his is a little blurry. The pink up in the upper left is the existing golf course and then there are these discrete neighborhood elements that would be considered as part of the expansion of this project to include the two blue sections which would be kind of the downtown Boulder Creek area and some of the corridor down Highway nine. In addition, there's a purple section that's Boulder Creek Estates. It's again, another sanitation district currently operated by St. Lawrence Valley Water that is requesting inclusion in the project as well. So obviously this would be a potential build out but obviously there's lots of steps that need to come, need to be addressed before we can settle on a full scope but this is the proposed scope to date. So as I said, that scope includes over 1200 new connections 900 of those being residential, 300 plus being commercial and obviously this could be a phased project or scale depending on community support, funding and various other circumstances. So quickly and briefly just touching on the benefits of this project. As I discussed from a public standpoint, there's the environmental protection, the climate change resilience, economic vibrancy, but there's also benefits to property owners and business owners. So as I said, in recovery, those folks that are rebuilding may be faced with enhanced treatment systems, requirements, but based on the lamp, that range at 70 to $100,000 is significant upfront cost that they would have to bear in either the rebuild process or if they're remodeling and subject to new standards. Additionally, by being on sewer, they have the ability property owners would have the ability to add a bedroom or an ADU without the complex redesign of their septic systems. There's also obviously fire suppression resources that would hopefully help improve insurance circumstances there. And then obviously the economic resources if downtown Boulder Creek expands and improves its commercial opportunities for community that ideally hopefully reduces the vehicle miles travel that folks have to get to travel, to get good services or other things that they may need. So the cost elements that I'll present to you cover the capital costs, some annual maintenance and operation costs and the one-time site improvements that may be required on an individual basis. That cost estimate right now is a range of 60 to $90 million, significant amount of money and obviously inflation and cost of construction is a risk that that number could go up. And obviously depending on the project scope, that project, the cost could go up or down depending on phasing. We've already applied for grants and I just wanna highlight and appreciate Katie Beach and Ashley Trujillo and Aaron McCarthy. McCarthy and Sierra Ryan, we have submitted, your board approved submitted a grant through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund to begin this project. And they did a tremendous amount of work to get that forward, but there are more grant opportunities that we need to explore to try and lower those costs. So to break down those costs, that's 60 to $90 million. If the property owners and the connections were to pay the full cost of that estimate, it's between $47,000 and $70,000 of connection. And if you amortize that over perhaps a 30 year time period, it's around that $1,500 to $2,500 a year cost. And that's if all properties are treated equally. We know that for something like this, you need to have an engineering report and there's a cost benefit analysis or there's a benefit analysis done. So we would likely see a different cost structure for commercial businesses versus residential businesses. And then you would have maintenance and operation costs in that range of $1,500 to $2,000 a year. And the one-time site improvements really vary depending on the conditions of the property, but in that seven to 10K range. So annually, you're looking at about $250 to $375 a month potentially for this. So it's not insignificant, but I think the important thing that I wanna bring up in the context of resilience is some of the other expensive resiliency projects that are going on throughout the county and put this in context. So we know that the Pajaro levy system is a resiliency project, a $400 million project that is ideally, is fully funded by the government. We have the Pure Water Soquel project which is a $195 million project of which $95 million of that is grant funded. And then we've done other things in the county as was referenced earlier by Supervisor McPherson, 3CE essentially is a resiliency project which took a tremendous amount of effort. So these kinds of projects are not free. They're challenging and complicated. And what we need to do now is move forward and try and find community support to move this latest attempt at soaring in the valley forward. And fortunately, we've started with a $2 million EPA grant earmark from Anna Eshoo's office before she departed as one of our representatives she earmarked $2 million. So we have $2 million coming into the county to move this project forward. And what we're gonna try and do in that first funding is to do community outreach and education to solidify community support on a scope. We're gonna do the things around an engineering report that would help define the finances of it. And then obviously continue trying to find grant funding and grant opportunities and further the design permitting and property acquisition to get a finer pencil to those estimates. So with that, I'll stop and answer any questions you may have. Thank you for that detailed presentation. Also thank you, Supervisor McPherson for all your leadership on this item. I appreciate that you've been a steadfast leader. Supervisor McPherson. This has been a big deal in Santa Rosa Valley and in particular Boulder Creek of course. And it's a very costly one as well. And I wanna begin by thanking the county for the past and present because it's been years long effort. We've worked to bring this concept back to life on for the people and businesses in Boulder Creek area. It's taken a lot of work to get to this point even before the CZU fires. And gave us a renewed sense of what we need to do to address a longstanding problem of the overdrafted septic systems in Boulder Creek. Some measures the most concentrated area of septics west of the Mississippi in my, that I've heard. This is especially important to give the new state standards that we have on advanced septic system, which as a report highlights could be very costly themselves for fire survivors and others when they rebuild or expand their homes. I think it's important to recognize that this project has received support Valley wide, Boulder Creek area wide from the Valley Women's Club Environmental Committee to Boulder Creek Business Association and the Santa Rosa Valley Water District. Some of whom were adamantly opposed and I remember that 1984 articles that were written in the 80s in the Sentinel. But as mentioned, this has already received a $2 million grant at ASU who was drawn out of the Santa Cruz County in the redistricting. But I can assure you that Congressman Jimmy Panetta is fully aware of the importance of this and the long time we've tried to get this funding started and how we identify, how we can provide a local match as well. The ultimate objective of course is to fully fund the project and win a broad base of community support, which is mentioned in the plan of the $2 million grant that we've received to bring these properties into the County Service Area 7. I also especially want to thank our partner the San Lorenzo Valley Water District for all the great work they do for the community. And I'm glad this proposal addresses the longstanding need to extend to Bear Creek estates. Our state and federal legislative delegation or delegations is also in support of this project and our goal is to win as much state and federal grant that is very costly as was mentioned. The economic fire safety, environmental recovery aspects make this a very attractive project, very expensive, but very attractive. This will really be important for the San Lorenzo Valley and the Boulder Creek area in particular for the public safety, for environmental protection. I thank you for all the work that you have done. We're at the starting line, but the gun has gone off and we're gonna start running to get sufficient federal and state grants, which I think we have a very excellent chance under the circumstances to get additional funding from federal and state sources. So thank you very much, Mr. Reed and everybody who has been associated with trying to get to getting us where we are and hopefully for a successful project in the near future. And I don't know what near means in that regard, but thank you very much. Thank you, Supervisor McPherson, Supervisor Cummings. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you all for that presentation and for the work on trying to get a large system and a lot of development. Is that better? There we go. Thank you. So the one question I had, you had the 1,285 new connections number. Is that new residential properties that could be developed or are these people who are, for example, a new concept that would then be connected into the sewer system? I'll just start there, I guess. Yeah, that number is based on the existing developed properties that are on sewer in those areas. I'm just curious if there's any potential for properties that can't be developed on currently that may be able to be developable when this new system would be in place if you have any thoughts on that. Your board as the land use and regulatory authority has the one acre minimum currently, county-wide. So it would be at your discretion whether you wanted to explore changing that. So currently properties that are less than one acre in the valley and throughout the county are not allowed to develop. And that's because of the septic requirements. So your board would have the discretion to explore how you wanna do that currently. The project is not in vision, adding that capacity to those under-buildable lots because of the notion that we do as a community want to try and put people in our urban core, which is generally safer from natural disasters like wildfires that were subject to this area. So the environmental communities in support of this project in part because the intent is not to expand significantly the development capacity in this project scope. Got it. And then just a follow-up question on what's a sense of timeline around this project? I mean, I think that there's some discussion about the potential for this to help with people who are trying to rebuild from fire. But if people are trying to rebuild and it's gonna take 10 years for us to get the system up and running, do they make these investments early on in septic with the hope that later on they can connect? So I'm just kind of curious if you can speak to a little bit to the timeline and next steps. Yeah, I don't know if assistant director Edler would like to talk on project timeline. I will briefly to say that the five year grace period was if we're making measurable progress, that would be extended. So it's not like the project has to be in the ground, but I don't know if you wanna briefly. Sure. Good morning, Ken Tedler, assistant director with CDI. The timeframe that we have built out on this is about 10 to 11 years. I mean, that includes everything from community outreach, forming assessment districts, going through the LAPCO process, all the environmental work and design. It's a big lift and a lot of that does depend on funding. Right now, it's approximately, could be up to $90 million project of which we have $2 million right now to start the planning process. But even the planning process alone is gonna be quite a bit more than just the $2 million. So hopefully that answers your question. Yeah. Any other, Surveys or Connors? Thanks for your work on this exciting project. It's an opportunity where we've identified a public project that will ultimately make everyone in the area better often if they were operating individually. So that's commendable. Question about the recycled water. So, I mean, is it, would it be treated to the same standards as for example, pure water? Soquel and then you mentioned that injection into the groundwater act for was a possibility, but what I got from reading the report it was just more likely to be released back into the creek itself to provide for fish flows. Is that accurate? Yeah, I mean, I think it's early in the process to know both what level of treatment would be funded, right, because to get to the pure water, soquel level costs a lot of money. And so I think that's my hope is that we can find the funding support to get to a place where it's as useful a water source as possible for as many different options. And whether that's injection or reintroduction into the surface water, we know regulations around recycled water continue to evolve and change. So 10 years from now or seven years from now there may be different opportunities to you in how that recycled water is used potentially toilet to tap type stuff, but we're not there yet. So lots more to work on if that's amenable in answer. Okay, thank you. I'd like to open it up for the community. Is there any member of the community that would like to address this on this item? Thank you, Becky Steinburner. So I want to confirm that this project would be an expansion of the existing CSA-7 with extraterritorial or annexations into CSA-7. Have you contacted LACCO to see what that process would look like and what the expense would be for that? Or would this be a special benefit assessment district that is a completely different animal and uses an engineering report and puts out to ballot special benefit assessments that are calculated for each parcel's special benefit amount. I want to point out, you talked about recycled water efforts in the county already. There's one in Davenport that you did not mention and that is a county recycled water facility that the county built and actually is not even being used. The agricultural users there are not using it. So let's put that to use and please include that in your reports in the future. I would like to know what environmental health has on record for the number of septic system complaints and failures in the San Lorenzo Valley. I know this winter has been a tough one for those with septic systems but I think that level of information is also important to have. I think that it's important to know where these treatment facilities would be located. A lot of people don't wanna have a sewage treatment plant next to their home. So that needs to be identified. The RINA numbers coming up may affect the build out in San Lorenzo Valley, although it is confined largely to within the urban services line but that needs to be discussed with the public to assure them that it will not create massive build out in the San Lorenzo Valley. How will this affect the groundwater recharge in the San Lorenzo Valley? I would be curious to see a study of that stream flow and interconnection. Thank you, thank you. Is there anybody else in chambers who'd like to address us on this item? Adam Clerk, anybody online? We do have speakers online, Chair, but if I may just make a brief announcement. If you're sitting on the dice, please be aware that there are emergency buttons underneath the desk and we've had an accidental press. So if you could please monitor those buttons and make sure that you're not accidentally bumping those that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Nancy, your microphone is now available. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is Nancy Macy, I am Chair of the Valley Women's Clubs Environmental Committee for the San Lorenzo Valley and lived in Boulder Creek for almost 50 years. I'm a newcomer compared to many of the other people. We are grateful to Supervisor McPherson's leadership in seeking solutions for this issue to Dave Reed and his crew's incredible work and to the board's attention to it. We have to acknowledge, however, the vital importance of healthy functioning septic systems. Those systems are the ideal wastewater treatment system for our mountains. They are vital to maintaining ground water levels, especially during the ever-increasing drought years that put demands on that resource. Second, however, the importance of properly functioning septic systems must also be acknowledged since a failing system can and does impact the health and well-being of our waterways, of neighboring residences, and so on. The three areas that would be served by this proposal are all in dire need. Maybe not as big as the map shows, but the basic areas. There are two caveats. First, the system has to be designed to survive being undermined by mudslides, like has affected Berkeley Grove in 236 this year. The design of that original SLV sewer system failed to address that very idea, and a mudslide would have allowed all the septic septage to fall into the river. So that's another reason for its failure, but that will be an important priority. And finally, the system must be designed to serve the existing businesses and residents safely and effectively without opening currently unbuildable parcels to development. We do believe this is a problem because of the strains on our current water supply and ongoing into the future of drought, the problems of traffic and its attendant pollution, the challenges of increasing population on our school system, the threat of wildfire and having to evacuate the increase in all these problems, non-point source pollution. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. We had no further speakers, Chair. All right, I'll bring it back to the board, so Vice President McPherson. Yeah, I'd move the recommended action to accept the report and direct staff to return in October or sooner to give us a status update. Second. Motion from Supervisor McPherson. A second from Supervisor Cummings. Roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. And Friend. Aye. That item passes unanimously and move on to item nine, which is a public hearing to consider the 2022 general plan annual report to accept and file two related annual reports and take related actions. Is that one of the memos of the deputy CAA? Oh, we have the agenda item board memo, the general plan annual report, housing successor annual report. Mr. Carlson, good morning, welcome. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Chair. Yes, David Carlson from the planning division of CDI be presenting the report today. So this presentation will be on the three annual reports to the state all related to the general plan housing, the general plan annual report, described activities related to implementation of the general plan. The housing element annual progress report includes various housing statistics and a report on implementation of programs in the housing element. And the housing successor agency annual report provides the status of the former redevelopment agency funds. The general plan annual report provides information required by the county code in these four areas. The sustainability update was approved by the board and the general plan amendments related to backing up that that was the sustainability update was approved in December of 2022 by the board. And general plan amendments related to the medical office building project are still pending. There were no changes to commercial agricultural land classifications, no development applications that triggered formal park site reviews. The capital improvement program was found consistent with the general plan. And there were no conflicts regarding coastal priority uses. There were no requests to change the urban services line. And in 2023, the priority for the planning division is to complete the update of the housing element and continue work on updating the coastal hazards chapter of the safety element. No, I had no, I was not aware that that was... Apologies for that disruption. That's fine. That's gross, please. That came right in between two slides. So no problem. Okay, the housing element annual report is a series of tables containing housing statistics and the status of programs in the existing 2015 housing element. Table A and A2 contain detailed data on housing development applications that were submitted to the planning division in 2022, discretionary housing development applications that were approved or entitled. All ministerial building permit applications and permits issued and housing construction completed. These are large and detailed tables and they're not reproduced in this staff report but they'll be submitted to the state. However, table D is a summary of the key information which is building permits issued for new housing units which count towards the regional housing needs allocation or RENA and table D contains information on the implementation of all of the programs in the 2015 housing element. So table B in the housing element annual progress report places all the new housing units represented by issued building permits in 2022 into affordability categories. Column one in green is the county's RENA number in each income level or affordability category for the planning period which extends to 2023. The income levels are further categorized as non-dead restricted which is generally the private sector housing market and deed restricted which mostly represents the nonprofit sector creating new housing units with financial assistance from county housing funds and other sources but it also includes some density bonus units developed in the private sector. The county does not actually build any of this housing. The second column lists the issued building permit data for each year of the RENA planning cycle in 2022. The highlight is permits that were issued for the construction of 115 units of deed restricted very low income housing units including 65 housing units affordable to households of extremely low income and 60 units of deed restricted low income housing units. Column three totals the number of permits issued in each income category during the planning cycle and column four lists the total remaining RENA in each income category. And so this is a graphical summary of that table B data showing the trend lines in each affordability category and the RENA target represented by the same color dots on the right and below a table showing the percentage progress towards the target in each category. It's showing nearly meeting or exceeding the target number of new housing units in the low and moderate income categories in orange and gray and 59% progress toward meeting the RENA numbers in the very low income category in blue and 67% progress in meeting the moderate income category in yellow. Many of the units in the non deed restricted low and moderate income categories are represented by ADUs of various sizes. And this overall upward trend over the years can be seen as a result of ADU streamlining legislation and county code updates since 2018. Table D reports on implementation of all the programs in the 2015 housing element grouped into these six categories. Every program has been implemented and to some extent and some of the highlights include the sustainability update, including new zoning tunnels for higher density, residential and mixed use, the density bonus program, ADU deregulation, amendments to the public facility zone district to encourage affordable and school employee rental housing, updated codes for farm worker housing, financial assistance to numerous affordable housing projects, preserving the affordability of mobile home parks, preserving affordable units in foreclosure, loans to first-time home buyers, short-term rental security deposit assistance and assistance in providing units for former foster youth and assistance to affordable housing projects for seniors and securing state funds for projects that include units for farm workers, extremely low income households and persons with mental health issues. And there are many more examples detailed in table D of the housing element and no progress report. And the third annual report is on the fund where the assets of the former redevelopment agency were placed and it is a continuing source of financial assistance to affordable housing projects, more so in the past when the fund was larger. The fund undergoes an annual audit and this is a summary of the status of the fund in fiscal year 2021-22. The revenues are a result of loan repayments, rents and sale of property and interest on the fund. And it should be noted that the maximum expenditure allowed from this fund on homeless services is $250,000 which has been consistently spent out of this fund over the years. And so the recommended actions are to conduct a public hearing on the 2022 general plan annual report except in file the report and the fiscal year 2021-22 housing successor agency report and direct staff to submit these annual reports to the governor's office of funding and research and the California department of housing and community development. And that's the end of my report. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Carlson. Any questions from board members? To those who are coming, please. Thank you for that presentation. I also just wanted to comment and thank the staff on the production of the deed restricted affordable housing because for a very low and low housing, ensuring that those are affordable and perpetuaries was really going to help us address our housing crisis. I wanted to see if I heard something correctly with the ADUs are those being applied to the moderate housing category or how are those being considered? What we do with ADUs is we look at existing data on market rate, rents and various affordability categories based on some state published formulas and then looking at the size of the ADUs compared to those, the market, we place them in either the low or the moderate category. Generally the studio and maybe some of the one bedroom ADUs are placed in the low income category and the larger ADUs in the moderate income category. And I'm just curious if you have any information on what the area mean income level needs to be to qualify for those different categories. I do have that data because that's what we use to do this work but I don't have it at my fingertips but I could follow up with you and provide information to you. Yeah, it'd be great because it's just helpful for folks to understand what income level we're talking about when we say very low, low, moderate because we're seeing market rate studios go for $3,000 a month. So really trying to understand what incomes we're hitting is helpful. So, but thank you for the presentation and I'll follow up with you. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Suvez or Hernandez. Did you have a question? With some of those funds, are those funds that can be used for like first time home buyers assistance and home repair programs and possibly like ADU type loans? I know not all banks do ADU loans but can those funds be used for any programs like that? Yes, in fact, some of the funds from the affordable housing impact fee that's charged on new development are going to go towards an ADU incentive program that will be launched later this year to provide help to people that want to develop ADUs and then additionally funds from that program and the housing low and moderate income housing asset fund go towards affordable housing programs including rental assistance and first time home buyer assistance. I'll follow up by not more about that too. Thank you. Thank you, Suvez or Hernandez. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Carlson for that report. And the last time the board received this information regarding the percentage of households bill since 2014 under our prior arena allocations, the numbers did not look nearly as good. I think it was just over 50% and now you're showing 79% which is very encouraging but that said, the new allocation that we have for County is nearly three times what we had here. It's going to be a high cliff to get over and I'm not just speaking for Santa Cruz County but I can tell you when I attend California State Association of Counties CSAC they don't know how they're going to get there either but we'll hope we can work together so the County will be able to step up the plate and do our part in a smooth transition to getting more housing and more permits issued. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Suvez or Hernandez. Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I agree. I think the report is actually better than expected at 79% that's pretty good. It's not where we need to be but it's better than where we were. And 350% increase in our arena numbers in the next cycle is definitely an intimidating cliff as Supervisor McPherson suggested. So to that point in terms of how we're going to meet it I mean, dimension of the ADUs is good. That is certainly one avenue we could take to building more low income housing but especially given that it's taking about I think last time I checked 190 days or something to permit an ADU today there's definitely room for improvement there and if we do that we should be able to get more affordable housing built that way. You had mentioned that some of the affordable housing that has been built is in dedicated projects and others is through the requirements of density bonuses that are built in market rate projects. Do you have a sense of what the breakdown is? Far fewer under the density bonus program. Those are in the private development projects so they're generally one or two units per project and that's actually detailed in the growth control report that we produced later last year and you can see that some of the subsidized affordable housing projects have a much higher obviously a much higher percentage of the deed restricted affordable units including the ones that are going through the density bonus program but the private development projects usually gonna be one or two units per project or something like that. Sure, I understand that in a private project there's less affordable housing units built. I'm just curious of all the affordable housing built is 20% of it in private developments, 50%, 10% to all parts sense of that. You know, I don't have a sense for that unless anything else here might be able to. Sorry, can you repeat the question? So the question is in terms of the affordable units that we've built what percentage of them are being built in dedicated projects for affordable housing typically built by non-profit affordable housing developers and what percent are being built? So when the report worked, okay. So I think we have a couple large affordable, sorry, Priscilla Wilson with housing. I think in this report we had a couple of projects that received density bonus. One of them was of 100% affordable housing project, it's a 1500 Capitola Road project. And then we have a couple density bonus units. Correct me if I'm wrong, David, in market rate units. So those generally are much smaller. There's usually, if it's a fore sale project they come in with a 10% bonus. So they only provide 10% of the units. So it's usually one to two units that are affordable out of a like a 25 unit project. I don't know if that answered your question. It's not a substantial amount of the four market projects that are developing the affordable units. Totally, I understand that. I'm curious if you add up all the smaller amounts, what percentage of all the low income housing that has been built to the account for? If I could clarify, are you asking what percentage are being developed through private projects versus what is being developed through subsidized? Exactly, exactly. You can get a sense of that. I can't do the math right now for you, but you can get a sense from that in table B. So where it's broken down by either deed restricted or non-deed restricted. So all of the units developed in the non-deed restricted category, those are generally gonna be projects developed by the private sector and all the units, deed restricted units in the low and very low and moderate categories are gonna be the projects that are developed by generally nonprofit developers with public subsidies. Okay, thank you. I'll look at that. I mean, the reason I ask is ultimately if we're trying to increase the amount of affordable housing produced 350% fully subsidized projects will only get us so far. And so to some extent we have to create conditions whereby the market can also produce a substantial number of these units. Exactly, which was one of the goals of the sustainability update to allow for that. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'd like to open it up and also thank you for helping us the question. I'd like to welcome out for the community on this item. Good morning, welcome and thank you for waiting today. Yes, my name is Charles Rolander. I just had a general question. We were talking about septic systems in the prior presentation. I'm just wondering with ADUs, do those, can they be hooked up to an existing septic system or do they have to be hooked up to a sewer line or how does that all work? Thank you. Do you have any other questions for us? Or is that your primary question? That's my question. Thank you. Before we address it, is there anybody else from the community here that would like to present any comments on this item? Thank you. Becky Steinburne, a resident of rural Aptos. I think this county needs to increase the percentage of affordable housing units that we require under measure J, the developers do. Measure J set it at 15%. I think we need to follow the lead of the city of Watsonville, for example, and increase that to 20% and hold them to it. The in lieu payment fees that this county did for a few years was a disaster. And I think we should never go back there and we should increase it to 20% required. Can ADUs be required to be deed restricted to be affordable? I have a lot of hesitation about classifying an ADU as affordable just because of the size. I hear that often used in developer applications that they are affordable by design, but as supervisor Koenig I think said, studios, small spaces are being rented out for $3,000 a month. That's not affordable. They're small, but that's not affordable. So can ADUs be restricted to be deed restricted to be affordable? I am aware of a few that ADUs that have been built and are actually rented out as ADUs as Airbnb's. So they should not always be counted in our arena numbers. How many applications has the county received for tiny homes on wheels, which is another avenue this board has taken to address housing? And I think this county needs to look at partnerships with the large agricultural growers and companies to provide farm worker housing, which is now allowable, especially in light of the Pajaro Valley flooding. They certainly need to be partners here. And I would like to see that to the end of the sixth cycle arena, there is- Thank you, Ms. Steinbrenner. Thank you, Ms. Steinbrenner. Is there anybody else in chambers I'd like to address us? Madam Clerk, is there anybody online? I see no speakers online, Chair. All right, Mr. Carlson, there was a question asked regarding the ADUs and septics. I understand the answer is depends, but if you want to go ahead and address it to the degree possible. Upon review of an application for an ADU, environmental health would look at the status of the existing septic system. And based on the size of the ADU, either require improvements to the assist, well, either established that the existing system can handle the additional bedroom or two, or what have you, or if the system would need to be expanded to accommodate the ADU, but it's very similar to simply adding a bedroom to your house and determining if the existing septic system can handle that, or if it needs to be expanded, you're not necessarily required to build a separate new septic system for a new ADU. Correct. Thank you, Mr. Carlson. All right, seeing no one else, we'll bring it back to the board for action. Surveys or comics? Yeah, I'll move to the general finance effort in a second. Any motion for the recommended actions from supervisor Cummings and the suffering from supervisor Hernandez, if we could have a roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig? Aye. Cummings? Aye. Hernandez? Aye. McPherson? Aye. And Friend? Aye. That passes unanimously. I recognize we've been going straight for these next two items should be pretty quick. So if the board's okay with it, we'll just go straight through. Okay, we'll do item 10, which is a public hearing to consider proposed 2023-24 benefit assessment rates for County Service Area number three to request a submittal of ballots for the proposed 23-24 benefit assessments. Continue the public hearing to May 9th, 2023 and take related actions of that line in the memo of the Deputy CAO Director of Community Development and Infrastructure of the Agenda and Board Memo. And welcome back, Mr. Machado. Thank you, Chair and supervisors. I'll be brief on this one. Thank you for the introduction. So that and before you is a public hearing for benefit assessment rate increase for CSA-3. CSA representatives have requested the Board of Supervisors to adopt a resolution of intention to authorize and levy an increased assessment for Aptos Seascape Road Median maintenance, street utility facilities, beach access maintenance, patrol and litter control services for the beach area below the Via Palo Alto and extending south to the resort. In order to complete this process, it will be necessary for the Board to open the public hearing, take testimonies and consider objections or protests to the proposed benefit assessments. And then close the public testimony portion of the public hearing and continue the public hearing to May 9th, 2023 to allow for tabulation and certification of the ballot proceedings. And I'm here to answer any questions you may have about the process or the project. Any questions before I open up the public hearing? Okay, seeing none, we will open up the public hearing officially. Is there anybody here from the community that would like to address us? Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. I am not a resident within the boundaries of CS Theory A3, but I have friends who are, and there is a lot of concern about the unfairness of this procedure. A special benefit assessment procedure is supposed to show the calculation of the benefit that each parcel will get and that it is proportional to the benefit that each parcel property owner gets. That has not been done in this engineer's report. It is a blanket assessment for different, for the properties and does not identify the proportional special benefit to any of the parcels. I did go to the public meeting that was held at the Seascape Resort. And what was clear to me, and many of the people there was that people who live along the beach and at the beach access will receive a much greater benefit from the cost of this increase that covers the beach cleanups and trash removal at the beach access, then will those who are not even near the beach, but those who are not near the beach are being charged the same. There were many protests at that community meeting and I'm sorry that maybe there were people here earlier that wanted to speak to that, but the engineer's report was not detailed and did not separate special benefit from general benefit, which is required under the constitutional article 13CND. So I will be curious to see how this goes and thank you for giving the public a chance to speak about it. Is there anybody else here for this item during the public hearing? Madam Clerk, is there anybody online for the public hearing? We have no speakers online, Chair. Okay, I will close the public comment portion of the public hearing. Now we'll bring it back to the board for action. Remember the recommended actions were to open the public hearing, hearing the objections or protests to request the submittal of all ballots for the benefit assessment for CSA number three to close the public comment and to continue the public hearing to May 9th to offer tabulation and certification. Is there a motion for the recommended actions? So moved. Second. We have a motion for the recommended actions from Supervisor Koenig and a second from Supervisor Cummings if we could have a roll call please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson and Friend. Aye. That passes unanimously. The last item on today's open session is item 11 which is a public hearing to consider proposed 2023-24 benefit assessment rates for County Service Area number 51 to request a submittal of ballots for the proposed 23-24 benefit assessments and continue the public hearing to May 9th, 2023 and take related actions. Is that lined in the name of the Deputy CAO, Mr. Machado? Thank you, Chair and Supervisors. Again, Matt Machado, Deputy CAO, Director CDI. The item before you is a public hearing for benefit assessment rate increases for CSA 51. CSA representatives have requested the Board of Supervisors to adopt a resolution of intention to authorize and levy an increased assessment for road landscaping, road maintenance and road improvements within CSA number 51, Hopkins Gulch. In order to complete this process, it will be necessary for the Board to open the public hearing, take testimonies and consider objections or protest to the proposed benefit assessments and then to close the public testimony portion of the public hearing and continue the public hearing to May 9th to allow for tabulation and certification of the ballot proceedings and I can answer any questions that you may have. Are there any questions of Mr. Machado before we open up the public hearing? Okay, seeing none, I'll officially open up the public hearing for this item. Is there anybody from the community that would like to address this on the public hearing for benefit assessment rate increases for CSA 51? Welcome back, sir, and thank you again for waiting. No problem. I'll bet you guys are ready for some lunch. Can we restart the time for Madam Clerk just because he hasn't started yet? Okay, well, I'm one of the 23 CSA 51 people with the ballot due today and CSA 51 has some problems. This is a third special assessment that we've had within the last five years and each one is progressively larger by 100, 200% or something and this one needs to be paid in taxes during the next two years, which means in my case, $4,000 to 4,200 or something to be paid in the next tax payment, which is already paid for my recent one, but anyway, in November, there's another one due. And then also in April the second and this is due in two installments. So that makes me come up with about $8,500 in the next extra after I'm already paying almost that much in taxes anyway. So I don't think that this whole thing has been handled real well because FEMA got involved and this whole thing started in 1917 and each one of these assessments has been kind of tied on to that first one with each one getting larger. Anyway, my decision is reluctant to vote yes, but I would rather request a new ballot and I know times limited because FEMA is involved and so I already voted yes on this. I don't know how the rest, I know there's a lot of discontent among the members, I'm not sure how it's gonna turn out, but I think that Hopkins Dolce Road is the lifeline to those parcels and without that road, the property is not worth much and the houses are probably not worth much. So anyway, the problems I see based on my experience and I've been, I'm retired now, but I've been a California licensed real estate broker I have a master's degree in business and I used to teach accounting as an adjunct professor at Cabrillo College. So I have quite a bit of background. The problems that I see today is the tax history. This particular road association was formed in 1978, which is probably a familiar year to you guys because that's when Prop 13 passed. And since then, there's also been Prop 218 which also passed after this road association was formed. I'm sure if you could just finish up your comments please. Okay, well, I sent an email to all of you board members and this involves Santa Cruz Lafta to Lafko. And I know Justin and friend are also on that commission. And I'm probably, I spend out 40 hours researching all this. I'm pretty familiar with it. And I haven't checked into any of the other road associations and road associations are very different from some of the other road associations and from some of the other CSAs. And to me, they should be based on the road itself, not to a bunch of parcels that are grouped together, originally based on value. And to me, I don't know whether that's being, this is because this is really old or whether new CSA road associations are being treated in the same way or not. But to me, the road association should define the length of the road, which ours is not very well defined at all. I looked at Lafko records, the last Lafko review was in November of 1922, not very long ago. So I'm sure a couple of you were on that and I know there are some other individuals from the county and cities that are on that commission. So it says the road is 4.7 miles in length it's a one-lay road. I assume it's a public road now. I think it had to become a public road when left agreed to have it as a CSA. In any way, I'd like to know what the length of the road is. This is not spelled out anywhere. I've asked the county earlier for that and I get no answer because it's not very well defined at all. But anyway, for regular maintenance of the road to me it should be divided into equal links for maintenance of the road. And for special assessments, it can be those same distances could be used if it provides access through driveways and private roads that come off of Hopkins Galt Road. Okay, sir. Right now it's not that so. I appreciate it. And I think, and Mr. Machado, you may wanna spend some answer, not now, but answer some questions with them afterwards. Is there anybody else from the community that'd like to address this in this chambers during this public hearing? Is there anybody online, Madam Clerk? We have no speakers online, Chair. I just wanted to ensure that he had a full opportunity because he was the only speaker here for the public hearings. Important to make sure that that was afforded. Thank you, sir, for waiting so long. We'll bring it back to the board for action on this item. Is there a motion for the recommended actions? So moved. Second. Motion from Supervisor Koenig and a second from Supervisor Hernandez. So we get a roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig? Aye. Cummings? Aye. Hernandez? Aye. McPherson? Aye. And friend? Aye. And that passes unanimously and also ends our regular session. Council, is there anything reportable out of closed session? Not today. All right, so we'll go straight into closed session.


Is it working? OK, I'm very excited to be here because often this idea that you don't actually know what's going on is a frustration for when I try to explain things. So I've decided that I'm going to start by actually allowing you to experience surfing the web in China. So I've done some screenshots before I came. First, I'm going to start. The first part is with a VPN on, so you can get the idea of how slow connections are and how frustrating it is. And I'll sort of talk through this experience with you. And actually, before I start, let me just say, so my goal here is for you guys to really get an idea of what it feels like to be on the Chinese internet. So I'm going to really, like, over sense, like, throw a lot of things at you, OK? So just be prepared. Let's hope this works. So it looks here. I'm trying to get on Facebook. So this is Baidu, which is a Chinese search engine. It's not really loading very well with my VPN on, as you can see. Yahoo! Usually works without a VPN. But for some reason, today it's not, because sometimes it's a little sketchy, little weird. And looking up Tumblr, yeah, Tumblr is usually not blocked also. But as you notice with my VPN, like, it's very slow. Don't have a lot coming in. Yelp is barely loading. Facebook, Google, none of these seem to be really working for me. This is very frustrating, as you can imagine, especially when you're trying to do things and stay connected to the West. So for some reason, New York Times seems to load OK. And luckily, this is a GIF animation, so we don't have any streaming issues, which I'll talk about later also.   So I'm going to see if I can see any of these pages. And now I'm going to search the Chinese internet. And we're going to see actually how fast it loads without using a VPN. Look at that. It's pretty efficient, actually, when you're not trying to get outside. These are some Baidu's the search engine. Doban is actually kind of like a music site. Taobao is the shopping site. As you can see, this is the Chinese internet. So now I'm going to take you through Taobao a little bit. Just pay really close attention also to the aesthetics of this page.  Right now I'm looking at movies. Now I'm going to look up cell phones. You can see how fast. You can see my options. You can see advertisement aesthetics on the side. OK, so now I'm actually just looking at men. And I want to pause it right here. So actually what I typed in was actually just the word for man. And as you can see, I've got some really interesting products for men. The thing is that in terms of how you can find even things you need, like certain products, if there are products like this, you can't just type in dildo and find it. So there's even a way about finding certain products online. So that comes into play with sort of creatively going through how to exist on this Chinese internet. So let's look at some of these products. Well, so pornography may be illegal in China, but toys are not. So these are just a few examples. And I'm kind of previewing this because I want you to understand that the culture is incredibly vibrant and everyone has the same desires. So there's options. However, actually if you notice back there, I don't know if I can go back because I've been having trouble with the video. But you notice how there were stickers on and kind of censoring certain parts of the image. I want you to keep that aesthetic in mind because we're going to talk about that again also. Let's see. So now I'm looking up Germany. And look at all the beer. Some of it's real German beer, most of it's fake German beer. And just in case you need some birthday shampoo, we have that in China also. I tailored this for the Germans. This is a streaming. I'm going to kind of stop soon just to show you how fast video also streams. Yoku is basically like YouTube. And it's pronounced Yoku, not Yoku, by the way. So yeah, you can see that video actually streams quite quickly. Yeah, we got some dancers. Yeah, I think you get the idea of the aesthetic and kind of what it's like, the differences between trying to access the Western web in China versus actually just existing on the local platform. So let's move in and talk about what that means. So the Chinese internet. I like to call it the Chinternet. Essentially, it's obviously a cross of Chinese and internet. And essentially, it means an internet with Chinese characteristics. That's what we're going to kind of talk a lot about today. Now, the thing that we have to understand is it has its own ecosystem. It has its own existence in a way of doing things. So instead of Facebook and Twitter, we have Weibo and QQ. Instead of Google, we have Baidu. YouTube, Yoku, eBay and Etsy, Taobao, Alibaba. WhatsApp, WeChat. So everything that you have outside of the Chinese internet exists inside of the Chinese internet. So this idea that it's a desolate or barren or empty landscape is very untrue. And that's what I really want to talk to you about today. So the biggest difference at this point in the history of the Chinese internet is that it actually mostly exists on a device like this. So thinking about that, if you think about most of us in this room, probably first access the internet through a very large computer. It was expensive. It was slow. It was dial-up. So we had a certain expectation for how to surf the internet, right? At this point in China's history, the majority of people experiencing the internet for the first time are experiencing it through a mobile device. So their expectation for how they interact, for how they maneuver through things, the speed at which it goes is very different from most of us. We also have to consider this. So this is a really funny advertising from WeChat, which is one of the biggest mobile app platforms. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger. And in this, it basically says that they are going to change the world. And that's kind of what I'm going to talk about. So that moves me on to my research, which is partly anthropological and also partly performative. I call it the Chinternet Archive. So to explain the Chinternet Archive, what I use is something called People Nearby. And it's a function in the app that lets me use the location-based services of my device and access other people. And I think it's around 1,000 kilometer or 1,000 meter radius. So it's very location-based. A lot of what I've collected for this archive has come from places like Beijing and Shanghai, Guilin, Shenzhen, Xi'an. I think there's like six different Chinese cities, also Korea, Texas, now Germany. So what I'm showing you is how I access this. So if I were to go and view People Nearby, this is what I would find in different areas. So it becomes very interesting the fact that it is location-based. Because everywhere I go, I find out new things about how people interact with this app. And exactly what is their relationship to China? Because this is a Chinese app. It is owned by a Chinese internet company. So it is a part of the Chinternet. So here's San Antonio, Texas, where I was briefly before I came here. And here's Germany. And what I found in Germany is actually it's mostly German men and a lot of Turkish, Iraqi people, which I wasn't surprised. WeChat has a reputation in the Middle East already. So I wanted just to give you an idea of how this happens. And I kind of go through and I start looking through profiles. Any profile that has, it tells me that I can look up to 10 posts, which means they've kept their account open. So I go through and I collect images in open accounts like this or profile images. So they're all public images. So what do I do with these images? Well, I'm looking for patterns and collections. And I'm trying to find out what's going on in China in the virtual world. A lot of times you can view what I am as sort of a documentarian. So I'm a documentary photographer because a lot of these are actually screenshots. This is an example, again, to look at the aesthetic of the Chinese internet. We have a lot of busyness, a lot of color, a lot of bling, a lot of different text in the same image. It's a little overwhelming. One of the artists that I work with is her name's Ying Mao. I'll talk about her later. She likes to describe the Chinese internet as an internet ecstasy. So let's keep that in mind as we move forward. So what do I find in most? I'm going to show you a few sets of things I find quite often. And one of them, oh, actually, we're going to talk about graphics. I'm sorry. So again, here we're just reinforcing that internet ecstasy feeling. Notice all the hearts. And actually, this is what an open moments page looks like. So if I can go into an account, this is what I'm looking at. And then below that will be the posts that they make. OK, this is a really great example. We have a few things going on here. We have a Chinese lamp. We have some roses, some Christmas candles and presents. And what does it say? It says, greetings. Good morning, good morning. It says, good morning in two ways. It's all Shanghai and so on. Same meaning. But they decided that it was necessary to say it twice. So again, this gives you an idea of how things get mixed up. And it's this piecing together when it comes to aesthetics. So this is probably a retailer. And she's probably selling beads like this. What she's using to make this edited part is a Chinese app called Mateus Yousiu. I've used it a lot myself. And guess what? Chinese people use it a lot, too. So this is a very common aesthetic, is this sort of overload. And if we think about that early Taobao page where everything was blinging and everything was boom, bam, whatever, it starts to translate in every part of life in China. But I think it's really quite special. He's saying, like, have a great time. He is, look, he's having a great time. So now let's say we're going to have a traditional picture. We still need to have some chaos. If you notice, all the different patterns everybody's wearing on their shirts. And if you also notice the background, we have bling on the background. So you can escape this. It's beautiful. So this is actually a photograph I took in the park. I like to spend a lot of time in the park because I think what I do on the Chinese internet is kind of like it's a virtual landscape. So often I look at what I do is if it's like a virtual street that I'm walking down. And I'm seeing things. But sometimes for me to understand those things, I actually need to exist in real life, which is why I live in China. So I spend a lot of time at the park because it gives me a really nice place to see a lot of diverse types of people. So do you notice his aesthetic, this mismatching in his shirt and its chaos? So this internet aesthetic exists in the physical form. It is everywhere. OK? So we're going to talk about that more later, too. So I'm telling a little story. So if you haven't gotten that yet. So what are some other things that I have in my archive? Lots of hearts. So this is a funny one because to play a lot of the way that things work on the Chinese internet is word play and number play. So in this case, 520 is in Chinese, Hu Arling. But it sounds a little bit like I love you in Chinese, which is why me. So they've decided that if you make 520, it means I love you without actually having to say it or use the characters. So this is internet speak in China. And it's interesting because in WeChat, it allows you sometimes during like Valentine's Day or different holidays. If you type 520, little hearts will float down the screen. It's very interactive. Also something to consider. The experience online in China is very interactive. Moving on. So someone made a nice dinner for his love. And there's crabs and a heart candle. Somebody's decided that their dog needs a heart. Food in shapes of heart. Roses. Shrimp. This is a particularly beautiful one, I think. They get very, very creative with their hearts, let me tell you. See, we could even, why not on your desktop, have one? And why not post an actual heart? This is a heart of a 38-year-old woman. So that moves into another portion, which is how actually explicit posts can be. There's not the same kind of censoring for gruesome things. So it's very interesting. I find a lot of injuries. Like I find a lot of people posting injuries. Very vivid ones. In the far left, they're very straight lines. So it's kind of, yeah. It could be self-induced. I also find a lot with IVs in the hospital. So these are common. And that moves into the hand ones. I have so many images like this. And they're very random. It's like an object in their hand. Sometimes their hand is doing something. Sometimes the object's doing something. Sometimes they're just holding it. But what I really want you to pay attention to is how actually when you start to look at these, it almost looks like you're entering that space yourself. It has this perspective of virtual experience, like that first person. So let's keep that in mind also. So this is the circle of life. Yeah, I don't know why I find this quite often also. Food. You'll notice on the second middle row, there's a nice one that's a little surprising. You don't catch that usually. I get to see in people's houses. So I get to see what their house looks like, what kind of technology they're using. This is a whole series of TVs, which I'm going to move into the houses a little bit. I get to have a very intimate perspective of how people are living in China. And it's varied actually. I have images inside of migrant homes or migrant dormitories, inside of student dormitories, inside of very, very wealthy people. So there's a very huge economic diversity in the country as well. The aesthetic we saw earlier, it's kind of happening here too, right? Do you see it? Not as extreme, but it's there. So here's some other ones. There's always pictures of food. This one's quite funny. He's got a bottle, Yes, My Wine. But I don't think it's actually the original name, because that looks like a sticker on top of the original label. And the Chinese name is actually Ye Mai Diou, which sounds like Yes, My Wine. So it's sort of a funny wordplay.  So this is a really interesting cultural pairing, because wine is not a traditional, red wine is not a traditional alcohol beverage of China. It's something imported. We also have Tylenol, also something imported, and something very traditional, which is the chicken feet. And beautiful, beautiful still lives of all kinds of interesting objects. I'm sort of showing this because in the archive there's also a lot of different qualities of resolution, which can reveal to me demographic as well, what kind of phone they have. This is a beautiful still life also. So I'm going to kind of move into Apple products or also something very heavily made fun of in China by Chinese people, because it's a status thing. So I'll just quickly go through these. We have a few iPhone 7. That's a nice one. So yeah, some more technology. These are webcams in different. Most of these are from gaming, like internet cafes. People covering. This kind of comes back to the topic of when people do want to censor themselves, because they do know the degree of which images are used, they will do it intentionally. And they use different apps to do that in kind of funny ways. She's done an interesting job here. It says hey, hey. And it's a smiley face next to it. She's also blurred out everything around her. These are also some important things to consider. Face, there's a heart again. So this is Tianjin.  And that's the only thing I want you guys to actually be able to see some artwork also. But I am going to talk about this meme, which is quite funny. There was one day, not too long ago, we had many weeks of smog. And then there was this glorious rainbow. And everybody's feet looked like this in Beijing, just over and over and over of rainbows. So actually, one artist in my feed made a beautiful rainbow picture in honor of it. And what was interesting about this was that the meme only lasted as long as the sun set. By the time the sun had actually set, all of the images, all of the jokes, all of the pictures were basically gone. And what was left was this amazing GIF animation. For a meme that only lasted two hours max. It's pretty good, really. So money is really big, lots of money, piles of money especially. Monies and phones also really big. Notice that they're Apple phones, although they could be fake ones, I'm not sure. So these are collections that I do. I post every day in my WeChat moments to sort of, as a daily performance of showing and revealing and learning more about these images as an archiving collection. So it's been installed actually at E-Project Space, which is owned by German and Hungarian women, in a show called Wang Wang Wang, which is internet, internet, internet. I typically will install it on a mobile device and so people can come in and they're actually can witness it because I post every day. So it's a performance in real time. So that brings me to the art portion, which I'm thinking I still have time for. I started a project as a result of this. The archive began because my research partner, Gabrielle DeSetti, he's actually a media anthropologist specifically focused on Chinese internet. And he was the one that introduced me to all of this. We started a band and then we started researching. But he proposed that we write a paper looking at Chinese selfies initially. And so I spent, that's how the archive started actually two years ago. And I spent eight months with just collecting selfies. During that time I realized I wanted to understand more because there was all this amazing stuff happening. And that's how it became what it is. And so the archive now is about 20,000 or more images. So it's a small data, but it's very telling and revealing as you saw earlier. And this influenced, I was already researching artists dealing with technology in China because I come from an internet background, tech art background. And the Chinese internet is a whole new landscape. And I was getting bored of the Western web. And I thought to myself, man, this is a whole new place that we don't know anything about. And I bet there's some interesting art happening too. So I moved to China four years ago to do this. And then started this archive two years ago, which is basically the pairing of the archive and the work with artists is, excuse me, important because I have a very in-depth cultural perspective of what's happening in China that influences, for influences in how I can understand the art and what's being expressed and why. And that's very important to understand. So I started Netizenet. And it's actually a play, Netizen, which is citizen and internet, came out of 1984. Not the book, but life. And at the time it was a word coined in the West for unified web freedom. But for some reason they used this word to describe Chinese internet users because when internet sort of entered China, it was a unified experience. It was the first time the country could sort of connect across all over the place and sort of voice and share their ideas and opinions and anything else. And so this is why they were referring to, they refer to Chinese netizens, okay? So a play on that. To make the Chinese name, because I need a Chinese name, it's Wang Yao Wang, which is just internet friend network. And what that actually translates to, it's referring to the early years of BBS boards and chat groups, right? A lot of people made very, very close friends on the internet in the early years. So with Netizenet, I'm looking at a lot of things and I started commissioning. New Hive was supporting some of this. I'm moving a lot into interviews. My biggest thing is I like to interview these artists and ask things like, when do you remember hearing about the internet? What's the first piece of technology? I'm very interested in creating a timeline of experience with the history of technology in China also. So my first artist was Ying Miao and she did a nice little show online for us and she named it Meanwhile in China, which is a Western meme, but so in love, we'll never feel tired again. And it's quite, so tired is spelled wrong and that was a chinglish accident that she made and then we decided to keep it because it was very appropriate. So she did, I'm not gonna talk about all of it, but she did one piece where we ended up splitting the screen. This is a video that comes from this meme. There was a meme with a kid born in the 90s who wrote like, so in love, we'll never feel tired again and ended up becoming viral. And then somebody, this is an example of a website called billybilla.com, which allows people to stream their own videos and then comments just run across. It's very interactive, right? So she splits it, it's actually in Youku and in YouTube. And so when you're in China, you can't see the YouTube side. And when you're in the Western world, Youku loads very, very slowly. So this piece specifically is straddling both internet at the same time. If you wanna see it, I'll give you the website later and you can go through it. So the one thing, actually, the first piece that she did dealing with the internet was in 2007 called the blind spot. She spent three months taking a dictionary, Chinese dictionary and a list of Google censored words and blanked them out. So this is the first piece I'd ever found that was really directly dealing with what the internet was in China at that time. That was in 2007, which leads me to Fenya. She was doing some screen paintings in 2008. And this one is particularly interesting because if you notice, it's a Google CNN. In 2010, Google left China because they were not into the censorship issue or censorship laws that were going into place and they routed everything to Hong Kong. So this is a really interesting piece because it's documenting a screen that no longer exists for a very specific reason. And she's gaming. So that interactivity thing is a really big thing to understand about the Chinese internet. It's an experience. This is Wei Yi Li and she's quite interesting because she is the first artist who's also curating works online. She has an online gallery called, sorry, called bigbadgallery.com. She does some really interesting projects. So if you wanna know it later, ask me. So this piece is called Oriental Giants and she actually, what she does, I can try to access it. She might not load. We've been having trouble with loading. Basically what she did is sort of like an open source crowd surfing project where she's trying to get people to send her images and information about giant Mao Zedong statues around the country and she's creating a statistical map. Ironically on Google Maps of things of these giant Mao statues all over the country. And this is interesting. So Katie's is actually an American and she's working on a project called Human Spam. The biggest experience with mobile device is the way that information is flooded.   So she was doing some pieces where she was actually spamming everyone and like only regurgitating information. And this is a play on sort of when you lose the search engine actually and you don't have that browser to go explore the internet and you're functioning mostly in something like WeChat. Everything becomes, oh, what happened? Did I press something? Yeah, I don't know. Well, so this is ah-ha-ha-ha. So it's kind of funny that it's laughing at us. I don't know what happened. It's... Yeah. Thanks, guys. Let me find where I was. Anyways, so her work with Human Spam is basically this idea that if you're... You know, if you lose the search engine then basically you're losing like that exploratory factor to go and find things. And so what happens is information just gets like regurgitated. It's in cycles. So it kind of feels like this. You're just seeing all this same stuff over and over again. That's kind of what it feels like on the Chinese internet now. This is something she did. I can play very quickly playing on this. And it just shows you the interactivity. So she types in... She pastes from somebody else's miss you. And this is... See? When you say certain things, stuff flies down the screen. So like I said, the experience is very much about interactivity, which means the virtual world is a very special place and means you're always connected together and never logging off. So that virtual world experience and that real life experience are exactly the same thing. That's very different from the West. We may think that we're always logged on, but not like this. I promise you. So this is Aspartime. They did another piece commissioned by New Hive for Net-a-Cinette. And they're playing on this idea. It's called Nine Computer Exercises for the 21st Century Online Digital Interactive Era, which is a great title. And it's based off of this idea in Chinese. There's daily routine and daily practice. It's a part of the culture. And so they're sort of playing on this digital era and the idea of how do we exist when this is that reality, when we are always interacting, when we're always online. This is an example of the piece. So it gives you instructions. Each slide gives you instructions. So, yeah. They also did some pieces. We're using Taobao, where they were called ideas, and they would ask people to make art for them.  This one's quite funny. They're asking someone to buy this piece by and make it themselves.  Again, that's an artist playing off of that interactivity. I asked them about Cheng Yu as a traditional idiom or poem in four characters, and I asked them to make one up for the Chinese internet. So they have xuamiya mozuo, which is mysterious. You can't imagine how deep it is, difficult to guess or comprehend. This is a Chinese person's perspective of the internet in China. This is happening right now by performance artists Beyo and Funa Ye, which we saw earlier. She did that Google CN painting. They're doing it through an app called 51rebo.com, which is like a domestic live streaming so you can have your own like reality show. What I want to show you, these are some screenshots. So what you're seeing here is that virtual and real world paired together. So they took, actually this is a friend who did this. This is an image she took at the studio while they were recording. And she realized it didn't have that right aesthetic. So she went and blurred it and she used xu-su-mu-mu and basically blurred the whole thing to make it feel right. And she did this in the digital realm because then she could share it properly on the internet. This is actually just what the scene in the live broadcastings actually look like. Okay, so that physical, that virtual, they're all real. They're the same thing. This is what the app looks like when you're featuring it. And again, it's interactive. Everyone's bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, giving you images, giving you content. It's super sensory overload. So Wang Niu Wan is interesting for her quote. I'm sorry I'm rushing. I kind of over-prepared. I asked her what she considered herself and she said that she saw herself in different physical forms and identities in the virtual world. And she sees herself actually becoming less and less in real life and more integrated online. So I'm seeing this consistently with artists working with technology. The body is losing the entire meaning. Identity is losing meaning and the virtual existence or the reinvention or creation that comes with virtual life is primarily what they're sort of moving into. Which if you think about what we saw earlier, digitizing the real life, like that seamlessness of virtual and physical and the way that something like WeChat is everything, it's centralized. You can have boyfriends and girlfriends and get taxis, pay your bills. So that leads me to Wang Xin thinking about that virtual world. She did an 8 hertz hypnosis lab thinking about that mind focusing on that mind and actually losing the body. Also looks very chinter-net right inside. So she does hypnosis and she's actually moving more into VR with Oculus now. And I asked her about what this experimentation is about and what she wants to create and she's working on at the moment is VR hypnosis. She wants to actually basically have an entire experience that's entirely mental and dimensional on many different levels of perception. It's not just hypnosis, it's about going and sort of figuring out the issues or dealing with issues, right? So that leads me to my conclusion. This is also from the archive. What I'm leading to is that this is actually an example for all of us of what's sort of happening in the world as we continue to advance with mobile technology. It's not a doomsday thing, it's just a reality we have to consider about what this means in legislature, in choices, in production of materials, all of these things. So basically this says that the internet is like opium 100 years ago, 100 years now, 100 years later.  However, it's in a traditional It's not simplified Chinese, it's traditional. So I don't know if this could actually be in Hong Kong or Taiwan maybe, or very far south, because in mainland we use simplified usually. You know, China is the first country in the world to actually officially say that internet addiction is a serious psychological problem. I see it every day. Again, we have that pairing side of the digitizing of real life and real life wanting to become a cyborg. These are also from my archive. What I'm trying to say is that in this massive archive I'm seeing these trends emerging. I'm seeing how life is becoming digital and virtual and less and less physical. And as we can see here he's already ready. And he's like thinking about it. He's like, I'll try this on. So what do we do with this idea? Well, I think there comes a little of this first. I think first we need to keep a sense of humor. And as we can see from a lot of some of the memes and some of the content that I've shown, the Chinese internet has a great sense of humor, actually. So even considering everything that is happening and that it's a walled garden, it is flourishing. It has its own digital landscape and it's affecting creativity in very fascinating ways. And that's actually what I am most interested about my studies. It's looking at how do limitations actually begin to emerge new ideas or experiences. And the reality is the entire world is digital. And so we all need to be considering what direction we take with this. And I suppose it's thank you in Chinese. All right. We have plenty of time left for questions and answers. So if you have questions about the very interesting Chinese internet, please come to one of the soil mics in the room. So everybody can hear you. And I think we'll start with a question from the interwebs. Yes. The internet would like to know, is it common for Baidu to track and analyze one user's or web user's behavior for statistics like Google analytics does or like it's done in the western world, I guess. Sorry. I didn't understand. The question is, is it common for Baidu to track and analyze one user's behavior? Yeah. I don't know. I don't study Baidu. I mean, I study user interactivity in WeChat. So I'm specifically looking at how people exist in this app. So that's not my specialty. I'm sorry. Thank you. All right. Then we move to the mic over there. Is this on? Thanks for this. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about where children who were addicted to gaming or just the internet in general were putting these boot camps, military style boot camps in order to break them of the habit, could you speak a little bit more of how the culture, the older generation and the younger generation are kind of interacting over the internet and technology and their creativity as well. So there are a lot of older people that are interacting in WeChat for sure. So it's becoming commonplace. And part of that is because most business is done, a lot of business, not most. I'll say a lot of business is done through WeChat. The centralization of the app also plays into this virtual, like, constant virtual experience because you can pay your rent. You can have a virtual girlfriend and boyfriend, a virtual secretary. You can use people nearby for hooking up. You can chat, video chat, group chat. There's retailers, people sell everything. So in terms of that interactivity I see mostly like older people, they tend to be businessmen or retailers. So they're using it specifically for e-commerce. With younger people it's definitely more about sharing and broadcasting. Quite funny, I had a retailer WeChat friend and she put me in a mother's group of 100 Chinese women once. And it was immensely fascinating. It was like every morning at 7am they're all talking about what they're going to feed their kids, what kind of detergent they should use, like where can they buy this or that. So the group chats are really functioning as discussion platforms for people to connect and solve. Solve issues in their life. And also to share information. Does that help? Yeah, great, thank you. Cool. Then we'll just stick with that, Mike. Your question please. Thank you for a great talk. It was very interesting. I have a question. Could you please say a bit about online dating in China? What is the perspective? How do people, both men and women know something about it? I mean, in your study. From the perspective of a foreign woman? No, I mean, professionally you do study internet, so that's what I meant actually. I don't know personally, I don't use any Chinese dating apps. They are used, I mean, with my experience, when I first started the archive, actually my profile was a Chinese woman, like a very beautiful Chinese woman. And so I was doing this because I really wanted to see what kind of natural interactions were happening. And sure enough, two years ago it was just lists and lists of men contacting me. Very rarely was it women. So I'm finding that definitely this people nearby function is used for dating and while I've been in Germany and other parts of the world using it, I see the same thing. Because I don't know that a lot of Germans maintain people nearby function in Germany for Chinese business because I'm finding it's mostly Germans or Turkish or Middle Easterns and that tells me it looks like it's more interactive for dating. In Texas it was weirder because my profile is still ambiguous and they thought I was Chinese so it was a lot of white men contacting me in broken, chinglish, like in broken characters I think thinking I'm Chinese. In terms of other areas I'm not familiar I don't use Chinese dating apps so I can only give my perspective so yeah. Is that okay? Perfect, then switch over to the other side of the room. I would like to ask you if you're sure that you haven't been trolled maybe by the culture because if I was looking at my timeline and the regular timelines of maybe professional Twitterers that would be the same cultural discrepancy I would say. So you're saying that I'm trolling? No, no, no. Being trolled. Yeah, it's like image board culture compared to maybe Facebook or well maybe like 9Gag, it's a bit more intense maybe. I mean again it comes back to the purposes for use are going to be different in China because the cultural context is different so if the apps used for centralization of most experiences the reason I know that the men contacting me are interested in hookup is because of the things that they say. No, I mean Did I misunderstand? No, I didn't reflect on that in the talk itself in general. About, I'm sorry? About the talk itself. Oh, the talk itself? About trolling? No, the images you showed maybe they were just not serious. Well yeah, I mean a lot of the images are incredibly playful but that's a part of the culture that's a part of online experience is not being serious and humorous. Yeah, I guess. It's a part of the meme culture. I'm sorry I don't understand the question. Alright, then we'll maybe move to another question from Twitter, IRC. IRC would like to know if you have experience or comments on Chinese image boards. Chinese like BBS boards? Yeah. I can't talk about that. Sorry. For a number of reasons. I will say this I will say this. From what I understand like many of the artists that I interviewed about their early experiences like BBS boards were the first sort of point of interaction. And you didn't have streaming sites in the beginning so everything was sort of shared with links and links and people would create portals outside of the Chinese web and send links to share certain kinds of content through BBS boards. So I guess that was made for Chinese men who want to pick up white girls and so they give you they all talk about giving each other advice of how to get a foreign girl for Chinese men. So it's, yeah. Sounds nice. Another question from... I guess that is your dating question also. Hang on a second. I think your mic is not on yet. Just repeat the question please. Do you think that the opposite side like if there is a Chinese person doing the same thing for the western internet? I don't know. Actually I haven't. Is there? Does anyone know? I think it would be very hard because for me to collect this amount of image you have to have a database and a function that allows you to collect images in this way that's location based. So the fact that it's a radius of people when I turn on people nearby means that the characteristics the kind of images I'm getting are based on location. So when I was in Korea I'm finding images that relate to why Chinese people are in Korea. A lot of it's like buying makeup so there's tons of piles of hotel rooms with makeup everywhere in suitcases. Now imagine if I went to places like Africa where China is actually investing in infrastructure and you have a lot of Chinese workers building railroads things like this I would also have a very particularly location based sense content that tells me what's happening in Africa in relationship to China and that's what's quite interesting is we have this idea of the Chinese internet being something only based in China but like I said WeChat is still the Chinternet. It's still Chinese internet with characteristics of Chinese culture it's related and it's based in China and it's mobile and so that begins to show us actually what China has on a much larger global scale because it's a location based feature. Okay alright then switch over there. I would expect that people interact quite differently online depending on audience whether they're talking to their work colleagues or their family or their friends could you maybe talk about how that affects the visual styles and how they behave? Yeah I mean I have people in my feed that I don't want to see things so you can actually block people from seeing your moments and this is the really interesting function of the fact that WeChat is also group chats and individual chats so what actually happens is these individualized groups exist and they're formatted or they become about topics or a group of people with shared interests and so that becomes the you know putting everything in little boxes that's part of it. I've also talked to young Chinese students and there's I know a few that they use QQ more with their friends and they use WeChat more with their parents and that seems to be the difference in platform allows them to separate that as well Yeah Okay perfect Thanks for your talk I have a short question Did you experience any situation when a Chinese person was so surprised by let's say kind of western content? Did you show anything which is special for let's say western internet to the Chinese person and it seemed so weird as this stuff seemed weird for us? I'm trying to think because you know a lot of the kind of people I would show that to would be artists or like very open minded creative people and most of them already have VPNs most of them have already studied abroad typically because it's an education class thing I think that's the other thing we have to consider is that when we talk about people who are really walled in this world garden they're of a certain class because when you do have a certain education background or you come from a certain demographic you have opportunity to travel and so you get experience on western webs and then if you come back to China you want to stay connected to your new western friends so you have things like VPNs or you just use WeChat because WeChat you know the reason I use it is because it's the quickest most reliable way to stay in touch without me having to use that slow VPN so that's also something to consider it sort of like jumps over that wall a little bit thanks okay you have the mic to the right please yeah also thanks a lot for the talk it was super interesting that you showed this kind of parallel internet but then in terms of the very similar to well western that art and how much do you think these two influence each other yeah because ultimately a lot of these artists who are working the art market landscape in China is still very very traditional so artists who are working with technology or the internet are the much younger generation and so they're already a little internet savvy and are familiar with the western webs so yeah of course they've been influenced so what happens is like we have a global aesthetic now across the web we all sort of adopt you can see this if you go to like most cities hipster culture exists everywhere in Africa in South America in China like so there is sort of a global aesthetic and so those influences still exist in China which is why you're seeing some similarities I would say the differences come in the platforms themselves or the cultural context for example their personal influences or something like using WeChat that are very Chinese specific but yeah okay I see one more question from the other side last image that you showed to me was kind of very political in the sense that it referenced the great the century of great humiliation and then it referenced like traditional imagery no traditional lettering could you talk more about the political context of that image or if there was one I mean I don't see the political context most of the time in images like that because I'm like images like that are very common and they're commonly posted like Chinese people use meme like imagery to sort of comment on those kinds of things and so it's almost like a solidarity factor it's like this is the situation that we're in what let's laugh about it and that's a part of feeling like we all get it now what's going to I mean what's happening I think there's you know it's a country that's changing incredibly fast and when you have an economy that moves that fast it's a little bit ahead of society in terms of the way of thinking and so there's like lag I think there was what Alvin told future shock I don't know if you've ever read this book it's this idea of like you have the people who are like ahead and then there's this this society that's moving at a certain speed and certain technological advances or societal things are ahead of us and then humans are not quite ready for it and so it becomes this like shock of the future at the speed I sometimes feel like that in China sometimes I really feel like I'm existing in an alternative future and I think everyone feels this and it's going by very it's really really fast and so what happens is it ends up being translated into like endless endless memes like this that also talk about politics and that's the easiest way to talk about politics is with humor that's yeah thanks sure so I don't see any more questions in the room but we have another one from the internet the internet would like to know what is your favorite Chinese cinematic movie my current Chinese favorite Chinese cinematic movie I don't I don't like Chinese movies that's the truth I'm sorry okay yeah then there's another room question I was wondering in terms of censorship and this being a very big platform if you have any data on how things are censored on on any topic of that yeah so some background on me I actually I gripped in Saudi Arabia in my early childhood but my parents are Americans so when you're a foreigner in Saudi Arabia in the 80s you're monitored pretty extremely so I grip with a very like high awareness for this and so self censorship is something very natural to me which is also why I was interested in the Chinese internet generally censorship happens with the person first like it's really a there's parts of like the internet for example they realize very fast that in Weibo that if you you know typed certain text it could easily code could be written to basically censor that very quickly right so to get creative they realized oh you could have a JPEG of text and this could spread around really fast before it was taken down so that innovation there's a lot of that comes out is this creative innovation to deal with the situation it plays on language it plays on formats and then it plays in memes again these memes sort of become something that generate the solidarity of experience so yeah it always starts with self censorship to be honest thanks okay so I don't see any more questions and we are almost out of time so thanks again Michelle