he opportunity has been set as this. Are there any additional speakers here in chambers would like to address this during the public hearing? Please set forward. This will be the last speaker and then we'll close the public hearing. Hello, I'm Bartley Carlson. I'm the forestry technician that did most of the work out on here. I would mostly just like to make my presence known so that if there's any questions I have seen this property from both the bottom to the very top. And if there is any questions regarding the reason of this property, I'm not sure that I can be of huge help. That's mostly a discussion of the Forest Productivity Act but if there's a question about the property I can help you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the board for consideration. Is there a motion? Yeah, this is in the fifth district of course. And I think the issues that have been mentioned here I think this has been adequately addressed in planning and public safety agencies. And I think it complies with the timber production zone. Like to thank the planning commission staff and the work for the work on this and like to also notice that the land trust is approved of this. And I would move that recommended actions that this be approved. I'll second it. We have a motion and a second. Is there additional discussion? If we've got a roll call vote please. Supervisor Koenig. Aye. Cummings. Aye. Hernandez. Aye. McPherson. Aye. And friend. Aye. And that passes unanimously. Thank you for your presentations. Mr. Jivars and for everybody's participation in the public hearing. We'll move on to the last item, the regular agenda before we move into our closed session which is item nine to consider adopting resolutions calling for a special election on March 5th, 2024 for a countywide measure to increase the unincorporated area sales tax by one half cent and establishing budget priorities that the sales tax measure passes and take related actions that line of the memo of the CAO. We have the agenda item board memo resolution calling for an election, the resolution supporting budget priorities, county sales tax measure fact sheet and the county sales tax measure FAQ and we have our assistant county administrative officer Nicole Coburn here. Welcome back, thank you. Hey, good morning. Almost afternoon, Chair Friend and members of the board. I'm Nicole Coburn, assistant county administrative officer and I'm here to talk about agenda number nine which is regarding an unincorporated area sales tax. So a little bit about our presentation today. I'm just gonna cover some background on the county and talk about some of our accomplishments. We have numerous things that we've been able to accomplish in recent years as well as some top priorities for the public and things that we wanna work on moving forward. And then I'll move into the proposed measure as well as our fiscal stewardship as a county. So as you know, the county of Santa Cruz is somewhat unique and that we serve over half of the county population. We have two rules here at the county of Santa Cruz. We have both our state mandated countywide services that we provide as well as more city-like municipal services that are similar to the cities. We like to say we are the biggest city in the county because of the wide breadth of services that we provide in the unincorporated area and that makes us somewhat unique. We are also serve a much higher portion of the population than some of our peers. As you could see here, we serve about 50% or more than half of the population compared to a peer average of almost 16%. At the same time, we receive a lot less revenue per capita than our peers. Here, as you can see here, we have about $460 per resident and property tax compared to a peer average of almost 4,000. This creates some challenges for us just in terms of providing those dual functions and serving the county both in our unincorporated area and providing those state mandated services.  I know it's no surprise to you, but we are facing a housing crisis here in our county. Frontline workers like nurses, teachers, childcare providers, first responders, emergency personnel and other essential workers are really struggling with the cost of living and the short of homes in our county. Four in 10 residents are renters with nearly half spending 35% or more of their total income on housing. Since 1980, the Santa Cruz County has added 80,000 people, but only 26,000 housing units. And we have a great housing dashboard on our website that I encourage everyone to go to that has some good graphical displays of what's happened in our county as well as what we're doing to address the housing crisis. Additionally, as climate change continues to threaten our community, it is becoming increasingly critical to fund and provide wildfire, flood and emergency response, prevention programs and disaster recovery services. To date, the county's climate change driven disasters as well as the pandemic have cost the county $242 million. We've had to issue some debt to pay for some of those costs. And this year alone, we issued debt of $61 million. And then we have at least another $80 million in damages that remain unfunded and that we're figuring out how to fund. This situation has depleted our available cash balances and severely limited our ongoing recovery efforts, as well as limiting our ability to prepare for and respond to future disasters. As you can see on the chart on the right, just in terms of the general purpose revenues that we have as a county, it comes to about $210 million. So those $242 million of disaster costs is 115% of what we receive annually here as a county in just general purpose revenues. Despite our challenges, we've been taking a lot of action here at the county to invest in our community and we've been seeing results. As you know, we saved Watsonville Community Hospital and we as a county had a $5.5 million investment in saving that hospital. We've also partnered to build affordable housing and medical clinics on Capitol Avenue. We purchased the Westridge Building and are establishing a South County Service Center. We've secured funding for the Pajaro Levy Project. We've invested in library and parks improvements across the county and we fortified first responder facilities and services such as the DNA Lab and the Recovery Center. With respect to housing, we completed our sustainability update, worked on code modernizations and completed the housing element to promote housing development. Also recently, we established the County Office of the Public Defender, which is working on providing holistic defense. And we have our Housing for Health Division that's working on various housing initiatives and serving our persons who are unhoused. In addition, amidst our climate change-driven disasters, we proactively established an office dedicated to addressing these issues. The office is the Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. They have established a climate action and adaptation plan that they're working on operationalizing with departments that's gonna provide a roadmap for mitigating against climate change field events. They're also working on updating our Emergency Operations Management Plan to be more effective in increased multi-agency coordination and they established the cruise aware system to advance public notifications for our emergencies. So moving forward, I wanna touch on based on a recent polling that we conducted over the summer, the public has a high interest in seeing the County invest in these three areas, wildfire and emergency response, roads, potholes and parks, and then issues that relate to being a healthy and safe community. Providing disaster response, prevention and recovery is the public's top priority based on our polling. 86% of County voters rate it important with over half calling it very important. This polls higher than anything else. As I've discussed, we've done a really amazing job in responding to pandemics, wildfires, floods and more, but there's more that we can do and should be done. Repairing streets and potholes and providing parks and recreation is also important to the public. As you know, we manage over 600 miles of roads that connect us to schools, libraries, parks and businesses. And for every $2 in local investment that we make into transportation in our road network, the County gets $9 in state and federal funds. Lastly, supporting frontline workers, including nurses, emergency responders and educators is a major public priority. We can accomplish that by working on our providing competitive compensation, providing affordable housing options through a pre-development work, especially as it relates to our County campuses, by providing internships and apprenticeships that will help foster the next generation to link people within our community to the County in public service. The public also sees a need for expanding mental health services for children and vulnerable populations. And we are doing this through the efforts of our public defender, as well as our health services agency. And most recently, we've been working on building a state of the art crisis residential center in Mid County for children who need these services the most. That gives you an idea of things that the County still needs to work on. So I wanna touch on our local sales tax. So the County sales tax rate is currently 9% and this is tied with the lowest rate in our County. The city of Capitola is currently tied with us at that 9% rate, as you can see here. The city of Santa Cruz is currently at 9.25% and both the cities of Watsonville and Scotts Valley are at the statutory cap of 9.75. The city of Santa Cruz just last week recently placed a half set sales tax measure on their ballot, which will appear in March. It's important to know that if the County and the city both appear on the ballot in March, these taxes are independent of one another. People who buy goods and services in the city of Santa Cruz will pay that rate and our rate will be only applicable to the unincorporated area. Our measure would be voted on Countywide, but there's just one rate that's paid depending on where you are in the County. In August of 2023, the County worked with EMC Research to conduct a survey of Santa Cruz County voters who are likely to vote in March of 2024. This measure uphold on increasing the unincorporated area sales tax by a half a percent or one half cent. Key findings show that initial support for the sales tax measure is above the majority threshold for passage. This is consistent with our past polling when we've gone out to voters to see what voter sentiment is like. Staff recommends that the board place a half cent sales tax measure on the ballot to provide a vital resource for addressing many of the community needs, including those that I just went over. A potential measure could be used to provide wildfire, flood and emergency response, prevention programs and disaster recovery services. It could also be used to repair streets and potholes and attract and retain frontline workers, including those nurses and emergency responders, provide mental health services for children in vulnerable populations and then maintain and improve our neighborhood parks. The anticipated annual revenue that would be raised by this measure is approximately $10 million, and it would ensure that we as a County have the necessary financial resources to execute local programs and services. You can see the proposed ballot measure here on the slide. If approved, the sales tax would be effective 110 days later, so we're estimating that would be July 1st of 2024. So in the next fiscal year of 2024-25, we're estimating that the annual revenue, just based on when we would start to receive the cash, would be about seven and a half million or three quarters of what we would receive annually. They're concurrent with this ballot measure that you see here. We are also recommending that the board adopt a resolution that's also attached to the item that would establish some key budget priorities for the county to address the key challenges we're facing. These priorities areas are housing and essential workforce retention. We're asking the board to prioritize a million dollars in this area of County-wide homelessness services. We're also asking the board to prioritize another million dollars to support year-round 24-hour navigation centers and services throughout the county. Climate resiliency in county parks is a third area with an equal amount that we're asking the board to prioritize to support those disaster response and recovery prevention programs as well as our neighborhood parks. And then the fourth priority area is the road repair and infrastructure projects. We're asking the board to prioritize, again, another million dollars to repair streets and potholes and address some of our infrastructure needs. And the remainder revenue would be used to support any other essential county services that we have, including our mental health services that we're planning to provide in mid-county and improving public safety. While the proposed sales tax measure would be voted on county-wide, it would be applied exclusively to unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County, as I mentioned. It's important to note that public disclosure of this funding would be made through the county's annual budget and financial audit. Also purchasing essential items such as groceries, prescription medication, diapers, feminine and hygiene products are all exempt from the sales tax. All of this revenue would stay here in Santa Cruz County for our use based on our priorities and they would address our challenges and needs, helping us to invest more in our county. So with that, I'm happy to answer your questions and I would ask that you approve the recommended actions in the staff report. Thank you. I imagine there may be some questions. I'll start with just a brief question just to make sure that it's exceptionally clear on the ballot language, it says that it'll bring in when fully enacted, I should say $10 million a year and you had a previous slide that showed that not 100% of the sales tax goes to a local government because there's split between the state and special districts. So is the 10 million specific to the county as an entity or is that the gross just to make clear the community and then there's a split from there? Yeah, the 10 million is just, it's our portion based on the half a cent that we would get here in the county that would be added to that pie chart that you saw there. All right, thank you. Are there questions from my colleagues on this item? As you've asked, Hernandez? You know, I think you had me at the three piece, right? The parks, potholes and public safety. But one that I'm really interested in is the workforce retention. I think that that's been one of the things that we really have to address at the county level and making sure that we have proper staffing levels for, we had this report that we had for behavioral health. And so we haven't had proper staffing levels there, but also in our public, in our sheriffs, we haven't had proper staffing levels. So I really hope that this really does meet the demand to properly staff a lot of our departments and a lot of our workforce that we need. Thank you. That's the Vazra Connor. Sure, thank you, Chair. You know, the thing for the fantastic presentation, I think it really makes it clear why we're considering doing this. The most common question I get when talking about this potential sales, sales tax measure out in the community is, well, we know there's inflation, but sales taxes by definition increase when there's inflation. So shouldn't the existing sales taxes be keeping up with the increased costs? And I think what you demonstrated very clearly is that the county is actually being asked to do more than ever before. The county is really left holding the bag dealing with the externalities from the climate crisis and the housing crisis. We have to, I mean, as you showed, more than a year's worth of our general fund revenues are have been spent just in responding to recent climate disasters. And then as also been mentioned, with the cost of housing increasing as rapidly as it has in recent years, we have to ultimately increase salaries in order to stay competitive and attract people to our area and fill those positions to provide services to the public. So fundamentally, that's why we need to consider a new sales tax measure is because the county is actually doing more than it has in the past. We should bet, of course, with the board approves this today, it will go out to the public to vote on whether or not they wanna approve this. And I don't think it's a unreasonable proposed increase. I mean, the county would still be, still wouldn't be the highest taxing entity within our region. And a lot of people, we live in such an expensive area, it seems like sales taxes even are ridiculously high here, but look across other parts of the state, I mean, in parts of the Bay Area or Los Angeles County, sales taxes are as high as 10.75%. And of course, those are areas that are dealing with a lot of the same issues that we are in high cost of living and then high cost to provide services. So ultimately, this will be a question that the community decide, I'm supportive of putting it on the ballot today, but it'll be our community decide what they expect from county government and if this voters don't approve this, and I mean, the reality is that we're not gonna be able to show up as much as we would like to. Thank you, that was my first one. Yeah, I'm supportive of putting this measure on the ballot to begin with. I'd like to hear the public comment, of course, but for many reasons stated in the staff report, the county does not have the proper funding streams to provide the level of services that we have as we represent the population in this county. And we have a very low property tax rate which compounds the situation for revenues for us, which is a big reason we have to ask voters for approval of measures in the past like GED and S for library, public safety for roads. And I really wanna thank the voters for doing that. We'd be in a bigger hole if we wouldn't have approved those. And as mentioned, the county spent a great deal of funding to be proactively responsive to COVID and the CZU fire and the Lightning Complex fire, the CZU fire and the atmospheric river events that we had last winter and we're spending a much larger federal share for that support, but it hasn't come. I mean FEMA has run out of money and there's been disasters throughout this nation and certainly in this state that it is not giving us and those are over a hundred million dollars total one way or the other that we've been paying for and we're just hoping that they repay us. And I think they will, but it's they're not doing it now and it really complicates the situation for us. I think this measure will help us provide the quality services that we want to do. I think I know there's a question as you've mentioned and why do all of the Santa Cruz County voters, including the city voters, vote on our sales tax measure of the county? Well, it's because we are the agents of the state to provide healthcare services, human services and people pay into that and that's part of our budget. So that's why everybody has to pay into that and that's a legal requirement as we've seen from past cases. And also as you've mentioned too, I want to make sure that the city of Santa Cruz voters realize that this is not going to be a half set, half set compound for a total of one cent. It'll only be a half cent for the incorporated area of the county and only a half cent for the city of Santa Cruz should they both be approved. I think those are very important issues and I think respect to by Konig's thoughts on inflation, but the cost of inflation or inflation results in higher prices to bill bridges or whatever the case may be. So we're trying to keep up with it and inflation is at the highest point it's been in, well, some time decade or more. So that's really put a pinch on us. We're in a tight squeeze here in the county and we're gonna hear more about that next week, but if we don't have this half cent sales tax approved, we are not gonna be able to provide the increasing services that people want from this county. I think it's a responsible thing to do and the voters will decide, but I think it's a legitimate request and from some very, very multiple cases of reasons why we need to go for this, but I'm gonna be supportive of this. Thank you, Survisor McPherson. I'd like to open it up for the community. Is there anybody in chambers that'd like to address us on specific to this item? Good morning again, David Schwartz. I'm opposed to this and I'll tell you why I'm opposed to this. We have so many families in this county that are one paycheck away from homelessness. If we add this cost to their daily living, we may create more homelessness and that's a big problem we have already. So we have to think about this. The other thing is we have opportunities for other sources of revenue that we might wanna look at. One suggestion, let's put together a task force to look at the former redevelopment agency debt that's sucking up 22% of our property tax revenues. That's a much larger piece of the pie than we even get. And I don't know if that can be reallocated back to us and all the other agencies within the county or not, but I think it's worth looking into. One of the other things that I had mentioned earlier is any opportunity for programs that we have to generate revenue and make themselves revenue neutral would allow us to then re-put that money to work in other areas. Finally, as you probably know, your county is actually a nonprofit as well. Why don't we ask the public to donate when they make their property tax at $100, they can actually deduct that as a charitable contribution. Now I know we give a lot of money to charity and we might be taking a little bit away from them, but people out there have money, let's ask them to help out as well without mandating it with a tax. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, welcome back. Good morning. Ms. Coburn and Mr. Heath, both talked to me a little bit before this item came up, so I appreciate that. I don't think I learned anything new though. My problem with this as the way it's framed is I don't think it's fair for the whole county to be voting on a tax in the unincorporated area. I think most ordinary people could understand just the basic element of fairness, but the way it's been described, Santa Cruz city resident will be able to vote on the tax rate where I live, but I will not be able to vote on the tax rate where that person lives. And I think that sounds like an equal protection issue to me. Both Santa Cruz and Watsonville have district elections for city council, I believe because lawsuits were brought in the past, raising the equal protection issue under the US Constitution. But I don't think we even need to go there because the state revenue and taxation code has section 7285, and that has a fork. If you read the very first sentence, it's big mouthful, but there's a fork in section 7285. So the county can either put on a tax that applies to the whole county and have the whole county vote, that's one prong, or the tax can be in the unincorporated area and the unincorporated area can vote on it. So I don't see how this is consistent with section 7285. Also, I think the county can save about a quarter million dollars by not running this election in four cities. I looked at the measure G results from five years ago and the measure G passed by a three to two margin in the unincorporated area. So I think this could still succeed, even if you run it in the unincorporated area. And my last point I'd like to make is I think this is gonna make it more difficult to pass the Santa Cruz tax measure if Santa Cruz residents have both measures on the ballot. Thank you. Well, again, thank you so much for allowing me to speak. My name's Tim Delaney. And the last two gentlemen, they brought up some very interesting points. You know, I kind of like, I can't, I'm not sure if I should be totally supportive of the sales tax. You know, the one thing I can say though, you know, in speaking to some of my other relatives, including international relatives, they were mentioning stuff like, oh, you know, what state should I live in that doesn't have a state income tax or sales taxes and so on. And I pointed out to them that, well, those states, you know, they don't always have jobs and the economic conditions are not very good over there. So there's a reason why we have taxes over here in the state of California. Okay. Now, so even though I don't know all the ins and outs of these type of measures and everything, I'd like to also point out to you, just when I walked out of the room there, I talked to the timber fellows and they'd never seen an old growth panorosa force or not, I'm not sure if they've even seen an old growth redwood force. So maybe you should be so quick to prove some of these sorts of things. So I have a challenge for all of you young men, okay, including Bruce. You should go down to Emeril Bay, go all the way down there and stand there and take a look at those trees. There's only about 10 old growth panorosa trees left in the entire Tahoe basin. And in the entire city of California, there's only about one to 3% old growth redwood left. And you can see that up in Northern California. You folks should take a trip to Tahoe and go down to Emeril Bay and take a hard look at that and think about the environment and taxes and all these things that you do before you make any more decisions. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you folks allowing me to speak. Thank you. Anybody else in chambers like to address us? Good afternoon. Welcome back. Thank you, Becky Steinbrenner. Why should we trust you now? When you came to the voters in 2018 with these very same arguments, support, and you didn't follow through with any of the fire support that you promised, you haven't followed through with the parks funding that you promised. Aptos village park was supposed to get $435,000. Now I'm told by the parks commissioner that was only a recommendation and there's no plan to do so. Why should we trust you now? The Santa Cruz County grand jury did a very good analysis of what happened and what has not happened. That was a 2021 did measure G mislead voters. The Santa Cruz County grand jury said, yes, you did. And they urge in the front page that the title is words matter. For future revenue measures, the grand jury encourages the County Board of Supervisors to review this report and consider adopting a policy requiring County staff to provide clearer, more succinct language explaining the nature of each tax and how it may be spent. Simply saying, oh, yeah, we're gonna give a million to this and a million to that. That is not clear or succinct or anything that lends trust to the taxpayer. Fire has received zero of measure G funds. And yet here it is being touted out as the big cause for this. You have the ability to provide fire, county fire funding with reallocation of Prop 172 money. There's a half cent statewide sales tax that was passed just for that. May I have one more minute please? But 30 seconds please. Thank you. So you have the ability to reallocate that and you do not. County fire gets a zero of that money but you have the ability to change that. You also have the ability to pursue a reconstitution of ERAF to get more of that money coming back from the state for fire and emergency services. You also took a very interesting stance to fire Rosemary Anderson, the county's emergency operations manager as a cost cutting and instilled a whole new bloated department, the OR3, which has caused a lot of expense to the county. FEMA money may have dried up but when these things happened, what happened in the county is that spending went crazy. Warehouses, renting in Monterey County to store equipment. I am asking you when disasters come to be more prudent for you. Thank you, Ms. Sebrner. Thank you, Ms. Sebrner. Thank you, Ms. Sebrner. I think we provided the additional time. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Sebrner. Is there anybody else in chambers that has not spoken to this item? Madam Clerk, is there anybody online? Yes, Chair. Colin, user to your microphones now available. Thank you, Becky, for that skating reality factual check. Why should we trust you? I don't, I live in the unincorporated area and pay plenty of taxes and what they're going for, the taxes are very disturbing for me. And of course, the overall tax in the equitable system in the whole country, we're part of it. Where the wealthy and the corporations don't pay and our tax money goes for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and other military production corporations to kill people all over the world. We need the money to go for beneficial projects in our own communities. You talk about providing for the public health and safety, all this radar, wireless technology, murder towers, cell towers, and column murder towers when you know how dangerous it is. What assault on the public health and safety, and here just quick facts, so you cut me off, cell phones, cell towers, Wi-Fi, wireless, smart meters, emit microwave, radio frequency, radiation, and children are especially vulnerable. Independent research shows this radiation causes cellular stress and damage, DNA damage, blood brain barrier disrupted, increased cancer and tumor risk, decreased melatonin, insomnia, abnormal heart rhythm, strokes, altered brainwaves, cognitive difficulties, memory and concentration, headaches, links to Alzheimer's and impacts to wildlife. Stop squandering our money on assault weapons. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Garan. Is there anybody else online? We have no further speakers, Chair. Okay, we'll close public comment and bring it back to the board. Supervisors are coming. Yeah, I just want to thank city staff for their work on this and for highlighting all the great work that the county does. And I do also want to thank members of the public who spoke today. And I just want to highlight too that this is not, it's not as if we're being fiscally irresponsible here. The county's done a great job at managing the public's money well. What's happening is that over time costs are going up, the cost to provide services are going up and we're expanding the services that we can provide here in the county. And in order to pay for all that, we have to find a revenue source and the sales tax revenue can greatly help us as we do that. We've been very responsive after the storms where crews were out fixing roads and clearing roads as quickly as they could to get people moving around again. The county was responsible with getting the OR3 office up and running, which has been really helpful at helping to address issues around disasters and how we can be more responsive to disasters. As was pointed out earlier, they've helped with getting funding for the Power Road. We have a lot of people in the county who have been helping us move forward with how we can address equity within our county. And so I think that the county's been really demonstrating to the public that we want to do the best we can to use our money the most effectively as we can. But what we're going to the people saying now is that in order to provide better services in order to continue to serve you, we need to raise some more money. We need to make sure that our workers have a place to live and that they'll stay, that we can retain them so they're not going over the hill and in order for us to continue to operate these services and have a functioning county, we need revenue and we're hoping that we can get the voters to support us as we're moving forward with this. And so I'm very supportive of this tax measure. I also want to point out that this is something that doesn't just fall on the backs of the residents. We heard a lot about how Santa Cruz is very open to having visitors come from other areas. And when those people from outside of our community come to our community and they spend money, that money comes back to us in the form of sales tax dollars. So I think it's different than like a property tax where the individual who lives here is just solely paying that. This is a revenue measure that yes, people who live here will have to pay into but all the other visitors who show up here will also be paying into this as well. So I think we should just keep that in mind as we're moving forward with asking the community to support us on this because people always ask how can we get more money from people who are coming into our community? Increasing our sales tax is one way we can do that. And so I just want to encourage our county-electeds, members of the community and community groups to help us as we move forward in this endeavor so that we can continue to provide good services and keep really talented workers here in our community. And so I'm happy with that. I'm happy to move the staff recommendation. I'll second. We have a motion for the recommended actions from Supervisor Cummings. And a second from Supervisor Hernandez. Any additional comments, peers? No, if we could have a roll call, please. Supervisor Koenig. Hi. Cummings. Hi. Hernandez. Hi. McPherson and Friend. All right, and that passes unanimously. Council, we're gonna be moving into closed session. Do you anticipate anything to be reportable out of closed session? No. All right, well then that'll close the open portion of the meeting. The board will move into our closed session.


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