additional frequency that was evaluated in the unified car to study for scenarios A, B, and C. So part of our staff recommendation is not necessarily to increase the transit frequency of the BRT light on SoCal Freedom but we do have in our staff recommendation that we're feasible when there's intersection improvements on SoCal Freedom to try to provide that transit signal priority and transit queue jump for the existing services but not necessarily to increase extensively the amount of service that's provided on that route given the higher quality transit services that will be provided on the two other routes. Okay, but some investment in those improvements along the route are anticipated. Transit signal priority and transit queue jump were feasible at intersections. Yes. Council Member Brown. I have a general question. So I have the pleasure of serving on the Regional Transportation Commission and a lot of my questions have been many most of my questions have been answered. I always come up with more every time I read through this document. So I have had the again the pleasure and the privilege of having access to getting those questions asked and answered. And so I appreciate you being here for other members of the council. I do think that this is a, I'll preface my question with a comment. This is a big document and we have spent the members of the council who are on that commission have spent considerable amount of time with it. And for the council to be asked in 72 hours to come and digest this and feel comfortable with stating the city's support wholesale is, I mean, I think that's kind of a big ask. And so the question I have is given that the commission has voted to delay until our meeting on the 17th. Our own, well, we've considered it, but our vote on this, what would it be a problem for this council to continue the item and have some more time with the document in order to maybe ask some additional questions or, you know, fine tune our recommendation at the city level, bringing it forward to the commission. Is that, would that be problematic from your perspective? What our plan was for the January 17th staff report to provide to our commission was to provide as much input as possible from the various different local jurisdictions that have made a decision, made a motion regarding the preferred scenario. So if it, if there was time on your agenda for future meetings, that's up to your discretion, obviously our packet has to be put together a week before the January 17th meeting. So it could still be be part of that staff report of them if your meeting was prior to that time. One other possibility. I know it is clearly a lot of information, but the recommendation be more general about the RTCs, the recommendation on the plan, but just that any plan that's approved include projects that are required in the city or interested by the city in future, in any scenario that's selected. I mean, I really see this as more of a, just an insurance policy that in the future, if we pursue these projects and when we pursue them, that we're not gonna be precluded from asking for grant funding for the projects. Every one of these projects is gonna require a lot of public process, environmental review, design, and a lot more action by council in the future. So I think, again, just more of an insurance policy to move forward. Thanks for bringing that up. I just wanted to interject on that point because you have the recommendation where it talks about the inclusion of these additional projects. You know, actually I feel comfortable on the RTC recommendation that we have before. But the second one as far as the inclusion of the multimodal intersection improvements, I'd like to make sure that we are qualifying those as they're the council approved projects because it was unclear to me which of these have actually come before the council and approved. Some of them were, but some of them, they're intersections improvements that are planned out for the future that do require some planning. And I don't wanna, you know, make, I don't wanna in any way, you know, prevent us from getting those funds, but I just wanna make sure that we're qualifying that these are, that the funds that we're getting are for council approved projects. And I think that's your intent. Yeah, because any grant funding that we bring forward has to go through first through the council. So in terms of the recommendation you have, do you have any objection to say that they're the inclusion of council approved multimodal intersection improvement projects? Do you have any? Okay, that's, I mean, that's something that's in the most, the recommendation, I'd like to see that language in there when it gets to a point. But council member Matthews, did you have an initial point? No, I think what you're getting at, Chris, is we could indicate support for either the 2035 preferred or simply say that any action taken by the RTC final adoption should include three added features that you've pulled out here. Yes, that's what I'm referring to. And I feel quite comfortable with that direction. Council member Crown. Is this the entire document that we have here in our packet that they've been considering? No, it's a summary. I think there's quite a bit more. Yeah, I would feel totally comfortable that we would, I think a study session would be great with the council to get grasp on these issues. So I mean, I would actually move to continue this to our first meeting in January since the RTC won't be taking it up till the 17th, and I think that'll be enough time for them to, for the new council to study it, get up to speed on this project and also get our recommendation to the RTC in time. We're at a point for just questions right now and discussion. I know that I have two people that request from organizations to ask to speak, and I'd like to first go to them and have them kind of provide that. That was Rick Longinati for the campaign for sustainable transportation, and then Manu Koenig from Santa Cruz County, Greenway. So each have four minutes to speak, and then we'll, any other members of the public that wish to speak to the side and we'll then have their opportunity. Okay, please go ahead, or whenever you're ready. Hi council members, my name's Rick Longinati with the campaign for sustainable transportation. So the request before you is to endorse the RTC staff's preferred option and I believe that's out of sync with the city of Santa Cruz policy and the voters in the past. We support compact development rather than the sprawl and we want to increase affordable housing and we want to have good transit and safe bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. We don't support projects that increase vehicle capacity and that means widening highway one. I want to remind you that the HOB lane project was a subject of a ballot measure in 2004 where it only got 43% of the vote it needed. Actually it was a sales tax measure but most of the money would go to the HOB project. In Santa Cruz it was overwhelming number of voters who voted against that sales tax measure.  So this is really out of sync because widening highway one according to the draft EIR would really increase vehicle miles traveled in greenhouse gases. We also, our group doesn't support expanding intersections to expedite auto flow if that means it's at the expense of pedestrian and bike safety and that's often what happens just inadvertently. You know, you can think of intersections around town that are totally intimidating to bicyclists and pedestrians and often that's because they've been expanded to increase auto flow. So here's the HOB lane project doubles the footprint of our freeway right now. We had Susan Handy come to Santa Cruz. It's our Loudon Nelson Center right there. She says, adding capacity to roadways fails to alleviate congestion for long because it actually increases vehicle miles traveled. We know that but the staff recommendation from the RTC doesn't really reflect that. The draft EIR on the highway, it analyzed something called the HOV alternative and the TSM alternative which you see on this chart here. The measure D funds are listed in orange there. Measure D funds would fund about a quarter of the TSM alternative, a little less than a quarter and we know from the draft EIR that the TSM alternative would result in very slight improvement in traffic congestion. Nevertheless, the RTC wants to go ahead with this project and the staff is recommending even more auxiliary lanes which will, just to go back here, the next level of auxiliary lanes, none of this is going to do more than very slight improvement in traffic congestion according to the EIR. Either would it improve safety because the total accident rates would be remain the same. But there are alternatives that have been analyzed in the unified corridors study, bus on shoulder of highway one, transit on the rail corridor with either rail or bus rapid transit or something else, and enhanced transit on Soquel and Freedom Boulevard. So in conclusion, I want to make the request that you do not approve, you do not send any kind of support for the staff preferred alternative. And I also want to mention that the request to widen the bridge over Highway One, bridge over the San Lorenzo River, the Highway One bridge which is in the city limits is another auto expansion project that's very expensive, over $10 million. We don't know what terms of time savings it would, how many seconds it might save somebody who's in travel on that bridge. It's just not a project that has been substantiated in terms of its worth to our community. And the Mission Street, my neighborhood, the Bay and Mission and the Chestnut and Mission Intersections likewise are calling for large expansions of those intersections without insurance in my mind that they would be better for pedestrians or bicycles. Thank you very much. Thank you, wow, right on time. Thank you, Rick. Okay, Manu, you are up next. Do you need, do you have a presentation? I do, yeah, okay. Great. So Manu Koenig, Executive Director of Santa Cruz County Greenway. The cartoon you're showing here really shows the risk involved in approving the staff recommendation today which is it's going to limit our options when it comes to the rail corridor because as Executive Director Guy Preston said at the last meeting, the Unified Corridor document is, it's a planning document. It doesn't direct any specific action. But what does happen if we approve staff recommendation is that it forces us to approve the Progressive Rail Contract which means that they become the short line operator for the entire line and we commit to doing freight throughout the entire county for the next 10 years. And that means that they really pre-empt anything that we want to do with the corridor when it comes to transportation. The reason for this is simple. Federal rail, when we were building railroads many years ago, that had to take precedent over local jurisdiction in order to happen at all. So the Unified Corridor study, it's a great document. It has some good data in it. But it's also seriously lacking. And let me put this simply, it has a cost benefit analysis without the cost. That's really only half of the information. And so what we've tried to do with this graph is provide the other half. This is really what we should be looking for, right? What is the bang for our buck when it comes to the different transportation options? And this is what the data shows. They basically cost $16 to the public every time someone gets on a train, $10 every time someone gets on a bus. So if you're looking at how do we improve transit and how do we make that transit go as far as possible, buses are gonna get us a lot further. And that's the same conclusion that a lot of other communities have come to. Of course, the best of all is a trail. And I think that as Claire was talking about some of the bike share options, let's build infrastructure that supports that kind of modality. So then there's this thing called the planning fallacy that Daniel Kahneman has described. Daniel is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he says that forecasts are unrealistically close to best case scenarios and could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases. So this is your opportunity to avoid the planning fallacy. This is some data from rail projects throughout the United States. And I'm just gonna read you the summary. This is Daniel Kahneman's own words. A 2005 study examined rail projects undertaken worldwide between 1969 and 1998. And more than 90% of the cases, the number of passengers projected to use the system was overestimated. Even though these passengers' shortfalls were widely publicized, forecasts did not improve over those 30 years on average. Planners overestimated how many people would use the new rail projects by 106% and average cost overrun was 45%. As more evidence accumulated, the experts did not become more reliant on it. Then there's the fact that rail, should it be completed, it's not gonna be done until 2035. I can't wait that long. Can our community wait that long? Then we had the technology risk. The train on the left there costs $6.7 million and holds 130 people. The ollie on the right costs $250,000 and holds 12 people. So $50,000 per person for the train, $20,000 per person with the ollie. You can buy 27 olleys for the price of the train. And they don't require a driver. They can go, they can be on demand and they can provide a lot more flexibility in transit. We talked about the jump bikes already. The city doesn't have to pay for this unit whatsoever, right? And 2035, how much is technology gonna change between now and then? There's a political risk. Greenway, supported measure D. We're not gonna support a tax measure for a train. Let's do something we can agree on. We've provided this alternative. Time's up. All right, just wanna say one brief comment. Round it up. Sure, we'll do. You can't get everything. You can't get the San Lorenzo River Bridge improvements if we pay for a train. And this data provides that. Thank you. Did you get permission from Claire to use that photo? I believe it's publicly available on the internet. I'm just joking. Any other members of the public that wish to speak to the side and please? Good morning. I am Brett Garrett. I am in agreement with Rick's comments and most of Manu's comments. I would not be ready to endorse the preferred scenario nor the scenario B. I wanna bring up that the Santa Cruz Metro has requested a comprehensive alternatives analysis to determine the best mode of transit on the rail corridor. In my view, the city should support this request for a comprehensive alternatives analysis instead of endorsing the so-called preferred scenario. Here's something Alex Clifford said about it during the November 16th Metro meeting. Alex was making a huge distinction between the alternatives analysis that Metro is requesting and the alternatives analysis that would come through the CEQA process that RTC would do by default. Alex said they sound similar, but they're very different. I quote, we're saying don't pick the mode. Do an alternatives analysis. Look at rail and there's variations of rail you could put in there. Look at BRT or bus. There may be one or two or three other alternatives that can function as mass transit in the corridor. Look at all of these. Lay out very detailed cost analysis of all of these including potential funding sources. Then make a decision based on a preferred alternative that comes out of that process. So that's what Alex Clifford said. I, as Brett Garrett, support what he said. I would take it a step further to say that personal rapid transit should be among the alternatives to be studied. Personal rapid transit, PRT, pod cars on an elevated guideway, preferably in a solar powered system with zero emissions. Lowest cost per passenger of any mode, much better safety, actually better transportation for everyone. I helped to get a study done showing that PRT would attract about five times the ridership of a train. I also believe that PRT would likely satisfy easement requirements. I don't know that for sure. So please recommend a comprehensive alternatives analysis to determine the best mode of transit on the rail corridor. Thank you. Thank you. Any other speakers, please step forward. You have two minutes. Hi, my name is Michael Posner. I've worked on transportation issues in Santa Cruz for third year, 40 years, 30 years. I do support alternative B. It's a proven track record, so to speak, for affecting land use in a way and doing transportation in a way that respects the world's climate and helps people that aren't rich. It's a public transportation and it's proven. In the 1930s, people that preferred private transportation ripped up rail lines all across the country and said that they were going to supply public buses. Instead, they purposely rode those buses into the ground so that they could make more money. And even though I'm not saying that people in this room want to do that, it's a potential outcome if we rip up our tracks. We need to keep the tracks. That's how we know we'll get public transportation and how we know that we'll support the kind of planning that helps the environment. I don't think the council should add a rider about widening the bridge over the river or Mission Street. Doing so would be saying that you agree with these principles, that you care about the environment, you respect how people should go around the county, but you're not willing to have a little bit of short-term suffering. You want to do old-school economics when it comes to sort of your transportation, your congestion, while you ask everyone else to move along to the next century. I think it would be kind of disingenuous. I don't think it'd be taken well by the people of Watsonville or other people in the county. And as you know, the highway bridge over the river is not considered important by Caltrans. It's not a high priority. So I hope you'll stick with B. It's been carefully negotiated. It's not everything I want it, but it's a good plan and I hope you'll recommend it to the Regional Transportation Commission. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? This is item number 25, the Regional Transportation Commission's Unified Corridor Investment Study. Please, step 40, you have two minutes. Good morning, Mayor, Council members. It's nice to see you at this time of the day. Oral of controversy starts. I just want to talk really quickly in regards to this item about the concept of opportunity cost and looking at the regional or the Unified Corridor Study and the results that come out. I personally was a little dismayed by the wide differences in the amount of money and different projects that were chosen, ultimately the very marginal differences that were coming out of the different performance metrics that were given from the Unified Corridor Study. And so we're looking at spending hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, potentially up to a billion over the course of between now and 2035. We can be really cognizant over if we invest $600 million to do something, a brand new thing, whatever that may be, that's $600 million we cannot spend on something else. And we've got a lot of problems that we're dealing with. So just keep that in mind. And also the Highway 1, Highway 9 bridge is a significant pain point for everybody who drives that part of the highway every single day. It backs up onto the 17, it backs up along the fish hook and it causes chaos everywhere. It is a high priority, please consider that. And I'm sure the businesses in that part of town over by Harvey West, whether it's later construction, kind people's Costco would really, really appreciate it if you got to get that investment in that bridge. Thank you. Thank you. Any other members of the public that wish to speak to this item? It's item number 25, the RTC Unified Corridor Investment Study. I'll bring it back to the council. Council Member Matthews. Yes, I would like to move that. I already made a motion to continue this item. Is there a second on that earlier motion? I'm sorry, on Council Member Matthews. No, no, no. I made a motion to, let me clarify. Before we went to the public. Okay. I'm confused now because I believe we were heading towards potentially a motion to not actually weigh in on the UCIS today and to proceed as recommended by staff about the city items for now. So if we can just clarify where this is going, then I'll know whether or not I'm seconding your motion. Let me hear, let me, I know I said I was going to go to the public for comment. Council Member Crum, before we did that, he made a motion to continue the item. That's where he was. Okay, so I'll second for the sake of discussion. I'm trying to figure out what we're doing here. Okay, so are we prepared to take action on what's before us? Let's revisit RTC Ginger. The timing of any action we take and how that gets integrated into your report for RTC. Just want to understand the. Ginger, our RTC staff, we have been asking people that if there, so there is a chance for the staff recommendation to be revised and brought to the January 17th meeting. If in order to get that information, in order to do that and be based on your decision, we would need to have that information. What we've been telling people is December 28th prior to that in order to make that change. Your motion can always go to the commission up until the day before if we receive the information, January 16th. So there's three different time frames. December 28th, if we had the information then that we could evaluate your information to consider changing the staff recommendation. If we received the information from your council prior to let's say January 10th, we could incorporate it into the staff report that would then be in the packet available to our website. If we receive the information by January 16th at noon, we could incorporate it as a handout to our commission. Is that the information that you're looking for? That is just my question exactly, thank you. So there's motion on the floor in a second. Is there further discussion on that? The idea of postponing. Council Member Chase. So I think I'm where Council Member Brown is on this where we had a discussion right before Council Member Cron made the motion to basically make a recommendation for the RTC to consider some items that are in part of this. So I'd like to hear more about that. I think that's kind of more where I was going particularly as a member of the RTC. So this is, the outcome of this is important. So you're opposed to the idea of postponing? I am opposed to the idea of postponing because I wanted to really flesh out, particularly given what Ginger just reported to us, I think that that makes no sense to postpone. But I wanted to sort of hear more about what Council Member Matthews and then I believe Council Member Brown made some comments on so I think that's where I'm moving. I agree, I'm opposed to the postponement. So I will withdraw my motion if it's okay with the second. Okay, Council Member Matthews. Then we will proceed with the main motion. Please go ahead. And I will go ahead and move that we support the RTC preferred scenario in the Regional Transportation Commission's UCIS with specifically the inclusion of the Council approved, and I'm adding Council approved multimodal intersection improvements and projects on the SOCAL and mission corridors and inclusion of the reconstruction of the Highway 1 Bridge over San Lorenzo River. Second that, further discussion. So I'm more confused. My sense of where we were going was along the lines of what Mr. Schneider suggested that we could send our letter in support of the city approved projects to ensuring that the city approved projects receive consideration, whatever the preferred scenario is that the commission elects. Actually, I'm fine with that as well. Okay, so that was what I would, Scott, where we were gonna go. Then let me just restate, race motion, restate motion. I'll move that the City Council express its desire that the RTC include in its final scenario additional lanes on bridge over San Lorenzo River, improvement of city improved projects on the Mission Street Corridor and intersection improvements for automobiles at city approved projects. I'm looking here at the line items that were packed. So it would be to include in whatever the RTC does to add those three as the city's strong preference. Can I refute back to the original recommendation in your staff report just to make sure there are multimodal improvements on the SOCAL and mission corridors? Yeah, because it says you're here just auto. You're right. Yeah, that was an emotion. So that's pretty clear, right? Intersection improvements, multimodal intersection improvements at city approved for city approved projects. Yeah, council approved multimodal projects, intersection. Yeah. So it will be the line that calls for additional lanes on the bridge over San Lorenzo River, which I agree is really a public safety issue. The Mission Street intersection multimodal improvements and multimodal intersection improvements for city approved projects. Those three items. Is there a second? Do we have a second? No, we already had a second. I'll leave a second. So Cal, the city clerk was looking for that language, some something so we have it in. It just gets really hard when the door opens. It was hard to hear you. Okay. Just the last part of it. We requested the RTC include in its final decision on preferred scenario the following. Additional lanes on the bridge over San Lorenzo River, Mission Street intersection multimodal improvements and multimodal intersection improvements for city approved projects. And I think does that cover for you? Yes, council member Brown. I will support the motion for the sake of moving this along. However, I do want to go on record and the only record we have for anybody who's listening out there because we only do action minutes. I am not currently in support of the highway one bridge over the San Lorenzo River. I understand there's serious safety issues there. I understand that this will be coming back to us in whatever form and this council will have the opportunity to weigh in about that in the future. But for the sake of moving us along today, I'm okay with moving the recommendation as made. Great. So we have a motion on the floor by council member Matthew Second and by myself, council member Crone. So Chris, if we do this, is this the city going on record that we're supporting highway one widening? This, the motion just is about Mission Street improvements as approved by the city council. And multimodal improvements. And as well as the highway one bridge. But not highway one, per se, the whole. Not highway one past south towards Watsonville. Oh, I think it'd be a good idea. I too want to, you know, I don't know. I really think, you know, I try to read all the stuff that comes to us. And I don't know if maybe outside of the council members who are on the RTC have read these documents. They're of enormous length. And I really, we've never had a study session on them. I really think we should. I think these decisions are really huge. And I will say for the record too, I support the council of endorsing the transit and active transportation measures in the UCIS, but I oppose auto-centric projects. And I don't support the highway widening that bridge over the San Lorenzo River. Thank you. Okay, council member Narayan. And this is where I just don't understand why people wouldn't be in favor of widening that bridge when there are safety issues. People are not going to ride their bike, not ride their bike because we widened that. People who are on that road coming into Santa Cruz aren't doing it, usually through there because they said, gee, I could have ridden my bike instead of driving on this stretch of road. It is a huge safety issue. I grew up here. I've seen so many horrific accidents at that intersection. So I just don't understand. It's the approach that's dangerous and it needs to be fixed. Okay, council member Brown. I just want to reiterate my willingness to support this motion in the interest of moving us forward here. We have a busy agenda today. And I believe that we will have plenty of time to discuss, get more information and debate the merits of the highway one bridge. I just use it as an example in the future, a future meeting. So I assume that will happen. I look forward to those conversations and I absolutely appreciate council member Crohn's suggestion and I suggested the same that for council members who do want to have more information and fully digest this document, I do think we could have some kind of study session with the council sometime in January to allow council members who are interested to really understand it better and potentially weigh in further. So we could do that if the incoming mayor is so inclined and or council members are so inclined. Would the maker of the motion see that as a friendly amendment that we schedule a study session on this document? We would really need commission staff to be part of that study session. They're really focused on trying to get their side of the equation for the commission done. I don't really realistically think that's gonna be possible before the January commission. This is gonna be a discussion over years and I think you're gonna probably have plenty of opportunities to weigh in on this.  I mean, I'd like to see where people are. So all those in favor, please say aye. Any opposed? Okay, that motion passes with council member Crohn voting no, council member Matthews, council member Chase, council member Brown, council member Naroyan and vice mayor Watkins and myself voting in favor. And we will then be moving on to the next item, 11 o'clock time certain. We're not on that right yet because we're gonna take one quick break. We've been going since 8.30 a.m. and then we're gonna come right back. So can we give us five minutes? That'd be perfect, mayor. I got a bunch of members outside that wanted to come in. They can come on in. Yeah, how about give us five minutes and, yeah, thank you. And get comfy. So it looks like there's a lot of people out there. Hey, thank you. Welcome everybody who's here. We actually have some audio that can be projected outside so that I know we're in kind of close quarters here. So if people would like to step outside that feel more comfortable, you'll still hear the proceedings and you could come up when this time when we call for public comment if you'd like. So just wanna make that option available for you because we do need to have access in the aisle ways so people can travel through the facility. So next up on our agenda is item number 26. This is a public hearing for the 100 Laurel Street project. We are going to, at this point, turn it over to Samantha Hatcher, our senior planner, or excuse me, Lee Butler, our director of planning to speak. Please, go ahead. Good morning, mayor and council members. Lee Butler, planning director for the city. And we're very pleased to be presenting to you today the project that is proposing redevelopment of the properties on the north side of Laurel Street between Pacific Avenue and Front Street. We're all well aware of the housing crisis that we're in. We're also well aware of the many decades that have gone by since we've seen substantial investments in the southern end of our downtown. And the council and our entire city team have been taking a series of efforts to address both of those issues. And I'll start with, by framing the conversation with the updates that we did to the downtown plan last year. In response to the lack of investment in the southern end of our downtown, as compared to what we had seen in the north end of the downtown following the 89 quake and since that time, we embarked on updates to our downtown plan. And those updates specifically addressed the provision of additional height in the downtown area to facilitate the redevelopment of those projects. That was approved by the council in late 2017. And then it was certified by the coastal commission earlier this year. And those changes are what has facilitated this project moving forward. And so we're seeing the fruits of that labor now with this project coming forward and embodying the vision that was articulated by those revisions to the downtown plan. The other thing that the council has done and that staff are responding to is the housing blueprint subcommittee work and the large community engagement effort that then Mayor Chase led at the end of last year that led to a series of recommendations that were then prioritized by the housing blueprint subcommittee. And then on June 12th of this year, council provided direction to as part of the housing production arm of those recommendations to really facilitate downtown housing creation. And one of those specific recommendations and the direction provided by the council on June 12th was to focus city resources and staff to encourage construction or approval of units downtown with a specific focus on enabling projects in the current development pipeline to break ground. And so this project does represent one of those projects that we've had in the pipeline and we're pleased to present it to you here today. Samantha Haschert, senior planner as well as Bonnie Lipscomb, the director of economic development will be providing some more details on the project and will be available for questions following the presentation and public comments. Thank you. I'll turn it over for the presentation. Thanks. Thank you. This is a six story mixed use building with ground floor commercial and 205 residential apartments above. It requires approval of a demolition authorization permit, a sequential lot line adjustment, a design permit, a special use permit, a coastal permit, a revocable license for outdoor extension areas, a heritage tree removal permit and approval of street tree removal. This project in this location, as Lee was saying, was directly envisioned by the downtown plan with the objectives of increasing housing stock in a transit priority area and also providing better connectivity between downtown and the beach and downtown and the San Lorenzo River. An approval of this project would be in line with strategic goal one of the city council's two year work plan to approve 500 to 600 housing units downtown and would also be in line with goals of the housing element to provide a diversity of housing types and concentrate new housing in the commercial core. Also to facilitate development of affordable housing through collaboration with nonprofit organizations, this development would contribute land to allow the city to meet that goal. There are many project specific details in the staff report that we provided to the planning commission. And so I'd like to focus this report just on some of the concerns that were brought up by the public during this process. This project was heard by the downtown commission on September 27th who recommended approval of 37 to 65 parking space deficiency. This is in line with the parking district resolution to encourage shared parking in the downtown area. The planning commission heard this item on November 15th and recommended approval with some modified conditions. The project is also subject to the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA provides streamlining provisions that allow for a lead agency to not repeat an analysis where impacts were adequately analyzed in an earlier EIR. This is under public resources code sections 21083.3 and it's parallel CEQA guidelines provision section 15183. We completed a checklist and found that the certified EIRs for the general plan and the downtown plan amendments adequately address the impacts of the project. The project density that's proposed is consistent with the assumption of build out that we used as a basis for the previous analysis in the downtown plan EIR. But we did require subsequent reports to confirm these analysis. We required full traffic reports, parking and circulation analysis, noise impact assessments, an arborist report, a historic resource report, archeological reports, and all of these are referenced in the staff report to the planning commission. We also consulted with multiple departments, public works who reviewed the traffic and parking impacts and the parks department who reviewed the tree preservation and our checklist was prepared by our professional CEQA consultant in consultation with Rami Moos Manly, a law firm that specializes in California environmental law. The checklist found no new impacts triggering changes or additions to the previously certified general plan or downtown plan EIRs. And the variations that are proposed as a part of this project are really minor design modifications that had no environmental impacts. So I'm just gonna go through the project to show you some of the proposed development. This is the project site shown here between Pacific Avenue, Front Street, and Laurel Street. The property is seven parcels that would be combined to create a 62,806 square foot lot. The property is entirely located in the central business district zone district and within the regional visitor commercial downtown Santa Cruz general plan designation. The entire project is within the downtown plan, though with the western half in the Pacific Avenue sub district area and the eastern half in the Front Street River Front Corridor. The project site is also entirely within additional height zone A that allows for buildings up to 85 feet under specific criteria. This is just a zoom in of the project site. The project would require the demolition of five existing buildings and we completed a historic analysis of these buildings to ensure that none of the buildings were of historic significance. Here's a site plan for the proposed project. The ground floor consists of commercial uses and two floors of above ground parking. That ground floor covers the entire project site. The upper floors, floors two to six are shown in tan. Those are separated by an interior courtyard area and then there's an interior mezzanine located at the middle of the building. This area down here is an open rooftop courtyard or open space area. That's above a 55 foot high portion of the building. The tan portions of the building are 75 feet in height and the mezzanine area shown in green here reaches a height of 85 feet. This is a bird's eye view of the project. Gives a good idea of how the architect has provided significant breaks between buildings and a variety of design styles and also step backs in building height and variations in stories to provide a grouping of buildings rather than one large monolithic building. There's a view of the Laurel Street Frontage. This is a pretty significant building mass here. However, it benefits from a two-story height variation and also this significant break to the interior courtyard area. And then the Front Street Frontage which again is another large building mass but this one doesn't benefit from any significant breaks. So we have included a condition of approval that would require the architect to provide either differentiation in design, building step backs, recess breaks to break down this building mass. This is a view of the downtown area with the project site shown here at the bottom in red. You can see the Palomar building here. That's a seven-story, 95-foot tall building at its tallest point. And then 1010 Pacific is here and 1010 Pacific is six stories and 68 feet tall and then the future will have under construction a building at the top of downtown which is five stories and 50 to 60 feet tall at 1547 Pacific. So the proposed project is within the range of building heights downtown. Onto uses, the ground floor of the building is shown here in this floor plan. The commercial uses are concentrated on Pacific Avenue with outdoor cafes, extension areas and a main lobby to the building to funnel the residents to Pacific Avenue. The Pacific Avenue Frontage would include wide awnings, retractable storefronts, mix of materials, significant landscaping. This is all really intended to eliminate the heart edge between the public and private realms and create gathering spaces for residences. The design is generally consistent with the design and development standards provided in the downtown plan but the downtown plan recognizes that the criteria can't address every situation so it does allow for design variations that are minor in nature and that help the project better meet the goals of the downtown plan. Those variations, I'm sorry, the applicant is proposing six variations and the planning commission and the planning department support all but two of those. So the first is going back to the floor plan here to not wrap the parking garage with commercial uses. So as I mentioned, the commercial uses are concentrated on Pacific Avenue. There's less commercial uses on Laurel Street but on Front Street, there's very minimal commercial uses and none other than just the one at the corner. The current state of Front Street is not a thriving commercial area but the proposed development will include 205 new residential units. The Metro site is also being considered for redevelopment into 100% affordable housing development and a large mix use development is in process on Front Street at the terminus of Cathcart. So Front Street is in a state of evolution and we would like the project to better meet the downtown goals by providing additional commercial space on Front Street. The condition of approval is included and has been drafted in a broad way to allow the applicant to determine what's economically feasible to provide true commercial spaces or possibly residential amenity space to activate that frontage. And the planning commission included an additional part in that condition that requires any space that's not converted to commercial uses to be designed to be able to be easily converted in the future to commercial uses. The second variation that's not supported is to allow for a mezzanine at the corner in this commercial space at the corner of Front Street and Laurel Street to create a 10 foot high ceiling within that space for about 70% of the space. We found that that would be very limiting to a future tenant. It would reduce visibility at that corner which is identified as a gateway corner in the downtown plan. And so we've recommended that the mezzanine be set back at least 20 feet from the front walls of the tenant space and we would desire that bike parking in the mezzanine to be relocated to an interior space instead. Here's some renderings of the project. These are from the Laurel Street Bridge. This is the Front Street elevation. And then another rendering from Front Street and then another rendering at night here. I have one more showing the active space illuminated within the ground floor of the building. So I just quickly wanted to go over how the inclusionary housing is being proposed for this project and then I'm gonna turn it over to Bonnie Lipscomb the economic development director to get into further detail on how that was calculated. But the project is proposing to use two sections of code to address the inclusionary housing requirements. The first one is section 24-16055 of the zoning ordinance. That was adopted on October 9th, 2018 and allows for the city to determine an alternative percentage only in cases where properties were acquired and applications for projects commenced during the time when the courts ruled that cities could not limit rental amounts for affordable housing due to a conflict with the Costa Hopkins Rental Housing Act. So this is commonly referred to as the Palmer case. So this ordinance, the zoning ordinance was intended to address situations where a developer moved forward with the purchase of a property and a project with the assumption based on this court case that they could construct a 100% rental project without the requirement for inclusionary housing and where the full 15% inclusionary requirement could make that project economically infeasible. So consistent with that ordinance, they did submit a pro forma analysis for review and Bonnie will go over them. The second section of the zoning ordinance that applies is section 24-16030 subsection seven. That is a section that allows for land dedication as an alternative method to comply with the inclusionary housing requirement. This is a feasible option if the land to be dedicated is adjacent to city-owned land and is a critical component of a larger city-supported affordable housing project. So the applicant is proposing to dedicate two parcels at 820 and 822 Pacific Avenue to the city to be used as part of a future 100% affordable housing project adjacent or concurrently with the Metro Center. The land meets both of these requirements and then in addition, the city is asking for the property owner to obtain and dedicate the parcel at 818 Pacific Avenue or pay an in-loofy of $1.2 million to the housing fund to ensure that the value is consistent with the value of the land dedication. So I think at this point, I'll turn it over to Bonnie to get into further detail on them. Great, thank you, Sam. Good morning, council members, mayor and council members. So we actually have our financial consultant on a WebEx and I'm going to give her the opportunity to speak at the end of this presentation because a lot of what has been discussed as far as financial feasibility is based on her analysis of the project. This isn't a city staff analysis of what's financially feasible. This is our independent financial consultants analysis of what is feasible. I think from our perspective, we would love for the project to be able to support a 15% inclusionary within the project, but based on the analysis, it's just not supportable within the project. With that said, we do believe that the 15% inclusionary requirement can be met. As Sam mentioned, the land dedication is an alternative means of compliance and I'll go into that in a little bit more specificity here in a minute. There have been some questions about the project specific analysis for this project that's been conducted. We initially had Kathy Head from Kaiser Marston do an analysis when the project first came forward in 2016 and then update that analysis in 2018. And so this is based on the general project specifics of a 205 unit project at a density of 130 units per acre. The assumptions for that are that in order for a project to be feasible, there needs to be an unrestricted market rate project approximately a 5% stabilized return to the developer and put a different way that a project is not supportable if there's a reduction in the land value by more than 30%. So that's sort of the threshold. And if it starts to dip below 30%, it's deemed not feasible from a developer standpoint. And Kathy can go into that in a little more detail. So that's the threshold basis for the percentages that we're discussing for this analysis. And so the August 2018 downtown inclusionary analysis, this actually was included in the inclusionary housing ordinance amendments that came forward to you in September, had a discussion of a downtown base case that ultimately supported a 15% downtown inclusionary requirements in the downtown and a 10% outside the downtown. And the difference between those two is that for the downtown base case, the assumption is that developers in the downtown are going to be able to take advantage of the density bonus provisions. And so the difference between that specifically in the downtown, and I don't think we went into detail about this back in September, but the difference of the base zoning before you add in the density bonus, downtown supportable is 6% inclusionary. And so this is relevant when we actually get into this specific project analysis. But there are a few reasons why this particular project is not going to take advantage of the density bonus provision. So as a result, the actual affordability for their project is closer to the 6% and when you actually get their specific financial information, the actual supportable inclusionary housing within their project is 5.5%. But there've been a lot of discussions of how can we have 15% and you're suggesting 5.5%. So I wanted to give a little bit of background on that. But at the end of the presentation, Kathy Head can go into the specifics. So key differences that I wanted to just call out to your attention between the specific project, and that means the proposed project before you today, and the base case scenario. The base case scenario was based on a hypothetical 90 unit per acre project. The base case was based on 100 units in the downtown, so it would be easy to see as a percentage the number of inclusionary units. The proposed project is already developed and they can do this by right at a higher density than the base case scenario was anticipated. The no higher density on the proposed project can really be achieved without changing the construction type. And once you change the construction type, the costs go up dramatically. So as a result, the density bonus does not change the economics overall to support that incentive for the developer to take advantage of the density bonus provisions within this particular project. Hopefully that won't be the case, I think, for a lot of the other projects in the downtown. Also, as Sam mentioned, because the Palmer case was the prevailing, we couldn't enforce the inclusionary provisions over the last, since 2009. They did purchase and assemble this land, paying higher land value with the expectation that they wouldn't be required to provide that 15% so they did pay a higher land value. When you actually look at the analysis of what a 15% inclusionary would require for this project, when you look at that, it actually creates a negative land value, meaning that everything they paid for the land would have to be completely free and then some by a couple million. It just doesn't work financially. With that said, because we have alternative means to comply with our inclusionary housing requirement, that 15% threshold can be met by alternative methods. And specifically, we're talking about the land dedication. And so, as Sam mentioned, but just to call out specifically, an applicant may propose to donate a minimum of 15% of the net developable land area of the residential development to the city for the construction of a project with at least 25% of its total units restricted to low income households or below. And I underline the next part of a lesser amount or a lesser amount of land of the parcel is adjacent to city-owned land and is a critical component of a larger city-supported affordable housing project. With that said, I still, when I'll show you in a second, we're actually really close to the 15% of land dedication and we'll show that to you. Additionally, we have the recent 2018 AB 1505, which does amend section 6585 of the government code that requires jurisdictions to include alternative means of fulfilling the affordable housing obligation, including in Luffy's land dedication, off-site construction, et cetera. So what we're proposing today and what we're recommending does comply both with our existing ordinance as well as the government code section as far as inclusionary housing. So specifically to look at, and I will show you a map in just a second, but just wanted to run through the numbers with you first, the land dedication inclusionary analysis. So the project, the net developable land area, that's when you take away the setbacks, we're actually taking, I think it's like eight foot right away off of Laurel Forestry Dedication. When you actually take out the areas that the developer can't develop, that developable land area is 55,160 feet. So we take per our inclusionary requirement, we take 15% of that as a land base, which is comparable to a 15% and that gets you to 8,272 square feet. When you look at the sites that we're proposing to be dedicated to the city, that's the commonly known as the Tampico site, 820 and 822, that's a 7,797 square foot project, which is approximately 14.14% of the developable area of the existing project. If you add in 1818 Pacific, is what we're proposing, we're proposing to either the developer to additionally acquire the 1818 Pacific and also dedicate that to the city or alternatively, if they're not able to do that, to provide an inclusionary fee of 1.2 million to fully satisfy what we feel like is the inclusionary requirement. If they're able to acquire the 1818 Pacific, that additional square footage actually brings the total inclusionary as far as a percentage of the land area up to 19%. So it does exceed the 15% if they are able to develop both areas. Okay, so this actually shows the map of the areas we're just talking about. And the city-owned, just as referenced, the city project that we already own that we're working on is adjacent to the Metro project. And so last year, actually last year this time, we completed the acquisition of the NIAC building, which is at the back on the side facing Front Street. And that's 333 Front Street. In the front, we already owned the city parking lot. So we have a total of 24,000 square feet, a little over half an acre that we currently own. We're in discussions with Metro. We would like to do a project that includes this city acreage and does a land exchange with Metro so that we can develop the frontage along the existing Metro. We'd like to be able to add an additional land, including this land dedication. The 1820, 1822 Pacific are the two areas in yellow that the applicant, the developer here today, currently owns and is proposing to dedicate to the city to satisfy the inclusionary land requirement. That's the 14% of their current project, which is the 7,797 square feet. We are additionally, the area in back is just to show you ultimately what we would like to have the footprint for our proposed affordable housing city develo