called over and over again they were still a refusal so how many of us dropped our landlines because at&t refused service i'm just wondering there's been a serious decline in how many people have landlines how many people like myself couldn't afford to have both alternatives and had to cut their phone off which i did which i regret at this point and i want my landline back because half the time my phone doesn't work so thank you for your time thank you very much my name is rick my cloud i live in a post can you hear me all right i sure appreciate you coming out i think you must be in a terribly tough position but i do appreciate your effort i want to say first there's no cell service at our house to radiation uh uh we know we won't resolve that debate today but my housemate suffers acutely extremely from emf and cell tower radiation so her concern is that any new landline she wants a real landline she needs a real landline not one that just mimics a landline with a little bit of a wireless gap there's got to be a real landline uh all right it's just our power is going out all the time or there are a couple failures on that uh cell failure right when hg has tried to get out of the landline business all cell phones failed last week uh also a failure that did not make the news our landlines could not reach any rise in the cell phone for uh five days uh never figured out i called both a gt and rise in and neither one of them day after day after day i could find any information on a major failure uh so and then lastly uh oh so i won't make sure any landline whatever alternative future fiber whatever is free of radiation and immune power outages that's our must haps and lastly um who defines the viable alternative and it wouldn't be possible to get your phone number but we don't want to go through all that AT&T uh run around did you have a phone number you can offer us thank you very much thank you my name is Becky Steinbrunner um our family has one of the very few landlines left in our rural Santa Cruz mountains neighborhood in an area that is blue on your map and uh there is no alternative there is no cell phone service and i like it that way i also suffer from emf problems and it's very hard to be here but i'm here because this is important um i don't trust AT&T to say that we'll take care of it because AT&T has not maintained the landline cables over the years for the last 15 years there was a and this the PUC reported that in 2019 and said that AT&T and frontier had allowed through neglect that the the lines and service had deteriorated that report was kept confidential until 2020 when CPUC said you have to give a public report redacted of that and that was verified that AT&T has not maintained the lines we have paid for the service but we have not received the service our landline has become very noisy um when it rains and um when repairmen do come out we we have to wait usually a month after we call in with the problem for anyone to come out but they can't figure it out because the lines are in such bad shape there's no way they can isolate the problem so i want to um say that probably some of the reason people have dropped to the services because it is such poor service it is reliable service it's better than nothing but it's got to be maintained and i'm asking AT&T to maintain the service also a lot of people on fixed incomes have been forced to drop it i want to bring out that there has been a 17 page motion for dismissal of your application filed by the CPUC advocates office and nobody's talking about that that was discussed at the hukai meeting thank you thank you mr amber is there anyone in chambers who is not already spoken on this item that would like to speak at this time if so please step up to the podium okay saying none uh we'll go back to online to see if there's anyone who has not already spoken on this item that would like to speak who's joining us online today yes sir we have speakers caller user one your microphone is now available the main challenge is to the structural domination of the corporate state there has never been more corporate power in this case AT&T than in our society today um i i would like that phone number i just heard stated by the AT&T rep that anyone who wants a phone copper landline in our area they can she would facilitate it give out this number as rick mclean just requested give it out now i know people who have tried to get a copper landline and they were refused i'm calling you on my only phone my copper landline by the way item eight also has to do with AT&T making more profit cell phone microwave radiation makes me ill as do the multi sources of radiation emitting wi-fi antennas 5g pole and ocean and water laptops etc at the county government building having attended board meetings in person for over 20 years warning and providing documentation of cell towers smart meter radiation harm um which you have evidence you have studiously disregarded i am relegated to phoning into the meetings now i did go into the building briefly on february 2nd to deliver hand deliver five copies of a formal protest of AT&T the application to remove landlines filed by nina beady you each have copies of that the AT&T rep talks about um alternatives in the protest i submitted page five copper landline is the only appropriate voice and thank you miss carol caller uses 7780 your microphone is now available hello can you hear me yes we can hear you yes this is craig shatterton um thank you very much for the information it's useful uh but let's come back to the fact that the AT&T says that they're relying on the maps in the tpu c my main big question here is why is mobile service considered to be an option alternative given the fires earthquakes and power issues we have all the reliability issues on mobile why isn't the alternative restricted to say copper or fiber which are much more reliable and going to be much closer to the liability issues liability factors that we get today from our landlines so if the if AT&T were instead restricting their blue areas to those that have fiber or cable i suspect the the numbers of people that they would see as being already served would be much lower and much more representative of what's really available so i want to know why AT&T considers mobile to be an alternative all right and there are issues with fiber and copper meaning power reliability when it goes down but that's one issue secondly why isn't color separated from the issue of serviceability if AT&T wants out of service find another carrier that will provide color that would be a much more palatable options for residents now we know we at least have someone who's on the hook and guaranteeing they're going to provide service self powers can be taken down or moved or deprecated at any point in time by the carrier they upgrade service levels and they reduce the range and now all of a sudden you can't get service color is very important and it really should be separated from service availability thank you very much and your microphone is now available thank you so much um justin your comments were fabulous and uh i just want to remind AT&T and and justin all you need to do is smile and say oh what about that lead cable in lake tahoe that's poisoning the lake and your lawyers are all wrapped up in court and everything and everyone's pointing fingers at one another and arguing about the removal of the lead cable from lake tahoe and all that water goes downhill to Reno sparks and to the fallen farmers and to the naval base out in the middle of Fallon Nevada and the pyramid lake native american tribe so you know AT&T doesn't have any shred of a record of being responsible to the communities here you know for in california or nevada so um i think you should question them about that thank you very much thank you david your microphone is now available thank you um there was a lot of discussion about the end of a life cycle of technology with regards to landline communications well i'm an engineer and i work in technology and well that's true for a particular application it's very rare that a particular technology ever ceases to be useful for specific applications for example today floppy disks are still used on bowie 747s to update the um the flight control software i was also in a previous life a navy someritor our communication last resort was very low frequency radio it was a wire that we pulled behind the submarine it was how we got our nuclear launch codes that technology is hundreds of years old and the navy still uses it today and operates a station that transmits in dixon california as i sit here today living in the santa cruz mountains it's hard for me to see how landline phone communication in its robust reliability in a power outage will will be replaced with a modern alternative modern alternatives represent better performance under different circumstances such as being in an urban environment potentially but you know much of santa cruz county at santa cruz mountains weren't represented by that kind of topography so i urge the board of supervisors to consider those facts thank you very much yeah that was our last caller okay well then i'll bring it back to uh well first i'll thank uh all the members of the public for the comments on this item want to bring it back to AT&T i know there are a number of questions that were asked about considering the consideration of bubbles as alternatives and why that's the case what about when power is out and how certain alternatives don't work when the power is out and then the maintenance of the current landline services among other comments and questions that were made but maybe that's a good starting point i'm i'm sorry sir can you can you repeat the question sure um there were a number of questions that were brought up by members of the public um one was asking about why is AT&T considering mobile as an alternative um and then another individual mentioned that when powers out um some of these alternatives don't work and so what are some alternatives that might be able to function if the powers out and then it sounded like there was a question about maintenance of current landlines and what is AT&T going to commit to in terms of that okay i'm gonna i'm gonna take the first one and then i'm my my brain's a little full so i'll ask you for help when we get to the second and third one but happy to take the first one which is why do we believe that wireless technology or wireless um is and why we believe it is an alternative to um pot's telephone service right so plain old telephone service or pots so um there are um seven seven out of ten adults um living in households have cell phones have chosen cell phones over pot's telephone lines so uh a lot of our technology a lot of um our businesses our daily lives um telehealth service government services are run over wireless technology so there's apps for this there's apps for that so many people have chosen um again i don't have a landline i have a cell phone so many people have chosen that as an alternative and so um there's fixed wireless there's wireless there's cable there's void there's fiber so there's many different product alternatives and that just happens to be one of them but we also recognize that it's you know it's not ubiquitous right wireless coverage is not ubiquitous it is very difficult to build cell antennas in some communities you you've heard here today that some people don't want them and so we get opposition when we attempt to put cell antennas up to provide better coverage there are people who don't who don't want that um and so it becomes a challenge for us in many jurisdictions to be able to get through the permitting process to place cell antennas so in some areas it's an alternative and other areas it may not be thank you and then with regards to the member of the public who was speaking to how when the power's out um the one benefit of landlines is that they still function and whether or not AT&T is exploring any type well-turned can maintain that similar function for when the power's out yeah so um so we so there there is you know if i call it a myth if i call it misinformation uh there is this idea that your your landline is going to work forever whether we have one day of power outage or 24 days of power out our our landlines are powered by what we have in our central offices so we have backup batteries in our central offices we also if if you are VoIP if you're a VoIP customer we can also bring a generator to the box on the corner and power that box because there's batteries in that box that provide service to your home but this idea that there's going to be an infinite amount of power coming to your landline because every time you go to it you you know you've picked it up and there's there is a dial tone um there is backup power regulations for our central offices it's not infinite so if we had a very um significant power outage there may be a time where we don't have backup power our requirement is 72 hours of power for our landlines that is our requirement so there is this idea that it's always going to work in perpetuity it's been on the wall for 60 years and it's going to work um so there is um there is a um this belief that my my landline is always going to work um that you know it may have worked um but there are situations where it doesn't if you're in a fire and you're you're working to escape a fire your landline is going to be burned in a fire your copper wire is burned your telephone I mean you're not going to have a landline do you have a mobile phone it's mobile you take it with you that's an option right um so and I guess the last question that came up um that I made note of from members of the public was just around AT&T's commitment to maintenance of service because it sounds like some people even got rid of their land because of the quality of service and within the COLA one of the obligations is that AT&T is supposed to maintain uh high quality of service so how should we you know if people are having issues do we have a call or what's kind of the approach that AT&T is going to take as it relates to maintaining quality of service for these landlines that currently exist right so the the service quality standards are set by the PUC and we work hard we strive to meet those standards um and if somebody has a problem with their phone line um they can reach to AT&T and set up a technician to come out and service those lines um none of that is changing our COLA obligation like I said is is still current and the designation is still on AT&T to remain right now as carrier plus resort and I guess since we'll have you all's contacts as well we can reach out to you if people are struggling with getting somebody to come out and service the land lines yes yes well with that um I'd like to see are there any further comments from board members on this item because I know we still have two more items in that I'm on closed session no thank you chair I think we're good okay well I just like to thank um Ms. Rihas and Ms. Saxon for taking the time to come and speak to the community and address on these items I think it's people very much appreciate your willingness to be available and to speak to us on this item so thank you all for your time today thank you very much and thank you to the members of the public who who came today to share their their voices their perspective with us thank you so with that I'd like to just check in with the board to see if board members want to take a quick break um or if we should just continue to power through I think we just got to keep going because all the people have been waiting yeah I think we're okay with I mean it's tough I think we should just keep going there's been people been waiting this entire time so okay but that then we will move on to item number eight which is considered status report on the progress of Santa Cruz County broadband activities accept and file the broadband strategic master plan and direct the information services department to return honor before September 24 2024 with an update as outlined in the memorandum of the director of information services and with that I'll invite up Tammy Wagle director of ISD. Thank you chair and members of the board I'm Tammy Weigel I'm the director of ISD with me today is Alan Piszczanik he is the head of our business analyst's office and he also worked on this strategic plan with me so glad to introduce him today as well so just briefly go over the agenda today we'll do a brief introduction on broadband quick review of the last strategic plan which was presented to the board I will do an overview of the grant programs that have come up in the last couple years around broadband then we'll dive into the broadband strategic plan I'd like to do a little bit of an update on the affordable connectivity program and its impact in Santa Cruz County review some of our activities that we are going to be engaging in the next six months some of our long-term deliverables and then kind of do an update of where broadband stands today as far as projects in Santa Cruz County so I think everyone here knows the importance of broadband I think that just the importance of communication during emergency events has really been expressed this morning um really we depend upon it with the fires with um all the other events communication whether it's through a phone or whether it's through broadband is increasingly important um the importance of broadband really came about during COVID that's when we really saw a push for reliable broadband because we had students working remotely we had people working remotely and also too we've seen the need for social inclusion so there are traditionally groups that have been on the wrong side of the digital divide so such as lower income individuals rural communities as we see today as well as seniors so back in 2015 the county planning department worked with design nine and presented the first broadband plan to the board this plan was a rapid assessment of existing broadband and it really was focused more on economic development with the following strategies to look at public private partnerships the use of existing middle mile infrastructure to expand business access to a last mile and middle mile is what the last mile what we get broadband to residents and businesses so that is like the connectivity back to the internet and then also there was a suggestion to build out dark fiber in open access middle mile and at that time it was estimated across a 2.2 million so since then there has been considerable interest and activity around broadband at both the state and federal level there are several federal and state programs that support broadband expansion in california that we are seeing being used in santa cruz county the first one i'd like to go over is the california band services fund better known as passive this is managed by the cpuc and it's funded using surcharges on revenues by carriers it's a recurring grant and so so as you'll see later on in this presentation several of the carriers slash isps have taken advantage of this grant opportunity to expand broadband there is also the california middle mile broadband initiative this is going to be managed by the california department of technology and it's funded by sb 156 which was the big um broadband bill at the state this includes approximately 70 miles of fiber in santa cruz county along highways 1 17 and 9 i will note that highway 9 was not originally included in this plan and so one of the things we did at the county level is we did reach out to the cpuc and the cdt to have it included because we know of the broadband issues that are up in the san lorenzo valley there is also the local area technical assistant grant or aka lada which is also managed by the cpuc this was funded through sb 156 to support technical assessments and engineering and this is what we use to in order to pay for our broadband strategic plan so there was no cost to the county finally there's a federal funding account which is last mile fiber program that's in accordance with sb 156 as well and it's administered by the cpuc under this 10.3 million was allocated for providers to santa cruz county to put in grant applications for and the big one that is coming up is of course bead which is the broadband equity and deployment program um this was authorized under the federal ii j a to provide high-speed broadband to underserved non-served areas and in california this is going to be managed by the cpuc we did hear on friday at a meeting that jimmy panetta and mbep hosted that right now the state plan has gone back to the nta for first approval it will be coming back to california for objections and so there's going to be an opportunity for what the state has stated for the county of santa cruz for us to be able to question the maps and also the proposal so there is going to be an open opportunity for citizens governments and cities to be able to comment on that plan so our strategic broadband plan 2023 again we looked at the increased focus and we knew that we needed to update the plan so we engaged a colombia telecommunications corp ctc to update the plan with the following goals we wanted to look at the effective use of grant funding we wanted to understand the broadband brand gaps we wanted to create mid and long-term plans for broadband in santa cruz county we also wanted to look at some short-term goals to have some short-term wins to be able to increase broadband to residents businesses and anchor institutions and also too we wanted to identify potential broadband partners and the current assets and anchor institutions within our county so i sd and ctc did an extensive analysis of the state of broadband of starting in late 2022 through 2023 so the data sources included along with talking to the isp slash carriers themselves we did extensive interviews with city and county governments we did interviews with educational institutions including the county office of education ucsc cabrillo and the library we did interviews with business groups we also did a survey of non-profit and business users we conducted speed tests which were on our website with residents and businesses we also did phone interviews with residents regarding broadband access and availability and we oversampled in those areas where we knew that there are broadband issues and we also took the existing data from federal and state resources so here were the strategic plan findings and there's more detail in the actual plan itself but this is kind of a summary the county while it's largely served by 120 which is considered the federal acceptable level for broadband only the coastal region about 28 percent have access to fiber broadband a significant portion of the county is limited to a single provider and that's about 38 000 households 21 households within our county lack high speed internet as we've heard today service reliability in rural and mountain region is a key issue especially during storm and other events there is a high reliance in our county on cable broadband and we're looking at kind of what we're putting the level at for our eventual planned goal is to provide 100-100 to the majority of residences and businesses right now the low figure on this is estimated at 537 million for a full fiber deployment so our recommendations for the first six months is we to continue to expand broadband we want to actually start conducting financial and business assessments for the planned use of bead including partnerships being able to join in with other grant opportunities looking at existing fiber and how we can use that and other sources of possible revenue we do want to continue to work with our regional carriers to improve internet access using a facilitation model we have started to establish relationships with them making sure that their grant applications do align with our needs and requirements here in the county and we're also working with the Monterey Bay economic partnership and that to tackle affordability issue as a region with Monterey and San Benito County we also I want to mention that we work with mbep on some of the grant applications through CASF so we're really trying to tackle this as a region as well so longer term we really what we want to do is pursue a cost effective hybrid approach to providing 100-100 which utilizes a mix of traditional fiber optics wire technologies satellite connections especially in those areas as we know where geography makes fiber only expensive and longer to deploy there is no one single answer to providing broadband so we know that we have to work with a variety of providers as well as a variety of solutions we also want to continue the research the potential for building county open access fiber that we could lease to carriers so that they actually the county would kind of a build it and they'll come approach and so one of the things that we're looking with the safety project that's going down so-called avenue with cdi is we worked with department of public works to actually provide more fiber than it's actually needed for that project that will be able to be able to lease out for less mile fiber to providers so ongoing we're going to as we said we're going to continue to engage with city governments and educational anchor institutions for upgrades and ongoing needs and requirements we all have the same requirements and so we want to make sure that we're not doing redundant activities and so one of the the really positive things that's come out of this study is that we have built up some relationships with those organizations and so that we can work together to get fiber to residents businesses and institutions we do want to take measures to encourage competition for broadband services to improve offerings and cost we want to facilitate conversations across relevant county departments to encourage efficient deployment of broadband technologies within our community and then also working with mbep as i mentioned before we want to continue to support grant applications for extending broadband in santa cruz county so i'd like to do take a moment and talk about the affordable connectivity program um the affordable connectivity program acp was a government initiative through the sec that came out during covet that was designated to help lower the cost of broadband service for eligible households and this was a huge step in the right direction for eliminating the digital divide so right now that program is only funded until 20 april 2024 and basically the fcc ended enrollment as of february 8th 2024 there are two bipartisan congressional bills that are proposed to extend acp with seven billion dollars that's hr 61 29 and 35 65 in the senate but they obviously are not have not moved forward if we were to lose acp about 11 000 households would be impacted if it was not extended so this means they run the risk of losing broadband access the biggest impact in our county to this would be within the 9507 6 we're looking at between 6 and 7 000 households that are on currently on acp and we are working with the moderate bay economic partnership with the california cetf to review alternative options for residents if acp is not extended and these would again be encouraging the carriers to provide entry-level options for these households that still maintain the level of broadband so i'm happy to announce that we have some really positive things that are happening with broadband right now within our county the map you see here shows that our our carriers and isps have been really diligent about applying for cast of grants but as you can see the almost our entire county except for the urban areas is covered in this map so on february 15 cruise io was awarded 5.6 million two for their equal access access summit to the sea and this also includes focus on areas that are less than 25 three for broadband and that's in man san mateo santa cruz santa clara and monterey counties and we were very glad to see this move forward surf net for county fiber which is a project for 11.8 million would provide last mile fiber at bear creek syante and empire grade this is pending approval and the cpuc may want to move this into their ffa grant so under the federal funding account grants surf net has applied for three fiber projects in the county this is mainly in rural areas tolling about four million dollars and then at and t as they've mentioned has submitted five applications for projects in the county tolling over 34 million on coastal fiber buildouts and then arpa i'm very happy to announce the cruise io will complete the arpa funding project in the spring of 2024 with 19 sites now capable of serving over 7600 locations within our county and with that said that ends our presentation and we'll turn it over for questions great thank you very much for that presentation all right i'll see if there's any board members who have questions on this item uh supervisor konig no questions i'm just really excited to see some of the progress between uh well i guess we expect the middle mile to be rolled out by the end of 2026 right that's correct how much longer before isp's are actually being able to provide improved service well off of that middle mile i would say it's going to be what this real life protecting is right now i'm seeing is the end of 2026 so that would be sometime in 2027 though the cdt is reaching out right now to the carriers to ask where they want to have vaults put which would allow them to be able to pull fiber and other technologies off of that middle mile so they are making progress while we're not on the list right now if you look at the cpc they are starting to work and our county is only i think only five miles of it's going to actually be least fiber the rest is going to be built out okay great well i know people throughout our entire county are eager to see this improved service come uh become available and applaud the efforts and we're excited to see this move forward thank you thank you um thank you for the presentation um the original broadband master plan of seven or so years ago the most recent one and then the funding that ended up in order to cruise the overall items that i brought forward to the board and it's it's great to see this trajectory move forward uh this collection of state and federal funding and in particular the large infusion through feed really does constitute the largest potential expansion of high speed internet access to our community you know i worked in the very end of the clint administration in 2000 and we wrote a report about the digital divide then and it really was for rural communities mainly within the central part of the united states most of those areas have actually been lit up pretty well because of the topography and we have in our own community here some of the most acute issues of a digital divide that i would say anywhere before anywhere else in the state in particular in the rural areas of santa christ mountains and within parts of south county that are in some cases less than a mile off of where there's a current fiber hall my question for you the the 500 plus million dollars number is not a realistic attainment number so i mean we're not going to get there from state or federal funding and fiber to home isn't a realistic option and you had you had mentioned for a lot of these rural residents and this is part of the atg conversation today and you had mentioned that there needs to be a hybrid model which i agree with but so far the cpc and the funding focus has been on providing fiber exclusively and not providing some of these other technologies that would help the rural residents so how will we be able to apply that funding considering that there's local providers within the region both toronto or cruzio that have this capability now that could light up a large part of our community how are we going to be able to apply our funding meeting those requirements and still be able to meet the topography i think one of the things to remember about bead is and this actually came out from the nta a representative that was there on the friday meeting is that while it's fiber preferred it's not fiber specific so there will be opportunities during the opposition phase as well as when carriers be able to present their grants they will be able to present alternative technologies um we see that again that the toronto wireless solution does offer some great opportunities for our county especially in those areas where it's been hard to pull fiber or where point-to-point wireless has not been effective so that is one of the things that as a county we should probably watch with the opposition um phase to make sure that is understood that fiber for us is just not going to happen and it's highly expensive especially when you're talking about in areas where cal fire has said it's going to be a high fire area and that recommendation is to build it underground and that definitely adds to the cost rather than just running it on a pole okay i think that maybe as part of the direction today if you're comfortable with it recognizing that these master plan strategic plans are really 30 30 000 foot views would be that we should proactively be prepared to already submit those comments i mean at the end of the day we know it was submitted to federal government for review we know when it comes back to the state it's not going to meet the needs of our community uniquely it's great for santa claire county it's great for la county it's great for san Diego county it's not great for santa claire county and we because of the topography and the two-hour conversation we had preceding this it's the exact same issue i think that we need to be very proactive in that so if you need the additional direction great if you don't i think they're needing to be something comes back to the border we we have a very formal statement on behalf of the county of why it doesn't work and why we why we need to have the flexibility here because i mean i know that surf nets had applications they were unsuccessful for because although it may be not fiber exclusive the reality is it's weighted so heavily that way they weren't scored highly so this is playing out of you know mount madonna and other areas and that we kosher in our districts so i'll take your advice on on the best way that we can participate proactively and getting those comments in i think that's one of the ongoing conversations that we're having with the marae bay economic partnership is they are starting to build um ways that not only the government but also residents can be able to express the hey i don't have good internet fiber is not going to work for me but i do think that we should as a county come back and i agree say that this is not a workable plan we're not going to be able to use bid money except in areas where it's easy to deploy fiber so again one of the goals of this plan is and is to be able to make sure that when we get funding we get in those areas and unfortunately for the santa cruz county those are areas where sometimes putting fiber is not effective so i agree i think there really should be something back to the cpc saying that this is not a workable plan if we're going fiber exclusive okay to me that we should be agnostic on the solution because it's just about providing high speed internet access to folks and we shouldn't care about what the mechanism is and for some reason they've limited the mechanism i appreciate that this work is i know it's behind the scenes it could be really transformational though for the families that i mean they can't access telemedicine they can't upload things for school work they can't tell they can't tell a work they can't really meet any of the elements of modern society because right now they're in satellite or services that don't aren't providing any sort of value to them so i appreciate both of you your work on this thank you mr chair supervisor supervisor rinandez yes i just i just wanted to ask too if there's anything any way we can anything that we could do to support the um the affordable connectivity program there the eca the letter of support or anything that we could do i think that we should probably do that and have our partners like at ambip and the broadband consortium also probably do the same no i agree on that one and i know that there has been this is one of those issues where actually i think the carriers um county governments city governments are all on the same page we don't want to see a cp go away so yes i think that would be appropriate to have the board have a letter back to um to congress saying that this is a program that we feel is vital for a community community and we'll just if it goes away we'll widen that digital divide a supervisor with first yeah thank you miss weigel and your staff for for being here i like this presentation a lot better than the last one i mean it's super and supervisor friend said last time uh you should come to us when there's a viable alternative this is uh not an alternative this is the plan of attack and this is encouraging because it seems like a lot of people are on the same page and identifying what the needs are and how we're going to get there to meet the criteria and i think this expanding broadband services is really at the forefront of our equity work overall in sanatrix county it's going to be vitally important to everybody so they can communicate more um and i think this helps us um take advantage of state and federal funding although the state funding is getting more questionable it seems as the weeks go by uh but um i i want to thank really just specifically congressman jimmy panetta for hosting a broadband symposium in boulder creek recently in my district last friday uh with representatives of the california puc and the n i n t i a um there's a lot of to be done in the ground work and uh it's all inclusive and i really appreciate you're looking at all avenues of how we can get to the final answer as quickly as possible going to be a time it's going to take some time but i'm really encouraged with the work that you've been doing and i appreciate it very much it's going to mean a lot to this community thank you and i'll just share the comment to me by my colleagues i think this is a great you know step forward for our community that's been long in the making and as we continue to make progress and keep progress on this you know we can ensure that folks will have access to to internet in some of the more rural areas but definitely something we're gonna have to continue to advocate for over time so we can ensure that becomes a reality so with that i'm going to close out um questions from the board and i'm going to see if there's any members of the public who'd like to speak to us on this item if so please approach the podium and you will have two minutes thank you for this good report my name is abecky steinbrunner i would like to ask that um this plan also incorporate um fiber continued fiber on highway 152 to assist the santa cruz county fairgrounds the 14th daa to have improved broadband service it is a problem um that is our evacuation center for our county and last winter it was used by monterey county and when there are um evacuations there with a lot of people or large events they cannot handle they do not have sufficient broadband service to handle the demand um and it is something that the new ceo uh zeke frazier is looking into their board is meeting at 130 today um so i'll try to ask that he contact you but it is certainly something that we should do to add for our county's emergency response would also like to ask that um our county partners with any and all projects such as caltrans and pgne work happening um there's work on highway one going on there's pgne is is supposed to be undergrounding lines let's put the the broadband fiber in there with that and piggyback on that work i do see many many large cables of the fiber stored at the farm park area and i'm hoping that that is being used for the uh so cal to state park traffic improvements there um i wonder why the county did not everybody in the tower that had been planned and funded to go up in davinport this semex plant i saw the plans i uh talked with the um contractor that was supposed to be putting it in but it never happened and that was about five or six years ago thank you thank you very much if i just may really briefly one of the things i think is actually a misunderstanding there's fiber everywhere in the county actually there's fiber going straight by the fairgrounds this is privately held and it's up to that individual providers to whether or not they're going to do it anywhere you see a school you can basically assume that there's fiber already because they get a special rate um and the same on the digging you know part of that package that i anyway it was interesting because you opposed it seven years ago and i brought it forward but but we have a dig one ordinance in the county already so when these things are torn up by pg and any others it requires a contact to all these utility or all these providers to say but the difference here would be whether or not the county actually publicly puts our own stuff down which financially wasn't a viable option uh seven years ago but but it exists it's just a question of getting the providers to even provide just some services like the like the programs sorry chris go on james hackett cruzio internet uh i mainly wanted to just thank the county for working so hard on this issue we've heard a lot today about the telecommunications challenges in our region it's obviously a very real problem uh cruzio has partnered with the county and others for many years to work on addressing this as as has been said several times the solution here won't just be one provider or one solution technologically it's going to be multiple providers multiple solutions the hybrid approach of fiber and fixed wireless really is the only solution that's going to work in our county um it's important we continue to work with the cpuc and the nti a nti a to make sure that they know that and that they know that uh small providers need to be able to access these funds and the barriers to small providers accessing these funds need to be removed uh cruzio is really excited to be part of the solution we want to continue working with the county to make sure we can bring as much available funding into our county as we possibly can and continue to work on imaginative solutions for access and affordability so our whole community can have access to real broadband uh thanks again for taking this issue so seriously thank you good afternoon my name is carl guardino i'm vice president at toronto wireless uh to have full transparency it's also my honor to serve for 18 years on the california transportation commission of which i am chair and i only mentioned that because the governor's executive order of 2020 called for universal service of broadband 100 percent of unserved and underserved families and we are one of the five commissions and agencies in the state that he has tasked to make sure that happens so this partnership with you is both my day job and my citizen service but i'm here on behalf of toronto wireless today i want to start by commending tambi weigel and her team for doing an excellent job on this effort i know that you enjoyed the 156 pages of the of the columbia technology corporation plan as much as i did but if not i'll send you each a summary of those findings as well overall they nailed it please look at page 87 as well as where they talk about the technological advancements that supervisor friend referenced as well that show that a combination of technologies can meet the needs we can't forget the number one goal of the governor's executive order of jimmy panetta's work on the bipartisan infrastructure law was 100 universal service all unserved and underserved as the good folks at the nta have asked us to remind people the law is called internet for all it's not called internet for some we don't want to be picking winners and losers that's not equity as supervisor macpherson referenced for santa cruz county residents so three key points technology advances finances are finite and timely deployments matter thank you so much to anybody else in chambers who'd like to speak to us on this item seeing none is there any are there any members of the public on the on the internet who would like to speak to us on this item yes we do have one caller caller user three your microphone is now available i don't have a computer i don't want internet i don't want your broadband radiation broadband means radiation and you speak of closing the digital divide have you heard of digital dementia children who are in front of microwave radiation emitting wi-fi computers getting dementia connectivity people how about people having connectivity to food and housing and a healthy environment this is the opposite i recommend you read the document these birds and mankind destroying nature by electro smog i am struck by the contrast of the previous agenda item where landlines and people can give computer access over their landlines are reliable and work and they should be maintained and offered to everyone to this toxic technology i'm it's just so outrageous i strongly oppose measures like this which mandate additional toxic microwave radiation assault and takeover of our public buildings schools and public right of way with fire prone death towers by telecom corporation tyranny with no informed consent and in violation of our constitutional right to be safe in our person and property this is a distortion and misuse of what should be helping the public thank you i oppose that thank you um are there any it looks like there's another person in i'm jamers but i just wanted to check is there anyone else online we have no further speakers online chair and you'll be the last speaker on this item great good afternoon my name is gabriel moran and i'm with torana wireless at first i want to commend uh besweagle on her fantastic report and understanding that a mixture of technologies will be needed to close the digital divide in santa cruz county and it is an important lesson for the state of california more broadly in considering how it will make the most of its once in a generation of bead funds i would like to highlight um cruzio one of the internet service providers here in santa cruz county who recently won a five point six million dollar grant from the california public utilities commission to serve 759 families in the county uh and using that money to deploy open access middle mile fiber to a fixed wireless specifically next generation fixed wireless service um at a cost of roughly five thousand dollars per home and when you compare that with other cpuc grants that have gone to fiber providers that uh with uh per home costs of upwards of six figures north of 150 thousand dollars it is an important lesson uh and important to recognize that uh with finite finances you have to choose the appropriate tool in the technology toolbox to meet the moment enclose the digital divide for all thank you thank you very much all right seeing no further speakers on this item i'll bring this back to the board for action and mr chair i'd like to move the recommended actions with some additional direction if that's okay and that's to direct um isd to come back to the board with a a letter of support for acp um that we can send out to our delegation and also the last action item as a direct isd to return on number four september 24th i just want to amend that slightly to say that if if ntia comes back before then with comments it'd be nice to have you come back before then with the board being able to direct those comments then as well so we have a motion by the supervisor friend with some additional direction the second advice supervisor mcpherson um is there any further questions or comments from board members okay it's saying none i'll turn it over the clerk for a roll call vote on this item the provisor konig hi friend hi hernandez hi mcpherson hi and comings hi that passes unanimously i just want to thank our ist staff for all their hard work on this and uh and with that we'll continue moving on to our next this is going to be the final item on our open session item number nine on the regular agenda consider report discussing an application of santa cruz county code 2.31 public works projects declaration of non-responsibility in the county's current bidding process discussion of project labor agreements and recommendation for a three-year pilot program using project labor agreements for up to five to be determined capital projects and take related actions as outlined in the memorandum of the county administrative officer and uh you'll give me one sec um this item will be presented by elisa benson uh peter deadlifts principal analysts in daemon edlo director of capital projects i'm sorry if i screwed up your name thank you mr chair uh good afternoon members of the board as mentioned today before you you have myself elisa benson assistant county administrative officer peter deadlifts our principal administrative analysts within our office and daemon edlo who is our director of capital projects also want to just say we have a multi-disciplinary team that's been working on this since your direction on december 12 we have folks from gsd parks cdi our workforce development board and county council as everyone has um put our arms and brains around this concept and how to bring it back to you as quick context before i get into the table of contents for today's briefing on december 12 we had a board item that really had three different parts of direction one was requesting a report on non-responsibility issues and within our our county code structure for contractors either in selection or in delivery how we address challenges of non-responsibility basically poor performance and then how that might be improved so we'll be talking about that we also had some direction around coming back with concepts for projects for a three-year pl a test and we'll be speaking to that and the third part of the direction was for us to return in april with a proposed pl a agreement and associated policy recommendations so that was the original order and i'm going to speak a little bit first on the next slide we can figure out how to do this up one too far what we're going to cover today and as you'll notice on the cover page this is part one we absolutely will be back at the first meeting in april based on direction today with a fuller proposal so today we will be covering the existing policies and practices daemon's going to be talking about that an analysis of plas as they've played out locally and in other counties and sort of general takeaways from that and and those pla considerations and advantages and disadvantages peter was speaking to that and then finally we'll be speaking to staff recommendations and i'll be taking that forward around a three-year pilot and some parameters we'd like to put before you for consideration to guide us in what we would bring back as a fuller program in april so this is part one of a two-part staff briefing with that i'm going to hand it over to daemon okay thank you lisa uh good afternoon uh as lisa mentioned my name is daemon adlow i'm director of capital projects with community development and infrastructure i'll be discussing the county's current policies and procedures and how santa cruz county code 2.31 declaration of non-responsibility has been implemented implemented in the bidding process on construction projects here at the county the county of santa cruz's current bidding processes require a contractor to demonstrate that they are a responsible bidder prior to having their bid accepted for construction projects a responsible bidder is one who has demonstrated the attribute of trustworthiness as well as quality fitness capacity and experience to satisfactorily perform the public works contract a non-responsible bidder is one uh who the county has determined does not have one or more of those qualities when the county receives bids uh staff conducts a responsibility uh assessment and analyzes every bid received uh during that process staff will examine the contractors past public uh works excuse me past public works project performance both with the county and other public agencies in addition the staff will review and verify the contractor's current good standing with the state of california contractor's licensing board for a period of five years verify that the contract contractor is free of disciplinary proceedings and or current suspensions this analysis also ensures that prevailing wage and fair labor practices outline and state and county code have been adhered to on past projects currently the county has mechanisms in place to disqualify a bidder if they have been determined to be non-responsible next slide the county also has the ability to review the contract potential non-responsible findings during construction as well as after construction closeout if the contractor is found to be in violation of public contract code santa cruz um county code or the contract itself the county has the right to disqualify the contractor from bidding and future projects for minimum one year from the date of the finding and the maximum three years for subsequent findings for non-responsibility uh to date it has been rare for a contractor to be determined to be non-responsible once in contract current county processes have historically been successful during the bid review process and filtering out most contractors that have been determined to be a risk of performing poorly throughout reach with local government agencies it is it has understood that it is uncommon for a contractor to be found to be non-responsible on public project statewide but there still is a risk it is most common for public agencies including the county to utilize a design bid build approach for construction projects um that require the owner to accept the lowest bid the private sector owners are able to to utilize a negotiated bid approach but this method is typically not available to public entities county staff is continuing continually reviewing current bidding and contracting processes as well as exploring different available options in order to reduce project risks one way to mitigate this risk in the public sector is through an alternative project delivery methods such as design build construction manager at risk also known as cm at risk or cmar and job order contracting also known as jock two of which have been utilized are currently being utilized at the county each of these are a few examples of project delivery methods that typically utilize a two-step process first step being a pre-qualification base and then the second step being submitting bids this approach is an additional filter that helps ensure a responsible bidding pool inherently there are risks with every project delivery method and contractual agreement there are no there's no panacea or magic project delivery method with this in mind staff utilize the variety of tools depending on the individual project scope and complexity with that i'd like to hand it over to peter debtlifts the ceo's office will be assessing project labor agreements I'm here today to give you a brief overview of project labor agreements and outline a few of the pros and cons of implementing a pla to support capital projects as shown here plas are collective bargaining agreement between a contractor and building and construction trade labor organizations the county would enter into a pla when approving a contract for the construction of a capital improvement project during the bidding process bidders must agree to be bound by the terms of the pla to be considered responsive including prevailing wages and labor practices previously mentioned by damon the la's established the labor organization and signatory unions as a collective bargaining representative for all workers who perform work on the approved capital project generally plas require that most labor on the projects be performed by union members there are several potential benefits to plas they're using the construction industry to set standard terms and conditions of employment on the labor pool for projects subject to the agreement supporters share that they allow for expeditious resolutions to disputes helping to ensure that the project is delivered on time on budget and that safety standards are maintained this is done by ensuring train union labor is used on a project and that any disputes are resolved with binding arbitration in exchange laborers agree to not engage in strikes walkouts or work slowdowns certain provisions seek to provide benefits to the community such as improving training through apprenticeships recruiting members from disadvantaged communities into high paying jobs and construction and ensuring small businesses have the opportunity to participate there's also potential disadvantages of plas as damon mentioned before the county's existing processes are designed to ensure qualified bidders deliver projects but plas could overlay additional administrative activities to ensure compliance plas could also adversely affect local contract or participation because of the requirement to utilize union labor and to pay into union benefit trust funds from worker wages smaller contractors including minority and women owned businesses make up a large portion of the workforce in santa cruz county that may not be able to comply with the terms of the plas and discourage bidding on a proposed project finally plas have historically been used for larger projects with tighter deadlines as most of the county's projects tend to be small to mid size and value there is the risk that receiving no bids at all on capital projects at all on capital projects requiring a plas the board should weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks that might be achieved from adopting plas into the counting's county's bidding processes i'm going to turn it over to elisa benson to further discuss a potential pilot program along with recommended terms and parameters of using a plas thank you peter so i'll be reviewing the staff recommendation and i'm going to take so there's three slides so i'm going to be sort of describing our first our proposal uh proposed recommendation for a three year pilot some of the initial parameters of a program we would like your direction on policy objectives we would like your uh your direction on and then a sort of a quick overview of what pilot administration will look like i'm going to pause on each of these slides and in case there's any questions or additional discussion that y'all would like to have so the staff recommendation at this point is a three year pilot that would be comprised of five large capital projects that would be at the threshold of at least five million dollars each the pilot parameters in this case would be these would be uh the pilot would be for select non-emergency projects that vary across county departments including parks public works uh whether that's roads or sanitation as well as general government so we get some experience in each of those project delivery areas with a pla we would also recommend excluding projects that rely on FEMA funding as you know this is already a complicated enough venture for us at this point we want to try and keep that as clean as possible and then i want to highlight that as folks have said their husband experience locally with the city of watsonville having um no bids received in uh solicitations that had a pla requirements um and so we want we are not sure that will be a problem given the size of projects that we're recommending it's significantly higher than the watsonville threshold but it could be an issue based on the recent bidding environment that we have been in so we wanted to put that forward for your consideration another aspect of this is you'll see a recommended action around directing the cdi director to um go to the sanitation district with an invitation to participate in this pilot as well we do think that there are a number of sanitation district projects that would be good candidates for being a part of the pilot so that is part of the recommended actions we put before you today and then finally as i mentioned we will be coming back to the board on april ninth with a recommended project list for the three-year pilot as well as the pilot pla agreement for your consideration to really set us forward um should the board decide to go in that direction i'm going to pause and see if there's any questions around the overall concept we're putting forward and then there's some specific uh policy objectives who would like direction on as well i have a question but if it's too specific then i want to it's on the the rebid if there are no bids um what if you received one bid but it was 50 over our engineer's estimate so it was astronomically more expensive than what we had budgeted for which just seems like happens all the time by the way um so is that too specific and that'd be something you would want direction on i mean to me it strikes me that the goal here isn't just to if you don't get a bid the goal here is to also not dramatically increase the costs of construction because one of the commitments that's been made from those that are advocating for this is that this doesn't do that and so in order to adhere to that then i think that we should have a tenant in there that makes that a requirement otherwise it should be able to be bid without a PLA i think we were happy to take that direction and formulate a bit more specifically in the program moving forward we hadn't we heard some comments today around requiring three bids at a minimum so you're not just going with a single bid um but i think i'd want to take it back to our capital teams for how we would want to refine that payment is there anything you want to say about that or do you want to just wait till they yeah there's similar models that we studied that have that type of language in it that we definitely would want direction on that there's there's different options different parameters and exclusions okay i mean my guess is that the board's will is that this isn't to increase costs right i mean that's not we just received a pretty significant presentation just two weeks ago about the fact that we have a massive capital issue and so i think that well whatever you want on the direction on that should should happen um because i'm okay with one bit if it's within the estimate for a qualified bidder right it's not about getting three it's about it's about the number and then making it qualified i think yeah we had started with no bids but i think those conditions with that in mind are appropriate okay thank you and today when we get bids that are way out of line with our expected costs we always have to pause and determine whether we can actually do the project so i think that's that's helpful direction for us to incorporate into the into the pilot and mr delas had used the language in a previous slide that said small and medium-sized projects for the majority do we have a definition of what those are how do we define a smaller medium-sized project starting that over to damon yeah there's there is not a standard that we define but typically in discussions under a million dollars would be a smaller project and one to five would be a mid-medium project basically likely i think yeah we okay there's not a i understand i just wasn't sure the scope that we were industry standard i would say large is above 10 million okay thank you okay and i was gonna say are there any other board members who have any questions yes so um initially i thought this was a we're gonna come back at the at the later date with a master PLA but my question is what are the other county's thresholds on the PLA that you guys looked at both counties and cities they are all over the map summer at million summer at five so it really varies by jurisdiction there's not a set formula is is there any that are master PLAs that you guys looked at for counties that what's their threshold let's see i'm in there they've been all over the map right i some counties were as high as 10 million right so which county was that there was 10 million remainder off hand you know when some of them started high and then lowered them over time i think that's all san francisco san francisco sonoma i think did the same what was that amount originally up at 10 and then they reduced them over time to it varies right five million one million right so there's there isn't there isn't a standard they faced it in from 10 million down to one million over time okay um yeah um yeah thank thank you for that presentation and for the cooperative effort you've had with the other departments of parks and public works and personnel um i think PLAs per se uh can create some questions but i think you've really uh put some guardrails around getting this thing when my uh estimation might get out of hand but i think that there's really some proper guardrails and i appreciate the commitment here to work with uh for county residents as well to identify them as much as possible as well as uh those in the apprenticeship program so that it's going to be very beneficial to the workforce of sanacris county. Supervisor County, any questions? Is there more? There's we have we have at least one more substantive slide that i'd like to walk through if that's okay. Sure okay then this before we did have a question on this slide so i guess one piece of confusion i have is um it's a the the proposal is a three-year pilot but it's actually a proposal for five large projects because it seems like it could either go one of two ways one could be that it's a three-year pilot where projects that come up within this next three years could actually fall under PLA or the it seems like the board well i guess what we're looking for is do we just select five projects and then go with that are gonna occur within these next three years so i'm wondering if you can just clarify that because um is that it seems a little contradictory but maybe i'm missing something and then the other thing that i was going to ask is that uh given that this is a pilot i'm just curious why we're setting the project price amount at five million because it sounds like there is an opportunity for projects within that medium range zone to potentially qualify under this the one million to five and potentially over five so why i'm just curious why we're restricting ourselves at five million if this is kind of like the time when we can see you know how many projects of one million if you qualify under this or maybe at two or three you know rather than going so high up to five million and not saying how this could work at a lower price point sure i'm happy to clarify our recommendation we are recommending a three-year pilot with a select group of projects for which plas would apply so we would be testing this for a three-year period to a select group of projects not all projects that the county do in the next three years but a select group of projects in the next three years regarding the five million dollar threshold absolutely if you all want us to look at other project thresholds we're happy to bring forward that those alternatives from our perspective having at least five at at least five projects at five million each and in some of the projects we're anticipating bringing before you would be significantly more than five million would provide a solid approach to understand how to apply these in a variety of different delivery areas so we're we are open obviously it's the board's discretion and decision if you would like us to apply this in at projects less than five million with the other driver for us in this was conversations with the trades around wanting larger larger projects with significant amount of work hours over multiple years to support apprenticeship programs so that was part of our thinking in selecting larger projects with larger numbers of labor hours over time but of course this is the decision of the board if you all would like us to try a project at a million or to it to it a million we can do that as well or a mid-size project we can vary what we put in the pilot we're just looking for that that specificity as we come forward with a project list on April 9th so in this case a chair coming the five million is a threshold so some of them could be much larger they could be 10 million or 15 million projects we're just setting a threshold of five million not that they would all be five million our projects five million and our recommendation is a threshold some of them may come in at 10 million some may be even higher than that thank you okay should i move forward to the next okay the next one this is really around as we've heard the primary objective of PLAs is really to provide um high quality skilled labor in pursuit of high quality construction outcomes timely and economical projects but there's also opportunities within these structures to get at policy goals around workforce development and and the local economy so on this page we are have put forward uh two specific recommendations that we would want your direction on one is this idea of local hire and the way we are recommending we design that in the pilot program is that local hire is defined as from the Santa Cruz Monterey County or San Benito counties and and to do that with a tiered two tiered approach where the first priority is for residents worker residents of Santa Cruz County the second tier would be reference for worker residents of San Benito or Monterey County and then the third tier would be workers from outside of the tri-county area just to really drive home that policy goal of building a pipeline and workforce opportunities for folks here in our community the second recommendation is around the apprenticeship requirements that would be folded into the PLA and that is that 20 uh apprenticeship labor for the project and then really this is that goal around creating the pipeline for our local resident apprentices to do work here in their community so those are the two staff recommendations we would seek your approval of the third item here and you can see I put question marks there are other opportunities to have even more focused requirements around serving uh different groups different vulnerable groups in our in our community who have maybe not had the same access we don't have a specific recommendation on that today and we really wanted to see if that was something you would want us to pursue to bring forward as an opportunity in April or do we keep it a little more simplified at this point with the two sort of objectives we set forward around local hire and uh apprenticeship pipeline so those are the other key elements we need a clear direction on so we can come forward with an agreement in April and if no questions on that okay Lisa would you like the questions now or should we um I have one more slide and then we'll be at questions for sure okay the next slide is just really quickly around pilot program administration clearly our teams need to get experience with this and how it's going to play through managing large capital projects and this a pilot approach gives us that opportunity we also anticipate we will be utilizing consultant project labor coordinator services to really help with both project by project compliance and making sure we're getting the outcomes we're looking for as well as that consultant outside perspective on developing and implementing programs that are embedded in the creation of the pilot and then lastly we wanted the opportunity to really collect some data locally you know does it have an impact on bidding what does it look like for costs we've seen studies all over the country where it varies by jurisdiction and really the conditions of their labor market and their construction environment so we really need to get that on the ground experience here to understand the how PLAs can meet the intended policy objectives with that I am we've completed our staff presentation and happy to take questions thank you for that presentation our learning board members who have questions for staff on this item this chair if I may I was going to begin with the question for director Adlo about the non-responsibility stuff you know my interest concern was peaked around this whole area of discussion that we're talking about today because of the long delay we've seen with the LIBOC library annex project I think we're close to a year now I mean the core question here is what could we do differently in the future to prevent a situation like this from happening again I think our typical processes the filtering so to speak that we do during the bidding process I had mentioned has historically worked when we're looking at the performance of a contractor and past projects we're requiring them typically to have worked on projects for a five-year period generally that's the best indicator to show that they will be a irresponsible player so to date that is satisfied that need moving forward one of the things I mentioned is utilizing the alternative project delivery methods that is a tool that is afforded to us and what that does is an example just to kind of simplify it talking about a pre-qualification process a step it adds time it adds money to a project but that's to me in our current tool set the best way to help prevent that okay and we've received the board received a letter from one of the subcontractors on that project concerned that they hadn't been paid even though the general contractor on the project had is there anything we can do just to our base contract to acquire some kind of you know leak subcontractor lien releases as a necessity for payment of the general contract that's correct it would be building up our current contract to make requirements during payment more robust okay is that something you're looking at we are okay actively okay great um on the um so I know we have members of the building trades here and I'd like to be able to ask them some questions as well so um on the subject of project labor agreements so for the building trades the port said that PLAs have historically been utilized for larger projects the tighter deadlines that typically provide minimal returns on less expensive projects through the increased administrative costs and lower potential for strikes or walkouts um I'm just curious how if one of you could respond to that I mean we had a lot of uh the membership here today talking about um you know requesting that we consider a master PLA down to one million dollars um you know clearly that says this has been explained on the lower uh and or even small project size I mean how would you respond so can I hold on one for one second I was going to mention this that we did have members from the building trades to talk about the staff um the staff recommendations but I want to see if there's any questions for staff because um I'm going to give a little bit more time to the representative who's here from the building trades so they can kind of go through some of those items so maybe if we could see if there's other questions for staff specifically on those last two recommended items and then I can have the trades representative come up and give a more extensive um uh some extensive comments on what's been presented okay of course chair um well I guess a question for staff I was interesting to note in the report uh I figured I understood this correctly that with Watsonville's experience you're suggesting that the private sector had actually been impacted because I guess presumably smaller contracts contractors have gone out of business or just not been able to survive as well because uh they're they're not being able to secure government work and therefore can't sustain themselves is that what was I read that correctly asked uh Mr. Machado to come up and speak to that yeah good afternoon everybody uh Matt Machado director cdi and so to the question about Watsonville's experience uh they did share that with us uh I don't know that I have any specific examples on those contractors uh but they've gone about 10 years without bids on some of their utility projects and they've had a fair amount of testimony from small contractors that have suffered greatly from from those experiences over the past 10 years but I don't have any specific names and project names for that example though okay thanks those are the questions I had for staff thanks supervisor friend um I don't have a question but they were seeking to sort of general commentary on on some of the elements of I mean I think that to the degree it fits with every other element that the board has been doing regarding uh diversity and supporting local workforce development that I think that when you do come back in April veterans minority owned women owned I mean I think these are important to have these these considerations as as part of it I mean again the point of this action shouldn't be to exclude anything right it shouldn't be to add cost or exclude it should be to to bring for the benefits that the trades have been committed that this would bring forward to and so I think that then there should just be parameters to ensure that that that happens I mean I I believe that it's true I just want to make sure that we have those elements and so I'm comfortable with those final slide suggestions Supervisor Hernandez and I think I'm okay with those you know the targeted local hires the apprenticeships and I'd like to ask though do we know the sort of the demographics of the local labor in terms of like where they're from the veterans stuff like that like on the third uh suggestion that we have um but overall I would like to see just a little more collaboration between labor and staff too I'm not sure if that question would be for staff or so we don't we don't have um demographics for the trades related workforce on hand that might be something that that the trades unions can present but we don't have those on hand on hand this at this table we can also check with our workforce development staff around what they understand around the demographics of the construction trades workforce thank you Supervisor McPherson yeah I just as I mentioned before I I know a lot of work has gone into this and I think you've got to a nice center spot on this and especially as it relates to prioritizing county residents and apprenticeship programs those are in that I think it's a very good balance I'm very impressed with this I mean this hasn't been an easy recommendation to come to or maybe it has been because it seems like there's been a lot of collaboration getting here so I'm very encouraged by that and I'm very supportive of what you're presenting I'm just wondering Elisa can you put up the last the second to last slide because I have some some questions on that sure let's see if we can do that so it'd be on the uh-oh on the wrong one it's going to be on the the policy objectives slide where we're focused on the local hire and apprentice a print one back from here apprenticeship requirements and then that question of okay let's see okay yes chair Cummings are you able to see it yeah I can see it now yeah and I also um I know that like as I mentioned before this is represented from the trades because I was speaking with them about how this kind of fits in and there were some concerns that were brought up but I do think that you know the objective is to try to really um you know get people who are experiencing poverty who have been underrepresented to get in with the trades so that they can have access to these kinds of opportunities so just figuring out how to operationalize that I think it's really important that staff is working with the trades to really figure out how you know they're able to meet those those goals within their kind of recruitment process that will ultimately meet the goals of what the county wants to see as well and then can you go to the last slide this one pilot administration yeah um so the one so this actually brought up some questions for me not so much regarding this program but just what does the county do currently to kind of track where contractors currently are hiring and where the people where their workforce lives you know are they you know paying prevailing wage and these different aspects because it sounds like you know we want to get you know oversight for unions but a lot of times where the oversight has has been you know needed in in the past has been with non-union contractors just broadly not calling out anybody here specifically but you know trying to make sure that non-union contractors are compliant has been an issue and in the past and so I'm just kind of wondering how we're tracking you know we're putting all these requirements or you know hopes and desires on the unions and this PLA but I'm just wondering do we have something similar in place for non-union because we don't I don't think we should be creating a double standard here you know we should we should be making sure that both our union and non-union contractors are you know trying to hire locally increase diversity and all those other things we're just wondering what's what's happening currently with non-union contractors I'm going to let Damon has much closer proximity to running these projects yeah so typically projects are registered with a dir and that allows us access to that information as well as through the bidding process the steps requiring bidders to submit in the test to hiring locally but beyond that that's currently the type of controls that we have and type of information we're able to access if I could add on to that a bit so all of our projects do require certified payroll and we do check those to ensure that the prevailing wage rate is being paid and that's both for state and federal projects or funded projects and which apply to all of our local projects I will add that local contractors what we see especially in horizontal projects they certainly have an advantage so we know project by project who's local who's not and I would say on the horizontal small to medium projects the predominant contractors are local their advantage is is mostly due to mode costs you know with heavy equipment things like that so so we do see that as an advantage for the local contractors and so we don't track it per se even though we do have a list of all those contractors for the last you know hundreds and hundreds of projects that we could pull together if the board is interested in seeing where those contractors are from we certainly have that data we just don't track it as a database appreciate that those comments I do think though as well because it sounds like we're moving with the PLA is maybe I'm wrong on this one is it is tracking where the labor is coming from and I think that's another critical piece because you might have a local contractor but where's their workers coming from and if that's something that we're going to impose on the unions you know I think it's that we shouldn't be you know we shouldn't have one standard for one group of folks and another standard for another and so but I'll leave my comments there and we can continue the conversation but I did want to invite up Casey van removal who's with the Santa Cruz Monterey building construction trades and I know we've been in conversation a lot with the building construction trades and so just wanted to give Casey an opportunity to respond I think he's going to need more than two minutes just because there's a lot in here but really wanted to give the unions a chance to respond I know that staff only had one opportunity to meet with the unions and I think if we're going to try to have something that's going to be effective and successful we really need to hear from the unions and their experience and and how we can make this an effective program for Santa Cruz County so with that I'll turn it over to Casey van removal. Thank you, Justin. I would also like to submit to the board facts and myths around project labor agreements with actual cited sources so if you guys would like to see this it's right please double check those cited sources. I appreciate the staff's ability to bring this report after reading the full report and the full agenda item I definitely had some concerns with the report setting the threshold of a million dollars for a county wide PLA project offers numerous advantages over a higher threshold and invites the larger pool of contractors to participate promoting healthy competition this increases competition can drive contractors to submit more competitive bids and ultimately benefiting the project and taxpayers smaller million size contractors may have been excluded by a higher threshold and can actively participate in inclusion a million dollar threshold for a county wide PLA provides a balanced approach that maximizes competition encourages diversity and stimulates the local economy by ensuring ensuring continuous supply of skilled labor through certified apprenticeship programs. The strategy not only benefits individual projects but contributes to overall growth and sustainability of the construction industry within the county. One of the staff recommended is that it adds an additional layer of bureaucracy that may not significantly enhance these outcomes. In fact it can streamline the process and foster efficiency. PLAs are designed to establish a clear standardized terms for all contractors involved in the project providing a structured framework that can be reduce administration burden. The standardized approach that contractors are on the same page promoting smoother workflow and the need for constant micro management. PLAs often include provisions that facilitate collaboration and communication between stakeholders fostering a more comprehensive work environment this can lead to a quicker decision making and issue resolution reducing the bureaucratic red tape that might arise in projects without such agreements. PLAs can favor non-local contractors or sorry PLAs can favor large non-local contractors undermining the county's goal to support local businesses and development local labor. The assertion that project labor agreements exclusively favor large non-unique or large non-local contractors is misleading. In fact PLAs are designed to ensure fair and open competition promoting the involvement of all contractors including small to mid-sized businesses. These agreements establish a level playing field by implementing standardized terms and conditions fostering an environment where contractors of various sizes can compete based on merit. PLAs contribute to the county's over objective of supporting local businesses by encouraging a diverse pool of contractors which in return stimulates local economic development and labor growth. During their report they said that historically have been used for larger projects with tighter deadlines and particularly provides minimal returns on less expensive projects. I want to reference some local PLA and county PLAs that were being discussed earlier. Santa Clara County a $2 million threshold their annual budget $10.9 billion dollars. I'm a Dean at County $1 million threshold annual budget $4.1 billion. Costa Rica County $1 million threshold annual budget in 2023 $5.5 billion dollars. And the San Francisco County PLA which is a 20-year PLA $5 million threshold for the first year $3 million threshold for the second year and then a $1 million threshold thereafter for the next their annual budget of $13.7 billion dollars. And am I excited to say that City of Hollister that just passed their community workforce agreement has a threshold of $250,000 and this is going to be able to provide a longer range of opportunity for statewide apprenticeship agreements and actually obtaining these hours for these apprentices to foster the next round of skilled labor. The potential administration complexities that introduced also warns consideration staff said. Once integrated into the policy's bidding procedure a PLA requires little time to administer. The key to the success of a PLA administration is to include the PLA and the bid packet. That requirement that the bid submittal by the general contractor include an assigned addendum A and agreement to be bound. The general contractor should then follow the same procedures when subcontracting bidding. This way everybody understands the rules up front and the burden to gather the signed addendum A's rests on the general contractor rather than staff. The local building trades make sure that all aspects of the PLA are being adhered to. This does not place any burden on staff. During one of their full reports, it was really concerning that they cited a survey that was done by local contractors and businesses that have historically been involved in implementing public work projects for the City of Santa Cruz. So yeah, we'd like to see that survey, right? But we got ahold of that survey and 29 contractors were conducted that survey. 90% were non-union. Four of those contractors have never registered as a prevailing wage contractor, which some of those contractors actually spoke to me. That registration fee goes to compliance for the state. So I understand why they would not want to pay that registration fee. 11 of the 29 contractors that filled out that survey has never filed certified payroll within the county in the last five years. Six of those contractors had serious social violations and failure to abide by workplace safety regulations. Now my favorite, 12 of the 29 contractors over 41 surveyed, 41% surveyed had civil wage and penalty assessments for labor code violations filed against them with the state division of labor standards and enforcement. That total is close to $1 million just by these 12 contractors in wage violations. So in short, I think that survey is very flawed and does not represent good contractors. And this is the type of homework that you need to do before hearing from these types of surveys. The city of Watsonville has a project labor agreement ordinance since 2013. We signed that agreement in 2014 in September. Discussion with staff revealed that several types of projects for sewer and water projects have been installed for 10 years due to lack of bidders to the projects. This is completely false. And you believe that council would allow a 10-year backlog? City staff also noted that PLAs have had an impact on private development projects due to smaller non-union contractors being able to unable to compete in the local market. The PLAs do not restrict these contractors to bid this work. I do support a lot of the key parameters in this agreement that staff has presented, but there's a lot that I don't agree with. We only have conducted one meeting for one hour. We have not negotiated in good faith and over a longer period of time. Some of the stuff that we do that they're recommending is already implemented, like the 20% of hours being done by certified apprentice for the classification. That is already a state requirement and should already be being trapped. One of the things is local target hire. As us unions, we have direct entry for veterans and trade prep program graduates, which we have one here with the county of education. We have one with an adult program in Watsonville, and we have one through the Monterey County Santa Cruz Building Trails Council. Our hiring requirements are set with the division of apprenticeship standards. To change that, we would lose our accreditation that we've worked so hard to achieve. One of the suggestions is targeting people without a high school diploma. We would not be able to do that. The DAS requires us that our applicants have EGED or high school diploma. Do we be able to obtain these high skilled jobs? Those are the basic requirements. So I think we need more time and we need an outline of a million dollar threshold with a term of five years and to negotiate in good faith and bring that back to this council in June, because negotiation doesn't just happen overnight. An education of these project labor agreements does not just happen overnight. We need to sit down and negotiate in good favor. Thank you for your time and consider my recommendations. Thank you so much. Mr. Sheriff, I may this isn't really seem to be a productive discussion right now. I mean, it isn't. And so what I'm hearing and I think that what we should do is just move to table this item, because at the end of the day, there should be more discussion with Casey. That's fine. But, you know, this isn't a one-sided discussion either Casey. I mean, there should be discussion with some of the small businesses that called.  And so if it's not ready for prime time, which is the distillation of what you just said, that's fine. But we're not going to, this is not going to move to a productive discussion today, Mr. Chair. I think we should all recognize that this needs additional time, additional outreach of folks that feel that they weren't heard on the union side. And people that called on earlier that had other points that needed to be raised on the local business side. So I'm comfortable with, actually, I'll ask council of what the proper approach that would be, whether it's just a no action, it's a direction to do that or whether it's a tabling in order to, this was a request for June, that's fine. Whenever the month is, that's fine. I think first we need to take public comment. And then once it comes back to the board, any of those all on above of what you just outlined is available within the discretion of the board. You can reject staff recommendation and say that you want something to come back in June. You can give specific parameters around what you want to see come back in June. And I think staff would benefit from as specific of direction as your board could provide with what it is that you want to see happen between now and June, so that we can bring back something in June that is directly responsive. Okay. And then Mr. Chair, then I'll just suggest then moving forward, if we've been taking additional public comment at this point, it's just like a point by point refutation of every point in there. That's not, it's just not a productive discussion. So I do understand that, but it was an agendized item. And so I'm not, I'm not debating that. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be a 10 minute. I mean, at this point, then I think we need to adhere to our time limits, right? Yeah. Because others were afforded two minutes that had points to raise as well, right? So I think that if we're having a discussion here, we should honor the two minute limit than moving forward. So there's some equity in that discussion. So that's fine. I mean, so with that, I'll open it up to see if there's any member of the public who has not commented on this item yet today. If you are in chambers, you would like to speak on this item, you will get two minutes. I do have a few questions. I'll still that raise. So that third, you know, the consultant that would be used, would that be third house supervisor, maybe we could get through public comment. We can still bring this back to your questions. Okay. So let's move forward with public comment. All right. Good afternoon. My name is Ron Cheshire. I've been in the construction industry for over 47 years. I've been a rep for the Carpenters Union, the CEO of the Monterey Santa Cruz Building Trades Council, director of apprenticeship training, pre-apprentices. I'm not here to debate anything. You asked a question. You want to know what we're doing within your community? Casey already told you a couple things. We've been working in this community for decades. We've brought re-apprenticeship programs to the area. We've opened them to everyone in all the communities. We have specific agreements actually. We've worked with the county office of education. Your workforce and development board director was here earlier today. He couldn't stick around. He's for pre-apprenticeships. He's for working together, making job opportunities to make better citizens for you here in this area. We work with disenfranchised communities. We work with people that have been in bad situations. Okay. The breakdown, the ethnicity, we could give that to you. I guarantee I can almost give it to you right now in Santa Cruz County. It's probably about 60% Latino Hispanic. And then I can't get down to Pacific Island or whatever. But in Monterey County, it's a higher percentage. We search for women to do this. We search for veterans. We have a rough time getting both groups in. Okay. But we look for them specifically to get them involved and get them into good careers. We don't leave a stone unturned in this community, in your whole county, in regards to anyone that wants to get into construction. We'll work with them to try and get them into it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Not smalling, but Operating Engineers Local 3. Some of you know me. Some of you don't. I find this to be a great conversation with that great conversation. We didn't have the opportunity to talk to these three. Apparently, non-union did. So here's my part. I'd like to see you all gentlemen behind there. Tell them to come see us. We're down there. And we're, uh, Casterville, come on down. Let's have a conversation. You three want to know something? We'll tell you up front and honest. Like Casey did today, he'll give you the paperwork. We're not scared of any questions that you have, but we want the people in Santa Cruz County to have benefits, to have health insurance, to have retirement. That's a huge step into anybody's life. Now my son-in-law just got out of the military. He's an Operating Engineers. He's in the apprenticeship. He's got insurance on my daughter, my grandson and himself. That's huge. That's a worry that he does not have to worry about. And you know what it cost for a veteran to join the Operating Engineers? Five dollars. So if you got a veteran, send him to me. I'd help him because I'm a veteran. Worthy chair, worthy supervisors. Thank you for giving the opportunity to speak here. Manny Panaro, CEO of Monterey Sanctus County Building Construction Trades Council, retired Operating Engineer as of today, the 27th of February, seven years. I got to go at 55. There's great opportunities here and a PLA for local people. Unfortunately enough, I could stay in Monterey County where I was born and reared and still there 62 years later. The opportunities here and by encouraging and entertaining a PLA for the county of Santa Cruz, a lot of young people have them established to stay here where the roots are. A good wage, a good benefit, and dignity when you retire. So let's continue these talks and hope you can make a decision today that we are going to go forward. So thank you for your time. This works. Good afternoon supervisors. My name is Steve MacArthur. I represent the plumbers and steamfitters. I'm the business manager for Local 62. Cover Monterey in Santa Cruz County. I have a great apprenticeship program in Castorville at our training center. I welcome any of you to come by and see it anytime. 8 to 4.30 Monday through Friday. We're there. I would just want to give a couple of points. Try to be quick, but any contractor can bid these projects PLA or not. There's plenty of examples even here in Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz Metro, the sheriff's facility were both PLA projects and they were done by non union contractors. So any contractor says they can't bid it is totally lying to you. They can any contractor can bid these projects. There's nothing in it says they can't. I would argue their whole made up theory about the increase admin costs, you know, you could use you could save all the time and doing wage compliance and for that one little part about putting it in the PLA language into the bidding documents. The whole fantasy about it costs more. I'm not buying it. There's you can go over the hill the other way to San Jose. They bid a project a nitrification clarification rehab project with a PLA came in 39% under the cost estimate. So the other way they had one in 2016 that just finished in 2022 $100 million project for their digester and thickener project. It was 29% over budget without a PLA and it still came in $100 million over budget by the time the thing was finished. So there's plenty of examples PLA non PLA. It has no effect on the price at all. It's all prevailing wage. You have to pay the same amount. The material costs the same. It's all down to the contractor. I'm trying to get local people to work here locally. They want to work here locally. Thank you for your time. They don't want to drive over the hill to get a job. Thanks. Thank you. How you doing? My name is Danny Rubio. I'm an organizer. I've been at trade for 25 years. The last two as organizer. Well, the last 20 years I've been driving San Jose because it's not a whole lot of work around this area. A PLA would help people like me growing up in Monterey County. When I was young, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was good to my hands. I couldn't afford to go to college. I was smart enough to go to college, but the building trades helped me find my way. And it's one of the best things I've ever done. It's the opportunity they gave me to provide for my family, to provide for my kids, and buy a home and stay in Monterey County. So I hope that you consider PLA and give these kids an opportunity that you don't want to go to college or can't afford to go to college. Give an opportunity to be productive members of this community. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the chambers who'd like to speak to us on this item? Good afternoon. My name is Paul Bruno. I'm the CFO and a principal of Monterey Peninsula Engineering. I sent an email yesterday. I hope you had a chance to look at it. It outlined what happened at your December 12th meeting. Please recall that board direction from that meeting initiated the review of the counting bidding policies and led to the proposed actions before you today. At that meeting, Supervisor Koenig made statements that include outright falsehoods about our family business. When I inquired of his staff about his statements, I was stonewalled. The question you should ask is why was the impetus of these policies changes based upon misrepresentations and outright lies? Or better yet, you should ask why can't these bidding policy changes stand on their own merits? Perhaps it was falsely presented as a worker protection measure to keep anyone from noticing that absolutely no financial impact analysis has been conducted. A few years ago, the city of Seaside was considering a PLA. A capital improvement budget analysis showed that the PLA would cost that small city upwards of $26 million more over the next five years. What would it cost a large county such as this? The county needs to look at Watsonville. Their tenure experiment with the PLA has been an absolute failure. It did not produce more local jobs or training opportunities. It did not increase apprenticeship. Worse yet, the PLA has impeded their ability to contract much needed work.  An informative pilot program would bid several projects side by side with and without a PLA. That way, you can tell the difference. I suggest the county take no action until it observes Watsonville's proceeds with modifications to their PLA. There's no need to rush this through. It's a solution in search of a problem. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody. I promise you I'll keep it quick. I got a three hour drive after this. So my name is E.J. Sire. I'm a political and public relations representative for Local 104. We cover the northern 49 counties. I cover the coastal counties from Ventura, all the way up to the Oregon border. And I do this in all of those counties, but all the way down to school board level, all the above. Generally speaking, whenever we see a situation like this, it's either because staff has inserted their own opinion into a project labor agreement discussion or there hasn't been enough meetings. Obviously, in this case, there has not been enough discussion as was pointed out earlier. And I was obnoxiously relieved to hear you just from the get go notice that it's definitely a relief because generally we don't have that. So just to make it real quick, you know, when you're talking about the diversity and inclusivity and all that, I'm on the board of directors for Rising Sun Center for Opportunity out of Oakland. It's a program focused on specifically underserved, underrepresented disadvantaged communities. On top of that, you mentioned the veteran status. I'm a disabled veteran. I was medically retired after eight years of service. I have 22 disabilities and the sheet metal worker still found a way for me to come into the trade, work with my hands. I spent five years as an apprentice. I built 80% of the duct work for the sales force tower in San Francisco with these hands right here, right? I have something to be proud of for that. As a veteran who thought that I was done myself, my wife and my four kids, we almost ended up homeless in 2017. The only reason why we didn't is because the local school district, the community college district, to where I live signed a project labor agreement, which required local hire, which meant they had to look for local applicants, which was me. So now myself, my wife and my four kids are comfortably in the middle class with healthcare, retirements, prevailing wage, a family sustaining wage. That's all we're looking for. So when you look at a PLA, whenever it comes back in May, June, whatever it is, make sure that those facets are put in there, the prevailing wage, the local hire and the apprenticeship programs. Thank you. Thanks so much. Okay. I'd like to ask if there's anyone online who has not already commented on this item. I guess we do have one caller. Yep. David, your microphone is now available. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and Supervisors. And thank you for your consideration of this item. My name is David Vincent. I'm a proud local sheet metal worker. I appreciate the councils proposing to move above and beyond the public contract codes requirements of responsibility to ensure that only the most qualified and reliable contractors are able to use our taxpayer monies to complete the public works projects in the Santa Cruz area. Additionally, I believe that the proposed use of a project labor agreement will augment the development of a skilled and trained workforce in the area, prioritize local workers for opportunities within the area, as well as those traditionally excluded from these sorts of opportunities. And it might actually minimize the risk of wage theft. That is the misclassification of workers on these PLA projects with the workforce compliance programs discussed earlier. And for that reason, I hope that the PLA is applied to projects that they even lesser threshold of $1 million. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there anyone else online? We have no further speakers, Chair. Okay.  I just want to say that first, I want to just appreciate staff's work on this item and for the people who came out to speak today. I do think that there's an opportunity right now just based on the conversations that had to continue negotiating the project labor agreements with the county. And I think it's really critical that the county is working with the unions and a grant of their understanding the impacts to other communities. And I think that it's really important that we continue to do this so that we can get to some kind of usually agreeable approach, whether that's a three-year blanket or whether it's a number of projects that we're just going to select. And I know that initially the direction was that we were going to move forward with 10 projects. And if we go in this kind of selection of project direction, I think that it would be good if we had five projects between $1 million and $5 million, and then five projects above $5 million, just to see how the breadth of PLAs can be carried out at those different price points. Personally, I think that there's a lot of information out there that we can work off of to draft just a blanket three-year PLA with that $1 million minimum. But obviously, it's a conversation, it's a decision that's going to be up to the board. So I'll leave my comments there. But my hope is that we can move forward with having staff go back and continue working on this with the union so that we can get to somewhere where we're all comfortable. And so I'll see if there's any other board members who have any questions or comments or would like to make a motion. I got some questions and comments too. So it was suggested that we do a three-year pilot. And I think Labor mentioned that they would like to see five years. I know that I actually spoke to Watsonville, some of the folks on their engineering side. And we originally were there. They looked at Berkeley, which was a seven-year kind of pilot that they did. And then they eventually did another one. But what's the difference? I don't know. What's the difference between three-year and five-year like they're wanting? I really don't know the difference. And then the other question is the consultant that they would use to oversee the project labor agreements. Is that third party or in-house? And when we have normal contracts, do we have a third party or is it in-house? I think Justin mentioned a little bit. But I think Damon mentioned that small bids are under 1.5. It'd be nice if we could see maybe medium-sized projects above that that we could look at for the pilot project. But overall, I really agree with Supervisor Zach Brand's statement about needing more collaboration. Let me bring it to primetime, something like that. Any words to his mouth? But yeah, those are my three questions. Yeah. So I can answer some of those. In terms of the three versus five years, we can pick whatever you like. A three-year would allow us to say, we're going to measure in a pilot structure for a period of time within the idea that we would bring something back and the decision would be, how do you want to expand this? What have you learned? So I mean, it's from a staff perspective, it's more about having a contained amount of time before you make a significant change to expand it, contract it, whatever you choose to do. But we're fine with three or five. I mean, I think that's definitely something to discuss. I want to stress we had one meeting with trades. The intention was not to negotiate a PLA for today. That was not what we were asked to do. We're asked to come forward with a report on non-responsibility. We're asked to come forward with projects. We did say we'd like to defer that to April, so about six weeks from now. But then we wanted to bring forward, what are some key policy questions? We need directions from you all to inform us coming forward with an agreement. And of course, we would be talking with key stakeholders between now and whenever you want us to come forward. So your last question, though, was around consultant. I'm going to let Damon talk about that and the idea of a consultant resource for the PLA coordination function. Is that okay? Yes. If it's in-house or third party and normal projects without PLA, is there in-house or is it third party? So typically, okay, so without a PLA, we're administering the projects primarily in-house with our project management team. We did do a little bit of outreach with other jurisdictions, and there's different models. But what we're proposing is to have it be consultant. So it would be a third party consultant that would be doing the project labor coordination. So it's additional oversight? Or is that just? It would be additional. Okay. And sometimes some jurisdictions have hired for that internally. So they have someone who's basically collecting the data from the contractor so you would see how things are playing out in terms of compliance with the policy goals. So our recommendation is for in a project scenario, we wouldn't be building a new function within the county, but we would be bringing that on as part of the project cost as a third party consultant. And I guess, alluding to Supervisor Zach Friend's statement, I think that we do need more collaboration amongst labor unions from here to end of April before you guys come back again. Have more discussion with all the parties interested, right? Absolutely. Right, Mr. Chair, I'm going to try and formulate a motion here. I'm just going to move that we reject staff's recommendations. This isn't a rejection of your work, it's just in order to ensure that this kind of starts a little bit blank slate and that you coordinate with some of the folks that are here today and actually broaden your outreach to include others and that you come back in June with revised recommendations as a result of that. So a new motion to put forward by Supervisor Friend, seconded by Supervisor Hernandez, more or less for staff to go work with key stakeholders and bring back recommendations. But I guess the first meeting in June, is that or whenever? Yeah, I don't have the master calendar in front of me to have a sense of what the extent of but the meeting that's the least impacted in June would be the preferred meeting for discussion of this magnitude. Thank you. That might be the second meeting, since I think we have last day of the first meeting in June. Okay, so, okay. Any further discussion? Hearing none, I'll turn it over to the clerk for an old call. Supervisor Koenig? Hi. Brent? Hi. Hernandez? Hi. McPherson? And Cummings? I couldn't hear McPherson, but I'm assuming that was an I. Okay, so that passes unanimously. And with that, that concludes our regular business today. And so we have one more item on the agenda, which is our closed session item, conference with legal counsel, existing litigation. Just want to ask if there's, if we anticipate having to report anything on a closed session. No. Okay. With that, I want to thank everybody for coming today. And we look forward to seeing you at our next meeting, which will be the first meeting in March. So thank you all and see you soon.