d evening. I'm Scott Graham. I'd like to speak tonight about things that have happened in the past that have closed off this government. At one time, there used to be green cards over here and any member of the public has filled one out and take an item off the consent agenda to talk about it. Now we have to go to a council member and beg them to take something off. I'd like to see that restored. Another thing is the minutes of the council meetings back when Emma was the city clerk, not only said who spoke at the meetings, but a brief synapses of what they said, what their issue was. And now it's just a list of people that spoke. Has nothing, you have no idea what they said. You'd have to go and watch the video. The other thing is this agenda meeting, why is it secret? Why is it closed off? In Berkeley, it's a public event. The public is allowed to come to those meetings and they actually put their two cents in. So I'd like to see more openness in this government so that the public gets more access to what's going on and gets more input into what's going on. Thank you. Hi, my name is Sherry Sherry Peterson. I want to speak about the bus service. I was walking down, it was my borrowed walker, the second walker I've broken, and walking down mission and there's only a bus every two hours down mission. So to get to your doctor appointment, you either have to walk along mission like this far from the semis and cars going 50 and it's really terrifying. I was praying the whole time, you know, going to my doctor, but I just wish that mission needs to have three buses an hour and I wish he could restore that. I wish every bus stop would have like a solar light on it. So females that are stuck at the bus stop when it's dark could like have a light.  I don't like being out at night myself. I only come out to talk to you to try and get your attention about homelessness, basically, but this bus is a problem. And I think if they had an overnight bus that ran all night and a lot of drivers agree with me, if there was a 71, if there was a 35, then people could at least spend the night on the bus. I have a friend that's 86 and she has to ride the Dearborn over by Gilroy three times a week because she can't afford to stay in a motel every night, but she's under wits and two, we're all in our wits end and we're looking for solutions. And I'm asking you, I'm begging you to deepen your heart and look for solutions. Thank you. And before you begin, I believe you'll be our last member of the community who's interested in speaking to us on items not on today's agenda. Okay, go right ahead. Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is Steve Rohr. I think I might be a little bit of a minority as far as my opinion here. I want to ensure that as voters and citizens of Santa Cruz that we're all represented and that no one should feel intimidated and I do feel intimidated because I heard people speaking, I disagreed with them. By the way, I think in America we're allowed to disagree, right? Is that okay? By the way, when you disagree, it doesn't mean you hate anyone. But I heard a gentleman talking about rent control. Well, we, overwhelmingly as citizens of this city voted down rent control and yet we still got rent control. I want to tell you my story. I do have some property in Santa Cruz. The way I got that was to drive an hour. Every day, get up at four in the morning and drive for an hour, work in construction which I'm still doing. I've been doing it for 42 years. That's how I was able to afford my first house. Nobody gave it to me. I wasn't born with a golden spoon in my mouth. I have health issues due to construction. My body's wearing out. I still work in construction. And yes, we do have some rental properties. We rent the rooms to students in one property for a fraction of what the university charges for a room. And yet people are telling us that we're supposed to drop our rent or we can't even increase it with the cost of inflation.  And now we've got people that were not willing to sacrifice many of them. I don't know, any renters, I have two rental properties in the house I live in. One of the renters sacrifices to drive an hour each way to afford to live here. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thanks for your speech. Okay. So that will conclude oral communications. So at this time we have one item on our agenda tonight. Before we go ahead and jump into the item, I would like to just remind folks of our council norms and my role as mayor and presiding officer of the meeting. So the council adopted some norms and I'll just briefly review those to be respectful, to engage in open and honest communication, to be truthful and honest, to address difficult issues, to seek to find areas of common ground, be open to different perspectives, to give the benefit of the doubt, roll out model good leadership and be considerate of each other's time. Everybody who is here has an opportunity to, or will have an opportunity to address the council. I ask that you allow that person to speak to the council when they are given the opportunity without interruption as they will allow for you to do the same. It's my job to maintain decorum in our council chambers. If I observe an individual disrupting the council meeting, I will ask that you please stop and give you a warning. If it is repeated, then I will ask that you please leave the council chambers so that we can move forward with our discussion and our processes. So I appreciate and thank you in advance for adhering to our rules of decorum and hopefully allow for us to have a thoughtful policy a discussion and experience this evening. And then I'll just go ahead and at this point, turn it over to our city staff who will be presenting the item. Thank you, Mayor Watkins, council members, members of the community, good evening. I'm Tina Scholl, the assistant city manager and to my left is Susie O'Hara, the assistant to the city manager.  Similar to your meeting two weeks ago, we have quite a lineup of additional speakers as well. We have fire chief, Jason Hayduk, we have planning and community development director, Steve Butler, economic development director, Bonnie Lipscomb. We have our city attorney, Tony Condati, and we also have some special guests. Dr. Leff is here from the county, our county health officer, as well as Mr. Brent Adams. We'll be speaking to tonight. We also have our parks and recreation director, Tony Elliott, for questions. So we have another full night of presentation for you. A lot of speakers. Okay, so similar to last time, we have a discussion agenda for you so you can track on how the evening will go. We'll first review the motions from your last council meeting, which largely drove the content for tonight's meeting. You'll hear an update on the city county joint action plan operations. There will be staff analysis and response to the motion from the last city council meeting. And then finally we'll summarize with some staff recommendations and considerations for council direction. So then first looking to your last council meeting two weeks ago, we received a set of direction from the city council that we have here. And just so you could track, you can understand the coding on the side. You'll see motion carried to and either check marks or diamonds. The diamonds are substantive items that are being brought forth tonight for your consideration and discussion with work product associated with them. The first being returning with a list of possible city-owned locations for encampments and safe parking locations. The second one is returning with ordinance language for both transitional encampment permitting and safe parking programs. The next one down is talking about the motion carried to direct staff to provide additional information on how this motion's incorporated into the project charter around encampments. You might recall at your last meeting we presented two project charters, one around hours in public facilities and council gave direction to work on that so that works ongoing. And then we also presented one on transitional encampments. At the time of the meeting, council didn't accept that work plan but we're curious to know how another set of action would fit in with that project charter as outlined by staff. And then the final action item, that's the diamond below is directing us to return with a revised shelter crisis declaration. We have that for you. And so then you'll see items that are check marks and those are items that have been completed or are substantially underway. The first one is directing city staff to share information with the county and that has been done. There was a two by two meeting that occurred since your last meeting, your meeting tonight and there was a robust discussion there and all of this was conveyed. The second check mark is removing the closure date at the gateway camp. That was your direction and that's been done. The third is providing signage at the camp about alternatives and that has been done. The fourth check mark directing staff to communicate with county partners that we are committed to the closure. Again, that was done largely communicated in the two by two meeting as well as staff to staff interactions between the city and the county. And then finally, the council did direct work on the project charter process for public facilities analysis and that work will be ongoing. That's not immediate work to return. But we'd just like to summarize for you so you can see how your action tonight is responsive to the council direction of the last meeting as well as the things that have been accomplished. So with that, we will turn to our first segment of the agenda and I will ask Susie O'Hara to provide an update on the joint action plan. Thank you, Tina and good evening. And I'm sure going into the night we'll recheck in on the timing. So I'm gonna be starting the conversation around an update of the joint action plan and then also kind of finishing the conversation trying to wrap up. There's gonna be a lot of information coming at you this evening, a lot of different speakers really trying to distill really a huge amount of information into what would be appropriate next steps. So with regard to the joint action plan I wanted to talk about two kind of specific areas. Current conditions at the camp as well as our engagement with the camp residents and really trying to understand kind of fundamentally who is out there? What are their needs and how best to serve folks that are out there? So with regard to conditions Fire Chief Hayduk will be talking more about this but I have been out there every week multiple times a week, really getting into the camp, having conversations with folks in terms of outreach and engagement and understanding what opportunities they may have for shelter provision but also having a lot of firsthand contact with the conditions at the camp. I just want to reiterate that it is significantly challenging out there in terms of health and safety considerations. The Fire Chief will talk about that more but I also wanted to reflect on that. So just to orient you to the left side of the screen here we've had 80 contacts with residents, 25 shuttle vouchers distributed and 12 residents that have taken us up on the offer of transporting folks to the winter shelter programs at either the VFW or Laurel Street. Last week, Megan Bunchenai also met with the camp council so there really is a self-governed group of folks that are in living at the camp. I see a few folks actually outside and I know that they had planned on coming and speaking as well. We conducted a meeting with five individuals last week, last Friday, to really understand what brought them to the camp, what their hopes are for maintaining the camp and the conditions there and then what services and what kind of shelter models might make sense for folks. And then also their interest in collaborating with the city and the county to really develop a stronger sense of partnership and coordination with our jurisdictions. So that was really an important information for us to take in and we will be meeting with them again on this Friday. So with regard to shelter provision, this was also mentioned at last meeting but to reiterate the Laurel Street program opened on the 13th of February. There are 40 beds at that site. They are not all full so we are really focused on getting more people into that shelter. 1220 River Street, we are moving forward with a contract with the Salvation Army to provide 60 individual tent sites at 1220 River Street and that will be, we are intending to open that on April 17th with board direction on the 16th of April so that contract will be with the county board of supervisors. The armory and the use of that facility is still being vetted by the county. We did report on that last meeting and those discussions are ongoing. In addition to that, as we really try to grapple with we have this state funding that's come to our region, the LOI process for emergency shelter provision, that process is complete. There are several programs that are funded for that and that was really to try to bolster our emergency shelter programming. So the AFC Safe Parking Program is part of that portfolio, 1220 River Street, the extension of the North and South County winter shelter programs to June 30th as well as support for the Polly Loft and their ongoing operations. So that process is finished and in addition to that the Heap and Cash RFP award announcements are expected very soon as early as next week and with those two processes done we'll really have a much better understanding as to the capacity that our local nonprofits have to meet these expectations, quite frankly these really high expectations we have to enhance our sheltering and homeless programming capacity. So we'll be able to report more out on that as well in the coming weeks. With regard to the encampment and neighborhood management a lot of this stuff we talked about to reiterate we have commenced the 24-7 Gateway Encampment Security. We are in ongoing conversations with Gateway neighbors, Gateway Encampment neighbors to ensure that that security is the most effective as it can be and we will be working with them moving forward. We have moved the footprint, the tent footprint of the encampment back. I did want to comment that the footprint yes is impacted by where the tent sites is, are. I think the footprint is more impacted by the day use quite frankly. We have a lot of people hanging around on the levee that it kind of pushes the activities out onto the levee pathway and so it's not just necessarily the tents that are impactful. The downtown streets team is cleaning Falker Street five to seven days a week. The mobile command unit has been placed in the Ross parking lot and that is intermittent and the syringe kiosk has been installed and it's quite heavily used. I think it was at capacity and needed to be somewhat on an emergency basis needed the syringes to be removed last week on the eighth. So with that bit of context I'm gonna turn it over to the fire chief to give you a little bit more information about the current conditions. Mayor, council, Jason Heide, fire chief for the city of Santa Cruz and I'm gonna talk a little bit about this. If you have questions, please let me know. One of the main directives that came out at the last council meeting was maximizing coordination efforts between the city and the county. And we've been having ongoing meetings within the city planning our efforts down at the camp as well as meeting with the county outside of the two by two meetings to discuss what we are doing to support the camp to mitigate any hazards that we find there. And finally what we came up with is a web EOC and what that is is an electronic platform that allows us to put our actions onto a web-based program so that we can both see it. So the county can see it, the city can see it, fire department, parks and rec, health services so that we can see when HP HP was there. We can see when the last time services were delivered significant incidents occurred down there. So it's a common platform that we can coordinate our efforts but more importantly, we can be aware of what the other agencies are doing. So I think that one accomplishment really hits home to what you asked of us as far as coordinating efforts and maximizing those. It provides situational awareness and real-time information. One portion of it that will be up and running soon is the shelter portion. And what that is is it has a list of shelters and more importantly what their current availability is and what their capacity is and what the different nuances is will they allow pets, will they allow couples? So that is something that someone in the field on a mobile device can look at and say we have shelter available for you right now. Do you want it? And so we'll be able to track that. And I think that's very important because the information flow has been challenging between all the non-governmental agencies, the faith-based agencies, the county and the city. This is a platform where we can put all that information in and we can access it in real time. Ongoing maintenance of the camp facilities as far as refuse the restrooms and sharps disposals, that's been a coordinated effort. Parks and Rec has taken the brunt of doing that. They've done a really good job. We need to do a better job as far as the amount of debris and some of the garbage that we have there because of the impacts to the community as far as health hazards. And I'll hit on that when I talk about the County Health Officer Assessment. Next this week we wanna do a site survey for the layout of the tents themselves for life safety and mainly for access. We've had a number of incidents. I talked about access for medical calls in that area. We also had a fire and we've had a few other incidents where access into that area is very challenging. And then the general layout doesn't allow for any safe spacing between the tents. And so we're going to engage with the council that's there and come up with what we think would be a better solution to how people are arranged down there for their own safety. In addition to that, we will be doing increased clean out. There's a lot of stuff there that's not necessarily just for living. It's not just for people who are sleeping in a tent. There's a lot of other stuff there and we wanna get that out. Calls for service continue. I know that we've had a decrease in the amount of law calls and medical calls in the last few weeks. And I don't have a reason for that but it is a continual source for fire law and medical. And the last, the County Health Officer, Dr. Leff, who's here, in our discussions with the county, we were concerned not only just with my concerns about fire and medical and law enforcement but we're also concerned about county public safety health. And that was, that's one of the reasons why we have a sharps disposal chaos down there to limit the spread of the disease. They did an assessment of the camp and despite our best intentions of raising up the tents off of the ground with pallets that created habitat for rats. And they are a vector for disease within a population that's living in close quarters. And despite our best efforts to provide restroom facilities and hand washing stations, it still has huge potential, not only for the occupants of the camp but spreading beyond the camp as far as a public safety hazard for disease spread. The County Health Officer, is he gonna speak tonight? Okay, I'll let him speak to that but that is a real concern not only for the inhabitants of the camp and the potential impact to them but the impact to the community that they're in because of the concentration of people and either overwhelming the sanitation that we've supplied or not using it correctly. So I'll let Dr. Leff speak more to that unless you have any other questions. Yep. Thank you. I'm Arnold Leff. I'm the County Health Officer. I also function as the city's health officer. And you all received the letter that I wrote a few days ago outlining a number of recommendations. Most of the recommendations are in process, the three major ones being to decrease the density of that camp as soon as it can be done since the significant density really is a public health danger. The road and control issue has just been spoken to and I know that your parks director, Mr. Elliott and our County's vector control are working together to find someone who can start to decrease the road and population at the camp. And then the other issue which is dear to my heart is the issue of syringes. We have a large percentage of the people at the camp are injecting drug users and require from 300 to 600 syringes a day. And as a result, one of my recommendations is to allow us to provide those syringes. Currently, we have some individuals who get syringes at our facilities and bring them down to the camp. I would hope that the council would continue to support that and actually encourage those syringes to be available. That's a huge potential public health issue. As you know, approximately a year and a half ago, we had a very serious hepatitis A outbreak. Now we've immunized thousands of people against hepatitis A and I'm hoping that some of the people at the camp have been immunized. We are also bringing our medical staff to the encampment to vaccinate folks for influenza and hepatitis A when they're interested in doing that. So I'm here mainly to let you know that we are concerned, obviously, the camp at some point needs to be closed in the interim. Any decrease in density would be helpful and the need to deal with the rodent problem and the syringe problem you're in process of doing. And we are in process of doing as well. So I am open to any questions you might have. Okay, Council Member Glover and then Council Member Crum. Thank you, Dr. Leff. Just wanted to clarify just so that there's a clear understanding within the community. You had estimated 300 or 600 syringes per day. That's for the entire camp. And that's an estimate. We are presuming that and based on a survey that our homeless persons health project did, we're assuming about 50% of that camp is doing injecting, is injecting drugs. We've distributed a huge amount of nalaxone, which is Narcan, which is an overdose prevention substance, but we're still concerned because if people are reusing syringes or using friends syringes, two major catastrophes happen, maybe three. One is you can spread hepatitis A, which when you spread hepatitis A, approximately 20% of it winds up in a community outside that nexus group. The second thing that happens is that you get wound infections. And those wound infections can be very, very serious because they can eventually go to the heart and cause what we call endocarditis or an infection of the heart. And Dominican is seeing, unfortunately, a recurrence or a resurgence, I should say, of valvular heart disease, secondary to injection drugs. And the third major catastrophe, which is related to that, is that it costs tens of millions of dollars. To deal with what dirty syringes bring to people that do not have clean syringes. Just the Amaline Clinic, the 282 patients at the Amaline Clinic cost the California, cost our alliance, our MediCal program, $52 million in 2018, 282 patients. And the top 10, we're half of that. So the reality is we need to deal with the syringe program. We need medically assisted treatment, which the county is doing our best to bump up and get to people so they can get medically assisted treatment on demand when they need it. But in the interim for the encampment, rodent control, decreased density, and allow for as many syringes that are needed. Thank you, there's one more question. In your professional experience and opinion, what is the most cost effective and proven way to help people transition off of intravenous drug use? Well, I think there's no one way. I think there's a number of way. Medically assisted treatment with Suboxone, methadone treatment, which is a longer term rehab, and then there's residential treatment for those that it's appropriate for. So, and there's a number of other things, but we can do it. Resources, we're hoping are gonna come in. Some resources are beginning to come, resources are beginning to come in to deal with that population group, but they're a very, very vulnerable population, not only with substance use, but also mental illness. Thank you, Dr. Leff. Questions, I think, was there a question here? And then- Yes, my question, thank you. You already asked. Oh yes, okay, Councilor McBrown. Sorry. Hi, Dr. Leff, thank you for being here.  Yeah, I remember. I was just wondering if you can tell us off the top of your head, how many bed spaces there are available for residential treatment in Santa Cruz County? If not, we can get it, but I just wanna get at the, related to the potential need and interest, do we have sufficient bed spaces in your assessment? Because a lot of people tell us, well, we just need treatment, not all of this other stuff, and it's a little harder, it's a little trickier than that. It's more complicated and resource intensive. So- Yeah, I don't know that I know the beds today. I do know that we, the county, have participated in a state and federal program to get MediCal to pay for residential drug treatment. And that program has just begun, really. It's sort of beginning to get going. Once that happens, you're going to see Janice is projecting to double the number of residential beds that they have for substance use treatment. But I could tell you we're going to need a significant amount more. Any other questions? Thank you for being here tonight, Dr. You're very welcome. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Love. Okay, so with that, we're now going to shift on to the next aspect of the presentation. Of course, we can come back for questions. So this is a brief presentation on the first deliverable that we returned back to the city council. And this was a revised shelter crisis declaration. And this was in your packet in total. So this is already, it was published on Thursday with the rest of the agenda report. So just as a reminder for the council and members of the audience who maybe didn't watch the last discussion, but under the California government code, local governments can declare shelter crises or a shelter crisis. If it finds that you can see this in red font, a significant number of persons are without the ability to obtain shelter resulting in a threat to their life and safety. And by declaring this, that local government sets in effect a few very helpful mechanisms. The first is it provides immunity from liability for ordinary negligence. So knowing that you have to move with due haste to try to resolve the issue, it does provide some protection. If not, everything goes perfectly according to plan. Of course, this does not protect against malfeasance or gross negligence, things like that. But it provides us a sense that we're trying to do our best under probably not optimal circumstances. The second and more significantly is that it allows suspension of state, local statutes, regulations or ordinances, prescribing standards of housing, health or safety when those existing standards would provide an impediment or some sort of barrier to whatever emergency sheltering plan you're trying to put forward. It also allows the local governing body to put forth alternate health and safety codes. So this is the value in doing this. We did some analysis of this last year the council has an adopted shelter crisis declaration on the books that was adopted by resolution in January of 2018. And in the discussion we had with you with your last meeting, there was talks that although it's in place and it has been helpful, in fact, that allowed us to access some of that $10 million in state funding, we felt it could be strengthened. We felt that in two prominent ways it could be a better instrument. And you can see those in the blue box on the right of the slide. First is that contrary to the existing shelter crisis declaration, the one before you tonight doesn't have any reference to any specific proposal or plan or navigation center or any sort of model. It just talks about it uses a language actually drawn from the government code about temporary bridge shelter, which could have a broad array of uses. So we feel like this is as much more flexibility and broader flexibility for whatever steps the city might find itself taking. And secondarily, the shelter crisis declaration, the revised one provides much more precise references to code and statutes that we're missing. And so rather than having any ambiguity, it just made sense just to strengthen that. So you've seen the document in your packet and we could discuss it further, but those were the two, it's an entirely different document, but those are the two major changes that were made that are before you this evening. And I can take questions now or we can take them as we move on. Okay, seeing none, okay. All right, so then now if I could invite up, I guess I'll introduce her first. Sabani Lipscomb is our director of economic development and she's taking on a fairly hefty portion of the presentation tonight. So the second substantive action that council directed was for staff to bring back a list of city-owned properties that could serve as a transitional encampment or safe parking program location. And so Bonnie went through a very substantive analysis. In your packet that was published on Thursday, there's a series of maps and we have access to those if you wish to see those. Bonnie has a slightly different take in her analysis. So she's gonna walk the city council through a series of slides through that analysis. Thanks Bonnie. Thank you right now. Good afternoon, mayor and members of council. So the map you see before you is very similar to the one that you have in the packet. We have a few refinements. I won't go into some of the details of those. They're basically from our assessor's parcel map and looking and refining some of the city ownership. Just some of those when parcels change, it takes a while before they're updated. And so this map is actually accurate for city ownership. And just to orient you to the overview in the upper left-hand corner, you have the property that we own outside the city. And that includes mostly property that is for watershed purposes. You also have the Loch Lomond Recreation Area up in this upper left-hand corner of your screen. And then some watershed areas and then we also have our Sky Park property. And just wanted to mention most of those other than in that area north of the city, we also own some property in Live Oak, again for water-related purposes. And then the majority of our remaining property is within the city limits. And that includes a couple of annex properties, one for water use and one for Dimeo Lane. So overall, we have 550 parcels in the broader Santa Cruz area when we actually start narrowing down the filter based on some initial feedback we had from Council. We have 287 parcels that are actually 5,000 square feet or above. And we did feel like that was a significant number. Just looking at, as we're looking at transitional encampment potential sites and for safe parking, looking specifically at sort of a minimum square foot size. So these sites would be sites that could accommodate potentially up to 50 people per site. And so this was some of the initial feedback we had from Council. And so this is the map that you see before you. If we expand that to, or increase that size to 10,000 square feet, which is slightly smaller than the 1220 River site where we previously had the shelter that site was, the usable area was around 12,500. I think the actual total parcel size was about 1,700 square feet, but some of that was sloped. And that's an important consideration because when you look at a lot of our property, many of the parcels, particularly when you get outside our core area in Santa Cruz have slopes or have other elements to them that make them not usable. So again, just looking at the overall map, what you see before you, the green area are our parks and open spaces, the purple area are our water facilities, the blue are our parking lots and sort of that golden orange are all of our other miscellaneous city properties. And I should say before I go further, I do wanna just thank and appreciate actually Rich Westfall in the city ITs department for creating all the base maps. And then for David McCormick, who is our asset property manager, who spent quite a bit of time really looking at the details and checking accuracy as far as parcel data to make sure that we have the correct information and help put this presentation together. So I just wanted to acknowledge them. Okay, so going in a little more closely now, just looking at the parcels within the city limits. And one of the reasons why we did that is we also largely control the permitting and the use within the city limits. And then also major reasons of just access being transportation and for a few other reasons which we'll go into in a little more detail. So looking within the main city boundaries, we have 323 parcels. We have roughly 215 parcels that are 5,000 square feet or larger. The only difference on this map is just drawing your attention to the upper part of the screen where you see the red dotted circle. That's actually a water-owned property on Ocean Street extension. And I have it circled and we looked at this one a little more closely. It's a fairly large site as it turns out quite a bit of it sloped. It is, what we thought had some real potential initially is we could look a little more closely because of the slope of the site. We think it may not be a site that we could consider for long-term, but it is worth a little more analysis. It is close similar to the 1220 River Street of the Concernist near a major water supply intake, so there is some concern for that. We would have to require carefully controlled conditions relative to sanitation, runoff, et cetera, and as I mentioned, the slope. So while we initially thought the site had some great potential, as we looked more closely at it, we realized that it didn't. So most of the other sites are, and we go to the next slide, I believe. Yeah, so we also removed and realized as we were looking at these sites, and where you see the exes are actually sites where we have critical facilities, and so those are water facilities, treatment plants, other areas that are very sensitive to use. Many of them already are gated in some way to restrict public access to them, and as we looked more closely, we actually went through all of them and looked more closely at them, and that's where we eliminated most of the water property sites. There are a couple remaining, and we'll show you those shortly, and that's why I went over the one that we didn't eliminate initially, but it did have some concerns over it. And then to just go a little deeper on that, as you can see, we have these sites. Some are, as I mentioned, are gated because they're sensitive to water and tank. We have pumps, tanks, storage facilities on site, and obviously our water treatment plant, which is very sensitive. So we have some health and safety concerns from providing access to these sites, some concerns about potential damage to property, just operational impacts. We restrict public access to these areas for a reason, and then also a lot of these areas, they're used. They're fully, as you can see, on the treatment plant area, there's just not room to have compatible use with those. And then we also, as just sort of the initial lens, also looked at many of the properties we own, and those are many of the properties that were in sort of that golden rod, that golden yellow area, are properties that have existing uses on them. So from our Loud and Nelson Civic facilities to some of our existing shelters, properties that we lease to other entities, to our wharf, which has active uses on it. So overall, some of the disqualifying concerns, we didn't eliminate parks from this initially, but we did look at compatible uses. We looked at leases that we have with private entities to run some of our public facilities. We looked at operational impacts, available space after the overall use were being used, again, existing lease terms, and some of the other impacts, both community and economic as well. And then finally, we also looked at the physical constraints. Many of these parcels, as you can see, have physical challenges to being able to use them, whether they're overall health and safety concerns. The terrain, as you can see in the bottom one, is just too sloped without actually doing serious grading.  Security and access being able to get access both for services, for social services, and also just for access to for security and our police and fire to be able to get in if there are a fire does restrict some of these sites. And then of course, in our city, we do have many of these sites that are prone to flooding, particularly when you look around the river corridor. So for example, with the tannery project, when we built that, we actually built it intentionally so that you had a garage on the ground floor and all the housing was after the first floor and we have had to evacuate that site in times of flooding. So we looked at that lens as well. So just to orient you where we are really looking for, we think the sites that have the most suitability or is in the area that you see outlined by that center blue square. And so we really focus on this area after taking a broad look at all of the property we own, both inside and outside the city, we realize that almost all of the sites that really have the parameters that we think we need to be able to have a transitional encampment and also a safe parking program are going to be in our larger sort of core area. And those reasons and the benefit of really locating in these core locations is accessibility, access to transit. And I'll show you a close up of our transit map closely. In a second, utility, access to utilities, refuse service against security and police services, nearby social services, habitat impacts. And I'll go into that in just another minute. And just also keeping our individuals and part of our community as part of our community rather than putting them outside our city limits. This one, just to show you, this is that same area from the previous side that's in the blue box, but it is overlaid with a GIS layer that shows all of our topography. And you see those in the brown sort of topo lines, as well as some of our sensitive habitat area. And then in the blue cross section on the bottom is also our coastal zone. So we also looked at it from where do these fall in some of these sensitive habitat areas and different areas and sloping terrain from the topo that we really need to be concerned about whether or not we can actually site anything there. So again, those most viable public properties within this sort of concentrated sort of core area are accessible, have access to public transit. We can bring in potable water, electricity, have minimal environmental impacts or sensitive habitat and are compatible also with surrounding, the surrounding environment and the land use. So this map that I'm not gonna repeat the sort of the points on the right, they're the same, but I did want to show as we take off the topo layers you can actually see in the, and I'm not sure if you can see it from this distance, but the brown areas are actually public metro transit sops, which the majority of those are really in the core of the city. And so one of the things that we really wanted to look at is make sure that we had within a half mile for most of these stops access to public transit. So finally, just getting to the city owned property within this core area, we did identify an initial six sites. And I will say that no site is ideal. There's physical constraints, environmental concerns, coastal concerns and almost every site there are some concerns. There are some benefits to the site and if you would like to go into those later, we're happy to go into some of those as well as the approximate size of each of those sites, but I'll name them just quickly. We do have one, I can actually go to the next slide. Yeah, thanks. One site, which is a water property site to, and again I wanna say this is an initial pass, looking at these sites. We need to get direction from you of what we've presented tonight of the parameters, if those make sense to you, if some of them don't make sense to you, if there's different things you want us to look at, we really would like that feedback. But specifically the sites from our first pass that we've looked at that we think are appropriate to do a deeper dive and go into more closely the suitability for these sites include one water property that's off of High Street, that's actually between the two churches off High, and this was a former reservoir site, the tanks have been removed. It could potentially be a good safe parking site, it's a site that's about 12,000 square feet, the usable area is about 8,000 square feet, it's worth a deeper look at that site. We have a site that's the Wharf Corp yard that is in the lower part of your screen, it's roughly two acres. Some challenges on this site is that we have just the title is clouded, we need to look at that and make sure we actually have site control with that site. We have a parking lot, we have two parking lots, one is located fairly close to the police station back behind Washington Street, it's north of Depot Park. Obviously there's some challenges with being anywhere near the park with that sort of concentrated use that we would need to look further at, but that is one site that again has about 8,700 square feet to look at. And then we have parking lot, and that's called parking lot 24 for those of you who are looking more closely at our parking map. And then we have parking lot 17, which is adjacent to the river, that is a linear site, it's actually about 12,000 square feet, it has some potential, that again has some challenges, it is located adjacent to the Kaiser Arena. So there's some compatibility uses, we also have a use agreement for handicapped spaces during game events, so we need to look at the time usage of that. And then finally the last two sites are park sites to look at more closely. In the past, looking at circling there up there is the San Lorenzo Park and there would be some analysis on I think the upper Benchlands area that Susie might want to go into more detail on that. And then the final site to look at is the site off of East Cliff, a portion of the lower side of Jesse Street Marsh. So those are the initial six sites, again none of them, all of them have constraints. They are the sites that the city owns that we think from the initial pass are most suitable, but that doesn't mean that we believe we should go forward with any of these sites at this time, but we are looking for some more feedback from you on those. Thank you. All right, thank you very much Bonnie. And so next for the next portion, and this is also the third deliverable for council tonight, I'm going to invite the Planning and Community Development Director Lee Butler to return to talk about the transitional encampment and safe parking ordinances to walk through some of the basics of how they might work and operate. Thank you Tina and good evening mayor and council members. So this, as Tina mentioned at the beginning is responsive to the council direction from the 26th of last month. And the ordinance is modeled, the draft ordinance that's before you is modeled primarily from an ordinance that was developed in Seattle that went through several versions to get to the place where it is currently in effect there in Seattle. And what this ordinance would do is it would facilitate the establishment of transitional encampments and safe parking areas. And those are really safe places for people experiencing homelessness to sleep, to store their belongings and to access for them to access facilities and services. It could take the form of individual tents. It could be cars or RVs. It could be larger group tents, for example, the sprung structures with the hard sides. It could be some variation through the emergency shelter crisis, the council could subsequently adopt different building health and safety standards. And so there could be alternatives that include things like sheds that can or tiny homes that can accommodate individuals. And so really the definition is somewhat flexible because what there is a demand for is to be determined. And so the ordinance could allow for any one of those or a combination of those on specific sites. And it's broken up into two separate and distinct portions. The first is long-term uses and those are associated with religious organizations. And the second is temporary uses on certain properties. And so I'll talk a little bit about each of those here. So the first is long-term uses associated with religious organizations. This is properties that are owned or controlled by a religious organization or if a religious organization is operating and it's the primary use on a property then regardless of the zoning district then a transitional encampment or safe parking place could be allowed on that site without any permits. It would be allowed by right. There are some approvals that would be required and I'll get to those in just a minute. And so I'll go through some of the specifications that the ordinance identifies. First is that parking on the site for the example for the religious use could be displaced. And the use itself, the encampment would not require any parking. We have in the draft ordinance a maximum of 50 occupants at any one location. And there are various fire safety, health and sanitation standards that would need to be met on the site. The provision of water the provision of restroom facilities and so forth. Cooking facilities would not be required. They may or may not be provided and there's some specifications if they are provided. Unaccompanied minors, those under 18 would not be allowed on the site unless they have a parent or guardian there. And then when I spoke to the approvals that are necessary there would be a required approval of an operations plan. So how that use is going to deal with potential complaints that they get from the surrounding community, how they're going to manage their restroom facilities, how they're going to refer people to services, what they're going to do if someone under 18 comes to the camp and requests to take up residence there. So a whole set of standard operating procedures. And then there is a provision that would allow for termination of the use by the city manager which would be appealed to the city council which is appealable to the city council I should say. And those criteria are included in the religious organization section. Moving on to the temporary uses on public or private properties. The distinction between the primary distinction between these are the first one that I'll call out is those affiliated with religious institutions that is a long-term use as it is structured in this draft ordinance. These temporary uses are just that temporary. They would be allowed for up to one year initially and they would have an extension for an additional year. And I should add that the ordinances, this is just kind of a summary of them. The ordinances contain additional information both the religious assembly ones as well as these public and private properties outside of religious assembly uses. So I'm happy to answer other questions on the details but this is kind of a broad overview. So temporary one-year term extension for an additional year, they would have to vacate that site for an entire year in order to establish it again on that premises if it went for a two-year timeframe. There are zoning districts that are specified in the draft ordinance and those are most of the commercial zoning districts as well as parks and public facilities. I will note a couple of things here. This does not include some of the beach commercial districts nor does it include the downtown districts. And so that's something for the council to consider. Of course, the council has flexibility to provide direction on any of the topics that we're talking about this evening. And then in addition to the zoning district criteria, there is a 25-foot setback from residential, a quarter-mile locational criteria from transit and a half-mile locational criteria from other encampments or safe parking areas. So both proximity to transit and separation from one another. The uses here cannot displace other primary uses while those uses are required. And so I mentioned in the religious assembly ordinance draft that a camp or safe parking area could locate in a parking lot, for example, and they wouldn't have an issue with the displacement of that parking. In this ordinance, it's set up such that it could not displace a required use. And so an example of that would be if there's a restaurant that's open from, let's say 10 in the morning until six in the evening, the camp couldn't operate in required parking areas for that restaurant during the time that that restaurant is open. It could operate outside of those times or if the restaurant has excess parking, then it could operate in those areas. And so that's a distinction between the two ordinances that I wanted to call out to your attention. There are, we were working very fast over the past couple of weeks trying to get this to you. And two things came to my attention after this ordinance was drafted and went out in your packet and that's under the considering adding, or excuse me, consider adding bullet here. And the first is that we included in the religious assembly section that no parking is required for the encampment itself. And we don't really have a use, a parking requirement in the zoning ordinance that aligns with this. And the council may want to consider adding that provision that no parking would be required for this use in and of itself. And second, we realized as we started doing some of the locational analysis that some of the public properties that are under consideration are not within those specified zoning districts. And so the council may want to consider adding a provision that says for public property that could be, these could be allowed through this process in any zoning district. So a couple of things for the council to consider that were not included as part of your packet. Apologies for that as we were trying to get everything together in a hurry. As far as the process goes, the ordinance requires an outreach meeting before the application is submitted. That would be noticed to individuals within 500 feet, both owners and occupants of the selected site. It requires that a community advisory committee be established to help address any issues that may arise from the operations of the camp and bring those back to the management so that those can be addressed. And then it has operational standards built in. The operational standards and the operational plan must be approved by the city manager. So there are a set of standards that would have to be adhered to that the city manager would develop. And then each location would have to develop a plan that shows adherence to that. Similar to the religious assembly, there would be a maximum of 50 occupants, again, no accompanied minors. And the process here would be an administrative use permit. There is no hearing associated with an administrative use permit. It can be approved administratively. However, those are appealable to the planning commission and city council. So as this ordinance is written, that's the process that it would go through. Two other things that I would add here. One, we do have a map of the specified zoning districts here. If the council is interested in that, we can pull that up and show you the distribution of those. Again, with them being commercial areas, they are distributed throughout much of the community, but not the entirety of the community. And certainly the council has the flexibility to change which districts these could be allowed in. And then finally, in terms of the process for you all to consider this evening, you ask that we bring it back as expeditiously as possible a couple of weeks ago. And that's why we're here tonight. We have two options that you could follow. One would be the referral of this ordinance to the planning commission. Changes to the zoning ordinance require that the planning commission provides a recommendation to the council and then it would come back to the council, so that would be the council's first reading. And then second, the council has the opportunity to pursue an urgency ordinance. That would require five votes of the council, but that could allow for the ordinance to take effect immediately. And then we could come back with the regular process of going through the planning commission and the city council. So thank you. Can you speak to the thing that you just passed? I will, yeah. I'll do it, yeah. So yeah, thank you, Leigh on that. You're welcome, thank you. Okay, and so to Leigh's final point about, we have a question over here. Good question, Leigh, how much is it to appeal to appeal the use termination criteria and the administrative use permit? So it's roughly $600 is an appeal cost for applications is the current cost. So that is the same price it would be for going to planning commission, also appealable to city council. The zoning administrator does have the ability, according to the code, to refer items directly to the planning commission. And so there is that opportunity that these such requests to be sent to the planning commission first. Certainly there is also an opportunity should the council choose to do so, to build in as part of the code provisions here. If the council wanted to hear all of these directly, they could say that they could directly, the ordinance be drafted such that these permits do not go through the standard temporary, temporary administrative use permit process that would go to the zoning administrator and the planning commission council. You could say, bring these directly to the council and we could build those provisions into the code such that it aligns with the other locations where the process would otherwise be called for. And then I just have a quick question. So for clarification, this is the sort of the overlay of staff and I appreciate you within the short timeframe informing informed by the Seattle ordinance but to the original proposal by council member Glover, Crone and Brown, is that where we're at? So it's the sort of the Seattle kind of reconciliation there. Okay. That's correct. And as I mentioned, there are some differences between those, the zoning districts, for example, but the council, it's their purview to make changes as they see fit. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay, I just have a question. Question? Council member Meyers and then council member Meyers. Just one quick question. We were just handed out. It's titled an interim urgency, emergency ordinance. I'm just curious in the staff report, it refers to it as an interim urgency ordinance. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. We just use a different word. Thank you. And I can talk through that or I can wait until there's questions. Well, council member Matthews and then council member Brown. I had just one question on the religious organizations. It says allowed by right, no permitting. That seems like a stretch to me personally. And then it says the operations plan must be approved. Use termination criteria. How do you terminate something that you don't have a permit for? So the way the ordinance is set up is that there are operational standards that would need to be approved. And if you want to go back, let's see one slide. So the operations plan must be approved. So that is essentially the only approval. It is administrative approval. If it's the council's will, we could certainly set up a process for that. And again, I believe this is something that was similar to what Seattle had developed. And it's also sort of stemming from, we have provisions in our current code and our current camping ordinance to allow for a minimal number of RVs to be located on a church facility. And so this would expand that significantly. And should the council choose to do so, you could require, for example, the same use permit process, administrative use permit. It wouldn't be a temporary use permit. It would be just a straight up administrative use permit because it could be ongoing. And again, the council could say if it's their desire that they would want that referred directly to the council and we could draft the code to respond to that. I'll just say the current allowance for church parking is what three cars? I think it's three vehicles. And up to 50 occupants is a big leap. Very significant difference. And also people in all the best intentions can propose operations plans and they can get approved and they can just like not pan out the way people hoped. And so I mean, my feeling is there has to be some kind of permitting and a little more structure to that. And we'll have a chance to discuss that. So at this point, if there's any other questions for Lee and council member Brown and then I'll let, we'll move on to the conclusion of the presentation. So I'm trying to get a better understanding of when we talk about zoning districts for public property, where those are, what those are. I mean, I have a kind of an abstract sense of that but you did mention that it's possible to look at a map. Is that, can that happen now pretty easily? Sure, we can do that. Let me say two things. It's on the server under. While they're working on that, I will say that the, one of the things that we recognized after drafting this was with it applying to both public and private property and starting to look at some of the properties that were under consideration. Some of the public properties have, for example, residential designations and those aren't on that list. They have the Warfjord down south of Depot Park that was pointed out by Bonnie. That actually has multiple zoning district designations including a like beach tourist residential commercial designation that isn't on that list. And yes. Is this the one? Specifically identified, the latest one, that'll do it. Yeah, so this, thank you. This is the, just the zoning districts that were identified and you can see, they generally mirror our commercial areas as well as the parks and public facilities. Again, the council can expand that out. And certainly we would want the council to strongly consider whether or not for public properties, it would be any designation. We of course wouldn't want the council to say, this is the, we found the perfect public property and now we need to go back and amend the ordinance and wait on that. So that may be something the council would want to consider is not having zoning requirements on the public properties and then for private properties that's up to your discretion as well. Any other questions? Okay, just a quick one. I am guessing that by private properties you would include property owned by non-profit organizations. That's correct. There is not a distinction between non-profit or just a business use or a vacant site. All those are potential locations and as structured it would be confined by the zoning designations. Okay, thank you very much, Lee, for walking through it. Quite complex and as you heard, I mean, we really had to move very quickly and I just really an excellent work product, especially considering this is less than a handful of work days pulling this together. And so I did just want to clarify a couple of procedural pathways that council may take related to this. Lee did talk about this, but you have the actual ordinance, a regular ordinance that was part of your agenda packet. What we sent around right now was a version adapted that could serve as an in-term emergency or urgency ordinance and that's when Lee said that if council wished to adopt that two night, that could happen with a vote of five members of the council. You could do that or you could do the other one or just the other one. So as Lee said, because this would amend Title 24, this requires a hearing at the Planning Commission. So all council could do tonight with a regular ordinance would be to refer that to the Planning Commission, which would then agendize it, duly take it up, have it public hearing and then return it to you with recommendations for potentially a first reading. And then as you know with ordinances, you have a first reading and typically two weeks later, a second reading unless you modify it substantially. And then if you would finally adopt it, it's effective 30 days later. So it does build in different timelines. So that's why pursuant to the conversation at the last meeting talking about how quickly could this move forward and could a declaration of an emergency, expedite things, we presented these dual pathways. So you could consider that. Okay, and now we are moving on to the next portion of the staff presentation tonight. And here you will hear very in-depth from Suzy O'Hara, again our assistant to the city manager, talking about policy and process around transitional encampments. All right, well thank you. So obviously a ton of information in front of you and then also really a sense with our current situation in our community, we're at a crisis moment here with regard to homelessness. We're trying to really balance the sense of urgency around what to do with the gateway encampment, how to expend the substantial amount of money that's coming from the state in the most effective way. How do we balance that sense of urgency with a process for which we can get to community acceptance and buy in around solutions. And so those questions really came up in my mind since the last meeting and how I went about kind of educating myself as to process and what other cities have done that have seen success with transitional encampments has lead me to presenting these slides here this evening. So just to reiterate, conditions at the gateway encampment require immediate action. There's an urgent need to close the camp. We heard from our fire chief as well as our public health officer around the conditions out there. That is reiterated with residents at the encampment as well. There's a lot of concerns that I've heard from camp residents as to those conditions and really fearful about what that means in terms of their health and safety as well. However, long-term success around homeless solutions requires data-driven study of feasible options, community engagement and acceptance and a socially equitable approach. And I'm gonna be talking about that process. Good governance takes time to understand our needs, evaluate options and build community acceptance. And I really are approached to implementing the city County Joint Action Plan and bringing these immediate short-term alternatives and also thinking of long-term alternative shelter modeling and homelessness programs in general really must balance that sense of urgency and good governance. And with that, as I mentioned at the beginning of this slide, I really did dig deeper into what other cities have done to try to do both of those things, balance urgency and good governance. So in my analysis, since the last time we met, we've actually, I've done a lot of work and I wanted to share with you kind of what I've learned. And those process steps included meeting with interested in community members, including the gateway encampment residents, which I alluded to earlier in the presentation, to discuss needs and understanding how those needs match up with our alternative shelter model ideas that are coming to council and before you right now. Learn more, have a deeper understanding of transitional encampments with regard to siding and operational standards and then go even deeper. So I did mention at the last meeting that I met with the city of Portland, really did wanna reach out firsthand to the city of Eugene and I had an opportunity to do that last week and take a deeper dive into the process for which Seattle has gone about really thinking about alternative shelter models in innovative ways, but also in a very practiced and regimented fashion as well. So getting to those process steps, meeting the first one, meeting with interested community members, including the gateway encampment residents. So on March 8th, I and Megan Bunch, who's come on to help with all work with regard to the homeless situation, held this engagement meeting with a camp council. Five people from different backgrounds, we met for about an hour last week, really did give me a strong sense of understanding of a few things. One, there's consistent opinion that the conditions at the camp have become pretty untenable from the perspective of a lot of people coming in. So if you think about kind of the populations in different ways, the council that we met with really did identify as a community, as a family, of really wanting to have structure and accountability around the camp and really were endeavoring to try to self manage in some way, but have been completely overwhelmed by the number of people that have come in and the conditions that are present. A lot of illicit activity and drug use and what I heard from them was that they don't find that acceptable either and want to have an opportunity to help the city and the county think about different models that would be most effective for the community that they've built there. So in addition to that, Megan and I met with Curtis who's here tonight last week to talk about some of his aspirations for what he would like to bring to our discussions around alternative shelter models and what I took from that conversation is there's a lot of interest in behalf of our community to help build these programs together. I think there's an investment on behalf of this core group of folks that I met with at the camp and other people that are invested in successful outcomes and really thinking about community building from the perspective of our shared space and shared values and thinking about how best to build community in that way. So that was a really important conversation as well. I will note, based on those conversations, there's a lot of interest in supportive and structured, in a supportive instructor, sorry, structured transitional encampment, tongue twister, but what I heard from this camp council is that there's a strong interest in accountability and they want to have that also be part of the program. And so we will continue to conduct these engagement meetings and what I did learn last week was a strong interest in collaborating and partnering to conduct this outreach and engage with more folks in the encampment as well, which has been a struggle for Megan and I to think about when we roll through there, getting people to come out and talk to us is somewhat challenging. And so really being able to rely on the community there to help us engage with folks is gonna be very important. So second on the list, learn more about transitional encampments and this is really from the perspective of citing and operational standards and then also what other communities have done to build their programs and really learn through that process of community engagement and buy-in as they've developed like for instance, the city of Seattle as they develop these ordinances that are now in place. So on March 1st and 6th and 11th, I met with Brent Adams who's here tonight who has been a strong proponent of sanctuary camps and now transitional encampments to really understand program model, citing performance metrics. And I've invited him tonight to talk about those things. And so I'm gonna yield the microphone to Mr. Adams who's here up in the front. And he'll take a few minutes to go through his slides and really trying to orient the council to what really we're talking about as it relates to transitional encampments. Mayor, council, thank you, Vice Mayor. Some of you who've been following along might realize how landmark this is. I wanna thank Drew Glover and the Sinies, Chris Cron and Susie Brown, especially Susie for really doing this deep dive and Lee, great work on this. Also, very proud of this city government for taking this on. So I'm not gonna give an anecdote but I've been traveling to the transitional encampments for many years since 2012. And the reason I become an inherent of them is because I watched them as sort of, maybe renegade looking encampments on church properties. And I had kept going year after year to watch them built up to the point where they're actually part of the city structure of Seattle and Eugene now. And you'll see them year after year getting bigger to the point where they had to move around every three months. And now finally they can stay on city property year round. So just watching every year the ordinance changes and watch the beneficial nature to the point where now those 10 camps are beginning to become tiny house villages. And it's just, I've been completely committed watching people grow and then watching the data as people move out of these programs. So of course, a lot of what I'm doing here is a little bit redundant but it's actually from kind of what I see the nonprofits up there doing. This is not necessarily all part of the ordinance or what you're deciding on but it's kind of what we see, what we brought together as the sanctuary camp model. What are the most successful programs up there and how are those programs designed from the operator standpoint? So as I see it, transitional encampment is the city or county permitted nonprofit operated community of soft-shelled or rigid structures on private or public land with food preparation and meeting spaces and an in-camp government structure and community outreach program. Now the hallmarks and these are a little mind blowing for me and which is why I'm so committed to them. People transition to better circumstances at a higher rate out of these transitional encampments and I'm happy to show data a little bit later. Most cost efficient sheltering model and I really wanna help you to ask yourself about the bang for the buck. What are we paying for when we, even when programs are putting people on the pathway to housing, what is the cost breakdown per person, especially when you take a program wide and how many people actually did get into housing. So we should really be that critical now. No increase in crime wherever they're located. That's really controversial but the way that happens is it creates community within the population as well as it strengthens the larger community and that's really one of the ways that crime is not increased and actually decreases. Also promotes interpersonal healing for all the residents inside. So there are some quotes from the permanent encampment and valuation report from the city of Seattle, dated June 28th of 2017. Here's a quote, Seattle police department has been collecting data and information about the levels of crime that occur around the permanent encampments. This data shows that there is no significant increase in crime and that is really, that's ridiculously important to put a pin in. So the agreements, again, this is for the people who are in the encampment, the residents, we call them rules. One of the most common is that these camps have allowed the residents with the encampment to engage in volunteer service rather than hiring out or paying, having paid staff for all of the elements. Every resident would do 10 hours of service per week within the program. Think downtown streets team only maybe cheaper with an encampment model.  And so that actually communicates to the neighborhood that these people are taking care of the neighborhood. That's how, and also people staff the front gate, keep things clean in the kitchen and really keep the place tidy and well-operating. Of course, no drug alcohol use, no weapons, no violence, no theft. Those are, that can be a zero, those are often no zero tolerance elements, no aggressive behavior, all the way down to the end. And people must participate in a case management program. Here a little quote here, residents hold each other accountable for individual actions. A grievance procedure is used to resolve conflicts. Some suggested resident criteria, and this is really important to my mind, a three tier admittance for access to this. For instance, some of these encampments that we've seen locally, people move from out of the area when they hear it or they see it on the news. It should always be stated that for a transitional encampment, it's for the people who are here if we're gonna engage in this sort of thing, we're not trying to put the welcome mat for people to come from out of the area. In fact, that's one of the reasons that some of these encampments have failed in years past. For instance, in Placerville because it went out on the news that there's this camp. So you really wanna take care of the population who are local here. Of one month trial period, here we have one month, six months, three months. By that three month, you're really trying to help people transition into a better space. If requested, residents must comply with the background check or your analysis. That's not normally a factor, but if you're having problems with drug alcohol within the encamp, that's a really strong conversation to have. Basic infrastructure, a lot of these things are in the thing before you, a camp management plan. I'll scale all the way down to tents on platforms with rain shedding. Now, this is the most basic shelter concept. Of course, it's our camping tent, but that's not really good enough over time. You need it up on a platform with something that's gonna shed water away from it. So water and sun really are never affecting it. You could have a much longer life. Food preparation, that's really important. In fact, in all communities, in all our houses, our homes are located around the hearth. People sharing food with one another. That's one of the most healing community things that can happen. We wanna make sure that people are able to share food, that if we have ABT cards, or people wanna bring food into the space, that's not off to the corner, that's right fixed in the middle. Of course, meeting areas, because there's one of the requirements for most of these transit encampments up north are regular in-camp meetings. Also front desk, that's critical. People shouldn't be able to just kinda waltz in. There's a 24-hour gate there with usually a volunteer. They're 24 hours a day to make sure that people can't just come in or somebody with a camera. During business hours, people can come in with a guide and take a tour. Next slide. So the operator, that's in this case a nonprofit or a church in-camp governance. So the nonprofit or faith community, whoever's going to apply for this permit would, in a transitional encampment, affirms the agreements that we just listed ahead of earlier. Affirm the agreement enforcement. How do you enforce rules? Do you, and a lot of that is, some of those are really easy. For instance, if you have like a handle of vodka or a syringe, that's gonna flag and the nonprofit's gonna have to have a meeting with this person. But if it's violence or theft or something like that, that's a zero tolerance moment. They have tasks to be addressed immediately. The nonprofit can work with the camp residents in this manner. Also all the way down provides onsite manager, including that could be a camp resident, but always there's always management happening 24 hours a day. There's always a responsible person on duty. It's never just kind of opened to the whims of people. Encampment community meetings. Now this is really important where people have some say in their community. When you hear a lot of these transitional comments are kind of like it's self-managed. They're not really self-managed to the point where they can just move it down the street or these in-camp meetings are usually consensus-based. For instance, in most community houses, we do have weekly meetings, monthly meetings. This is really to talk about social issues or how to deal with problems within the camp and also allows them to have a representation so they can bring it to some of the, this community advisor community or the city or how to interact with the nonprofit. The Casework program, this is really key in actually the success hallmarks is that people are there, but how do you benefit them? How do they move from one place to another when they're moving to a better space when they exit the encampment? So target goals and this could, this would actually be a professional staff, some of these encampments use college interns to help manage this, but we're focusing on housing, sobriety, education, employment opportunities and mental and physical health, but it really gets people working towards attainable goals. That's really important. Also improving the circumstances when it's time for them to move out of the encampment. Operator responsibilities is the nonprofit responsibilities. Lee mentioned community outreach meetings and community advisory committee. Before you site locate any of this into a neighbor, you just don't want to plunk this down on a city property without meeting with the neighborhood first. So I think that's actually in the plan that you're looking at, but it's really important to bring the community in, to have them and also see clearly what's being proposed, but there would also be individuals from the neighborhood around who are from stakeholder groups in the advisory community. So you have, it's like a bicameral government governance that there are meetings within the camp, meetings outside of the camp and sometimes you get together and have a larger meeting. All the way down data collection. This is really important in fact to show efficacy and this is one of the reasons I'm most committed to this because we're watching people move out of homelessness through these. So you have entrance data coming in, exit data and then data about case management. Here's another quote. The governance management model creates shared power and decision making structure where residents participate in the adoption and enforcement of policy, assist with security and property maintenance and share the experience and expertise with their peers. There's a mentoring that can go on. Here's some data. This is from, you'll see to the right there source reports from the Eugene city manager's office, 2017. Also from a city of Washington, they have a permitted campment evaluation that came out in 2017. This is about data that they produced in 2016. I think this is really critical. In fact, when we look at that, so you'll see the blue and the red there, Seattle and Eugene. So those are different sets of data. Eugene only has the exit data but Seattle has some intake data there. I think it's really, really critical to note that people are, they're coming in from the street or from the shelter. Those are the large numbers there under Seattle intake and they're exiting in the next column largely to permanent housing and transitional housing. They're not going back into a shelter or largely back onto the street. So highly beneficial here. Also Eugene, look, they're exiting largely into permanent housing. Also down to the right here. So I'm talking about bang for the buck for a program like this. It says cost per person exited from the program. And this is, these are yearly totals. So it only costs 2,300 essentially per person. And the city of Seattle, it was paying about 85% of those budgets. And then the next one is the cost per person exiting to permanent, permanent, permanent supported housing, permanent housing. So the number of people that year who exited to housing divided by the cost of the program. And I think that's a really good bang for the buck. When you think about the cost of programs and how many people are actually moving into housing. We talk about permanent supported housing, housing first quite a bit that programs want to put people on the pathway to housing. Here's a real good example of a program that is doing that and that the cost is in line. And it's a little, you know, with something that's a little more sane. Last slide. So it's really important to, if we're going to do this, this is a novel approach, of course. It's a little controversial, but I've seen dozens of these up in the Northwest. So I'm wondering how can we have something so effervescent and perfect in Santa Cruz? One way is through community acceptance. Of course, it's through these resident and neighborhood outreach meetings. Of course, I direct the storage program operated by the warming center. And we had some neighborhood meetings, some meetings with the neighborhood tenants, lots of meetings with the landlord prior to citing that. And that's really why we've been so successful. So in a camp like this, you really want to have the neighborhood engaged. Also the community advisory community that we mentioned earlier, that the neighborhood stakeholders become a little bit responsible for the success also. Hallmarks, let's revisit those. People transition to better circumstances at a higher rate. We've seen that now. It's most cost-effective sheltering model, especially when you're talking about large shelters. No increase in crime wherever they're located. It creates community within as it strengthens the larger community and promotes interpersonal healing. So what we're proposing is a pilot camp to start with. Of course, there's a longer track that's being proposed, a permitted, how to get something that's a permitted and a certified transitional encampment. But what about first a pilot camp project to show the beneficial nature that can produce data right from the beginning? Now Seattle and Eugene had some timelines of acceptance. They started small. They could only be in a space for nine months. And finally, they can be there all year round. They could only be in certain areas of the city. Now they can be in any area of the city. So they really built from something small. But do you want to do that in Santa Cruz also? Start with the pilot project. So this is a very innovative approach. So let's be cautious and measured and start with some community input. Have some of these community meetings. And thanks for the time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Brad. I really appreciate it. So as you can imagine in these conversations I had with Brent over the last couple of weeks, really thought provoking around process and how did these communities that have made a significant investment into really innovating around alternative shelter models. How long did that take? How did they engage with their community? And then how did they end up with these ordinances that we're reflecting on today? So kind of the second and third step of this process and to include more voices in the conversation was to dig in deeper with transitional encampments with regard to the city of Seattle and King County and then also having a conversation with a council member in Eugene, which I had a couple, I guess, two Fridays ago. Brent mentioned the King County evaluation. I did go deeper into that and really looked at what were their recommendations as to process? And so mind you, it's been 10 years that the city of Seattle has been going through this process with I think three or four iterations of their ordinance to get to a place that works in their community from the perspective of really seeing effective programs that the community can touch, feel, learn and listen and have data to support their success. And once those programs were up and running, really being able to model those programs in other parts of the community. So what I gleaned from that research was, as Brent is mentioning, pilot first, be very small scale at the beginning and really the city of Seattle leaned heavily on their faith-based community. They had a number of faith-based organizations that were interested in helping with that. Having those proponents, having people that were really spearheading that process made a big difference for them in terms of siting and operational capacity. They also built community understanding and acceptance before making any sweeping policy changes. So had community task force really focused on how do we as a community really engage the entire network of stakeholders around solutions. Those processes took years, years, figuring out how best to move forward with transitional encampments and other alternative shelter models. And then really develop clear and measurable performance metrics for clients and neighborhood compatibility. So if you think about those four bullet points, the top two really focused on the homeless individuals that are at the camp thinking of how best to serve them so they can by virtue of what the camp is supposed to do transition out of the camp into a better living situation. And then also looking at from a public safety kind of neighborhood compatibility perspective, how do, is there positive encampment neighborhood interactions and then really focused on crime and safety. And then lastly, I just wanted to mention I did have a conversation with a council member in the city of Eugene. What I did not know when I reached out to him is that he was the council member who's really spearheaded many of these efforts with the city of Eugene. Same exact information as King County, city of Seattle, pilot first, small scale, a quote that he gave me which I thought was really interesting that I wanted to share with you is to go slow to go fast, really think about developing a program for which you can educate yourself on how that program might fit and then once you have some success, build from there. So in addition to that, in thinking about, okay, so I've come to the conclusion that it makes a lot of sense to pilot and this is based on my engagement with the gateway encampment and also in discussions with Brent, how do we balance this kind of potentially, urgently moving forward with a program that really meets the needs that the council is trying to meet in terms of innovating and moving forward swiftly in a time of crisis with how do we actually build a sustainable program that really gets to larger questions in our community about compatibility? And I did find a study that was conducted for the city of Oakland. They were back in 2014, 2015 dealing with significant issues around unsanctioned encampments and did contract with the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley to develop a study for which they were looking at alternatives to unsanctioned encampments. Highly recommend you read this study. It is exactly what we're experiencing right now and I really drew upon it to think about process for which we can get to community acceptance and those process steps include conducting a needs assessment. So this is across your house and unhoused populations, evaluate policy alternatives based on specific criteria, thinking effectiveness, social equity and implementation feasibility and then developing short to long-term solutions to improve the status quo and I'm gonna go through those. So that first step, conduct a needs assessment. So we really, I mean I have seen through my unique experience out at the encampment and I know many have those same experiences. We need to understand our population. The gateway encampment is one specific population. It does serve as generally speaking what we see across our community. We need to understand the basic needs of the individuals we're trying to serve better. So the number of unsheltered homeless population. We also need to understand what our current sheltering portfolio looks like and how it fits into the continuum of care. We wanna quantify the resources that we as a city currently expend on managing unsanctioned campments in our street homeless population. Getting deeper into understanding the needs of the unsheltered population according to many of these things here from security to utilities to social services, privacy, stability. When you have an opportunity to quantify and actually discuss those issues you can get a better understanding of what people's needs are and how best to serve them. And then also understanding the needs of our house community as well. That's equally important in terms of the neighbors and businesses and folks that are living within our community that are impacted by its unsanctioned encampments specifically. We wanna evaluate policy alternatives based on specific criteria and that is really the degree to which the policy in question addresses the immediate problems associated with these encampments comprehensively across both in short and long-term solutions. You need to look at how you're preempting complaints from your house residents, the use of city staff time. You also need to look that whether you're not just simply offloading this burden onto a different jurisdiction. Are you meeting public health standards for outdoor spaces? Are you meeting health and safety needs for and long-term housing needs for the marginalized residents that you're focused on? Equity. So this in terms of social equity is really looking at measuring the differential consequences of a policy on different stakeholders or constituents. In other words, is this intervention likely to have a disproportionate impact either positive or negative in any particular group in Santa Cruz? And you need to focus on everybody who's impacted. The unsheltered population, your house residents, your business and property owners in Santa Cruz and city staff. And I pulled this quote out of the report because I think it's a really important way to think about it. So the issue of homeless encampments inherently encompasses a trade-off between some individuals right to live where they choose here in Santa Cruz with others' rights to be free of nuisance to the extent that the cost of such freedoms does not hurt the others. And we get down to the third, the implementation feasibility and that's the city's capacity to implement each alternative according to its original design. And it's really important to think about this within the context of, yes, we have significant influx of state funding. Yes, we're particularly in a crisis right now with this gateway encampment, but are the programs that we're considering actually gonna be feasible for the long-term? And you wanna think about kind of how the systems work together, that relative measure of fiscal feasibility. What is our long-term fiscal strategy for funding these programs likely buy in from the homeless individuals that you're focused on and then these group dynamics between encampment groups and service providers and city staff, those connections need to be maintained throughout this entire process. Last process step, develop short to medium and long-term solutions. Generally speaking, your short-term, better coordination. Let's not duplicate efforts. Let's make sure that all of the partners that are involved are working together and as Chief Hayduth demonstrated, I think we're moving towards that right now with the web EOC model and our ongoing conversations on the two-by-two, increase public awareness and build a pilot, medium-term, develop new stakeholder relationships and identify champions. This is a regional statewide nationwide crisis and the city is not going to solve these issues on our own. We must engage with partnership. We must lean on other jurisdictions and other nonprofit and faith-based organizations to help us with this. And so in thinking about long-term strategies, it's really important to think about that. And then also long-term, consider new citywide policies to lower barriers for innovation and sustainable approaches. Long-term process for which, yes, let's tackle thinking about ordinances and changes to our mini-codes to think about how to lower those barriers for innovation. But that's really long-term after we think about these short and medium-term and how we're trying to be really pragmatic about building some shared understanding and knowledge, building off success and engaging with our community partners. I think that's it. I'm gonna turn over to Tina. We're almost done. So I just wanna have a few key takeaways before I move on to the staff recommendations. And really thinking Susie for that research, both in person at the encampment, you heard over multiple days, multiple stakeholders, talking to folks in other communities, exhaustive research, reading things. I mean, she has really put a lot on the line to deliver this information. So I do wanna recognize her. But through this, I received an education around what it takes to realize success in this area because we have two things facing Santa Cruz. One, we have this intractable long-term problem of solving homelessness, which no one has done anywhere in America yet. And you spoke to this. And then we also have this urgency of dealing with the encampment. And I think to resolve both at one blow or one set of policies is likely not the best solution for the city of Santa Cruz, not in the inclusive way, not thinking about all the partnerships, all the people that wanna have a voice in this conversation either. So reflecting on that, I was really struck by this sense of we need a balanced approach, highlighting ideas and going, what is it, go slow to go fast? That really struck me as well. And so these are, I think, really good lessons we can take away from this. The socially equitable approach of recognizing that everyone has a role in our community and everyone should be at the table, not just thinking about one group or another. And then finally, just a note about process and slowing down. We have really have been hurtling very quickly over the past three council meetings to the exclusion of a lot of other things. And knowing that things are a priority, also it does come into sacrifice for really in depth research. We've done not the community outreach, not withstanding the excellent work of the encampment. It was some already engaged people, but we haven't even had any opportunity to talk with others or have a broader community conversation. And that's worrying when we're talking about major changes for our community. And so we would ask for that consideration as the city moves forward. Let's pace out the work. Let's focus on actionable solutions, things that we can tackle and take things in a sequence. And we're very motivated or very dedicated to this work, as you can see up here. And then other staff that are watching it and participated. And so we want to honor this work and we want to do it well. We don't want to crash and burn. So those are some just parting thoughts I want to say with thanks again to Susie. And so then marching through some staff recommendations. So you have recommendations that appeared on the report that was published on Thursday. And we have a refinement on that we'd like to suggest. The first being that knowing the urgency of the health and safety, the crisis, the inconceivable conditions down at the encampment. We do recommend trying to push toward another deadline for closure. And that being to coincide with April 17th, which is when 1220 River Street is slated to open. And then knowing that to hit that target something else has to happen. We've talked before that we need to find alternatives for the individuals who are sleeping at the encampment. And notwithstanding 1220 River opening very aggressively it having capacity of 60, we still think we need around 40. And so we have to do something to meet that need. And looking and you heard through the extensive research and other presentations that we think there's a couple of avenues council could think about there. One being a small scale pilot program of either a transitional encampment or a safe sleeping in storage site, which is basically a very basic desk to dawn program that Suzie spoke about in your last council meeting, which is just literally a place you can come, be safe at night and we can store your possessions for you during the day. But we have to create some additional capacity in within the system with inner city in order for us to be able to successfully close the encampment. Also the third bullet here, we presented at the last meeting the transitional encampment project charter. A lot of thought went into that, a lot of process. And I feel like the values in there in the process was solidified with this additional work you've done looking at Eugene and Seattle and that report out of UC Berkeley and the Goldman School of Public Policy. So we think that we should, that should be brought forward as maybe a good pathway in a model and also consider including safe parking. And then the fourth bullet, something that another thing that emerged in our research was that some communities have done shelter feasibility evaluations to really look at what are the needs of our community. So we have a better way to project what we think we will need because right now we can look at the hard numbers. Well, the 2017 point in time count said there were 1,204 people homeless in the city of Santa Cruz. The survey data yielded that about 78, 80% of those were unsheltered, therefore about 963 people are unsheltered. But that hard number doesn't tell the full story. Not only is it not really achievable, but also it doesn't tell the whole story of where the need is and what that might look like. So something we found that's very interesting is pursuing the idea of a shelter feasibility evaluation. And then also an unsanctioned encampment management plan. And I will note this was a feature of the city county joint action plan saying that we need to be able to think in the future and how are we gonna resolve the next encampment that comes up. So we don't have another gateway encampment situation where we find ourselves in this very, very difficult situation and people living in very difficult conditions. So we think that this work should continue. And then I'll find, or two more, immediately support the association of faith communities safe parking program by identifying a city parking lot to be included in the satellite program. So they've asked us for this. Currently they have a rotation of, I forget how many churches around the county. Do you recall? So it's the new program. So they have an indoor shelter satellite program that's I think about a dozen churches. The safe parking program I think is up to 15 churches and they have asked both the city and the county to support that satellite program with one parking lot each. For how many vehicles? The program is anywhere between two and five vehicles depending on the space. And then finally adopting the revised shelter crisis declaration. So to square this full slide of recommendations with what I just said about slowing down to go fast and being thoughtful and deliberate, we think our efforts are best focused on trying to resolve the 40 additional beds we need. And so we'd ask for that space and in your direction on how to best go about that. So with that, I think we will conclude our staff presentation with great thanks to Susie and to all the other speakers. And thank you, Brian, as well. Thank you. Thank you so much for your comprehensive presentation. And our city attorney, Tony Condati for drafting all of the ordinances with my apologies. Thank you all for your work on this. We very much so acknowledge it was short time and turn around and appreciate your comprehensive report and work. At this time, I had originally asked that council member Glover hold his presentation but I'm wondering if we could do that after public comment first originally proposed. Knowing that you'd still be able to get that in. Yeah, it's mainly, I mean, the purpose of it is to educate the community before public comment because of how we had it structured from your email. So this way it'll provide, it's a short presentation and give us some information and then we can go from there because I'm sure we all have a lot of presentation in our mind now. So if it's okay with you, just a quick. No, definitely. We'll go ahead and move forward as originally planned, being mindful of the time and interest in public comment. City manager, Bernal, would you pass me the clicker? Oh, she has it there, right? Back computer. Wonderful, so good evening everyone and thank you for being here and thank you to the staff for that amazing compilation presentation such a short turnaround. Lee, great, Susie, amazing. Brent, thank you for the input. The city attorney, everybody involved, city manager's office really, really impressive and see what you can do with that speed is amazing. So I'm just gonna talk really quickly about the safe parking and transitional and caments and how we can consider them. I identified four additional locations outside of the ones that were recommended by staff just to be able to talk about briefly as well as give some background as to what's been going on in Santa Cruz. They're just for the record so that people know this is not the first time that there's been the conversation of safe parking programs in Santa Cruz in general. It's actually been a topic of conversation for years now so it's nice to see that we're actually taking steps to move on it. For many parking and camping programs are the only way to keep a family unit together. I think that's really important to acknowledge because we do have families that are experiencing homelessness, especially in the absence of affordable housing which we direly lack here in Santa Cruz. Without access to legal parking programs, vulnerable people are subject to fines and criminalization. Those fines can impact their credit scores and then damage their ability to move into housing after the stint of experiencing homelessness is over. And this is a great opportunity to make a considerable impact on the population of people living unsheltered in Santa Cruz. So we just heard Assistant City Manager Shull just cite this number so just so everyone knows that as a 2017 there were an estimated 963 people sleeping without shelter in Santa Cruz on any given night. We know that those counts are under representative of the actual quantity of people in Santa Cruz because it's a point in time count which takes place over a very short period of time on one day of the year. So it's important for us to acknowledge that. Of the people in the entire county which is about 2,200 people experiencing homelessness, 30% of them are sleeping in their vehicles at night. This includes students and people that are working homeless. Also out of all of the individuals in the county there are 129 families. So like I mentioned before, the ability to keep families together, mothers, children, parental structures and support systems so they're not being separated because I don't know about you but I'm very much against separating children from their families. Also made up 403 individuals out of those 129 families. So just a quick overview of what safe parking programs are. We heard that briefly before but they're programs that allow for overnight parking to motor vehicles. They usually and typically have a transitional focus that transition people into stable housing and services. Also access to resources and stabilizing the people whose lives have been destabilized by our economic structure. In providing accommodations for those living in the cars, those without housing are given the ability to avoid those steep fines and criminalization like I mentioned before. It also helps the community by reducing the impact on an already burdened law enforcement system. There's a big complaint within community I hear a lot that they don't get responses timely enough from law enforcement. If we can ease their impact from having to deal with parking citations and other kinds of things, we can make it so they can respond to other issues within your communities. Also providing a foundation by which those in difficult situations can attain a permanent employment housing and access to resources which I think we can all agree we wanna be able to offer to people experiencing homelessness. So just an example of some safe parking programs in other cities, here's a list of them that are somewhat close to us just to put it in reference on the west coast of the United States. In Eugene, Oregon, we talked about that before but last year 81 individuals were helped in at least 27 families with 81 children were able to transition out of homelessness or at least be supported by the program. You can check that out with the same Vincent DePaul Society of Lane County in San Diego. It's funded by the city and also Dreams for Change who has managed the multiple safe parking sites since 2009. Without direct oversight from the government the program operates on a relatively light crew achieving much with very little, offers the same similar things to Eugene and also has helped 2,650 people thus far with safe sleeping. And then in Santa Barbara, it's been going on since about 2004 working with nonprofits, churches and businesses providing sanitary facilities, camper screening, placement for its participants in addition to job placement assistance has a shelter for about 150 people a night you can check that out with the Santa Barbara report. So some commonalities between all of the different programs is they incorporate case management to facilitate the moving onto better housing situations the implementation and inclusion of trash disposal services and dumping solutions because I know that's been a concern that's been mentioned by people that have come out in opposition to parking programs also set hours, some programs are open and used by the participants at specific times like a dust till dawn program others may be established more permanently if they're on faith-based communities and then keeping records. Now this is something that is up for discussion but it is something that is used to help to keep track of who's coming in and out of the facilities. So where can they go? We just heard a wonderful presentation from our staff and thank you again to the planning and economic development department for putting together those amazing maps. It allowed for my team and I to dig through some of them to identify some potential locations. Now this one was interesting this is 1214 River Street. The issue here is now after reading the ordinance and some of the language specifications it is in rather close proximity less than half a mile from 1220 River Street in fact it's the next parcel over. I haven't had a chance to talk to staff about what this site actually is used for. It looks like a storage yard for vehicles or something. I've seen shaking heads. This is why I wanted to present it today so we could talk about what it could potentially be used for or hear why it wouldn't work. My estimate based off of the size of those cars it could house maybe eight to 10 vehicles depending on how the structure is set up. Then Broadway and Frederick. Now I noticed on the revised map that y'all provided this strip that was orange in my map wasn't orange in your map. So I don't know what the transition is. This is a strip walkway and parking lot next to the Santa Cruz Bible Church on Frederick Street. So if I were to pull out from this image you would see that the Santa Cruz Bible Church has a huge parking lot. It completely for the most part is empty from every time I drive past on Frederick Street it's predominantly empty. So that could propose to be used either for that strip which to my understanding from the map I got with city owned obscure city owned property which could do maybe eight vehicles but if we partner with the faith communities as was mentioned in the staff report about and the recommendations of leaning heavily quote on our faith communities then that could be a fantastic facility not to mention I've been in that church before and that big building that you see there in the top portion of the image that is a huge hall that is totally potential for shelter space. So the issue there which I wanna address just so that people know that I'm aware and thinking about it is its proximity to Iranagulch. It's very close to Iranagulch basically right across a ravine and then in a neighborhood and close to Galt school as a potential drawback. This is another location on Frederick Street just up the street. So if for some reason the Santa Cruz Bible Church didn't wanna go for it. There's also our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church with this amazing parking lot that just sits there empty for most of the week. It has a pretty existing parking lot. We could partner with the faith community and the only con that I was able to identify is its neighborhood proximity and proximity to schools that could be another eight to 15 vehicles. And then this one I couldn't see into and so maybe the staff can let me know about the terrain that's back there. I was able to see along the highway if we go into the street view. This is off of Lee Street and there's at least room for a few tents there along the freeway with some erected fencing and or some mesh to protect the individuals that are camping there. Could have up to 20 tents from the space on Google Maps. Matter on the layout of the facility. The issue there again is proximity to neighborhoods and would require a neighborhood outreach as well as some pretty open communication and problem solving with the people that live there. All in all, if we were to go on the maximum amount of all of those different locations we would be able to identify at least 75 beds where people could sleep and or park their vehicles and stay overnight just on these four sites. And then the proposed structure which has been talked about before interviews before placement, participant agreements, case management, combined crews of limited paid staff and volunteers to manage the cost associated with the implementation of the parking programs. Also making sure there's a lot of public input and review. It's located in the city on city on property and or select property and then may really focusing on the transitional focus. So I know that I wanna thank the mayor for the opportunity to speak but before I transition the public comment I do want to just say that I was encouraged but also dismayed by the language that I received and some of the correspondence that I got with regards to this. On one side of the spectrum and there were people that were really supportive but on the other side it's what I could only really describe as darkness essentially. Not only was there a consistent sentiment that if people can't afford deliver them they should leave but it was really disturbing to hear people saying that they need to register their life history, get fenced into a pen and then tagged with ankle bracelets. So that's really, really scary to hear. And then also an individual, a gentleman wrote to me and said it might be time to quote a culling of the herd. So we just heard a agenda item before this with regards to immigration reform and ICE and the abduction of people and we are at a pivotal moment right now in our history both as a city and as a country and we need to realize that the words that we use are dangerous and powerful if they're used in the wrong way and if we're using these terms to dehumanize people we have to realize that we're not talking about cattle we're not talking about livestock we're talking about people that need our support and are relying on us to figure out solutions so that we can give them the space and their own agency to empower themselves and rejoin our community as productive members of society. So thank you mayor for the opportunity for the presentation. Okay. So at this time I will open it up to public comment. Before I do I just want to acknowledge that the last council meeting we had we went into late in the evening and it was brought to my attention that it felt very undemocratic that having us decide really substantive policy near 1 a.m. was inaccessible for folks whether they were observing from home or here in the council chambers and as both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi have said or observed that the means are the end in democracy and I want to just really highlight I know that's open to interpretation and perspective why this item is brought here in council chambers as opposed to the civic. If we were to hold the session in the civic we would not be able to have the video streaming so folks who regularly watch our council meetings would not be able to access the council meetings. People who have other commitments at home or for other reasons aren't able to come here. So I want to just sort of provide that as a understanding of my decision to hold it here with overflow in the civic to provide more access for folks who are at home. And I want to also try something a little bit different and I want to invite up anybody who wants to self-select as wanting to just briefly share their thoughts and comments with the council and you'll be given one minute to present whatever you want to share briefly and if you want to wait until after we have our group presentations then I will open it up for those who want to speak and stay for the two minutes. So if there's any member of the community here that wants to address the council briefly and recognizing that we're now at 9.30 I will allow you to come forward and you will be given one minute once we are concluding with the folks who are interested in speaking briefly to the council for the one minute time I will then acknowledge these organizations who reached out to me in advance for their presentations and then we'll reopen the opportunity for public comment for two minutes for folks who want to stick around and speak to us at the two minute mark. Council Member Matthews. This is just an honest question. Now what point do you anticipate us trying to get to our discussion? I will and we have about a half hour of public presentations from organizations so I wouldn't anticipate probably for another hour and a half depending on how many people want to address the council. So if you're interested in just speaking to the council for public comment for one minute I want you to please stand to my left and I will start with you and once we are concluded with those folks then we'll go ahead and open it up to group organizations. Please feel free. You'll be given one minute. Hi, my name is Jesse Balzel. I'm a Santa Cruz resident. I am a PhD student in Marine Ecology and Biological Oceanography. I've had several years of experience working in the fields of ecology and environmental science and tonight I'm somewhat of a disappointed voter. I think that it's disappointing that a group of self-styled progressives would mimic Donald Trump's emergency declaration and call for potentially environmentally destructive land grab. I say land grab because this is for all intents and purposes what's being proposed and from what I've heard a residential development. Concentration in hundreds if not thousands of transient people on public lands is incompatible with recreation and it's incompatible with biological diversity. A large and continuous human presence in our parks and our nature spaces will destroy native flora and displaced wildlife. Thank you. And please feel free. You can leave your comments with us. You may not because this is the one minute at a time and if you were interested in staying it would be the two minutes so I apologize but you were welcome to leave your comments with us and we will be able to review them if you're interested in that. Okay, what do I... You will give with our clerk. Thank you very much. So again, this is for folks who just briefly want to use the one minute opportunity. Thank you. Hi, my name is Kim and I want to applaud the council for going with the safe parking program because I know how oppressive it is to be criminalized for sleeping in your vehicle. There's literally no place to sleep in Santa Cruz in a vehicle without getting a ticket and I experienced that firsthand as a homeless person. Concerning the Ross camp, I really feel that the gravel... I went down there, I took a walk down there to Ross camp and there were park rangers that were contemplating dropping some gravel all in that area that would like significantly reduce the health hazard or the health problems that are incurring from the mud that's there from this long-term encampment. They did not ever drop the gravel that day that was going to secure the porta-potties and it really needs to be entirely covered with gravel for the safety of the members there. So I wanted to bring that issue up. It's a very practical thing that the council can move on right away. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Hi, for the sake of time, we'll jump right in. Councilor Mayer, thanks. I am afraid and scared that the city of Seattle is actually used as the model for what we want to do to this town. It's been an absolute disaster up there for the last five years. The Puget Sound Business Journal reports that are approximately one billion dollars. I'm gonna just go ahead. I wanna just remind those that are present here this evening that when somebody is at the podium that they have the opportunity to address the council without interruption and I will stop the time if that happens to you but everybody has a right to address the council whether or not we agree with each other's perspectives. So please allow everybody to speak to the council without disruption. Sir, go right ahead. Thank you, I appreciate it. The crime rates in Seattle are now two and a half times that of LA, four times that of New York. The homeless situation is completely out of control. The drug and addiction problem is completely out of control. This is a potential environmental disaster for our city and as a member of the community and a parent ideal on the west side with an ongoing issue of crime break-ins, the addiction that the doctors spoke of need to be fed. Those addictions are fed through a lot of property crime and why understand there needs to be some compassion associated with this situation. It's a complex one and I appreciate all the work and thought that's gone into it. Expanding these sites, you don't need to be an epidemiologist to understand that you're also exposed. Thank you. You get my point. Thank you. And you'll be given one minute. Good evening, Mayor, Council. Thank you for the opportunity. Suzie, thank you for all the work you put in. I am simply here to urge you to go slow to go fast. This is a long-term issue. Let's take our time. Let's do it right. Get the community engagement. That's the other way. Give people a chance to speak up. Get people engaged besides the folks in the camps. Those that need a chance to get out and are willing to counsel folks that are complaining that the other people aren't letting them do their job, support them, give them a way out. Transitional encampment with precautions. That's great, but let's not rush into it, please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council, my name is Coral Brune. I live at the Tannery, which is next to the Ross camp, which I'd like to address three points. Congestion, the very humanity. I'll just go through half of my list of things. I enjoyed the presentations tonight. I learned a lot. Traffic businesses, houses, tents, and not a lot of extra space adding more to this congestion. So that's an obvious situation, more to some than to others. I've talked to some of the persons there and people are suffering. And that is on people's minds a lot. Some of my friends have skills to partially help the situation. If funds are available, they can teach skills to building simple housing structures for the houseless. The surrounding neighborhood that seems to be impoverished by the association of having a type of community, such as homeless, would do themselves a favor to have positive attitudes so that more solutions can be creatively managed in the situation. A few living in the Ross state they know. And please do feel free if you want to email your comments to us as well. I will. Thank you. So next time I'm hoping the public can speak first so it's not this late at night. That'd be wonderful. We're the taxpayers. Number two, it looks like there's a lot of professionals here that are making a lot of money off homelessness. I'm sorry to say. I hope your intentions are good. There's professional homeless people here. Advocates that are getting paid. Listen, the number one thing is we've gotta think about our children. We just had a guy tell us that at least half these people are heroin addicts. And now you want to introduce them into the community, into neighborhoods, right next to schools. Come on people. God bless you. Pray and ask God to give you wisdom, okay? Cause we're all gonna answer for the way we take care of our children. They're the most helpless people in our community. Okay? And now you're gonna introduce heroin addicts into neighborhoods, residential neighborhoods. Come on. Do you have any common sense? God bless you. Okay. I believe that that concludes any member here who's interested in addressing the council. Okay, we have one more. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, so we're still on the one minute time. If this is the one minute, this is the, I'll just remind folks, this is an opportunity for individuals to address the council who want to do so expedited. And you'll be given one minute. And then once that concludes, we'll go ahead and open it up to presentations and then to a public comment for two minutes. So we're still on the one minute if that's true. Thank you. Yeah, I'm Nancy. And I've been listening with such excitement to tonight's conversation. It feels inclusive of people who have been for so long considered outsiders who could not be part of our community. And I've been looking at and studying along with Brent and Stacey Falls as well. The sanctuary camp model for years now. And as the cities of Seattle said, the encampments have met and exceeded the contracted performance measures. Now that includes a whole lot because much is required of those camps. And one of the things that I want to point out that thrilled me most about them is the feeling among residents that they themselves become providers of help for themselves and other people. Thank you. Hello, my name is Linda Kover. I live at the tannery. I'll be brief. I really appreciate you're going forward with what you're doing. You've really covered a lot in a short while. However, I really need you to address the camp as it is right now. And one of the things I'm asking for is to define the camp by the levy with a fence. And there's an area with the bathrooms and the garbage can be placed if those tents were not there. And it's just a few tents that could be moved so that that walkway can be open. And I know you pushed it back some. It's absolutely not enough. And just define that with a fence and not a portable fence because that doesn't work at all. And one last thing is that the encampments you're talking about, they're out. Thank you. Please do feel free to if you want to leave your comment. Yeah, thank you. Okay. All right. Next speaker. Hi, my name is Luba Kaplan-Skya. I'm a fourth year student at UC Santa Cruz and I just wanted to offer possibly a solution to the safe parking. There's a competition every single year called Cruise Hacks and there was an app. I'm not affiliated with it at all. It's called Vroom, V-R-O-O-M. And it's sort of like an Airbnb for residents to rent out their parking spaces that are at their houses for really cheap rates, $3, $4 a night. It might seem not very appeasing for people but the founders of Airbnb also struggled to make the concept normal to allow strangers in your house. Perhaps we could also allow strangers to park in our parking lots and you post your driver's license and you basically get to help with this problem. And I'd also love to encourage our fellow community members to come up with ideas and solutions to this. I really appreciate City Council for all these proposed solutions. I've seen a lot today but I would love for us to come up, not only voice our concerns and opinions which are extremely valuable but also really creatively tap into our wonderful, incredible minds and think of solutions. Thank you. All right. So I think that concludes the interest of the, oh, I'm sorry, I keep, I apologize. I have a question for a few minutes. Yeah, and so- My name's Manuel Prado. I have you, I, yes, I have you. Yes, you'll have your four minutes. So we'll do presentations after we have the folks that just really briefly want to share their comments for one minute. Okay. I just want to applaud the council and the staff for this comprehensive approach and applaud you especially for the quickness by which you've been able to move. This is the first, we've been looking at homelessness for two decades, what have you. And this is the first re-initiating of a comprehensive address since we approved and built the shelters on River Street. Thank you very much. Go forward. Thank you. My name is Travis Coleman. I'm a teacher in Santa Cruz. Thank you very much for the time and energy and effort you have put into this. I strongly support and hope that you are successful in finding a new location where you can create a camp that can offer better support for our community. I also would just offer that as kind of a follow-up to the woman who spoke two people ago, I would gladly offer my driveway to someone who needed a safe place to stay overnight. And I suspect that many other homeowners in Santa Cruz would do the same. So if we can find a way to, exploit is not the right word, but to take advantage of that generosity in our communities, I think that we might be able to come up with other solutions as well to provide more people with safe places to stay. Okay. So I believe that concludes any interested member of the community who wanted to briefly address the council. At this time, I will now go ahead and acknowledge the folks that reached out to myself and our city clerk in advance requesting extra time on behalf of their organization and membership. So if Carol Walker could come forward on behalf of the Tannery and Coastal Watershed Council and Falker and Price Streets. Carol? Hi, you'll be given four minutes, Carol. No, I don't think I need it. Hi, Mayor Watkins, council members and all present. I'm Carol Walker. I speak tonight for River Neighbors and Coastal Watershed Council, which represents residents at the Tannery, Price, Falker and Grant Streets. Since the Ross encampment began and escalated beyond control, our residential neighborhoods have experienced undue and unwarranted harassment, threats to our lives, physical assaults, trespassing, loitering, car break-ins, vandalism, trash,