Good morning, everyone. I'd like to call the Santa Cruz March 24th Metro Transit District meeting to order. It's really nice to be here in person with you all this morning, and it's not dumping rain on all of us. So welcome. I'll move on to agenda item number two, which is Safety Announcement by Curtis Moses. Thank you. I'm going to ask Ms. Donna Bauer to do a roll call, please. Here. Here. Director Newsome. Present. Heroes. Yeah, here. Thank you. So we will now recess to the Santa Cruz Civic Improvement Corporation annual meeting. And I'll pass it on to Director Rodkin. So I'm going to quickly explain what this is. In order to get loans floated or bonds more importantly, it's necessary to have some kind of a non-profit agency that is not the transit district as a way to transfer the money from the federal government over to us. It's quite bizarre, but that's the way it works. And we've all seen banks and floating these bonds. So we created this group, the Santa Cruz Civic Garden. That's the reason the group got created. When we were actually floating a bond for the transit district, a lunch out of it, mostly it's a pretty inactive group, in which case we don't serve anybody lunch, because that's what that group is for. So we keep it in reserve. It costs a fair amount of money to set that group up, the cost of incorporation and some other kinds of things. So rather than sunset it when we were done, we kept it alive for future possibilities of floating bonds for the region. Thank you. We'll go to Director McPherson. Thank you. Just like to announce, I acknowledge the appointment of Metro Board of Directors to serve on the SACIC board officers. Due to five directors having been termed out or vacated their positions on that board, the following board members were appointed to the Metro Board of Directors February 24, 2023, meaning to serve the following positions on the SACIC board of directors, Bruce McPherson, president, Dr. Colin Terry Johnson, vice president, Dr. Koenig, secretary, Dr. Pegler, treasurer, and director Downing as a member of that. The four positions will serve an additional two-year term to March 25th, and one position will complete a term vacated to March 24th as highlighted on Attachment A. And I understand it does not take a vote to, you don't need a motion or a vote to make that something based on employment that's made it already. Thank you. We're done with that meeting. We're not. Can I have a roll call of the SACIC? Is there anybody in the public that would like to address us? I said there's no bond activity that we anticipate at this point. With that, sorry, I would just call to adjourn the meeting of the SACIC. You need to, in addition to the, or deletion to the agenda, which there, then prove the prior year minutes of March 25th, 2022. If I move, we approve those. Second? Pegler, term number seven is the acceptance of the financial statement for the fiscal year 22, which is Attachment C. Are there any questions by the board members? Any questions from the public? Move a motion to accept the financial statement this year 22. I'll second. And we will now adjourn to the next SACIC board of directors meeting. Thank you. Excuse me for, thank you. OK, we will reconvene the Metro District Board meeting, and I'll move on to announcements. Today's meeting is being broadcast by community television of Santa Cruz County. We had planned on having Spanish interpretation, and due to unforeseen circumstances, we had a last minute cancellation, so we will not be able to provide that today, unfortunately. And we're fortunate to be able to participate, have hybrid participation. So if you're participating online, please mute yourself so we can minimize background noise. Any other announcements? I'm missing? OK. I'll move on to agenda item seven for board of director comments. Any board members have comments? Good morning. I just wanted to, you have COVID, you have fires, now you have this. And I think it's just phenomenal that you just keep getting there. The other thing I wanted to do is thank John for posting the reimagining meeting this week. It didn't go quite as planned, but we got spoke about things. Thank you, chair. I want to report that last Wednesday I had the opportunity to go up to Sacramento as part of the Central Coast Coalition a day. We've talked, so there's representatives from all the way down to Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo County, Monterey County, San Benito County, and ourselves here in Santa Cruz County. We talked to a number of state representatives about common transportation projects that would benefit the Central Coast region. Exciting to hear that our representatives in the Assembly and Senate are forming a Central Coast Coalition to have a little bit more voice up against the folks in LA and the Bay Area. Probably the most notable meeting for this agency was a chance to get in front of Under Secretary Mark Tolson and talk about the advantages of the proposal we have for the Transit Inner City Rail Capital Program grant, or TERSIP, they've applied for a grant that would fund a number of hydrogen buses as well as a hybrid fueling station. I'd say you understood the advantages of investing in smaller urban areas like ours, where there's possibility for a significant change in the way that people get around. Hopeful about that. And I just wanted to thank, I was really proud of the response from Metro and of Ronald Srinettis wrote us and coming back to work after getting his family out of the safety from their home in Pajaro and still coming back to be able to drive for para-cruise and the response from the Metro staff and employees that raised the funds to help him. I just read that article in the Sentinel and just, it was to everybody. I mean, it just reminds us of the dedication of our drivers, but also the staff to be there to support one of those that is struggling right now. Thank you. I want to just thank the staff and the administration of Metro just for getting ahead of so many issues, offering the rides and share the ride. Great meeting at the museum, part of history, not tomorrow. But in this day and age of electric vehicles and going to electric buses, I am very proud to announce that on Tuesday, three to two votes, the County of San Luis Obispo decided to join Central Coast Community Energy. Now we have the seven cities, the San Luis Obispo as well as the county, so we have the whole county. And now in that Cripple CE, we have 35 agencies that are participating and having us have a cleaner environment. It was a rough old goal. We went down there two weeks ago to get it on the agenda and you get that three to two vote and it's very, very pleasing. It's gonna be a really good thing for this whole region. Other directors? I'll take a moment and also echo my colleagues' comments that I want to acknowledge and thank the staff and the drivers for the work that you did over the storms over the last couple of weeks, really going above and beyond and showing the community that we are more than providing bus transportation. We are critical to public health, public safety in times of crisis and at any time. So just thank you so much for the work that you did in helping our community. Okay, we will move on to agenda item eight, which is oral and written communications to the board. So this is a time set aside for directors and members of general public to address any item not on the agenda, which is within the subject matter jurisdiction of the board. So I will first go to members here in person and see if there's any oral communication. I don't see any and I will now look to those participating virtually. If you'd like to comment right now at oral communication, please raise your hand. I don't see any hands raised, I'll give it another. Oh, I don't see that. Okay. Hi, this is Brian. Oh, that's why, I was looking to the right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I know. So you want me to talk? Are we ready to go? Okay, please go ahead, Mr. People's. Hey, this is Brian. People's from trail now. I'm gonna mention my favorite subject, which is the Coast Santa Cruz Coastal Trail. The North Coast Trail that goes from Wilder to Davenport has been delayed for years because it goes along the coast and the Coastal Commission has placed major restrictions. Actually, they only allow a temporary retaining wall for the trail. And so for this reason, it's been delayed and we actually don't have enough money now likely to build it. When we look at the entire Coastal Port or from Watsonville to Davenport, there are many locations that the trail or the rail line goes within 20 feet of the coast. And also it goes through the federally protected Harkin Slough, which is actually underwater right now. So what the issue is is that the idea that we're gonna have a new electric train 20 feet from the coastline is not realistic. And what that's happening is it's preventing our trail from being built. There's actually even no plan to build the trail to Watsonville. Watsonville is actually probably the community that is most penalized by this because they will never have a trail because the train advocates are trying to believe that they'll have a train. But what we've seen with the North Coast Trail is evidence that the Coastal Commission will not allow it. Think about it. Everybody envisioned Manresa Beach where the tracks are. It's 20 feet or Park Avenue in Capitola along that cliff. The idea of spending a billion dollars for a train, 60 trains a day go past that. Now, many people think that the public wants a trail and are a train and we're gonna give it to them. Well, unfortunately, you can't give it to them on the Coastal Corridor because it's 20 feet from the tracks. And what that's doing is it's preventing our trail from being built. You've only built 1.2 miles of the trail over the decade. And actually it's cost more than widening the highway. Building a 12 foot wide trail that costs more than widening the highway doesn't make a lot of sense. So I wanna encourage everybody to start being realistic on what we can and can't do because we're not getting it done. We're not getting the trail built. Watsonville, you're not getting the train widened the highway, that's the path forward. So I appreciate everybody's time and I want everybody to just start to have that realization that you're never gonna have a train and it's preventing our trail from being built. Thank you for your time. Let me ask a logistics question. Is there a timer on for speakers? Okay, I can't see it on my screen. Okay, thank you. Are there any other members participating virtually that would like to speak for oral communication? Anyone seeing what I'm seeing? No hands up? Okay. All right, we'll move on to Labor Organization Communication. Hello? Okay, there you go. Good morning, Board of Directors. It's good to be in person again. I really missed this. For everyone online that doesn't know who I am, my name is James Seneval. I'm the General Chairperson of Smart Local 23 who represents the bus and paratransit operators here at Metro. And first I want to say congratulations to Shabra and Kristen on your appointments as Chair and Vice Chair. It's gonna be great working with you guys to make sure we get Metro where it needs to be. And I also want to thank Scott and Vanessa for meeting with me. It's great to know you guys a little bit better and making sure that I have a relationship with each and every board member here that we're all continuously working together to make Metro a better place. And I just want to mention that negotiations are coming up. Our first date for negotiations is April 6th and April 7th. And I just wanted to say that it's been a great change for the past year working with Michael Tree. We've been spending a lot more energy working together instead of fighting against each other. I'm hoping that this negotiations will be a smooth one. I will say the last one for the board members that were here could remember it was a pretty rough one. So I'm hoping that we could reach a deal that would help us better recruit and help better retain the operators that we currently have. So with that being said, thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm moving to item 10, additional documentation to support existing agenda items. Thank you. So we are now moving to consent agenda which is item 11.1 to 11.7. I'll look to directors to see if there are any comments or questions or if any item needs to be pulled. I would suggest that we pull item 11.7 proving a consideration of award of contract to Miller-Maxfield Inc. for strategic planning services for future revenue options, not to exceed $338.50. Okay. So we're pulling item 11.7. Any other comments, questions, items pulled? Okay. I'll look to see if there are any members of the public that have comments on consent agenda items 11.1 to 11.6. Anyone here in person? Anyone virtually? We have a motion by Director Rotkin. Second. Second by Pegler. And we'll do, do we do a roll call vote when we're in person? With the exception of number seven. That's right. With the exception of seven, 11.7. And he'd be promoted to a panel. I can't hear anything. I just hear people saying aye. Can you hear us, Director Dutra? I can only, I can hear you and I can hear people saying aye but I could not hear the roll. Oh, you couldn't hear Donna, huh? No. I actually haven't been able to hear her really the whole meeting. So I don't know if she's, I can hear you now, yes. See now you just went away again. So I don't know if you're backing away from the microphone maybe. Yes. So can I vote? Yes. Aye. We have you down as aye. Thank you. Okay. All right, so that passes. We will now move to 11.7 and I'll pass it to Director Koenig. Just thought this item bore a little bit more discussion. One of the first opportunities we've had is a board to discuss the potential for a revenue measure in the coming years in a little bit more detail. I was just curious, I've had a couple things.  Second, you know, this is fairly large sum of money. My, you know, back at the envelope calculation or from past experiences that a countywide campaign will cost about $400,000 give or take. So this is close to that amount. I'm curious, you know, if these services would actually be for the execution of a campaign or if they're simply research oriented. I think it's also worth pointing out that 2024 is going to be quite the year for revenue measures. I think many of the agencies that I'm a part of are discussing the potential for one right now. So I was just also wondering how much we've talked with other agencies and other directors here can talk about their experience on that. I mean, the board is talking about potential, or supervisors is discussing potential revenue measures. So yeah, I think that the timing bears discussion as well. We'll ask Michael if you wanna respond to some of that. Sure, you hear me okay? So great questions. Long story short, the contract amount is task order base. So we would pay as we go and look into opportunities and one of them could be a future ballot measure. Certainly November of 24 would be a potential time to go to the ballot. We have done polling and it's in the giraffe mode and so we're looking at over, we're analyzing it and our thoughts are to come back to the board once we've kinda locked in where we think that poll directs us to as far as what the public sentiment might be for a potential metro ballot measure. But long story short, it's a multi-year contract which should you progress through various phases so to speak as you make decisions on whether you wanna be on the November 24 ballot. This contract price would allow you to do multiple polling events and generally speaking to go out and do a statistically valid poll if the public is about a $50,000 endeavor. So this includes those type of activities. So I guess the quick comment is we're analyzing a poll that we've done. I would say early indications are in the giraffe poll that it looks very interesting for the board as far as an opportunity to potentially go that route. Thank you for the clarification and I understand that this is sort of just an overarching contract and it's still, you know, it's pay as you go and certainly not a comment on the qualifications of, you know, at Maxfield, an excellent local firm and clearly scored very well in the RFP process. I'm just wondering about the timing here. I mean, I'd feel a little bit more comfortable seeing the poll results first. I'm also understanding if that was looked at in the context of potential other revenue measures on the 2024 ballot or beyond. The other question I had is, are there potential revenue measures this board could look at other than a sales tax measure? You know, I think so. I think as we move forward, part of the work of this contract and the firm, Miller-Maxfield, would be to look at all opportunities for strategic funding moving forward and to that end, we've had some initial discussions with the city managers, with the county administrator just to kind of get a lay of the land in the field for who's thinking what. So I think some major decisions are upcoming for the board and this contract allows you to basically gather the information, put together this final version of the poll so you have good information to act on. You're saying that Miller-Maxfield would be involved in analyzing the poll results that we already have? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, I authorized the poll under my spending authority and for lack of better word, need some professional assistance in making sure that I'm analyzing correctly the results moving forward. Are there other directors of comments? I have a question. Is that Jimmy? Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. So when was this poll taken? So it was the first week of March. Director Dutcher. So it was recently taken and from your initial glance and I know you're not a complete expert in this area of reading polls, what did you see in it? I would say from a, like a real div of Metro and majority may not ride Metro, they see value in investing the maintenance and future improvements of Metro. I actually had a conversation yesterday with a writer or he used to ride Metro. He was really disappointed that the 91X was taken away and that was his, it really shortened his transportation throughout the county. And so he's now switched back to driving in the car. But I think that we are gonna have to do a lot of work on really trying to win the public's trust back, especially since, when I believe when we did the Cabrillo College, when they taxed themselves that the 91X was really promised as a route that was gonna be preserved. And that didn't happen. So I'd be really curious to see what the public is, how they view us as an organization when we already went out and promised a certain route. And then we have recently taken it away. So that'll be, it'll be interesting to see the results of this. And I have to, I mean, I'd like to, I kind of agree with Director Koenig as well as it'd be, it'd be nice to see these results first before really, you know, moving forward with such a contract. Thank you, Director Dutra, Director Rodkin. Unfortunately, in doing work on elections, it's not always, for example, trying to pull public opinion, get a realistic read of what the public might be willing to support. And again, in the end, it's not the poll doesn't determine what happens in the election does if you have one, but being able to run those polls on the basis of CEO general managers going to set them off rather than having a big public discussion about the poll gets you data that's useful. If you announce you're about to do a poll and whatever and stuff, groups get organized and basically make the poll useless. And so I think that's why we're having the money available, the ability of our general manager to make a decision about when it might take the right time, what kinds of questions need to be on the poll. Unfortunately, those are things that we have input on, but I don't think it makes sense to have those discussions in public or to see the poll first or put it out in public before you then vote for the money that funds that possibility. I also have to say that there's not an agency in this county that doesn't really need to improve its public transportation situation and we're the real key to that in all the five jurisdictions that we're talking about. So even though I know those agencies all have interests and they might be floating measures of a variety of different kinds, the idea that somehow we should step aside and wait for them to do their things. Almost all of them that had bond measures on our local tax measures and the last several elections, we haven't had an election for a general pay increase other than the measure D, which funded not just us, but all kinds of things. Since 1978, I worked on that tax to get us our initial half-send sales tax. And the result of having that kind of local self-help funding is what's responsible for all the federal, not all, but plays a key role in the funding that we've gotten from the federal and state governments because the ability to show that our local citizens support our public transit system is the real key to getting that funding that moves us up in the competition with a variety of grants that we apply for. So I think it makes a lot of sense for us to approve this general amount of money is to be available for this process. And the board, of course, will get to weigh in on before we actually expend any of it in the future. It's not like it's just a blank check to Michael Tree to go spend it on wherever he thinks we ought to be doing. The board will get a chance to actually weigh in, but it lines up an agency that's demonstrated their ability to do this kind of work at a professional level and prepare us for this kind of activity, which I think is critical for this agency. A small additional infusion of funding to this agency would make a huge difference in facing all the problems that we're confronting here. Thank you, Director Rottkin. Any other directors, comments, questions? Thank you for those comments, Director Rottkin. One question is, could we extend the, or modify the contractors to say that we could extend it through, or an additional, either an additional period after the first extension of three years or make the second extension four years? I'm just thinking about maintaining the option of any efforts in 2028 through the end of 2028. I'm gonna guess that, I mean, I'll leave it to Saft to determine whether it's feasible, but at some point that people bidding on this are tying up their resources and preparing for this. If you ask them for another year, I bet they won't do it for free. I hope we can talk them down to the littlest amount of money if we go that way, but I think let's recognize you don't get, it's not a free lunch for this. Michael, did you wanna comment on that? I was just wondering if Director Tonic could restate exactly what you were envisioning there. Just, so the, I think the contract says it's for two years with a three-year potential extension, three years would take us to just pass the presidential primary in 2028. I'm wondering if we either could add an additional option for extension or make the second extension period four years or maybe make it two two-year periods, or sorry, three total two-year periods just so that we have the option of extending the contract through the end of 2028, which of course would be the next with 2028 presidential election. I could, the parties can always agree to extend the contract by amendment, and I think the question will come down to where things are in terms of the compensation of that item. Can you hear me? Sorry about that. The parties can always agree to extend the contract by amendment when the time is appropriate. I think the question will be where things are in terms of the compensation if that item would need to come back to the board, but that's sort of the option to amend the contract is always. Great, thank you. Thank you. All right, if there aren't any other comments or questions by directors, I'll move to, I'll see if there are any members of the public who have comments or on this item, okay? Anyone virtually? All right, I see Mr. Peoples hands up. Thank you. This is Brian Peoples from Trail Mail. You know, in 2016 Measure D came out. We actually came out as a political action committee opposed to Measure D at the time. And the reason was because they had 24% of the funding going towards a train, actually $14 million going to a new Monterey County train station. So we were coming out to oppose it. And so what happened was Zach Fran and Don Lane, who's the mayor at the time, negotiated and changed the language. So they reduced it down to 8% of funding going towards the rail. And the money was transferred to Metro, paratransit and so then what we did is we became a supporter of it. And our supporters actually fund provided the greatest amount of donations for Measure D. 2016 Measure D. And we all know how important that election was. Big supporter, we were a big supporter for Metro at the time. Having said that, watching how the Metro board members on this board, when they're voting, how they vote on the RTC board, putting a train over Metro funds, we questioned whether we would support another sales tax measure for Metro. And I would honestly tell you, if we continue down the path building an expensive, narrow trail next to the old railroad tracks where the train is not possible because it goes 20 feet from the ocean, that kind of leadership, we will, I will become a PAP, a political action committee opposing any Metro sales tax measure. And the reason is because we're watching how you're spending our money today and how you're misusing. And you've only built 1.2 miles of the trail. And the trail costs more than why need the highway. So that kind of use of our tax dollars is not appropriate. And so you go back and asking for more money, we will oppose it if you keep heading down the path we're heading. If you don't, if you do start moving in, doing the interim trail and supporting that, by all means, we'll support the Metro tax measure. But right now you guys are wasting our tax dollars and you're not building the trail in a timely and effective manner or environmentally, you're cutting 400 trees down. So anyways, thank you for your time. I just wanna make sure you know that if you keep managing our money the way you do, we will, I will become a PAP opposed to any tax measures for Metro. Thank you. I thought I saw Mr. Matt Ferrell's hand up. Did you wanna make a comment, Mr. Ferrell? You're unmuted, you can speak. Matt, can you hear us? No, he doesn't look like it. Matt, you can speak up as well. His hand was up, yeah. So I think he can't hear us. I wanna give him an opportunity to speak. Matt, can you hear us?  Okay, I think we move on. All right, any other members wishing to speak on 11.7? Chair for Smart Local 23. I just wanted to comment on a couple of the things that we've heard here today. And I'd like to remind you that the RTC spending doesn't necessarily reflect Metro spending. And we started this meeting talking about the things that our drivers and our staffs do for this community. We need financial support to be able to do that. We have an extremely aged fleet. We have a shortage of staff across multiple departments. And the only way that we're gonna fix that is by remaining competitive. We're gonna remain competitive, we need money. I think that Michael has shown over the last year he's extremely responsible and extremely proactive in trying to fix these issues. And for him to come here and tell you, I need help doing that. It's very important. And I think we should look at that and see this man is doing everything that he can to fix the problems that we have. He needs your support to get it done. This is not money that is going to be wasted. This is nothing to do with the train. This is about Santa Cruz Metro and our bus system. And Michael has done nothing to make you question whether or not he would spend this money appropriately. We're in full support of you supporting us. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I'm gonna just see one more time if Matt's able to hear us and wants to speak. Matt, can you hear us? No. Doesn't appear so. All right, I'll come back to the directors for a motion for 11.7. Director Rodkin. I'll move approval of the staff recommendation but amend it to direct staff to meet with lower max field to discuss the possibility of an extension option. I just, that's not part of the motion but to explain the motion. For example, we might agree that if it's extended within a year or something which doesn't require them to put aside a lot of resources to get ready to go and those, if you do it at the last minute it's expensive to add it, maybe not earlier. So the motion is to direct staff to talk with them about what it might cost us to have an option for extension. Thank you, Director Rodkin. Otherwise approving the matter before us. Second. I'll second. Director Paikler for this question. Just one last question. What is the spending a limit that you would have to come back to the board to approve any further spending under this contract? 50,000. I'm prepared to support this understanding that we're not actually agreeing to any specific expenditures today but just the fact that we're pursuing this. I also appreciate the time to daylight this a little bit discuss further among the board. I do think there's some issues that we're gonna have to address here going forward. As I said, it's gonna be extremely competitive environment in 2024. Not to say that this agency is not worthy but of course it absolutely is as we've all expressed. I just wanna make sure that we're all realistic about how best and most efficiently to invest our resources to be successful. And I appreciate Director Connick's comments because I do know as he mentioned other jurisdictions will be looking at funding as well but I was good. I'm happy to hear that Michael and staff that there's been communication with our local city managers and CEO for the county and that that's part of the research that you're doing is talking to the various jurisdictions finding out what their plans are and coordinating to where we all be most successful so that I agree is an important component of that as well but otherwise I support the project. Okay, there's no further discussion. We'll take a roll call vote. Aye. Kirsten. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Feros-Carter. Aye. Thank you. We're moving to our regular agenda. We have item 12 which is presentation of employee longevity awards. So I will present those now. We have a certificate of appreciation for Javier Favella and I will apologize in advance if I mispronounce anyone's names. Javier Favella who has worked with the Metro for 10 years. So thank you. Certificate of appreciation for Jose de Zamaripa in the mechanic two position for 10 years. Patrick J. Orthon, bus operator for 15 years. Maurizio Italia, bus operator for 15 years. And John C. Nevin, transit supervisor for 15 years. Thank you for your years of work with the Metro and we really appreciate it. Let me just make sure I didn't miss anybody. I don't take comments on this, right? All right, so moving on to agenda items. Will you round up a pause for this? Yes, thank you. That would be... Is this the one? Okay there. I just wanted to make note that I know it's gonna be a lot harder nowadays because we're short staff, but back in the days we would invite these people that would get these longevity awards to our meetings so they could speak to you all. And I thought it was a great experience because you get to see these people in person and it was a big deal for a lot of people. So I'm hoping we could eventually get back to that. I'm not saying we could do it now but it would be great to see it back. So thank you. 13 is retiree resolution of appreciation for Mark Saunders, bus operator. And I have a logistics question to Donna. Do I read the entire resolution? Hannah, there's some really nice things in here. I'll just take a moment to read it. Thank you. So whereas the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District was formed to provide public transportation, you know what, I'm gonna skip over that stuff and talk about Mr. Mark Saunders. Whereas Metro required an employee with the expertise, dedication, appointed Mark Saunders to serve in the position of bus operator. And whereas served as a member of the operations department of Metro for the time period of November 9th, 1999 to February 23rd, 2023. Whereas Mark Saunders provided Metro with dedicated service and commitment during the time of his employment. And whereas Mark Saunders served Metro with distinction. Whereas the service provided to the residents of Santa Cruz County by Mark Saunders resulted in reliable quality public transportation being available in the most difficult times. And whereas during the time of Mr. Saunders service, Metro improved existing and built new operating facilities, converted the fleet to a CNG propulsion system, developed accessible bus stops, improved ridership, responded to adverse economic conditions, assumed direct operational responsibility for Highway 17 express service and the Amtrak connector service, and assumed the direct operational responsibility for the Paracruz service. Whereas the quality of life in Santa Cruz County was improved dramatically as a result of the exemplary services provided by Mark Saunders. Now therefore be it resolved that upon his retirement as bus operator, the board of directors of Metro does hereby commend his efforts in advancing public transit service in Santa Cruz County and expresses sincere appreciation on behalf of itself, the Metro staff and all the residents of Santa Cruz County. Be it further resolved that a copy of this resolution will be entered into official records. So thank you so much, Mark Saunders. And let's do a round of applause. Oh, and we have a comment. Yeah. I believe I need to make a motion. We need to take action on this. Yes, we do. So I move that we approve this. Great. All right. We'll call vote. Director Brown. Director Downing. Aye. Director Dutra. Aye. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson. Aye. Director Koenig. Aye. Director Lind. Aye. Director McPherson. Aye. Director Newsom. Aye. Director Pagler. Aye. Director Queeros Carter. Aye. And Director Rockin. And the motion passes. Now the applause. Round of applause. Congratulations. And thank you for all your service. All right. Moving to item 14. And that is our state legislative update from Mr. Michael Pimentel. Okay. Should we move to the next? Sure. Let's do that. So we will be doing item 15, which is our federal legislative update. Chris, give me up. Welcome. Thank you. It's good to be here. I usually start my, you know, my rift is, you know, thank you for allowing me to come out here for the good weather. But right now it's super nice in DC right now. It's actually warmer, I think. But anyway, it's good to be here in person for the first time in three years and see all of you and get together here. So thank you for the opportunity. I thought I would kind of just go over a few items that are going on here in Washington DC. One in particular that I want to kind of concentrate on with regard to the budget, but I do have a couple of other items. The DOT budget, the IIJA, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or as the president calls it, the bipartisan infrastructure law, kind of implementation of that. And then we are in a new Congress. We started a new guys that everybody knows. In January, we started the first session of the two year 118th Congress. So just a little bit about that. Oops. So first with regard to the budget, the FY 2023 budget for the Department of Transportation and all other agencies as well was enacted in late December of 2022. That's about three months after the official start of the federal fiscal year. October one is the official start of the federal fiscal year. And it's been about 25 years. I think last year was the 25th anniversary of Congress last actually approving their budget before October 1st. So we've got some problems with regard to being able to enact a budget on time here in Washington DC. For most of the programs at the US Department of Transportation, funding was kind of steady, a little bit of smaller small increases. We really do benefit from that by partisan infrastructure law, which also included in addition to these competitive grant programs, a five year reauthorization of federal transit programs. And so these funding levels are kind of baked in, hard to reduce. And so I talk about small increases, but I don't want to undermine the fact that the first year of the IIJA, which was fiscal year 2022, included some pretty significant increases, particularly of transit formula programs, 30% increase sort of overall. And so they've really front loaded that, those increases kind of two or 3% increases after that. So while I say small, these are still sort of much larger than FY22 with regard to that. So same thing with the bus programs, the competitive programs that we like to apply for, those also got some small increase, actually over the authorized levels that the infrastructure law has enacted. In this very goofy budget parlance, we call it a plus up. You've probably heard me say that before, where Congress takes that authorized level and increases it a little bit.  So for instance, this low and no emissions bus program that is about a $1.2 billion program now, again, back in FY2021, that was about a $200 million program. So even though it looks like a small $150 million, I believe is what the plus up was for this program, it brought it from $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion almost. So again, not insignificant with regard to that. The FY2024 budget process has started. You might have seen that the president sent his proposed budget to Congress in the last few weeks. Just like every other president, those are kind of considered by Congress to be dead on arrival. Congress takes its power of the purse really seriously. And so they will take the president's budget under advisement, but they will also make changes to that with regard to that. This is the one thing I wanted to kind of talk a little bit more about, and that is these differences between the White House and congressional Republicans with regard to spending. So as we know that Republicans are now in the majority in the House. It's a slim majority, but they are in the majority of the House. And so it's going to take some bipartisan negotiations to pass an FY2024 budget. Up to now, House Republicans have been pretty certain in their desire to include a lot of deficit reduction in the annual budgets over the next few years. And while they haven't given us sort of specific programs that they would like to either cut or reduce or eliminate, to reach those very, very, I think it's $10 trillion over 10 years, some really pretty big cuts. What they have said is that, oh, we're not going to touch social security, we're not going to touch Medicare, and we're probably not going to cut defense spending, which is about half of the entire federal government budget. So what we're looking at to get trillions of dollars of deficit reduction is a really narrow path. It's probably somewhere between 25 and 30% of the overall budget is where all of that has to come. And so that's where we talk about, where we worry about these Department of Transportation programs being vulnerable to reductions, even with those baked in amounts in the IJA. That's kind of the president's law. And so I think that we may see some proposals by Republicans to cut back on everything. And I'm not talking just about transit, but other things for those of you on county boards and city councils, Department of Housing and Urban Development, really vulnerable, EPA, Department of Labor, things that you care a lot about. And so it's going to be a battle. The president doesn't want to do all this. As a matter of fact, his budget proposes an 8% increase in those areas that we call the non-defense discretionary budget. And so he's going to fight it, but in order to get a budget passed, it's going to take some Republican votes. And so I think it's going to be a kind of a hairy summer and fall with regard to that. Again, I don't think, I think the 26th straight year, we won't meet that October one budget. And we may even have a government shutdown at some point in the fall. If I were a betting man, I would say we might have one of a few days, a few weeks, depending on when it happens. But it's going to be tough, and we're going to have to do a lot of work. Luckily, we've got a congressional delegation that's very supportive of federal transit programs and Metro in general. But we're going to have to work very hard to make sure that they know how important these programs are because again, if there's horse training that's going to go on, somebody's going to, you know, somebody's ox is going to get cored or how they say it. So anyway, so just kind of a warning that we're looking at kind of rough waters over the next few months, but hopefully we can come out okay. They ruined this Donna with regard to the, yeah, it doesn't seem to be going forward, or it was before. Here we go, thank you. So I thought I might, with regard to that, bipartisan infrastructure law, IIJA, thought I might kind of give you an overview of where we are kind of a year and a half in. It was enacted in October of 2021, about a trillion and a half in infrastructure spending. About half of that was that transportation reauthorization. I feel like with regard to actual new spending, I talk about it somewhere in about the $500 billion area over five years as opposed to the 1.5 trillion that people talk about overall. They were going to do that, the transportation reauthorization anyway. And so I think, so the infrastructure bill kind of added on to that. So anyway, we've seen almost, I think there's one small culvert program or something like that that needs to come out with regard to the competitive funding here. But almost all of it is sort of on the street with regard to notices. I think now, I say about half of that first year funding has been awarded. I think it's now a little bit more than half of it. And others are getting ready to go. Here's just a couple of examples of those very competitive, but large, we're talking billions of dollars in competitive programs annually. So like the low and no missions, which we care really, we care a lot about, that mega grant program, which Metro benefited from with that, the RTC, Caltrans Highway One grant that was just given. And then this safe streets for all, which is a pedestrian sort of basically safety program. And I believe the county got a planning grant for that recently. And so we do have a pretty good idea of how all of these look. I was talking about the last point here, where I was talking about what we've been seeing and it's what we've been expecting from the Biden administration. They're very focused on, particularly in the transportation area, of making awards that deal with safety, modernization, climate change, and equity. And the awards seem to bear that out. I would also say that the awards seem to be very geographically spread out. And some folks may think it's not the case, but it seems to me that the DOT has been making awards in red states and blue states and big states and small states, urban and rural. They've been trying really hard to spread it out in an equitable fashion with regard to that. I'll pop up to that second to last point with regard to the Biden administration. We are hearing and seeing this administration really sharpening its rhetoric with requirements. And Bi America is one of those, which Bi America has been kind of the law of the land for a long time, but the federal government has been pretty generous with waivers if you can kind of convince them that you can't find something domestically, they'll give you, pretty much give you a waiver for that. Impression is that this administration is really going to tighten up. They really want everything to be kind of made in the USA. And in some cases, that could make a project more expensive or delay it with regard to supply chain issues and stuff like that. But like I said, this administration seems very focused on keeping those rules in place. And then the last thing I talk about, we've talked about this the last time I was on line with you guys, but it hadn't been official yet, right? We've now got a slim Republican majority in the house. I believe it's Speaker McCarthy can afford to lose about four votes on any given day if Democrats hang together. And so that's gonna make passing legislation there hard. The Senate, same thing, very slim majority. I count the one is independent Senator Kirsten Sinema from Arizona, who was a Republican, changed parties. Says she's not caucusing with either party, so that's why I've kind of, there are, among those 50 Democrats, there are a few independents. Bernie Sanders is an independent. There's a Senator from Maine who's an independent, but they caucus with the Democrats. Sinema is not doing that, so that's why I see that. And so as a result, we're probably gonna see a lot of Connolly Harris, the Vice President, in the Senate chamber to break ties. And so, but again, that slim majority in the Senate gives us this kind of dichotomy between the two that where they're not doing the same things. The House is doing their bills and the Senate is doing theirs, and there's not a lot of coming together on the same items. Again, we know this, but again, sort of official with regard to the House delegation. Of course, your Congressman Panetta represents a good chunk of Santa Cruz County and has now been given a lot of the area in the San Lorenzo Valley and all we're in as she was representing. And then we've got a new member down in the Watsonville area, Congresswoman Zo Lofgren, who's a really senior member of the House. She's a ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee. She's a very senior member of the House and she's a chair committee, very well thought of among her colleagues. And I would imagine with all of this weather, she and things happening down in that new part of her district that she's getting to know it faster than she ever thought she might, but she's been very interested in, the CEO has already been before the election, briefed her staff on metro operations and so we've got a good relationship with her staff already and she seems to wanna be willing to help and be effective in Watsonville. And then the last thing I was saying before, the FY 2024 budget I think is, that's the one thing that the House and Senate have to come together on, right? If the Senate can do their judicial nominations and they can do legislation that the president supports but the House doesn't support but eventually they gotta come together on this budget. They probably have to come together on this debt limit. Some people are saying, maybe we don't have to increase the debt limit but the Treasury Department said, sometime this summer we're gonna run out of time and so that's another area where I will agree to vote for a debt limit increase if you agree to my demands with regard to deficit reduction. So again, that comes back here. House Republicans have a lot of leverage with regard to that so again, have to be very careful and fight for the programs we care a lot about. That's about it in a nutshell but happy to answer any questions or if I missed anything I'm here to help. Thank you so much. Thank you. Questions? It's clear that for structural reasons, because of structural reasons that, but you have your ear to the ground in Washington. Are there people among those Republicans who are actually speaking about targeting transportation funding and the scuttle butt and stuff like, that's where I'm gonna go get the money or is it just talk is about, let's claw back unused pandemic relief money if it's unused or unobligated. Let's claw back out years of the infrastructure bill with no specifics but it's sort of, I think Republicans see those as maybe low hanging fruit because it's kind of out there but hasn't been spent yet. Let's take it and do that. But nothing specific yet, especially in the transportation area. Let me see if there's any public comments. And I see Mr. Pimentel. So we'll go back up to item 14 and that is state legislative update. Hello, Michael, thanks for being here. There we go. Well thank you, Madam Chair and Board members. Appreciate your flexibility this morning and allowing me to move after Chris and we'll say that I think there's gonna be a lot of congruency in terms of updates and really some of the challenges that exist here at the state level relative to how we have seen challenges at the federal level. Now, I would ask that we pull up my PowerPoint slides so I can run through just a few items that speak to where we are with this legislative session for the 2023, 2024 year. So I'm gonna pause for a beat so we can pull up those slides and then get underway. So we can move to that first slide. And Donna, I'm not seeing anything on my end with regards to legislation. So 2023, 2024 legislative session. I am not gonna, this is still now. To share it from your side. I certainly can do that. All right, so folks, I'm gonna walk you through just a few high level updates with regards to work under way here in Sacramento. I wanna note for you that we are in the regular session for the 2023 to 2024 year. And here, the legislature has reconvened for this session. They were convened on January 3rd and we are just passed a deadline for submitting legislation for this calendar year of 2023. That deadline was February 17th. And with that deadline, we saw more than 2,500 bills introduced in this legislative session for this calendar year. And I'm gonna be touching on a few of those notable bills that have some potential impact on Santa Cruz Metro as I move through my presentation. But just wanna also note for you that as a matter of process, we're also very quickly approaching a spring recess. That's when the legislature breaks for a moment in time and they will be reconvening on April 10th. And so between March 30th, April 10th, I expect no legislative action. But as we've seen over recent weeks, there has been a variety of legislative hearings to consider legislative proposals as well as aspects of the governor's proposed budget, which I will touch on in a moment. So moving to the next slide, I'll just highlight for you one of those bills that has some potential impact to Santa Cruz Metro. This is a bill that is being sponsored by the California Transit Association organization that Santa Cruz Metro is a member of. This bill, AB 463, heart. Michael, if you could just pause one second, we lost the screen one moment. Oh, there we go. Okay, please continue. All right, sure thing. So this bill establishes for transiting agencies this designation of an essential use customer. And that essential use customer status affords transit agencies with the ability to have continuous access to electricity in the event of rolling blackouts. And the concept here is that agencies across the state are moving very rapidly to introduce zero emission technologies. We've had a lot of discussions with the Metro team about your own plans for both battery electric, hydrogen fuel cell technologies but recognizing that there has been increasing demand on California's electricity grid. The incidence of grid challenges has become more acute. That is something that may have an impact on your ability as an agency to carry out two core functions. One would be daily service delivery. The other would be emergency response. And I think as was alluded to earlier in today's board there have been extreme weather events across the state including in Santa Cruz Metro or rather Santa Cruz County that has required a Metro to be activated. This bill would afford Santa Cruz Metro like agencies across the state with some added ability to have a reliable access to electricity. Now I prepared this deck prior to the bill being heard in the assembly utilities and energy committee. And today I'm pleased to note for you all that this bill did pass out of that committee with bipartisan support and we'll be moving on to the assembly appropriations committee. Now I also wanna highlight an additional bill for you and this is one that we've talked about in years past albeit in a different form. This is AB 610 by assembly member Holden that would establish a structure for funding youth transit passes through transit agencies in partnership with educational institutions. This bill was before the legislature last year as AB 1919 and that bill did reach the governor's desk but was ultimately vetoed because there was not funding to bring that bill online. Now this year advocacy organizations from across the state are working to identify that budget resource that can support this program. And they're pursuing that in tandem with this legislation which is currently a bill that's passed out of the assembly transportation committee and onto the assembly appropriations committee. Now I also wanna highlight a bill that has the potential to significantly modify the structure of transit operations but also two laws and regulations impacting transit agencies at the state level. This is the bill AB 761 by assemblywoman Laura Friedman happens to be the chair of the assembly transportation committee. And here this bill acknowledges that even pre-pandemic most transit agencies across the state were seeing declines in transit ridership but certainly because of the pandemic we have seen that ridership has become increasingly stagnant at a level that is well below pre-pandemic levels. And while that does not exist for every agency across the state on balance it does. And with that assemblywoman Friedman is looking to introduce a bill that would convene a new task force at the state level to review those challenges that are presented to transit agencies in their recovery from the pandemic and then also challenge agencies in their long-term efforts to incite mode shift away from cars and to high capacity public transit. Now this bill is one that just passed out of the assembly transportation committee. Again, this presentation was prepared for this week's hearings and the bill will be moving on to the assembly appropriations committee. Now this bill is one that is very critical in part because in Sacramento there are ongoing conversations around transit operations funding. Chodras operational funding shortfalls that are the outgrowth of the pandemic but also to provide support to agencies in advancing strategies to regrow transit ridership as a legislature has contemplated those requests from the industry writ large. They've been very clear reform needs to be part of the conversation. This bill helps to advance one form of reform to move that type of investment forward in this calendar year. Now I do wanna highlight then a few items related to the state budget. And here I just wanna note for you that Governor Newsom did release his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2324 on January 10th of this year. And the budget picture is frankly pretty dark. The governor's administration has projected a $22.5 billion funding shortfall for this year. And with that, as you'll see in a moment there are a variety of proposed cuts that are on the table primarily from discretionary spending as a mechanism for reducing that budget deficit. And so here I wanna note for you that perhaps the most operative cut before the transit industry is a proposed cut of $2 billion to the state's transit and intercity rail capital program. Now, as you heard earlier in the remarks there is strong interest from agencies across the state in building transformative capital projects. Santa Cruz Metro does in fact have a request in for a program from the TIRCP for what is known as cycle six of that grant program. And I will note for you that these $2 billion in reductions speak to out-year investments. And so it would not have an impact on the funding cycle for which Santa Cruz Metro has just applied. It would speak to future funding cycles that are actuated through a new process. The TIRCP by and large operates as a competitive grant program that is overseen by the California State Transportation Agency. These $2 billion in reductions relate to a form of investment that would in fact flow through the regions for a project selection at a regional level for purposes that relate to the interests of the TIRCP program which is largely building, again, transformative capital projects but also supporting the transition to cleaner technologies like Santa Cruz Metro's interest in moving to hydrogen fuel cell buses. Now, I also want to note for you that another proposed reduction that is on the table is this $1 billion reductions of programs not that full balance would impact transit buses, ferries or locomotives that are deployed by transit agencies. It's a broad-based cut that would impact light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles but there would be a proposed 10% reduction to the investments that would flow to the California Resources Board's hybrid and zero-emission truck and bus voucher incentive project also known as HFIP that provides voucher incentive to reduce the incremental cost of transitioning to zero-emission technologies. And I want to just then show you what that looks like in real terms. I noted again, broad-based cuts across the board. You'll see that there are a variety of programs that have seen reductions. Those are spoken to on the far right column where you see the amount of funding that is retained relative to the initial budgeted amount. And then as I had noted, you see a roughly 10% reduction for transit bus across programs overseen by CARB as well as programs overseen by the California Energy Commission which relates to infrastructure investments to support zero-emission bus transition. Now I also want to note for you one thing that does not speak specifically to elements of the transportation program that the state has control over. And so these are programmatic investments that flow on a formula basis and for which the state does not make annual appropriation decisions around. Programs that are highlighted, for example, include the state transit assistance program that is funded by the sales tax on diesel fuel and the reductions that you're seeing here in terms of funding amount. And you'll see a total reduction of $118 million relate just to changes in economy, changes in fuel consumption that have led to reduction in the revenue that's being generated by these funding streams. Now, as I close, I do want to note for you that there is here this focus on the next step of the budget process. And that is going to be the introduction of the May revise. This is an opportunity for Governor Newsom to present updated budget figures that reflect the state of California's economy mid-year. Now, here I want to apply for you that we are likely to see in May revise a relatively lean budget. And that is because both the state and federal government have delayed for some counties across the United States and in case of California, across California in filing taxes. And that is because of the extreme weather events that we've experienced in recent months. And so as a result, in normal years, we would receive the tax receipts in April. The governor would be able to present his best estimates come May. This year that deadline has been postponed till October. And that means that again, we'll see a lean budget come May. And then there would be some successive actions that take place later in the year to plus up investments as we see a fuller picture for the state's budget. Now, I also want to just highlight for you that the prospect for new state transit funds remains uncertain. I noted earlier in my remarks that there is a push for new transit operations funding. That is going to be a challenge because of the state general fund picture, but also to the reality that other forms of discretionary investments like cap and trade are oversubscribed. And so the message we've been hearing from Sacramento in addition to reforms is the need for self-help or counties for localities to bring online things like low option sales taxes as a way of supporting but addressing their individual programs and priorities in the absence of additional state support. And so I know that there was some conversation earlier in today's board meeting around Metro and potential efforts. Here, I would say that there's some congruency with some of the message that we're hearing here in Sacramento about the need for that focus on self-help generated revenue as opposed to waiting still on the state government for additional support. Now, I wanna note for you that irrespective of these delays in the deadlines for tax receipts, we are gonna see a budget adopted in June. It will go into effect for the start of the fiscal year 23-24 by July 1. But then as I noted, there would be later term action likely in late summer, early fall that would serve to provide supplemental investments to support the state budget and the priorities that the state has. And so at this time, I'm happy to take any questions, comments that you might have on the workings here in Sacramento. It's certainly a lot of activity. Unfortunately, with the budget outlook being as it is, it's gonna be a challenging year across a variety of fronts, whether budgetary or legislative. I was happy to take questions. Thank you. Number one, I've got a couple, have a couple of questions on assembly bill 610 holding youth transit passes. What's the definition of youth? I mean, more than half of our ridership is UCSC and Cabrillo well over half. Just go to grade school or what does it go to? Yeah, so the way that they have identified youth and the purposes of this bill relates to the institutions that would be partner agencies with the transit agencies. And so here there's a clear identification to K through 12 institutions, CSU, UC and California Community Colleges. Okay. And at the end that you were talking about self-help and part of the reason that all passes that transportation were included in measure D and that's why it passed, I think, is that we became a self-help county. Does this mean we have to renew our self-help status? We are a self-help county. There's not every county of the 58 in California or self-help counties with transit. Are we a self-help county now by definition of that or do we have to do another thing to quantify for being identified as self-help? Yeah, so I would say that you are, as Santa Cruz County, currently a self-help county, if you've operationalized a local auction sales tax or any other form of measure some counties have, for example, parcel taxes, things of the sort, then you are categorized as self-help. But the general point that I was making on that slide was not so much a matter of new designation for counties or a new need to say get recertified as self-help, but rather the general message that money from Sacramento may not be forthcoming. And if localities have interest in making further investment in transportation or public transit, likely much of that revenue would have to be revenue that is derived from the regions or from the localities. And so that has been the dominant message from Sacramento. There is some interest in having some honest conversation about additional state support, but noting the budget picture and the challenges that we face here in Sacramento. Again, that focus has been a message of subsidiary and really that focus on generating revenue at the local level to support local priorities. Okay, one final question, this could probably be addressed to both federal and state. With previously we were talking about the federal legislation seems to be addressing rural as well as urban. Do you think trying to make that equal or as much as fair as possible between the urban and the rural areas? Do you think that the, we know where the power is in some of the big cities, for instance, in California and in the big states in the nation, but is there any establishment of fairness in all of these bills that rural or we'll get the same attention as urban counties? That's probably pretty hard to, it's gonna be a team effort and boy with the close situation we have in Washington, DC, that's gonna be hard to satisfy everybody, I would guess, but. Yeah, what I would note for you is that as we look at programs that would bring new funding online, for example, AB 610, the Holden bill on Fairfrey Transit, monies would go out on a formula basis. Formula basis generally defined based on population, but then also to based on the revenues that are generated by the agencies in the region. And so that prevents what is necessarily solely investment in urban counties and urban transit agencies and ensures that there is a funding that is spread across the state. On programs like the Transit and University Rail Capital Program, one of the criteria for investments that they maintain is a heavy focus on ensuring geographic balance, geographic equity in the total balance of investments that that program makes. And so I wanna, I suppose, take this opportunity to note one thing with regards to Metro's TRCP grant application. We did work very closely with CEO Michael Tree on collecting a series of support letters from your legislative delegation to help support that application. And one of the things that we were very clear to elevate within that context is the reality that irrespective of this focus on geographic balance, geographic equity within that program and its long history, the realities that Santa Cruz Metro has not yet won an award from that program. And so we're very eager to highlight that within the state's review of that application, recognizing that as that program moves forward, there's going to need to be that balance of ensuring that counties across the state are benefiting from its investments. And then Director, I also wanna note for you that we're also seeing some changes in leadership here in Sacramento, whereby Assemblymember Robert Rebus, one of the members of Santa Cruz Metro's delegation will soon be elevated to the role of Speaker of the California State Assembly. And so with that, I wanna suggest that there will be a rebalancing of priorities within Sacramento policymaking and funding decisions to further ensure that there's that balance between rural and urban counties across the state of California. First of all, I wanna thank you for your service for the transit district. Along with Chris in Washington, I think we are able to be represented by lobbyists who really do a great job of bringing us funding and we should appreciate that. And the small amount of money we spend on that is well worth it. My first questions about the state budget situation, you'd said that there's about a $22 billion deficit and then you outlined about $3 billion that's coming out of transit. Where's the rest of it coming from in the Governor's budget? Yeah, the remainder of cuts are being made to a variety of things like energy programs, some health and human services programs. There's a balance of investments that are being proposed to be rescinded, generally through, again, those discretionary investments that the state has made over these last few years. And my second question, Bruce McPherson has raised this, but the youth bill 610 that's being considered, I don't know if you're the right person to answer this or our staff, but we have a program of free rides for youth that we're working on. And I'm just wondering what the relationship is between that state legislation and what we're already doing. Yeah, so what I would note for you is within the structure of the bill, there's actually an opportunity for Santa Cruz Metro to be able to draw down some additional state resources. So the bill is really focused on one, encouraging transit agencies that today do not have fair free youth transit pass programs to implement those programs. It does so by providing new resources to those agencies, again, in partnership with educational institutions. But the bill also does have a provision or should say a section that states very clearly if you're an agency that today has a youth transit pass program in place and that can be again defined as a partnership with a UCSESU, a California Community College or a K-2 Paul institution, you can draw down on resources from that program as well to further support the efficacy of your existing programs. And so for example, no doubt you all are receiving some form of financial support for your partnership with UC Santa Cruz with Cabrillo College. The bill would provide some additional resources in the event that you wanted to, for example, increase service levels to those colleges or in the event that you wanted to expand the nature of your service. Some agencies, for example, may have their partnerships on for the duration of the school year. Students, of course, oftentimes are around campus for that full calendar year, there would be an ability to expand into additional months for that partnership that may not otherwise be covered by the agreement, the financial support that you receive from those educational institutions. And so built into it is again, that type of support for existing agreements, recognizing that we want to honor, uplift, continue to support those agreements and the reality that many agencies were out at front making these types of partnerships to the benefit of California students. Thanks. The directors have questions. Can you remind us, sorry if I missed it, the exact status of 610, is it anywhere near the governor's desk? No, it's still several steps removed. And so currently it sits in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. After it moves out of the Appropriations Committee, it will go to the assembly floor and then it will go through a similar cycle that it did in the assembly where a bio will be routed to the Senate Transportation Committee after moving off of the assembly floor onto the Senate Appropriations Committee, onto the Senate floor, and then onto the governor's desk. And so, so a few steps before that bill is actually something that he may act on. And then as I noted with last year, we saw the same bill, largely same structure of this bill moved to the governor's desk. Again, he had vetoed that because there wasn't a budget appropriation attached to it. And so Mr. Holden is working alongside the sponsors of that legislation to ensure that there is a budget appropriation that moves alongside that legislative vehicle to bolster his chances of being signed by Governor Newsom this year. My recollection from AB University of California, CSUs and so forth because there are students of those institutions that are not used. So complications arose with what's the definition of who's in and if you're a 60-something student getting a graduate degree included. So I just raised that as a concern that that be clarified. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Pimentel for the report. I mean, it is a challenging situation in Sacramento clearly that we're looking at. And obviously if these kinds of cuts do come to pass, it would be more difficult for us to ultimately achieve our aspirational goals of 100% zero emissions fleet. I mean, the buses we have, excuse me, all no are not cheap. So that was part of our message with the Central Coast Coalition is to our legislators is that they push back a little bit against some of the governor's proposed cuts to TERSIP and other transit funding so that, because it does take sustained funding in order to make a difference for our agency and for others throughout the state. I was just wondering if you could remind me when we'll hear back about our TERSIP application. Is that made in time frame? Mr. Drucker, I actually do not know the exact time frame for that. Staff at Natural may be able to better advise on that, but I believe that it should be in the spring time frame. Maybe program awards sometime in April, I believe. And so as Director Rotkin mentioned, how much impact would it have if we showcase some of our early successes in what we're doing? I understand it's a little different from what's being proposed, what we're doing locally, but is it worth our time to communicate our early successes with the state decision makers? I would say certainly to support the bill in moving through the legislature and then having communications with your legislative delegation about the impact of the programs that you have in place currently in Santa Cruz County would be an asset to their deliberations on the bill. I will note for you that as we saw with AB 1919, the bill is likely to move forward without significant opposition. We have seen broad coalition bipartisan support on both bills. And so I wouldn't discourage the engagement. I would note for you that very likely it will move to the governor's desk this year much like AB 1919 did last year. Thank you so much. I'm not seeing any other, oh yes. Not to, sorry about that. Not to belabor the point, but as the bill, as 610 moves along, I don't know how much of an opportunity anybody from the CSUs or the UCs are gonna have some sort of consultant or some sort of mechanism to provide some feedback. Because as 1919, 2176 prior to that, as those were written, it's great in concept, but there are a myriad of gotchas that could really backfire, at least how I see it. I won't speak for any of the other UCs, but the way that a lot of transit is funded, the way that it's set up, I just, I notice there's a lot of gotchas and it's a great idea, but it really has to be well thought out so that it doesn't become, it doesn't blow up in everybody's faces and it doesn't result in reduced services for students, which if you look at it a certain way, that could happen. So as this moves along, I mean, I don't know what opportunities we might have. I might have other experts when it comes to the UC transit for our students might have to chime in, but if that opportunity is there, I'd love to be a part of the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I do wanna acknowledge that given where we are in the legislative year, the process and the opportunities for engagement from stakeholders in the public are nuts. We do have a number of hearings that are gonna be forthcoming, again, in the Appropriations Committee in both houses and the Senate Transportation Committee and would certainly advise that if this is a bill that Santa Cruz Metro ultimately wants to take a position on or offer guidance on, we can certainly work with CEO Tree and his staff to tee up what those recommendations are and advance them to the relevant committees and to your legislative delegation for consideration. So Matt, please, Matt Farrell. Good morning, Chair Calantari-Johnson and Metro Board members. I'm speaking today in representing Santa Cruz County Friends of the Rail and Trail. We wanted to let you know that we have written letters to all our state legislators, encouraging them to support additional funding for TERSIP and for transitioning federal and state funding to allow money to be used for operations. And finally, encouraging them to support AB 610. I'd also like to thank Assembly Member Gail Pellerin because she is a principal co-author on that bill and we plan in the coming weeks to follow up with these legislatures and encourage their support for the bill. I think it's really commendable that your team at Metro and the Board have moved forward with this pilot transit pass program, youth transit pass program. And while I don't know the details, my intuition tells me it will position you well if the governor has the vision to sign this bill. So thank you very much for your time and for all your work. Thank you so much for that update, Michael. And to our legislative update, thank you that you got a sense of what's ahead and how we need to. Thank you for having me. I'm 16, consideration of authorizing the CEO General Manager to negotiate a lease agreement for 809 West Beach Street in Watsonville, Mr. Chuck Farmer. Hello, I'll wait till a presentation comes up. Let's see if it works, oops. Okay, so I wanted to kind of bring this to your attention and I want to kind of go through this. So this is a property down in Watsonville and what we're doing is looking to rent it as I'll just say is a parking lot in a staging location. Okay, so I'm going to go through. The reason why we're looking at this lot is one, we are receiving hopefully by the four to the end of June five electric buses. On top of it, we've now I think locked it in that by May through July of this year, we're going to get 10 articulated buses from San Diego that is going to come up. On top of it, we are doing a lot of projects across the agency. This includes looking at a hydrogen fueling station that we're going to be putting in, which is going to go in our operations lot up here in Santa Cruz. We're also looking at development of Pacific Station, which is slated right now for November start date, as well as the Watsonville station and then our Soquel Park and Ride, which is where our paratransit is going to be located. All of this, and I think going through the storms, I think a lot of the people in the operation so I can tell you, we've had to move buses out of our operations lot, stick them up on the street to move things. We're just really kind of at our capacity at this point right now at our location. Getting these new buses in, it doesn't mean another bus walks off the lot. It also, we're getting in Artex, which are 60 feet and more than likely the buses that go out are going to be 40 feet. So this is a bus and a half that's coming in and we're only swapping it out with a bus that's 40 foot. So as part of it, we need some kind of location where we can put these extra vehicles until either they get pushed off into, whether it's auction or for that matter, even storage. For example, we have a whole bunch of equipment that's sitting on our Soquel Park and Ride and when they start, we're going to have to move that equipment somewhere and there is no location that we have right now that we could put up in Santa Cruz on our lots. So we're kind of limited in that space. So this is really about a space and resource issue at this point. And like I said, this is a three year lease that we're talking about and we're talking about something that we could extend later on as well. And the lot is actually kind of large and I'll kind of go through that here in a second. And if anybody's talked to me, we've been looking at this for months and months and months, trying to find something. And up in the city of Santa Cruz, there's no room. There's nothing in Capitola. There's nothing in Aptos and literally it pushes you down into Watsonville, which is the prime location and it's actually a great location. We found a place that's actually a parking lot. The whole thing is a parking lot. We don't have to worry about a building in the way and we can actually use this and utilize this space. So if we go on here and like I said, I think I kind of mentioned a couple of these items. This is overflow for some of our buses. And like I said, we're gonna use this for staging of all our stuff. At some point, we're gonna be getting hydrogen fuel tank and we're gonna get hydrogen buses. I mean, we have this terse of grant. If we get it, we're gonna start moving on it. We may actually get the buses before the hydrogen tanks, hope not. But if we do, we're not gonna be able to use the buses. So we have a place to store it and then once we start using the buses, then we have double council buses. So as you can see, we don't have room and this creates a real problem in the sense that we're parking these on the street. And of course, there's some neighbors there and so forth as well as that we've had issues with some vandalism and so on. And we need them in our lots, not on the streets. So as part of that. Excuse me, Chuck, could you hold on a second? Okay. We're trying to get these slides out to zoom here. Oh, okay. We're good now? Okay. All right, let's see if I can go on the next one. So let me show you where it's at. This map right here, which hopefully everybody who has a screen in front of them can actually see it a little bit better. In the top right hand side, that is our actually current Metro Watsonville Transit Center. If you pull out, go over to beach road and hang a right. Driving down beach road, it's all the way down on the left hand side of the road. The actual distance on it is just a little, I think it's a little bit over a mile. And this is the property itself. So right now it's 809 Westby Street. It's 3.36 acres. It's almost fully paved, whether it's tar or whether it's concrete, but it's mixed match throughout there. And as part of that, the size of this is more than enough to what we need for right now. But the value that we did by going around and looking at other locations, we're either constrained where it was either a huge building that took up the majority of the lot, which of course we don't need a place with a building, or it ended up being a grass field where we would have to do a whole slew of infrastructure improvements, the lay down pavement and so forth. So this actually fits our needs because this is exactly what we're looking for. And then this is what it looks like right now. As you can see, it's got a fence already around. And then you can see the pavement and it goes all the way back, not quite to those buildings back there, but close to it. And right now, green waste is actually renting a portion of it and they're on a month a month. So if we go get approval to move forward, green waste would have to shift their vehicles back over to their lots and then we would take the lot itself. And then as part of it, just to kind of give you an idea on the size, if you take the parking lot that's sitting in our maintenance facility, which is on the left and the parking lot that's in our operations facility on the right and you look at the acreage, it's roughly about the same size of all of that. So we're really doubling our parking area at this point. And so to get the cost, so what we're asking is it's approximately $11,000 a month on the lease piece. There's a permanent cost of roughly about $10,000 and we're estimating it's gonna be less than $90,000, just to clean up the lot, maybe fix if there's a hole in a fence or something like that and so forth. If we have to put up some lighting as a parking lot, but that was pretty much the whole, full investment is about $100,000 a one-time sun cost and the rest of it is leasing and that's $121,000 a year. Pros on this, like I said, it's ideal location, availability, that's been really tough. I mean, like I said, we've been looking for a year and can't find anything that's came up. The cost is very cheap. This is the cheapest place. There's a place right down the road on beach that's really just, I guess it's a grassy area, much, much smaller, but they wanna sell it for $3.8 million, far beyond what this is. So we're, right there, we've got a good deal. Like I said, increased parking and storage serves as a backup location. Something happens here. For example, like right now, if we knew we were gonna have floods again and we have to move those buses up, we could move those half those buses down there in storm until the floods are over and then bring them back instead of sticking them on the streets. And then at the same point, and I'm just gonna mention this one time, at some point, our Watsonville facility is gonna be up and be under construction and then we also have the, I'm sorry, the SoCal Park and Ride will be under construction for Paratransit and where our Paratransit is located right now, the lease will be coming due here in the next couple of years and we will have to move and we could use this as a bridge to move Paratransit and then of course, move them into their new place when they're here. So that's another good thing. You know, the bad thing, like I said, it's incremental spending for the location and then of course it's the sunk costs that I just talked about. It's the fact that it costs a little bit more money. Anybody have any questions? Can you tell us how this fits into our budget situation? Is this gonna require an amendment to our budget or it's already been out of a fund that's already anticipating this? So how it's gonna fund is through our operating capital reserves and it is actually in the budget, the budget I presented and then what you saw that's on consent right now. We actually put it in. The capital costs are much higher so they'll come down based off of what we have here. Fantastic lot, like I said, close to highway, close to the Grand Center in Watsonville so it really meets a lot of our needs. I'm just curious about the existing SoCal Park and Ride lot that we're renting in capitol. I think it's the SoCal Research Park, right? How big is that lot? What is our current lease and does it expire? For the SoCal Park and Ride? So we have it, we own it. Yeah. Well, to clarify. We own the location off of Highway 1. Yeah. We're storing bus shelters there. We actually move para-cruise operations to it? Or current? Sorry, I meant the para-cruise operations. The current today. Yeah, so current today it's in Aptos. It's in an industrial area just north of 41st and we're back in a corner. We've given up half the space so now we have only half the space left. The way it works is very tight back there. When an operator comes in, they have to pull the bus out and pull their car in because there's a lack of parking right now. The lease, the way it's set up right now, it actually expires here in August. And we have an option for, two options actually for one year extensions that we can use at any point in time. And at this point, I know that the landlord does want us out sooner than later. There is no doubt about that. I understand quickly that we could potentially move para-cruise operations to this Watsonville lot or is it just competitive? I realize we're putting a lot of demands now. Yeah, so if we have to move or we make a decision to do it, I'll work with Julian team on the general council but we could move temporarily the para-transit, everything, the operation center and so forth, bring them down to Watsonville. They could operate out of there until the so-called parking right is complete. And then at that point, move them in. Can I speak? Yes. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great, thanks. So I guess historically going back, I think that it was a big mistake for us to sell our property when we owned it here in Watsonville. I think it was on Sakata Lane. But it's nice to see that there is a, or hopefully there will be, support from this board to move some of the facilities down to South County. I guess my question is, I have a couple of questions. One is what's the term of this lease? And because we're in the middle about doing our general plan here in Watsonville. And so I think that the zoning in that area may be up for discussion on the future of that area. So just wanting to make sure that if it does get zoned in a certain way, the owners aren't gonna pull all the work or money we've invested into that area in order to benefit financially for them for themselves. So can you answer that question first? Yeah, so we're going in with, basically our offer is $11,000 a month for three years. And that's going to our real estate agent who's gonna pass it over. The owner of this property knows that if this goes through, that's approximately what we're gonna do. Do they come back with a five-year lease? I don't know yet. This is our initial pushover to them to find out. I think that a five-year lease is safer just because of the uncertainty of the market and probably in any city today.  Going in and a lot of some of our businesses in that area got pushed out because they wanted to go in a different direction where they could get more money for their location. So I don't know, I just feel safer that if it was a longer lease, just because three years, we blink and three years is over. I mean, it's time flies so fast. Okay, I mean, we could look at five years or however. I mean, I'll talk with Michael about it and we'll decide which way we wanna go. Yeah, I think, you know, I think we'd be interested in talking, but I think big picture-wise, we're finding that Watsonville would be an advantageous location for a permanent facility for Metro. So your zero-emission bus master plan, for example, has all of your electric buses being charged and operating out of Watsonville. By far the majority of your employees are from Watsonville that operate the buses. So this is a strategic location to make it easier for people to be employed with Metro. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So our thought is this is a property in an ideal situation. So let's go lease it and then use it as a staging area because we have a need it needs. But I think over the next year, we're really gonna take a look what other properties are around and then make a very aggressive approach with board direction to acquire property that we could use as a local match in a federal grant which requires some analysis. And then at the end of the day, we want to purchase a property. So I just want to counterbalance Director Dutcher of the thought that a long-term lease may not be as advantageous as we hope because our thought is we would like to purchase property. And this may be an ideal location to purchase it, but we haven't done the analysis. It's pretty rigorous, but this property is ideally situated for a short-term use. Yeah, okay. And I appreciate that. I also want to say thank you for being considerate of the workforce that does live down here in Watsonville. And I do appreciate the fact that we're trying to be a little bit more inclusive. And I do see the vision that you have and this may not be the exact location you're looking for. So on that temporary term, I definitely, I'm supportive of course. And I would like to see the permanent happen down here. I feel too often, and I know that my voice is a lot of sometimes some of the board members don't want to hear, but I feel that Watsonville gets a lot of taken away from them a lot. And one being the property that we had down here that was sold that probably never should have been sold. So moving forward, I do hope that when we do try to find that permanent spot that South County Watsonville, it comes back. And we meet the needs of our drivers because like Michael said, a lot of them do live down here. And we build a facility that I think that will be really moving forward thinking. And I know that the demographics of this community will really put us in a position for grants. When we speak about going out for funding, I know that the demographics of Watsonville really puts us up in a different tier when it comes to getting these grants. And I hope that when we do move forward that the permanent facility is located down here. So with that said, I will support the temporary lease for this property, but I'm hoping that this board and it sounds like Michael is already has the vision of having something permanent down here that this board does move with making sure that a facility does find itself down here in Watsonville. Thank you. Thank you, Director Duque. I'll look to see if there's any public comment on this item. Yeah, I just wanted to bring up another point of us needing a backup facility for operational standpoint, our current Metro base. We only have one way in and one way out. When we were threatened during the fires and we needed to evacuate those facilities, we utilized the downtown metro station to store all of our vehicles and run operations out of it. That will not be an option for us come fall into the winter. So if we are found in that type of situation again where it's not accessible or something happens to that portion of highway nine, we will need somewhere to be able to go. Otherwise we simply will not be able to run and get any of our equipment out. So we also support this temporary lot as pretty much necessity for us to be able to guarantee that operations will run on a daily basis. Thank you. See any hands virtually raised? All second. Director Brown, Director Downing, Director Dutra. Aye. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson, aye. Director Koenig, aye. Director Lin, aye. Director McPherson, Director Newsom, aye. Director Pagler, aye. Director Keros Carter, aye. Director Rocker, aye. And the motion passes. Thank you so much Chuck. Right next we are on item 17, re-imagined metro oral update and we have Planning and Development Director John Ergo. Good morning directors. John Ergo, Planning and Development Director. It's nice to be with you all in physical space the first time in three years in my tenure as your Planning Director. So in a minute I'm gonna introduce Daniel Constantino from Jarrett Walker and Associates who's gonna give a briefing on where we are to date in our re-imagined metro process. This is again, this again is a 15 month planning process that we kicked off in January to evaluate comprehensively all of metro's routes and services, not something that we've done here since 2016. And to develop service scenarios for our current resources and future opportunities to expand the network should additional resources become available. So the team from Jarrett Walker has been here in Santa Cruz this week meeting with our bus operators riding our routes, conducting in-person meetings. We had a Zoom meeting on Tuesday. It was unfortunately interrupted but we had over 40 participants that stayed with us throughout the meeting to share their feedback on where they would like to see a metro go in the future. And what we're hearing is people want more. They want more service, they want more frequency. We heard that in the fall when we did some survey work preparing for this process we heard that over 70% of respondents at that time wanted to see more frequent service. We also heard that over 50% of non-riders would ride Metro more if the bus came more often which was a phenomenal response to get from a survey. And we're hearing the same thing from our current riders. So this initial round of outreach is all about engaging with our current riders and stakeholders in the community and we're hearing a lot of the same things. So without further ado, I'd like to invite Daniel up here from Jarrett Walker and Associates to share our initial results from the first round of outreach. Thanks, John, appreciate it. Hi everyone, my name's Daniel Costantino. I'm a principal with Jarrett Walker and Associates. We're a public transit focused consulting firm. All we do is help plan public transit networks throughout the US and abroad. I am the project manager on the consultant side of the team for the Reimagine Metro project. And I'm gonna give you a little update of kind of what we've done so far, a little bit of what we've found out and then I'm happy to take any questions or give any further context that y'all might be interested in. So let's see if I can click this. Do I have to be pointing in a particular direction? Yep, afraid I'm not. Does not seem to do anything. Oh, there we go. All right, thank you. So first of all, for anyone not familiar, what is Reimagine Metro? So this is a project to re-envision the network. And when we say the network, what that really means is it's a fancy word for where buses should go and how often they should run in those places. And so as part of the key goals of this effort, we're really looking at creating a network that is more relevant to the community's needs, that is more useful, that is more attractive for many people's trips so that you can really shift the conversation from a place where transit is a relatively marginal part of the transportation system in the county to something that is useful and attractive in many people's daily lives. And so that involves a few components. One of the more obvious ones is kind of to adapt to all the various changes that have happened in the last three, four years between natural disasters and COVID and everything else. Another part, quite frankly, is to increase the amount of service provided. And so a lot of the work that we've been scoped for is to see what we would do and what we would do with increased resources, how we could improve service, how that would improve people's lives. So as far as the process goes, it's kind of in three phases. There's a first item that we're calling early wins, which is really about looking at what can we do with the resources that are gonna be available in the next year. And so by resources there, I kind of mean money, but I also mean how many actual drivers you're gonna have, what actual buses you're gonna have, all of the stuff that you've spent a fair amount of time talking about today. So we're gonna look at how we can improve things in the next year, taking into account some of the realities that are coming down the pipes, such as the changes at Pacific Station, for example. Next phase after that is looking at alternatives. And what we mean by that is we're gonna look at what are the different ways that you could change this network if you were to put more service in. And so depending on what your policy priorities are, you may make different choices about how to increase service. You may make choices that are more oriented toward frequency and core corridors. You may make choices that are more oriented towards getting service closer to more houses. There's different ways to look about it. Those are probably the two biggest ends of the spectrum there, but we haven't yet to find exactly what the alternatives are, but we will be working on them. And then we will go out to the community with these alternatives, get their input on that in the next phase of outreach. And based on that input and based on direction that we will be soliciting from yourselves as the board on that input, we will be then developing a plan. What's the plan for change for the future? And we'll present that plan again to the public and to yourselves, and based on that, we'll go from a draft plan to a final plan. So quick reminder about who's working on this. Obviously this is being led by the planning team and John Ergo at Reimagine Metro. On the consultant side, you have a team led by the firm that I work for, Jared Walker and Associates. We're working in association with a local firm from Monterey called Amma Transit Planning. And really we specialize exclusively in public transit. We reimagine public transit networks in a lot of different communities. And we do it in a particular way where we're really interested in responding to community input, making policy trade-offs clear, balancing a lot of different and potentially conflicting goals. And we always want to be really clear about what those different goals are and the ways in which they work together or they conflict. So this is not the first place we have worked as a firm or where I have personally worked even locally. I personally was the project manager working with the Amma team on the COA for Monterey-Salinas Transit, and which resulted in the recently implemented Better Bus Network in Monterey County, California. We've also worked throughout the U.S. and abroad, put in a couple examples here that are relevant locally and more largely. Jared led the next network, Bus Network Redesigned for Santa Clara VTA a few years ago. In recent experience, I've led the Monterey-Salinas project. I also led a similar project in Madison, Wisconsin, which is obviously a big college town, somewhat like yourselves. Possibly the most interesting project that I've had the pleasure and the honor to work on in my time as a consultant has been managing the Bus Network Redesigned Study for Dublin, Ireland called Bus Connects, which also involved a very significant increase in service. We're really looking for a step change in making the bus a more relevant options for all sorts of trips. And of course, our partners, Amma, have worked with us on many different projects throughout California and also somewhat beyond as well. And, okay, so as to what we've been doing, we've been working on this project since January. And in that time, we've really been in a process of learning. We are obviously not from here. We don't know your communities yet. We are in the process of learning. And to do that, we're going through it in several different ways concurrently. John mentioned some of the meetings that we've had with the public. I would say that I'm grateful to Metro, first of all, for having done a general public poll before this study even started, which gives us some understanding of what the public wants, both riders and non-riders. And then in this first phase, when we've been engaging with the public through a series of surveys with riders, and those surveys helped us recruit rider-focused groups that have happened both virtually and in person. And we've had meetings with a whole broad variety of stakeholders representing all sorts of different community organizations, as well as the city and county governments, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. So that's one part of it. Another part has been the desktop exercise of reviewing all the relevant census and local RTC data that may be relevant to transit needs and transit demand. And we've also been reviewing all the data that Metro has been able to provide to us on your existing and recent service, frequencies, schedules, ridership, all sorts of things, as well as having conversations with Metro operations, both at the supervision level. And yesterday, my colleague, Alvaro, was at the operations dispatch talking to drivers. So we've been learning about things. So I just want to give you a quick overview of some of the types of facts that we're interested as we look at this kind of study. So we're really interested in where people are and where they need to go. And so the map that I'm showing you right now is a map of population density kind of throughout your current service area. And so basically, if areas are marked in blue, they're areas where relatively many people live compared to the size of the area. They're relatively densely populated areas. And what's clear from, and you already know this, right, but is that people are very concentrated within the kind of urban and suburban areas in this kind of 30 mile long corridor from Watsonville up to Scotts Valley. And that that's about 80% of your population. And so that's really the areas that transit is able to serve in an effective way for fixed routes. And that's kind of what we're focusing on most. The other thing that's clear, of course, is it's not just where people live, but where they need to go. That you don't have a single dominant center of travel where people need to go. There is not one big downtown CBD that really dominates everything. You have some very large destinations. UCSC probably the largest one for transit right now. But you have others that also generate a really significant number of trips, like downtown Santa Cruz, like around 41st Avenue in Sekelle, like in actually several different parts of Watsonville, downtown being just kind of the biggest one. Or even kind of out here in Scotts Valley, there's relatively significant concentration of jobs. And even saying those, I'm missing a whole lot of other places. So the reason these things matter is because when we look at how to distribute transit service and how much of it to put, the key thing that really determines whether a transit service is gonna be useful to many people is whether it's near many people and near the places they need to go. So we're always looking at density. Where is their higher density? The more people in destinations are near transit, the more people are likely to find it useful. The other thing is that your destinations being kind of distributed through a wide area and with significant gaps between those areas, well, that means that transit is relatively more complicated and expensive to provide because there are a lot of long distance trips and there are a lot of relatively empty sections in terms of bringing more riders on board. Another thing that I wanna point out, I think that there is a clear sense in all the conversations we've had about the importance of travel out of county, particularly up to San Jose. And I wanna say to you, yes, that is true. There is a lot of travel over the hill, but even despite all of that, the majority of commute trips, as is being shown on this map, but probably all trips as well, and perhaps even more so, is really staying within the county. And so there's a real value at looking at how you're gonna serve trips within the county and how you're gonna improve that because that will have ultimately the greatest impact, although we will of course continue to look at regional links. Other thing that's really important is where different people live. And by different I mean the characteristics that are relevant to transit. I'm starting this with a characteristic that's not directly relevant to transit, which is this map of race and ethnicity in your county. So this map shows little dots. Each of those dots represent about 25 people, and the color of those dots represents the race or ethnicity that they have reported to the census. And you can see on this map really clearly how there are some very stark differences between South County, Watsonville, and surrounding areas, and Greater Santa Cruz. And I would say that those differences continue and accentuate as you go north towards Scotts Valley and the San Lorenzo Valley. Now those differences, the fact that Watsonville has 80% of its population speaks a language other than English at home, probably mostly Spanish, those aren't direct things that impact whether people need transit or use it, but they do reflect a whole lot of other factors that are relevant. So some of the factors that are relevant are where there are people who don't own cars. And we see that there are a few really clear concentrations in your core service area, which I'll now focus on more specifically for the rest of these maps. So you can see that there's a high density of households without cars in Santa Cruz itself, particularly on the west side, somewhat on the east side as well. And there are several large concentrations of households without cars in Watsonville, both downtown Watsonville and a little bit of north Watsonville kind of going toward freedom. And there's also a fair number of people without houses in the live-up, but specifically perhaps most towards Pleasure Point and a little bit towards the Dominican Hospital. And so there's all sorts of reasons why people don't own cars. For some people it's simply because they live in an area where it's relatively convenient to walk and so you maybe need it less. I think your housing costs have a certain impact on people's pocket books and what they're able to do. But there's one of the factor that correlates a lot with it is income. And so that's the map of where people don't own cars and this is the map of density of people with low incomes. And so again, the darker colors are showing you the higher densities. And if I flip back and forth, maybe I can. Doesn't seem like I can. In any case, if you were able to see, there's a lot of the areas that showed up dark in the last map show up dark in this map too. But there are also other areas with large low income populations that don't show up on the no car household map. And that's areas where you have a lot of low income people who for whatever reasons, the places they live in and the options for walking, cycling, and taking transit don't match. And so they essentially, despite their limited resources, are being forced to own and maintain vehicles. In some cases, I'm sure many people enjoy owning and maintaining a vehicle, but it is an economic burden on a lot of households. Of course, when we look at a map of low income in a community like yours, we know that that means many different things and many different types of transit needs. So for example, on the west side, a large part of the high density of low income people has to do with students. Whereas in Watsonville, we're looking at a lot of large, relatively low income households. And in the middle, in kind of Capitola and Pleasure Point, we're looking for the most part at larger concentrations of low income seniors on fixed incomes. Those are not absolutes, but those are kind of the big patterns that we see in the data. So here, for example, is a map of density of people under 18. So this is really telling you where there are families with children or families with a lot of children. You can see that the points that stand out the most are in Watsonville. There are some areas that stand out in the Greater Santa Cruz area. But that kind of tells us something about the different types of poverty that are in different communities. Right, so there you can see that. Again, how that goes. And then if you look at the map of seniors, you can see that there are parts of Watsonville that show up too. So again, large multi-generational households. But as well, the kind of Pleasure Point area really pops out on that map. And you can see that there's a lot of low income people. So kind of getting back at what I was saying before. So anyway, these are just various factors that we're looking at when we try to understand both demand and need. But it's not just about who lives in places and who lives in places. It's also about how the built environment facilitates the use of transit. And so that's something that we've also been examining. There's two factors that really matter a lot here. One of them is walkability. And that is partly about how easy it is. Well, it's about two things really. But the basic point here is that if it's difficult, if you're in an area where it's difficult to walk to places, almost certainly this is an area where it's challenging to provide transit that's useful to a lot of people. And that's because if you put a transit stop in a place where it's difficult to walk, fewer people can get to it. And fewer people are willing to make the trade-offs to their safety that may be involved in some cases. Or if you have a street network that simply doesn't allow you to walk very far because there aren't a lot of streets and they don't connect a lot, then you just can't get to the bus stop very easily. Things that look very nearby on a map turn out to actually be rather far away by the paths where you can actually walk. So we've mapped this out in Santa Cruz County. And you can see a really clear difference between areas in the city of Santa Cruz, for example, which show up as having very high street connectivity, and so being relatively walkable, versus, for example, areas in the Live Oak, where if you're right near one of the main streets, perhaps there's a fair amount of places you can go to. But we know that the street networks are very disconnected, lots of cul-de-sacs. Not a lot of paths from one main street to another. And so as a result, there's gonna be this issue where any transit service going through the Live Oak is simply going to be slightly less accessible to the people near it. And that's something that we have to keep in mind. In Watsonville, you can see kind of the same thing. The older parts of Watsonville developed at a time when it was standard to build walkable cities. Very walkable, very easy to get from one place to another on foot. And then some of the newer places in Watsonville that also, however, have high densities of population and population with significant transit needs, not so connective, a lot more challenging from a pedestrian perspective. Other thing that really matters, and this is in terms of designing the services, whether it's possible to connect a lot of places in a straight line. Everyone wants to travel in straight lines. Buses are no exception, and people on buses are no exception. People wanna take the fastest path from A to B. But a bus all has to take that path and has to get close enough that people can actually use it. And so when you have a lot of places that aren't located on straight paths between the beginning and the end of the line, then it's hard to run bus lines that are both efficient and useful. And so that means that we're gonna end up in situations with, and you already do, have these locations where there are tough choices. So one of those, for example, is right here in Scott's Valley where there's a bus line. There's probably gonna continue to be this bus line in any imaginable scenario that goes from Santa Cruz to San Jose. And it's useful to a lot of people. Along the way, you have Scott's Valley and you have a ton of jobs in Scott's Valley, particularly along Scott's Valley Drive. And so there's a natural question about, well, should the bus that goes from Santa Cruz to San Jose stay on the highway? Because that's the fastest way to go there for people going from Santa Cruz to San Jose. Or should it get off the highway for a few minutes and serve Scott's Valley Drive? And a whole bunch of other people might find it useful. Conversely, if you do that, you make it less useful for people going to San Jose. So there's value in choosing either of those two things. And there are a lot of parallel situations throughout your county. But the reality is that a single bus can't do both of those things. So we're gonna have to be looking at those choices. In terms of your network as it stands right now, I wanna kind of give you credit where it's due and maybe talk a little bit about some of the shortcomings of the system as well. First thing here, this is a map of the transit network as it exists right now. The lines within the core area, we also have a regional map that I'll get to. The lines on this map are colored and the color of those maps mean how often the bus comes. And you'll see that there's a few lines in this dark blue color that means it's coming every 30 minutes. And there's a bunch of lines in this light blue color that really means the bus is only coming once an hour on this route. And even a few lines that I actually can't even see from where I'm standing right now, but they're in a light gold color and they just come a few times a day. And that being hard to see is deliberate on this map. We wanna point out that there's service there, but it's so thin that you may not even know it exists or have a way to use it. So a lot of routes are infrequent and why does this matter? Actually, I'll skip this part. It matters because frequency means less waiting. And really, waiting is one of the biggest things that prevents people from using transit. People don't have time to wait, they need to get places. And so when you make a more frequent service, you have to wait less. You also have easier connections. So if you happen to need two buses, you wait less twice. So there's that much more impact of the added frequency. It also means there's less impact from disruptions. So if, for example, for some reason, a bus doesn't show up because perhaps you have a vehicle shortage or a driver shortage, if a bus is supposed to come every 15 minutes and you miss one trip, well, maybe you'll wait 30. If a bus comes every 60 minutes and you miss one trip, they'll have to wait two hours. So as a result of all this, higher frequent service is more convenient and gets a whole lot more ridership, even more ridership per unit of service. And I just wanna leave you with this little tidbit about frequency. If you're not a person who uses transit a lot or you know people who don't and you're talking to them about it, you can just think of that frequency as being how often you can leave your house. So really, you can imagine that there's a gate at the end of your driveway. You don't have any control over that gate and it only opens every once in a while. If it only opens once an hour, well, it's better than not opening it at all. But how useful is that really for getting to where you need to go? To give you credit where it is due, you have regional service right now in a way that has disappeared in many parts of the U.S. It is in fact possible to travel from San Jose to Santa Cruz to Watsonville to Salinas, albeit with MST, but in a way that connects with your service. And that's really great. And you have actually kind of a really nice basic system in that way. So you have those regional services. And I just wanna say that one of the other thing about that is that some of those regional services are doing double duty. I heard Director Dutra earlier talk about the 91X. That was the express service between Watsonville and Santa Cruz.  The 69 spends some time on Sakel Drive coming into town into Santa Cruz. There are good reasons for it to do that, but it does mean that there are certain reliability issues that end up impacting the regional routes. Quick note on things that are happening in specific areas in Watsonville. There may be a perception that there isn't that much service. There's actually kind of a fair number of bus routes in Watsonville. And there are a lot of streets with multiple bus routes, but none of these buses are coming more than once an hour. They're all going different places. It's all really complicated to figure out. And so when we hear some of the feedback that we've heard, for example, that some service changes that happened in Watsonville were particularly confusing, there's all sorts of reasons why people may or may not be confused about service changes. But one of the things that's true is that if you're a transit rider in Watsonville, you're holding a lot of information in your head because of how many routes there are and how they all go different places. And so that is gonna necessarily make using the service more difficult, even if by doing all those complex patterns you can point to a lot of very specific needs that you're pointing out. Another thing to note is that despite all these bus lines, there are certain parts of Watsonville that don't have service. And probably the biggest one I'd note is kind of where you're planning on putting that temporary facility along Beach Street. There are a ton of jobs on Beach Street. And there's no service there. Beach Street, South and West of Watsonville downtown. So those are some of the issues we've noticed here. And Greater Santa Cruz and Capitola, probably the biggest issue that we've noted so far is that despite what it may look like when you look at a pretty map like this, you have two essentially entirely separate networks between the West side and the East side of the San Lorenzo River. Everything in the West goes to UCSC. And a lot of service in the East is really geared at those regional connections. And as I said earlier, doing double duty with regional. So the reason why that matters is that you obviously have significant housing affordability problems on the West side. And you have a lot of people trying to travel between East and West side as a result of those. And they all have to change buses if they're doing that at Metro Center. And there are issues with changing buses. When buses are at very low frequencies, as I've said, it's very complicated. By complicated, I mean you lose a lot of time if you try to change a bus. And so that constrains how many people find the service useful. At UCSC, we obviously have another very complex situation. This is obviously really critical to the success of what you're doing right now. It's about half your ridership. And there have been a lot of overcrowding and reliability issues at UCSC. And I wanna stress that those issues are not related directly to the quantity of bus service being provided on campus. There are a lot of buses on campus. Perhaps not enough of those are Metro buses. There are about eight Metro buses an hour, but when you add all the campus shuttles that are also running on campus, you get to about 20 buses an hour. And when you see that red line there, those are some of the tap shuttles that run on campus. So we have a situation where what we've heard from people who ride on campus is that the Metro buses are overcrowded and but the campus shuttles have spare capacity. We've also heard about slow service, a lot of issues with, there's obviously very constrained narrow roadways. So buses can't pass each other. There's really a situation where you can't just, you don't, students or people in that area are not getting on the first bus that comes by them for a number of reasons. And I think that there's a good argument for looking at how do you make every bus useful enough that people get on the first bus that comes by. There's also certain operational issues like the fact that people are checking fares that really slows buses down. In any case, there's a lot to be looked at up there. In terms of where your ridership is concentrated, I think I heard Dr. McPherson talk earlier about how more than half your ridership was at UCSC and Cabrillo. That is true with UCSC being probably the largest by far there. In terms of where there are a lot of trips that are attracted, the west side, but also Capitol LaMalle shows up a fair bit. And I don't think it's just because of transfers, because of how infrequent the service is, but there's a huge amount of employment and retail in that area. Cabrillo shows up and a few little points in Watsonville and also in Scotts Valley, Covey, our transit center. I think what we're seeing there, and I'm still figuring it out, is basically a whole lot of park and ride and kiss and ride activity for people coming in from the San Lorenzo Valley. So as we've been talking to the public, just a few of the broader concerns we've heard and that we know we need to address reliability, especially in Santa Cruz and by reliability, I mean the ability for buses to be on time and to run when they can run. We've heard a lot about communications, and it's sometimes hard to tell if what we hear is a result of what's happening right now or what's happened historically, but we've heard a lot about people need more ways to get the message from Metro about when things are changing and how they're changing. This is true throughout the county, but it's particularly true in South County and it's particularly true with everything that relates to messages in Spanish. We've also been made conscious of some of the issues around your fleet, around its age, the condition of vehicles, and I think it's excellent that you're looking at getting more buses right now and I think that's gonna be necessary as you go forward. More broadly, there is a sense that in the last 10 or 20 years, service has really degraded, that there used to be really good transit. We've even heard of people who moved to Santa Cruz to be carless and who no longer feel that they were able to do that because transit no longer is doing that and some of that has to do with factors that are beyond your control from the pandemic, right? And it's downstream consequences like all the shortages that we're experiencing now and some of that are perhaps decisions that were made along the way. There is in fact significantly less service now than there was 15 years ago and that was true even pre-pandemic and it's possible to get better service but ultimately what drives service being very useful and a lot of people finding it useful is having enough of it that when people need it, it's there. We also heard about transfers. There's a huge reluctance among your current riders to envision transfers and we think that's very much related to the service pattern as it is right now. Infrequent on-time transfers are simply unattractive. I think there's some transferring that's gonna be inevitable in any version of this system and so we need to find ways to address that. Perhaps be it through making transfers less expensive or free, be it through timing transfers, be it through more frequent service. So in terms of the project, right now we've been learning, upcoming in April with staff, we have kind of a network design workshop where we're gonna be looking at kind of what early wins are, what alternatives are going to look like. In July and August, we're gonna go out to the public with the alternatives to hear more and we're gonna summarize all that we hear back from the public so that we can get direction from the board to develop a draft plan to be ready in November and then over December, January, we'll do outreach on the draft plan and our goal in the end is to have a final plan in March of 2024. So with that, that's all I've got. Thank you very much and if you've got any questions, I'll be delighted to entertain them. Thank you so much for the presentation and the work. Questions from directors? Director Rodkin. My first question is, could you give us a better idea of what is the AMA or AMM, what's the division of labor, the talk of associates and that? In this project, that division of labor is around outreach. So AMA are, they specialize in two things. They specialize in paratransit and they specialize in outreach and so they are our outreach sub-consultant. They are the ones who are organizing the surveys, the public meetings, the stakeholder meetings, all of that. Yeah. My second question, yes, system involved. Director Rodkin, we have had a DPS-based system. Currently we're just, what's happening is we're transferring that system to a new vendor. So we've already been collecting that data for the last two years. As part of this analysis, we also did a ridership automatic passenger counter sample. So we actually have stop level ridership as well. So we're using both of those data sources currently. So the implementation is short of the next project? Yeah, what's happening now is more on the public side, real-time information, the data we've already been collecting and using in our analysis. Thank you. Thank you for the great presentation. You mentioned with the Watsonville roots, how much data someone has to have in their head to effectively navigate the system because of all the different roots. I think that's fairly true county-wide. And one thing that left an impression on me was visiting Boulder a number of years back and they're sort of a poster child for improving bus service. And we hear all the time about how they renamed their system. I think it's the hop, not exactly hop, skip, jump, but it's something. It is. Is it a hop, skip, jump? Okay. And how that was part of their strategy is to make the whole network easier to understand as a new writer or an existing writer for that matter. How much are we looking at, I don't know, either renaming the roots or rebranding the roots, or is it just simplification? How does that approach play into this? So that sort of depends on the time horizon you're looking at. For the early wins, not that any of these decisions have been made yet, but my sense is for the early wins we're really looking at what changes